When Pigs Fly_ Training Success With Impossible Dogs - Jane Killion [10]
Now that you know that the first and most important thing you need to do with your Pigs Fly dog is to get him active and operant, you can begin to understand why traditional training methods fail these dogs and why it is so important to learn to train without using corrections. Traditional training methods use a lot of positive punishment—leash corrections, verbal reprimands, physical grabbing or striking of the dog—to both shape desired behavior and control unwanted behavior. There are lots of reasons why I avoid using punishment in my training program, but the one reason that is central to this book is that, even when expertly administered (which it almost never is) punishment has a blanket dampening effect of the dog. The effect of punishment is to make your dog unwilling to try behaviors, which is the exact opposite of being operant. Sadly, many people are happy with this—they define a well-behaved dog as one that basically does not do anything. That is antithetical to the Pigs Fly training system.
I don’t recommend positive punishment on any breed of dog, but some breeds/ types are going to be able to take a degree of punishment and still function. For example, a particular Labrador Retriever who has a strong inclination to be interested in you and what you are doing, might put up with some punishment and still be eager to train, because his desire to be with you is a strong motivator. The Labrador, in many cases, is hanging around with interest just to see what you would do next and if, joy of joys, you might ask him to participate in your next activity. The Shar-Pei, on the other hand, really has no interest in your next inevitably pointless and stupid activity. If you punish the Shar-Pei he is going to go from neutral-not-caring to actively avoiding. If you punish your little Dachshund for chewing a shoe, he may generally freeze up in your presence and never do that, or any other behavior, in your presence again. Unfortunately, lots of people have that frozen little dog as a goal. Getting these zombie dogs to perform even desired behaviors, like sitting or coming when called, becomes next to impossible. Consider what trainer and author Jean Donaldson writes in her book, The Culture Clash (Berkeley: James & Kenneth, 2005):
If you [administer punishment correctly], the punishment may buy you a temporary suppression of the behavior. Remember, you have not killed it but merely brought about an emotional state which is incompatible with the behavior you want to get rid of (the animal is too upset by the punishment to do it for the time being). He is also, incidentally, too upset to do much of anything right after a punishment. Punishment is like carpet bombing. The behavior you wanted to target gets hit but so does a huge portion of the dog’s whole repertoire. Dogs who are punished a lot behave a lot less in general. What’s particularly scary is that this is what a lot of dog owners actually want. They want a general toning down of the dog. It is a sad comment on human-dog relations when we claim to love dogs and then attempt to behaviorally lobotomize them with thousands of leash jerks in the name of “obedience.” The bland, behavior less animal many people bond to so strongly can scarcely be called a dog. It is the ghost of what once might have been a dog. (Emphasis added)
I think it is very nice that we can train our dogs without positive punishment. It does appeal to me from a humane perspective, I’ll admit it. However, that is not why you need to learn to train without using corrections or positive punishment. You need to learn to train that way because it is the best way to get your dog to trust you enough to try things freely. If you can learn to train almost exclusively by rewarding your dog for doing what you do want, and eliminate luring and/or compelling the dog to do things, the dog has absolutely nothing to lose by trying again and again until he comes up with the right answer. He