Whatever happened to mans best friend?
Treat training isn’t “positive reinforcement”, treats are reward based training only. All dog training has become today is about quadrants – PR/PP uses one, and balanced uses all 4. Training today has become all about tool use – and that’s not fair. B.F Skinner got blamed for the quadrants – but he didn’t create them. Trainers did based on bad analysis of Skinners’ early work back in the 1980’s. Training has taken the dog out of the animal kingdom and put it somewhere else – to reflect the training protocols. Skinner didn’t care about the animals brain – he was only concerned about behaviour, all behaviours can be fixed through operant conditioning. We need to start pushing the dog to use its brain – to make choices.
People always ask how I trained my dog to be so easy going, calm and friendly. Fact is, I didn’t. Monty is the outcome of positive reinforcement, the real deal – not treat training. I didn’t use treats or clickers, prongs or e-collars etc. Positive Reinforcement has to come through personal choice – the dogs choice. The dog has a brain, they can think, they can problem solve, let them use it. But training today takes it away.
All too often, I see dogs being rewarded or punished based on what the human wants. Human makes up human rules, and the dog is rewarded or punished based on that. The dog is pretty much forced to live in a human world – but we should be focused on creating a dog centric world within our own. Can you punish a dog for a choice it didn’t make? That isn’t positive reinforcement. You are only rewarding the dog for accepting your choice, for accepting what you want – what does the dog want? Yes, it matters.
This is how true “positive reinforcement” is translated to a dog. Put away the treats, throw the quadrants in the garbage, you don’t need them. You want your dog to follow because it trusts you – not because you have a piece of food in your hand. It’s the same as any human relationship, you’re not going to follow someone you don’t trust. We need to stop focusing on the reactivity and the aggression, neither of these is a diagnosis – they are symptoms, the outcome of a problem. Start understanding WHY the dog is behaving the way it is – because it doesn’t trust. The dog doesn’t trust you, the dog doesn’t trust you to lead them, they don’t trust your judgment in the scary environment. This is why dogs get reactive, crazy, aggressive.
And the thought of wrapping an e-collar or prong around the dogs neck is nothing more than control – because you’re scared of what your dog is going to do. That’s not training, that’s control and management, that’s treating the dog like a liability – and the very reason you’ll use those tools for the rest of the dogs life.
Take a child that has been abused, and scared of the world – the child doesn’t want to live like that but it’s likely all they know. So what will it take to get the child out of that state – that negative comfort zone? One person that they can trust completely, one person they can follow – one person to lead them and show the world doesn’t need to be a scary place. You wouldn’t use food reward, that offers up no long term goal. The child needs to make the choices to overcome fear, and that comes through trust and trust alone – what is the personal reward for choosing to overcome fears? It’s the same for your dog, or any animal, Skinner proved that. Forget about dog behaviour and dog psychology and focus on the animal in front of you.
Step 1, build solid trust. Forget about everything else, trust is everything. You can’t train trust. When you lack confidence (insecure), you spend more time thinking and worrying about what everything/everyone around you is doing, rather than focusing on yourself. Think about that long and hard. Now think about your reactive dog – they are focusing on the environment rather than themselves. This is what fear and insecurity does to us, to the animal.
Trust – firm belief in the reliability, truth, ability, or strength of someone or something.
Owners don’t want to hear this, but if you have a reactive dog due to fear, insecurity, etc – the dog does not trust you. And you don’t trust them. They are growling at people, dogs, and things because they don’t trust your judgment. On the flip side, they are protecting you. Imagine that, an insecure dog protecting an insecure human, dangerous combination. The question is, why doesn’t the dog trust you? What reason have you given your dog to trust you? What have you done to earn trust? I hear it so often – how do I make my dog trust me? You can’t make a human trust you, the dog is no different – it has to be earned by being trustworthy.
Trust is so easy to gain, your dog wants to trust you. How do you gain trust? If you want your dog to be social – then be social. Meet people, meet dogs. Show the dog that you aren’t afraid of this thing they are reacting to – take the lead, interact with things that scare them. If it’s a person, leave the dog where it is and go say hi, shake hands. If it’s something inanimate, leave the dog where it is and go interact with it. No words, no encouragement, just calm and wait – and let the dog make the choice. Sometimes the answer is no, but you keep doing it over and over. Trust me, the dog is watching. Let the dog make the choice to come to you, the dog needs to make the choice to overcome the fear – and use the trust in you to get there. The dog needs to choose to trust your judgment. When a dog makes the choice to take those steps to trust you – you’re not terminating fear, you’re fixing a broken relationship. And a dog that trusts you completely will feel secure, even when they feel vulnerable, they will still follow you – because they trust you to step in when they need help.
You CANNOT terminate fear in a human, you CANNOT make an environment not scary for a dog. But that is the training protocol. You can gain trust in hours, or spend months/years trying to terminate fear. The environment is what it is – the dog needs to trust you, to trust your judgment in that environment – to follow you. They need to know that you are there for them, that you will step in when they need it – “Follow me! I got your back!” I’m showing you that I’m not scared, you don’t need to be either. That is called leadership, and that is what your dog wants.
This is what I did with Monty the first night, and the amount of trust gained in an hour or two was
incredible. He was making all the choices, he was choosing to trust me – I wasn’t trying to make the environment “not scary”. At the end of it all, through all the positive choices that he made to trust – the pet store employees and customers showered him with treats, gave him affection, the dog was in heaven. My job was to build trust – people made the environment positive. I let it happen, I had to trust him to make choices to show me that he is capable. That is positive reinforcement – not immediate reward given by me. The environment became the reward and he couldn’t wait to come back to experience it again. Monty earned that reward through positive choices – it’s self gratification. “I make good choices, good things happen!”. Once Monty chose and understood the choice that calm got him what he wanted – the world became his oyster and it exploded. But I had to trust him to make the choices, to show me that he was ready. You need to learn to trust your dog.
People always ask, why don’t I reward him? I don’t need to. He’s rewarding himself through making good choices, getting what he wants – and I have to trust him to do the right thing. And that is “Positive Reinforcement” – I’m reinforcing good choices and the reward is what he wants – to simply be a dog and explore the world.
Respect – a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.
Once the dog comes to trust you, respect is automatic – people respect that which we trust – you just helped your dog achieve a goal – the first step to becoming a thinking being. Now it’s time to start socializing.
Socialized – having been made to behave in a way that is acceptable to a particular society. This is the textbook definition – and “having been made to behave” is how many trainers apply “socialized” to a dog – that’s wrong. But what is social, what makes humans social – to not go out in public and be a complete jerk? Step back and think about that for a minute – its the same for a dog. Socialization is more about exposure to everything the dog is going to experience in its’ life. It doesn’t mean they will meet everything they are exposed to – but they should understand that everything isn’t bad. Take the boogey man out of everything and there is nothing left to bark at, nothing left to react to.
You learned through making choices, good and bad, showed that you were capable of interacting with the public because of the right choices you made. Monty has met thousands of dogs, thousands of people – but does that make him social? No, it doesn’t. The fact that he CAN meet thousands of dogs and people and remain calm and polite makes him social. When you get through all that – confidence is the result because you are developing a solid relationship
with your dog. Now you’re getting the dog that you want, generally the family dog. When you develop that relationship, training for anything else is so easy. That is what comes through 2 way trust and respect, communication etc.
Apply it to human relationships – if you can’t trust your spouse or the person that you are with – respect is impossible. And you will lose confidence. We call that a toxic relationship. It’s the same for the relationship with your dog – it’s animal. Humans have the choice to stay in that relationship – or not. Your dog doesn’t have the choice to leave.
If your dog is consistently running away all the time, maybe it’s trying to tell you something.