Memories of my time with horses and how it relates to dog training

A Long Time Ago

When I was a young girl, my parents did not allow pets but I loved them.  I was able to have fish which I got to eat from my hand and come to the top of the bowl to receive petting (R.I..P. Mo-Mo).  I would leaf endlessly through classified ads looking for the right pet for me.  Something to train.  Something to cuddle with.  My mother was afraid of dogs.  My father didn't like cats.  Mice, rats, hamsters and guinea pigs were out of the question because my parents didn't want rodents in the house.  I tried to get a kangaroo in the classifieds section of the newspaper but that was a no go too.  My closest attempt was a Llama believe it or not but my parents said zoning ordinances prevented that from occurring (even though we had neighbors that had horses).  

My parents finally let me take horse back riding lessons when I was in grade school which lasted for several years.  I'm sure they thought it would stop my relentless quest to acquire a pet.  This was my first attempt to get an animal to do what I wanted and I wasn't good at it.  I was appalled when my horse back riding instructor told me that I had to hit the horse with my feet and my crop.  I remember riding one old black horse whose mouth would foam from being aggravated by the bit.  After those lessons, I would untack her and brush her and tell her how sorry I was that I made her mouth do that.  My first attempts at riding off a lunge line was on a "stubborn" appaloosa named Rusty who ran me into the phone booth in the stable.  The instructor said I wasn't using enough force.  I didn't like pulling on the horses mouth.  I didn't like kicking the horse.  I didn't like hitting the horse with my crop.  But I was young and was instructed to do as told by someone who was much more experienced than me about this subject.  And it was true.  Back then, there was no clicker training for horses.  There was no horse whispering.  This is the way it was done.  But I viewed the relationship between me and the horse as one of mutual respect and trust.  I thought we should be a well oiled machine, anticipating each other's next move and responding accordingly.  The reality of the situation was that there was very little I could do to develop a relationship with a horse that saw me once a week.  Even at ten, I understood that. 

How does this relate to dog training?

I still view my relationship with animals the same way but it's easy for me to understand when others do things to their dogs that I wouldn't recommend.  Some other professional may have told you it's the right way and in a desperate attempt to understand your furry friend, you listened.  You may have listened to the guy on TV that said that you need to be the pack leader (even though science states that is not true).  But remember if something inside you tells you that something isn't right, question it.  If the response doesn't sound right, fact check them.  There are some rather benign things that clients tend to reject like crate training, head halters and muzzling but there are some recommendations that you may hear from others that may hurt your dog like choke chains, shock collars and alpha rolls.  These items can put you in danger too!  Especially if you are dealing with an aggression issue.

So think critically about the techniques you use to train your dog and decide if you want a harmonious relationship with joyfulness on both ends of the leash.

The problem with punishment- Part 2

Other issues with positive punishment are listed below.  (This article is a continuance of The problem with punishment- Part 1.)

Many people have difficulty timing the punishment correctly.

According to AVSAB (American Veterinary Society of Animal Behaviorists), in order for punishment to be effective it must occur within one minute of undesired behavior.

You may need to increase the intensity of the correction to get results.

Dogs can get used to the level of aversive punishment that is applied causing the owner or trainer to increase intensity to get results.  For example, a dog is being walked on a prong collar.  Everytime he pulls, the owner gives a leash correction at a low intensity because that is all that is necessary to stop the behavior and it works.  If this person uses these same intensity leash corrections for this and other behaviors (applying a leash correction is often used by old fashion trainers for non compliance with a request, i.e. sit or down), eventually that level of correction would need to be raised in order to be aversive for the dog. 

When prong collars are misused, you often see dogs that even pull against the prongs as a matter of habit and feeling quite comfortable pulling against them. This is especially true if they get to move forward – a very rewarding behavior for some dogs.

If you start out at too high of an aversive stimulus you may hurt your dog.

It is difficult to gauge the amount of correction needed to stop the behavior.  If you start out too heavily with your correction, you can really damage the dog, either emotionally or physically) and your relationship.

If you are punishing a dog for aggressive behavior, you can escalate the aggression.

If you apply an aversive stimulus when the dog is highly aroused, it is possible that the dog will redirect the aggression onto you. 

If you punish a dog for showing distance increasing signals such as growling, you may end up with a dog who bites without warning.

Even if you apply the aversive and it works in stopping the behavior, you may only be punishing the signs of the behavior and not the emotion involved with it.  If you apply a shock correction to a dog who is growling at another dog and the dog stops growling, next time he may just decide to bite because he was punished for the growling.  So in essence, you punished the growl and not the aggression.  Often times, this is how people get a dog who bites without any signs.

Negative punishment is often used with positive trainers and it has the least opportunity for serious side effects but these side effects do exist.

Negative punishment is the removal of something that the dog likes in order to stop a behavior.  A classical example of this is when a dog jumps up and the owner removes all interaction as a result.  Like most people who walk into their home, they look at their dog barreling down the hallway or waiting at the door to greet them.  So you start the interaction with eye contact and acknowledgement of the dog.  If the interaction didn’t start that one, one could argue that we are using a different method.  The reward may have been touching, petting, puppy talk or even eye contact.  Once this is removed, the dog is punished for his greeting because what the dog wants is being removed.

If you are training with rewards, you are always using negative punishment- everytime a dog tries a behavior and you don’t reward it.  Let’s say our example dog knows sit and down.  We ask the dog for sit but he offers a down.  We don’t reward the behavior and his sit in this context reduces in frequency.

If you are not training properly and constantly assessing your dog’s abilities, you may be setting your dog up for a lot of frustration.  This frustration may get the way of learning.  This is why reward based trainers set the dog up to succeed and raise the criteria gradually. 

Although negative punishment can cause some side effects, most trainers believe the side effects are less severe and easily overcome with good instruction.

The Problem with Punishment

Anytime punishment is applied in dog training, you can see some unwanted side effects.  These unwanted side effects are often called behavior fallout in the dog training and canine behavior world.

Positive punishment is not positive in the way that most people think of it.  It is application of something that the dog doesn’t like to stop a behavior.  (To learn more about this concept, see our blog post How do dogs learn- Operant Conditioning.)  This type of punishment can be mild, like saying no in a sharp tone or very strong such a high level of shock.

One possible example of behavior fallout is a poor association with whatever the dog is looking at, at the time of correction.  For example, a dog and their family live in town and have an electric fence.  They begin to go to the boundary to greet passerbys and as a result receive a shock.  The dog learns, through classical conditioning, that people walking by cause the shock.  (To understand more about classical conditioning, please see our blog post Pavlov is at work with your puppy.)  Some dogs can learn this in one trial, others learn it in several trials and still some never make that association.  It always depends on the dog.

Using a mild aversive can have the same behavior fallout but it is less likely to occur or produce a strong reaction.  In this example, let’s say that when a dog jumps up on counters you yell “no”.  If a dog has a strained relationship with a person, this could cause a sensitive dog to run and hide or be apprehensive about approaching the person who issued the punishment.

 It should be noted here that a dog that is sensitive to sound may find yelling “no” highly aversive and a dog who is looking for attention and accepts any interaction as wonderful may find this rewarding.  Rewards and aversives are always defined by the dog and not the human.

Punishment has to be consistently applied to be effective.  In the example above, with the dog jumping on the counters, if you only catch the dog doing it 4 out of 6 times (for example), your dog may learn to play the lottery.  This means, he’ll give it a shot because he may get yelled at or he may not.  The possibility of rewards may be greater than the possibility of punishment.

More about punishment tomorrow.

Pavlov is at work with your puppy

Classical conditioning is defined as conditioning in which the conditioned stimulus is paired with and precedes the unconditioned stimulus until the conditioned stimulus alone is sufficient to elicit the response.  This phrase was coined by Ivan Pavlov and is always at work in dog training. 

It is incredibly important to realize that while dogs do learn by operant conditioning, classical conditioning is working too.  Dogs can associate objects or people as good or bad.  For instance, if everytime your dog is around children your dog gets kicked in the face the dog learns to associate children (neutral stimulus)= kick in the face (bad thing).  Eventually, this dog may see the situation like this: children are a bad thing.  The children are no longer a neutral stimulus and worse they are a predictor of bad things.

If everytime your dog is around children and they drop food on the floor (as children often do) then dog learns that children=yummy food on the floor (good thing).  Overtime dogs learn that children are a good thing.

Let’s look at another example.  When Rufus the terrier was a puppy, he saw a man a couple times with a beard that harassed him.  This bearded man poked him, made him bark and laughed when he tried to run away.  Now when Rufus sees a bearded man- he thinks that they are going to harass him.  The bearded man (which was a neutral stimulus) has become a predictor of bad things to come (a conditioned stimulus)

If Rufus’s experience were different where everytime he met bearded man he got a really yummy cookie, the bearded man (which was a neutral stimulus) would be a predictor of good things (a conditioned stimulus).

For some dogs it takes many bad experiences to react to a situation and for others it only takes one.  When you are socializing a puppy, you are working to make positive associations with new and novel people, objects, etc. 

Classical conditioning does not work alone.  Operant conditioning is always at working the background too which makes it sometimes confusing as what to reward and what not to reward.

Dogs learn through Operant Conditioning

B.F. Skinner coined the term operant conditioning and used it to describe how consequences affect an organism’s behavior.  Skinner believed that an organism operates his environment and figures out what works best for them.  Dog trainers have used operant conditioning for years to change behavior in dogs.  Operant conditioning is always working in the background with your dog whether you are actively training or not.  A dog trainer or behavior consultant should have an excellent understanding of these concepts while the average dog owner needs only a basic understanding of these.

There are three main components of Operant Conditioning:

1.       Reinforcement-  Something that makes the behavior occur again.

2.      Punishment-  Something that causes a behavior to become less frequent.

3.      Extinction-  No consequence to behavior at which point the behavior becomes less frequent.

The first two components can either be positive (adding something) or negative (taking something away).  The four quadrants of operant conditioning are as follows:

Positive Reinforcement is adding something the dog likes to increase the frequency of behavior.  An example of positive reinforcement is giving a dog a treat for sitting. 

Negative Punishment is taking something away that the dog likes in order to decrease the frequency of behavior.  An example of negative punishment is not giving a dog a treat until he does sit.

Positive Punishment is adding an aversive (something the dog doesn’t like) to decrease the frequency of behavior.  For instance, a dog is off leash and starts to chase a squirrel.  A person applies a shock from an electronic collar to the dog. The dog stops chasing the squirrel.

Negative Reinforcement is taking away aversive stimuli (something the dog doesn’t like) to increase the frequency of behavior.  You generally need to apply positive punishment to get the effect of negative reinforcement.  In the above example a dog started to chase a squirrel and a shock was given.  In order to use negative reinforcement, the shock would stop when the dog ran back to you.

It’s important to remember that using punishment in dog training can have behavioral fallout.  If you are training positively and you withhold too many rewards too early, your dog can experience a high level of frustration which is not conducive to learning.  If you are using positive punishment, your dog can associate the wrong thing with the aversive you applied.  Classical Conditioning is at work along with operant conditioning.

Socialize Your Puppy

You have a new puppy.  Now what?  Do the best thing you can for your puppy to prevent him from exhibiting aggressive behaviors later on- socialize your puppy!

There are critical periods in the development of a dog that occur during puppyhood.  It is critical to the well being of your puppy to take advantage of this time period to prevent issues later on in the dog’s life.  Although debated, most experts agree that the window for most dogs closes at about 12-14 weeks of age. This does not mean that if your dog is older, he cannot be socialized but depending on how much older and what his previous experiences are, it may be more difficult.

Hopefully your breeder has already begun the process.  If your breeder was not responsible enough to do this, you need to work overtime.  Even if your breeder did start the process, socializing your puppy should be a major priority right now.

During this critical time, you should work on exposing your dog to following situations and make sure that your dog has a positive experience.  In what Margret Hughes from Positive Paw Dog Training coined the Puppy Rule of 12, your puppy should experience twelve of the following things before your dog is twelve weeks of age.

12 New People (Outside of the Family)

12 New Objects

12 New Sounds

12 New Surfaces

12 Fast Moving Objects (not allowed to chase)

12 New Locations

To ensure your puppy is starting out right, it would be wise to take it a little farther and do the following also.

Handled by owner and family twelve times a week

Eat in twelve different locations

Played with twelve different safe, healthy puppies or adult dogs

Safely left alone from family or other animals twelve times a week for a minimum of five minutes.

Every exposure should be positive.  You can keep it positive by not pushing your dog, feeding yummy treats or playing with your pup during the exposure.  You are working on making positive associations with these things.  Your dog doesn’t have to do anything.  Allow your pup to investigate the object on his own time.  Be patient.  He will change his mind when he realizing that the object means him no harm.