17 JanEpisode 37 | Dog Training Pet Peeves: The word “energy” and the misuse of the word “positive”
In the modern era of dog training, people often rush to blame a person or a dog's "energy" for behavior issues. In this episode, Annie addresses why all the talk about using or observing "energy" in order to train a dog makes her cringe, and also why she thinks the misuse of the word "positive" leads to too many misunderstandings about science-based training.
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Transcript:
Annie:
Hello human listeners. So today I am going to talk about some of my pet peeves when it comes to dog training, specifically, words people use in the dog training domain that drive me a little bit nuts. Now, if you've listened to this podcast before you might know that I generally think we use too many words with dogs in general. Too much talking goes on. I think we rely far too heavily on language when it comes to dog training. Considering that of all the many, many things that dogs and humans have alike, considering that we're both mammals living in the same time and place and environment and climate, etc, etc., language is a big thing, at least verbal language, is a big thing we don't have in common and I think there is too much focus on it in dog training. But I was specifically talking about, uh, words that we use with each other to discuss dog training.
And you know, I think that these words that I want to talk about, two words in particular, I think they kind of speak to some of the divides that exist in the dog training field. And I know as someone who came to dog training from a totally different career, totally different place that a lot of the disputes that exist among different dog trainers can just seem like insider baseball to those who exist outside of the world of dog training. And again, because I come from that place, I totally get it. I get that people probably have this point of view before they are, sort of, in the world of training with their own dog or just because they're interested. I know that this point of view exists of, like, why does this matter? Why are you having these, you know, niggling observations about someone else doing something as simple as teaching a dog to sit. It's silly. He trained a dog to do something. The dog is trained. That's it. It's done. End of story. Let's not lose sleep over this. There are far more important things in the world to worry about.
And I mean obviously I no longer feel that way because I see the extremes of how people approach dog training. And in my opinion, not only is it a matter of ethics, how we treat our dogs, but thinking about how we train them and how their learning I think has a lot to do with how we treat each other and how we treat our children and how our children learn to treat each other and to treat animals. And there's certainly an aspect of animal welfare that has to do with training. And there are a lot of dogs who I think are hurt more than we realized more than we realize because of the widespread acceptance of dog training methods that I and many others consider inhumane. But that kind of I think get lumped together under this dog training heading of… this heading of dog training and all the things that fall under it, which are, you know, like how much sleep can you possibly lose about training a dog to pee or poop where they should.
But at its heart more than anything else, I think that dog training is just–not just, “just” is belittling. It is a really interesting application of behavioral science, which is an endlessly interesting area of science that too often gets short shrift as some sort of pseudoscience where it's absolutely not. The science of behavior is the science of why living animals do the things that we do and “doing” is what keeps us alive and keeps us procreating and keeps us getting better at solving problems, or we hope.
And these two words that I want to talk about, I think the misuse of these words or the misunderstanding of these words or perhaps their use at all, I think helps create this foggy area where people don't quite see dog training as anything related to science and instead kind of buy into it being about, I don't know, like myth and magic and personality.
And there's just so much of that in dog training. So much faith that people put in dog trainers who, I dunno, like bill themselves as shamans. I recently met a trainer who is a self-proclaimed expert, although this person has no degrees to speak of. Certainly nothing to do with any kind of academic background and animal behavior, no even professional certifications that I was aware of. But everything this person said, because this person was, was self labeled as an expert, every thing this person said, I saw people just eating it up and like this person announced that not only do dogs like to chew shoes, which, you know, okay, sure. Dogs like to chew shoes, but that they're particularly interested in left shoes. And I was watching the people listening to this person say that and I saw that they just totally were like, Oh, how interesting. You know? Oh yeah, that must be a real thing.
It's like people just throw common sense out the window. I've seen this myself, you know, I've gone into sessions with clients who I feel like are so desperate to be given some kind of magic word they can say, or they're so eager to see me take out some magic wand and, make a potion that's gonna make everything better that, you know, like I could seriously say like, what you need to do right now is jump up and down three times on one foot and yell the word raspberry and everything's going to get better. And like they would do it.
When, of course, my approach is to say to people, look, there's no magic here. This is an application of science. You know more about animal behavior, than you're giving yourself credit for it because you are an animal who is behaving all the time, just like your dog is an animal who is behaving all the time. And if you approach it from that perspective, you'll start to see that, you know, some of these mysteries aren't so aren't so opaque and that some common sense and a small investment in sort of learning about… the learning about learning theory can go a long way.
Another example, this like acceptance of the nonsense that so many trainers spew is the oft heard maxim, I think, it's a Cesar Millan thing of, you can't let a dog go through the door in front of you, never do that. And you know, I think people eat up these kinds of rules because it seems like, “okay, well I can, I can follow that. I go through doors every day. My dog goes through doors every day, you know, if that's the key to this lock, then gosh, darn it, you know, I can follow that rule.”
But when you take a step back and think about it, it's just totally absurd. Yes. Okay. There might be some situations where it's a good idea for you to go through a door before your dog, but to think that your dog is gonna lose respect for you or is going to be, you know, untrainable that your dog is going to be unruly because you sometimes let the dog go through the door before you is ridiculous. And so often this is pegged to, well, you know, in the wild the alpha wolf would never let the young pup go ahead of him. When in fact, you know, there are no doors in the wild. And I can tell you from first hand experienced having a dog who I've lived with for more than 13 years, who has gone through many doors ahead of me, you can have a wonderful well-trained dog who sometimes goes through the door ahead of you and it's gonna make absolutely no difference in either of your lives.
Anyway, but let's get to the point of my two pet peeve words. So the first word, it's really about the usage of the word, not the word itself, the word is “positive.” Now “positive” if you take a moment to reflect on it as a word has many meanings. Some that we might think of as good and some that we might think of as bad, right? Positive on a pregnancy test could be either good or bad, but it means one specific thing. Certainly if you're HIV positive, that's generally considered a bad thing. Positive can mean that you are sure of something, I'm positive about that. And, of course positive, can mean that something is good, especially an attitude or a way of looking at things or just something that is well liked by a subject I guess. And it's this latter usage that annoys me the most as it relates to dog training.
Positive when it's used to refer to something and that sort of glass half full way or think happy thoughts, be a Pollyanna type way. Should mention there is a field of psychology called positive psychology and positive psychology I think is actually a really interesting area of psychology that's really all about how we can live happier lives. It's very much rooted in specific steps we can all take to be happier, in groups or as individuals. And, I think, it's a very valuable thing to learn about, but it has nothing to do with dog training. And positive reinforcement dog training has very little to do with positive psychology, although I guess, I would say that devoting your life to positive reinforcement dog training might be something that could help you lead a happier life.
But they're very, very different areas that I think because of the word “positive” can sometimes be conflated. And I was reminded of this a few years ago, when I went to a workshop on positive psychology at like a retreat center in Massachusetts and the leader of this workshop really could not define what positive reinforcement was at all. Which I found surprising ‘cause she had, like, a PhD in psychology and positive reinforcement certainly plays a role in psychology beyond positive psychology. Anyway, about a week later, I went to a big dog training conference, Clicker Expo, where I was speaking to Ken Ramirez, who is a very famous trainer, one of the heads of the Karen Pryor Academy, my alma mater, my training alma mater. And I mentioned, that I had been at this workshop on positive psychology and he didn't know what positive psychology was.
But anyway, the reason that the usage or the miss usage of the word “positive” gets under my skin is because it really only has a single definition in dog training and it has nothing to do with thinking happy thoughts, of hoping for a good outcome of being a nice person. The only correct way to use the word “positive” or to define I should say the word “positive”, in the field of dog training is to add something. Positive reinforcement dog training–the “positive” in the positive reinforcement means you're adding something to an equation in order to encourage the likelihood that a behavior is going to happen again. That's what reinforcement means. And interestingly, people often think, well, the opposite of positive reinforcement is negative reinforcement, not quite. It is, you could say one of the opposites, if you're negative reinforcing something, you're taking something away from the equation in order to encourage a behavior, negative reinforcement–waterboarding for example, you're taking away someone's air supply that's negative. Not negative because waterboarding is mean and bad negative because you're taking something away in order to encourage them to tell the truth. That's the reinforcement part.
But there also is another opposite quadrant of positive reinforcement, which is a positive punishment. Positive punishment is where you're adding something to the equation in order to discourage the likelihood that a behavior is going to happen again. And that is the definition of a punishment. Whenever you see the words, reinforcement or punishment used correctly in dog training literature, let's call it, a punishment just means discouraging something. Reinforcement means encouraging something. Positive means adding something and negative means taking something away.
So if I hit you in the face because you stole something from me, in theory, I am discouraging the behavior of you stealing something. That's the punishment part. By adding something to the equation. What am I adding? I'm adding my knuckles to your cheek. If I'm positively reinforcing a behavior that my dog does, and you always have to remember, you're not ever positively reinforcing or punishing really a person, it's the behavior that you're reinforcing or punishing, technically speaking. So if I'm positively reinforcing my dog when he sits, it means I am adding something to the equation in order to encourage the likelihood that he is going to sit. If I'm positively reinforcing you for coming to work on time, it means I'm adding something to the equation, a compliment or a bonus or whatever in order to encourage the behavior of you being punctual.
Of course, it's easy to think the word “positive” means that I'm giving you something good but good is totally subjective. So if I'm positively reinforcing my employee for coming to work on time and what that employee really enjoys is being spanked, you know, that could be positive reinforcement. It doesn't necessarily mean that it's something that I like, but if that's what's going to encourage the person to repeat the behavior in the future.
And of course we see this with dogs all the time where we positively reinforce behaviors we don't like by giving the dog something the dog likes that we think must be a bad thing. I think yelling and attention are good examples of this. A dog jumps up on you and you yell at the dog to get off of you. You think you have told the dog off because certainly the dog wouldn't want to be yelled at. But actually you've added something to the equation. You've added your attention to the equation. Your attention is positively reinforcing and you can tell whether or not you have successfully positively reinforced the behavior or positively punished the behavior by whether or not the behavior happens more in the future or is less likely to happen in the future.
So it's really about “positive” in a mathematical sense. And I'd be interested to hear from people who do dog training in other languages because I don't really know about how other languages define positive reinforcement and if they use a word that also has so many other meanings the way “positive” does. But I have found that, in my life as a so-called positive reinforcement trainer, the word has led to a lot of misunderstanding that has sometimes been quite frustrating. I grew up with two parents who are self-defined Pollyanna types, I would say. Both my parents sort of always believed in trying to find the good in everything and trying to project good into the world in order to make good things happen I guess is how I say. People determined to always see the glass half full, even I think maybe if they didn't, if that wasn't always their like initial reaction, it was sort of tool use. Like, well if I can, if I can think positively about X or Y situation, then everything will be okay.
For my mom, it's always been about finding the good that comes out of bad, trying to focus on the good in any situation. And I think she would call that a type of positive thinking. For my dad it was more about just imagining good things would happen. Imagining that the cab would show up when we were running late for somewhere. Imagining the job he was working on would be done and everybody would love it and it would be a huge success. And I think he would call that his form of, or would have called that his form of positive thinking.
And to be honest, I think I kind of grew up feeling like, well, I must be a sort of negative person because their attempts to win me over where their positivity, like many kids, you know, would sometimes annoy me. And so I felt like, well then I must be more negatively inclined. I must be like a pessimist. And, you know, “negative” is defined as bad usually. And when I tried, whenever I made a real effort to squash any cynicism, I felt by being extra positive, it felt like extra positive, as they would phrase it. I think it felt like it just felt disingenuous. It felt like I was putting on an act.
But anyway, in my adult life as a positive reinforcement trainer, I've dealt with my parents misunderstanding the word “positive” in positive reinforcement, at times, in ways that I have found really frustrating. It's either usually been in reference to me saying something that is not totally glass half full, you know, expressing some sort of stress or disappointment about something rather than vociferously counting my blessings. And then being told that I should be more positive if I'm a positive reinforcement trainer. Or more frequently it's been in relation to me not being nice about something, not being gooey and treacly about whatever's going on and being told, you know, how can you be this way when you're a positive reinforcement trainer? Basically, if I'm not being nice then I'm not using positive reinforcement. And like I said earlier, it's totally possible to be a not nice person who uses positive reinforcement all the time. I mean, I do hope and think that I'm generally a pretty nice person. And I do think most people who are skilled at using positive reinforcement to manage people or train animals or deal with their kids or spouses or parents or whatever are generally probably pretty nice people. But niceness is not required. This is not “positive” in the hearts, stars, flowers, balloons, and rainbows sense of the word.
Like I said, you could positively reinforce someone by spanking them, if spanking is a thing they enjoy. You could positively reinforce your dog by yelling at your dog, if yelling is going to encourage the likelihood that behavior is going to happen again.
Anyway. So that's my beef with the word “positive” and I have said at times to trainers who work for me when I've overheard them using the word positive to mean something good. Saying something like, you know, you want going in the crate to be a positive experience. You want to make sure that, I guess it's usually used with the word “experience,” you want things to be a positive experience. Anyway I often will ask them to try and not use that word in that context, to find another word. You want something to simply be a good experience. But I think when we're talking about dogs and dog training it's better if we reserve that word “positive” to just mean adding something so that we don't confuse people who have a too broad understanding of the word “positive” as it relates to the training that we do.
The other word that's a big pet peeve of mine is “energy.” And this is a word that is, so–god–it's become such a part of dog trainer verbiage that I think people just take it for granted that dog training has a lot to do with energy. And I'm not saying energy isn't a real thing in the world. Certainly it is. In science, energy plays a big part in many things, but not in the science of animal behavior.
And this is because a person's energy or a dog's energy is not one thing. It is completely subjective and may be defined or understood by any number of factors that can differ from one person to another. And like I said, I think dog training as an application of the science of behavior and in science, if every single person defines something differently, we don't get very far. We need to all agree on the elements of the periodic table. We all need to agree that, you know, reinforcement is the encouragement of a behavior. And you can tell if it's happening, if the behavior is happening more and punishment is the discouraging of a behavior and you know, the sun rises in the East and is made of plasma, etc, etc.
A person’s energy or a dog's energy not only may be seen as… interpreted as something different by one individual or another, but it also has so many parts to it that it can change from second to second. But not only do many trainers talk about energy as if it's some sort of fixed thing that is possessed in a given moment by the person or animal in question, but it also seems like it can be transmitted from a person to a dog or vice versa in a way that is supposedly crucial to affecting changes in behavior. And this too just drives me bananas.
Recently I was asked to bring a dog to a photo shoot with another trainer who was working with the dog on the shoot. I was just kind of a bystander and the dog was like a prop basically for the shoot. But the other trainer kept saying how great my “energy” was, how I had such wonderful calm energy and how that was really the most important thing to have as a dog trainer. And the dog was super anxious. Now I wasn't happy the dog was anxious, I was trying to do what I could to help the dog be less anxious, but, like I said, I was kind of just like on the sidelines. It wasn't my shoot and it was kind of tricky for me to get too involved because it was really this other trainer who was working with the dog. But I kept thinking that if it's true, that dog training is all about energy, and my energy as interpreted by this woman was so calm and serene, then her energy must be really bad if it was resulting in the dog acting in this way.
Which relates to the sort of fallacy that you hear a lot, that it's always the owner's fault. It's always the person's fault if a dog has behavior problems, which is something else that drives me crazy because I always say, you know, our most challenging dogs at School for the Dogs unanimously have the best owners, the most devoted, caring, thoughtful owners because if they didn't these dogs would be disposed of at shelters. But if someone is seeking out training for a dog who has major issues, 9 times out of 10, the dog's issues I say would say have nothing to do with the person's treatment of the dog.
And you know, one time I was sitting outside a coffee place near where I was living with my dog Amos, who is like a 17, 18 pound little terrier who was once attacked by a sort of pit bull type dog. And ever since then if he sees a certain kind of pit bully type dog and the dog is approaching in, I don't know, like a certain kind of way and I don't intervene quickly and help make the situation better, sometimes he'll bark at the other dog. And it doesn't happen that often. I don't think it's a huge deal. And when I'm paying attention, which I usually am, it doesn't happen. But anyway, I was sitting outside this coffee place and enjoying my cup of coffee. Amos saw these two big pit bull kind of dogs and even, I should say, he has had some wonderful pit bull friends since he was attacked. But it was just a moment and he barked at this other dog and the guy…these two dogs and the guy outside the cafe just shot me like the world's most angry look about my dog barking at his dogs. And I said, “I'm really sorry. Sometimes he's just scared of pits.” And this guy says to me, “well, they always get that from their owners” as if I had a fear of pit bulls and that fearful energy was being transmitted to my dog. Which is ridiculous because pit bulls are actually… well actually the pit bull is not a specific breed, it's kind of an umbrella term. But I love pitties. I had one once, I've worked with lots of them, it's probably like generally speaking, my favorite kinds of dogs are pittie kind of dogs.
And I was just shocked and reminded of this weirdness that people have of going to the more complicated conclusion that somehow my fearful energy, whatever that is, has jumped to my dog rather than what I think of as the more reasonable, understandable reason that my dog is scared of dogs that sometimes look a certain way based on classical conditioning association. He associates a certain kind of dog who approaches him in a certain kind of way with this bad experience that he had years ago.
Anyway, I think we can blame a lot of the chatter out there about how you need to have a certain kind of energy in order to have a well-behaved dog on the dog whisperer, aka Cesar Millan, his real name. Cesar Millan is big on using terms like “calm, submissive energy” and “calm, assertive energy” to describe behavior, both the behavior you want in your dog and the behavior you want, the energy you should have in order to have a well trained dog.
But the problem is, like I've been saying is I don't know how the average person is supposed to just know what these kinds of energy look like. I work with dogs all the time and even I'm confused. And I also don't think that two people would ever completely agree with someone else's definition without conceding at least some differences between one kind of energy and another. But his approach is that your dog gets his energy largely from you and then your dog's problems are therefore a reflection of your problems. So if you lack confidence or leadership, that's going to lead to your dog having issues. And if you can fix your energy, if you can become as commanding and authoritative as Cesar Millan is, then your problems will be solved.
And you know, I just frankly think training doesn't need to be that complicated. I think you do not need to have all your stuff together. I do not think you need therapy and counseling on how to have a better, I don't know, energy as a person in order to get what you want from your dog. You just need to have a basic understanding of behavioral science and the laws of learning. I also want to get repeatable results. I don't want to have my clients get results that they can only get when the trainer who has the special energy is present. And that's a big criticism of Cesar Millan's work from actual people that he's worked with, you know, whether or not he is getting results because, as I would say, he's often using punishment and sort of turning dogs into terrified zombie-like creatures who will just do whatever it is he wants because they're so sort of stressed out and shut down or if he's getting results because he has such amazing assertive energy one way or the other. A lot of people who have actually been on his show later complain that the results don't last. That, you know, it's like the car was working when it was at the mechanic’s but not when they left. And certainly, as a professional dog trainer, I want people to have lasting results that stick around when I'm no longer in their living room.
So I don't really want my energy to be the factor in what's creating a change in their dog's behavior and I just don't believe that the answer to any training problem is changing the energy of the person that I'm working with ‘cause I don't even know what that means. And it seems to me there are a lot shorter paths that we can take that don't involve trying to parse and dissect what makes someone's energy one way or the other, and how I perceive it versus how someone else perceives their energy.
I mean, look at someone like Donald Trump. I think Donald Trump has bad energy. The way he talks, his mannerism. I mean, besides sort of just giving me the general heebie-jeebies, I think he comes off as a kind of overcompensating, insecure person. But there are certainly plenty of other people who think he has the energy of a leader of an authority figure, etc, etc. And which one of us is right?
You know, I find it really interesting that the, I guess, let's call it the debate or the divide between sort of science-based dog training and more, I guess, traditional dog training that's often based on punishment, but also on this kind of this idea of energy and myth, that a lot of it corresponds very closely to the divide in psychology between, those who practice like ABA styles psychology–so that's applied behavior analysis, and a more Freudian, Lacanian approach to psychology, which is largely about understanding the root causes of things based on a person's history and patterns and on consciousness. I mean, I'm oversimplifying it a lot, but it's like kind of in each domain, psychology and dog training, you have those who are firmly on the side of we can only study the things we can observe and change the things we can observe. And then you have those who are on the other side saying, no, we need to look at not only the consequences of behavior, but the causes of behavior. And we can make guesses as to why things happen based on larger patterns and theories of the origins of our experiences. And then in both cases, of course, there's plenty of people who are kind of in the middle.
And, you know, I'm not a scholar of the history of psychology, but I have often noticed how behaviorists like BF Skinner, who I talk about all the time on this podcast, are often not in the study of psychology at all. It's kind of just skipped over. And I was reminded by this by one of my best friends who actually is Lacanian psychologist–Lacan being a French psychoanalyst of the 20th century, kind of in the vein of Freud. She admitted she knew nothing about Skinner, had no idea when he was around, and couldn't define operant conditioning or classical conditioning. And I remember once she asked me who came first, Pavlov or Skinner, and in my world as someone who's so enmeshed in this stuff, I felt like she might as well have asked me like, who came first, Jesus or Martin Luther King?
And one time she was telling me about a client of hers who, a little girl who had developed a fear of fire. And she went on about how this little girl's fear of fire, this girl was a French-speaking child, that it related somehow I think too, like the word for “fire” in French was relating to a nickname her father had given to her and then her father left. And I don't know, it just seemed so convoluted to me and that the treatment had to do with discussing her father. And I said, you know, look, listen, I'm not a psychoanalyst here, I'm just a dog trainer. But I would say put her in front of a fireplace and feed her ice cream. That's like more of the applied behavior analysis approach, which is like, I don't, I'm not looking at why she's scared of fire as much as how we can change the association.
In the early 1900s, sort of sandwiched between Ivan Pavlov, who's credited with codifying classical conditioning, and BF Skinner later in the 20th century who was very much affected by Pavlov's work and is best known for codifying operant conditioning, also called Skinnerian conditioning. In between those two was John Watson, who is often considered the founder of behaviorism and he too was a scholar of Pavlov's work and influenced Skinner to a large extent. And Watson is a really interesting figure. He's not that well known, I think partially because he burned all of his writings and manuscripts before he died. He was kind of, seems like he was kind of a weird dude in a lot of ways. And he ended up, although he started out in academia, he ended up in the ad world as kind of like a super successful Don Draper type focusing on using what he knew about manipulating behavior in order to get people to buy stuff.
But before that he was a professor at Johns Hopkins where he did a lot of very interesting and also kind of weird experiments, which I will talk about I think in some future episodes, although I think I've mentioned before, like, the Baby Albert studies where he conditioned a child to have all sorts of weird fears. But he also wrote a lot of papers arguing that it was misguided to separate the study of animal psychology and human psychology. And that human psychology basically put too much of an emphasis on feelings and consciousness whereas a behaviorist approach would make more sense, putting the emphasis of study on the way animals behave in observable ways and how we can shape and change behaviors using clever conditioning.
He was famous for asserting that if you gave him 12 healthy children, 12 healthy babies and an environment that he could set up, that he could shape each of those children to be anything he wanted them to be. That basically all babies are a blank slate and that using environmental control and conditioning, we can turn them into anything we want. And, you know, he was an extremist for sure. But I mention him just because I was reading this passage in something he wrote called Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it. And if you are an animal training geek, you should definitely give this a read. I wanted to read a little passage of it cause I was reading it and I thought, you know, you could really just substitute the word “energy” here whenever he talks about consciousness and feelings and you would have an essay about my pet peeve of focusing too much on this undefinable word that gets tossed around so much in dog training. So I just wanted to read a little bit of this…
Psychology as it is generally thought of, has something esoteric and its methods. If you fail to reduce my findings, it is not due to some fault in your apparatus or in the control of your stimulus, but it is due to the fact that your introspection is untrained. The attack is made upon the observer and not upon the experimental setting. In physics and in chemistry, the attack is made upon the experimental conditions. The apparatus was not sensitive enough, impure chemicals were used, et cetera. In these sciences, a better technique will give report reproducible results. Psychology is otherwise. If you can't observe three to nine states of clearness and attention, your introspection is poor. If on the other hand a feeling seems reasonably clear to you, your introspection is again faulty. You are seeing too much. Feelings are never clear.
The time seems to have come when psychology must discard all reference to consciousness when it need no longer delude itself into thinking that it is making mental states the object of observation. We have become so enmeshed in speculative questions concerning the elements of mind, the nature of conscious content, for example, imageless thought, attitudes, et cetera, that I as an experimental student feel that something is wrong with our premises and from the types of problems which developed from them. There is no longer any guarantee that we all mean the same thing when we use the terms now current in psychology.
That is from John Watson's Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It written in 1913 and echoes a lot of the divide in dog training.
You know, I don't think you could find three dog trainers who are going to give the same definition to terms like “energy” or even “dominance” or “calm submissiveness.” The dogs that Cesar Millan on his shows refers to as being in a “calm, submissive state” I would define as being in a zombie like, terrified, shut down state, so there you go. Whereas the terms I prefer to use as a dog trainer: punishment, reinforcement, positive, negative antecedents, consequences, conditioning. These are all terms that we should all be able to define in exactly the same way. And that is what puts the science into behavioral science. As I see it. Psychology as the dog trainer sees it.
Anyway, thank you to listening to what I hope was not too much of a ranty episode. I hope be back on track with the podcast. I fell behind for a couple of weeks both because School for the Dogs moved to a new facility, which ended up being quite an undertaking. But I think we're through the hardest part of it and we're super excited about it. I hope if you're a fan of this podcast and you're in New York City, that you'll come by and say hello to us. We're open every day, 92 East Seventh Street. We have a great shop there that you can peruse. And it's a really great place.
Other reason I fell behind is I am eight and a half months pregnant and, which is also a wonderful thing, but it has slowed me down a little bit in many areas of my life. And I hope to stay on track with the podcast for the end of my pregnancy and with the new baby. But I guess we'll just, we'll see how it goes.
Woof Shout Out this week to my incredible partner, Kate, who I met about eight years ago and we started School for the Dogs together shortly thereafter. And, it's just, she's just been such a blessing in my life and I am starting out this new year, feeling really grateful to have her, to run this business with. We've been through a lot through the years and I am, I'm just so thrilled to be in this crazy business with her. So you Kate, you Kate, 2019 is for you as far as I'm concerned. 2018 was difficult. She lost our, our spokes dog, her wonderful pit bull, Disco and I hope this year brings good things to her.
And our Fun Fact of the Day, this is something I heard recently on public radio. Did you know that Rolf the Muppet, was developed originally for a Purina ad in Canada in the sixties? I looked up the ad. It's pretty hilarious. It's him trying to convince another dog puppet that Purina dog chow is tastier than asparagus. I will post a link to it in the show notes. It's a lot of fun.
Happy 2019, Everyone.
Links:
Karen Pryor Academy
Freudian
Lacanian
Ivan Pavlov
BF Skinner
John Watson
Little Albert
Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It
Rolf Purina Ad
