• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 367 0

is anything that tends to increase behavior, while punishment is anything that tends to decrease behavior. What is a reinforcer and what is a punisher will depend on the dog’s opinion. For instance, you may think that, if your dog is barking in his crate in the other room, it is punishment if you run in there and yell at him. If the dog was barking because he did not want to be isolated, your running into the room (even in an angry way) is reinforcing because the dog got what he wanted—i.e., not to be alone. Since barking worked to end his isolation, he will do it again next time. In this case, yelling at the dog was a reinforcer, since the dog’s barking will increase. Conversely, you may think that, if your dog sits, giving your dog a nice scratch behind the ears is reinforcing. If, however, your dog is afraid of having his head touched (maybe he was hit in the face at a previous home, or maybe he is just shy) he will avoid doing the thing that led to the ear scratch—in this case sitting. Thus, the friendly ear scratch is punishment because it will decrease the behavior of sitting.

The key concept is that you cannot make any assumptions about what is reinforcing or punishing to your dog. You have to relax and observe how your dog is reacting to things to know what is reinforcing/punishing to him. This is unbelievably difficult for people to do. Our cultural/species biases are so profound that we find it hard to see clearly what our dogs find reinforcing/punishing. We think that yelling at our dog for barking is punishment and we think that a scratch behind the ear is reinforcing, so it takes some patience and practice to see beyond our assumptions.

I have found that you get the best performance and most enthusiasm for training out of Pigs Fly dogs by relying on positive reinforcement as much as possible and, to a much lesser extent, negative punishment. If you are setting up and managing your dog correctly, he will be offering you lots of behaviors that you can reinforce, and there will be very few times when he is not doing what you want. When your dog does something right, he is rewarded. When he does something that you do not want him to do, he is ignored, reinforcements are withheld, or he is given a time-out. This is the technique that is used to train killer whales to swim in a tank without eating the other animals, pee in a cup, and hold their mouths open for dental attention. Can you imagine giving a correction to a Killer Whale? If an undomesticated, ten thousand pound marine mammal can be trained without correction, you can train your family’s Fox Terrier without correction.

How far do you think she would get if she tried to compel or correct this whale? If we can train wild Killer Whales without coercion, we can train dogs without coercion.

You Can’t Go Anywhere if There is No Gas in the Tank

Creating an Operant Dog

The owner of the easy-to-train dog has a head start on you. Those dogs actually find their owner’s approval to be reinforcing. Your dog, on the other hand, really does not care if you approve of him or not. Before you even get started training, your dog has to want to work. Those biddable dogs are just sitting there waiting for their owner’s next command while your dog is doing any of hundreds of activities that are incompatible with working—sniffing, snoring on the couch, barking at squirrels, hiding behind your legs, staring off into space, etc. How are you going to teach your dog anything if he couldn’t care less about you and what you have to offer? It does not matter if your dog is so shy that he is shaking in his boots, so hyper that he is ready to explode or so lazy that he has to be dragged from the couch, your first task is the same. Your dog must become operant before you can get anywhere with training. Whoa, hey, I slipped in a scientific term! All operant really means in the context of dog training is that:

1. The dog realizes that he gets a reward if he does something that you want and,

2. He tries to get those rewards by offering you different behaviors.

Pig-tionary

Operant: