The Dog Blog

Punishment has become such a bad word of late within popular dog training media.

There are some trainers that say they only use Positive Reinforcement. The word punishment invokes certain feelings and ideas in many people’s minds. From personal experience it seems, choke chains, alpha rolls, slapping or hitting etc. Yes all off these things could be described as punishing – perhaps! Read on…

To understand what a punisher is we need to understand learning theory. Punishment is something that reduces behaviour. Reinforcement is something that increases behaviour. Now, take the choke chain example – if I stop choking the dog when he sits down, I have just used the removal of the choke chain as reinforcement for the dog to sit! This is called Negative Reinforcement – the removal of an unpleasant/undesirable stimulus when the desired behaviour occurs.

Lily's recent death at age 10 paralleled the entire first decade of the 21st century. She came into my life on January 2, 2000 and she left it 10 days ago almost exactly ten years later on January 10, 2010. I've recently rediscovered a box of old video tapes including a lot of footage of my children when young and, of course, my dogs past and present were well represented, sometimes to the exclusion of the kids!

The process of video preservation -- transferring the tapes to the hard drive of a computer and then editing the footage into interesting little movies for both personal and professional use is an exciting but nevertheless daunting proposition.

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?

As dog trainers we regularly see people who have chosen to add a dog to their home that isn't always the best match for them. Our job is to teach them how to live together in spite of the challenges a mismatch may bring with it. Most of the time we can help, but sometimes sadly the dog ends up in rescue instead, despite our best efforts.

What I don't understand is why more people don't ask trainers their opinion in finding the right dog for them. We see and work with more breeds and shelter dogs regularly than they will ever meet in a lifetime. Some of us even live with multiple breeds in our own homes. Not to mention the fact that dog trainers know about dog behavior and breed traits because it is our job to know this information.