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Should you ever punish?
Unfortunately, punishment is still frequently a first-line or an early-use tool by both the general public and traditional dog trainers, despite the well documented, scientifically based studies regarding the adverse effects and difficulties in administering punishment effectively. Even when punishment seems mild, in order for it to be effective it often must elicit a strong fear response, and this fear response often becomes generalized to the presence of people, (most often owners), environments, other species and things that look and sound similar to the punishment.
One of most important problems with punishment is that, not only does it fail to tell the animal what it can do; it doesn’t address the fact that the undesirable behaviour occurs because it has been reinforced – either intentionally or unintentionally. Punishment only suppresses (or ‘stuns’) behaviour. It does not address the underlying cause, therefore behaviour will either continue or be expressed in a different form.
As a trainer, it is my primary responsibility to ensure that you, your dog and the general public remain safe. I will give you safe, effective learning tools, which are up to date with current best practice policy, to enable you to successfully train your dog without the use of fear, intimidation or coercion. This involves following these guidelines: - First, do no harm - Withdraw attention
- Management
- Remove access to desired object / environment / activity
Punish your dog and these 6 behaviours will happen in this order (and they can be reliably observed and measured): - ANXIETY - FEAR - ESCAPE - AVOIDANCE - AGGRESSION - LEARNED HELPLESSNESS Behavioural science has documented that continued use of inescapable punishment teaches the dog to do literally nothing – to be helpless. As punishment escalates, the intensity of the dog’s reactions will increase from anxiety through to learned helplessness. If the intensity of the punishment is so high with no escape possible, all mammals will go into learned helplessness. You may still be wondering why, as many times as you have punished him for getting into the garage, chewing your shoes, etc, he hasn’t learned to leave it alone. The answer is: He thinks he is getting punished for you coming home, being in the room, etc. Not for anything he may have been doing earlier.
My question for you is: Given how many times your dog has gotten into the garbage, jumped on visitors, etc, why haven't you found a way to manage the behaviour or change the environment so he can no longer do it?
When you resort to physical punishment, you are no longer training, only giving in to an emotional response. This constitutes abuse…. not training and is the greatest threat to the human-animal bond today.
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