Eight Rules for Punishment (and why we shouldn't use them)

Mocking.  I see.  Glad you feel successful.

poodleOwned

and that us low IQ trainers don't

No, i said "lower dog IQ people", i didnt name anybody in specific or a specific philosophy

Once again, what's the point of me showing an example if you will doubt it and will point out that is only one dog?

Mocking and IQ degradation... sliding this discussion into innuendo and barbed sarcasm... what fun!  Can we be adult and share and exchange without this?  It isn't as clever as some might believe it is.  It's transparent and annoying to the rest of us.

espencer

Once again, what's the point of me showing an example if you will doubt it and will point out that is only one dog?

Why don't you just show us? Though it sounds like the behavior you have a video of was trained via positive reinforcement and not with Cesar Millan's training model, so it sounds like a moot point? Please correct me if I am wrong.

tenna

espencer

Once again, what's the point of me showing an example if you will doubt it and will point out that is only one dog?

Why don't you just show us? Though it sounds like the behavior you have a video of was trained via positive reinforcement and not with Cesar Millan's training model, so it sounds like a moot point? Please correct me if I am wrong.

Seems a reasonable request to me. We come up with a theory, we check it out with a practical example, we  show it to our peers and if the theory holds any water we go on and collect more data to back up our theory. OR

We shut up because our theory doesn't hold any water and we go back to the drawing board.

It is a hard hard world in research.  Peer review is not for the faint hearted.

tenna

Though it sounds like the behavior you have a video of was trained via positive reinforcement and not with Cesar Millan's training model

I think you are confused on what my point is, i do not have a video correcting my dog. Poodleowned thinks it takes "ages" to undo "damage" to a dog and make him learn a new behavior. That's flat out wrong, it didnt take "ages" for my dog to learn something new (which is the video i have) even when i use corrections to stop him do things i do not want him to do

espencer

Poodleowned thinks it takes "ages" to undo "damage" to a dog and make him learn a new behavior. That's flat out wrong, it didnt take "ages" for my dog to learn something new (which is the video i have) even when i use corrections to stop him do things i do not want him to do

Then show me how my experience over many years with many dogs is wrong. Start with your video and move on from there. Then lets test you assertion against mine. Unfortunately i don't go around videoing xover dogs. They generally take buckets of work to get right .  

"Poodleowned thinks it takes "ages" to undo "damage" to a dog and make him learn a new behavior. "

This is a mis quote and an extension of what i said. My personal experience is that it takes ages to get a dog learning and happy to learn. That once punishment is removed as an option, many of the behaviours do deteriotate. There is a ton of literature  out there that supports my assertion.

The video business is really easy. Just put it on utube and lets have a look and go from there. I am always intersted in learning something new.

 An example of a single dog is a  great example. In behavior, conclusions often do come about from repeated examples with single subjects, as opposed to large group studies.

poodleOwned

I really also want to see evidential data. Show me a dog trained with a lot or a majority of correction  and it is pretty evident.

I want to see videos.Show me a video of the dog learning something new.

It takes ages to undo the damage even with a sound drivey dog .

poodleOwned

"Poodleowned thinks it takes "ages" to undo "damage" to a dog and make him learn a new behavior. "

This is a mis quote and an extension of what i said. My personal experience is that it takes ages to get a dog learning and happy to learn.

(emphasis added)

What a difference now, "and happy" to learn. How abstract this "fixed" comment is now. It would be only on the eyes of the beholder to determine if the dog is "happy", very general and i might add "safe" way to try to make a point

Then we agree to a certain point, that a dog that has been corrected can still learn new behaviors really quick. "Happy" to do it is now the issue, well i can say that i see that my dog is eager and happy to do so but you might not think so because after all, we can not really ask him directly

Either you have a point and you wish to illustrate it with a video or you don't. Make up your mind.

I guess that one way of figuring out how  happy adog may be or eager is how fast they  learn  a new task. So without the threat of eminent punishment i am certain that my dog changed from exhibitng near learned helplessness in his work to being one of the faster dogs of his breed in the ring to an objective observer. But then again i put up.... i trialled my dog under both sets of training and took my lumps so to speak.

Happy is not that objective.. We can measure pleasure seeking in animals by looking at there hormone mixes in saliva much as we do when we wish to measure stress.We can also use the science of behaviour analysis which video helps us do.

I guess that if you really want proof of his eagerness i will post a video of him starting a track in a trial  for Tracking Champions when he was 14 1/2... He is still pretty quick.

 You will have to take my word for it that he wasn't so happy as a dog under traditional training methods.

When i you going to show us this video? What is the excuse now? 

tenna

denise m

Sorry, you are still saying the same thing. 'People can only read their dogs accurately when they become positive only trainers'  

No. I am saying there is a difference between a dog's behavior when he is trained purely positively vs. trained with corrections. And that a person MAY NOT NOTICE that he was giving signs of being unhappy until they see a different model (the positive-only trained dog). It could go both ways - someone may not notice how happy their dog is to work until they start using corrections. I am saying that a lot of owners may not notice the fine signs a dog is giving that he is not 100% enjoying working/training until they see a dog that has been trained positively. I am saying that sometimes you cannot see fine body language in your dog until it is no longer there. Please, try again.

I don't understand why someone either has to be a purely positive or punishment based trainer. Although, I think I recall someone on this forum saying that unless it's a life or death situation, if you use punishment you are a punishment based trainer (or traditional trainer, IIRC). I don't believe that all training we do with our dogs can be 100% positive, IMO, taking a reward away can build frustration and be unpleasant to a dog. Many self titled purely positive trainers are happy to slap a head collar on a dog in order to train it, yet they still maintain they don't use aversives or punishment or corrections. No one can be entirely, 100% positive only IMO.

I'm a pretty inexperienced handler (just ask Poodleowned ;)) but although I am a rewards based trainer, I can't lie and say I've never used punishment or aversives in some way i.e. a voice correction or a tug on my dog's leash. I truly believe that my dog is not afraid of me, or has trouble learning anything new. In fact when she's frustrated she offers as many behaviours as she can until she realises what I'm asking her to do (again, I'm inexperienced, lucky I have a dog who is more cluey than I am!).

Seeing as you are so keen to see people prove themselves, feel free to look at my latest upload on my utube channel. Feel free to laugh at my crappy handling skillz ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6f--DRfQNhE

Now, for a dog whose been corrected at certain points over the last three years, she looks pretty keen and happy to work to me. Please let me know if you think I'm missing something or reading her wrong.

 Linky didn't work for me.

Thanks for the heads up Corvus. All fixed now :) Although you know my utube channel, you've probably already seen it ;)

I don't think I'd seen that one.

That's basically what Erik looks like when he's training, and he's never been punished in his life. He's a little more animated, but he's still a puppy and he's pretty animated about life in general.

Kivi looks different. He stares at me more and wags his tail less.  

Actually, I tell a lie. Erik has been punished, but I totally met every one of the eight rules! He'd been ripping up the carpet and I'd let it blossom into an obsession. I tried preventing him from getting to it, and I tried distracting him, and I tried redirecting him, but in the end he was still in danger of injesting carpet fibre and making a mess of the floor. And our front door was out of action because so many things were piled up around it. I could redirect him and distract him, but he'd be back at it a moment later, and it was just getting worse. So I started throwing a pillow at him from behind the couch whenever he did it. He's very clever, and I think he suspected that it was me throwing the pillows at him, but he'd come over with a "please explain" look and I'd tell him he was a good boy and give him something legit to chew on. I think I threw about five pillows over three days before he stopped ripping up carpet. He doesn't have access to carpet when no one is home, so I got him every time. It didn't hurt him, or frighten him overly, just startling him and breaking his concentration, and I haven't used it for anything else. To be effective it has to come out of the blue. It can't come out of the blue if you use it regularly. I'd very much like to never have to do something like that again. Erik is so wiley, I think he was onto me. I think I'd have trouble pulling off the same thing again without him becoming sure that it was me.

I wouldn't do it to Kivi at all, though. He would find a pillow coming out of the blue and hitting him to be far more aversive. I'd likely have him afraid of coming into the room at all. One time he knocked a laptop off the coffee table and it hit him on the way down. It wouldn't have hurt much if at all, but for weeks afterwards he shied every time he saw one of the laptops, and would cower if someone moved one near him.

Yeah I'm quite happy with how she is working atm although you can see how terribly distracted she was at the start of the video. She wasn't working as well as she can that's for sure. But we have a couple of months to work on that before stepping in the trial ring in February ;)