“There is a Better Way . . . Find it!”

Positive doesn’t mean permissive. I have a 21 month old Border Collie who would be labled as Autistic if he were a child. He is super sensitive to sights, sounds & motion. He is a very intense, hard dog with a dominate personality. I can’t tell you how frustrated I was in his first year because using 100% clicker training wasn’t working on him. It wasn’t until I could interrupt his temper tantrums that I could start to get through to him. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t use force, I’ve practiced being firm (not mean or mad) the dogs know the difference. Every dog is different & they each have unique needs. I trained all the Focus games with him, shaped him (had great success with the crate games) finally got him to want to work with me, this dog wasn’t motivated to work for food or toys, he made me work hard. The turning point in our relationship was when I set the boundaries. I think it makes all the difference in the attitude & intention we use when handling our dogs. They KNOW what we know or don’t know. I am finally seeing the partnership that I had hoped to have with my dog when I first got him, it has taken almost 2 yrs. of training. He may be 5 yrs. old before I can actually take him to agility trials & that is ok. or he may decide that sheep herding is what he was born to do. It is more about the relationship for me then winning titles even though I got him to be my agility partner.
We need to observe our dogs as individuals & be the best we can be for them and making sure they have happy balanced lives.

Hysterical comic! Excellent!

I think one of the best kept secrets in positive dog training is punishment. It’s so well-kept that trainers keep it a secret from themselves! 90% of punishment seems to happen accidentally and the rest of it often seems to happen incorrectly. Very hard to really target punishment on a problem behavior and too often it lands on behaviors (trusting behaviors) we really want to cultivate.

BUT we do learn something when we make mistake (negative punishment), or we experience a failure or when we stub our toe or bump our head (positive punishment). Every dog is unique. I have seen situations where dogs really don’t understand “danger,” their genetic drives can’t be fooled and there are life or death reasons why they need to learn “danger!” In certain circumstances (and I never thought I would be the sort of person who would argue this point) with certain highly prey-driven, prey-aroused, obsessed dogs (and I personally have never seen a border collie come CLOSE to being this sort of prey-obsessed dog), there can be a value to teaching the dog the meaning of a cue that means “danger! turn back!” In that rare situation, I would rather have my dog get a badly stubbed toe (a shock could feel that strong) than have the dog gleefully blast off after a deer or a squirrel and get hit by a car and killed.

It’s easy to train dogs not to chase after cars, as we can control that distraction incrementally, we can have dog get hit by wheelbarrows, we can control the stimulus and practice as our husbands drive back and forth. It’s not so easy to control squirrel stimuli. I’ve done lots of premack, I’ve experimented with lots of ideas, and the bottom line is the matching theory. You need to be able to match all the reinforcement in the environment in order to condition a cue. With squirrels sometimes the only way to honestly match that reinforcement is to help the dog decide that it’s not as much fun as he imagined. If dogs don’t satiate from squirrel chasing, but find it the very best reinforcement available, and if the human really can’t match that reinforcement, then a stubbed toe ( a not-extreme shock) can help the dog decide for himself that playing tug really is a lot more interesting.

I agree that electric collars are misused way too much. I can’t agree that there is *always* a better way, but usually, yes. I am right now working with a client who (incorrectly) used a shock collar in a young green dog, and now the (confused) dog still chases squirrels and their bond is damaged. We do need to teach our dogs to trust us, as otherwise dogs aren’t going to fully dare to express their intelligence and opinions, and unless the dog trusts us, the dog won’t follow our advice.

But I don’t want to see shock collars banned in the US as they are in Wales, because sometimes, they can provide life or death information to a dog that is impossible to clearly communicate in any other way. With my Tigerlily, who was really squirrel obsessed for four years, and it kept getting worse as she managed to collect escape and blast-off opportunities (in an ideal “ruff love” world we prevent all escapes, but my world wasn’t ideal, no matter how I tried) one apparently not traumatic experience with a shock collar gave her really important information! It made her trust me more than ever. (“OH! NOW I know why you didn’t want me to blast off.”) Letting her discover some danger was much less damaging to our bond than me holding her leash, trying to move her away from moving squirrels as she prey screamed and pined.

OMG that was so funny, we both laughed and oh so true.
Thanks & Great article.

I am the owner, teacher, partner and best friend of the Rottweiler, MACH6 Nordike’s The Spy Who Loves ME, UD, FX, RN. I would like to set some records straight about my dog and my training methods.
First of all, she is 8 QQ’s into her MACH7 with all the speed points needed. That 8th QQ was last weekend.
Although The Spy Child was in a league of her own as a pup and growing up, (Wrote a book about the experience, she was so “over the top” in enthusiasm and imagination). My methods for teaching her were all positive motivation, using food to shape the pieces and parts of the exercises, but her motivation was to get the big, “Yes!” from me and for me to continue to play games with her.
She’s always been a sponge for knowledge and because everything we’ve done has been one big game to her, she hated it when we had to stop. Feeling sorry for her, I added a game of ball retrieving to the end of our training sessions.
I don’t bring food or toys with me to the agility ring. Spy doesn’t need any incentive to play the game of agility. Normally, she can barely hold a start line stay she wants to run the course so badly. I don’t bring any food at all, but I do bring her favorite ball and we play some retrieving at her crate before I put her away.
On to the next misconception. Shock collars. Never owned one, never put one on any dog of mine and never even held one in my hand. Don’t know how to use one and don’t really care to know. Never had a use for one and quite frankly, I think of myself as a good enough trainer that I can’t fathom ever needing one. Wouldn’t go there if I did.
Next is the dog walk issue. As most of you know if you’ve competed in agility for any length of time, some dog walks can be shaky or wobbly. Unfortunately, Spy has been on some of that equipment in the past several months at trials and it has shaken her confidence in the equipment. Not in herself and her abilities, not that she fell off of anything, not in her relationship with me. What I regret is, I didn’t have the Judges check the dog walk before her run and that I wasn’t aware and in tune that it was rattling her cage with every run.
Actually, I was quite happy with the equipment in Syracuse. The DW was sturdy and LOVED the rubber footing. I hoped that four days running on good equipment might convince her that dog walks will be sturdy from now on.
Lastly, I’ll tell you what really happened on that run. The only thing that’s been told that was correct is, the course did start out with a tire to the DW. I lead out 1/2 way to the DW with the intention of allowing Spy to run a little ahead of me to get up on the DW so I would be pushing from behind. For the first time in her life, Spy just sat there on the start line, not wanting to begin. She knew I would be asking her to go up that thing. I called her again. That’s when the ears went down and her whole body drooped. At that moment, I knew I had to change gears immediately so I reached into my bag of top motivators and began to chant as I squatted down a bit and got a big grin on my face, “Ready……Ready….Ready……GO!” I didn’t stop saying Ready until I saw that little girls eyes light back up, ears perk, and that, “I’m gunna break this start line stay if you keep that up” look. That’s when the Go came. She was strong on the jump and was good to go until she actually got all 4 feet on the DW. I praised her, stayed with her and the communication between us was, “I’m right here beside you, Spy. If anything happens, I’ll catch you. We’re a team and I’ve never been more proud of you”.
And pride I do have for my little Spy Child. It was one of the bravest things I’ve ever seen a dog do. You’ll have to ask Spy exactly what gave her the courage to get up on that walk, but I’d like to think it was her love of dancing with me and the dog walk is part of the dance.
Her best run was the last of the weekend. She had only a slight hesitation getting on the DW and trotted over the top and down the other side like her old self.
I’ll be taking her to a local training center and putting the DW all the way down, flat onto the floor. When that isn’t an issue, I’ll raise it up onto milk crates, then a bit higher. If we reach a height that she gets uncomfortable with, I’ll drop it back down to the level she liked and let her run that a few times before I raise it up a wee bit.
We WILL work this out. This is a dog who has such good balance, she would jump off the arm of a chair onto the back of my big boy, Otis and go for a ride yelling, “Yippy Ty Yay Yea!” at 9 weeks old.
Thank you for allowing me to set some records and facts straight. I’m an open book to my training methods because I don’t train or work her at home and haven’t gone to an agility class for the past 3 years. What you see in the ring IS where we train. The rest of the time, Spy is happy keeping my house in order and telling everyone what to do and how high she wants you to jump. She’s got two adults and her daughter, Kaper wrapped around her little paw.

Sue Waite
Author, “Too Much Dog!”
Too Much Dog.com
Owned by The Spy Child
One thing I love about agility is, it’s taught me to embrace Plan B in a nanosecond. If I take the time to worry, she’s already gone off course.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/01/080114103723.htm

Something else I thought of regarding the remark about methods working for you because you are an unusually good dog trainer, but the rest of the world should be relegated to using physical punishment. What a defeatist attitude! How about teaching the rest of the world to be good dog trainers, which is what you as well as several other brilliant trainers endeavor to do with seminars, books and classes. Bring us all up to your level; we may not reach it, but at least making the effort will be an improvement.

Thank you for posting the clip, writing another excellent blog post, and by combining them, taking a strong stand on a certain new and disturbing dog training trend made popular by (ugh) TV.

I thought the following was an interesting article. “Aggression As Rewarding As Sex, Food And Drugs, New Research Shows” http://www.sciencedaily.com
I’ve long suspected that punishment is self-gratifying, and aggression in a training scenario would be the trainer punishing the dog. People continue to think punishment works because it feels good to them to be the punisher. 🙁

We have much the same issue when doing herding work. A lot of trainers still use some kind of punishment (not necessarily striking the dog although I have seen that used when all else fails, but usually banging the ground, yelling or other methods of scaring the dog back off the stock). Particularly when working new dogs that are just so turned on being around stock that they won’t respond to anything else. We can control the situation fairly easily and not have to use such methods of intimidation (my shelties tend to be soft enough that I can just physically block them off the sheep), but I think a lot of people don’t see anything wrong with it, particularly when in high drive situations, most dogs don’t tend to show the same reaction to corrections as they do in lesser situations (like obedience work). I think that’s one of the reasons it’s so hard to change the mentality, it can be hard to argue about corrections being “bad” when the dog is still highly motivated to work . People *see* how much better the dog works in something like obedience when trained without corrections. I’m not sure in these kinds of situations people would see enough of a difference to make a change in training methods. We certainly see how challenging it often is for people to become *good* clicker trainers, in my experience they really have to be motivated to make that change and just as often or not, that reason is to improve the dog’s performance. I’m not sure the argument about it just being “nicer” to the dog would convince trainers that are stuck in a rut of using corrections…when it works for them, they get good results with it, and it’s what they know.

DianeB wrote:

“The main difficulty with field training is that the birds (at least for pointers/spaniels/retrievers) are more rewarding than anything I can provide – and there is no way to fully control the rewards.”

Exactly. Susan says in Shaping Success that in order to train with positive reinforcement, you must be able to provide rewards that are of higher value than the activity the dog is doing. I don’t understand how you can do this with field work.

Kathy
What type of field work? The yahoo group PositiveGunDogs has some good discussion on field training – mostly on retrievers. The main difficulty with field training is that the birds (at least for pointers/spaniels/retrievers) are more rewarding than anything I can provide – and there is no way to fully control the rewards.

For pointers, I’m still struggling to figure things out. I agree with the “Violence begins where knowledge ends” – I have not found the better way and I have not found anyone to teach me the way either – to be purely positive in training pointers for field trials.

Loved the video!!!!!!!!!

I still find it a constant source of amazement that people are willing to hurt their dogs in the name of competition. I can understand the person who puts a shock collar on his dog because the dog needs a solid recall and that is the only way he thinks he can get it (I disagree, of course, but I can understand it.) What I can’t understand is how someone can do that to get a competitive edge (and of course, I’m totally with you that there are alternate ways.) This, to me, shows a lack of respect for the animal, treating it merely as a tool. I’ve been on Yahoo Answers dog section a lot recently, answering training questions, and so am exposed to a lot of what the non-training public, and the Koehler and shock collar trainers advise and do. Not only do they not “get” positive reinforcement training, they aren’t willing to get it, and I believe for much the same reason you mention- if they could agree that positive reinforcement training works, why wouldn’t they be using it, as we all love our dogs. Fortunately, I can remember back to when I (reluctantly) put a prong collar on my pointer mix because I was advised by many people that it was the only way (I got him as an adult with a lot of issues, and his neck was red from constantly pulling -hard- on the leash). This was in the days before GLs and Haltis and front-snap halters, and before I’d heard of clicker training, when the only books I had to read on dog training (and I read everything I could get my hands on) came from the Monks of New Skete, and Wynn Strickland and the woman who wrote Mother Knows Best (or some such title, I forget her name now!) I still get teary eyed, thinking about how I trained him, or didn’t train him because I didn’t like what I was doing to him. He took to clicker training very well in his later life, and is one of the main reasons I was so ready for it when I got Brodie. So I understand the guilt that people aren’t willing to feel, so I keep plugging away answering the questions about clicker training, or training in general, and hearing constantly that “you can’t get reliability without physical corrections” in spite of all sorts of examples to the contrary.

I too love the expression you cited “violence begins where knowledge ends” (I believe it is a quote from Abraham Lincoln) and the more I learn, the less I want to correct my dog. As knowledge about dog behavior and emotions and communication becomes available and widely disseminated, I hope people will start paying more attention to what their dogs are saying about the training methods they are using, as well as what is happening from the dog’s point of view when something fails (or is sucessful!) I remember very clearly an agility training class years and years ago with Brodie, who overran his DW contact in the sequence. He had fabulous contacts (not much else, but those he had!) and we had done some proofing. The instructor made the comment that he was “blowing me off” and I was absolutely flabbergasted. Fortunately, all I did was stop and then continue. I still don’t know what happened to cause him to overrun that contact, but considering how little I knew then, I’m sure there’s something we didn’t consider other than “blowing me off!” We did a training session a week or so later where I tried to get him to overrun, and couldn’t – and I swear he was laughing when we worked on it, he would grin at me and I’d see a bubble over his head saying “you can’t make me!” and I was hooked- you can’t get that kind of relationship and trust by inflicting pain- physical or emotional- on our “best friends.”

Good timing of this blog, sorry cant watch the video right now but I will.
My dog just earned two legs on her CDX on the weekend. We didnt place but I watched a video my friend taped of us. I was really happy to see how well and how happy she worked. She lost points at the start, I guess passing the leash distracted her at the start, I train alone alot so dont do that. Today in training I had my virtual friend there that I passed the leash too!! I am not a perfect trainer for sure but my intent is to be as positive and to teach my dog as well as I can. I realized from the trials though that I am a “lurer”, for shame. I have come clean and I can see the understanding in her already. She loves to be released to her treat, either on a chair or doing crate games. Unfortunately many of the winners use “positive punishment” and e-collars. Their dogs do not display fear, shyness or any negative behaviours from this. They work at a top level and their owners consistently do well in the ring. Not all the top winners are painted with this brush but there are many. I hope that as I become a better trainer and learn to build drive and enthusiasm to work with me that the proof will be in the pudding. I stay away from unsolicited conversations on training methods normally because there are some strong views out there and I am working on the pudding right now !!! A big ribbon painted with the wrong brush is not worth having to me.

As I am currently dealing with a dog who now exhibits low stress in the agility ring (blows me off to go sniffing), I find myself very frustrated. Having said that, I am searching for any other way other than the physical to correct this problem that I must have somehow created in this dog. I have been telling him to sniff, and reward with a yes/treat when he does so. After a few repetitions, he gets the idea and stops sniffing. I admit, I almost fell back to my old ways, getting ready to yell at him, and watch him not return to me. I am working hard on giving up those old ways and using reinforcement as much as possible.
Thank you for your blogs – it’s because of available information such as this that trainers like me can change training methods to better our relationships with our canine companions.

Thank you for this post! No matter how many positive reinforcement trainers are around, I still keep bumping into those who believe in physical corrections and I have trouble explaining them I’d like to do things differently.

“There is a better way… find it!” Thanks for this inspiration!

Your post was so well written and well said. It is great to find others that feel the same way!