How do you build a well-behaved dog?
Most dogs are getting shortchanged. Current programs are still stuck in 100-year-old dog training models.
The available tools most trainers use have some impact but never 100%… food luring, environmental enrichment, clickers, e-collars, reinforcement schedules, leash, collar, toys, punishments, positive reinforcements, critical periods, etc. The inventors, or followers of these inventors, of these tools have resulted in dog trainers who place too much faith in these tools, but real-life animals then thwart those things when put into practice. That has led to the marketing of systems for business purposes, making promises that can’t ever be kept.
The dog training world needs to get away from a.) gimmicks; b.) the typical, “do 10 repetitions of this, use this tool, and then provide this consequence at this frequency.”; and c.) doing something more than ringing the bell and causing the dog to salivate. Much more is possible. A question needs to be asked: what is the relationship between the behavior and physiological makeup of a dog? In other words, it is time to revisit the age-old mind/ body problem.
Here’s an example, and then think of how this might be applied to training dogs.
Example: In the hypothalamus, there are sensory cells that detect heat and cold. If you implant a device there and heat it up, it will cause sweating. If you cool it down, the animal will start to shiver. With a rat, if you cool it down, they will start to shiver. If you cool it down past a certain point, they will start building a nest or enlarge an existing one. Or, you can stress out a rat, and it will die young, often of various diseases.
Oh wow.
HINT: So… maybe a dog trainer can use physiology to influence behavior, and behavior to influence physiology? Oh yeah…
It is harder to study animal behavior than to implement a step-by-step program that all dogs are supposed to fit. This is why I say that the training needs to fit the dog, instead of making the dog fit the program. The ideal approach is to evaluate a dog correctly and then apply the right tools along the way to get the desired result. You also need to understand HOW and WHY the tools work.
B. F. Skinner famously stated, “we can predict and control behavior without knowing anything about what is happening inside.”
He was wrong.
There are a lot of components which must be considered to maximize the potential of any dog/ handler combination, and each has a unique solution. We can’t just keep thinking that good dog training is just doing stuff to dogs.