I was speaking with a new student yesterday who was trying to understand why so many trainers use different approaches. In her case, she has an under-socialized young adult dog that is fearful of new people and new situations.
One trainer she spoke with said that they were going to start the dog on an electric collar on the first lesson. I told her that made no sense at all. I posed a question: how do you make a dog feel safe with strangers using an aversive stimulus. Of course, that wouldn’t work, but this is how a lot of trainers approach this kind of situation.
Why would this be the case? I believe it is because the study of animal behavior is a relatively new endeavor. Let’s look at some historical landmarks…
Some ideas have come along the way, such as by Darwin in 1859 (and to a lesser degree, Alfred Wallace (1859)), proposing evolution as a philosophy of science. But other than postulating about why animals behaved in certain ways, not a lot was known at that time. Darwin didn’t understand much about inheritance of traits. He even assumed that what one animal learned as a habit today was passed on to offspring in future generations. And while he brought forth a robust discussion of these issues, much of what he was proposing was not, and still is not, testable by science since evolution is not a science but a philosophy of science. Thus, his works include descriptions of animal behavior as if those animals had thoughtful intentions, using human terms.
Next comes those like Freud who used introspection, meditating and puzzling out (psychoanalysis) why people thought and felt, to try and ferret out how thinking and behavior manifest. His first major book was in 1895. But introspection couldn’t be tested as it clearly was a very subjective approach and was challenged by those who wanted a science of psychology. Since animals couldn’t do introspection, it had little relevance to understanding much of animal behavior. Some useful concepts did result, such as considering the effects of early life experiences; drives; and the influences of interpersonal relationships.
In 1910 Konrad Most wrote his famous book, Training Dogs, which continued to be the basis for much of dog training for many decades and still has valid insights today.
We then move forward to the early significant research of Loeb (1912), Pavlov (1897), Thorndyke (1898), Watson (1913) and Skinner (1938). None of these theorists were studying animal behavior. They were studying and applying limited tests of how environmental stimuli affect the actions of living organisms, from simple orientations to stimuli to more elaborate stimulus/ response observations. What developed were a set of proposed laws of how one might understand the probabilities of what an organism might do when encountering different stimuli during various laboratory experiments. That information was very useful since it could be tested and led to ideas that we continue to use today to influence what living animals do and how to then predict and influence human actions. But none of this was a study of animal behavior. Instead, it was the beginnings of the development of a body of learning psychology methods and theories. The idea of instincts was mostly ignored, and behaviorism was closely defined as a companion to the study of physiology.
We now move forward to Tinbergen (1951) and Lorenz (1935) and their studies of instinct, which developed into the field of ethology. Their work harkened back to many of the ideas about instinct proposed by Darwin and even Freud. Many useful concepts were identified and later tested, such as the influence of imprinting, reflected in the research of Scott and Fuller on dogs (1965). The goal of ethology has been to describe the biology of behavior, which required scientists to move out of the sterile laboratory atmosphere into nature and to seek to observe and describe the variety of behaviors of the animal kingdom… and answer, “why”?
In 1960, Jane Goodall began her study of chimpanzee social behavior.
The Koehler Method dog training book was written in 1962.
By the late 1960’s, dog trainers were re-evaluating their methods and looking ahead to how to better train dogs. In the early 1970’s, Helmut Raiser wrote Der Schutzhund, applying the concepts of drive to working dog training. Now, behavior was becoming more important again.
Around 1975 zoos started implementing environmental enrichment for captive animals. The sterile environments of the typical zoo resulted in early deaths because of extreme stress.
In 1980, Temple Grandin wrote two influential papers regarding beef cattle behavior during handling, and then later works developing improved, lower stress methods for managing cattle in slaughterhouses. Back again to the study of behavior, yet still very rudimentary.
Beginning in 1986, Mech started his studies of wolves on Ellesmere Island.
In the early 1990’s, we saw the popularization of clicker training by Karen Pryor. This was the application of behaviorism to animal training. But it wasn’t the application of the study of instinctual behaviors. (I have heard, but not verified, that Leon Whitney was instrumental to the introduction of clicker training as a concept.)
And then fast forward to today: the study of instinctual animal behavior has been hit and miss for a long time. We only have bits and pieces of the puzzle but not an entire picture. A considerable amount of research involving dogs has been performed by the pharmaceutical and medical research industries, but most of that has not been directly useful in the progress of improving dog training. Behavioral research of dogs was also considered beneath the dignity of university researchers, so much of the early work was done on wild animals. Thus, we see a heavy influence of behaviorism when dog trainers approach problems, and very little application of behavioral research into dealing with dog problems. In my opinion, there isn’t enough good behavioral information that is widely understood about dogs. Thus, it is easier to put a shock collar on a dog, or use a clicker with some treats, than to try and figure out the underlying reasons why a dog is doing this or that and to come up with a different solution. This is also why the public can be sold into ideas like “dog whispering”, which in my opinion has no solid basis in research science.
I see dogs where a behaviorism approach failed and only made the situation worse. But that is understandable when you look at the timeline of where most of the research efforts have been done. Instinctive behavior hasn’t been prioritized; I think in part because it isn’t so easily tested in a laboratory. Instead, a lot of that work must be done in the way that Jane Goodall studies chimpanzees, and the way that Scott and Fuller studied dogs, and the money and interest in that kind of work isn’t available. I observe that even the membership organizations that dog trainers join more emphatically emphasize and test behaviorism applications rather than dog behavior research and application. The same is true with the certified veterinarian dog behaviorists, who seem to know more about drugs, operant conditioning and classical conditioning, but lack understanding of animal instincts. You can see it clearly in the papers they write.
So, what is a dog owner to do these days? That’s a tough question to answer since they don’t know what is authoritative, current, and humane, and so they can only ask that the trainers they use limit the application of aversives unless clearly warranted and be skeptical regarding descriptions of this or that reason why their dogs are misbehaving. In other words, they are just going to have to trust their guts when making those choices. This is also why we are seeing so many countries applying nonsensical laws to dog training: they are operating off obsolete knowledge and emotional public appeals and complaints. Because they are afraid of making mistakes, more mistakes are being made. We now have the “all positive” training mandates, which are not based upon good science. Dogs, owners and the public are being harmed as a result.
For now, look at the limited amount of time in the past 2 centuries studying instinctual behavior. It is hard to understand because we don’t fully understand anything we haven’t studied enough. Much of what is generally known is rudimentary and not very useful. The only way to get ahead of this is for a trainer to do as much animal instinctual behavior study as is feasible. It can be accessed, but it takes a lot of effort to cull through a wide variety of sources to amalgamate good answers, and to then devise good solutions.
In the end, let’s address this: are their good dog trainers out there with sufficient knowledge? Yes. Will they be hard to find? Yes.