Eric Goebelbecker's blog

Lisa Whelan started a great conversation over on her blog, and I want to chime in over here.

Is punishment a bad word? I say "no."

First let me get the easy stuff out of the way. As Lisa said in her post and as Dr. Dunbar said a few months ago, punishment doesn't always have to be bad. No reason to cover that ground again.

And, as Lisa also pointed out, punishment doesn't fully cover the "bad stuff" either. Negative reinforcement can be pretty nasty. But punishment, both as a concept and even just as a plain old word, takes all of the heat.

Anthropomorphism is "the attribution of uniquely human characteristics to non-human creatures and beings, phenomena, material states and objects or abstract concepts." It's a natural human tendency that is almost unavoidable, and something we need to be conscious of when we are dealing with our dogs. We often put very human ideas and feeling into our dog's heads — and they don't really belong there.

It's easy to come up with unhelpful examples of anthropomorphism:

A case could be made for much of the training based on pack theory being a big exercise in anthropomorphism. Are dogs really keeping a mental tally of who is in charge based on who walks in front of whom or enters a doorway first? Are dogs really in a constant battle with us for supremacy? Or is this just an example of something that an insecure human frets over?

"Whenever there is a simple error that most laymen fall for, there is always a slightly more sophisticated version of the same problem that experts fall for" - Amos Tversky

It's been a while since my "Rocket Surgery" post and recent events have wanted me to revisit the subject of simplicity.

Are some breeds of dog more aggressive than the other? Many people seem to think so. Laws placing restrictions on, or completely banning, some breeds (Breed Specific Legislation - BSL) exist not just in the in the U.S, but around the world. These laws don't seem to be going away either — it seems that not a week goes by where I don't see a story about BSL being considered in a new community.

But the thing is, even if you think that restricting or banning breeds because of aggression is effective (and I don't) these laws almost always target the wrong breeds.

In 2008, Applied Animal Behavior Science published research that examined the relationship between dog breeds and aggression. The results were, in my opinion, entirely unsurprising unless you happen to be a politician or rely on TV news for your understanding of dogs. (Is that redundant?)

Source:

A few months ago the Journal of Applied Animal Behaviour Science published an article titled Survey of the use and outcome of confrontational and non-confrontational training methods in client-owned dogs showing undesired behaviors". Two of the researchers participated in the research regarding children and dog bites that I wrote about earlier, so I decided to plunk down my $31.50 and read it for myself.

One of the main reason people resist using treats to train their dog is that they don't want to "bribe" them. This is perfectly understandable; one shouldn't have to bribe a dog to do something. However, if you are using food the right way your are not bribing your dog, you are rewarding her.

Let's take a look in the dictionary (Merriam Webster Online):

bribe: "money or favor given or promised in order to influence the judgment or conduct of a person in a position of trust."

reward: "recompense (to give something to by way of compensation as for a service rendered or damage incurred) "

It's hard to talk about, work with, or even think about dogs without broaching the topic of barking. Even the absence of barking is frequently noteworthy.

As a matter of fact barking can be a very big issue. The sort of issue can lead to dogs being rehomed or...worse. Coppinger and Feinstein ("Hark! hark! The dogs do bark ... and bark and bark"; Smithsonian 1991 - can't find a link.) once recorded a dog barking for seven hours straight.

Why do dogs bark? From an evolutionary context, that's a good question. While wolves and coyotes are capable of barking, it is very rare. Belyaev's famous foxes famously do, much like dogs. (Silver foxes normally do not bark very often.)

I can think of four main "types" for barks off the top of my head, and since that is exactly where this blog entry is coming from, those are the four I will list.

Another article discussing experts that are critical of Cesar Millan has hit the Internet. Actually, I think two articles were published this week, but I can't find the link for the other.

Truth be told, I only really skim these articles lately. They all follow the same general outline:

There are approximately 1 million dog bites each year in the United States. Between 60 and 70% of them are to children. (See this.) That's a pretty staggering statistic.

Why are a majority of bites to children? In 2007, three researchers attempted to address that question. They examined the records from three years of bite cases involving children from the Behavior Clinic of the Matthew J Ryan Veterinary Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. They looked at 111 cases. (There were actually 145 cases, but they could not determine the age of the children in 34 of them so they were not included.) A few of the cases were repeat offenders; there were only 103 unique dogs in the study.

The numbers that grabbed my attention and lead me to purchase the paper were these:

I wrote about the evolution of the dog in a pretty popular post on my blog a while back. In it I discussed Belyaev's fox experiment and its implication for two of the theories on how dogs were domesticated. WNYC's Radiolab (a podcast you should start listening to like, yesterday) just broadcast a very entertaining (as usual) show on "change." and discussed the foxes. The segment includes a theory on how selecting for behavior resulted in the startling physical changes in the foxes.  
Here's the segment: