Be kind to your dog
Katrina Ward says being cruel and unrealistically demanding fails to help train or socialise your family pet
GEORGE is a mastiff. His breeder advised the owner to teach George who’s boss. This was to be done by holding George down on his side for 20 minutes a day.
Phoebe, a border collie, lives on a property without a front fence. Phoebe’s owner found out about invisible fences (electronic boundaries) that would keep Phoebe on the property.
Badger is a labradoodle who is very enthusiastic and pulls on his lead. The owner read this should be controlled by jerking him hard on the collar.
Sammi is a terrier cross. Her owner was told to pick the dog up by the scruff of the neck and growl in her face if she misbehaved.
These four dogs have loving owners who want the best for their dogs. They sought advice and applied it.
George has since been euthanased because of aggression to his owners. Phoebe refused to enter her own yard after receiving the electric shock for approaching the boundary. Badger still pulls on the lead. Sammi’s owner sought more advice as she didn’t like the way Sammi squealed when scruffed. (The names and breeds have been changed in these examples to protect their identity)
You may have read or heard that training dogs using positive reinforcement will create “spoilt dogs”.
The Australian Oxford Dictionary defines spoilt as to “injure character of by overindulgence”.
Being a kind, benevolent leader for your dog and using positive reinforcement as a training method is not overindulging nor is using treats to reinforce desired behaviour “bribing” your dog.
Again resorting to the dictionary, a bribe is defined as “money offered to procure (often illegal or dishonest) action in favour of the giver”.
Undesired behaviour is not caused by a dog wanting to “dominate”. Pinning them down or scruffing and growling at them will not put you in a dominant position nor make them respect you.
It will engender fear and even aggressive defensive behaviour. It’s time to put the science into dog training. Science is not always the truth, but it is a way of objectively processing information and self-correcting and verifying through independent groups of researchers.
Hypotheses can be proven or not with experimentation. Laws can be discovered and theories can be developed.
Dog training is about changing behaviour through the science of learning theory, or behaviour analysis.
The most relevant behaviour law is the law of effect. What this states is that behaviour is a function of its consequences. Simply put, what comes after an action will determine if that action is likely to be repeated.
An action which gives the dog a good outcome (something it wants), it is likely to repeat that action. That action has then said to be reinforced (Dog raids the bin and finds something tasty, he’ll keep raiding the bin).
Positive reinforcement training involves the human delivering a good outcome to the dog when they see the action or behaviour they like.
On the flip side is positive punishment (Dog raids the bin and the lid falls on his nose, scaring the dog. He won’t raid the bin again). So, in training, positive punishment involves the human delivering a bad outcome (something unpleasant) to the dog when the dog does something they don’t like, so the dog will reduce the behaviour.
The problem with the punishment option is that it comes with a cost, to the dog’s welfare and the dog-human relationship.
Yes, there are more than one way to solve behaviour problems and learning outcomes, but is this cost worth it? Is it ethical to be recommending such techniques when there is a kinder, more effective method available?
When faced with a training dilemma, what is the Least Invasive and Minimally Aversive (LIMA) choice you can make for your pet?
For example, your dog might be jumping on you in greeting or for attention. You could punish your dog for jumping or you could teach your pet through positive reinforcement to do an alternative (substitute) behaviour (to sit for treats instead of jumping on you). What is kinder?
Then the next question: what is more effective? There are inherent problems with applying effective positive punishment to dogs to try to change behaviour. One of those is the dog’s motivation to do the behaviour. Badger kept pulling on his lead because his desire to sniff things and get places outweighed the annoyance of the neck jerking. So the neck jerking might escalate to purchasing a choker chain, and on to a prong collar or even an electric shock collar.
A third consideration is to question what the dog is actually learning when the punishment is applied.
Is Badger learning that walking is painful, that the streets are dangerous, that the dog he is approaching is evil or that his owner is mean? Does he learn to flatly refuse to walk? Or is he learning not to pull? If he’s still pulling, he’s obviously not learning what was hoped he would learn.
A fourth consideration: is Badger able to learn or is he too distressed to learn? Engaging the frontal lobe is a challenge when in a state of distress. Fight, flight or freeze responses are elicited instead.
Finally, does Badger have a choice? Is he empowered to make a decision that can deliver him a good outcome?
All animals love to be able to control their outcomes. The lack of the ability to control outcomes can lead to mental, physical and emotional problems.
As a veterinarian, my professional ethos of “do no harm” makes it clearly obvious why I, and my professional association, the AVA, do not endorse or support the use of punishment based training.
The training industry is unregulated in Australia so it is recommended you look for a trainer who is certified and who belongs to a professional dog training organisation with an abiding code of ethics.