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Episode 135 | Bonus: A brief history of modern dog training (audio of lecture from the SFTD Professional Course)

Warning: If you're not a very nerdy aspiring dog trainer or a science geek when it comes to the history of the study animal behavior, this episode might not be for you! You've been warned. Annie talks about the evolution of dog training, starting with hypotheses about the domestication of dogs, the rise of the "pet" dog in the late 1800s, covering the work of Pavlov and Watson in the early 1900s, the birth of clicker training in Skinner's lab in the middle of the century, up through the rise of dominance-based trainers on TV in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

This is the audio from a lecture Annie put together for the School For The Dogs Professional Course. School For The Dogs has been training up dog trainers for four years, and is in the process of putting much of this curriculum online for aspiring dog trainers. If you're interested in learning more about the SFTD Professional Course and would like to be notified when it launches, email annie@schoolforthedogs.com.

 

Mentioned in this episode:

We met the world’s first domesticated foxes

Annie reads an excerpt from the book Dogs

 

Books mentioned:

How to Tame a Fox (and Build a Dog) by Lee Alan Dugatkin

Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior & Evolution by Raymond and Lorna Coppinger

Culture Clash by Jean Donaldson

Don't Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor

 

Related Episodes:

Episode 126 | Bonus: Annie reads aloud John B. Watson's 1913 essay “Psychology As The Behaviorist Views it”

Episode 69 | “Mean Talk,” Mouse Traps & Water Guns: The Lassie Method

 

Transcript:

Annie:

So this is a bonus episode that is really for listeners who are super nerdy about dog training. You've been warned if you end up finding it's boring, you might not be nerdy enough. I recorded this for our professional course which we have been building out and really putting the finishing touches on.  We've had a professional course for a few years, but we've been working on putting the majority of it online with both on demand and live interactive parts. If you're interested in learning more and being notified as soon as it officially launches, just email me, annie@schoolforthedogs.com and I will give you more info.

 

But yeah, so this is the audio of this lecture. There is a PowerPoint and video, too, which obviously you're not going to experience because this is a podcast.  But I thought I put it up here, because when I first got interested in dog training, I really didn't have any context for any of it. So I put this presentation together to try and give some context, and answer the question where did, for instance, where did clicker training come from? And why isn't it more widely used, and was it just recently invented et cetera, et cetera.

 

So, hope that if you are an aspiring dog trainer or are just a geek about this kind of stuff as I am, I hope you will get something out of this. All right, here you go. Oh, and by the way, if I sound like I'm talking a little bit slowly or whatever, it's because I'm going through slides while I'm talking. So that is that is my full disclaimer. Now go forth and listen.

 

This lecture is going to be a brief history of dog training. This is not meant to be a comprehensive history, but rather something that touches on both the last century-ish of dog training and with an attempt to put it into the larger context of dogs in the human world over time.

 

Did humans really domesticate dogs?  We tend to have this assumption in our culture that domestication is something that we did to dogs. Actually, the more likely scenario is probably one of co-evolution, with natural selection favoring dogs who could exist in the human realm, favoring dogs who were less fearful of humans and more likely to engage in behaviors that human liked.  Or have performed some kind of job for humans. The most basic job probably being eating a family’s scraps, which would reduce the amount of disease carrying vermin.

 

Darwin was someone who thought a lot about domestication in many kinds of animals and noted that many domesticated animals, be they cows or mice or dogs had similar physical traits.  Highly recommend looking at the book, How to Tame a Fox or finding YouTube videos also about the Siberian fox experiment also called the Belyaev fox experiment where they bred dogs for nothing but their ability to exist near humans. That was the only criteria that they picked. They also had a control group of foxes that they let breed naturally.

 

And the short version of this decades long experiment is that the foxes that were bred for being less fearful of humans ended up, within just a few generations, developing many dog-like behavioral and physical qualities.  Physical qualities that are actually quite similar to some of the physical qualities we see in other domesticated species of animals: curved tales, floppy ears piebald or spotted coats.  Really interesting stuff.

 

I also suggest looking at the book Dogs by Ray and Lorna Coppinger.  Raymond Comppinger was a very famous ethologist.  Ethologists study animal behavior with a focus of looking at them under natural conditions and looking at behavior as it relates to a species’ evolution.

 

The Coppingers make a strong argument against what they call the Pinocchio hypothesis of the dog, where people would supposedly take pups out of wolf dens and turn them into pets, taming them and training them. And instead argue that the modern dog developed probably over just a few generations shortly after people became less peripatetic, started settling and having dumps. The wolves that were able to get closest to the dumps were able to consume more calories while expending fewer calories, therefore thriving. 

 

In the introduction of the book, they also do a nice job of breaking down the four basic symbiotic relationships between humans and other animals: commensalism, mutualism, parasitism, and amensalism.  Commensalism being a symbiotic relationship that is good for one species, but does nothing for the other.  Mutualism being a relationship where both species benefit from the relationship.  Parasitism being a relationship between two species where one organism obtains a benefit at the expense of the other. And lastly, amensalism.  Amensalism being where two species are living together, and one is hurting the other, although perhaps unknowingly and without benefit even to itself.

 

They argue that the current relationship between humans and dogs is parasitism. I will read from section:

 

Parasitism defines a relationship between two species living together where one organism obtains a benefit at the expense of the other. It may be unpopular, but we are going to make the case that the domestic house dog may have evolved into a parasite. It costs more than it gives back.  Further, we postulate another relationship, a subcategory of parasitism called dulosis.  Dulosis is enslavement where one species captures workers from another species. We are resigned to the fact that we will probably lose this argument, but we bet we lose it because people just don't agree with us and not because someone can provide data to the contrary.

 

The presence of parasitism or amensalism should not be taken as grounds for the elimination of dogs in our lives. Rather, the facts should be used as starting points for change and moving toward real mutualism.

 

This is from the introduction of the book Dogs.

 

I would argue, as a modern dog trainer, that if we're looking at the history of dog training over the last century, we might also see a relationship that could be called amensalism, in that I think we have often caused a lot of harm to dogs without really benefiting ourselves.

 

Now, if we're talking about the history of dogs within the context of modern dog training, I think it's important to mention that there are way more feral dogs in the world today than there are dogs living in homes. And when I say feral, I don't mean that there are more dogs in shelters than there are in homes. I mean that there are more dogs living absolutely on their own outside of homes than there are dogs in homes or dogs that have a prospect of going into homes, at a ratio of about one to three.

 

So for every dog you see living with a person who's uploading photos of them to their Instagram, there are about three dogs out there that are living in streets, living on beaches. We have seen these dogs, you maybe have seen these kinds of dogs, street dogs, in your travels.  And many of them are thriving because of humans, but not living with humans.

 

So they're living off of our waste. And they may even be sometimes cared for by humans, but it is not a relationship where we are asking anything in particular about them. So right now that ratio is about one to three. Of course it used to be much higher than that. It's really only in the last century or century and a half that people have started to bring dogs inside at all.

 

So what happened 150 or so years ago? You know, it's an interesting question that I am constantly learning more about.  Happy to recommend some of the books I've looked at on the subject. But the short answer is that it seems like it had a lot to do with the industrial revolution and fads and eugenics.

 

About 150 years ago, it started to become possible for people to breed their own dogs without a huge investment. Pprior to that, people who had dogs had dogs on farms, or had dogs for hunting.  Most people who had dogs had dogs for some kind of purpose, to do X, Y, and Z. So every generation people were selecting for dogs that were the best at herding, or the best at retrieving, in order to meet their needs as farmers, hunters, et cetera.

 

Around the late 1800s, having dogs as pets increased. And it was also possible to just get your hands on two dogs of a specific breed and have these rather fancy kinds of breeds that they would see the Kings and Queens having without a major investment.  All you needed is to have these dogs to start out with.

 

And I mentioned eugenics before, this of course was also a time where people were beginning to understand genes in general. This was around the time where Darwin was writing. People were talking about breeding humans in certain directions. And it was sure easier to make those kinds of experiments with dogs, to get dogs looking and behaving a certain way through breeding than it was to do that in humans.

 

So you might argue that eugenics and sort of an interest in experimenting with eugenics led to creating specific breeds. And this is when we started to have breeds that didn't necessarily serve a purpose. They were bred for their looks more than ever before, most likely. And they were brought into homes to show status often and not necessarily to serve a purpose of guarding, hunting, shepherding, et cetera, et cetera.

 

Along with this change came the notion that we need to teach dogs how to behave. Here we are bringing them into environments that were indoors, not necessarily the most natural places for these dogs. And along with that move came increased interest in molding these dogs into creatures who could live with us.

 

So much of these early dog training efforts had to do with communicating to people how they could control dogs. And, you know, I did this end gram, which shows the term “dog training” throughout the years in books. I think it's interesting to note that you first start to see an increase, a real increase around 1920. And this is a time period of world wars, Stalin, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler.

 

This is an era of dictators, and I think that we can find a lot of similarities between the way humans are controlled and the way we are moved to control or attempt to control our dogs.  Certainly the trend was — and unfortunately, probably still is, but we're trying to move away from it — was to control dogs using force, power and intimidation, much like people were being controlled in that time.

 

By the mid 1900s, I'd say it would be safe to say that dogs were often treated as household criminals. This is from a book I have, I believe it's from 1940 on house training on dealing with a dog who is going inside. They say:

 

 “Act quickly, act with decision, shout fearfully at him so that he knows that there is trouble ahead.  Seize him by the neck and not gently.  Place his nose in close contact with the exact spot where the deed was done. Give him some sharp spanks with a folded newspaper or open hand.  Shame him with your talk.  Tell him frankly your opinion of him, then hurry, hurry him outside the house.

 

“Alas and alack, now and then, we meet up with a hardened criminal. He just won't learn. Yes, he will in time. And in the meantime, increase the severity of physical punishment. Lay it on heavy. You will not be cruel. The punishment should bring sharp physical pain. The dog is deserving of it.”

 

Also middle of the 1900s, we have Rin Tin Tin on TV. We have Lassie on TV.  We have Snoopy in the comic strips.  And it could be argued that these dog characters sort of helped fan people's notion that dogs were like humans in dog costumes, that dogs had morals. That dogs understood language, that dogs had ethics that align with ours.

 

There is an excellent section in the book Culture Clash, at the beginning of the book Culture Clash. The first chapter where Jean Donaldson talks about this Disney-ification of dogs: “The Walt Disney dog being a very intelligent dog who has morals is capable of planning and executing revenge solves complex problems and understands the value of the artifacts in Walt's home.”

 

And I think that this set unreasonable and unreasonably high bar for how dogs should behave.  There is a lot of shoulds, and very little efforts put towards helping people actually understand the science of dog training.  The science, which is an application of the science of behavior.

 

Which interestingly, at around the same time was starting to be codified by BF Skinner in his lab at Harvard. BF Skinner was a professor of psychology who really identified what we today call, or what he called operant conditioning. He showed that with all kinds of animals, pigeons, rats, dogs, humans, and beyond, behavior could be controlled by controlling the environment and controlling consequences using reinforcement or punishment to either encourage or discourage behavior.

 

He was very much influenced both by Ivan Pavlov, who in the early 1900s showed that animals could be conditioned to respond to previously neutral stimuli. We will go over this in great depth in our section on respondent AKA classical conditioning.  And also by John B. Watson, who was an American psychologist working in the early 1900s, who is generally credited with having established the psychological school of behaviorism.  His most famous essay being a Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.

 

It's a short read of an essay. I thought I would just share the first paragraph here. It was a short essay. It was published in 1913 in the Psychological review. This is the link if you would like to look it up. The first paragraph reads:

 

“Psychology as the behaviors views it is a purely objective experimental branch of natural science.  Its theoretical goal is the prediction and control of behavior.  Introspection forms no essential part of its methods, nor is a scientific value of its data dependent upon the readiness with which they lend themselves to interpretation in terms of consciousness.  The behaviorist in his efforts to get a unitary scheme of animal response recognizes no dividing line between man and brute.  Then behavior of man with all of its refinement and complexity forms only a part of the behaviorists total scheme of investigation.”

 

Interestingly, John B. Watson did not have a very long career in academics, but actually went on to use his keen understanding of animal behavior to manipulate people in the world of advertising.

 

There was a lot of interesting work that happened in BF Skinner's lab. During World War Two, his lab was actually contracted by the government to train pigeons using rewards and conditioned reinforcers to guide missiles. His lab developed a system where a pigeon could be strapped into a special device attached to the missile. The pigeon was trained to peck a target on the screen, which would then help literally guide the missile to its destination.  Kamikaze. He trained kamikaze pigeons. Sadly the pigeons were never used and the US dropped atomic bombs over Japan instead.

 

This was just one of the many interesting projects helmed by BF Skinner and his lab.  There were also a lot of interesting people who worked there, more than more than we can cover in the scope of this lecture.  But it is worth mentioning two of his grad students, Marianne Breland later known as Maryann Breland Bailey, and her husband, Keller Breland.

 

Marriane and Keller Breland, and later Bob Bailey, who ended up marrying Marianne Breland shortly after her husband Keller died in 1965.  They started a business called Animal behavior enterprises, where they taught all kinds of animals using the operant conditioning techniques that they had learned and helped develop in BF Skinner's lab, and were probably the first to use any kind of clicker on a wide scale with a wide variety of species of animals.

 

They trained animals for commercials, for both TV commercials and tons of commercial purposes. They trained animals for appearances at amusement parks.  They were really at the forefront of what animals could be trained to do early on. 

 

And Breland’s work got into the hands of Karen Pryor, who in the 1960s was a young mother living in Hawaii. She was something of a breastfeeding expert and her husband bought a marine mammal amusement park. Karen Pryor had never really trained animals before, but her husband asked her to see what she could do with the dolphins.

 

And using this guide that Keller Breland had put together, she figured out how she could use a whistle as a marker signal to train dolphins to do all kinds of amazing things, using shaping and the whistle as a conditioned secondary reinforcer.

 

Now I've given you this background of what started out in BF Skinner's lab and moved to the world of dolphin training and training chickens for amusement parks, et cetera, only to point out how the science behind positive reinforcement, reward based dog training was there, even if it wasn't in the popular culture during these decades.

 

[Music and excerpt:]

Man speaking:

Why do we use chickens? First off it pretty well is true that if you can train a chicken, you can train almost anything.  That they're limited animals, but what they know, they know very well. They've been around for millions of years and they know how cope in the wild. And one of the major ways that they cope is with their behavior.

 

Annie:

Instead, the aforementioned tendency to treat dogs as villains who needed policing was maintained by fad dog trainers in the sixties and seventies.  There was Rudd Weatherwax, who was Lassie's trainer who advised doing things like stepping on a dog who's lying down in order to teach the dog to stay, stepping on the dog's back.

 

And then people like Barbara Woodhouse who was popular in the seventies and eighties on the BBC, she had a hit TV show. She had no formal training in the science of behavior and offered up advice that was pretty cruel, and crazy in my book.  But she had this kind of stern nanny 911 type personality that seemed to really appeal to people.

 

My favorite Barbara Woodhouse suggestion is to get a dog to stop chasing cars — well, I'll just read from this bit of one of her books. She writes:

 

“Enlist the aid of a friend with a car, ask him to drive you slowly past the dog that chases cars, and as the dog comes into the attack, throw out as hard as you can any fat hard covered book and make certain that the book hits the dog.  The shock it gives the dog so frightens it that I have never had to repeat the treatment more than once, even though the dog may have chased cars for years.”

 

And I love this part, she adds: “My favorite book is an old AA handbook. It is just the right size.” 

 

Now in the 1980s, Karen Pryor wrote the book, Don't Shoot the Dog, which is about how to use positive reinforcement in order to change behavior, the behavior really of people. Although it does touch a little bit on dogs.  The title is a bit misleading.  In the nineties, she started to popularize the clicker and a positive reinforcement based approach to dog training.

 

She would later go on to start the Karen Pryor Academy, which runs Clicker Expo a few times a year throughout the world, and trains up trainers to be able to teach clients using a clicker based methods, using positive reinforcement, et cetera, et cetera. I am a graduate of the Karen Pryor Academy. I think it's a great institution that for the last decade or so has been minting trainers who are going out into the world, singing the gospel of positive reinforcement dog training.

 

Now, of course, my hope is that all the Karen Pryor Academy Academy graduates out there, and that places like School for the Dogs, and that people like you, will go out there and change the conversation about dog training and challenge people's preconceived notions about dog behavior.

 

Sadly, however, for the last couple of decades, the person who has been the most synonymous with the dog training profession has been Cesar Millan. Cesar Millan, also known as the dog whisperer, grew up on a farm in Mexico with many dogs.  Received no formal training on how to train dogs, but learned a lot on his own.

 

Particularly, he learned how to use punishment to get what he wanted with dogs, how to use fear to cause dogs — I'd say fear and exhaustion, often to get dogs to kind of shut down so that they will do whatever it is he wants them to do.  At least for long enough to get the shot for the show.

 

But while I might attribute his success to a mix of well-timed punishment and getting dogs into this kind of zombie state of what we called learned helplessness, and I also credit who shows editors to making it all kind of look like it works, he really credits his own energy and people's energy and blames people for having poorly behaved dogs because their energy is bad.

 

I honestly think this tends to create kind of a fog about what dog training is, cause it sure is overwhelming to tell someone that they need to change their energy. I mean, I think it's kind of an overwhelming thing to suggest that someone overhaul that specific thing about themselves.  

 

And it it makes it seem like dog training is its own special category of occupations.  That while other occupations might require education, tools, techniques, and skill, dog training is sort of a talent that you are born with and depends on this amorphous subjective thing that quite possibly cannot be simply learned.

 

If you're teaching someone how to drive a car or how to do a surgical procedure or how to fly a plane, nobody references your energy as a teacher trainer. And yet, if your student is a dog, Cesar Millan and his ilk put energy at the top of the things that you need to have, or I should say the right kind of energy, which I guess is whatever energy Cesar Millan has.

 

What's interesting is the techniques that he suggests really aren't that different than the techniques suggested by Barbara Woodhouse, Rudd Weatherwax, et cetera, et cetera. It's just been kind of cloaked with this new age idea of energy. Here is a Cesar Milan on this topic:

 

[Dog Whisperer excerpt plays]

 

Cesar Millan:

They don't see breed. You know, we see black people, Mexican people, white people. What they see is what is the energy of that human inside? Not what you look like. It’s the energy of inside. So dogs focus on the energy of the people. You get it? We focus on the race of the people. 

 

You know, you will say, that's a Mexican guy. That's a black guy. That's a white guy. You won't say that's a nervous guy. That's a tense guy, that's a fearful guy. You won't say that.  You won't call people by the energy. You will call people by their race. They don't do that. We're the only racist species in the world.

 

And then the animal in him is able to absorb that.  The dog in him is able to learn it, nose, eyes, ears. We're not using any sound. So when you think of him as name, you use ears, eyes, no nose.  You see? So you address to his brain as he was a human, but he is a dog. So he's nose, eyes, ears.

 

So you would use same language to communicate with a human who doesn't communicate like you, but you're not doing it to him. You're doing it ears, eyes.

 

Annie:

Now I'd like to say that we are at a turning point in our culture, but the fact is, I'm not sure that's true. Recently Brandon McMillan, a celebrity dog trainer, has put out a masterclass where he doesn't seem to be presenting dog training as anything rooted in science. And instead is suggesting punishment-based techniques that have been around and been recommended for far too long.

 

I'm going to end this lecture with this clip that brings us to the present state of dog training, at least in popular culture. And I hope will leave you thinking about how you can be part of the effort to change the conversation and bring people more accurate information on how to live with our dogs in a peaceful way.  Where we can still get behaviors that we want and get behaviors that will help our dogs live lives that can be happy within the confines of the human world we're asking them to live in.

 

[excerpt plays]

 

Brandon McMillan:

Off. There are no untrainable dogs, just untrained humans. It's just that simple. That's a down very good boy, Eddie. I come from a family of animal trainers and I've dedicated my life to training dogs. And now I'm going to share my most valuable methods and techniques with you. 

 

I'm going to teach you seven common commands. Sit, stay, down, come, off, heel and no, that you'll be asking your dog to do almost every day guaranteed. And I'll be going over how to eliminate these behavioral problems that most dogs have like chewing, excessive barking, even house training. The techniques that I'll teach you are things that anyone can do.

 

Dog training is not about dominance. It's about trust, technique and conditioning. There's a real easy way to stop excessive barking. You can do it with something as simple as that little contraption I use right there, the penny bottle. I'm going to simply step on the leash right here. I want to say the word off as she jumps.  Off, off, I’m gonna wait her out, off. This is what I want to see. Three, two, that's an off.  Good.

 

Before you decide to train your dog, you have to get that dog to trust you. My dog, Lulu. She did not come up to me for nearly four years. When my Jack Russell died. Lulu crawled in my lap. From that moment, Lulu was a lot easier to train. It just takes a little bit of time. And a lot of authenticity.

 

If you combine all these things together, you'll not only have a well-trained dog, but you'll have a best friend who trusts and loves you and will be there for you for the rest of their life. I'm Brandon McMillan. And this is my masterclass.

Annie Grossman
annie@schoolforthedogs.com