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Posted by Greta on 12/31/2008, 3:42 am, in reply to "Clicker training and breeds?"
I know clicker trainers who have bully breeds and plenty who have other non-herding breeds. I think lots of trainers, period, have herding breeds, anyway, because a lot of trainers are into performance sports at which herders excel.
But I think this is mostly historical. I think clicker training first took hold in agility, which is dominated by you-know-what. It is much later taking hold in retriever training, Schutzhund and obedience, which have been based on much more force based methods for a very long time. People do what works and they know how to make those methods work in those sports because they, or someone they look up to with lotsa titles knows how to make those methods work for them. Plenty of choke chain OTCH trainers and field champ e-collar trainers have written recipe books, but the only clicker training book for obedience is by someone who has never put a UD on a dog, making him vulnerable to criticism and easy to ignore. The more people are able to break ground and get the top titles using c/t, the more easy it will be for us non-trailbreakers to make it work for us, too. And as it happens, a lot of the top obedience breeds are not herders -- Goldens are the gold standard in obedience, and Labs in field trials, etc. Remember that BCs weren't competing in AKC obedience until the mid-90s, so although there are a lot now, there weren't when many of the top names were coming up. And lots of the top OTCH obedience trainers who don't click at all are also BC people...
Objectively, your OP's claim is ridiculous. Really -- you can train a killer whale with this method, but not a pit bull? Hmmm, it must be that pit bulls actually have a different kind of nervous system from all the other 140 species of animals that the Brelands/Baileys trained in 45 years in business.... yeah... that's it! 
You might want to point out that there essentially were no Beagles or Afghans titling in obedience UNTIL clicker training came around.
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