Random Thoughts

Today a friend and I had a lengthy conversation on all things dog training and ended up discussing some "touchy" subjects for me including relationship and punishment. It was interesting to hear the take of someone who pursues herding as it requires the dogs to have a great deal of respect for their handlers commands and requires a great deal of self control. This is true in agility as well but in agility we're not playing around with a dogs prey drive with a bunch of sheep in the ring and in general our livelihood is not tied up in how our run goes. Another interesting difference I found is that in herding the reward for the dog doing well is "letting them have their sheep" where as in agility we do use continuing on in the excercise as a reward but we primarily use food and toy interaction as reinforcers for our dogs.

So one of the things we talked about was relationship with our dogs and how much of our dogs behaviour results from a poor relationship with their handler versus poor training by the handler. It all went round and round and in the end I'm not even really sure where we ended up LOL One thing I will say is that I believe a great deal of the problems we see in our training is the result of having either poor timing or in rewarding crappy behavior. For example if a dog is breaking its startline the first place I would look is in how the startline was trained and how it has been maintained (has the dog ever been allowed to keep going when it breaks its startline?, how much reinforcement has the behaviour had and what was the dog doing when it received the reinforcement) verses saying the dog doesn't respect the handler or they don't have a good enough relationship and this is why the dog does not stay. I am not negating the impact (good and bad) that our relationship with our dog has on our training but I do think we have to be so careful when we talk to others about their dogs and use the word relationship. It doesn't feel good when someone tells you they think your relationship with your dog sucks and I'm not so sure it get people all excited about dog training. A more successful approach may be to focus on the dog training and on rate of reinforcment, timing, criteria etc. By keeping training fun yet still focussing on the mechanical skills involved in the end we'll probably have the biggest effect we could have on our relationship with our dog anyway.

One of the other things we talked about was punishment and its place in dog training. I do believe that punishment does have a place in dog training provided a person has excellent mechanics and there is a long history of reinforcement for the correct behaviour. I also beleive it is way too often used by people who have no business doing it - they have crappy dog training skills, they have not successfully taught the dog the correct behaviour or are inconsistent in their criteria (ie sometimes its okay to pull on the leash but sometimes its not) and they end up creating a stressed out dog who has no idea what to do to avoid being yelled at, confined to their crate or worse yet collar corrected or physically corrected in some other way.

Personally I am trying to minimize/eliminate my verbal corrections and physical corrections for sure no longer has any place in my dog training. I do still use negative punishment (time outs, removal of opportunity for reinforcement) when I feel they are appropriate.

Today I am grateful to have friends who offer both simillar and different perspectives to my own ideas and who can discuss differences openly without getting personally offended. I am grateful that my thoughts on dog training are always evolving and incorporating new ideas and information.