True love equals kindness plus responsibility. This is the motto of Warrenton-based Protect Them All, a local and national charity animal welfare organization working to improve the lives of companion animals and their humans.

Part of how the organization achieves its mission is by helping people learn how to train and handle their dogs with kindness rather than through inhumane, unkind methods and tools such as force, pain, fear, intimidation, shock and prong collars, and other aversive tools and methods.

Unfortunately, a lack of resources in many areas sometimes results in people defaulting to inhumane methods — either because they aren’t aware of the inhumane reality of the methods, or they don’t know what else to do. Lack of access to humane, anti-aversives education and training experts in some regions, or the cost of these, or even a cultural inequity is sometimes the root of the problem. Working to overcome these challenges, Protect Them All recently announced that it will begin offering anti-aversives education and training scholarships to those in need.

Believing that human well-being cannot be fully achieved if the beloved companion animals of humans are suffering, Protect Them All offers a variety of force-free, fear-free, pain-free, intimidation-free programs for humans that, when properly implemented, increase well-being for animals as well as their humans. One example is the Fearful Dogs Project, which helps people learn anti-aversive, best practices for living with or working around shy, fearful, traumatized, feral and other fearful dogs. Another is force-free for all, which consists of more than a dozen topics in general training and behavior. And there’s the crucial training and behavior literacy program for shelters and rescues, which focuses on ensuring that “lifesaving” does not end at rescue or placement but instead is lifelong, via a set of policies and practices that begin before adoption and continue throughout the animal’s natural life.

Protect Them All is a nonprofit organization that relies on the generosity of the public and an occasional institutional grant. Check it out at ProtectThemAll.org, and if you’re looking for a good cause to support, consider Protect Them All. Since most elective euthanasia is caused by behavior problems, and since behavior problems are shown to increase when aversives are used, you never know whose lives you might be helping to save either now or down the road when you support Protect Them All’s humane behavior modification and training programs.

Rain Jordan is a certified canine behavior consultant, certified professional dog trainer, and certified fearful dogs professional instructor/mentor. Visit her at www.ExpertCanine.com.