What Would Andy Griffith Do?

If you were looking for a community leader, would you look to Andy Griffith or Barney Fife?

If you were looking for a dog trainer, would you look to Andy Griffith or Barney Fife?

Why?

The reason I ask this question, is that these two television characters are a shared American experience, and therefore a kind of "totem" we can talk about.  They also reflect, to some degree, two very different types of people to whom dogs and people react quite similarly.

Does a person who talks a lot, shouts on occasion, and who is generally a bit manic and insecure (i.e. Barney Fife) create respect in you and a desire to follow?

Not generally!  Instead, most of us tend to follow those who are calm, who walk with square shoulders, and who actually say something when they do talk (Andy Griffith).

We are attracted to those who talk slow and low and who are fair in their dealing. We are looking for signals of strength, calmness, power and leadership. We are looking for the relaxed movement and calm face that signals a nonthreatening clarity of purpose. And when we find those, what is generally triggered within us is some degree of followship -- the willingness to take and follow direction from that person.

What about the obverse?  Do we feel secure in the presence of the manic person with flailing arms and a loud and rising voice who talks a little too much?  Do we feel secure when someone is sending us too many signals all at once, or when they stand with a slouched body or move too aggressively and without calm intent?  Do we feel secure, and do we naturally want to follow this person?  Not generally!

What's my point? 

My point is that all of us read people all the time, and most of us are instinctively attracted to people like Andy Griffith, and most of us are instinctively suspect of people like Barney Fife.

Andy Griffith, of course, is a true dominant.  He threatens no one, but we feel his calm clarity of purpose.  Square shoulders, sparse body movement, clear signals, and a generally friendly and solicitous maner are paired with a low, slow voice. 

Barney Fife, on the other hand is a true submissive. This is not to say that he does not want to be dominant, only that he is incapable of actually shouldering the role for very long.

Barney is quick to brag and he frequently threatens others such as Otis, the town drunk. That said, no one takes him too seriously because he is all wind, braggadocio, and fluttering hands. When Barney gets wound up, his face become extremely animated and his voice gets a little louder and it rises in pitch. When he stands, his shoulders are narrow, and he often advances with a scuttling walk that he fancies to be a swagger. Every movement and sound betrays him. There is no real leadership here, only a thundering insecurity worn on the sleeve.

Now think about dogs. 

Do you think they are any different from people when it comes to what they are looking for in leadership?

I would posit that they are not.

What dogs want to see in their canine leaders, as well as their human owners, is a little more Andy Griffith and a little less Barney Fife.

And yes, all of this has something to with dominance and submission.  "Dominance" is not about pain or coercion, any more than submission" is about cowering or humiliation.

Dominance is about leadership. 

Submission is about followship. 

In the old television segment below, Barney Fife explains to Opie (the young Ron Howard) the essential difference between dogs and giraffes.

Watch Opie's face.

He's listening to all of Barney's words, but he's not really caring what Barney has to say because, at age seven, he already knows it's mindless yapping from "the little trembling" dog in the room.

Now watch who Opie does turn to.  

He turns to the "big dog," Andy Griffith, for the definitive signal about what is actually going to be done about the problem before them. 

Opie knows it's Andy that really calls the shots and that it is Andy who will actually take care of the little ones in the pack -- himself, Aunt Bea, Miss Ellie, and even the trembling and yappy Barney Fife.

In the very last few seconds of this clip we see Barney Fife change his position in response to emotional "extinguishing" from both Opie and Andy.

Yes, flashes of lightning and the sound of rain play a role here too, but watch how quickly both Opie and Andy turn a dead flat non-response to Barney's "incorrect" answer into a beaming smile for a "correct" one.

Click and treat.

Barney Fife, full of himself and with his own noise ringing in his ears, may think he drove this decision train, but if you are looking at this clip through the lens of dominance and submission, extinguishing and reward, the true tale is revealed.

• Related Post:
  ** Calm and Assertive Clicker Training
  ** Dominance, Submission and Evolution

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Sit-stay With Wildlife Distraction

These two working terriers know that sit means sit.

How do you get a pair of high prey-drive dogs to never bust on rabbits, deer, squirrels or other dogs when they are off-leash at the park? Practice and a few simple tricks and tools.

Dog Whispering

What If Dog Licensing Meant Something?

John Wade makes a nice analogy about the folks who think owning a pug is the same as owning a large game-bred molosser breed.

Ms Clifton’s article illustrated a classic example of what I refer to as a mini-van level driving skills person buying a Ferrari because they “love them” without considering that the investment of competence and commitment that will suffice with one will not affect the other. A Rottweiler is not a mini-van breed. In the many assessments I’ve done where behaviour is going off the rails, it is often enough due to the person end of the leash rather than instability in the dog.

Some breeds require more driving skill, maintenance knowledge and time to invest than others. Inappropriately matched, it should come as no surprise when a mini-van rated driver ends up rolling the Ferrari, either wrecking themselves, the vehicle or an innocent bystander.

Bingo. Read the whole thing.

I have come to more or less the same conclusion when it comes to Pit Bull, and have offered a suggestion, short of a ban, that I think would reduce the number of Pit Bulls acquired in haste and abandoned to death by the folks who "love" them.

The sad truth... is most Pit Bulls in America do not end up in the right hands. This is a breed that tends to attract "the wrong types" to the point that research has shown that U.S. Pit Bull owners are far more likely to have criminal records than other dog owners.

The predictable result of too many boisterous Pit Bulls meeting up with too many ill-prepared and unstable owners is that the dogs suffer.

And in America, Pit Bulls suffer terribly.

Nearly a million Pit Bulls were euthanized in American shelters in 2009 -- more than the sum of all dogs of all breeds registered by the American Kennel Club last year.

In the last decade, about 8,000,000 Pit Bulls were euthanized in U.S. animal shelters -- approximately four hundred million pounds of dead Pit Bull.

What makes this particularly distressing is that Pit Bull euthanasia rates in the U.S. have been on the rise for 30 years, even as all other canine impounds and euthanasias have been on a steady and steep decline.

What's going on with Pit Bulls?

The problem is not Pit Bull haters.

Ironically enough, the problem is Pit Bull lovers.

After all, it's the Pit Bull "lovers" that are breeding these dogs.

It's the Pit Bull "lovers" that are acquiring these dogs.

It's the Pit Bull "lovers" that are too often abusing the dogs through ignorance and neglect before abandoning them to their death a year or two after acquisition.

You mean Pit Bull "haters" are not the problem?

No, they are not.

The problem is young numbskulls who acquire these dogs in ignorance and haste, discover that they are too much dog to handle, and who then abandon them at leisure.

So what to do?

One of the most obvious ways forward, is to do with Pit Bulls what we have done for hawks, guns, and and cars in the U.S.: require a license conditional upon passing a basic training course.

When "hunter safety" courses were mandated in the U.S., accidental shootings fell to the point that golf and tennis are now deemed to be more dangerous than hunting.

When falconers were required to serve two-year apprenticeships, the longevity of captive birds soared, and concerns about raptor abuse plummeted.

And, of course, driving courses and driver's licenses have been in place since the beginning. Do accidents still happen? Sure, but no one argues that driver's license enforcement is not Step One to improved highway safety.

With dogs, however, the assumption is that everyone knows everything they need to know about dogs at birth -- and never mind if that is demonstrably wrong, especially for large game-bred breed like Pit Bulls.

And the consequence of this crazy idea?

Millions of dead dogs.

What is bizarre here, is that you would think there would be a natural constituency for a simple Canine Safety and Responsibility Course.

After all, teaching such a course could be a small money-maker for sponsoring groups such as the Kennel Club, Dogs Trust, the RSPCA, and dog-activity clubs.

Would a Canine Safety and Responsibility Course solve every Pit Bull (or dog) problem in the world?

No, of course not.

But it would solve a lot of them, and it would also serve as the "edge of the wedge" when it comes to tackling the human problems that too many dogs face -- ignorance about costs, responsibility, health, and training.

Before They Were Called Dog Crates

Before they were called dog crates, they were called terrier boxes or kennel cages, as seen at top, and were frequently used to ship dogs by rail.

Somewhere around the turn of the century, a gentile version was made and sold as a "snuggery" for lap dogs -- the first "sherpa bag".

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In the 1940s and 50's, production wooden boxes were produced for airline travel using a new material -- plywood.
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Then in the 1970s, the airlines began selling fiberglass (not plastic) "Sky Kennels" produced by Doskocil (now called Petmate) which could only be bought directly from the airlines (they were not sold in stores or by mail).  Sky kennels were produced through the 1980s until they were replaced by injection-molded plastic crates.

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The local Petco shelves.

Today's injected-molded crates made by Sky Kennel or Vari Kennel are now lighter, sturdier, and more secure than previous models, and have become the backbone of not only pet travel, but night time pet containment.
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Clicker Training Does Not Require Empathy

Dog training is not complex, and it does not require psychic abilities.

Of course some people think that must be the case! After all, if they have trained a dog to jump over a low fence, they must have a "gift" and a "special talent" for dog training, right?

Wouldn't that make them "special"?

One of these types wrote in yesterday to claim clicker training required "empathy, sensitivity, patience, excellent observational and mechanical skills, self-awareness, planning, appropriate utilization of canine ethology/canine body language and signals, and a knowledge of nutritional factors".

To which I can only say ..... Ri-i-i-i-ggght!

Clearly this poor soul does not know much about operant conditioning.

If she did, she would know that the best operant conditioners in the world have NO empathy, NO sensitivity, do NO planning, have NO knowledge of canine ethology or body language skills, and do not give a damn about nutritional factors.

And you know why these excellent animal trainers are so cold-hearted?

Because some of the best operant conditioners in the world are machines!

Machines are great at operant conditioning because they have infinite patience and perfect timing.

And here's a thought: they have infinite patience and perfect timing regardless of whether it is rewards-based training or aversion-based training.

This is Skinner 101.

The Skinner reference, of course, is to B.F. Skinner, the father of modern operant conditioning.

Watch the videos below, and you will Skinner's training machines in action.



And what is one of the best training machines for humans? Skinner points to the slot machine!

Of course, we have progressed beyond Skinner boxes and slot machines. Now we have online tests and even online universities. Click and treat!



I suppose, I should note that there is nothing wrong with empathy provided it is moderated somewhat.

You see, a good dog trainer is not overly emotional, while a bad dog trainer is one that is wearing a little too much on his or her sleeve.

The dog does not need the trainer's "concerns." The dog does not need the trainer's sympathy. The dog simply needs a clear, well-timed consequence or signal. And guess what? Well-designed machines are pretty good at delivering those, while "deeply concerned" arm-flapping humans who assume dog training is all about them, often are not!   : Reposted from May 2010.

Secret Sauce Dog Training

I got into a conversation, a while back, about some of the strange things people believe about dogs.

Trying to provide a helpful framework, I referenced the work of Harry G. Frankfurt of Princeton University, who notes (On Bullshit, 2005) that there is a difference between a bullshitter and a liar.

A bullshitter will say anything to get a rise -- he does not care what the truth is. A bullshitter is a fake selling his wares with whatever story, line or song he thinks will do the job that instant.

A liar, on the other hand, knows exactly where the truth is, never keeps his eye off it, and tries to steer folks far from its edges.

A lot of folks in the world of dogs are bullshitters or, to be more precise, they are squawking parrots repeating ad nauseum whatever humbug they were "told" by someone.. somewhere... sometime.

What's the pay off?

More often than not the purveyor of bullshit is simply searching for that warm glow that comes when he or she has demonstrated that they are a "special" person with a "special" base of knowledge that only those "in the know" share.

You know the type: "their" breed of dog is a rare breed designed to herd fish into nets or scoop puffins from cliffs. "Their" dog food is a boutique brand made from the dried placentas of Icelandic sheep. "Their" method of dog training is so modern and so scientific no one in the world of working terriers, sled dogs, bird dogs, running dogs, herding dogs, or guard dogs is actually using it.

A bullshitter will not provide footnotes, will not have any experience of their own, and almost everything they say will be swaddled in some sort of clap-trap theory.

To clarify, a bullshitter need not necessarily be wrong -- they are simply not very concerned if they are right. Or, to quote Tim Minchin:

You know what they call alternative medicine that works?

Medicine.

Bingo.

The world of dogs is old, and most everything has been tried. If something works in the world of dogs, it's no longer an "alternative" anything -- it's just another tool in the box, to be used if needed, depending on the problem at hand.

The simple fact is that Frank and Rudd Weatherwax, the owners and trainers of Lassie, were training dogs with food, praise and a chain slip collar long before B.F. Skinner saw his first pigeon or built his first "Skinner Box," complete with electrified shock floor and food bucket.

But of course, no one wants to pay homage to the old. Everyone wants to be "new" and everyone wants to be "special".

Ironically, in this way, we are all the same.

The result is that in the world of dogs, we are neck deep in bullshit.

Am I the only one to notice that Pet people seem to be a little more susceptible than most to such complete malarkey as aromatherapy, homeopathy, and fear-mongering about preservatives used in vaccines?

Slap the words "holistic," "natural," or "human grade" on any kind of dog food, and pet people will buy it no matter if it has never seen a feed trial and if it is manufactured by a nameless, faceless third-party company that gets its ingredients from God Knows Where. Beef, chicken, corn and soy are deemed to be "bad" merely because they have stood the test of time, while pumpkin, flax seed, clover, and potatoes are deemed excellent because they are brand new and sound great!?

And is it any different in the world of dog training?

Of course not.

Now, to be clear, I am not talking about any one method of dog training. As I have said before, almost almost all methods found in books actually work, at least for something.

But isn’t that true for human exercise down at the gym too?

And really, is a dog trainer really that different from a personal trainer?

In both cases, the client comes to the table knowing the basics but willing to pay a little money if there is some some sort of "magical solution" that does not involve time, self-discipline, and (to tell the truth) mind-numbing boredom.

Eat less and exercise more? Who wants to do that? No one!

And so the rallying cry of the personal trainer is the same as that of the dog trainer:

• Like me.
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• Trust me.
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• Pay me.

Both the personal trainer and the dog trainer may claim expertise in a bit of magic not found in a book, but you will have to sign up for the course or buy the system ("a $600.00 value for 3 monthly payments of $39.95") to find out the rest.

Right.

And what is this secret knowledge? What is the "secret sauce"?

Down at the gym the personal trainer may be pushing a special diet, or his own recommended rotation of weights, or a certain set of calisthenics.

And will it work?

Sure, provided you put in a hour of hard labor everyday and mostly eat vegetables. If you follow up on that by cutting out the fats, sugar, carbs, booze, cigarettes, and dope, I am pretty sure you can be whipped into shape in 120 days!

And what is the "secret sauce" of dog training? It's pretty much the same.

If you put in an hour a day, every day, exercising your dog, and if you read a few books on well-timed rewards-based training and measured consequences for bad behavior, and follow the program every day, I am pretty sure you can transform your dog into a model citizen in 120 days or so.

Of course, neither your personal trainer nor your dog trainer is likely to be as transparent as I have been about the entire process.

And maybe you don't want them to be. I mean if you're going to pay money to get external reinforcement for your lack of internal discipline you may want a little "secret sauce" to hide that fact.

No problem. A lot of personal trainers and dog trainers know this is exactly what you want, and so they are only too happy to whip up a little "special sauce" for you.

Don’t be surprised then if your personal trainer talks about the Glycemic Index, the Montignac Diet, the I-tal diet or the Kangatarian diet. He or she might talk about cross-training, periodization, plateaus, and isometric exercises.

While pushing their diet and exercise recommendations, don't be too surprised if they also start to demonize or minimize other systems as being less effective, slower, or perhaps "toxic" because they "create too much cortisol."

Remember, it's not enough that your new system works. The old system has to be bad. In most religions, it's not enough that you go to heaven; everyone else has to go to hell.

However it goes, though, one thing is always the same: If you really want a new body, you will have to get off your ass, exercise more, and eat less. Every trainer presents a different set of sticks and carrots, but not a single one of them has ever presented a magic wand.

And what about dog training? It's petty much the same thing.

Whatever dog trainer you end up going to, they are sure to talk about rewards-based training and socialization, fear-based aggression, canine motivation, and timing. The smarter ones will also talk about simple measured consequences to end unwanted self-reinforcing behavior.

While pushing their own brand of dog training, most dog trainers also demonize or minimize other dog training methods, explaining that they don't work or work more slowly, or are "cruel" or "old" or "not scientific" or don't result in a happy, health dog no matter what you may have seen or others may have said.

However it goes, though, one thing will always be the same: If you hope to end up with a better behaved dog you will have to get off your ass, exercise your dog, and spend more time communicating with it in a consistent and well-timed way every day.

Exercise, rewards, consistency, timing, consequences and lots of repetition. Though every trainer will present with a slightly different set of carrots and sticks, those are the commonalities and there is no magic wand.

Nothing I have said here should be too shocking. Market segmentation is as old as markets, and "secret sauce" come-ons are as old as cookbooks.

I am not opposed to secret sauce market segmentation up to a point.

All I ask is that people don’t lie.

Don’t tell me a Fruitarian diet cures cancer when Steve Jobs died of cancer after eating a fruitarian diet for years.

Don’t tell me early childhood vaccines are dangerous when nothing has improved the lives of people (to say nothing of dogs) more than vaccination.

Don’t tell me I can eat as much as I want and still shed several pounds a week.

Don’t tell me a toe tap is a kick, or that a leash pop is animal abuse.

Don’t tell me that every Pit Bull is as dangerous as a wild lion OR that Pit Bulls, as a breed, are exactly the same as every other dog.

Don’t tell me slip collars cause cancer or that electronic collars cause hypothyroidism.

Don’t tell me that bottled water is medicine, or that ground up seaweed is a cure for "chronic disease and premature aging."

Don’t claim to be "national research council" when you are nothing more than a vet tech with an opinion.

Don’t tell me you are a "scientific" dog trainer when you do not have a degree in science and do not use every quadrant of operant conditioning or classical conditioning at all.

Don’t tell me you are a famous dog trainer in Great Britain when you do not own a dog at all.

And, above all, don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining!

The secret sauce is commitment. 

• Related Links:
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  ** No Evidence One Dog Food is Better Than Another
  ** Between Two Lies, Lost Opportunity for Pit Bulls

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Disney Dog Training with Contrived Controversy

Fifty-five years ago, Walt Disney filmed a movie called Big Red featuring a show-bred Irish Setter that wanted to hunt, and a contrived crisis about dog training between an older English-speaking Canadian (played by Walter Pigeon) and a younger French-speaking orphan who wanted to teach the dog using "gentler" methods.

The movie begins at a dog show at the Montreal Kennel Club where Big Red wins first prize and Walter Pigeon's "kennel man" is instructed to spend as much as $5,000 to acquire Big Red -- a cash equivalent of over $35,000 in today's dollars.

In the next scene we see the improbable situation where a show dog has been bought by a shooting dog man, and the shooting man with show dogs also has many breeds rather than specializing in just one.

We then get introduced to the orphan, dressed in beautiful clothes and dripping in pancake makeup, who slurs grade-school French.  Welcome to the wonderful world of Disney!

Finally, we learn that just one month after being acquired, Big Red is supposed to go to the Westminster Dog Show in New York where, if he wins, he will be "the best dog in North America, perhaps in the whole world" and his cash-value will then double.

As the movie rolls forward, we see the horror of aversive training techniques -- Walter Pigeon cuffs the dog under the jaw so that it will hold its head unnaturally high in the show ring.

Of course the boy is shocked -- this is abuse!

But Walter Pigeon explains, setting up the essential conflict of the movie, that "a dog is an animal, he is governed by conditioned reflexes.  Dogs are not people, they do not have human reactions, and the only way to handle them is with a firm voice and tight lead."

And with that -- all of two seconds of training done with horrible timing -- Walter Pigeon gives up on the dog for the day. "We'll try again tomorrow" he tells the kennel man.

Walter Pigeon explains to the Orphan that Big Red is a "bench dog" and that "his kind are not used for any practical purposes any more" because they were bred for looks rather than work.

This little scene is designed to reinforce our dislike of the older man, who has just said he bought a useless dog at an extravagant price solely to make money.  This is, quite obviously, the antithesis of  good red-blooded American values.  And besides, Big Red is not useless!

Welcome to Disney, where every story is a morality tale.

The movie takes obvious plot twists and turns as it progresses, with the poor Orphan Boy somehow becoming an expert trainer in less than a month (a miracle!), and the fellow with the expensive shotguns and kennel full of dogs, somehow not knowing his ass from his elbow.  And yes there is the obligatory run-in with a mountain lion, with Big Red and the Orphan Boy saving the day.

What's interesting about this story, from a historical point of view, is that it shows how long the  battle between "abusive" trainers and "gentle" trainers has been going on.

In fact, working dog men like Montague Stevens were training dogs with food long before the parents of Karen Pryor or Victoria Stilwell were born. 

Food rewards as a dog training method are older than Jesus, and it's hard to find a 19th Century book on dog training that does not talk about the practice. 

But you cannot train everything with a food reward, which is why God gave porcupines their quills, and skunks their spray.  The real world is full of consequences of all kinds, and they are not all positive, are they?

The dog trainer who was actually used in this movie is none other than William Koehler, who is often demonized as an abusive trainer simply because he did not shower his dogs with biscuits and then turn around to whine that they were now all fat. 

This is not to say that all of of William Koelher's techniques would be saluted today.  Long lines?  Yes. Tossing a light choke chain at a dog?  OK.  But Koehler also saluted the idea that with some dogs a very powerful aversive, done once, was less cruel that mincing about with half measures for months.  Was Koelher right?  The bull in the pasture that does not test his electric fence says "maybe."  But do most dog trainers really need to use strong aversives?  The answer is no.  Most dog owners are pet owners who will never see their dog running free off leash, and most are training dogs starting as puppies, before bad behaviors have been deeply ingrained because they were (unintentionally) rewarded for years.

Koelher, of course, did run his dogs off-leash and unlike so many in the world of dog training, he did not start by training fat suburban dogs owned by owners too lazy to walk them. 

Like so many dog trainers of his era, Koehler started off in the military in World War II where the dogs acquired were almost all large adults and given (read abandoned) to the military because they often already had discipline and temperament issues. And yet, in the military, a dog that does not obey a command can cost lives, both human and canine.  To this day, the U.S. military uses very strong aversives for certain parts of its training regime.  When a bomb-detecting dog is told to "stop" this is not to be taken as a suggestion!  A dog that barks while on patrol can kill an entire platoon.

Yes, most military dogs "will work for Kong" and other toys and small rewards, but these dogs have also learned  that there are certain never acts, and some of those (such as barking on patrol) may be counter to their internal code.

The year that Big Red came out, William Koehler published The Koehler Method of Dog Training which became a staple of AKC obedience competitors.

A variation of the "Koehler method" of dog training was brought to television in the late 1970s by Barbara Woodhouse, who featured basic Koehler methods in her own book, "No Bad Dogs."

Of course, most people who opine about Koehler today have never actually read a Koehler book, and have no idea that he trained dogs in Hollywood or that he trained dogs for this "anti-abuse" movie in particular.   When they do look to defame Koheler, they generally do so by quoting from the very end of one of his books -- and leaving out the fact that this section is very clearly labeled as one that is only to be consulted when all else has failed and the next stop for the dog is the gas chamber. 

Death before discomfort?  That's the rallying cry of a lot of "pure positive" dog trainers today, who are only too willing to declare a dog untrainable if they cannot get it to changes it ways with nothing more than a few cubes of cheese.

Did William Koehler believe in unearned rewards, or effusive baby talk to dogs?  No, but neither do most sensible trainers.

Did William Koehler prance about in a dominatrix outfit while showering dogs with biscuits and screaming at their owners?  No, but neither do most sensible trainers. 

William Koehler was a balanced trainer.  He knew dogs needed exercise (as can be seen in this movie), and that for a working dog there were few more powerful forces at work than the code that explodes (as can be seen when Big Red pings on birds when out in the field with the Orphan Boy). 

Koehler also knew that in the real world of off-lead dog work, a dog that obeyed only some of the time had a higher-than acceptable chance of ending up dead. 

That's still true today, whether the dog is an explosives detection dog in the Army, a police dog in Detroit, or a companion dog that escapes the yard in California.

William Koehler worked with dogs for 50 years, was employed by Walt Disney for 20 years, and over the course of his life he trained more than 25,000 dogs according to his obituary.

Compare his record with anyone else, and you are likely to find his credentials and experience without peer. 

Does that mean you have to train your dog the Koelher way?  Of course not!.  Train your dog any way you want.  But do everyone a favor, eh?  Admit that William Koehler had a long and remarkable career training very happy dogs (as did other Hollywood dog trainers, such Rudd Weatherwax, the trainer of Lassie), and that William Koehler was dealing with a lot of dogs that were not Labrador retrievers, that were not puppies, and which required a performance standard a little bit higher than "sometimes he'll do it if he feels like it and I have his toy or a chunk of cheese."

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  ** De-sensitizing a Dog to Stimulus
  ** Fence Fighting at the Dog Trainers Guild
  ** The Limits and Strengths of E-Collars  .

In the Land of the Blind the One-Eyed Dog is King

A repost from October 2011

While at coffee today, I read an article on Slate penned by Gene Lyons.

The article was about a fellow who bought a 5-year old German shepherd protection dog, sight unseen, for $7,500, and then tried to return it.

It's a good read; check it out.

Buried in the article was this little line:

Almost as puzzling as dog haters are people who keep pets but have no earthly idea how the animals think and feel.

Cesar Milan has made a handsome living off dog owners whose cluelessness makes “The Dog Whisperer” one of the funniest things on TV.

The word clueless leaped out at me, as some years ago David Dunning used this word to describe why people so often think weird things, a topic I am flipping around in my brain these days.

Recalling Dunning's diagram, I drew a slightly modified version on a napkin, with an added circle to show what people might actually know about dogs, and a second circle to encompass ignorance, which I think is quite different from cluelessness.

The smallest circle, in yellow, is denial. This is the stuff about dogs that is too painful for us to confront for whatever reason. Sometimes this is about dogs in general or a breed in particular, but often as not it is about the owner and his or her own need to work out his or her own psychological issues through a canine surrogate.

The next largest circle, in white, is actual knowledge about dogs. Here we have the sum total of what an owner may have read about dogs, been told about dogs, or actually experienced or seen with their own eyes with their own dog. This is a surprisingly small circle with most people, and it is probably way over-represented in this drawing.

The next largest circle, the one in orange, is self-deception or what Dunning describes as "rationalization, wishful thinking, defensive processing, self-delusion, and motivated reasoning." This is the circle that encompasses all the falsities we tenaciously hang on to, or refuse to reexamine because re-examining them is not very convenient. How many people position their dog food or dog training choices as the only ones that work, and never mind the evidence to the contrary? How many people blame the dog for their failure to be clear and consistent? How many people are breed or kennel blind? How many think they exercise their dog when they walk it around the block? How many people think they know all about dogs even though they have never read a book or bothered to teach a dog a simple trick?

The next ring is ignorance. These are the things we know we do not know. We may not know how to teach a dog how to climb a ladder, for example, or how to close a barbed wire flesh wound, but we know it can be done and it can be learned.

Finally, on the very outside, and encircling all in purple, we have cluelessness. This is the stuff that we do not know that we do not know. This is the eternal mystery of dogs. Humans do not smell the world as dogs do, nor do we see the world in the same visual spectrum, nor do we see the world from the same angle. We do not hear what a dog hears, and we do not have the same internal drives or all of the same motivations. When a dog throws a sign, we generally do not know how read it or even that it is being given, much less how to send it back (or that we should) with a wag of our tail or a slight movement of our ears, or a curve in our gait.

We have no idea. 

In the world of the dog, we humans seem to bump around blind, deaf, loud, incoherent, manic and stupid.

Look at what is in white versus the sum of what is colored, and remember that knowledge is probably over-represented here!

Now is there really any wonder why so many people think strange things about dogs?

Self-deception alone has made us blind to the large numbers of deformed dogs paraded around Kennel Club rings. Self-deception is what enables us to call a place a "shelter" when 75 percent of the dogs admitted are summarily killed.

Denial is what enables English Bull Dog owners to claim their dogs are fit for function and Pit Bull owners to tell each other that their dogs are exactly the same as all the others.

And as for knowledge, it is not that easy to get, is it?

The all-breed books are packed with invented stories from dog dealers, while so many of the dog training books are either autobiographies or tips on how to train a dog to do a trick. Veterinarians seem to be more interested in bill padding than setting the world straight on how to breed healthier dogs. And how much of what we read or are told is nonsense copied from one autodidact to another?

And, of course, book learning will only take you part way. You cannot really know dogs until you have spent a lot of time in action with them and observing them, and not just one dog, but many.

If you truly want to know about dogs, you have to take them out into the elements for which they were created. And even then, there will be mysteries.

While you may be able to shrink the denial circle, and expand the knowledge circle, there will always be the vast land of Clueless lying just over the horizon.

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They Invented Animal Training

This article was written for the June 2010 issue of Dogs Today magazine. Illustration by Kevin Brockbank.

Who invented animal training and what can we learn from them?

The question may seem silly. Animal training is older than the hills. For certain, it is as old as the dog.

That said, most of what we call animal training today fits into the folder of "operant conditioning," a term first coined by American psychologist B.F. Skinner in the early 1930s.

Chase it around the room, and operant conditioning is simply learning from consequences.

Skinner codified the basic principals of operant conditioning, and he invented a laboratory-based mechanical-training machine which rewarded animals with food when they pulled levers and pecked at spots.

Skinner's real claim to fame in the world of dogs, however, is that he hired Keller and Marian Breland -- two young assistants who more or less invented the modern art of animal training.

Teaching Pigeons to Bowl

The Breland's made their first big discovery while working with Skinner in 1943.

As odd as it sounds, the goal on this occasion was to train pigeons to "bowl" a ping-pong ball down a short alley to knock down a few pins. Keller Breland decided to use a hand-held switch to trigger a food reward, rather than a purely mechanical device. A small problem was that the pigeons had no interest in pecking at the ping-pong ball! Though Keller waited for hours for the right behavior to express itself, it never happened. In frustration, Keller decided to give the pigeons a reward for doing anything approximating movement in the right direction. To his amazement, the pigeons caught on pretty quickly, and the completed trick was learned in short order.

Thus was born "shaping," or progressive rewards based on approximating a task.

The second big development occurred in 1945. By this time, B. F. Skinner had left the University of Minnesota, and the Brelands had decided to strike out on their own as professional animal trainers.

While shaping tricks, the Brelands noticed that the animals themselves seemed to be paying attention to the noises made by the hand-held food-reward switches.

Keller and Marian Breland soon discovered that an acoustic secondary enforcer, such as a click or whistle, could communicate to an animal the precise action being rewarded, and it could do so from a distance.

The Brelands called this a "bridging stimulus," (now generally called a bridge) and it dramatically sped up animal training by increasing the amount of information going to an animal.

Thus was born clicker training.

The Rise of Commercial Animal Acts

By now the Brelands had created their own animal training company -- Animal Behavior Enterprises. Their first contract, with General Mills, was so successful that other contracts with movies, circuses, museums, fairs, and zoos soon followed.

Over the next several decades, the Brelands trained more than 15,000 animals representing more than 140 species. At one point, the Brelands had more than 1,000 animals under training at a single time -- a jaw-dropping level of production.

The Brelands did not just train animals; they also trained other animal trainers who went on to work at such venues as Busch Gardens, Disney World, and Sea World. The Brelands themselves signed contracts with such major amusement parks as Marineland of Florida, Marineland of the Pacific, Parrot Jungle, and Six Flags.

Rewards-based clicker training worked so well that in 1951, the Brelands authored an article in American Psychologist, in which they said they thought rewards-based clicker training might work on any animal to train just about anything.

And then something happened. They noticed that clicker training was, in certain circumstances, beginning to fail in ways they could no longer overlook.

When Clicker Training Failed

In a 1961 paper entitled, The Misbehavior of Organisms, Keller and Marian Breland described their first experience with the failure of reward-based operant conditioning.

It seems that when working with pigs, chickens and raccoons, the animals would often learn a trick and then begin to drift away from the learned behavior and towards more instinctive, unreinforced, foraging actions.

What was going on?

Put simply, instinct was raising its inconvenient head.

Though Skinner and his disciples had always maintained that performance was driven by external rewards or punishments, here was clear evidence that there was an internal code that could not always be ignored.

The Brelands wrote:

These egregious failures came as a rather considerable shock to us, for there was nothing in our background in behaviorism to prepare us for such gross inabilities to predict and control the behavior of animals with which we had been working for years.... [T]he diagnosis of theory failure does not depend on subtle statistical interpretations or on semantic legerdemain - the animal simply does not do what he has been conditioned to do.

The Brelands did not overstate the problem, nor did they quantify it. They simply stated a fact: instinct existed, and sometimes it bubbled up and over-rode trained behaviors.

Clearly, every species had different instincts, and just as clearly, a great deal of animal training could be done without ever triggering overpowering instinct. Still, the Brelands noted,

After 14 years of continuous conditioning and observation of thousands of animals, it is our reluctant conclusion that the behavior of any species cannot be adequately understood, predicted, or controlled without knowledge of its instinctive patterns, evolutionary history, and ecological niche.

The Problem with Dogs

What does this have to do with dogs?

Quite a lot. You see a small, but vocal and militant group of clicker trainers believe everything a dog does is learned by external rewards, and internal drives are "old school" fiction.

While the Brelands argued that a species could not be adequately controlled without “knowledge of its instinctive patterns, evolutionary history, and ecological niche," the most extreme militants in the world of clicker training now seek to minimize and disavow the very nature and history of dogs.

Dog packs? There are no such things, we are told.

Dominance? It does not exist in feral dogs or in wolves, and never mind the experts who disagree.

Prey drive? Not too much said about that!

Of course, instinctive behaviors and drives do not disappear simply because they are inconvenient.

As Keller and Marian Breland put it,

[A]lthough it was easy to banish the Instinctivists from the science during the Behavioristic Revolution, it was not possible to banish instinct so easily.

Of course, one must be careful to qualify the role of instinct.

Yes, dogs have instincts, but the history of dog breeding has largely been about reducing instinctive drives. As a consequence, most breeds have instinctive drives that are sufficiently attenuated that they are not much of an impediment to basic rewards-based training.

That said, not all dog breeds are alike. Not every dog is a blank slate, as the owner of any herding dog or game-bred terrier will tell you. Prey drive does not disappear because you want it to. Many problematic behaviors in dogs -- especially behaviors in hard-wired working dogs that are being raised as pets -- are self-reinforcing behaviors that express themselves without any external reinforcement at all!

Clicker training, the Brelands remind us, cannot solve everything.

Is rewards-based training the most important tool in any trainer’s box of tricks and methods?

Absolutely. There is not much debate there.

But the Brelands remind us that dogs do not come to the trainer as a tabula rasa, nor should we think of all dog breeds as being more or less the same, or that all responses are equally conditionable to all stimuli.

Dogs and other animals, it turns out, are a bit more complicated that white rats, and the real world is not a laboratory.

In the wild and on the farm, animals have managed to learn, all by themselves, since the Dawn of Time and long before clickers came on the scene. How did they do that? Does the real world have as much to teach us as the lab? Keller and Marian Breland thought it did.

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The Radical Notion of Consequences

Balance is achieved by counter-balancing self-reinforcing behaviors.

School should be fun for both students and teachers, and the same can be said for dog training.

Dogs and children learn quickly when educational elements are interspersed with play, and when well-timed rewards and praise clearly signal when success has been achieved.

Well-timed rewards and praise are the basis of most training.

But not all learning is accompanied by rewards, is it?

For humans, domestic animals, and even wild animals, powerful aversive experiences also educate.

A fox may get a ripped muzzle, a cow a shock from an electric fence, a horse a mouth full of nettles, a young man a police arrest or black eye.

Live and learn. Such is life.

Ask any man or woman to show you their scars, and they will remember what caused them.

Fox, cow and dog are no different.

Three Shocks Change a Life

Aversives, when strong enough and well-timed, make a powerful impression and can fix a lot of problems before they start.

Imagine if, when you were sixteen years old, you had been shocked just as you reached out to touch that first can of purloined beer.

Would you have reached for a second? A third? Would you have ever drunk a six pack?

And if you had not, would you have done better in school? Would you have married a different girl or gotten a different job?

Would three or four well-timed shocks have changed the entire trajectory of your life?

Probably.

But, of course, that's not what happened, is it?

Instead, you drank the first beer, and the first beer drank the second beer, and before you can say "Bob's your Uncle" you had downed a six pack and discovered the joys of being drunk with members of the opposite sex.

Of course, when people drink, bad things eventually happen. People get sick, they say or do something they shouldn't, they embarrass themselves.

And yet, people still drink. We humans are slow learners and quick forgetters.

Why? Why are we slow learners when it comes to things like booze?

Well, to put it bluntly, beer, fate and society are not very good animal trainers.

All three elements allow for long periods of self-reinforcing pleasure punctuated by episodic (and sometimes apparently random) negative outcomes.

Often these negative outcomes are not all that painful. We survive hangovers, clean up the vomit, make our apologies, and we do not change our behavior too much.

Of course, alcohol intoxication is only one form of self-reinforcing behavior. Others include driving too fast, coming to work late, leaving work early, and spending more money than we actually have.

Provided nothing really bad happens, these bad behaviors will not go away.

Only when we "feel the heat" do we "see the light." Even then, the heat must be consistent and far enough outside our comfort zone to counter-balance the reward implicit to any self-reinforcing behavior.

The good news is that if a well-timed and consistent aversive experience is delivered, we learn quickly.

In fact, if we were all given a mild shock every time we went over the speed limit (rather than a random ticket we pay later), I think most of us would stop speeding in short order, and thousands of lives a year might be saved. Lesson learned, and it would not take a long time to learn it!

Cold Hand Meets Hot Stove

This last point is important: It would not take long time to learn it.

Electric fences work because they ALWAYS deliver a jolt when touched, and the shock cannot be brushed aside. The jolt of an electric fence is memorable even to a one-ton bull.

An electric fence is not designed to torture cows; it's designed to train them.

Training here is done with perfect timing and an assured, predictable, and memorable consequence.

Bad habits are never reinforced, and they are never ignored. It only takes a few well-timed applications of a powerful negative consequence for the cow to "get it" and stay away from the fence. After that it may never get jolted again.

The point here is that aversive training is not torture; it is the opposite of torture.

Torture occurs when punishment is random, unpredictable, or incessant.

Aversive training is NOT "randomly shocking the food bowl" to create psychosis in an animal.

Aversive training is NOT long periods of permissive indifference punctuated by sudden and unexplained periods of overlording, intolerance, or pain.

Nor is aversive training always painful.

It is simply an unwanted but memorable consequence that is consistently applied to counterbalance what would otherwise be an unwanted, but self-reinforcing, behavior.

For some timid animals the counter-balancing aversive that is needed may be as simple as a loud voice, a light jerk on a leash, or a loud rattle-can tossed in their direction.

As a general rule, the younger the animal, the less ingrained the habitat, and/or the weaker the positive stimulus provided by the animal's unwanted behavior, the weaker the aversive stimulus needed to serve as a counterbalance.

Training Is Not Torture

Why are so many people frantic in their assertion that negative consequences should never be levied when training an animal?

I cannot prove it, but I suspect some of this reaction is the pentimento of bad parenting long ago inflicted on confused children.

Adults raised as children in unstable homes sometimes have a hard time, later in life, differentiating between simple discipline and abuse.

In their own childhood, long periods of lackadaisical parenting may have been punctuated by overly-severe application of consequences, with new rules invented overnight and maintained for only a day or two before being abandoned without explanation, or honored only in the breach.

Of course, what has gone on here has not been discipline and training, but the opposite of that.

Where there should have been consistency, there was no consistency.

Where there should have been positive attention there was instead weeks of indifference.

Where rules should have been clear, there was only confusion.

People raised in these kind of households often have trust and communication problems, and people with trust and communication problems often gravitate to the world of animals, and especially to dogs.

Feeding, Seeding & Weeding

In a healthy household, the ratio of positive to negative consequences is always high, and it remains high.

There is no magic here; positive or pleasurable consequences, as well as consistency, are the backbone of all successful teaching.

Of course, we do not click and treat our children with little lumps of cheese or hotdog!

Instead, we use words, body language, short written notes, text messages, grades, privileges, time and attention, toys, play opportunities, money, fancy clothes, and increased responsibility to signal our approval.

Nor do we ignore bad behavior. Here the theories and methods range all over the map depending on culture, location, time and temperament. Some parents use a strap, some spank, some put kids in time out, most lecture, some humiliate, some withhold privileges, some slam doors and make threatening noises, some hold back toys and fun activities, some impose hard work or even fines.

Does it all work? Of a fashion. One problem is that parents are notoriously inconsistent (espcially when there is more than one parent), and the ability to time consequences so they are associated with bad action is hard.

If a child is started early, raised in attention and love, and attuned to the fact that well-timed and consistent consequences will follow, however, bad behavior rarely gets too far out of hand.

Yes, there will always be some bad behavior, but it does not take much to set the child right.

And what is true of children is, generally true of dogs and lawns.

Lawns?

Yes, lawns.

In many ways, raising children and raising dogs is a bit like growing a lawn; It's all about feeding, seeding, and weeding.

The feeding is your positive daily interaction with the dog.

A healthy lawn needs sunlight, water, and fertilizer. A strong system of roots prevents a lot of problems, and tends to keep weeds at bay on its own.

This is true of children and dogs as well.

The seeding is the introduction of trained behaviors.

Some folks want kids and dogs to "grow naturally" and so, to extend the lawn metaphor, they allow the grass to grow tall and self-seed, and they let the edges of the lawn run a bit wild.

Others want children and dogs to follow a very prescribed set of behaviors and so the lawn is cut sharp twice a week, edged once a week, and overseeded on a regular basis.

Weeding, of course, is simply the elimination of certain unwanted plant species which, if left ignored, would self-propagate and ruin the lawn.

No matter how strong the lawn and how judicious your seeding and fertilizing, every lawn eventually has a problem weed or two, and woe is the homeowner who does not take the time to grub them out.

You see, weeds self-propagate. They are as self-reinforcing as some bad behaviors.

Can you feed your way out of a weed problem?

No, not generally. There's a reason every lawn keeper has a weed tool, and every dog owner has has a leash and a collar. Sometimes you just have to say NO, and mean it.

This is a repost from May 2010.