Ooh… a dog trainer just told you about their dopamine method or tool. Must be some kind of Jedi Master dog training guru stuff, right?
Well, for me, it gets a bit tiresome to hear dog trainers toss around the term, “dopamine”, as if they are knowledgeable about brain chemistry, and can then use that knowledge to help you addict your dog to their training protocols or tools and buy their programs.
Let’s start here.
Brain chemistry is in its infancy. So, even the top scientists in the world don’t understand how it works and tell of paradoxical experimental results. More is going on that just dopamine and neuronal dopamine receptors. Genetically altered (knock-out) animals don’t always perform as expected, and neither do the drug experiments. Much of the focus is on ADHD, for example. Not training dogs.
So, what usefulness can you get from reading a bit about dopamine? If anything, the best you are going to get is that the dopamine circuits of the brain are involved when a dog’s needs and drives are activated by noticeable and predictive stimuli.
In other words, if what you are doing with a dog has a noticeable reward value, then they are going to be interested in getting that reward and will possibly learn something along the way. So, use tasty treats and other rewards that the dog wants, and you have a good chance of teaching a dog something.
That means you don’t need to be awed when someone tosses around that “dopamine” word. You were doing that stuff all along. Everyone tries various ways to reward dogs, so they learn.
Dopamine has become a marketing buzzword to sell dog training programs and devices.
There are bigger fish to fry, more important concepts you need to learn and implement. You are a long way from having a trained dog, and this is going to be a mostly fruitless detour.
Plan accordingly.