E206: 샤론 캐럴(Sharon Carroll) - "행동 수정(B-Mod)에 관하여"

enter the nose work competition scene one day. It won't be any time soon, but one day. And then I've got Vincent. He's my baby boy. He's 20 months now. He's another standard poodle. He gets to work on everything. He's probably nearly ready to have a go in the ring in Rally and Obedience. He's got a couple of team titles. He's got his champion trick dog title, and he's doing a bit of nose works training. And I started some tracking training with him recently with Lucy Newton going through the tracking course. And that's a new sport to me, so that's really exciting. I've been enjoying that. Vincent's a lot of fun. He's a really great dog to work with. Yeah, both my poodles, they're a bit low energy, really. And I sort of have to plan my training session super carefully so I can fit in all the training without exhausting them or reducing their enthusiasm for training. So I've no doubt there'll be a new puppy joining us this year, which is pretty exciting. Trying to make that super tough decision whether to change breeds or not. Poodles here aren't recognised as retrievers or gun dogs or working dogs, so they're really not bred for that. And you don't even see many in the obedience ring. Most of the breeders here focus on confirmation and also breeding for therapy work and assistance dog work. And I'd really love to have a dog maybe with a bit more energy. It kind of pushed me to work a bit. I used to compete with working line border collies. So it's a big jump from those to where I am now with the poodles. But I do love the poodles. And it does look like Vincent's full system might have a litter this year. And that might just be too tempting. So I probably will have another poodle next time you talk to me. That's exciting. Puppies are very exciting. Yes. Yeah. So the plan is to talk BMOD today. So I thought it would make sense to maybe start with kind of a rough definition. I think BMOD short for behavior modification. So I guess it makes sense to kind of start there. What is behavior modification? And how does it really factor into dog training as a whole? Yeah. There's actually no definitive line between dog training and behavior modification. I mean, there's that bit of a blanket idea that people have that in behavior modification, we're modifying existing behaviors, whereas in dog training, we're creating new behaviors. But you can see that gets a bit hazy pretty quickly, because certainly in dog training, even in our competition training, sometimes maybe we have a dog that's coming in crooked in its fronts. And we strategize to fix that and have the dog come in straight. And we're modifying behavior.

And conversely, of course, quite often in behavior modification, what we're actually doing is creating new behaviors to replace those existing behaviors that we don't want. So I guess from a practical perspective for me, if a potential client rings up and says, I have a dog that I'd like to be able to do XYZ behavior, then I would consider that a dog training sort of situation. Whereas if I have a potential client ring up and say, my dog is already doing XYZ and I really need it to stop. And usually they're going to be things like digging, barking, biting, escape behaviors, leash reactivity, and so forth. Usually there's going to be a significant emotional component on the part of the dog. Usually the behavior is going to be driven by some sort of need within the dog. So when I sort of put all that together, that's what I would tend to refer to as something that's a behavior modification case. I think when BMOD comes up, so do a lot of like other phrases that are kind of, for lack of a better term, you know, we hear them all the time, but maybe don't necessarily know exactly what they mean. So things like desensitization, habituation, counter-conditioning, pre-MAC, you know, those kind of things. Can you just give us a little insight into maybe what some of those things have to do with behavior modification or how they compare? Kind of talk about that a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So to look at the technical sort of definitions of the terms, habituation really refers to that process of response reduction. So where the dog or the individual is actually responding less and less progressively to the same stimulus. Desensitization techniques are the methods we use to achieve habituation. And then if we were to look at, say, two examples of desensitization techniques, they may be systematic desensitization and counter-conditioning. But if we wanted to look at it more practically and have a look at those three, most of the time when people talk habituation as a behavior modification strategy, really what they're referring to is encouraging that natural process of habituation to occur. So we know our dog, for example, can walk past our dining room table and it just doesn't respond. It's not finding it particularly exciting. It's not finding it particularly fear-inducing. It just has no change in arousal and no change in behavior associated with that because it's habituated to it. We know for us humans, we can walk down the street. We can walk past other humans. We can walk past vehicles going by. And unless something particularly catches our eye for a very specific reason, we are just

going to walk past them. We're not going to have an emotional response. We're not going to have a change in arousal or a change in behavior because we're habituated to that. Now, in behavior modification, what we tend to look at for habituation is how can we use this sort of concept to prevent behavior issues from occurring? So if we want a dog that we picture as an adult dog is going to be able to walk down the street or walk through the park and it's going to be able to walk past other dogs and walk past unknown people and not have a big change in arousal or a big change in behavior, then we really need to set that situation up. That dog needs lots and lots of practice at simply walking past dogs and people and nothing fear-inducing happening and nothing exciting happening. And the dog will habituate to going past them and be able to walk past on a nice loose leash and have no change in arousal or change in behavior. Where it tends to go wrong is a lot of people are so enthusiastic about giving their dogs all these positive experiences that they encourage their dog to go up to every dog or every stranger. The problem then is what we're doing is drawing attention to those dogs, for example. And so our dog now starts to predict dogs as exciting things to interact with. And so it wanders up to one and has a fun encounter and wanders up to the next one. And next thing, it's actually pulling us towards dogs because it just sees them as very fun and exciting things. And so instead of reacting in the presence of dogs, now it's reacting several meters from dogs. And now it's looking for dogs so that it can start to get excited. And at that point, we're going to see a dog that's potentially leaping up and down, lunging, barking, crying, pulling us towards other dogs or people. And that gives us our own set of problems. But then beyond that, what happens when we block the dog from performing that behavior? Then potentially we get frustration from the dog. So then that adds to our existing arousal. Then we have a risk for the dog to tip over into aggression. They can turn around and start attacking the leash. They can attack the handler or start to bite the handler when they're trying to restrain them. And they certainly can snap at the dog if they finally make contact with the dog, purely because they've become so aroused that they tip over into aggression. So when we talk about habituation in behavior modification, it's usually people are usually referring to how can we use that basic concept to prevent behavioral issues from occurring.

Then if we look at systematic desensitization, that refers to that gradual habituation to an arousing stimulus. So we commonly use that in behavior modification when the problem is caused by an inappropriate arousal. Really doesn't matter the valence of that arousal. So the dog can be super excited or it can be super fearful. Really doesn't matter. What we're trying to do is reduce that arousal response. And we do that by gradually exposing the dog to low levels of that stimulus that it can cope with. And then steadily decreasing that distance only when the animal reliably fails to react at the previous level. So we want to get to a zone where the dog kind of notices the other dog's there. But we don't get a big change in arousal. We don't get a big change in behavior. The dog can still listen to us. It can still take treats. We hang out in that zone until the dog's so comfortable that it really hasn't even noticed that that other dog's there. And then we get a little closer. And over time, we get a little closer, a little closer. Eventually, we're in the immediate presence of the original stimulus. And in this way, the technique aims to raise the threshold for the response. Then if we look at counter conditioning, that's when we're exposing individuals to repeated stimulus pairings of the opposite valence. So negative and positive. So the practical use of this in dog training is that we might have a dog with a negative valence emotion like fear. And instead of that dog seeing that stimulus and just feeling fear, what we're going to do is pair that situation or pair that stimulus with us perhaps giving food, something positive. So now, after several repetitions where the dog is given food in the presence of the stimulus, then the stimulus itself starts to predict that good things are going to happen for the dog. And so often that systematic desensitization and counter conditioning most commonly are grouped together in some form and are worked as one basic principle. And then I think the other one you mentioned was a PREMAC principle. This one is thrown around a lot when it comes to behavior modification. The basic principle is that it's the relative theory of reinforcement. It really suggests that we can use behaviors to reinforce other behaviors. And what it states is that the more probable behaviors will reinforce the less probable behaviors.

So really simple example, I think, a way to explain this is if you have a child that loves ice cream but doesn't really like vegetables and you put down a bowl of vegetables and a bowl of ice cream, by free choice, given complete free choice, what's the more probable behavior and what's the less probable behavior? Well, more probable behavior is eating ice cream. But if we instead made the eating the ice cream contingent upon eating the vegetables, so if we said we're going to make the opportunity to perform that more probable behavior contingent upon doing that lower probability behavior, so you have to eat your vegetables before you can eat your ice cream, then we're more likely to see the lower probability behavior occur. And that's exactly what happens with our dogs. to reinforce the less probable behavior. Now, the only thing I would say that I often see happen when people talk about using the pre-made principle in their training is that you have to remember that you are encouraging that high probability behavior. Every time you use it as a reinforcer, you're encouraging that high probability behavior. So just make sure that that high probability behavior is a behavior you actually want. You don't just go, my dog loves doing X, Y, Z. My dog loves, you know, chasing birds or my dog loves chasing bicycles. So I have to put that into a pre-made principle. No, you don't. You don't have to. You can use other strategies to create impulse control around those things. So, yeah, always make sure that the high probability behavior is a behavior you actually do want and you want to encourage. And the other thing I'd say is make sure that your high probability behavior supports your lower probability behavior. And by that, I'm talking arousal levels. So if I want my dog to remain calm and lay on its mat while bicycles are going by and things like that, that might be a low probability behavior for some dogs. So I need to reinforce that with another low arousal behavior. So my high probability behavior in that case might be eating. So I might reinforce that low probability behavior of remaining calm in that setting by giving the dog a treat. Whereas what I'm not going to do is say, wow, you've remained calm for so long, I'm going to jump up and play tug with you. Because now you've got your high probability behavior not supporting your low probability. After many successions of that, the dog won't actually be laying calmly on the mat.

It might be laying on the mat, but it's going to be laying there with its tongue hanging out, its eyes popping out of its head, because it's anticipating that really exciting high probability behavior, that reinforcement of tugging. So just make sure that your high probability behavior arousal-wise supports your lower probability behavior. So I kind of threw some phrases around there and asked you to talk about them. But I know you're kind of doing a webinar on this stuff next week. So, you know, what protocols or processes are you kind of talking about in the webinar? Can you give us kind of the one-on-one version of that right now? Yeah, absolutely. So we're talking about five protocols. So we're talking about often durational engagement, which is essentially my version of putting together some systematic desensitization, a counter conditioning component, and also an operant training component. So a component where we actually are reinforcing certain behaviors individually as well. So we have often durational engagement. We have distraction, which is sort of active management. That's sort of what to do when things go wrong. So if we notice our dog is starting to increase in arousal or starting to change in behavior, we might want to jump in with some distraction. Or if we see that a situation is about to happen that the dog's not yet ready to cope with, we might jump in with some distraction. We talk about stationing, which is sort of that stay behavior, usually includes staying on a mat or a platform or a bed. Maybe it might even just be stationed with the handler. We talk about reinforcement of an incompatible behavior. So, for example, if we have a dog that's jumping up on us, it can't be jumping up on us and have four feet on the floor. So if we reinforce the incompatible behavior of four feet on the floor, we end up with a dog that's now got four feet on the floor in our presence instead of jumping up on us. And the last one we talk about is management. Management is where you just do something to stop the behavior or avoid the behavior from occurring entirely. So if you have a dog that triggers when it sees other dogs and you avoid triggers, you just avoid going places where there might be dogs, that's a management strategy. Or if you know your dog's going to jump up on guests at the door and get really excited and just decide to put the dog in another room, that would be a management strategy. Management strategies aren't aimed at changing future behavior as such. They're not a training strategy.

But they are really useful as part of a behavior modification program because we stop the practicing of that unwanted behavior. And I would also say it's important to note that sometimes it's okay to just use management long term. People often feel like they're some sort of failed dog trainer if they decide to use management in certain situations. But really, you know, especially if it's something that comes about very rarely, you know, if you have your grandkids over visiting not very often and only a few times of the year do they actually use the swimming pool. But when they are in the swimming pool, they're running around and giggling and splashing. Your dog is going to run the pool fence barking at them. But that's the only time you kind of does it. Then, you know, take the dog, pop him in a nice quiet room, give him something to chew on. Problem solved. News management. Don't put all your effort into retraining that if you don't need to. So if those are kind of the solutions you're talking about, I know you've given me a little bit of this already, but, you know, what problems are we really looking at that these types of things can help us solve? What behaviour issues are you kind of talking through, you know, in the course of the webinar? Yeah. So I think if you have those sort of five protocols in your toolbox, you know, if you have your offered duration engagement, your distraction, your stationing, your reinforcement of an incompatible behaviour, and your management, if you know how and when to use those, you're probably going to be able to deal with almost all behaviour issues. But in this webinar, we certainly do cover a lot of different issues. When people were asked for what issues they wanted covered, we ended up with a giant list. So I think we've got something like 17 behaviours to look at. But we're going to include things like leash reactivity, off-leash dog-to-dog behaviour issues, transport issues, both the loading issues and the travelling issues themselves, separation-related problems, sound sensitivity. Fence running and barking, hypervigilance in the home, dogs that are uncomfortable around strangers, overexcitement when you get the leash or the collar or the harness out, counter-surfing, jumping up on guests, attention-seeking during meals. I think that must be about it. Oh, no, actually, we also look at dogs that reject treats. And the reason I really wanted to look at that is that's a really big stumbling block for a lot of people. So they really do want to get involved in dog training or they want to modify some behaviour, some existing behaviour.

But they think they can't because their dog won't take treats. And so we look at the issues that cause that to happen to help those people out, hopefully. We also look at the opposite problem, the dogs that over-arouse to treats or training. As soon as they see the training situation setting up, they get really excited or certainly over-arouse for one reason or another. And we also talk about strategies for building confidence in those super fearful dogs, those dogs that genuinely almost can't sort of leave the home or can't come out from under the bed. So, yeah, there's lots of things we can use those protocols for. Yeah, I mean, that's quite a list. Would you be willing to kind of talk us through one of those as an example, kind of how you'd approach changing one of those using kind of the protocols you mentioned? Yeah, sure. Let's look at sound sensitivity because it's probably one that is not covered as often as maybe, you know, leash reactivity or something. Sound sensitivity can be fear-based. It most commonly is going to be fear-based. But you can get dogs that are just over-aroused or stimulated by a certain sound. It really doesn't matter what valence that emotion is, whether the dog is fearful or whether it's excited. What we go ahead and do is use that offered durational engagement, so that element of systematic desensitisation, element of counter conditioning. When we talk about the systematic desensitisation with these guys, though, like with these sound sensitive dogs, of course, we're not talking about decreasing distance the same way we were from those visual triggers. We're talking about reducing volume. Reducing the intensity means reducing volume. So we can lower the volume directly if the device that's causing the noise can just have the volume lowered on it. And we can start with those performing that offered durational engagement in the presence of incredibly low volume and then slowly build that intensity up. If it's a device that we can't lower the volume on directly, we can try increasing distance from the object that's emitting the sound because obviously that inherently lowers the volume. Or what we can do as well is we can actually record that noise, maybe on our phone or something, and then replay it back on our phone. That way we can control the volume. So say it's a microwave or a blender or a washing machine, something that's making a noise, we can't control the volume. We can record that sound and then use the recording of that sound in our desensitisation program and build that volume up towards the real-life volume.

And another thing we can do with that recording type thing is that we can change the environment as well because just say we have a dog that every time the doorbell rings, the dog just straight away pretty much goes past threshold. It's out of control. There's barking. There's running. There's excitement. And the person says to me, I really just don't know where to start. I can't even get in there. And you go, oh, well, you can record it and you can play it quieter and straightaway the dog still runs to the door. It's, well, let's take that recording to a park. Well, let's take it somewhere else that's a different setting and let's start our desensitisation there because that's going to straightaway interrupt that pattern that the dog has. So it's going to hear the doorbell, but it can't run to the door because there's no door. So you're going to have time to get in there and get some training done and then shift back to doing it in the home setting. I love that idea of taking it to the park. That's fantastic. You kind of teased in there, leash reactivity is more common. Maybe it's talked about a little bit, but I'd still love to talk about it if you're up for it. You know, how do you approach barking, lunging at people, at dogs, that kind of thing? Yeah. Yeah. I think leash reactivity is seriously the big one. I think a lot of behaviour modification work for behaviour consultants works around leash reactivity. Yes. But partly because, you know, sometimes it's been inadvertently created, but not always. Certainly there's some other reasons why it can happen. So when we're talking about it, that sort of thing, we're talking about a dog that's lunging and whining, crying, barking, potentially growling. So, you know, it can be all sorts of different vocalisation. It may be directed at another dog. It might be a person, a car, an animal, a bicycle, a skateboard. There are a variety of underlying emotions and motivations, and it's kind of important at some point to work out what's really driving this behaviour, because it certainly can affect how we're going to address it from a behaviour modification point of view. So some common examples of what might drive this behaviour will be things like something that's fear or anxiety-based, something that's frustration-based, something that's stimulated by just the fast movement or the sound. It can be predatory behaviour. It can just be purely high arousal or excitement within the dog itself before the trigger even presents. So it can be state-driven. It can have owner-guarding behaviours. It can have genetically-based dog aggression issues.

There's lots of reasons why a dog might decide to lunge and bark. We start with that often durational engagement, so using that desensitisation and counter-conditioning and instilling some new behaviours in the dog. But we don't usually, or for me, I don't usually start with a stationed behaviour of any sort, unless I really absolutely know where this is coming from. Because if it's a fear-based behaviour, the last thing I want to do is be asking the dog to sit and sort of stay sitting in front of me while I'm, you know, working with the dog or something, because I want that dog to feel free to avoid or escape or give me information. So I don't start with a stationed behaviour. However, once the dog is mostly not reacting to the previously triggering stimulus, then I'm going to consider adding a stationed behaviour. The reason I'm going to do this is because if the behaviour is purely fear-based, so if the dog is just performing the barking, lunging behaviour because it was scared of that stimulus, then once we go through our desensitisation and our counter-conditioning, the dog's not fearful anymore, guess what, behaviour just completely disappears and we don't need to do any more than that. But if there's a desire component involved, if the dog is actually chasing the bike because it likes chasing bikes or because, you know, it's got an owner-guarding behaviour and people come near the owner and it's lunging and barking because of that. So there's a component that's not fear-based but it's actually driven by desire on the part of the dog. Then just desensitising and counter-conditioning won't be enough. It won't help because what will happen is, yes, it's really good at helping with impulse control. It's really good at getting the dog literally desensitised to that stimulus being present. However, it's still going to just leap out and perform the behaviour when the object gets close because you haven't told it not to. So it's still going to perform that behaviour because it wasn't just driven by fear. So at that point we often have to add a heavily reinforced station behaviour. So that might be just sitting in the heel position, it might be sitting in the straddle position. So we're saying to the dog, now we've put that work in to help you with your impulse control. We've desensitised you to the presence of these stimulus that you used to find incredibly stimulating and arousing. So now we've put that work in but on top of that, guess what, I need you to perform this behaviour in the presence of these things and I'm going to heavily reinforce your ability to do that.

So we do have to a little bit at some point often tease out why the behaviour is occurring just so we can get the exact right behaviour modification approach. And I know we were kind of talking about that, you know, in some of our back and forth before this, before actually doing the call and hitting your record. And I know kind of another component that you mentioned was this idea that clients will, you know, have a dog that maybe barks and lunges once and then they see what they think is the same trigger again and they get a different response. You know, less or none or something else. And that you said you kind of have clients ask about that all the time. Do you want to kind of talk about that a little bit too? Yeah, yeah, of course. So it is a common question. It's a super common question. I think this is because as humans, we try to work out why the dog's doing it. So we go, our dog's lunging at bicycles. Okay. But why does it sometimes lunge at bicycles and not other times? Or, you know, our dog's lunging at other dogs and we're looking for a specific thing. Is it big dogs? Is it small dogs? Is it fluffy dogs? You know, we're trying to work out is there an obvious visual trigger that we can predict? And often there is. But there are lots of times where there isn't. So it can be that the dog is perceiving something that's definitely there that we just don't perceive because we're humans. So maybe there is a certain scent that triggers the dog or a certain sound or maybe there's something visual that we're just not perceiving. But also it often is that there's a different energy level or behaviour of that stimulus. So, for example, maybe an old Labrador flopping on by. It's nice low arousal, not really that interested. It wanders by and it doesn't trigger our dog. But maybe a little toy poodle goes past and it's quite active and it's trotting along and it's a bit more energised. Maybe it's having a bark and a leak in the air and that might trigger our dog. And then people at that point, if it's the first time they see it, they go, oh, it's small dogs. No, not necessarily because the next time a really nice slow dog, a small dog with low arousal might wander past. We don't get that behaviour. Equally, sometimes some people, they approach the dog in a nice, calm, relaxed way and they're very casual and they don't make a big approach on the dog and you don't get a response. But then another person might be all excited and they approach the dog quicker or they approach with a higher energy or they talk in a nice, high-pitched voice and the dog does trigger.

And so it can be the different energy level or the different behaviour of the stimulus itself. It can also be trigger stacking, which a lot of people are familiar with. So that's, for example, we head out the door, a dog sees a bicycle, it doesn't react. But then a few houses later, some dogs run at the fence line and bark at it. And then a little while later, some small children go running past. Then we get to the next corner and a bicycle goes past. And now a dog does lunge at the bicycle. So it can just be that trigger stacking effect, which is essentially increasing arousal. It's just sort of arousal is very accumulative in dogs. So, you know, it's whether it's positive or negative, it all just adds into the one pot. But another thing to know is it can be completely state-driven by the dog, meaning that your own dog, when it's at low arousals, may not react. And when it's at a higher arousal, it might react. So if, for example, we're going for a nice, relaxed, sniffy walk and the dog's at a very low arousal level and the dog goes trotting on by, it may not react. Or it might sort of look up and increase its arousal a little bit. Nothing big happens. But then the next time we maybe have just finished playing tug with our dog or playing fetch with our dog or been running and the dog's a bit more aroused and then a dog goes by and it might turn around and snap at that dog. So it may be that the dog's own arousal state is what's driving the difference. I think it's also maybe worth just kind of talking briefly about, you know, kind of the elephant in the room anytime behavior modification comes up. So this idea of intentional fallout and why, you know, positive reinforcement is so powerful when we're talking about behavior modification. Can you kind of address that? Yeah, yeah, sure. That's a tough question, Melissa. Because I know I'm going to have to use the word punishment in there. People hate that word and I don't want to be linked with that word. But I do agree with you. I'm guessing what you're referring to here is the fairly frequent use of punishment-based approaches to address behavior issues in behavior modification. It's certainly not the modern approach, but it is still common out there in wider society. And certainly for me, most clients, when I talk to them, they've either tried some sort of punishment-based approach to fix the problem, or they've at least had people tell them how to fix the dog's issue with a punishment-based approach.

I guess it's still there because it is the traditional approach and often information like dog training is just passed on generationally within a home. Certainly for me, you know, my parents are in their 80s now, so it's a long while ago that I was a small child. But certainly in the home that I grew up in, dogs were absolutely chastised. You know, if they toileted in the house, someone would chase them around with a rolled-up newspaper or rub their nose in it. If they put their feet on the kitchen bench, someone would bang the kitchen bench loudly or yell at them. So, you know, for a lot of people, that's the exposure they've had growing up. And then they got a dog and then they used those techniques and then their kids got dogs and they used those techniques. And I think for us in the dog training community or in the dog world, we sort of think everything's progressed so much. But it's important to note that a lot of pet owners feel the need to go and seek out new information. The information they have kind of has served them well usually. And so they just sort of continue along that path, not really meaning to, maybe not even realising that there is new information out there. I guess the other problem with punishment behaviour, punishment-based protocols, is that they do work, unfortunately, in lots of cases. You know, or they at least appear to work. They do stop the behaviour initially. So if that punishment is not contingent, obviously it's never going to work. So, you know, rubbing our dog's nose in its toileted area is never going to work. And, you know, if we come home and there's rubbish spread everywhere from the trash can and it's hours later and we try to explain to the dog what it did, then certainly that's never going to work. So when punishment's not contingent, it's never going to work. But if the punishment is contingent on the behaviour, so every time the dog puts its front feet up on the kitchen bench, someone bangs the bench really loudly and frightens the dog, then certainly that is going to essentially work. You know, after a few repetitions, the dog's going to stop putting its feet on the bench. What I would say is when we say punishment-based training works, we have to define works. We have to define, you know, what are we really talking about when we say it works? Well, it might stop that behaviour then and there, but what's the fallout for us, like for me, I think we need to factor in the dog's mental health. I think we need to factor in the impact of those techniques on the relationship between us and the dog,

the impact of those techniques on the future learning of the dog. We know that punishment-based training can affect future learning or how they learn. Also, I think when people are saying that punishment-based training works, they're probably not factoring in the potential fallout, so the fact that we can actually get new problems created by the punishment. And for me, I'd say, why do it? Like, why would we do it? Positive punishment, by definition, needs to be aversive. It has to be aversive enough to stop the behaviour. So it needs to be really unpleasant, usually fear-inducing and intimidating or painful. And why would we want to do that to our dogs if we could achieve the same or better results without making our dog feel uncomfortable or fearful or confused or conflicted? And, of course, some of these techniques don't work, and that's probably what keeps me in a job, is when people have tried these techniques and they haven't worked for them. So sometimes people do manage to fix one of the unwanted behaviours, but because they just targeted the actual behaviour instead of the reason for the behaviour, they just often get a new unwanted behaviour. Or due to the punishment-based approach, the dog's arousal increases. Then we might get some redirecting onto the owner. We might end up with a situation where the dog's biting the owner now because of the punishment-based approach. That's because if the dog was performing the behaviour due to fear and then we just add more fear and intimidation and pain on the dog, well, you know, we're going to end up with a dog that basically is going to lash out because at that point it's trapped and it really doesn't see an alternative. Another time I commonly see things go wrong is when a fearful dog has been asked to station and it just can't cope with being pinned to the spot. And certainly we know ourselves, I mean, I see this happen frequently. These are what people would term the without-warning attacks when, you know, behaviours have been extinguished, those warning behaviours have been extinguished. So if you were to say to me, like, I'm really scared of spiders and I would say, well, I'm going to put a spider on your arm, you'd probably say, no, you're not, I'm going to leave. But if I said to you, well, you know what, I'm going to hit you with an electric cattle prod if you leave. Okay, well, there's a fair bit of an incentive for you to stay still while I put that spider on your arm. Now, if you just don't like spiders, you're probably going to cope. You're not going to enjoy it. You're going to forever feel horrible about the experience,

but you are going to cope. But if you really, really are scared of spiders, there's going to be a point that you're going to break. And it might be as I place it on your arm, or it might be when that spider starts crawling, or it might be when I put it on your face, not your arm. There's going to be a personal threshold that you can't tolerate. And then because you've tried to suck it up for so long, you're in such a high arousal state that when you react, it's really ugly. You're going to throw that spider across the room. You're going to scream. You don't care about the cattle prod anymore. And that's exactly what happens with these dogs that have been asked to sit there. You know, they're scared of children approaching maybe. They've been told to sit. They try to move. They've been corrected for that. They curl their lip. They get corrected for that. They growl. They get corrected for that. So in the end, they're just sitting there sucking it up. And if they can tolerate it, that dog forever may never lash out at a child. But it's forever going to be very uncomfortable. But if that dog does have a breaking point, maybe the child touches the dog. Or maybe the dog can cope with that, but it can't cope with a big hug around the neck. Or it can't cope with being stared at eye to eye. Or maybe two children come running at once. There's going to be a personal breaking point for some dogs. And when they do go at that point, it's really ugly just like it is with us and the spider. So at that point, they just lash out. They don't care about the correction. They will just react. And it can get pretty ugly. And that's where those big without warning attacks come from. And then I guess when we're training new behaviours, it always seems so straightforward and obvious to use rewards-based training, especially for the people that are in the dog training world. But when trying to get rid of a behaviour, it's a bit of a human thing to just get tunnel vision and only see that we're trying to get rid of a behaviour. So we start looking at ways to stop that behaviour. And punishment is kind of intuitive for humans in that situation. Like even if we took a person who'd never owned a dog before and we told them that their goal was to get the dog to stay out of the kitchen, the first thing they do is just yell at that dog or chase it when it came in the kitchen. You know, equally if we said to that person, I want you to teach this dog to not jump up on you, the first thing they're going to do is just yell at the dog or push it away. So punishment sort of based training, it doesn't require, it's intuitive for humans.

We know how to stop something from happening. But if I was to give that same person a bag of treats and then say to that person, now I want you to stop the dog from jumping up on you, but you can't use an aversive, you can only use these treats, they literally would not know what to do because using rewards-based training requires knowledge and understanding and thought that just isn't required if we're prepared to use punishment. So punishment is sort of the easier option if you don't need, because you don't need that same knowledge base. And unfortunately, behaviour modification is where the aversives often still come out, even from the more modern dog trainers, because many people just can't get past the fact that we're usually trying to stop a behaviour in behaviour modification. And by definition, that's what the punishment quadrants are all about. They're about reducing the occurrence of behaviour. Whereas behaviour specialists, instead, we're going to focus on adjusting the conditions that lead to the undesirable behaviour, so the behaviour is less likely to occur, or we're going to replace the current behavioural response with a different response and then heavily reinforce that. It is hard, though, to see so many people still reach for punishment-based strategies when attempting to modify behaviours. It surely just isn't necessary. I honestly believe they're effective rewards-based approaches for every situation. But yeah, tough question, though, Lisa. So I hope I answered that question in a kind of useful way. Yeah, I totally think so. I have one last question for you here, Sharon. So it's the one I always end on. You know, what's something that you've learned or that maybe you've been reminded of recently when it comes to training? Yeah, OK. Well, I just got reminded of this very recently. And that is how often the dog is learning something other than what we think we're teaching them. And, you know, often we have this giant plan. We can picture exactly what the end goal is. We can picture what we expect, like the cues we're expecting the dog to notice that are happening. And so we think we're teaching something. But somewhere in amongst it all, we thought we'd made specifically relevant cues. The dog saw other cues we hadn't even thought about. And now we've got a dog that is not performing the behaviour for the reason we think that the dog is performing the behaviour for. So often, and I'm so aware of this because I see it happen time and time again with dogs, that they, we think we're teaching a certain behaviour. They're learning a completely different thing.

In my case, it was my older dog with nose works. I just spent a little bit too long on boxes and containers. I thought I was just teaching the dog to be fantastic at finding odour. My experience in scent work has always been just on container type searches, on scent detection in that sort of setting, as opposed to sort of wandering through the environment looking for scent. So I'd spent way too long on boxes and containers. My dog was phenomenally good at locating the boxes. He could put 30 boxes out. He'd run around and find the right box. But I thought I was teaching him how to locate scent. He thought he was learning how to decide which box had the scent in it. So when I then put the scent somewhere else, I put it on a chair in the middle of the patio area and asked him to search. He looked at me like I was crazy because there were no boxes present. And I suddenly realised what was happening. I thought, he doesn't know what this cue is at all. He doesn't know I'm asking him to look for scent. What I'll do is throw some empty boxes out there. He'll realise from that cue, that context cue, what I'm asking. And once he gets in amongst the boxes, he'll use his nose and then he'll realise that the hide is on the chair. But no, he went out and he searched all those boxes and he looked around and went, yep, no odour in any of these boxes. How can you be standing inches away from the odour and not put your nose on the hide? And purely because he thought the game was check the boxes for odour. He didn't realise the game was search for odour, wherever that might be. So as soon as I recognised that, of course, I just changed strategies and he's fine now. But yeah. And just recently someone said to me they were teaching their dog a go-out. And in Australia our go-outs, they have to run sort of 25 metres to just a defined area on the ground. So this was four sort of pieces of PVC piping, sort of making a box on the ground. And so the dog runs in a straight line and goes into that box and sits. So the person said to me, yeah, I've built this distance up. The dog's phenomenal. It goes really fast. It goes on cue every time. It goes the whole 25 metres, gets in the box. Everything's great. But now she's just blowing me off. She's just, I give her the cue and she just doesn't do it. She just wanders off and starts sniffing. And I said, that doesn't sound quite right. Let's talk about what's happened. And when I talked to the lady, what had happened was she decided to teach this by putting a bowl in the box. A perfectly fine way of doing it. There's lots of different strategies.

And she decided to put a bowl in the box with a bit of food in it. And she'd been sending the dog out there and had been going to the bowl and eating the food. And then she'd moved on. She'd taken the food out of the bowl and the dog would run out into the box. And then she'd go up and give it the food reward. But sure enough, what did the dog learn? The dog had learned that the cue meant run to a bowl. It hadn't realized the box was even relevant. It just thought the bowl was the relevant cue. So when she took the bowl out, the dog just looked at her like she was mad because how can I run to a bowl when there's no bowl to run to? And she thought the really obvious cue was the box on the ground. And the dog didn't even realize that was a cue. It just thought the bowl was the really obvious cue. So sure enough, yeah, when she tried to send it out, she's showing me these videos. She's trying to send this dog out. And it's literally looking at her like, well, how can I go to a bowl? There's no bowl there. You're telling me to run, but there's nothing to go to. And yeah, it was just wandering off and sniffing. And she took that. The dog did know the exercise and it was blowing her off. I went, no, absolutely. This dog does not. So that's fine. We just went back and put a bowl in there and then did a bit of a reduction of the size of the bowl and faded that prop out. And the dog was absolutely fine. But it's so easy for us to think we're teaching one thing and then to be learning something else. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's true of people too, right? Sometimes we think we're teaching another person something and that's not what we're learning. Nope. Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Sharon. I appreciate it. That's okay. It's been great. And thank you to our listeners for tuning in. We will be back next week with Nancy, Megan, and Amy to talk about whether size matters and what the differences are when training a little dog versus a big dog. Don't miss it. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice. Then our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fensi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fensi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by bensan.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Line. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training. Music.