16 JulEpisode 161 | Behavior, Misunderstood: Crying It Out and Pandemic Pets In The New Yorker Magazine

 

Transcript:

[music and intro]

Annie:

I just wanted to mention that I am recording this while holding my one month old daughter. So you might hear some gurgling and sucking sounds. So I get The New Yorker magazine, like I get an actual physical copy in my mail once a week. I'm that old school.  When my first daughter was born, I used to joke that you could determine her age or guess her age by counting how many New Yorkers were stacked up, unread.

 

I actually do read them some of the time, flipping through an issue right now, as I speak. I at least flip through the table of contents and see if there's anything there that seems interesting to me, or is by someone interesting to me.

 

So this issue comes the other day, and lo and behold, the first two articles — this is the issue, June 28th issue. It has a girl putting on eyeliner on the cover. The first two articles, one is called Pet Projects: Why are we so crazy about our animals by Nick Paumgarten. He is a very well respected writer, also used to work at the New York Observer where I used to work, although he was there before me. So of course this is an article about pets. I would like to read that.  Not a lot of articles about pets in The New Yorker. Usually.

 

The other article, it's called Dreamweaver: the Art of Putting Your Baby to Bed.  And as someone with a toddler and a newborn, I think a lot about putting babies to bed. So, I sat down psyched to read these two articles.  And I want to talk a little bit about each of them.

 

But I should start out, I guess, by saying sort of my feeling at the end of reading these two articles, which was, I guess it's kind of like if recycling is your passion, if you devote your life to help people see how they can live a more sustainable lives and you spend all your time trying to help people and thinking about this, and then you walk out your front door and your neighbor just has this big pile of takeout containers and trash that hasn't been sorted.

 

I think that's sort of how I feel as someone who devotes her life to thinking about how to help dogs live happier lives and how we can use what we know about behavior to live happier lives ourselves, and maybe work even in the smallest realms to try and create situations where we're not using force and coercion to control ourselves and each other.  But mostly, yeah, like how can we give dogs happier lives and how can we learn from the happier lives we're working to give them.

 

Anyway, the thing is, it's like, yeah, sure. There are people who do apply behavior analysis, who think about this kind of stuff. And they're certainly, you know, my Instagram feed is full of positive reinforcement dog trainers who are passionate about training dogs without force and coercion.

 

But I don't feel like the larger public cares.  The media is covering global warming. The media is not really covering the thing that I'm passionate and concerned about with. And yeah, both of these articles in different ways left me with that ‘my neighbor doesn't recycle their takeout containers’ kind of feeling.  Of like, no one cares. And more than that, like this thing I'm passionate about isn't understood at all.

 

Like it's behavior, right? We're all behaving all the time. And yet it's still often treated as a kind of pseudo science and it's not very widely taught or understood. And to that point, there's actually a factual mistake I'm gonna talk a little bit more about in one of these articles, which relates to a pretty basic bit of behavioral science that I talk about often when I'm talking about dog training, but that I wouldn't really have known about had I not become a dog trainer and seems to be so misunderstood by most people.  Including, I think, the writer of the article and the editors and whatever fact checkers looked at the article.  And The New Yorker is famous for having fact-checkers.

 

You know, it would be an error like saying the boiling point of water is a thousand degrees. Or saying salt isn't an element right there. These are things that most people, if they got through middle school would know were scientifically inaccurate statements, probably wouldn't have gotten printed in the magazine.

 

Well, I think that this error about behavior is about something that really is that elemental, but it's like a forgotten area of science. And it's also, I think an area of science that most people probably wouldn't think had any applications to training kids to sleep or to anything at all about pet ownership. But I certainly see it as an integral part of both of those things.

 

So the first of these two articles, the one about pets and sort of about pandemic pets, but — you know, it's actually kind of a weirdly disjointed article. The first and the last parts are about Americans in China working to rescue dogs from the meat trade. It starts out talking about animal activists, animal rights activists, who go to China during the time of the Yulin dog meat festival in Yulin to try and rescue the scores of dogs it says that get killed there each year.

 

And at the end of the first page, I did have high hopes for this article. I'm going to read just this section from it, because it quotes from the writers of one of my favorite books, the book called Some we love, some we hate, some we eat by Hal Herzog, who is a psychology professor at Western Carolina University. It quotes from an article he wrote in the Journal Animal Behavior and Cognition.

 

The paragraph starts out: 10 years ago, The Journal of Anthrozoos published a study of 60 societies and fewer than half were dogs considered pets, and even pet dogs were, in most cultures, kept around for practical reasons: guarding, hurting, hunting.  Only seven were dogs fed and sheltered inside the home. And in only three did people play with their dogs.

 

And here's the Hertzog quote, “Cultural differences and historical changes in patterns of pet-keeping do not support the idea that love for animals is a hardwired human trait.” And then Paumgarten goes on to write a few paragraphs later at the end of this China section, first China section of the article:

 

“Some dead animals we eat, others we mourn. No creature on the planet kills or coddles other species the way humans do.  The scenario of a global pandemic erupting from a wet market from exotic carcasses and dubious circumstances clarifies the mind, no matter the visibility of the lab leak hypothesis.  Animals, or really our mishandling of them, may well have got us into this mess. And in many ways we have been relying on them to get us through it. Our fraught relationship with the beasts under our dominion may make us the most exotic animal of all.”

 

So I read that. I was like, yeah, now we're getting into the stuff that really interests me.  Not rescuing dogs from China doesn't interest me, but I guess I just have mixed feelings about efforts to rescue dogs in China when there are so many animals in this country that are basically mass incarcerated so that we can eat them. It seems–now I know I'm comparing the lives of livestock farm animals to the lives of dogs, who in our culture, we consider pets. But I don't know.

 

I don't know if the dog to the dog has a life that matters less than the chicken’s life matters to the chicken. Obviously I'm more in love with my dog than I've ever been in love with the chicken, but maybe if I spent more time with chickens!

 

Just because we have more sympathy and heart in the matter of dogs being killed for me in my mind, I at least think there's the argument to be made that a life is a life. And rather than worrying about this animal or that animal dying at the hands of humans, my concern and my life and my work is, how are we treating the animals that are in our care? Whether that's because we want them at the foot of our bed, or we are going to end up eating them. It's not just about whether they're alive or dead, I think. As an animal trainer, I wish we were thinking more about what happens between when they're born and when they die.

 

And, you know, a lot of dog trainers are big fans of Temple Grandin, and her work is largely about that. How can we make animals whose lives we've created only because we're going to end up killing them and eating them, how can we make their actual lives as happy as possible and their deaths as stress-free as possible?

 

And actually in his book Some we love, some we hate, some we eat, I recall professor Hertzog, making the point that a chicken who is raised to be a cock fighter because it's not a chicken, then, it's a rooster, lives overall a much happier life, has more happier moments in his life than the chicken raised to end up on a rotisserie. The former lives the life that's basically like poultry CrossFit.  Cock fighters are trying to raise cocks that are going to kill another cock. So they want to have like the Uber cock.

 

Words that I did not expect to be saying during this episode, but here I am.

 

They're trying to raise a healthy, strong, a good fighter where as your typical broiler chicken is raised in confinement living largely a life of sorrow until its death, whereas the bird raised to fight is going to have quite a happy life, quite possibly until the actual cockfight happens.

 

Anyway, animal ethics and animal rights. It's something that interests me.  Certainly not something that I'm really comfortable having a debate about on either side, because I don't feel like I really know enough, but I think it's an interesting area. And, I do think about the way that all animals are treated, given that I spend so much of my life trying to help people take care of their dogs in the best possible way.

 

And I guess part of what frustrated me about this article is that there is not that much in it about how we can give these dogs that we're bringing from China or getting elsewhere great lives. It's one thing to rescue a dog. It's another thing to actually give it the life it deserves. And frankly, there are dogs who are rescued and I think end up worse for the ware.

 

Speaking of The New Yorker, actually, the article Anna Heyward, our apprentice, wrote for The New Yorker touches on this with a dog that she fostered. She writes about how this dog was originally taken from the city shelter and then was later returned to the city shelter. And he returned to the city shelter with all kinds of fears and anxieties that he hadn't had before, and that at that point left him, sadly, basically unadoptable and ultimately euthanized.

 

I know there are so many dogs suffering in China who are gonna wind up as dog meat, and I hate that idea.  But it's also a fact that three quarters of the dogs in the world are not pet dogs the way that we think of pet dogs.  Three quarters of the dogs in the world don't live in people's homes and aren't vaccinated, don't have microchips, naturally will lead shorter lives, but maybe not unhappy lives.

 

And clearly not unsuccessful lives, because if they weren't so successful at living in a human dominated world without actually living in their homes or being taken care of by specific people on purpose — I mean, a lot, a lot of dogs in the world live off of garbage disposed of by people the dogs probably don't know. And this is how like the proto dog lived.

 

In the book Dogs by Ray and Lorna Coppinger they do a really great job of describing this theory that wolves who ate our garbage were the most successful evolutionarily speaking.  The carpenters were ethologists, so they were thinking about how animals can consume more calories than it takes for them to survive, than they need to expend in order to survive. And the wolves that were not afraid of people, or less afraid of people, were the ones who got closer to our dumps when we started being less nomadic.

 

And that the dogs that we have today are all descended from these wolves who one generation to another got friendlier and less spooked by humans because those were the animals that were selected for it, because those are the animals who were able to get the yummy stuff that we left on our plates. So their argument is natural selection made dogs what they are, not us hand-selecting the friendliest ones and breeding them. In that way, they evolved to live off of our trash and plenty of dogs still do.

 

And, you know, the dogs that we have in our houses are just maybe the most elite of those in that they're also in our sheltered environments and have all kinds of other kinds of care from us to the point where we're even helping them procreate in large numbers.

 

But anyway, my point being that I think it's wrong to think that there is one of these groups that is necessarily happier than the other group. The street dog might be happier than the apartment dwelling dog, because, you know, I look at the big apartment buildings outside my window and I look at all the windows and I think how many of those windows have actually really unhappy dogs inside for whatever reason.

 

And I'm not positive that in every case, those dogs are actually happier than the dogs who are in China and might one day become meat. And I don't think that's because people have bad intentions with their pets. I think there's just so much that's misunderstood about dog training and about behavior in general, even though I think it's way easier to understand than all the other sciences I had to take in middle school.

 

Anyway, the article then kind of goes into Nick Paumgarten talking about pandemic life and dogs and his own dog. And here he gets so close to touching on behavior that I started to get excited. But actually he doesn't go into anything really about dog behavior. He does quote dog trainer, Kate Perry, who also works in New York city.

 

He writes, “Kate Perry, the trainer classifies for canineality types, the workaholic, the sensitive artist, the methodical thinker and the party animal.” And that's all he has to say about that, which I mean is fine. But I guess I just, I don't love having to describe dogs in these human terms.  

 

And it seems a little reductive to say there are exactly four types of dogs.  And also, you know, there's lots of research out there about dogs and how they learn and what their predispositions may be to learning in any given situation, but just sort of calling out these blanket stereotypes. I don't think gets us very far and it kind of ends there in the article. They're not elaborated upon.

 

So then there's this other part where he's talking about his own dog and it's like, the article is sadly missing any good canine anecdotes. You think an article about dogs, there would be some things to talk about the dogs actually, you know, doing stuff tather than just being these things that we rescue or not.

 

But in, in this little part about his own dog, he writes about things that have happened in central park with these dogs. And he writes:

 

“There was the unhappy gent, a ringer for a Van Morrison who often stood near the 103rd street transverse with what seemed to be a dire wolf on a rope, and yelled at anyone who allowed an unleashed dog to come over.  One fine April morning by the park’s mulch depot, Keiko wandered over and Van Morrison barked at my wife, ‘Fuck you!’  She blurted back, ‘Happy Easter!’

 

“There was also the aardvark of a man with a pair of enviable dachshunds, who, after Keiko had run up on him too aggressively, shouted at me from six feet away, ‘You're an asshole!’ He might've been onto something or else he was projecting Happy Easter.’”

 

So before I became a dog trainer, I would have been like, yeah, Nick people in New York City are crazy. I can't believe someone would yell that at you. So what your dog is off leash. It's not like your dog was coming at them with a gun. Now, if I was in the park and someone let their unleashed dog too aggressively run up to my dog, I'd totally be like, you're an asshole, fuck you.  So you have to tell me if that makes me a better person or a worse person I used to be. [laughs]

 

And then he gets so, so close to touching on anything about how we treat dogs and how we might decide to treat dogs differently. He writes:

 

“With the right kind of distance, a brain on science fiction or a sativa gummy, one can start to feel a little queasy about the leashes and collars, the sudden bursts of anger and reproach. The institution of cuddliness contains a trace of tyranny. Out of nowhere, a Park Avenue matron wolfs an angry, no like Caesar in Planet of the Apes.

 

“The other day, I saw a middle-aged man sling a leashed corgi toward the curb and grab it by the scruff, the dog squealing as the man roared. Apparently the dog had got hold of a bread crust or a tasty turd. Why you so mad? If it had been his son I might've called child services. I also saw a woman chide a doodle for sprawling on its back in the dirt leg splayed. ‘That's not very ladylike,’ she said.”

 

And this felt like, yes, you know, now he's starting to actually think about how some behaviors that we take for granted might seem to a dog or seem to someone like me, who perhaps has had too many sativa companies and read too much science fiction.

 

The dog got a piece of bread and the guy's freaking out like threatening to kill them basically. And the dog's just like, dude, why are you so mad? I feel like I'm thinking about dogs who are with people and are in that situation all the time.

 

And he also touches on how kind of ridiculous it is when we expect dogs to be in any way like humans. Even if we're kind of joking about it, like when we say stuff like that's not very ladylike to one dog when they're sniffing and other's butts.  Like we're projecting our own values on them. And while there's nothing obviously wrong about that, I don't think it helps in the larger picture, if we're actually trying to understand dog behavior.

 

And then he has a quote from Alexandra Horowitz, who's a senior research fellow at Barnard. Very big deal if you are a dog nerd, author of the book Inside of a Dog, super well respected professor and researcher. So I was like, okay, maybe now we're going to say something useful about dog behavior. But he quotes her saying, “‘We added dogs to our lives before we figured out how to get the food we need and what to do with all the shit we produce ourselves. It's like we didn't think ahead.’”

 

Which is a fine quote. And it's true. But… as a one-time journalist, I get the feeling he asked her about something else. Like, does it make sense that we have dogs who are producing waste, these dogs that are not necessary to our lives that we keep as pets, but they're adding to what goes into our landfill and they're contributing to deforestation because of the meat that's raised to be killed for their food. Like it doesn't make sense that we have dogs in our lives at all.

 

And Dr. — never know if you should call them professor or doctor. Anyway, Alexander Horowitz says, “we added dogs to our lives before we figured out how to get the food we need and what to do with all the shit we produce ourselves. It's like, we didn't think ahead.” I feel like that's the question she was answering, not anything having to do with, like, does it make sense that we are projecting these human attributes onto dogs and you know, scolding them, punishing them when they have no idea what the hell it is that we want from them?

 

Like I think she could have answered that question, but somehow this quote about some other thing she talked about got put in this part of the article, because whoever was editing it probably wasn't thinking about dogs and how they behave, which like I was saying, I think is missing from this article.

 

And I think that's sad and I think it's a mistake. And I think it's also worth noting that I think part of the reason Cesar Millan early on was taken as seriously as he was, was because Malcolm Gladwell wrote a long article, a long profile of him in The New Yorker, a rather glowing profile. And that too, of course, filled with a lot of misassumptions behavior.  Or I guess you could say myths about dog behavior, which again is disappointing. Because it's Malcolm Gladwell.  And it's The New Yorker.

 

Anyway, I could do a whole other episode on that article and maybe I will, but I'll just leave it at saying that that article came out 15 years ago, and it was one of the only articles that I think talked at all about dog behavior in The New Yorker, in my memory. And it's just too bad. Cause I feel like this article could have been another place for it to talk about it in a way that makes sense. And just felt like sort of a missed opportunity.

 

Two pages later, we have this article by Sam Knight called Dreamweaver: A sleep trainer is for babies, but the hard lessons are for parents. That last part is the subtitle. And this is about people trying to figure out how to get their kids to sleep. And it has some real stuff about behavior within it.

 

And I've talked a little bit before about sleep training babies and behavior, and specifically about crying it out. And a lot of this article is about crying it out. And I guess if I had to summarize the article, I'd say basically, it's that crying it out works to make children be quiet, might not actually be helping them sleep. That is an interesting and important point that is made in the article.

 

But that crying it out works. We've known it works for a long time, however, it's really hard to do. And so some people pay professionals who come and in a very stern way, direct them to get their kids to sleep by letting them cry it out. And because they've paid a professional a lot of money to tell them so, it makes them more confident about doing, because otherwise it is very hard.

 

Now, to be clear, this is an article about babies. There is very much an analogous conversation that happens amongst dog trainers about, is it okay to let a dog cry it out? And I think it's important to note that I, as a parent and dog owner, dog trainer, I don't in my own life, I haven't let either of the species that are under my care cry it out. But with dogs, I have actively worked to train dogs to feel comfortable being alone, being in a crate, et cetera, et cetera.

 

With my children, I would say I haven't done any active training. I've just embraced the fact that I'm someone who really enjoys drinking coffee, and I wake up at night when my kids need something, because I feel like if they're crying, they probably need something. It's not that they're manipulating me trying to get my attention.

 

Kind of like I approach working with puppies and a puppy class, at this point in my kids' lives, I want them to feel safe and feel like all of their needs are met. I want them to feel like they are living in an environment where there is great surplus.  Because I think, you know, puppies who are raised feeling like they're in a world of deprivation where there may or may not be enough food for them, that there may not be someone there to protect them, is a puppy that is much more likely to grow up to be not a great pet, let's just say.

 

You can be born into a world of surplus or deprivation. And I want my children to feel like they're in the former, that their needs are met, especially at this very early point in their lives. And as they get older, I can shape the behavior of like, please stay the hell in your own bed tonight, honey. But right now I just wake up when they need me to wake up. And sometimes that's the right approach in certain areas to take with dogs too.

 

Like I'm always mentioning Anna, our trainer and my good friend, Anna Ostroff and her husband Allen, could they train Ginger to only ever pee on the sidewalk? Yeah, they probably could, but you know what, Ginger’s scared of the sidewalk and Anna is a freaking dog trainer. It's a very deeply seated fear. And Alan and Anna have realized that the best thing to do is to let the dog pee inside!  Meet the dog where the dog is, instead of putting the focus on a behavior that seems strictly necessary. Dogs must pee and poop outside, right? Well, not necessarily.  Might not be the right thing for that dog.

 

Anyway, what's happening when an animal cries it out when they're alone, or when a baby cries and cries and cries for whatever reason and nobody comes, is the behavior of crying can go under extinction. And he talks about extinction a little bit in the article.  You know, the four quadrants of operant conditioning.  While some argue that they shouldn't be called quadrants because there's actually a fifth possibility between positive punishment, negative punishment, positive reinforcement, and negative reinforcement. There's a fifth thing that can happen, and that is extinction.

 

And excitingly, extinction is explained here. Sam Knight writes, “Extinction is a behaviorists’ term.  In 1958, Carl Williams, a psychologist at the University of Miami reported on the treatment of S, a 21 month old boy who refused to fall asleep on his own.  Behavior that is not reinforced will be extinguished, Williams reported. The first time S was shut in his room alone, he cried for 45 minutes before falling asleep.  By the 10th occasion S no longer whimpered, fussed or cried when the parent left the room.  Rather he smiled as they left.  Extinction had occurred.”

 

Now, I think it would be easy to misread this paragraph and think that Carl Williams in 1958 discovered extinction. BF Skinner was talking about extinction before that. But I think that he must've been the one who did this early study on showing that crying it out actually does keep a kid from crying eventually.

 

But then he goes on to write, “But what else is being extinguished? Jodi Mindell, a psychology professor at St. Joseph's University who also works at the sleep center at the children's hospital. Philadelphia…acknowledges that sleep training is not appropriate for children who have been in foster care or infants with any history of trauma. ‘We don't want to add any more stress on those babies in terms of responsivity,’ she said.”

 

I read that part to my husband. And he was like, so it's okay to traumatize a baby who hasn't already been traumatized?

 

Then he continues: “It doesn't take much in a sleep shot mind to draw a line from the unheated crying of a baby on the other side of the bedroom door to the social and cognitive impairment suffered by children who grew up in Romanian orphanages.”  Quote from Ockwell-Smith, who is someone quoted earlier. She is the author of the book, The Gentle Sleep. She says, “We know that there's this thing called learned helplessness. What we effectively ended up doing is teaching them, there's no point in crying it out because we won't meet your need.”

 

So I'm letting my child cry because it alerts me to the fact that she needs something. But it's also possible for me to be there, to give her what she needs. With dogs, if we're training them to be alone, I mean, there's the approach of just never leaving your dog alone. But most of us have to leave our dogs alone some of the time. So we are working to progressively reinforce them for being calm and not just not barking, but actually being calm in larger and larger chunks.

 

We're shaping the behavior of not barking, but not just getting rid of the barking, but actually getting rid of the root cause of the barking. Because otherwise what you get is a dog who is still stressed out, but not barking. And that can just be like switching seats on the Titanic. You still have a dog who's stressed and anxious, but the dog maybe won't bark anymore.

 

I mentioned this in an episode I did with my husband a few years ago where he, with his ex wife and their dog had a shock collar on the dog. The shock collar is positive punishment, not extinction, but you have the same problem of getting rid of the behavior without addressing the root cause of the behavior.

 

The shock collar did make the dog stop barking, but then the dog developed the habit of clawing at their front door for hours and hours and hours. I mean, when you're using extinction, you're not teaching the dog and alternate okay behavior. And you're not really getting rid of the stress. And a couple of paragraphs later this article touches on that. Says:

 

“In 2011, Wendy Middlemiss, a psychologist at the University of North Texas led a study of 25 babies who underwent a five day course of extinction sleep training at a clinic in New Zealand.  At the start of the course, the levels of cortisol, a stress hormone, in the babies and their mothers were in sync.  By the end, cortisol levels had fallen in the mothers, but remained elevated among the infants, even though they were no longer crying in the night.”

 

And then this leads the article to go on, to talk about how this led to and movement against the cry it out method. But ultimately I would say this article is pretty pro letting a child cry it out. The writer does make the point that it would basically be impossible to do any true controlled test to see how crying it out, if you're a baby, affects who you become as an adult.  My parents let me cry it out. Many of my closest friends have done cry it out with their kids, and their kids seem perfectly fine.  Beyond fine. Great.

 

So there's really no way that I could think of that you could exacto knife out that one part of your development to see how it affects you as a person later on. Fair enough. But with dogs, dogs have far fewer experiences, shorter lives. We ask them to do or not do fewer things than we ask of each other in our much more expansive human lives. So I'm not sure that's the case. I'm not sure we can't often draw a direct line between the dog who has been allowed to cry it out and the dog who has then developed other issues.

 

But here's one strike against crying it out. He writes, “Parenting books in Germany in the thirties frequently warned that a coddled child would turn into a house tyrant. Photographs of crying, babies were captioned, ‘This is how he tries to soften stones.’ In 2019 Scientific American reported on the work of German sociologists who set out to interview childhood survivors of bombing raids during the second world war, only to find it necessary to expand their study to take in the traumatizing effects of Nazi parenting guidelines.”

 

So basically crying it out was the preferred method of the Nazis. And yeah, if a child isn't crying it out, the child is, in the writer's words, coddled where, I don't know. I mean, are my children coddled? I guess so. I feel like I'm just giving them what they need.

 

Now, I don't know what the Nazi's feelings were about letting dogs cry it out. But you could reread that whole paragraph as being about dogs and how the coddled dog has suffered. And studies could be done on dogs who have lived through the traumatizing effects of human guidelines in regards to dog ownership. Humans who were Nazis and otherwise.

 

So throughout the article, the writer talks about his own experiences sleep training his kids with the help of this very expensive expert, who seems to understand extinction and does not seem to cater to the idea that a behavior like being calm in bed and not could possibly be shaped, and is working with people who really need a quick fix because their lives aren't like mine, where I can afford to sleep late in the morning after being up two or three times in the night, dealing with a crying baby. And I should say, she doesn't actually cry that much. And I'm very good at falling back asleep.

 

Anyway, he hires this guy to help him with his kids. And he asks this Professor Ball, if it's likely or unlikely that anyone will ever prove the absolute merits or harm of old fashioned sleep training. And she says, “‘I'm agnostic, I suppose, about whether there are any long-term consequences.’ I then asked her what she thought we had done to our sons. And she says ‘On a very basic level, I suppose you have operant conditioned them. It's like ringing the bell and the dog salivating.’”

 

This is the error in the article that I mentioned earlier. Now, at first, when I read this, I thought I must be either misunderstanding something here, or else this is a very nuanced explanation of conditioning, because usually when we're talking about a bell and a dog salivating, we're talking about classical conditioning, AKA Pavlovian conditioning.

 

Pavlov rang a bell, or it was probably a buzzer, gave his dogs food, the dog salivated. After enough repetitions, the bell indicated that food was coming. The dogs knew this. So even when there was no food, the dogs started to salivate. It was a conditioned response to a conditioned stimulus. The food is the unconditioned stimulus, dog doesn't need to learn to salivate at food, but it took this bell, which previously had no meaning, and the bell started to elicit behavior because of these pairings. And that is classical conditioning in a nutshell.

 

What's noteworthy is the dog's behavior between when the bell rings and when the dog salivates is unimportant.  Pavlov was not rewarding some specific behavior by giving the dogs the food. When you're looking at operant conditioning, you're looking at those unconditioned responses that can be conditioned so that they become responses to these previously meaningless stimuli, like the sound of a bell. There's like a stimulus that causes some kind of basic innate behavior.

 

When you're looking at operant conditioning, usually there is some criterion that we are then reinforcing. We are encouraging specific behavior. So rather than bell, food, salivate, we have bell, behavior, food.  Now, because behavior is happening all the time, Pavlov's dogs, there was some behavior that was being rewarded. We just don't know what it was, but I'm sure there are some dogs in his lab who maybe learn to sit when they heard the bell, because they developed a superstitious response. ‘Oh, every time I sit, I get this food,’ when really the food was not contingent on sitting.

 

You could say that all conditioning is operating conditioning, just with classical conditioning there trainer has no specific thing that we're rewarding. And with operant conditioning, there is some, whether it's minor or not, specific thing we are rewarding.

 

Also classical conditioning and operant conditioning are happening concurrently. We're making associations when we might also be learning that there's a reward or punishment associated with a specific behavior.

 

So I thought to myself, well, maybe that is what this professor meant there? But I kept coming back to it and thinking about it, because if it really was like ringing the bell and the dog salivating, what was the bell? And what is the behavior? I mean, is the kid learning about, I don't know that turning off the light signals screaming? I don't know. I couldn't figure out what the unconditioned behavior was. I mean, perhaps sleeping, but then if it was sleeping, I couldn't figure out what the bell was.

 

And I was starting to think maybe I had some real gap in my knowledge about operant conditioning and classical conditioning that I couldn't figure this out. So I actually wrote to Professor Ball, who is the one who's saying this, she's the anthropology professor. And she has a website called the infant sleep info source.

 

And she wrote back that she doesn't recall saying anything about dogs and bells at all. And that it must have been added in. And that it is an example of extinction, and that crying it out shows no evidence of improved sleep for the babies, just for the parents.

 

But then she also said something about how you could say crying is an operantly conditioned behavior, where I actually think crying is an instinct, unlearned usually, for small babies. So then I wrote to the writer, cause I kind of couldn't believe that this was in there that they would have made this up. Like, I didn't want to doubt this professor either knowledge or her memory, but I also didn't want to doubt The New Yorker, the most venerable of institutions, in my opinion.

 

My best guess was that it was a kind of like Frankenstein of a quote where Professor Ball said something about classical conditioning and something about operant conditioning. And they hadn't been said right next to each other, but then they're putting the article in a way where it seems like one relates to the other.

 

But Sam Knight wrote me back very nicely, and actually shared with me a little chunk of the transcript of his interview. And it looks like she did say that.  Basically making the argument that — I guess what she says to him is basically that the room, like I said, that the darkness becomes the conditioned stimulus and the conditioned response is being quiet.

 

Now she is an anthropologist and not a behaviorist or a psychologist. And I am just a lowly dog trainer with no advanced degrees. And I may or may not be a little sleep deprived. So I texted this paragraph to a few very smart dog trainers I know. And they all were equally confused.

 

I think basically what's that the shows is that there is just not enough fluency of understanding about behavior, to the point that even this well-informed sleep specialist, this Professor Ball is talking about this stuff in The New Yorker with not a whole lot of specificity or clarity, as far as, as these terms go.

 

I mean, even just saying or I think the average person reading her saying, you know, “I suppose you have operant conditioned them,” it sounds like operant conditioning your child is some, you know, evil thing. Whereas of course we're operant conditioning our children to do things all the time, right? Put on your pajamas and you can watch cartoons. That's operant conditioning right there.

 

Anyway, I think both Professor Ball and Sam Knight had nothing but good intentions in writing this, but I'm disappointed that it doesn't make more sense. At least it doesn't make more sense to me.

 

But you know, between these two articles, there is an article in the shouts and murmurs section that is a letter from aliens writing to us, trying to figure out why we're all so obsessed with Tucker Carlson. So you could say it's whole issue about things that don't make sense.

 

Two sort of fun facts about me and The New Yorker. One is also on the topic of aliens. My father, who was a cartoonist, worked at The New Yorker. It was his first job out of college. He worked in the cartoon section and he had a handful of cartoons published. The only one that I can specifically remember is of an alien crawling through a desert saying “Ammonia, ammonia.” 

 

The other sort of fun fact is that I'm actually in a video that's in the article that Nick Paumgarten wrote here, in the digital version of the article. I was interviewed for the video two years ago, when it first came out. It's the kind of journalism about pets that tends to annoy me where it's like, you know, “Ruby went to the spa and had her hair done, and then took a French lesson. Ruby is a shih-tu.”

 

You know, it's like, there’s always these articles sort of poking fun at people who are treating their dogs like little humans. And I think I come off sounding really good in this video, only because I'm sandwiched by such total silliness. Anyway, as I guess an extra in the online version of the Nick Paumgarten pet projects article, you can see this video, which is called Why Humans Treat Their Dogs Like People.

 

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