Dog Sense (18 page)

It has become abundantly clear that the model upon which many people are training, managing, and simply interacting with their dogs is fundamentally wrong. The traditional “lupomorph” model is contradicted both by the current conception of how wolves actually organize their lives and by the logic of the domestication process—and since it doesn't explain dog-dog social behavior adequately, it is also highly unlikely to be of any use in explaining relationships between dogs and
their owners. Nevertheless, this model is still promulgated by many dog trainers, who use it to justify their methods. These trainers frequently portray owners as misinterpreting their dogs' motivations and promote the “dominance” model as the only way to restore healthy relationships. At the very least, this approach saps the joy out of dog ownership; at worst, it is used to justify physical punishment as an essential component of training. Many people now think that these punishment-reliant training methods are unnecessarily stressful for the dog. While they may appear superficially effective, such methods often don't work well in the long term, for reasons that are abundantly clear to those scientists who study how animals learn.

C
urrently, dog training has a high profile in the media; evidently it makes for good TV, as evidenced by the rise of celebrities like Cesar Millan, the “Dog Whisperer,” and Victoria Stilwell, presenter of “It's Me or the Dog.” But there is tremendous disagreement among dog trainers about the best approach to shaping dog behavior. A number of high-profile trainers and behaviorists continue to promote the idea that dogs are pack animals and that many can be controlled only through the application of “dominance” theory and the use of physical punishment. For example, Cesar Millan writes: “Dogs have an ingrained pack mentality. If you're not asserting leadership over your dog, your dog will try to compensate by showing dominant or unstable behavior.”
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Or this from UK “Expert Dog Trainer and Canine Behaviourist” Colin Tennant: “Most dogs will strive to dominate any other dogs or humans with whom they come into contact by body language and/or growling, biting or aggressive physical bullying.”
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Others, such as Karen Prior, Patricia McConnell, and Jean Donaldson, radically disagree with this approach, rejecting the wolf-pack analogy and advocating training dogs as if they were any other animal. Furthermore, they emphasize that training should be based around rewards and abhor the unnecessary use of physical punishment. Dr. Ian Dunbar, one of the originators of this approach, states that compliance, the goal of all dog training, is most often achieved through positive
training methods, specifically the lure-reward methods—using treats and praise—that he pioneered. Dunbar, a veterinarian and dog and puppy trainer with more than twenty-five years of experience, bases his methods soundly on dog psychology, backed up by a doctorate in animal behavior from UC Berkeley and a decade of research on communication and behavior in domestic dogs. The debate between the two camps has at times become heated, even personal. For example, Dunbar has said of Millan: “He has nice dog skills, but from a scientific point of view, what he says is, well . . . different. Heaven forbid if anyone else tries his methods, because a lot of what he does is not without danger.”
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These differences of opinion are not just of interest to the dog trainers involved—they have real effects on the welfare of dogs. Every year, many dogs are abandoned, even euthanized, because they have come to behave in unacceptable ways. In many cases, these behavioral problems are the result of inept or inconsistent training. For this reason, it is essential that we try to understand how dogs
really
learn, and thus which training methods and philosophies are most effective. Getting training right is essential both to the welfare of dogs and to the peace of mind of their owners.

The notion that dogs are wolves under the skin still pervades much of dog training today, despite having been abandoned by the scientific and veterinary communities and an increasing number of dog trainers. The “wolf-pack” approach promotes two interdependent ideas: that dogs, because of their ingrained “pack mentality,” can be controlled only if their owners adopt the role of pack leader, and that the most reliable way to ensure this outcome is by the use of physical punishment. Both of these ideas go back to at least the nineteenth century but were given added reinforcement, or so it seemed at the time, by the studies of captive wolf packs that were conducted in the middle part of the twentieth century. Now that a more accurate picture of wolf society has emerged, based on family ties, the credibility of both ideas has been seriously undermined, yet they are still widely promoted.

The widespread use of punishment-based dog training is usually traced back to Colonel Konrad Most, whose highly influential book
Training Dogs: A Manual
first appeared in 1910 (in German) and was
translated into English, due to popular demand, in 1944. Most was emphatic that the relationship between man and dog was not only hierarchical—with only one “winner”—but could be established only through physical force, by an actual struggle in which the man was instantaneously victorious. The dog had to be convinced of the absolute physical superiority of the man.
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This approach demands that the owner constantly maintain and reinforce his or her position at the head of the family pack. In this conception the dog perceives the people it lives with as fellow-members of its pack, and misbehavior is construed as being due to a failure of the owners to maintain their dominance over the dog. Training methods are accordingly designed to lower the dog's position in the hierarchy or “pecking order,” as it is sometimes referred to.
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The Monks of New Skete, best-selling authors of dog training manuals for over thirty years, are highly influential promoters of this philosophy. They maintain that understanding wolf behavior will help owners to understand their dogs, and that books about wolves are often of more use to owners who wish to understand and appreciate their dog's behavior than dog-training manuals.
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The Monks are very specific in turning this principle into practice. For instance, for aggressive dogs they recommend the “Alpha-wolf roll-over.” This is a disciplinary technique nicknamed for the way the lead wolf is supposed to punish misbehaving members of the pack,
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whereby the dog is grasped firmly by the scruff of its neck and vigorously rolled over onto its back. For puppies, they recommend the “shakedown method,” which they claim resembles what the mother does to her pups to keep order in the litter:
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The puppy is grasped by the loose skin on either side of its neck, lifted off its front feet, and shaken.

Those dog trainers, such as Dr. Ian Dunbar, who promote reward-based methods regard this “dominance reduction” as both unnecessarily cruel and based on a complete misconception; they fundamentally reject the assumption that because an animal is misbehaving it must mean that the misbehavior is motivated by a desire to have high rank. Instead, they rely on much simpler explanations based on the science of animal learning, emphasizing that many of the behaviors that animals perform are performed simply because those behaviors have been rewarded many times in the past.
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They rarely make special reference to the dog's origins
as a wolf, since the effects of reward on behavior are universal among vertebrate animals.

Some experts go even further, asserting that training techniques derived from the dominance concept can actually harm the dogs they're applied to. Their uppermost concern is that punishment-based methods, often used in an attempt to cure a supposed “dominance problem,” may initially suppress the behavior but can then cause the dog to become depressed and withdrawn.
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Even worse is what can occur if the “dominance reduction schedule” does not work: If the misbehavior continues, the owners may come to think that they are not asserting their position strongly enough and become more and more aggressive in their attitude. Eventually the dog may become so fearful of them that it bites them in self-defense.
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Personally, I'm delighted that the most recent scientific evidence backs up an approach to managing dogs that I'm comfortable with. As a scientist as well as a dog lover, I am dedicated to assessing the best evidence available and then deciding on the most logical approach to adopt. If wild wolf packs had turned out to be as fraught with tension as their counterparts in zoos, I'd have to agree that the dominance approach had merit. I'd still be reluctant to adopt punishment rather than reward as my philosophy for training my dog, because for me the whole point of having a dog is the companionship it brings, and domination and companionship don't jibe for me. As a dog owner, I was relieved by the discrediting of the wolf-pack idea, since I could then explain to myself and, more importantly, to others why routinely punishing a dog is not only unnecessary but also counterproductive.

Both sides of the debate over proper techniques for dog-training claim that their approaches are based on serious science. Dog owners, not surprisingly, have trouble assessing which claims are true and, therefore, how best to train their dogs. The issue of how closely dogs' behavior aligns with the behavior of their wolf ancestors turns out to be something of a distraction in this regard, because when it comes to training, the most important question is really
How do dogs learn?

First of all, it's important to stress that dogs are learning all the time—not just during formal training. Or, to put it another way, dog owners
often do things that train their dogs without being aware that they're doing them. Dogs learn especially fast while they're growing up; they can modify the “instinctive” ways in which they communicate with one another and with us; they learn how to get on with other dogs and with the people they meet. From a young dog's perspective, there's not much difference between the training class and everyday life; the dog will learn all the time. However good the training session may have been, owners need to bear in mind all the opportunities their dogs have for learning, not just those formally labeled as “training.”

Dogs learn in much the same way that other mammals—including humans—learn. However, species vary slightly in terms of what they find
easiest
to learn and what
motivates
their learning. One reason that domestic dogs fit into human communities so well is that they find human contact very rewarding and, conversely, become anxious when separated from their human companions. Thus they are strongly motivated to do things that please their owners or, if they can't work out what those are, to at least get their owners' attention.

However, if you want to train any animal to do something, it's easiest to start with a behavior that the animal would do anyway. Obviously, not all animals are equally easy to train, either in general or with regard to particular behaviors. Biological heritage does matter. On the one hand, many of the things that we train dogs to do, such as rounding up sheep and retrieving game, make use of pieces of behavior that evolved millions of years ago as part of their canid ancestors' natural hunting behavior. On the other hand, as predators, dogs do not naturally run away from things unless they're scared of them, so it's much more difficult to train them to, say, pull a cart than it is to train prey animals such as horses to do so.
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Nevertheless, there are fundamental disagreements among trainers about how dogs are motivated to learn. Old-school advocates, supported only by tradition, think dogs need to learn their place in the pack; modernists, supported by scientific evidence, think dogs learn to please their owners.

What, then, does it mean for a dog to learn? We can usually say that a dog has learned something when its typical reaction to a particular situation changes. Short-term changes that can be ascribed to internal
processes such as hunger don't count. The more time that passes since a dog's last meal, the hungrier it will get, but its interest in food wanes after it has eaten. That's not learning. However, when a dog suddenly gets excited when it hears its food bowl being taken out of the cupboard and then repeats this behavior every day, we can be sure that it has learned something.

The simplest kind of learning is
habituation
, defined as the waning of a response to an event that turns out to have no consequences. Most animals have sense organs that pick up far more information about the world than they can possibly attend to, and dogs are no exception to this rule. To avoid wasting time, animals need a mechanism that allows them to avoid responding over and over again to something that their senses are telling them they might want to attend to but does not actually need to be bothered with. It's a very primitive and universal ability: Even animals without nervous systems can do this, or something like it.

Habituation explains, for example, why dogs can rapidly lose interest in a particular toy. If dogs are repeatedly offered a favorite toy—a squishy teddy bear, for example—they will stop playing with it, usually after only five or six presentations. But if the toy is then swapped for one that is only very slightly different—identical in appearance except for a different color or odor, say—they will start playing with the new toy just as excitedly as they had with the first one. Of course, they quickly get bored with the second toy as well, since there is nothing intrinsically more exciting about it compared to the first toy.