Dog Sense (22 page)

It's also possible to transfer the negative punishment to a
secondary punisher
, which is analogous to a secondary reinforcer. In the context of dog training, an arbitrary yet distinctive sound can be used; however, it must be the exact opposite of that produced by a clicker. For this purpose owners can purchase “training discs,”
²¹
but a distinctively uttered word can be just as effective. First, an association is built up between the cue (e.g., dropping the training discs on the ground) and a mildly frustrating event (e.g., temporarily removing the dog's food mid-meal, or offering and then withholding a treat). The cue itself then becomes a
secondary punisher
and can be used under other circumstances as well, such as getting the dog to stop barking. As with all punishers, including negative reinforcers,
the desired response—such as sitting and not barking—should also be rewarded. (This is an example of positive reinforcement.)

Punishment, in the psychological sense, is an inescapable component of the dog owner's armory of training methods. Today's most knowledgeable trainers agree that it is in fact impossible to avoid at least some
negative punishment
(the withholding of a reward that the dog is anticipating) when training a dog. And few would argue that it's unethical to make a dog feel slightly uncomfortable by delaying somewhat a reward it was expecting. (Indeed, in real life this may be virtually unavoidable. Each time owners give their dogs a food treat or other reward, they set up expectations that the same reward will appear again when the situation is repeated. If the situation recurs and there is no treat, then the dogs are, technically speaking, being punished.) Many trainers who avoid physical punishment nevertheless use the withholding of reward as a way of modifying behavior—clearly a very good way of getting and holding a dog's attention,
²²
once reward-based training has begun.

It is the use of physical punishment that remains controversial. Traditions die hard, and “traditional” training methods based on physical punishment are still widely employed. One recent US survey of clients at a veterinary behavior clinic
²³
found large numbers of owners using confrontational methods, including “hit or kick dog for undesirable behavior” (43 percent), “physically force the release of an item from a dog's mouth” (39 percent), “alpha roll” (31 percent), “stare at or stare [dog] down” (30 percent), “dominance down” (29 percent), and “grab dog by jowls and shake” (26 percent). All of these actions had elicited an aggressive response from at least a quarter of the dogs on whom they had been used, indicating that none of them could be regarded as safe.

The reason for the widespread incidence of physical punishment was unclear from the research, since few owners in the survey indicated that these techniques had been recommended by dog trainers (although television was the most frequently reported source for the practice of abruptly jabbing the dog in the neck). However, much of the advice reported to have come from trainers did involve the punitive use of collars and leashes, such as prong-collars and forcing-down, which also cause aggressive responses. The survey found no link between aggression and the use of training methods that did not involve physical punishment. Although
the majority of the dogs had been brought to the clinic for problems involving aggression, none of the nonaversive, neutral, and reward-based interventions that their owners had used produced aggressive responses in more than a tiny fraction of the dogs they'd been used on, in stark contrast to the aggression triggered by physical punishments.

Why, therefore, do TV companies seem to prefer to publicize methods based on confrontation and punishment? Perhaps because conflict, and its dramatic resolution, make for compelling entertainment.
²⁴
Reward-based methods are slower, if surer, and much less dramatic. If dog-training programs were regarded as mere entertainment, then none of this would matter very much. But if the use of physical punishment and other techniques that supposedly reduce “dominance” are adopted in good faith by dog owners, problematic behaviors can easily be exacerbated. When such techniques don't work as quickly and effortlessly as the TV version seems to promise, there is a risk that owners will escalate the punishment, in the belief that they have not gotten through to the dog. The result can then be a dog that resorts to aggression because it finds this is the only tactic that gets it noticed. Inept use of reward, by contrast, is likely to result only in an overweight or overdependent dog—both conditions that, while not exactly desirable, can at least be readily resolved.

Given all the scientific evidence that is piling up against the use of physical punishment in training, the question that has to be asked is why such methods remain so popular with owners. The main issue seems to be that dog training originated as a craft and, hence, has no clear route for integrating scientific understanding of dogs into its methods. Neither dog training nor the treatment of behavioral disorders in dogs is a regulated profession, so keeping up to date with the latest developments or, indeed, getting some kind of formal education in the field is not legally required. Television companies also seem not to value formal qualifications; for example, Cesar Millan and Victoria Stilwell (whose approaches, it must be said, are very different) do not mention any academic qualifications on their websites. Increasingly, however, there are moves on both sides of the Atlantic to introduce self-regulation at all levels. The biennial International Veterinary Behavior meetings and the
Journal of Veterinary Behavior
(neither, despite their names, restricted to veterinarians) are just
two of the ways in which new ideas and research are being exchanged internationally.

As a result of such exchanges, there is a growing consensus that the dog's supposed drive to “dominate” is, in fact, just a convenient myth for those who wish to continue physically punishing dogs—indeed, one that has been demolished by studies of both wolves and dogs. The wolf's natural social behavior is now known to be based on harmonious family loyalties, not on an overwhelming and incessant desire to take control. Could such a desire for control conceivably have been induced in dogs during the process of domestication? It seems much more likely that precisely the opposite must have happened, since dogs that showed a tendency to control their human hosts would have been selected against, deliberately or accidentally. Yet despite all the accumulating evidence, old habits are proving remarkably slow to die, in terms of both training and the perception of dog as wolf.
²⁵
Thankfully, there are now some signs that the tide is beginning to turn; for example, some rapport seems to be developing between the old-school and reward-based trainers; Cesar Millan has even asked Dr. Ian Dunbar to contribute to his book
Cesar's Rules
.
²⁶
The hope is that dogs will soon be universally portrayed as the utterly domesticated animals that they are, not as superficially cute animals disguising the demons that lurk within.

D
ogs are not born friendly to humans. No, that's not a misprint. Dogs are born to
become
friendly toward people, but this happens only if they meet friendly people while they're still tiny puppies. Scientists have known this for half a century, but the implications are still not universally applied or even widely appreciated. Today, many puppies are still raised for the pet market under impoverished conditions—conditions that predispose them to a life blighted by fear and anxiety, causing behavior that will not endear them to their owners or indeed anyone else they come across. Yet all this is entirely preventable.

Domestication has not adapted dogs to human environments; it has merely given them the means to adapt. Exposure to both people and man-made environments must occur in a gentle and gradual way to enable them to learn how to cope. This process starts in about the fourth week of their life and goes on for several months. If the exposure is either deficient or defective, the dog will develop deep-seated fears or anxieties that can be very difficult to eradicate later. Although some details of precisely how this happens have not yet been scientifically explored, the overall process of this “socialization” is well charted, and it is a tragedy that so many puppies do not receive enough experience of everyday life to allow them to cope adequately with their life among humans.

In 1961, a short paper appeared in
Science
that completely revolutionized our thinking about the bond between man and dog.
¹
In order
to study when puppies are most sensitive to exposure to people, researchers raised five litters of cocker spaniels and three litters of beagles in fields surrounded by a high fence, so that they never saw people—food and water were provided through holes in the fence. Then every other week from the time the puppies were two weeks old until they were two months old, a few of them were taken out to live indoors for a week's “holiday,” receiving one and a half hours of intensive contact with people each day. At the end of their week's socialization, they were put back in the field with their mother and littermates.

The timing of the “holiday” was absolutely crucial to how the puppies reacted to being handled. At two weeks old, they were too immature and sleepy to interact much, but the puppies taken out at three weeks were instantly attracted to the person looking after them. They would paw and mouth the researcher and play with the hem of his lab-coat. Five-week-old puppies were wary for a few minutes but soon started boisterously playing with the person. Seven-week-old puppies needed two
days
of coaxing before they could be persuaded to play, and nine-week-old puppies took even longer, becoming friendly as late as the second half of their week's holiday.

The timing of their first introduction to human contact was absolutely crucial to how the puppies reacted to people later on. All of the puppies in the experiment were taken out of the field when they were fourteen weeks old and at that point began to live with people like normal dogs. The five puppies that had spent all of their lives in the field
never
learned to trust people, even after months of intensive handling. The six that had been taken on “holiday” when they were only two weeks old and were then returned to the field for eleven weeks fared better: Though initially quite wary of people, they became somewhat friendly after a couple more weeks of gentle attention. All the other puppies were instantly friendly—remarkable, given that some had last seen a human over half their lifetime ago. The six that had not seen a person for ten weeks were initially difficult to leash-train, but training the others was straightforward.

Overall, the results indicated that puppies need some (but not very much) contact with people if they are to react in a friendly way toward
them. There also seems to be an optimum age for this contact to be effective. Two weeks old appears to be too early. Twelve weeks old is definitely too late; by this age the puppies observed in the study had become fearful of anything they had never been exposed to when they were younger. This implies a window of opportunity between about three weeks and ten or eleven weeks of age—what the scientists referred to as their “critical period.”

The idea of a “critical period” derives from a 1930s study by Nobel Prize–winning biologist Konrad Lorenz. Suspecting that some animals have to learn their mother's identity, rather than knowing it instinctively, Lorenz hand-raised a clutch of goslings. His prediction proved to be correct: Having never seen their mother, they adopted him as their “parent,” following him around like a pack of faithful hounds and paying no attention to their biological mother.

What Lorenz had discovered was the process now known as
filial imprinting
, whereby young animals learn the characteristics of their parents.
²
Geese will imprint onto the first moving object of about the right size that they encounter between approximately twelve and sixteen hours after hatching. In the wild, this is so likely to be the mother goose that the chances of anything going wrong are remote. It's essential to their survival that goslings know what their mother looks like; otherwise, they could easily stray away from the nest and perish. But why do they need to learn this? Wouldn't it be more sensible if they hatched with the mother's image already burned into their brains? Biologists have no definitive answer to such questions, but perhaps learning is simply easier; three-dimensional images are probably difficult to encode in DNA. In fact, studies show that young birds are born with
some
built-in guidelines for what to look out for—something that moves, makes bird-type noises, and has a head and neck. (But not much more than this: For example, if prevented from seeing their mother, domestic chicks will readily imprint onto a stuffed ferret.)

Lorenz originally conceptualized his “critical period” as a rigid timetable of events. In the gosling example this enables a young bird that is mobile within a few short hours of hatching, and unlikely to survive for long on its own, to quickly latch onto its mother. It's now known that there is more flexibility in this type of learning than was
first thought: Subsequent research has shown, for instance, that a gosling hatched in an incubator and kept away from its mother until it is thirty-six hours old can nonetheless bond to her immediately. Thus the timetable isn't quite as rigid as Lorenz originally thought it was, and for this reason these windows of opportunity for learning are nowadays usually referred to as “sensitive periods.” They seem to be modifiable according to circumstances, rather than coming to an abrupt end when a clock in the brain says they should. Nevertheless, it is true that eventually, after a few days, imprinting cannot be reactivated. The young bird's brain does not wait indefinitely for the mother bird to show up; that door does eventually close as the baby's brain matures.