09 MarEpisode 2 | What is “Good” dog training?

Good dog training is efficient, requires little investment or equipment, and generally produces long lasting results. It also happens to be a lot of fun, both for dogs and humans. The fun-factor is not why it works— it’s just a happy byproduct of this style of training.

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Transcript:

Annie:  Hi! This is Annie. Thanks for tuning in to our second episode. In the last episode, I spoke about how I got interested in dog training, to begin with. Today, I’d like to talk specifically about the kind of dog training that we do at School For The Dogs. Now, before I started studying to become a dog trainer, I think I thought of dog training as just one thing. It was a thing that had a beginning and an end, and it was something that you did to your dog and then you were done. And I think these are some pretty common misconceptions. I think when people think about training a dog, they think “Okay. Well, I’m going to get a dog, maybe I’ll take some classes in a church basement, or maybe I’ll have someone come do this training thing to my dog for me. He’ll learn everything he needs to know, and then he’ll be a trained dog and we’ll be done.” And I know when I first got my dog 13 years ago, it certainly never occurred to me to seek out different approaches to training. There was a dog daycare near where I lived, they had classes, that’s where I went. I don’t think I asked any questions about what kind of training they did because I didn’t know there were different kinds of dog training. And even if I had known, I’m not sure I would’ve thought that it really mattered. I just wanted a dog who was trained and however we got to the point of him being trained was besides the point. Now, of course, I have a completely different take on the subject.

For one thing, I like to ask my clients to consider what it really means to have a trained dog. There is not one universal training goal that we’re all trying to get our dogs to aspire to. And because every dog is different and each one of us has a different life situation in which we’re injecting that dog, no two people are going to ever have the exact same training goals for their dogs. And beyond that is the fact that training isn’t something that stops. And that’s because dogs are constantly learning. All animals are constantly learning, it’s how we stay alive. All day, every day, both humans and dogs are trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t work. And because their survival is so dependent on us, they’re really excellent at learning from us, which means training isn’t something that just starts when you enter a training class or when you strap on a treat pouch and it’s not something that ends when you get your puppy kindergarten diploma. Of course a lot of the time we inadvertently train them to do things we don’t want them to do. And that’s why I think it’s important to understand the basics of learning theory and understand how conditioning works in order to train them more effectively to do the things we want them to do. That’s why it does matter what kind of training you are doing if you want to train effectively and look at why what you’re doing is or isn’t working.         

So, in this episode I want to go over some of the names that are given to the kind of training that we do at School for the Dogs and talk about why I like some of these terms better than others, and what they each mean. I don’t want to talk too much about all the other kinds of training that exist. We can talk about other kinds of training in future episodes but if I just had to broadly define all the other kinds of training that exists, I’d say they are generally rooted in punishment. Now, I’m not saying I never use punishment, I do, it’s just like way down at the bottom of my toolbox and I’ll definitely be talking about why that is, but to put it most simply, the definition of punishment is that it discourages the likelihood that a behavior is going to happen again. And of all the reasons why I don’t like having to use punishment, really the major one is that in order to be punishing a behavior, in order to be discouraging a behavior, I have to have a behavior present to discourage. In my experience, it’s possible to manage a dog’s environment with such precision and to manipulate the consequences in such a way where I’m not going to get behaviors I don’t want. So therefore, I’m not going to have anything to punish. 

The opposite of punishment is reinforcement. Positive reinforcement training is a label that’s often given to the kind of training that I adhere to and I often call it positive reinforcement training myself although this isn’t my favorite label for it. Positive reinforcement simply means that it’s training that involves adding something to a situation in order to encourage the likelihood that a behavior is going to happen again. Like I said, punishment is about discouraging a behavior and reinforcement is just the exact opposite – encouraging a behaviour. In this context, the positive simply means that we’re adding something. But one of my beefs with the term “positive reinforcement” as it applies to dog training is I think people often misunderstand the positive part of it. I think some people misunderstand the positive as if it has something to do with being smiley and gooey and nice and I promise you, you can be a total cynic, you could be a sarcastic person and still be a perfectly good positive reinforcement trainer. I’ve also encountered people who think it has something to do with positive thinking, like if you think your dog is going to be good, he will be good. That might work, but it’s not positive reinforcement training. Maybe the most frustrating way that I’ve seen people misinterpret positive reinforcement training is when they decide they’re only going to focus on the good things or the positive things and ignore everything else. But again, the positive in positive reinforcement doesn’t refer to positive as a good thing it’s positive as in addition. When we use the word negative in dog training, we are also not referring to something bad we’re referring to taking something away. So, while you can be a good positive reinforcement trainer who is focusing on lots of good behaviors on reinforcing those good behaviors, you’re not being a positive reinforcement trainer because you’re focusing on the good behaviors, you are positively reinforcing behaviors by adding something to the equation in order to encourage the likelihood of those behaviors are going to happen again.  Whether I said positive reinforcement doesn’t refer to any specific behavior, be it good or bad, it refers to the consequences of that behavior. And another tricky thing to keep in mind about the term “Positive reinforcement” is that positive reinforcement is happening all the time. And it just means that you might be using positive reinforcement in training when you don’t mean to, which is possible. I mean, your dog is being positively reinforced all the time in ways that have nothing to do with you. In fact, anything that your dog does, he’s doing because in some way, it’s been reinforced. But the reinforcement might not be something that was doled out by you. Many behaviors are positively reinforced simply because they work. They either work in making the dog, or you, or whoever is being positively reinforced feel good or they have an effect, the desired effect. Putting one foot in front of another is positively reinforcing if your goal is to move forward. So, while the term “positive reinforcement training” means that we’re focusing on using positive reinforcement to get what we want from our dogs, I love it only because I think it makes positive reinforcement seem like it’s some sort of special thing that can be used rather than an innate part of life that is in use all the time. We are engaged in behaviors that are positively reinforced all day, every day. If you’re training using positive reinforcement, it means you’re very specifically trying to lasso its power to achieve certain goals. But it’s at work even if you’re not paying attention to it. And like I said, all you really need to do to understand that reinforcement is to look at all the things you do, all the things your dog does, all the things anyone does all the time. If those behaviors weren’t being reinforced, they wouldn’t keep happening.

Now, just to be clear there is another kind of reinforcement which is negative reinforcement. And often, people think negative reinforcement is just the opposite of positive reinforcement, which is not quite the case. Remember, the opposite of reinforcement is punishment and negative reinforcement is still reinforcement. You’re still encouraging the likelihood of behaviors going to happen again, you’re just doing it by taking something away. And certainly, we all know a lot about negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is why we pay our taxes, the behavior of paying taxes is encouraged because it takes away the threat of going to jail. Negative reinforcement is why you put your seatbelt on when the car starts making a beeping noise; the behavior of putting your seatbelt on is being encouraged because it’s making the annoying sound go away. Anyway, I don’t want to delve too deeply into the different kinds of reinforcement. I just thought I would be remiss if I left out the other kind of reinforcement. The last problem, I think, with the term “positive reinforcement” is that not only are things being positively reinforced by the environment or by the innate joy of just doing the thing all the time, but a lot of the time when people are trying to punish a dog, they really are using positive reinforcement. Which means you might be a positive reinforcement trainer even if you don’t mean to be. Which again, kind of complicates its use as a label. In my experience, anytime we’re giving attention to a dog, be it yelling at them or scolding them or pushing them because they are doing something we don’t want them to do, we are usually inadvertently reinforcing whatever the behavior is that led to us trying or attempting to scold them. And you can tell whether or not what you’ve done has been reinforcing or not based on whether or not their behavior continues to happen. If it continues to happen, it means you did reinforce the behavior rather than punishing it. Because if you’ve effectively punished the behavior, it shouldn’t keep happening. When people are attempting to use punishment, usually the first thing they do is yell, but of course most people don’t just yell once, they yell over and over and over again. Because the yelling is actually reinforcing whatever the undesired behavior is rather than punishing it. And now, I think it’s possible that there are some dogs who can understand that some attention is angry attention and some attention is happy attention; In my experience, most human attention tends to reinforce most dog behaviors. And if you’re positively reinforcing behaviors you don’t want, you are not doing very effective dog training. 

This brings us to a second commonly used term to refer to this kind of training, which is reward-based training. And again, I do use this term but if I don’t love it it’s again, because I think it’s easily misunderstood. One reason is that I have seen people dismiss reward-based training as training that has to be done with treats. And while I certainly do use a lot of treats in training, I think a good dog trainer understands that there are many things a dog finds rewarding, and we can use all of those things in training. Attention can be rewarding, play can be rewarding, your presents can simply be rewarding. So, it’s not just about pushing treats into a dog’s face all the time, which I think can be kind of a caricature that comes to mind when you picture someone describing themselves as a reward-based trainer. There’s also the same problem that arises when you’re talking about positive reinforcement training, which is you could inadvertently be rewarding lots of behaviors you don’t want. Like I said, because attention is so rewarding to most dogs, yelling can often prove to be rewarding to a dog. But that’s not really what reward-based training, as a term, is meant to describe. Now, a lot of people call this kind of training “science-based training”. And again, I sometimes call it science-based training. But my issue with that term is that I think it’s too broad. What we mean when we’re saying we’re science-based trainers, is that we’re using what we know about the science of behavior to teach dogs how to live in our world using the most effective, least aversive techniques we can. And the science of behavior is really the science of how animals, at least non-extinct ones, evolve to adapt to their environments in order to survive long enough to procreate. And that’s a process that involves being really good at learning. Certainly, reinforcement is a big part of that. But punishment is a part of that too. So, dog trainers who use punishment before they use any other methods of training, might still be using training methods that are rooting in science, and could also call their kind of training “science-based training”. 

“Force-free” is another label often given to this kind of training. But it’s another what-if-tricky nomenclature. We definitely try and give our dogs choices in training. We try to set things up, so that the right choices are the attractive choices. And we certainly avoid using coercion and  causing pain. But there are times, when in the interest of training, we put dogs into situations that they might not choose to be in on their own. And there are also times when we arrange situations so that a dog will only have a single possible choice he can make. And you can certainly argue that if you’re only providing one option of what to do, you may indeed be forcing the dog to do that thing, even if the result is not going to be something unpleasant for the dog. 

The last term that I want to talk about, which is often applied to this kind of training is “clicker training”. Now, a clicker is a small hand-held plastic device that you operate with your thumb and it makes a sharp sound. It’s used to indicate to a dog that he’s done something that we like. And it’s always followed by some kind of reinforcer. It both acts as a way to give very quick, very specific information. And it also kind of helps standardize the whole process, because sometimes you’re going to be giving a piece of turkey as a reinforcer, and sometimes your reinforcer might just be patting your dog on the head, or throwing a ball. But the click is always the same. Whether I do it or you do it. And it’s the same no matter what the reinforcer is that’s going to follow it. In that way, I kind of think it’s like when you get paid for a job with a check. It represents that something reinforcing is in store. And it’s just an easier thing to exchange in a transaction, than giving somebody gas for their car and groceries. I love using a clicker, there are so many great things about using a clicker and I use clickers often. However, if I don’t love calling this kind of training clicker-training, it’s because you absolutely do not need to use a clicker. A clicker is just a marker signal, and there are lots of things you could use as a marker signal other than a clicker. I often use the word “yes”. There are some trainers who don’t say anything at all, they might make a motion with their hand as a marker, some trainers make a little sound with their tongue, and there are certainly a lot of training situations where you don’t need to use any marker signal at all. I’ve certainly had clients who are totally turned off by the idea of using a clicker. They don’t want to have to have something in their hand, they are worried they are not going to remember to have it around, or it just turns them off when they think they have to use some kind of device in order to train their dog. And I alway tell them, you don’t have to have any kind of device in order to train your dog. If you don’t like using a clicker, don’t use a clicker.  So, I think it’s sort of reductive to call this kind of training simply “clicker training”, since it’s just one of many possible tools. I would say it’s kind of like calling writing “pencil moving”. Yes, you can use a pencil to write, but there are certainly lots of other ways to write too. 

So, what do we call this kind of training? Well, I like to simply call it “Good dog training”. And I like to go over some of the ways that you can spot good dog training. It was only after I started calling it “good dog training’, that I realized it’s kind of a funny rearranging of words or play on words which was not my intention, in that it contains the phrase “Good dog”. And  one of the reasons why a lot of people want to do dog training to begin with, is in order to get a good dog. Of course, what is a good dog? Certainly, what’s good to me might not be good to you. And society, what we want from dogs has changed from one period to another. 

So, I have an episode in the works where I hoped to talk more specifically about this idea of “The good dog”, and what a good dog is. But, I think one way to begin thinking about good dog training is to assume that dogs are born good. They’re born good at being dogs, of course. But they are also born being really good learners, and they are especially good at learning from us since so much about their survival depends on us. It’s sort of funny saying this because as I’m speaking the words out loud, I feel like “Isn’t this obvious? Don’t we need to be saying this?” But I think so much about dog training as it exists in our culture and society, is about fixing dogs as if they start out as a problem and training will solve the problem, rather than approaching dogs as inherently good and perhaps just in need of some guidance as to how to best exist in our world. Dogs did not evolve to live in human households, but good dog training can help them learn to live happy lives within our world. Good training is also good because it’s something I believe anyone can be good at. It doesn’t involve being born with any kind of special knowledge or ability. And it’s also good in that it’s actually pretty easy once you get the hang of it. Good dog training solutions are solutions that generally make a lot of sense. They don’t require great leaps of faith or great investigations into dog psyche. You’re welcome to dive into the dog’s psyche if you want to, but often when you’re working with a good dog trainer, you’ll find that there’s a lot more emphasis on solving a problem at hand, rather than investigating all the possible origins of that problem, simply because we can’t read dog minds. But as good dog trainers, we don’t have to. Good dog training is also training that focuses on prevention rather than punishment. And I said earlier, if undesired behaviors don’t happen, then you don’t have to use punishment. If there’s no problem, then you don't have a problem to get rid of. Good dog training also produces dogs who are really good learners. And a dog who is a good learner is a dog who is constantly trying to figure out how to get his needs met in appropriate ways. It also produces dogs who are addicted to training just because it’s so much fun. And it’s certainly easy to be a good teacher when you have very eager students. And the last thing that I want to mention about how to spot good dog training, is that it’s training where there shouldn’t be very much fall out.There are certainly other approaches to dog training that can produce results. But any kind of training that uses punishment or coercion, almost always produces unintended results. And usually, the unintended result is fear. And fear for dogs are dogs who bark, and bite, and attack.  Nearly 5 million Americans a year are victims of dog bites, most of them are children. And behavioral issues are the number one reason that dogs are relinquished to shelters, and the number one cause of deaths for dogs under age three. And fear is the number one cause of behavioral issues. That’s why I’m of the opinion that the most important job of any good dog trainer should be reducing the amount of fear a dog feels in any situation. Both because, no animal does their best learning when they’re scared and because fear for dogs can pose serious danger to each other, to themselves, and to us. So that might really be the most good thing about good dog training. It’s good because it keeps people safe and it’s good because it literally keeps dogs out of shelters and away from the likelihood of euthanasia. 

So, I’m going to leave it there. I hope that I have provided some tools to help you develop a critical eye towards viewing different kinds of dog training that you might come across. And I encourage you to think about what good dog training looks like to you. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the subject, you can join the conversation in our Facebook group. And you are also welcome to email me annie@schoolforthedogs.com .  

Fun dog fact of the day:Did you know that in the Wizard of Oz, Dorothy’s little Cairn terrier was named Toto, of course, but “Toto” was actually a nickname. His full name was teetotaler, because, like most dogs, he did not have a drinking problem. Speaking of Cairn terriers, I’d like to send a woof out to our student Linus, a beautiful Cairn terrier who lives in Tribeca with his humans, Elise, Steve, Felix and Sebastian. And a terrier brother, a Cesky terrier, named Preston. We’ve been working with these two terrier brothers since we first started School For The Dogs, and it’s really cool to get to work with a family that’s so devoted to good dog training.