By Gary Wilkes © 2021 480-649-9804 Behavior and Training Services, San Tan, Arizona

Imagine for a second that your puppy has swallowed a sock. This is not the first time your little darling has tried to ingest an inedible object. She’s been trying to do it since she was eight weeks old. You have unsuccessfully tried to control the behavior the entire time. Your vet has cautioned you that swallowing such an item will likely cause an intestinal blockage – a blockage that could easily be fatal. Your vet has not offered any advice about how to prevent a tragedy other than living in a house devoid of potentially fatal objects. You abhor Scandinavian modern décor and have children who acquire things. It is an unreasonable goal to make your house into a concrete warehouse. As for puppy proofing your house, you have also discovered the physics of static electricity. Socks can move without the need for human intervention. Now it appears that a sock is missing. You cringe at the thought but have a good suspicion about where it is. It’s inside your pup.

After a day of anxious watching, you realize the worst has happened. The puppy can’t keep anything in her stomach, not even water. She is becoming lethargic. You rush her to your veterinarian. The vet says, “I told you so,” but can’t come up with an answer when you ask what you could have done to prevent this. An examination indicates that indeed, your fears are correct. Barium beads and x-rays confirm the pup has swallowed the sock and has a complete blockage of the intestine. Surgery is the only procedure that stands a chance of saving the pup’s life…and it better happen soon.

As you ask your vet to please begin the surgery as soon as possible, you are shocked by her reply. “Yes, immediate surgery is the only thing that can save your pup, but I can’t possibly do that. I would have to take a razor-sharp scalpel and cut her tummy open. If I do, the surgery might cause your puppy pain, discomfort, perhaps fear or even death. At this clinic, we reserve surgery as a last resort – and we haven’t tried a dietary procedure, yet.” Sounds outrageous, doesn’t it?

In this hypothetical situation, any loving pet owner would be outraged. A veterinarian has a moral, ethical and legal obligation to provide the procedure that is most likely to help the animal. A vet can’t simply refuse to treat an animal because the procedure might be painful. Right? Nope. It depends on the type of life-threatening behavior you are talking about. If you are talking about a medical problem, no problem. The vet is unconcerned about fear or long-term pain. If you are talking about a behavioral problem that leads to a medical problem, it’s a big problem. You are going to get the very advice I just labeled outrageous.

Normative Hedonism meets Cartesian Dualism: Say what?
If you are wondering what I am driving at, let’s replay the tape. A moment ago, you were thinking that a deadly intestinal blockage warranted invasive, painful and potentially life-threatening surgery. Not only was it the correct thing to do, you realized that it had to be done immediately. You weren’t considering surgery as a last resort – the lethal nature of the problem made surgery the first resort. Even though the surgery will cause pain and suffering to the pup, it is the ethical, moral and loving thing to do. There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that the surgery is the appropriate protocol.

If the problem is behavioral – and it is – you will never be offered information about how to prevent the need for surgery. Instead, you will be told that punishing the behavior will cause damage…somehow. You see, normative hedonism is a philosophy that holds that pleasant experiences are good, regardless of context or outcome. Unpleasant events are bad, again, regardless of context or outcome. Cartesian Dualism is the concept that we are two creatures – a mind and a body. That is what allows two sets of ethics. The ethics of a medical doctor are almost entirely opposite those of a behavioral doctor. One cuts immediately, the other knows that using aversive control would prevent the need for the surgery – but has no training in how to do that and vehemently opposes using punishment. Sadly, our culture is ruled by those two philosophies in the treatment of behavior. Anything that would cause pain and fear are taboo – even if it would save the dog’s life.

Which leads us to the next set of circumstances…

If our imaginary vet successfully removes the hypothetical sock, a rather odd irony arises — the pup is now in more danger than before she ate the sock. The puppy now must survive the surgery and recover from the shock – but has no inhibition about eating another sock once she is up and running again. If she swallows another sock, a second surgical procedure becomes far more risky than the first. Putting the pup through a horribly painful procedure only to allow her to eat another sock is plainly cruel and morally negligent. No one can watch a puppy constantly, forever. Some day she will find a sock or rock or other potentially fatal item to swallow. You now have a “dead dog walking” unless you can inhibit sock/rock/wood/stuff eating.

So, here’s the question that separates the dog lovers from the wanabees. What are you willing to do to prevent your pup from eating the next sock she sees? Would you spank her if spanking had a high probability of teaching the pup to leave socks alone? Would you use a shock collar? Would you use a clicker and treats to teach an alternate behavior? If you choose to use some form of aversive control to create an inhibition, do you actually know how to do it? Does it matter how you do it or is it merely a matter of applying nastiness whenever the pup is near a sock?

Now we reach the paradox of modern pet ownership. As long as we are talking about caring for our dogs’ bodies, we know exactly what to do, both practically and ethically. Once we step into the realms of behavioral health, we are on shaky ground – and there aren’t any trustworthy guides to help us find our way. Every major dog training association or psychological association is blatantly biased in favor of positive reinforcement and opposed to punishment. None of them teach, advocate, approve or specify how punishment is to be conducted in a safe and effective manner. They universally caution you that punishment is potentially harmful and/or ineffective. That means you can eliminate these groups from your search, since they openly admit that they A) don’t use punishment and B) It doesn’t work and C) it is too dangerous for poor, ignorant, abusive little you to use. So much for your pup’s chances of survival.

If you are still clinging to cherished illusions, let me vaporize them for you. Positive reinforcement cannot create inhibitions. Stopping a behavior requires some form of tangible punishment. This is not subject to debate. A puppy that runs into a sliding glass door for the first time is instantly inhibited from attempting to cross that particular threshold. If a noted trainer or behaviorist isn’t capable of doing what a sliding glass door can do, you can decide for yourself as to their competence. My opinion is pretty obvious.

If you think my sliding-glass-door model isn’t complete, you’re right. It’s only meant to show you that in the real world of dogs, punishment happens all the time. Dogs attempt to jump upward to be patted on the head and mistakenly crack their noggin on the underside of a table. They watch their upward movement after that.

Likewise, they don’t run headlong down a carpeted hallway, hit the hard-wood of the bedroom floor, slide uncontrollably at about 20 miles and hour and then slam head-first into a stud, barely padded by sheet-rock…more than once…most of the time. (The dog was a Bull Terrier named Sam. He hit the stud, picked up the tennis ball he was chasing and trotted back to get his owner to throw the ball again – he didn’t realize that hitting a stud was supposed to influence his behavior. )

Unlike the dire forebodings of “experts,” dogs/puppies routinely experience punishing events without any harmful side effects. The reality is that more often than not, punishment prevents the damaging and potentially lethal side effects of positive reinforcement. Read that last sentence again. Did I really say that punishment protects the dog from the dangers of positive reinforcement? You bet I did. Let’s remove the rose-colored glasses and you’ll see what I mean. The puppy who eats socks likes eating socks. “Eating a sock” is a positive reinforcer for any behavior that makes socks available for eating. This next part is going to throw you for a loop, so hold onto your hat and read this very, very carefully. It is the harmful side effect of positive reinforcement that is going to kill this puppy. Logically, it is the beneficial side-effect of correctly applied punishment that will save this puppy’s life. OK, take a few breaths and read this last paragraph again. It contradicts virtually everything you believed about punishment and reinforcement before you started reading this article. You might consider putting this down and waiting awhile to read the rest.

The Blessings of Punishment, the Lethality of Reinforcement.

Because you love your puppy, you have a hard time imagining doing anything unpleasant, especially after such a painful surgery. Get a clue – you demanded to have your pup’s belly slit open like a fish in order to save its life. You didn’t ask to have the surgery just to have your pup die a week later because your six-year-old forgot to put a sock in the hamper. (Or because the Saint Bernard puppy got big enough to knock down the heavy-duty kiddie gate. True story – resulted in a dead St. Bernard pup who was recouping from surgery after an obstruction.)

Now is not the time to wimp out. If you do, your puppy dies. Why? If you make your decision about training based on the pleasantness of the process, you will choose the training method that promises to teach with “all positive” methods – which, according to your own experience and the experience of every thinking person on the planet outside academia and “modern dog training,” is obviously the wrong tool for teaching an inhibition. If you blindly accept trainers who espouse punishment without actually knowing how to use the tool, you may be accepting advice that will cause you to unintentionally brutalize your dog – and still not teach the puppy to leave socks alone. You sense that either type of training has shortcomings and that which one you pick may have a direct effect on your puppy’s survival.

To partially alleviate this ethical paradox, it helps to take another look at accepted medical ethics. For instance, the one piece of information almost never solicited when asking about punishment vs. reinforcement is “how much experience do you have using these methods?” An obvious irony of the issue of using punishment in training is that many “all positive” trainers claim that they don’t use punishment and never have. If that is true, then they are obviously not speaking from personal experience. Taking advice about punishment from someone who admits never using it is like discussing surgery with a Christian Scientist. No matter how sincere the person’s opinions may be, they cannot give you either an unbiased opinion of the procedure or any practical knowledge of how to actually proceed. The chance that you will find a person who abstains from a practice but has intimate knowledge of it is virtually impossible.

For “all positive” trainers who once used punishment, but now don’t, or trainers who make no bones about using punishment, we must look a little closer at their credentials. For instance, many people connote physical assault, no matter how vicious, as punishment. In reality, violence directed at an animal is rarely punishment – it’s “violence directed at an animal.” To again use our medical analogy, think of this example. A person may perform a “surgery” without actually benefiting the patient. However, to consider all surgery to be “butchery” is stupid. This means that if the patient needs an “appendectomy,” then the doctor dangerously cuts through the peritoneum and removes that blasted little vestigial thing that you don’t need, which is in danger of killing you. If, after the surgery, the appendix is still there, somebody goofed. It may have been an abdominal surgery, but it wasn’t an appendectomy. Got it? Just because someone hangs a dog with a choke chain doesn’t make it “punishment.” It takes knowledge and skill to apply punishment as well as ethics beyond that of an infant. (I refuse to go to a dentist to fix my broken tooth because it will hurt.) The scientific definition of punishment requires that the behavior changes after the application of the “punishing procedure.” So, your first task it to clean up your logic and realize that punishment may or may not be abusive – it requires an analysis of the process and the outcome before you can determine abuse. Abuse is defined as “improper use.” To show how old this issue is, my knowledge of Latin includes the following aphorism…

Abusum no tollit usus – The abuse of a tool is not an argument against its proper use.

That means that if you use an electric shock collar to teach your puppy to not chew socks AND the puppy never chews a sock again, then you used effective, safe, humane, loving punishment to save the puppy’s life. Even if it were possible to burn the pup’s skin with the electrodes (which is impossible because of the low voltage of the collar and high moisture content of canine skin) the burn would be nothing compared to the surgeon’s scalpel that awaits the uninhibited sock-eater. Remember, the electric collar cannot cause burns – that is a fantasy from the horrific imagination of people who have never put one up to their own neck and hit the button. (Note: Not being a trusting soul, I have tested the claims of people who both support and abhor shock collars. Having zapped myself at high power from several varieties of collars I can attest to the following — no burns, no damage. The redness fades in about 5 minutes. The sensation is seriously aversive or a light tickle or anything in between. The level of stimulation is under the control of the user. Most collars have a fail-safe that prevents stimulation for more than 10 seconds. The actual effect of the collar is something anyone who has used a shock collar against their own skin would know and any fool who has never use one would not know. ) Anyone who pretends that a positive reinforcement solution is possible to create a long term inhibition to pica is blowing smoke. Period.

Here’s your choice – you can fantasize that you will cause two small burns in your puppy’s neck and she will never eat a sock, or you stay your hand to prevent the burns and a vet will split her open like a catfish. She may not survive the surgery…especially the second time.

So, here’s your problem. To withhold a medical treatment known to be effective is unethical for doctors, veterinarians and anyone who owns an animal, regardless of whether the treatment “hurts” or causes discomfort. One would think that the same would be true for behavioral treatment – and one would be entirely wrong. In the world of behavior and especially dog behavior, withholding needed treatment because it “hurts” or causes discomfort is the refuge of mock saints. Not only is this the norm, it is a cause for celebration and pride among those who espouse practices that result in the death of the animal. The treatment is withheld because 1) Punishment in always traumatic 2)

Now we are at a place where the brush has been cleared away and we can start making progress. Just as with a medical procedure, we can ask specific questions about exactly what procedure a trainer will use to stop future sock eating. Other questions will be generated by the answer to the first question – is the method risky or safe, effective or ineffective. Are there other treatments available. How long should it take to achieve success and what expectations can we have for the future. If the trainer is unable to fill in the blanks in the same logical manner that a veterinarian would discuss standard treatment of a medical condition, find one who can.

For about 3,000 years, Western Civilization has held the belief that the brain and the body are separate. This philosophical nonsense holds that the ethics of preserving mental health are different than those used for physical health – as if the mind/brain can actually be separated from the flesh and bone. A brain without a body is a character in a bad horror movie. A body without a brain is a character from a bad beach movie. Until we integrate the wisdom of our medical ethics into our bizarre behavioral ethics, making decisions for our pets’ mental health will be a confusing, unrealistic experience – like living out a real-life version of Beach Blanket Frankenstein.

To test my statements, ask any dog behavior professional how to stop your dog from darting out the front door and then think about their answers. Modern trainers, behaviorists and other academically oriented people will suggest that teaching a dog to “sit” is the solution to darting out the front door. By asking the dog to sit, this will cause the dog to not dart out the front door. This is a common solution to the problem, called “counter conditioning.” It means teaching the dog to offer an alternate and incompatible behavior – and doesn’t answer your question. You didn’t ask to have one behavior swapped for another, you asked “how do you stop a behavior in its tracks?” (When we get back to dealing with sock-eating the importance of this will become apparent.)

To understand why counter-conditioning isn’t a necessary ingredient to solving our dog’s problem, consider this. My common, everyday example of punishment is a puppy that inadvertently runs headlong into a sliding glass door. That is undesirable to the puppy. There is no need for the pup to “sit” to stop it from running into a sliding glass door. The glass teaches the inhibition beautifully without any need to replace the behavior with another. The dog simply stops running into the glass and then offers any other behavior that doesn’t happen to include being whacked in the head by a stationary glass wall. Adding an additional behavior is not necessary and merely complicates the process. We’ll come back to the alternate behavior folks in a moment…

Our third group of experts is equally clueless about how to stop a dog from darting out the front door. The only drugs currently on the market for behavior problems do not include anything that can stop a normal behavior from occurring. Period. To make a dog not dart out the door chemically, you would have to drug them to the point of intoxication. Trusting the integrity and competence of your academically trained behaviorist, you fill the terribly expensive prescription and then find that the company who manufactures it includes the following caution: This drug is to be used in conjunction with an approved behavior modification program. Hmmmm. Here’s the rub – your veterinary behaviorist isn’t a trainer, doesn’t come to your home and has no clue whatsoever about how to create a behavioral inhibition other than drugging your poor pooch out of his mind. You will be referred to a “trainer” or “behaviorist” who will walk you through the process. Hmmmm again. Ask that person how to create an inhibition and you’ll once again be hearing someone tap dancing around the issue.

As you weigh the information, the paradox unfolds further. You sense that somehow your pup must learn that sock-eating causes some consequence that will cause the behavior to stop. None of the experts you consulted referred to punishing a specific behavior – one batch talked about using choke-chains to create ‘fundamental skills’ but didn’t explain how that was going to stop the behavior in your absence. The other two groups warned you against punishment because it would cause emotional damage and make the dog mean. To say that you are confused at this point would be an understatement.

The Final Problem:
However, here’s the third and final problem. I can’t openly tell you how to punish your dog’s sock-eating. To quote George Orwell,

“The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.”

If I have spoken the truth, all those experts and thousands of ‘dog lovers’ will destroy my social media platform, such as it is. The dog lovers will openly threaten physical violence and death. Their rhetoric is exceptionally nasty. The medical and behavioral experts will declare me uneducated and claim that punishment isn’t necessary. They will have ‘studies’ to back that up, but no actual evidence that what they say is true.

So, good luck. Even if you agree with everything I’ve said, a world of experts and their acolytes will thwart your attempts to save your puppy. My condolences for your loss.