the role of punishment

When I foster a litter, leashing pups to me is simply not an option.  I guess I acheive the "tug on the leash" with my voice instead.

If you want to call it punishment, what I do with pups who decide to teethe on me is to correct (unh uh, no bite) redirect to a proper chew thing and praise like crazy for chewing on IT instead of me.  Same basic thing, but I use my voice and not a physical correction.

My voice is the most oft used tool in the old toolbox.  I can walk nearly 500 pounds of german shepherd on regular flat collars, in town, which can be distracting, and never ever have one of them pull even in the slightest.  I typically walk on the bike/walking path with six dogs, but now and then, the village hasn't gotten around to clearing it and we walk on the streets or sidewalk, if thats been cleared.  And, admittedly, a woman my size walking that much dog sometimes gets folks to cross the street but most of the folks I encounter have gotten to know me and know that i've got the situation handled.

I don't consider myself the "pack leader", just Mom.  And my dogs, and my frequent fosters, listen to mom.

we have four professional training centers near me. Not one ever recommends the use of punishment (I regularly go watch their classes)- all four routinely produce well-mannered dogs and happy owners. Three use mostly +R plus some -P; and one uses mostly -R, plus some +R and -P (which brings up an interesting point: why do so-called balanced trainers rave on about "using all four quadrants" but never ever talk about or apparently ever use -R?). All of them recommend the use of a verbal no-reward-marker ("eh eh" being a popular one). Is that a punishment? not to most dogs, it's just information, as people are stating. Some dogs find no-reward-markers to be demotivating, so I guess to them it is a punishment.

I've talked to the professional trainers at these centers- most have stated they think collar-corrections are one of the least effective methods of training dogs, particularly by the general unskilled public who have bad timing.  

 'm sorry, but "eh eh" can be either punishment or a no reward marker. With Eko, he hasn't time to develop the idea of a no reward marker. It's punishment. Same as when Sasha snarls at him for being a goofball. The word has baggage, for sure. I'd like to see psychology come up with a more neutral term, because the common use of the word punishment is very different than the OC one. I won't hold my breath!

Of course trainers aren't going to say "Use punishment!" To most people that doesn't mean what it does in OC terms.  Trainers do suggest techniques that are P+ in the language of OC.

For the purposes of dog training discussions, with a group of people aware of operant conditioning, I am going to stick with the technical definition of punishment and not resort to feel good statements that I never use positive punishment. Talking to my neighbor, no, I'm not going to say I use positive punishment. I would describe what I do in other terms.

For me, acknowledging the ways in which I use P+ allows me to be more aware of my actions and my motivations. I'm probably gentler for it. Awareness allows room for choice.  

mudpuppy

why do so-called balanced trainers [...] never ever talk about or apparently ever use -R?

When I say "reinforcement", I mean BOTH +R and -R. When I say "punishment", I mean BOTH +P and -P. You apparently assume "punishment" means +P only. It's your assumption that is incorrect. 

mudpuppy

All of them recommend the use of a verbal no-reward-marker ("eh eh" being a popular one). Is that a punishment?

Yes. A "no-reward marker" isn't somewhere floating around outside the OC box. There is not "neutral feedback" quadrant in the OC framework. That's +P. Yes, it's information. So is any punishment. But so is a reward. It's ALL feedback or consequences.

I'm not so sure. One of my dogs is clearly "punished" by the use of a no-reward marker, so I don't use it with her. My neighbor's dog clearly views it as "information": oh, you don't want that? how about this? or this? or this? (he's a little on the manic side).  And how did you go about teaching the dog that your eh eh was a punishment? if the sound is meaningless, you'd have to apply some kind of aversive after issuing the sound to teach the dog what it means; if it's a no-reward-marker you just never reward the dog after issuing the dog. Oddly enough most dogs seem to understand the meaning of a sharp eh eh from birth (the word NO is completely different story). Why? cause it sounds an awful lot like a roar-bark, which is a doggy expression of "you stop doing that right now". 

Of course trainers aren't going to say "Use punishment!" To most people that doesn't mean what it does in OC terms.  Trainers do suggest techniques that are P+ in the language of OC.

I mean that none of the four training centers around me ever suggest using techniques that are +P. One of the centers, which is into dog sports (the others mostly just deal with teaching dogs to be happy pets) has racked up an impressive number of titles and wins in a wide variety of sports in dogs who are trained there.

People attack the "NO +P" crowd as being soft-heared idiots, but I and many other folks have observed that you get better results the fewer corrections you apply, and the more skilled you get as a trainer, the situations where a correction could be applied occur less and less often. Last pup I raised has never even been given an EH EH. If you set your dog up to succeed, he won't make mistakes, and you'll have zero opportunities to correct. Punishment is often used as a substitute for skill. Some highly skilled folks claim that it is appropriate to "correct" a dog who is "willfully disobedient", i.e. an "undermotivated dog": the dog will then be motivated to obey in future. Well, I ask you, are you sure the dog is "undermotivated" and if so, why? are you sure the dog isn't just distracted, confused, under-trained? Last time I correct an "undermotivated dog" (five or so years ago), it turns out he was simply highly distracted, hadn't even heard my command, and he clearly thought I had just attacked him out of nowhere for no reason. Took me weeks to convince him I was a safe, fun person to be around after that.

mudpuppy

we have four professional training centers near me. Not one ever recommends the use of punishment (I regularly go watch their classes)- all four routinely produce well-mannered dogs and happy owners. Three use mostly +R plus some -P; and one uses mostly -R, plus some +R and -P (which brings up an interesting point: why do so-called balanced trainers rave on about "using all four quadrants" but never ever talk about or apparently ever use -R?). All of them recommend the use of a verbal no-reward-marker ("eh eh" being a popular one). Is that a punishment? not to most dogs, it's just information, as people are stating. Some dogs find no-reward-markers to be demotivating, so I guess to them it is a punishment.

I've talked to the professional trainers at these centers- most have stated they think collar-corrections are one of the least effective methods of training dogs, particularly by the general unskilled public who have bad timing.  

I have attended classes given by many top trainers, not only in my area, but also in the country at many different locations. Most of them use P+ in the form of collar pops, in addition to using R+, R- and P-. A couple of them didn't use P+ beyond an "eh-eh". These are people who have all put multiple titles on dogs in several different disciplines, as well as training dogs for police work, narcotics detection, SAR, assistance work and training pets and their owners.

Of course, these are people who have been training dogs for decades, so one could say they are "old school", but it does work and it works well, and the dogs are all very happy, eager, outgoing, thinking dogs. They are all dogs that if not under a command will offer many behaviors. And most of their students, who begin as the "unskilled public", by the time they graduate class in a few weeks, are not unskilled have achieved the results they were looking for.

FourIsCompany

So, the reason I use punishment is to inform the dog. It's to give this intelligent and discerning animal as much information as possible to help him succeed. Does he NEED this information? Maybe not. But why should I withhold it? This isn't some dumb animal who can't tell if he should be afraid of me or not. It's not an insecure, psychologically-messed up, lower being. This is an extremely intelligent animal capable of choice, emotion and thought. The more information I can give him, the better.

I don't consider an "ah" or "eh-eh" a punishing type of information. I say the same thing to my dog and if it's about something tasty, she thinks it means she should eat it as fast as possible before I get a chance to take it off her. But then, that's because I've never made an effort to offer her a benefit for leaving it beyond my saying "good girl" which is pretty lame in the face of contraband chicken bones lying around on the road. It doesn't really reduce the likelihood of her doing something so much as increases the likelihood that she will be distracted by the sound and look to me for further information. My "ah" sound is an instinctive sound I use on all my animals. It halts them in their tracks because it's so sharp and urgent-sounding. 

Leash pops and the likes, though, are punishing. Why should you withold punishing information? Because it's punishing and you can present that same information in a non-punishing way. I don't think I'll ever understand this. I love my animals. I don't want to do things to them that they don't like. Why would I do that if I didn't have to?

Besides which, half the time it doesn't even communicate the right thing. All leash pops taught my dog was that I do mean things to her sometimes, especially when she's walking next to me. Consequently, if I gave her the choice she'd walk as far away from me on the leash as she could get without pulling. It took years of no leash pops for her to overcome that compulsion, and the scars it left on our relationship are still there now that I know what I'm looking for. They're hard to see, and it took a relationship with an animal raised without punishments for me to see it. I sincerely hope what I did to Penny only caused the damage it did because she didn't need corrections and that the same damage doesn't occur with many other dogs. It was a horrible, horrible thing to realise how I'd let my dog down all this time, and it broke my heart when I finally saw how I had ruined that bit of magic that makes Kit and I capable of reading each other's minds.

Dog_ma

You can have a positive relationship with the hare because you don't expect or need the same level of behavior you do your dogs. Even my cats don't respond to P+ the same way dogs do.

Well, sorry, but I don't think this argument holds much water. I've seen cats performing out in public without leashes and doing it better than dogs. You work within the capabilities of your animals. If my hare was capable of walking on a leash and what have you without me terrorising him, I'd do it. If I had to punish a dog in order to get it to do something, then I would assume that something is beyond the dog's capabilities and forget about it. Maybe I fail to grasp the important differences between dogs and every other animal on the planet, because there are some rules that apply to all animals, in my world at least. One of those rules is simply to avoid doing anything to the animal that they will find painful, scary, or unpleasant. If that rule applies for every animal on the planet that you want to like you and enjoy your company, than what makes dogs so different? Why shouldn't that rule apply to them just because we have different expectations of them? If our expectations require them to be punished, maybe we should be reassessing our expectations of them.

Sigh.

A punishment is anything that decreases the chance that behavior X will occur again. So yes, to a social animal, disapproval in the form of eh can be a punishment.

I'm not talking about punishment as "You did something bad, therefore I punish you."  

As far as cats go, I suppose I'm blessed, but life with a barely trained cat is much simpler than life with a barely trained dog. Forget tricks and fun stuff. Give cats a litter box, instinct says to use it. I give them nice scratching posts, and they (mostly) leave my furniture and carpet alone. Yes, I can train cats to do cute things. I have done so, with only P+. I have trained a goldfish to "kiss" my finger when I tapped on his bowl.

What I find different about dog, from goldfish or cats, is their social structure and the natural importance of feedback on what not to do. Feedback on what not to do = punishment. In scientific, OC terms. Jeesh. I'm not making up the terms or the definitions. If a social animal is motivated not to piss off group members, then feedback about what not to do makes that behavior less likely.

I think we carry too much emotion into the discussion. Conventional, every day punishment is very icky to me. I raise my daughter with as little punishment of ANY kind as possible. I'm one of those weirdos who tries as much as my human patience allows me to look for mutually agreeable solutions rather than parental dictates. And I absolutely use OC punishment with my daughter. We don't hit. We don't use time outs.  When push comes to shove, I go for P-. And even that I don't like using.

So I present this challenge: who here really lives life with a dog and never ever gives feedback on what not to do? If you are trying to decrease behavior x, and your efforts work, then you are using punishment.

Why should a dog who is never given feedback not to chew slippers, not chew slippers? An infinite supply of RMB?

 ETA: http://www.wagntrain.com/OC/#Operant
 

I was using mudpuppy's definition as stated in the original post. And I don't think negative feedback necessarily decreases behaviour x from occurring, anyway. As I said, Penny thinks the 'eh' sound means eat whatever she's found quick before I can take it away. It's not punishing enough on its own to decrease the behaviour, but if I used it in conjuntion with a good motivator to follow my next suggestion, then I'm well on the way to increasing the likelihood that a non-compatible behaviour will be repeated instead.

True, she doesn't like it when I'm angry with her and if I shout "ah" about something she doesn't want that bad, she will leave it in the interests of avoiding my displeasure. But she's not so keen to avoid my displeasure that she'll hold off jumping in the putrid, filthy water just because I have made it clear I won't like it if she does that, and she's more keen to avoid disapproval than any other dog I've had live with me. To me, that makes it extremely mildly punishing. It only decreases a behaviour the dog is not particularly interested in repeating anyway. Is something that is so mildly aversive that it only decreases the likelihood of a behaviour repeating if the animal didn't care that much about doing it in the first place and even then only works sometimes considered punishment? Where can we draw the line? How significant does a decrease have to be  for a punishment to have occurred?

And we have somehow ended up back in the "who wants it more" question. Whenever two animals want conflicting things, they can often decide whether to pursue it or not based on their asssessment of who wants it more. Is it punishing to decide someone else cares more about this than you? My mother was telling me just this morning how she's sorted out Pyry's insistence on barking at nothing and refusing to come inside. Telling him she's not fond of his behaviour does precisely nothing because he doesn't care. Bribing him with something tasty works most times, but apparently marching out there with an air of business works like a charm every time. Pyry assesses how much she wants him to not run away and come back inside as told in the way she walks and figures he doesn't want to stay out so much that he's ready to run away from her indefinitely, which is exactly what her body language is telling him he will have to do if he doesn't comply. Is choosing to come inside punishing in that case? Does the body language decrease the likelihood of him running away or increase the likelihood of him choosing to comply with the request? How can one tell in these situations?  

I'm not arguing that using negative feedback is never a punishment, but I would say it isn't always a punishment and sometimes it might be an incredibly mild punishment. If I had a particularly sensitive dog that was totally crushed by a stern word, I'd take that as a good indication that I should be avoiding using stern words.

I believe punishment (which should never be issued with frustration or anger) is as informative to the dog as reward. It's the other side of the coin.

this sounds logical, doesn't it? unfortunately it doesn't work that way. +P and +R are not information; they are motivators. They increase or decrease the probability of the dog performing the behavior in future. So you want to teach your dog to loose-leash walk- you go out and give the dog a leash-pop whenever he pulls, and praise when he doesn't. It's very clear TO YOU what you are rewarding and punishing; but the dog has no idea. You can't explain to him what SPECIFIC behavior is being picked out- from his perspective, he was simultaneously walking/pulling on leash/ looking at a squirrel/ turning his head to the right. He doesn't know which, behavior, specifically he got leash-popped for. The only way he can figure it out is by experimenting- but guess what, since +P decreases the probability of him repeating behaviors, he's not likely to experiment much. At the same time you're rewarding him for not-pulling, but again, he was simultaneously doing multiple behaviors- wagging his tail/walking/looking at tree/ not pulling. Only way he can figure it out is by experimenting- but unfortunately you've reduced his desire to experiment by giving him that leash-pop a couple of minutes ago. It sounds illogical, but dogs learn what you want MUCH FASTER if you never punish them- because they are happy to experiment and figure out what specific behavior is being reinforced.

mudpuppy

You can't explain to him what SPECIFIC behavior is being picked out- from his perspective, he was simultaneously walking/pulling on leash/ looking at a squirrel/ turning his head to the right. He doesn't know which, behavior, specifically he got leash-popped for. The only way he can figure it out is by experimenting- but guess what, since +P decreases the probability of him repeating behaviors, he's not likely to experiment much. At the same time you're rewarding him for not-pulling, but again, he was simultaneously doing multiple behaviors- wagging his tail/walking/looking at tree/ not pulling. Only way he can figure it out is by experimenting- but unfortunately you've reduced his desire to experiment by giving him that leash-pop a couple of minutes ago. It sounds illogical, but dogs learn what you want MUCH FASTER if you never punish them- because they are happy to experiment and figure out what specific behavior is being reinforced.

mudpuppy

unfortunately it doesn't work that way.

But it does work that way. It has worked that way for me. I am not sure what the difference between "information" and "motivators" is, but in this context, I give my dogs information and they are motivated one way or another by that information.

I actually taught mine a command for not pulling on the leash and they got it. All 4 of them. And I used corrections coupled with reinforcement to do it. Nothing that physically hurt them, but correction, nonetheless. I talk to them and gesture a lot, so they know many commands about walking: "let's go home", "stop", "no-pull", "heel", "wait"... and more. And our relationship is such that THEY KNOW that a correction is information that they should take seriously. They actually know my tone of voice when I give corrections. And every correction is coupled with showing what I want and praise or other reward. It's clear. In fact, when my dogs get a correction, they KNOW a reward is on its way as soon as they do the right thing!

I think I give dogs more credit to figure things out, to THINK ... and they live up to my expectations. If they are smart enough to experiment with different behaviors to find out what it is that I want, they are smart enough to figure out what it is that I don't want. And since I don't use pain to punish, there's no need for them to stop experimenting or avoid trying different things.

I understand the theory of +R "only" and I still choose to use punishment (in the form of corrections). It does not have the effect on my dogs that you say it does. I can understand and believe a dog being beaten daily will eventually shut down and stop even trying, but my dogs have never been beaten. That's abuse. If I raise my hand to them, they look at it expectantly, wondering what I have for them.

When you talk the way you do in your post, it sounds to me as though dogs are some kind of vending machines. You put a penny in there and a certain behavior pops out. You wiggle this lever and another behavior materializes. Flip this switch and the dog barks... as if all dogs will behave the same way under these circumstances. I have no such experience and I don't wish to. That doesn't account for relationship, temperaments, environment, nuance. Sure it's a fine foundation, but it's very mechanical and sterile and I don't have that experience with my dogs.

I want my dogs to live their doggy lives and, when I want something from them I will let them know. And when I want them to stop doing something I will let them know. I will let them know by giving them information. It does work that way. It works that way for us.

FourIsCompany

mudpuppy

unfortunately it doesn't work that way.

 

But it does work that way. It has worked that way for me. I am not sure what the difference between "information" and "motivators" is, but in this context, I give my dogs information and they are motivated one way or another by that information.

For a social animal, information can serve as motivators, both in P and R ways.

And I don't know what I'm doing wrong, but I teach my dogs a version of mudpuppy's squirrel-leash deal. I say eh, and they desist, because even if they are highly motivated they learn that (a) I'm not going to allow them to continue the eh behavior, and (b) listening to me increases the chance of something happy and fun.

Totally cute story from yesterday: I gave Sasha a RMB to chew while I took Eko out for socialization around the town. When I came home, I took the bone inside and put it on a towel in the living room so that Eko could potty outside without being chased away. A minute or so later, I'm talking to my mom in the kitchen and in walks Sasha with the bone. She drops it on the floor, and looks at me. I had to laugh, and said "Oh alright. Take it back outside" and gestured towards the door with my head.  She happily went back outside. If I had said unh uh, she would have taken it back to the living room.

And every correction is coupled with showing what I want and praise or other reward. It's clear. In fact, when my dogs get a correction, they KNOW a reward is on its way as soon as they do the right thing!

Oh, so true! And I, using my eh correction/punishment, see the same result. Again with the cat stories. I have 3, they are run-awayers, and Eko is sight hound. This morning, he started to trot after one. I said eh, he took another step, I gently stopped him with my hands. No reinforcement for that, no ability to chase kitty either. Not too much later, he started towards the cat again. (Cat was flirting about the room, wanting my attention). I said eh, Eko stopped in his tracks, sat, and looked up at me. "See mom! Do I get a cookie?" I use intermittent reinforcement, so that the dogs are never 100% sure if they will get a treat. He did that time, to drive home the difference between cooperation and the lack thereof.

And since I don't use pain to punish, there's no need for them to stop experimenting or avoid trying different things.

Totally. My corrections are mild. They are adjusted to the sensitivity of each animal, so that they are not aversive enough to stop creativity. I never taught Sasha to ask permission to take a bone outside. She is willing to risk correction (in the form of an eh).

That assumes that during the course of the walk there was only one R+ and only one P+.

no it doesn't, and it doesn't matter whether the punishment inflicts pain or not. As long as it acts to reduce the probability of the dog repeating the behavior in future it's punishment. Yes, training dogs with collar-pops work; people have been doing it for decade. But the no-punishment method of training works far better. Logically and in actual practice. Go try it and see- how can you possibly claim +P works better than no punishment if you've never tried it?