The ugly history of today’s dog training

Please read this to understand, not to react to it. There is too much reaction today and that doesn’t allow for open discussion. Understand as you read this – I’m not blaming dog owners for all this, you are victims.

Burrhus Frederic (B.F.) Skinner is the man blamed for the creation of the Quadrants Of Dog Training, but he did not create them – trainers did based on bad analysis of Skinners works. Skinner literally defined Positive Reinforcement as the removal of Negative Reinforcement – not have a treat or click. From his book The Behaviour Of Organisms published in 1938.

Human beings have basically removed themselves from the animal kingdom – and they’ve taken the dog with them. We tend not to think of ourselves as animals anymore, just rulers over the animal kingdom. The dog has become something to be “operantly conditioned” or “trained” – everything can and has to be trained and that ideology is destroying the relationships between dogs and their owners. Training has taken over behaviour – and it’s nothing but protocols and tool use. Treats, drugs, clickers, prongs, e-collars, choke collars etc – and it’s all punishment based. Are people tired of all this yet? Are you ready to start questioning?

Trainers have owners believing that the dog can’t possibly learn without reward and punishment – this is a lie. Why is this? Because that’s what the quadrants dictate. “Positive Reinforcement” / “Negative Reinforcement” – “Positive Punishment” / “Negative Punishment”. And the punishment is so bad today it’s to the point of mental and physical abuse. People have normalized all this out of pure frustration. Then all we hear is “hire a trainer”, cause the average dog owner can’t possibly work to with their dog on their own anymore. People that can’t afford dog training take to watching training videos online out of desperation. But yet, I watched Zak George turn his dog Inertia into a basket case – he made her reactive and people cheered. The dog in the video is not yours, every dog is different. Dog training has become a cash cow. Treats, toys, crates and other tools have been normalized into billion dollar industries and trainers are driving the bus.

5 years ago, balanced trainers weren’t pushing for e-collar use the way they are today. It used to be a tool as a means to an end – train the dog and lose the tool. Well, today that’s turned into “Meh, just leave it on, just in case”. Why? Because it’s not a training tool, it never was, it’s a tool of control and punishment. How many dog owners were given real information on e-collars and their use? Balanced has been getting gradually worse because the protocols and understanding are failing.

5 years ago, positive reinforcement pushed treats as a means to an end – train the dog, get rid of the treats. Today? Always carry a treat bag – you will be treat training the dog for the rest of it’s life – and somehow, that became normal. Owners are so desperate to use these techniques that they are willing to starve the dog to food motivate it. So many owners ended up treating their dog for everything, and when they realize – no treat, no trick.

Now they push food to train behavioral issues – there’s some good news – that’s the worst possible thing to do. You’re luring your dog to a target that it’s scared of – forcing it to generate cortisol, and now pushing it to stress eat. You’re rewarding a dog for being in that state of mind – “dog, this is how I want you”. To ice that cake, the dog has to justify the reward because that’s what animals do – humans included. Was that ever explained to you? Think treat training can’t be punishment? Skinner coined a phrase “pigeon superstition”. When pigeons got a piece of food that they didn’t earn, they would try to figure out what they did to get it to repeat it. Your dog is no different, you are no different. You’re forcing your dog to justify every morsel of food in any situation. This is why some dogs learn weird things that the owners didn’t train. It’s self taught to justify that food you gave for free.

One quick note on clickers. Any solid trainer would tell you that the clicker turns behaviors into tricks – read that again – nothing but tricks. You’re trying to “operantly condition” your dogs bad behaviours into tricks. Yes, clickers work but when there is such a high probability of incorrect use – then it shouldn’t be used. Clicker training isn’t easy to undo.

All of this goes back to one man – a fellow by the name of B.F Skinner – the father Operant Conditioning. He was considered an animal behaviorist – but he was a human psychologist. Skinner did experiments on animals in a lab environment in order to understand US – the human animal. He didn’t bring these experiments into his human practice – but it’s the lab experiments we are pushing on dogs. Humans were his target, not the dog. He understood that humans can be Operantly Conditioned, just like any animal. And that’s what we are throwing at our dogs. The experiments he did would be considered abuse – he was shocking dogs 100 years ago – and today? Yeah, chew on that for a while, not much has changed. If you don’t know who B.F Skinner is, and you are using any quadrants, I suggest you read up on him. Read his books, not a trainers interpretation and lies of his writings.

And by the way, Skinner was not an animal trainer or dog trainer.

There are 3 animal species on the planet that will take abuse and come back and apologize. Horses, dogs and humans. Chew on that for a bit. Beat a cat and it’ll be a cold day in hell before it trusts you again. Beat a dog, and it’ll come back to lick you on the face. Shock or prong a dog, same? And then we wonder why dogs run away when they get the chance – but now it’s train recall with punishment. There’s some good news. We’re taking advantage of this, this is the only reason we get away with using tools. You wouldn’t shock your house cat and you know damn well why – there is no pass on that one. And people probably respect their cat more than that.

Crating, there’s some good news – and it’s automatic now. Just got a puppy? Buy a crate! Can’t do without it. Now it’s muzzles – let’s muzzle every dog. I’m losing my mind.

Many trainers and behaviorists latched onto Skinner work back in the 1980’s – and took it to the extreme stating that dogs don’t have emotions or intelligence and they created the “quadrants of dog training” based on that. Why? Because Skinner himself didn’t need the brain to change an animals behavior, he didn’t care about the brain – everything can be conditioned. Positive reinforcement is one quadrant of this system if you’re not aware. The ideology that dogs are simply not capable of learning with out reward or punishment is the biggest lie you have ever been told when it comes to a dog. And that has created this mess that we have the nerve to call “dog training”. That’s the basis for the quadrants that trainers created. Skinner did NOT create the quadrants of dog training. Trainers and behaviorists did based on some really bad analysis of Skinners work, but Skinner got blamed for all this. Now, here we are. If Skinner woke up today and seen the state of dog training based on his work? I suspect he would go ballistic.

We have come to a point where dog owners believe they need to reward and punish a sentient animal in order for them to learn anything. Unfortunately, that ideology takes away the dogs ability to think through “listen to me or I’ll punish you in some way”. Even the removal or withholding treats is punishment to a dog, that’s proven by Dr. Gregory Berns.

The positive and negative punishment quadrants. I have never read those terms in any of Skinners works – if I missed it, someone please fill me in. Skinner himself didn’t believe in punishment – he knew it wasn’t effective – and it’s too tempting to use. For example, he spoke at length about prison systems being ineffective – it’s punishment, not rehabilitation. A person commits a crime, does their time, pays their “debt” to society but then has a criminal record dogging them for the rest of their life. Always being punished, creates a revolving door to the prison system. The threat of punishment is for life. Think e-collars aren’t punishment? Trainers will tell you that tools like these fall under the positive punishment quadrant – but Skinner used shock as “negative reinforcement”. When he turned off the power – he called that “positive reinforcement”. You’re punishing your dog. Are you punishing the dog based on a choice it made – or that you made for the dog.

So, positive and negative punishment – that’s 2 quadrants in the garbage.

Skinners original definition of “positive reinforcement” was the removal of negative reinforcement. For example – directly from one of his books “Behavior of Organisms” published in 1938 – but this is new science? He would hook up an electrode to a dogs tail, and shock it until it performed an action. When he turned off the power, he called that “positive reinforcement” – the removal of negative. Shock it again, and it’s going to learn repetition pretty fast because it wants the positive reinforcement – it doesn’t want the pain. It works, should we be using it? How did that turn into clickers and treats? I know how. Because Skinner did alot of food reward to get animals to do weird things – he screwed up alot of animals in the head. I highly doubt the pigeons he worked with in that lab would have an easy time just being a pigeon in the wild. People need to think about that long and hard. He also used pigeons to understand us. hrmmm.

Early on, he used negative reinforcement and it was generally the infliction of pain – IE shock. Later in his career, he seemed to have stopped using it because there was a better way – he realized that hurting animals is not the right way to get a positive response. Yes, pain and punishment works, but it’s not necessary. And they can serve to suppress behaviour.

So, negative reinforcement – 3rd quadrant in the garbage.

There is only one quadrant left – positive reinforcement. And trainers still managed to change that to treats and clickers. That’s not what Skinner described as positive reinforcement later in his career. Positive reinforcement has to come from the animals choice. But training is taking the dogs brain away. It works backwards in so many ways. Treat training is NOT positive reinforcement – only reward based training, don’t be fooled. And treat training is punishment in so many ways. How is it punishment? You’re trying to replace the dogs brain and thought process with a piece of food. You’re building a food relationship with the dog, and somehow that’s become “normal”.

And by the way, ask any “positive reinforcement” trainer to define what positive reinforcement is beyond one quadrant or a treat. They are going to have a hard time doing it because it’s so fractured – or they tell you “don’t waste my time”. I can never get a straight answer.

That’s 4 quadrants in the garbage. So why are the quadrants so prominent in dog training today?

Skinner didn’t care about the brain, it wasn’t important until later in his life when he had a stroke that changed him. Only then did he consider the brain important – too late, the damage is done. Everything can be conditioned – and that is dog training today. Taketh the dogs brain away – you don’t need the brain to condition everything – that goes for humans too! That’s why many trainers today carry the attitude of “listen to me or I’ll punish you in some way”. They don’t care about the brain, they remove it. You will hear trainers say – “as long as a dog thinks it’s making a choice, then it is”. That’s exactly what Skinner himself called “free will is an illusion”. The illusion of choice. One can’t punish a dog based on a choice it didn’t make?

That’s what we are pushing on dogs today. Dogs are incredible, dogs have a brain and real intelligence – they are sentient. Dogs are very social, it’s humans that are making them anti-social based on bad advice. We need to start focusing on that. We need to start giving dogs free will, give the dog choices, push them to use their brain and turn them into dogs. That’s what I did with my own dogs, we have solid trust because we both earned it.

What training has become today is based on misunderstanding of Skinner. Trainers are lying to people – and the sad fact is – many don’t know they are lying to you cause they have never read Skinners books – only trainers interpretations of it. This is all they have learned. If a trainer does know this – and they continue lying – what does that tell you? If dog owners would sit down and read Skinners books – the quadrants would be thrown in the garbage and dog training would change.

Ian Dunbar for example, well known trainer – he was like many others, swinging the quadrants around like it was a dog training bible — and the amount of damage and normalization that trainers did from the 1980’s through to today is immense. Dunbar and others have dropped the quadrants are pushing understanding the dogs behavior instead of punishing it. I respect Dunbar, I don’t agree with everything he says but that’s fine. But the damage has already been done. How do we undo it? Are we too far gone?

That’s the sad state of dog training today. It’s all based on lies and human opinion. Humans keep creating protocols and tools for the dog – opinion becomes fact – but yet, we’ve lost understanding of our dogs. Dog owners and their dog are paying the price through all this nonsense.

What we managed to normalize because of frustration blows me away. People reach for tools out of frustration cause nothing they tried is working and you’re convincing yourselves that this is the right thing to do because you’re stuck with it for life. I’m willing to bet that people didn’t tell you that it’s likely a life long tool for the dog. Lifelong punishment. I love it when people say their dog loves the prong – the dog has been conditioned to it, no prong, no walk. Imagine every time you go for a walk that you need to wear this thing around your neck that hurts. What would it do you you mentally? I couldn’t imagine shocking my dog, he’s my best friend.

It’s not owners fault and that’s the worst part of all this.

The worst of all this? Dr. Gregory Berns is a neuroscientist that is using trained dogs to lay still in an MRI machine and he’s watching their brains live and in color. It’s called the dog project, and it’s been going on for 10 years now. I beg of people to listen to Greg with an open mind – you will change the way you look at your dog. What’s he’s finding is absolutely astonishing – that dogs really are sentient. I’ve known this all my life – just didn’t have the proof til lately. He’s pushing to get dogs better rights in society beyond being property due to this research. In his own words:

“Eventually, I came to the conclusion that the key to improving dog-human relationships is through social cognition, not behaviorism. Positive reinforcement is a shortcut to train dogs, but it is not necessarily the best way to form a relationship with them. To truly live with dogs, humans need to become “great leaders.” Not dictators who rule by doling out treats and by threatening punishment, but leaders who respect and value their dogs as sentient beings.”

Robert Hynes Dog Training – Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.
email: robert@roberthynesdogtraining.com
Phone: 780-863-9547
https://roberthynesdogtraining.com