In the late 1930’s, B.F. Skinner and other behavior analysts developed a language intended to accurately and ‘scientifically’ describe behavior. They intended to start simply and gradually increase complexity, even as other sciences developed over time.

To match the easily observable development of behaviors increasing in likelihood, they selected the word reinforcement to describe “something added that strengthens.” So far, so good. The term matches the reality of adding a reward that strengthens the likelihood that a behavior will occur. What happened next pretty much destroyed any chance of ever being able to discuss behavior and behavior modification in a rational, objective manner. To describe the opposite of reinforcement, behavior analysts picked the term, punishment.

No matter how much you wish to think of punishment in a purely objective light, you can’t do it. We now live in a world that has been affected by 80 years of conflating the word ‘punishment’ with ‘abuse’. Almost everyone flinches when they hear the “P word”. After all, who would suggest abusing an animal? However, I’m getting ahead of myself.

Early Definition:
Skinner defined punishment as the presentation or removal of a stimulus (scientific jargon for “thingie”) that causes a behavior to decline or stop. EG: If you touch a cactus with your finger and it pricks you, you will not touch cactus in the future. Skinner would call that “positive” punishment – positive in the sense of “added” – because the addition of a painful event caused a behavior to decline or stop. That is so completely cumbersome that only the select few with years of academic training can be fluent in that arguably misuse of the word. The rest of us tend to scratch our heads and go, huh? We think of punishment as a ‘negative’ thing.

The real sticking point is that punishment has a common meaning that we all know. Punishment is some kind of ‘unpleasant to painful consequence’ of doing an anti-social or injurious act. If you wish to end a behavior in this type of context, it requires that someone be the bad guy and apply the punishment. Our heart immediately goes out to the punished person or animal. The last person we want to be in that formula is the “punisher.”

Now we have a serious problem. Even if the punishment is incredibly light, we have a hard time participating in a cold-blooded act of what smacks of retribution. (I used those words intentionally to show you that the words and thoughts associated with them influence our emotional reaction.) If you hear “cold-blooded” you don’t immediately think of the words objective, dispassionate or, especially ‘beneficial’. You are more likely to translate cold-blooded as cold-hearted, unsympathetic and may even toss in words like calloused, uncaring and cruel. To speak about stopping behaviors effectively, safely and humanely, the word punishment has to be used sparingly and with some delicacy. Fortunately, we have a word that isn’t offensive, isn’t emotionally charged and describes the process perfectly. The word is inhibition.

Roughly defined, an inhibition is a road-block that stops a behavior from happening. When you are young, you burn yourself on an iron, a stove, candle or other hot item and learn to avoid touching hot things in the future. Likewise, you learn to not shove melted pizza-cheese in your mouth unless you want to burn your upper palette. If you eat something that makes you sick, you may have an inhibition against eating that item again. By the time we are adults we have many inhibitions that control and limit our behavior. Our brains are adapted to integrate these inhibitions into our repertoires, smoothly and without future concern. For instance, I don’t eat Sauer Kraut. It doesn’t like me. I have not eaten Sauer Kraut in many years and never lie awake at night worrying about what I might be missing. Likewise, I do not go into dark side-alleys in big cities at night. I never aim a gun at anything I don’t want to shoot because I assume they are all loaded. Alec Baldwin did not have the same inhibition. Mine was created when my Grandfather cracked me in the back of the head with his cane. We can only imagine that Alec missed that lesson.

My life, to date, includes many inhibitions. These things don’t bother me at all. I am perfectly at peace with the inhibitions I have learned over the years. They do not stop me from doing things that others might consider risky. I have no fear of large caliber artillery howitzers – safely. That means I have inhibitions to doing things that would hurt anyone. Why should that surprise you?
After all, I handle vicious and other dangerous dogs for a living. I don’t worry about that either. I have many inhibitions that operate when I handle violent animals. The point here is that being able to generate inhibitions is both necessary and generally good. I don’t mouth off to airport security personnel. I don’t yell fire in a theater. My inhibitions allow me to experience many things more safely than if I was not cautious about my behavior.

Acknowledge the Species:
When we speak of dogs, inhibitions become even more important than whether or not they will eat Sauer Kraut. For most dogs, inhibitions are the difference between life and death. For eight years I worked in shelters receiving dogs from their owners. In all those years, no one ever said they were getting rid of a dog because he couldn’t learn how to sit, lie down or fetch. Of the tens of thousands of people I talked to, their reasons were remarkably similar. They simply couldn’t own a dog who jumped on guests, children and old people. They couldn’t live with a dog that bolted out the door every time it was opened. They couldn’t live with a dog that consistently got into the trash or any other potential food item. They didn’t like begging, chronic barking, chasing the kids and most of all, biting anyone. The result was a shelter that was invariably filled with dogs that had already displayed behaviors that would be deal breakers for any potential adopter. About 85% of these dogs were destroyed. Meaning, dead. Jumping on kids is lethal. Stealing food or destroying shoes is lethal. Ripping up landscape and drip irrigation systems is lethal. Biting people is lethal. Of the remaining 15% that were adopted, there was never any actual checking to see if they, too, were eventually abandoned, passed to another unsuspecting owner or simply taken to a shelter out of embarrassment – no one wants to be confronted with their failures. My best signature quote is this, “Belief in a flawed ideology resembles nothing so much as abject stupidity.” Those who are confronted with a failure of their ideology rarely admit it. That is because they have no inhibitions to being abjectly stupid.

A Shelter Revelation:

Back when I was working in shelters, I came to realize a simple fact. Dogs that didn’t jump, chew, shred, bite, dart, tug or bark were the ones most likely to survive. If those bottom lines were met, their owners would keep them long enough to love them. If not, not. My problem at the time was above my pay-grade – I didn’t know how to stop a single behavior. I don’t mean that I didn’t know how to stop any behavior – I mean, literally, that I didn’t know how to stop a single behavior. If a dog’s only problem is that he jumps on guests, it doesn’t help things if you knock out a whole hunk of his behavioral repertoire while trying to fix the jumping. Traditional trainers had 10,000 years of cobbled together advice for stopping all kinds of things – but the cure was usually unacceptable or simply mindless.

For instance, a once popular method for stopping a dog from digging was to fill the hole with water and then submerge the dog’s head until it struggled. That never crossed my mind as something I would do. If it came to that, I’d get a shovel and help the dog dig, and bury the book that suggested it. The majority of those who get rid of dogs at a shelter won’t do that either. One long-published training book included this suggestion up until the early 90’s. They got the idea from a very popular traditional trainer in the 1950’s and not being good trainers, merely passed it along. They edited it out when they realized that it was both cruel and ineffective. Just kidding. They removed it because they feared that sales would drop. Publishers and television producers are paranoid about appearing harsh. A current television celebrity trainer was forced into writing a book about positive methods in order to extenuate his image as being harsh. Even though most of the book is wildly inaccurate, it was done to make sure ratings didn’t drop. As they say, it’s not what you say, it’s what you do. He didn’t do what he said.

First things first:

This chapter heading has some wiggle to it. This first rule is indeed a critical factor in inhibiting behaviors, but because the four rules I give you are intertwined, all four must be achieved. They are coequal. Once you read them all you’ll know what I’m talking about. Here they are. Just four of them…The Four “I’s” of Inhibitions…

1) Intolerable
2) Immediately Identified
3) Inescapable
4) Inevitable
1. Intolerable: The stimulus/event that inhibits the behavior must be considered intolerable by the organism. While mainstream behaviorists assume the worst, they rarely use their imagination to discover things that can inhibit behavior but cannot do damage, even if they did it wrong. EG: Almost all mammals hate projectiles flying at them. If you fold an average sized towel in half and roll it into a tight tube, bind it with heavy rubber bands on both ends, you have a professional quality “bonker.” If you launch this at a dog, he will invariably consider it intolerable. This tool takes a small amount of rational thought to use. Do not bonk a Shi Tzu in the eyes. Here is an example of the horrible, nasty, risky, traumatic use of punishment to stop a dog from jumping on guests. If you think there is something wrong with this, there is something wrong with you. Note: The dog is wagging its tail throughout the procedure. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGS1Kmiz66k This is a good test of how much anti-punishment Kool-Aid you’ve consumed in your life. If you can oppose a procedure that stops a behavior but doesn’t even make the dog stop wagging its tail you are officially a blind ideologue. Stop reading this before you experience permanent brain damage.
2. Immediately Identified: The American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior (AVSAB) has a public “position statement on punishment”. You can find it on line. In essence their position is that you shouldn’t use it because they don’t use it. They list a bunch of reasons why it’s a terrible, dangerous process. One of the most critical is this guideline. Apparently, punishment… “must be applied as the animal is performing the target behavior or within one second of the behavior to be most effective.” This is completely mistaken. Pavlov demonstrated repeatedly that a conditioned association to a previously neutral stimulus could include a long-term latency. In the specific experiment, a bell was associated with electric shock. The latency between bell and shock was gradually extended. A dog so conditioned would give a perfect galvanic response 30 minutes after hearing the bell. (meaning muscular flinch) The point is that if you say the word “NO” or its equivalent at the instant the behavior starts, the tangible punishment can be applied almost leisurely and the dog will still make the connection. For practical purposes, ten or 15 second delays are not a problem – if you say the word “NO”, first AND you make sure you bonk the dog. (See criterion #4) The issue is that connectivity is in the physiology of the dog, not the mind of the behaviorist. The practical meaning of this information is that you do not have to apply the punishment immediately. You must have a signal that identifies the behavior immediately. (Consider the phrase, “Wait ’til your father gets home and see what you’ve done”) If you think of the timing of pushing the shutter button on a camera you will understand the timing perfectly. Imagine you are taking a picture of the instant before the behavior starts and you will be able to do this procedure correctly, with good timing.
3. Inescapable: If you say “NO” and then squirt a dog in the face, there is a high probability that a mild inhibition will be created. If you say the word “NO” and the dog turns his head so that the water hits him in the shoulder, he has escaped the aversive nature of the squirt and it is no longer intolerable. Likewise, if you say “NO” and throw a bonker at a dog who is suddenly running away from you, the bonk on the butt is unlikely to create an inhibition. This is easily fixed. Position the person with the bonker in the direction the dog is likely to escape or hunt the dog down and make sure you bonk him on the head. Likewise, if the dog tries to hide under a bed, block the gap from the floor to the frame or just shut the door, thereby preventing escape. If you use your problem-solving abilities this is an easily established criterion.
4. Inevitable: The point of Pavlov’s research has largely been mistaken by behaviorists. The fact that he could create a 100% reflexive response to a conditional stimulus was perceived as a surrogate for tangible reinforcement or punishment. The actual function of the conditional stimulus is to limit the amount of information the animal must process to discover the connection between a behavior and a consequence. In essence, it is a “hitch” that links a specific behavior to a specific result. This has led to the assumption that one has achieved success if by saying “NO” the animal stops the unacceptable behavior. That is a grand mistake. Learning an inhibition is a two-part process. It requires a signal that identifies the specific behavior followed by a tangible, intolerable consequence. If you say “NO” you are morally obligated to apply the punishment if your goal is to inhibit the behavior. It’s like putting out a fire. If there is fire you hit it with an extinguisher. You don’t chant, ‘Fire, go away or I will use a fire-extinguisher on you’ – or threaten the fire by pointing the nozzle of the extinguisher at it.

Preparation for Stopping a Behavior:

The first stage in stopping a behavior is to pair the word “NO!” with a tangible punishment. My tool of choice is a ‘bonker’ – meaning a soft projectile intended to hit the dog in the head. Having used that tool for several decades, I can’t find anything more powerful with less risk. If you know of something else, use it – or learn to use the more effective tool and why it’s more effective.

So, say “NO!” and THEN apply the punishment. Repeat. If you are weak minded you can invent some transgression rather than what seems like punishing the dog for nothing. However, the tool is more powerful if the dog is completely ‘flat footed’ and unaroused when you start the pairing. So, it’s NOT for nothing. It’s a critical aspect of being able to use punishment to stop and inhibit behavior. Consider it ‘punishment prep’.

Note: If you use a shock collar, you will have to either say “NO!” or use the tone built into most collars. So, “NO!” or “TONE” followed by shock. One other point. Whatever form of punishment you use, you must be proficient in its application.

Practical Examples:

Jumping on people:

Take a dog who habitually jumps up on people. Bring the guest into the room. As the dog orients on the person, say “NO!”, big time. Then throw a well-aimed bonker at the dog’s head. End of repetition. Have the person exit the room and put the dog elsewhere. Now, do it again. Have the guest in the room and introduce the dog. If the dog makes any more toward the guest, say “NO!” and bonk the dog. Repeat as needed.

Once the dog isn’t going to approach the person, use a clicker and treats to seal the deal. Meaning, the guest is there and the dog doesn’t approach. Click, THEN treat. Put the dog away. Then let it back into the room again. If they dog tries to rush the guest, say “NO!” and bonk the dog. If it doesn’t do that, click, THEN treat.

You must maintain those rules until all four of the criteria are in place. That includes ‘inevitable’. Once you convince the dog that the new rules are in place, the behavior will likely not return. You can help that with clicks and treats for ‘not’ jumping up or use an obedience command. I prefer “Down” to “Sit” as a sit starts with the dog’s muscles bunched, ready for a jump upwards. “Down” is more difficult and requires the dog to stand up, first. If it does come back – a possibility – it will likely come back with a whimper. Then you repeat the process, if needed.

Note: Why the bonker works better than other forms of punishment
Above, I suggested that you acknowledge the species because dogs have a special relationship with projectiles. Something coming at a dog’s head is intolerable to them. A bonker does not rely on pain as the primary motivation. The dog’s fear is instinctive. Yes, fear. Fear is the catalyst for dramatic changes in behavior. If you choose not to use it, don’t expect to inhibit behaviors or expect to take a very long period of wasted time. It’s a transitory experience that is not harmful in any way. You have been scared a time or two and you’re still here. The ‘terrible’ side effects of punishment are never compared to the ‘horrible primary effects’ of antisocial and/or dangerous behavior. They should be.
Other factors: The signal paired with the punisher need not be a word. It can be anything sensed by touch, sight or sound. I often use a cheap window alarm to generate a sound when a behavior starts. A thread trip-wire works beautifully. Once the dog sets off the alarm, you can leisurely apply the bonker.

To continue this investigation, you can find videos and in-depth articles on my blog, www.clickandtreat.com/wordpress and my YouTube Channel, WILKESGM1 There are daily discussions of my training knowledge on my Facebook page.