Category Archives: Science, Behavior and Training

These articles lean toward explaining the proper place of science in training. You will note that I hold a factual and historical bias – dog training is 15,000 years old. Dog trainers are the most knowledgeable, experienced and effective behavior specialists in the history of mankind. By contrast, behavior analysis is less than 100 years old and only works well on heavily confined, browsing, grazing animals. I don’t happen to train animals in lock-down – not many people do. i.e. Shamu has nothing on a Seeing Eye Dog of one of George Hickox’s English Pointers.

The Only Scientific Presentation of its kind – in history

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Author’s note. In 2009 I was pretty much fed up with scientists who distort reality. I have been a member of the Association for Behavior Analysis International since 1992 and have given many presentations and been an invited speaker more than once. I decided to give it one more chance and peel back the onion for those learned doctors. I submitted this handout to the review committee for the international conference. It was accepted. I gave the workshop. My demonstration assistants were two adult male Dobermans that had fought viciously several days before. They were still wearing a multitude of stitches from their battle. I had them lying side-by-side within ten minutes. They fell asleep about ten minutes later. Of the 1500 presentations that year, mine was the only one to demonstrate punishment and discuss it as a viable, humane, ethical means of modifying/removing unacceptable behavior. I also presented a paper on the topic and one of the only clinics in the world that uses punishment to stop serious behavior problems did several presentations about work. In all, that makes a comfortable 150:1 bias against any discussion of aversive control. That is why I get stuck talking about this topic. I hate deceit. Pretending that punishment is evil, harmful, risky, dangerous and traumatic leads to an unethical practice – withholding treatment and knowledge of treatment known to be effective. In that spirit I hope you enjoy this. (UPDATE: At the 2015 ABAI conference a catalog search pops up three abstracts containing the word “punishment”. None of them actually discuss anything substantive and one is actually an attempt to control behavior without punishment. That makes the odds up to about 1500:0. The proof of bias is plainly statistical in a group that is obsessed with statistics about behavior.) Continue reading →

What is Real Clicker Training?

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Note: I have noticed from the enthusiastic response to this article something rather interesting. The objections presented in the comments run to several basic themes. One type of objection picks a tiny point and emphasizes it well beyond the main theme of the article.That is called a “straw-dog” argument – where contradicting a lesser point is supposed to neutralize the bigger issues. The rest of my blog has the equivalent of a 300 page book on topics that all relate to the real world. Some of those articles may answer your questions in the broader context. As you read this I would suggest that this is about real animals – straw dogs need not apply. Continue reading →

A Study in Ethics: Pica

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A well known dog behavior expert was quoted in a magazine column by another well known dog behavior expert as saying that if you are going to own a puppy you can expect to have at least one very expensive pair of shoes destroyed. The quoting expert agreed with the quoted expert and the rest of the column was a list of reasons why dog owners should lower their expectations, not of behavior modification, but of dog experts. If an expert says it can’t be done, then they can’t be held accountable if you lose a $3,000 hearing aid, right? Wrong. It’s not about shoes. It’s about socks. The sort of socks that lodge in a dog’s belly and block the intestines. ER vets cut things like socks out of dogs and puppies all the time. It’s called pica and it’s often fatal. Continue reading →

Scientific Confirmation: A Specious Argument

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I once met a woman at a seminar who was up-to-date on all the academic blather about why one should never use punishment. She said two things that were completely mistaken – not because she had ever done or seen what she described, but because someone with an academic degree (or some opportunistic “modern, scientific trainer”) had pronounced a rule. The first was the concept that if you attempt to punish aggression, you are only punishing the “precursor” to the behavior while leaving the motivation intact. The implication is that the dog will be seething with pent-up angst and then explode when you least expect it. The other thing she said was that there is “no scientific evidence” to demonstrate that punishment stops behaviors. Au contraire on both counts. Continue reading →

Conditional Reflexes: Pavlov translated

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A correct translation of the title of Ivan Pavlov’s magnum opus is not Conditioned Reflexes. Pavlov studied unconditioned reflexes. The title of his book is Conditional Reflexes. In Russian, the word for conditioned and conditional is the same. You can only know which meaning is correct if you put the word in context. The English translator didn’t know the context – just like modern behavioral scientists. If you think this is a small thing, read on.

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