에피소드 52: 패널 토론 (Balabanov, Ellis, Hilliard, Cottee)

what happened in europe um and and that that the chances to happen here are just as good if we don't maintain some reasonable uh um defense to that so before we get going um instead of me introducing everybody i think uh it's better to give you opportunity to give your own uh credentials and who you are and what you've done and what backgrounds you have so people that like to take this conversation seriously understand that you're not just uh anybody in in the industry although as you might guess the the attempts to be discredited or labeled as animal abusers after the conversation they stand so um it's unfortunate but that that's to be expected we we all have experienced that to some degree um so let let's let's let's start with uh um dr stephanie cote um thank you for making this happen like i i really appreciate i know it wasn't easy you had to move a lot of things around and but here we are so thank you thank you i wouldn't miss a chance to be on a panel with you gentlemen so i try to move mountains for this one oh oh bull you had to look me up you didn't know who i was hey hey what i what i did i'm like hey this is going to be awesome i'm so excited a lot of people don't know who i am never it is who wouldn't work with the famous quilter that's right um so i'm stephanie i am trained as an animal behavior and welfare scientist i've worked across a bunch of different sectors actually in the ngo sector i've worked in um you know animal agriculture and still do for a long time i'm looking at behavior and welfare and ensuring uh well-being of of animals throughout their entire life um worked in research and industry and i'm also a dog trainer and breeder of working line german shepherds and co-owner of black kraken canine or black kraken kennels up in ontario canada where it is snowing very heavily right now you guys all have beautiful hot weather from what i hear right now very cool yeah well some some of us have good weather michael didn't know about the earthquake that just happened in in california um right through it i guess let's let's go with uh dr stewart hillard um hi that that's me by process of elimination that must be me um very briefly uh i received a phd in behavioral neuroscience in 1998 from the university of texas at austin and i have about 45 i guess years in training dogs breeding dogs mostly a focus on working dogs and the majority of my career has been spent in the practical working dog realm so i've i've been in sport before but most of my career has been devoted to military and police dogs and if that voice sounds familiar um yeah

stewart has done quite a bit of work on on uh a lot of uh videos a lot of scripts in fact um we worked together way back in the 90s i think it was we we did right so uh excellent so far michael michael ellis thanks for inviting me guys uh i'm michael ellis i've been training dogs for similar to stewart 44 years 45 years somewhere in there um started out as a hobby sport dog primarily but have done all sorts of dog training over the course of my career uh did like i've been for a period uh more than 10 years traveled the seminar circuit doing seminars for dog training clubs police departments military service dog organizations pet dog training groups etc and then about 15 years ago i opened a school for dog trainers in california i've been doing that for the last 15 years um and so i've been breeding malinois for 30 years as well by the way very cool very cool okay guys so um what i'm thinking there we have few few options to to tackle different issues and different um you know there's just a ton of misleading information and and the idea is to try to at least dismantle some of it or at least bring some questions that should be asked and uh what i want to do is like the first thing maybe for us to address is that um the animal veterinarian society of animal behavior resources some ibsab um and and specifically their position statement that um it is in my opinion very harsh and misleading um it really reflects a ideological bias rather than a balance and evidence-based perspective by um categorically rejecting aversive and it disregards the all the complexities of animal behavior and nuanced application of training methods so uh for for safety welfare and effectiveness of dog training it is crucial that uh um we challenge this oversimplified claims with some robust evidence and and practical evidence uh and practical experience which collectively i i believe we have all of that uh uh um really really um insane experience and credentials in my opinion um so what i want to do is i'm gonna bring several of the points what i'm thinking of their position statement some of the highlights and we kind of and are they are they brief enough for you to read them uh yeah yeah yeah i i they they are they are uh so so they're really like uh two liners but yeah that's perfect if you if you can read them so we don't have to take anybody's word for you know for sure their interpretation of them like what the original words say for sure for sure so so let's go let's let's let's get it moving then so here is first one aversive training methods have a

damaging effect on both animal welfare and human animal bond so i i'll kind of give you just a little bit of my take and you know it's a clearly a blanket statement that oversimplifies a very serious and very complex topic when applied responsibly aversive training methods can enhance safety and improve relationship by resolving severe behavior issues and and so on so claiming they universally harm welfare and bonds ignores the the evidence to the contrary and uh here is one of the favorite slogans that they you know use a lot and i'm sure you know of it if you punish then how do you expect the doc to trust you right is that is that a question for the panel to consider i mean it no it's not but it's definitely rhetorical okay well it is uh it is a kind of uh a point that they love to to drive and and it's like okay no how how in the world a dog will trust you if it gets punished well and the first thing i'd point out is that is that trust is not a scientific term right um well-established scientific terms are things like predictability and control so if i were to address that question i would tend to transmute it into terms of does the dog under training is it is the animal able to predict what will happen next and can the animal control what will happen next i would prefer to relate that to the pretty well um defined scientific term of welfare or at least in the process of being defined rather than a term like trust the animal control or at least in the process of being defined right right but yeah that is excellently put um back to i i know i i cannot repeat the the statement um again aversive training methods have a damaging effect on both animal welfare and the human animal bond that's that's their opening so it's it's absolutist it it it it allows no qualification and it's beyond the it covers the board right yeah it's universally harmful and for the welfare and the bond and the strongest claim is essentially they don't use the word always but the claim is essentially that it will always have uh negative impacts on welfare that's a very strong claim and one that we can address yes yes i would love that we dive a little in that uh who wants to start well i can just i can start by saying that it's just simply not true right it's even regardless of whether or not uh we can argue whether or not it's measurable whether or not it's scientific if you've hung around dog training circles for any length of time or not it's a very strong claim that you can't be able to do it in that way and then your eyes will

show you if you believe them that the that statement is patently false there are literally tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dogs out there that have been subjected to various degrees of aversives in a thoughtful way during their training processes and they have wonderful relationships with their owners and they're reliably trained and they enjoy the work and it's obvious from the outside if you have any uh any um experience with dogs and you've seen lots of it so what they're what what you're asking people to do is not believe uh what they're seeing right when you can we could trot out a hundred dogs in five minutes that would show you that that's not the case yeah i mean i would say one of the sorry go ahead michael no i was just going to say so there's like you can you we can begin to collect a body of um scientific evidence to the contrary which is going to be important right when since a big part of their argument is this science-based aspect and that only the reward based end of the thing is science-based but embedded in all this one of the things that bothers me the most is that you're being asked to deliberately discount your personal experiences with animals you're like well no that's not believable because it's not a part of some rigorous study like you're like everybody out there with lots of hands-on experience that are being asked to not believe right what they see right i would say collective personal experience yes because you are not singled out for by any means no shall shall i weigh in yeah please okay um so what i would do first of all is say okay what is the definition of poor welfare and there are a few ways of defining it one of them would be is poor welfare the presence of an environmental challenge right so is is is the presence of stress evidence of poor welfare another option is um is is not only the presence of a stressor but also some um um adverse emotional response present in the animal either in the form of observable behavior or in form in the form of of activity of what they call the hpa access access which is essentially something that that produces corticosteroid hormones that are associated with responses to stressors and stuff like that is that the definition of welfare presence uh of poor welfare presence of an environmental stressor plus presence of of evidence of emotional um stress or distress on the part of the animal those are those are a couple of options and if you look at the supporting documents that absab cites as being the documents the studies that support this point of view uh what you realize really

quickly is that most of the studies if they have measures of uh behavioral measures of stress stress or even physiological measures of stress in the form of measurements of corticosteroids they're normally acute so essentially the stressor is happening and the animal shows an adverse response to it right and and a question that needs to be asked is is that a comprehensive and an accurate definition of welfare and is it what you will find is the definition of welfare if you go to the literature the canon the canon the scientific canon of the study of welfare and since about the 80s it is not what you find if you go to the welfare literature what you find is that welfare poor welfare or distress is not defined or viewed in terms of the presence of stress or even the presence of stress related responses on part of the part of animals it is related to the absence of predictability and control and so the um so the the essential view is that stress is something that comes to all organisms it's a normal part of adaptation and coping including for domesticated animals and the question is not whether stress arrives and whether it is perceived as the by the animal or the human being as stressful but whether or not the animal quote-unquote successfully copes and the measure of coping is can the animal or the human being predict what will happen particularly things that are stressful although things that are not we don't think of them as inherently stressful can be surprisingly disruptive to behavior if they're unpredictable and then also can the animal control them yeah and this goes back to um the work in the late 80s and the 90s of a a dutch ethologist named vipkama i'm not sure i'm pronouncing that correct because my my flemish dutch is pretty much non-existent and a man who i believe was his student whose name is colhas and they've written extensively on on these kinds of subjects and so again and again you will presently find in contemporary references in the welfare literature uh definitions of stress references to stress that refer not to is the animal upset does the animal uh seem to feel that something aversive is going on but can the animal successfully cope and coping is predictable is principally carried out by predicting and then um controlling the stressor the other thing i'd like to point out is that the measures of of stress or distress that we frequently see in the literature they're punctic they're very limited they don't go into they they prefer only to um the amount the animal's immediate point of view

if you will and they are not inclusive of other hazards to welfare like what is the cost of the animal's welfare of not getting trained which actually we will get to in in the the further in the statement exactly what are the risks of euthanasia what are the risks of rehoming what are the risks of death and injury and then also we have to include what are the welfare risks to the owner of having a dog that has not been successfully trained financial emotional all kinds of stuff so when i consider these questions um i i consider them under a rubric that i call global welfare which is inclusive of all of this stuff in a much bigger picture than did the animal look quote unquote upset at the time that this training procedure was carried out yep yep yeah yeah stephanie yeah to echo that i think this is a really good beautiful because i think where we get trapped and where this all falls apart and why we keep running around in circles with this thing is because what they're claiming is always oh well the science shows that you know uh punishment or reverse of tools or whatever it is when applied to the animal they get stressed out right they get stressed out it's like oh no kidding i mean that's not rocket science but the issue isn't so to me as as a welfarist animal welfare and i've said this before and i'll say it again animal welfare is defined by the quality of life of an animal not the quality of the moment and where we get trapped is that they keep taking a snapshot just like a two second like millisecond snapshot of when you uh prong pop or whatever it is or say no whatever that punishment or aversive stimulus is it's like oh it the animal's stressed out that's it oh but and and the ends there they never look beyond you know the five minutes or the one hour or the two days or the one month afterwards they never take into account what happens after the application of the immediate stimulus and to steward's point the the the um the immediate response and i think we get too wrapped up over the immediate response rather than looking at what that response leads to as an outcome for the quality of life of the animal and we never take into account also beyond just the animal's response we never take into account the animal's resilience and the animals who overcome that actual stimulus that's really important right so and again to your point the thing about coping if the animal isn't coping well that's an issue that's a problem and i can totally see you know issues with that but the animal you know bounces back they're happy the tail's wagging there's no problem

everything's great afterwards then really shouldn't we be looking at that why are we so why are we so concerned about what's happening in that millisecond right rather than what's happening overall the cost and benefit of going to the dentist or or whatever right absolutely you're getting a a vaccination or blood draw yeah yeah okay let's move on that is and i would i would say like there's a lot i mean we may wind up getting into this but there's also uh sheltering dogs from uh aversive experiences does not help them cope with the inevitable aversive experiences that life will throw at them as well right yeah the idea is go ahead i was going to say that i'm sorry you go ahead please you were saying something interesting but the welfare of the dog long term also includes the dog's ability to cope with other stressors and part of the training process is to get a dog that is fluent in the training procedures so that they can experience the life that we want right so that we can open up their life to to to more options and be able to to participate in society as it were but also to help them be able to cope with difficulties that they might encounter that were unplanned and my personal experience and i'm sure it's the true of many many people that have spent all all of the people here of course is that um by sheltering dogs from that their responses to other unpredictable stressors are worse right their ability to recoup to recover and bounce back and the intensity of the responses are significantly higher right so like there's the idea that we're building resilience in a dog as well and if i could follow up on that that the uh the reasoning underlying some of the sort of force-free uh uh standpoint is that a completely stress-free life is the objective of keeping a dog that that is the perfect life is absolutely no stress whatsoever but there's also a literature about uh essentially the u-shaped function of of stress of emotional stressors in terms of producing optimal um functioning cognitive emotional etc and so uh i can refer to i uh recently read an article by pari har at all 2011 um basically looking into the effects of mild and to moderate chronic stress on the growth of hippocampal neurons and a bunch of different emotional variables and stuff like that the implication was that the rats in the experiment that experienced chronic mild to moderate stress as a result of handling and confinement the effect of the depression that showed better better better measures on well-established psychological

uh assays of emotional and cognitive function than animals that didn't get the stress you can also look up stuff like this under the heading of what's called hormesis which is um it's essentially a borrowing of a term that has to do with responses of biological systems to toxins. So the idea is that inoculation with small amounts of poison or toxin renders animals more resistant to subsequent poisonings. This idea and this concept has also been applied to emotional stress. And there's a small literature that you can find by looking up hormetic stress, hormesis, stuff like that, in which the implication is also pretty strong, that it's not that the perfect life for an animal or a human being is no stress. The idea is that it is successfully surmounted normal stress that creates best functioning. And we can take one step further and go, oh, is best functioning tantamount to best life? And these are the terms in which I think. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I also I agree with with I mean, that was a very good point. Michael Broden and Stuart going. Yeah, we can't we can't protect our dogs for everything that's going to happen to them any more than we can protect our children. So is it our role as parents to protect our children from any stress whatsoever? I've never known a parent who thought that was his his or her duty. Our duty is to make of our children to the extent we can independent, fully functioning, resourceful and resilient agents of their own circumstances. And I would argue that just as Michael says in slightly different terminology, that's also our duty to the animals that are in our care. Yeah. Excellent. And we accomplish it through training. That's the way we do it. Right. Right. So it's a it's a measured. Injection of amount of stress. That is. Contingent upon something that there is a resolution and you grow from that. But we let's go on that. This is very interesting. I already love it. Here is another one for you. There is no evidence that aversive methods are more effective than reward based methods in any context. There is no evidence that aversive methods are more effective than reward based methods in any context. So it's a statement that's patently false studies, including the one I participated just recently, demonstrates the effectiveness of aversive methods. It's scenarios, especially like what it was with a predator behavior. And when specifically when when when positive only approach fails. So ignoring this kind of evidence is not only misleading, but ultimately it's seriously damaging. Dog will end up in a bad place. They'll end up in a shelter. They end up euthanized.

They you know, it is a it is a problem. And it is again, it's a very interesting statement. I will say it one more time. There is no evidence that aversive methods are more effective than reward based methods in any context. Like how can you how can you be so blunt? Right. Yeah. But I think. OK, so when it comes to this whole there's no evidence or there's no science and there's no research around it. Partially is. Yes, it's true that the amount of scientific published literature in this space is very sparse. We know that. And thank you for doing trying to fill in some of that void by stepping into that space and trying to do some good science behind that. But I also think this is my own personal opinion. Is that. Even in. Let's say like in a research utopia, let's say you had unlimited funding, you had like millions of dollars and you had all the resources in the world. You could have all the dogs that you want and you can run the experiment however you like, even under, let's say, the most perfect conditions to run a really good trial. You have like 100 dogs in every treatment group. Right. Like the way you would with like mice or other rodents. It is my belief that no matter how hard you try, I do not think that you could ever replicate what you do as a professional trainer on the field. In a laboratory setting. So because like you were saying, you've been training all day, like, I don't know, maybe 12 dogs today, you know, and you're exhausted. And everyone here knows that the way you train the first dog of the day or the second dog or the third day, you're not using the same tools. You're not using the same methods. You're fluid. And things change all the time. And I think where we get lost is we're trying to put a scientific framework on something that can help your science. Because when you run like, let's say, a drug trial or nutrition trial, it's pretty easy to have everything really rigorous. According to the scientific method, everybody gets the same treatment and you can filter out effects very easily because everything's exactly the same. You can't do that in dog training because dog training is as much of an art as it is a science because it's so fluid. And you keep changing it and you keep adjusting it. Like, I know that I've trained a dog even literally in that same session, I'm going to switch something up. I'll be like, yeah, I don't think this is really the way because this dog isn't quite responding or it's a very sensitive dog or maybe it's not sensitive or maybe it's just whatever. You have to feel it out.

And there's no way you can replicate the changes that you do within that same session into like a scientific study. You just can't. Even the best way. And I think that's partially the problem is we'll always have that void because of that artsy kind of fluid part. All those uncontrolled variables. Yeah, you can't. You can't replicate that. I would also draw attention to the fact that I think that question is a silly question, right? The idea that they're basing on assumption. Like, I know almost no one that would be considered a skilled dog trainer at this point in time that's using only aversive methods. Right? Or this idea that one of these methodologies is better than the other. You're either going to use purely aversive methodologies or you're going to use purely force-free methodologies. Yeah, it's a strong man argument. Yeah. Yeah. We can't. That's a silly question. Why are you even having the discussion? Nobody does that. So that's not where we should be looking. That's not at all where we should be looking, right? It's the combination of all those techniques and levels of aversiveness and when it's applied and in what circumstances and all those sorts of things that drive the efficacy. You're not saying, oh, none of us are arguing that aversive methodologies and isolation are the best way to train dogs. It's nonsense, right? Correct. Yeah. The efficacy and the welfare implications, right? Of course. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. I don't think that... And time frame. We cannot ignore time frame, too. We have effectiveness, we have welfare, but also how long? Yeah. How long? And how much control of the environment do you need to accomplish said intervention? Right. Amen. Yeah. What I would say to that blanket statement by ABSAP about no evidence whatsoever that aversive... What's the exact... What's the exact verbiage? There is no evidence that aversive methods are more effective than reward-based methods in any context. Yeah. So aversive methods is not defined, right? And one is tempted to define it in the straw man way that Michael's referred to. I'm also unaware of any really strong evidence that positive reinforcement methods work better than what we can call inclusive methods, right? There are studies out there that make that claim, but there are a number of valid objections to different aspects of those studies. And in the... Particularly that the kind of yawning gulf between a real experimental study with random selection of subjects and comparable methods.

And basically, I'm referring to what Stephanie referred to, which is the difficulty of running a really good and conclusive study on this topic. In this context, I think Johnson and Wynn 2024, the study that you made possible, Yvonne, and that was published not long ago, I think it's instructive. I don't think it addresses what Michael calls the silly question, but it does bring about a comparison. And in that little microcosm, in which a very stripped down, purely positive method was compared to, in a pretty comparable way, a very, very stripped down, positive punishment, aversive method, the results that were achieved with the majority of the subjects in the condition that experienced aversive control are conspicuously more promising. Than the results that were achieved with the pure positive methods or the force-free methods. The difficulty is that I don't think, and you might be able to comment on this, Yvonne. I don't think that the methods in the paper really map very well onto what most dog training professionals actually do in these circumstances. Because the study was geared towards trying to produce a reasonably apples-to-apples comparison, rather than really taking optimized procedures based on both what I would call, let's say, aversive control measures versus force-free methods. So I don't think either side really represent, for instance, the limitation to 20 stimulations with the electric collar. Like, no dog training professional that I know of who is reputable and effective with electric collar would limit themselves to 20 stimulations because it drives one to use very high levels of stimulation. Because you have to get a result pretty quickly. Yeah, very true. So it's a special little situation that was set up for very valid reasons by Johnson and Wynn. It tells us something very, very important about the rapid effects that can be achieved using an electric collar. But I don't think either set of procedures map super, super well onto what accomplished professionals really do on a daily basis. And again, I'm alluding to what Stephanie said, which is that in order to formulate a comparison, it's really difficult to control all the variables in such a way that you can represent what people really do in the real world and also come up with a valid comparison. And in a way, in a way, it is a little bit of a silly question. And we can do better by looking at the welfare implications than strictly the efficacy implications. Yeah. Yeah. Well, well. I think at the end of the day, it's not, it's not this. Honestly, none of this is about efficacy. It's not.

It's not about efficacy. If we strip this away, it's not even about behavior. It's about welfare. This really is just an animal welfare issue. Because we know damn well what's efficacious and what's not. What people get upset about is, ought we do this? It's not what works is, should we do this? This is literally a question of should. And another way that we might be able to cast the question is to go, what are the parameters for a successful force-free intervention? Does that take six weeks? Does it take eight weeks? What kind of control of the environment is required to produce a good result across a broad range of the presenting cases? And then what are the parameters for successful employment of a more inclusive, for a more inclusive intervention? And I think that's something that we can attack, you know, quantitatively and objectively a little more successfully. And then come up with a comparison of if you're going to do a really good job force-free, what does it take in terms of time, money, control of the environment? And what are the risks? Because there are risks to welfare of not getting the dog trained. Risk to the dog's welfare. Risk to the owner's welfare. Risk to the welfare of other animals and other people in the environment, in society, right? So what are the relative requirements and the relative risks benefits of these two approaches? I think that's a less silly question than which one works better, right? Right. And to add to that, skills. I mean, it's always, well, I guess, any time you kind of pin down some of those really extreme advocates of force-free, they would acknowledge that punishment works. We can argue about the ethical portion of it, but they will immediately jump into, well, you have to have the skill, you have to understand this and this and this and this. Right, yes. And so you do for any approach that you have to control behavior with. Yeah. Like to create a very, I don't even know what word to put in here, but a very comprehensive, force-free, differential reinforcement program for something, for a dog that has some serious history and some really dangerous behaviors that actually time matters on top of everything. Of course it does. Of course it does. Because the skill of the trainer. Because time is money and the number of people who can afford the time to do a long, slow fix is smaller than the number of people who can afford the money and the time to do a shorter, more efficient fix. And you know what is also interesting? And I kind of always kind of somehow end up bringing it into the conversation is we have dog competitions.

And they're a beautiful way to compare. And you can compare everything from consistency, from emotional state of the dog, of time that it would take to accomplish something. And I think there are plenty of force-free trainers that do the difficult sports. And the difficult sports for me are the ones that have something, some competing reinforcer that really jacks them up. And, you know, like protection sports are a very good example. There is quite a few other things. Agility doesn't quite have that. Obedience, AKC doesn't quite have any of that. So I don't want to go into comparing agility with any protection sport because it is a very different way to control behavior in a dog. And they work in a very different mindset. But regardless, like if we put all these studies and all the science aside and we just say, okay, no, we're just dog trainers. We don't know any fancy words. We don't do nothing. But that's how I can train a dog, which is the majority of dog trainers. And when you look at the success that people have, the most successful dog trainers across the board use some form of aversive in their training. It's inevitable. And trust me, the moment somebody comes up and wins some competition without use of aversives. And it's not this one hit song kind of, you know, it's actually, you know. A well-trained dog that can do it repeatedly. The line, the stars didn't line up today. But, but exactly. Then, then you get my attention. Then I wouldn't, I wouldn't look at what science and the evidence says. Like, okay, no, you, you really are on to something. But as of today, this hasn't happened. Yeah. And we are in this now that that whole movement's been for how long since late eighties. Yep. And it was very, very promising. And, and actually I know me and Michael both jump hardcore in it because it was so exciting. Me too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But eventually, because just as Stephanie was saying, training dogs every day, you start to see limitation. You start to see dogs actually kind of confused or struggling to where you can help them. Mm-hmm. And you, you, you feel obligated to help them, no? Right. Yeah. Instead of leaving them to flounder. I, I, to your point as well about skill levels, right? That's the, the constant thing I've been in a lot of conversations recently because the subject is now front and center and we're being kind of thrust into having this discussion more than we'd probably like to. We'd rather like to be out there talking about methodologies and actually training the dogs, but we're in this discussion a lot. And people keep saying, well, yeah.

So you trainers that have lots of experience and are, and skills, yeah, maybe you can do it without damaging the dog, but somebody without any training. Okay. Like some new person, they're going to make mistakes and they're going to damage dogs and they shouldn't be allowed to do that. That's true of any discipline, right? Right. So if you're going to be a surgeon, right? You're, you're going to have to go through a teaching process where your mistakes aren't killing people, but you're going to make mistakes while you learn how to do these things. And that's a part of the process. And if we don't do it, like I've had people argue that, um, you shouldn't be showing new trainers how to do aversive, any kind of aversive techniques because they're, they're not going to have the skills to use them. Well, how are they ever going to get the skills to use them? Right. It's necessary. And if we keep saying like, uh, aversive control as a last resort kind of thing. So that's the other thing that's embedded in all of this from my, from my perspective is the highest, best way of using any kind of approach in dog training isn't as a last resort when everything else has been exhausted. Right. So I'm not going to say I've tried force free for two years. It's not working. Now I'm going to bring in the aversives, right. That to, to aversive control that is absolutely the wrong way to approach it. Like you should look for small, deliberate opportune times to teach the dog about coping with stress in small ways. So you build to that. So then when you do need to make a stronger aversive impression on a dog, if it's necessary for a certain dog, some dogs that will be some dogs that won't be, we all know that. But if you do the dogs well-prepared for all of that, it's not like you took some dog that had no experience. And then we decided just to hammer you for this. And so I think there's a whole bunch of stuff there. Like one, people have to do it to have the skills. So we need that. And to like avoiding it until it's necessary is also not the way forward for any of us. That's not. One of the potential topics of discussion that, that Yvonne queued up for us was discussion of Lima and what's the other one? Life. Life. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not, I have only a passing familiarity with both of them.

But my main observation is essentially the one that Michael is making, which is that both of them imply that what you're going to do is take a, that the ethical thing to do, the ethically defensible thing to do is to take a completely force-free approach until the situation dictates that you have to do something in the nature of a last resort. And then when you and the dog are both unprepared, you're going to implement your last resort. And I don't know anybody that I think of as reputable and effective and technically strong that employs aversive control this way. Right. Aversive control is integrated into their method. Everything that they do in the sense that positive reinforcement and many other tools are used to prepare the dog to cope very, very well, to find the solution to situations that may involve aversive control in particular to learn very quickly. And with manageable stress, how to control aversive contingencies in training. of aversive experience, it's like, are you getting put in a situation that you have the tools to cope with? I think it just needs to be mentioned over and over again. In terms of welfare, it's well-documented in human welfare. It's not the absence of aversive experience. It's the controllability and predictability of them. It's like, are you getting put in a situation that you have the tools to cope with? And so it's not that you're not stressed. Are you prepared to handle it appropriately? Is it under your control? Okay, guys, here is another one. The learner must always feel safe and have the ability to opt out of training session. So I personally am not sure what to make of this one, really. What does that even mean? I would say it's clearly unrealistic and impractical in any real-world scenario, especially if you're addressing some serious behavioral issues. dogs really don't have that luxury of opting out. No. When something, you know, like sometimes safety has to take precedence over comfort. It's just very, like, it sounds beautiful. Like all of it sounds in some way like it touches you. It's like, oh, I kind of like that. But then when you stop and think for a moment, the learner must always feel safe and have the ability to opt out of training sessions. Or says, oh, I don't want to be neuter today. Or, oops. Yes. So I think you hit it there. I don't know what happened there. Was that deliberate, Ivan? No, I have no idea. But the other thing is you touched on one of them. One of the places that it's most likely to occur is going to the vet.

Like, so, okay, let's not even talk about teaching your dog to heal or come when called or something like that, which are obviously potentially essential behaviors as well. But your dog has to go to the vet, right? Your dog's hurt. It's an emergency. They're not. Like these things. There's no opting out of this. That dog's going to have to go, be handled, restrained, still muzzled potentially because now it's scared and all that. Like, we can't avoid these things. And so, and a force-free kind of approach to rearing dogs does not prepare them for that, right? It prepares them to, as long as they're actively working for reinforcement and the threshold of discomfort or fear or things don't come in higher than that, then they're fine, right? As long as their desire for rewards is overriding it. Now I have a dog whose desire for rewards is not overriding their discomfort, their anxiety, their physical discomfort or whatever, which happens all the time at the vet with dogs. Now that dog is going to be put into a situation where it can't opt out and it's going to be subjected to procedures that require that it be restrained and everything else. And that is infinitely more stressful than it needs to be because those dogs aren't prepared for that. Right, their argument will be, their argument is always, well, you have to prepare it. The moment you get the puppy, you start to teach him and shape this behavior just like how you would do with the tiger in the zoo. But even with the tiger in the zoo, you can do everyday shaping and manipulations and there will be a moment when you're going to have to, you know, shoot him with a sedative and do something because things have to be done. Yep. Yeah. And it's also, I would argue also that it's not the same kind of coping. There's two different kinds of coping. We use the first one repeatedly, right? So we use rewards to teach dogs to work through difficulty. There's no doubt. And a dog that's motivated for rewards learns to persist with rewards. And it's a prerequisite to learn, teaching the dog to learn, to work through difficulties based on aversive stimuli or aversive contingencies. It's a prerequisite. Absolutely. It is. Yep. But it isn't the same thing at the end. No. Like you can have a dog that's very fluent in that. And when that breaks down, they're not at all fluent in yielding to pressure in a way that's necessary. Right. And to me, it's like installing both of those sets of skills in a young dog, right? In a dog that's being developed, I'm installing their ability to control environments, to work through difficulty with the use of rewards.

And also in the absence of rewards or when the difficulty exceeds the value of the reward for a given dog. And a different part of their brain has to take over. Like the shift in like, okay, I have to do this just to work through this. I'm no longer actively trying to access a reward. That's a different mindset. You know, that's why using reward based methods up into the point where you need aversives and then just applying an aversive to a dog is not going to necessarily have the intended effect you want because they don't know how to control the aversive yet. That has to be taught to just like they gain control of rewards. They learn from us what they need to do to access rewards. Right. And how to do that. And so, but they don't, they're not born doing that. That's a learned skill, just like learning to work through aversive difficulty as a learned skill. Right. Yeah. I'll give you another one. There's before we leave that one. Also, that statement from AVSAB is, is very much like, like saying that not only is the dog capable of giving consent to training, but that the dog must give its consent to training. And, and, and my response to that is to say, okay, well, if I give the dog both of those rights or properties, right? Does this mean also he must consent to me not feeding him as much as he wants? Must he also consent to me not allowing him to eat the stuff he found in the corner of my yard, which may be toxic? Does this also conflate with all kinds of other, for instance, must my child give his or her consent every day to going to third grade? Right. Right. Right. And if the dog, if the child does not give its consent to going to third grade, does that mean the kid's not going that day? Not many parents would say so. Right. Right. So if we expand this almost outrageous to me blanket statement, it becomes nonsensical. If we begin to apply it, there's a, there's a lot, it's, it's a reduction to absurdity, right? We can take that statement and apply the rhetorical device of reducing it to its absurd essence by applying it to a bunch of other situations to go, oh, you know, there's all kinds of situations where, where entities, sentient entities in our our fostership, our care are not expected or required to give consent for us to do things that we have in a well-considered way decided are in their interest. Yeah. And ours too. Our interest also applies when it comes to taking care of dogs. do you think that there's just a shift in in like what's going on is partially due to just a massive shift in our in our culture and our in our understanding of animals and what

i mean by that is it goes beyond just training i think what's happening is that we're just sort of the recipient of a change in culture and you can even see that in our language like we used to be dog owners and now we're pet parents guardians yeah pet parents uh guardians but parents a lot like we never used to say that before no um you know i'm also seeing like nail polish on poodles um i saw that at walmart a couple weeks ago and bizarre like pink cartisans and we're trying to change them into children and are just are yeah fur babies fur babies is yeah yeah and i don't know if this is just where it has a really good rant on fur babies if you ever want to hear yeah i have a rant on fur babies right but like we're here like a working dog group and i and i don't know if there's just this digression between sort of the average pet parent and the culture that's sort of pervading there well well we're the we're the recipients we're the lucky recipients of of 40 years of steady development of the sophistication of the technical capability of positive reinforcement enforcement methods in dog training right so we are the happy recipients of this amazing behavioral technology that's allowing journeyman dog trainers of no particular distinction to regularly obtain levels of technical performance that were basically confined to geniuses 30 years ago right so so that and all of us i think i think michael and myself and yvonne and i'm not sure how long you've been in it stephanie but i think all of us have been in dog training long enough for our attitudes towards what we regard as acceptable in dog training to shift enormously under the influence of the positive reinforcement resolution and also the what i call signaling revolution which means the ability to develop communication systems with animals so we're the happy recipients of you know the best dog dog training of all time and hopefully we're making a contribution to making it even better in in future years or at least you know my my personal i think i think yvonne and michael can claim to realistically to be making dog training better in future years i just hope to personally be a little bit better in in coming years but but but the the other side of that sword is that as we become as a race hopefully more sensitive to the experiences of other animals and even other people we also may may be led into extremes and i would argue that the statement that we just considered that a dog must be able to opt out of training at any time is an example of one of those extremes yeah and and i'll tell you we're we are hitting right

into the next thing which is we'll go back to anthropomorphism too so here it is dogs trained with aversive methods were more pessimistic on average compared to dogs trained using reward-based methods more pessimistic yeah dogs trained with aversive methods were more pessimistic on average compared to dogs trained using reward-based methods so i mean i don't know more profism at best but but assigning this human-like emotions as pessimism to dogs um that are trained with aversive is just there is no science that's behind it like like what what are we really saying why are we saying this that's the irony right so they're saying the the scientific literature is on our side that like all the evidence is on our side and from a scientific perspective this is a settled issue and then they use a term that's absolutely completely not measurable in any scientific let let me object for just a moment um which is that there are behavioral measures of pessimism and optimism um and and they're found in and stephanie's bob and her head up and down and they're found in the welfare literature um because uh in the 70s dawkins an author who who is who's frequently cited in the welfare literature who said that what's important is not if an animal subjected to a stressor or not as we can observe it what's important is how the animal interprets its circumstances and and that brought up the scientific question of how the heck do we figure out how animals interpret their circumstances and there is a very sophisticated test in which and and i i wish i'd read up on this before the um before this this panel occurred and this is maybe when i would put in a hook for a project that michael and i are involved in called kynology which is a series of we call them symposia where we get together with with serious dog trainers who like to discuss behavioral science and we go into depth and unpack issues like welfare learning pabloving conditioning all kinds of stuff like that and one of them that i intend to treat in the future is this question of optimism and pessimism essentially what you do in order to assess optimism in animals is you put them you put them through a training procedure and then expose them during which they learn that two different stimuli alternatives are associated either with appetitive outcomes meaning like nice rewarding outcomes or aversive outcomes the aversive outcome is frequently absence of reward right instead of something like we would think of as an aversive right and then the animals are confronted with an ambiguous stimulus and the extent to which their

selection the stimulus control of those ambiguous uh uh stimuli that the animal was not trained with that that the extent to which they bias the animal's behavior is taken as a measure of the animal's optimism or pessimism so there are results that show that for instance animals after physical restraint and this is this is a subject of inquiry and in animal welfare uh journals because they're greatly concerned with the experience of agricultural animals that are often not trained for things like restraint they just get restraint right so the question is what is this experience like for your average sheep who needs to be sheared or whatever and one of the ways to ask the question is to put them through this test and i'll have to look it up for you uh yvonne so we can title no that's very interesting yes but it's a it's a well established test to try to look into the experiences of animals and there is evidence that after stressors animals are biased towards what researchers have called pessimism now given the fact that this this data exists this science exists that does not mean that the claim that avsad makes the huge blanket sweeping claim is substantiated i would like to see the papers that are cited in support of this conclusion yeah because i mean i i totally get now now that you kind of and and let me before we i i i think stephanie might be a little more polite than the rest of us interruptive toxic men did did you have it and this is your area of expertise um stephanie is there anything you'd like to to add to what i said you're absolutely correct um and even some of those studies about like showing them you know the two different stimuli and the one in the middle which is ambiguous can you remember what that test is called i can't remember it oh my god i forgot what it's called i know what you mean we should look it up and then we'll like insert it but there is the actual standard name for that but even that test it is fraught with some some difficulties there too like for for instance we'll give an animal my colleague just did this with pigs um look at a uh white panel and then a black panel so those are you two ones associate with positive and the other ones associate with negative and the negative is absence of reward right uh i don't remember what it was it could have been like a puff of like like wind in their face oh yeah it it can often be something unpleasant like the animals offered food but then a a fan blows on the animal or something like that it could be anything they don't like but it's very obviously like let's say the white

is associated with something positive and the black panels associate with something negative and then they show the animal a gray pet right and so gray according to us is somewhere in between black and white so it's ambiguous and so they're like how do you see that gray do you do you and they've never seen the gray before so they don't know what to associate it with i see what you're saying so then they go okay well i i think like if i'm the pig that always got something good um i'm gonna i'm gonna associate it with the white panel versus the dark and if you're pessimistic you're gonna see you're gonna associate it the gray one with the black because it's somewhere in the middle i would even say i've never thought that was a good test no i i know that people would disagree with me because i don't think that's truly uh ambiguous in the middle because what if you and i might think that gray is somewhere between black and white but was it what if an animal sees gray as literally a color and anything that's not white is considered color versus white which is mature yeah but i tell you this is super interesting in the right and that's not even fair in the variations that i've read the variable had to do with spatial location yeah so it was so it was kind of like if you if you associate right with something positive left with something negative and then you present a location intermediate yeah the unbiased animal will choose something right in the middle and the animal that's biased will choose a little further away from the negative option that's what the expression of of of attribution bias or choice bias or something like that that's the name of the procedure so and i'm not saying that this science cognitive bias i think that was it cognitive something like that yeah cognitive correct cognitive bias or emotive cognitive bias whatever but but um i'm not saying that this i'm not saying that this uh this methodology is super super well developed and refined and all that sort of thing but it is present in the literature and it speaks to the effort of scientists who are now as opposed to 30 years ago very concerned with the affective and cognitive experiences of animals to try to parse those apart so it so it's not outlandish to talk about pessimism on the part of an animal but to make a sweeping kind like the one made in the statement uh uh read by yvonne that requires a lot of evidence and i'd like to see that evidence i'm not aware of it yeah also at the end of the day like you said honestly it

doesn't even matter i think this is great fundamental science but but there's that there's a place for fundamental science and then there's a place for practicality that you have to apply to real life like you said michael like at the end of the day if you got to go to the vet you got to go to the vet and it doesn't matter if you're positive like positive or you're pessimistic you're going to the vet we're just not with that's not we're not negotiating that so how do we take that science and then apply it into practical applicability at the end of the day we have to make decisions right i i would also say that that my experience in stuart you and i had a conversation about this a lot of the studies on aversive control the scientific literature when they measured kind of after effects they measured it immediately after in many cases this would be the same kind i would like to see the structure of this kind of thing but are they actually talking about it changing the animal's world view to be pessimistic for life right and that's what's implied in there right this idea that if you ran this experiment on a dog and then immediately after that experiment that dog may show some hesitancy to interact with uh an ambiguous uh stimulus of some kind right is it still there a month later is it still there six months later is it like so that's the other thing when we start talking about all kinds of aversive experience right that we and we talked about it earlier it's not what's happening in the moment and immediately after an aversive experience for a dog they might be careful they might be hesitant they might be a little not not ready to interact with things but does that bleed away and did they learn something from that that was valuable and it has not ultimately colored their entire world view going forward and i think that's that's the thing they're implying that any amount of stress that's measurable at a point is permanent and there and that's part of the scare tactic involved in it like you may not even see the damage in the moment to them right but it'll crop up down the road somewhere right so when you're being you're being asked to to say like well yeah look that dog didn't look like it was very stressed but trust me you're doing damage right and it's sort of the same thing they're implying there's long-term effects which i'm sure that has not been looked at in any meaningful way and not in a structure and there there is so many other factors really actually not to totally go off rails here but like going back to what stephanie was saying with the black white

and the gray in the middle i mean i mean the like considering the the interaction of affect and arousal and how the brain feels at that moment can choose to be positive or negative experience just because of projection and and you can be hungry and or you can hear a good sleep or or and so on and that can influence how you look at thing in a in a positive or pessimistic optimistic or pessimistic way not not just because it is but it's your perception at the moment and that perception is not it's actually way more internal than external interaction with with the outside world so uh but again like the to to to mention something that we didn't say that i think it's also very interesting and should be noted when you think about the verses we well not we but but they wanted to believe that it's always a really bad idea and when you look at any game being two dogs playing being a football game or or like the most interesting interactions that are playful interactions involve certain element of aversive experiences they're by far the most experienced ones to where you you will have two dogs play and if the one kind of softens up the other one's gonna try to find somebody to bite him back because that's part of the game it's the aversive it's not universally a bad thing and and that statements you know uh um you you can absolutely have aversive that is included that is in a form of a game that's actually it's like yes right yeah yeah and and stuart hinted at it and it's something i'm sure we we will wind up talking about maybe maybe not today but is the the um uh withholding of uh of positive reinforcement is aversive right so violating expectations your animal wants something and you don't give it to them yeah situation is aversive i mean how many slices of pizza you're gonna eat before it becomes aversive right yeah exactly yeah okay so in in the in the force-free community like just because i'm not using tools does not mean i'm not putting my dog in situations that they very true yeah very true okay here is another one behavior modification plans should include science-based classical or operant conditioning protocols there is no role for aversive training in behavior modification plans so to me that just flat out contradicts all the principles of operant conditioning which inherently includes punishment as one of the options that you have so just denying the role of aversives kind of there's there's there's a very large literature so so behavior modification is is associated very strongly with um the assistance and the ministering to populations of human beings which for one reason

or another live under some kind of managed care right so when we talk about behavior modification yeah we're talking about dogs and so forth but if you talk about behavior modification literature you're very very often looking at human populations right and there is a an expansive literature in the behavior modification canon about the use of positive punishment to deal with severe adjustment problems like headbanging self-mutation uh aggression all kinds of stuff like that so it is especially when everything else fails it is factually utterly incorrect to say that the use of aversive contingencies is it does not play any role in behavior modification because it does historically it does yeah we haven't i mean i mean as long as and it's been go ahead now go i was gonna and steward it's been shown to be effective as well oh yeah quite quite often with with with with severe problems with severe compelling behavior problems that affect human population and when you look at the alternatives to not do it that there is you know like like when when everything else is failing and now you really have to decide and this is a lot of times the the problem like you you have a volunteer in a shelter that's taking dogs on a walk and then there is that dog that cannot go on a walk why cannot go on a walk because nobody can gain any control and feel comfortable to take them out on a walk so i mean that's like the mild option but that goes down the rabbit hole to euthanasia road right um and and i i just lost my thought here i got too excited on this one it'll come back yeah yeah so so avsab can redefine behavior modification if they wish as being exclusive of aversive of aversive control but i would like to see comprehensive evidence for why because behavior modification would seem to include the idea that we're going to control and modify behavior using instrumental and pablovian contingencies and and yvonne's already pointed out that those contingencies include there's a lengthy history and tradition of those contingencies including aversive contingencies right i mean i mean just think of the very simple thing when when they say there is no role for aversive training and behavior retention plans does that mean that you cannot really even say hey don't do that right and and have a consequence for doing it there's a whole culture of dog training now that say don't even use the word no oh yeah i've i don't even understand why like that's just insane and and and eventually a pet owner is trying everything you know what happens quite often and i think i mean i i don't know if you guys

kind of encounter this but i i've had people that come to me for training with the dog that's been through several you know all positive and they feel ashamed and guilty and and like like ultimately they are blamed because they're not following the protocol right not that the protocol sucks but they are not capable to follow it and and it just all around becomes a very very bad experience and there is no there is no outcome that needs to happen literally today like we don't care and it's still questionable in two years if we're going to succeed what do we do these two years right right yeah yeah yeah and much of it's implied i think as you go through the rest of their statement like the rest of the the aspa statement there's a whole host of things in there about management protocols that like if you're going to deal with your mod that you're controlling your environment it may be necessary medication may be necessary all those sorts of things and anybody that's been around and looked at a lot of those protocols for even moderately difficult behavior issues not even not even super difficult intractable ones right that that the management protocol and the uh the cure as it were um are almost uh impossible for the average person to implement like unless you decide to move you don't live where you're going to live you can't walk out in your neighborhood you get like all all these sorts of things you have to be able to control your environments to such a degree that yeah the one of the demonstrations one of the demonstrations in johnson that win 2024 is that food reinforcement competes very very poorly in a population of dogs selected for predatory pursuit competes very very poorly with the rewards intrinsic to predatory pursuit so the implication is if you uh if you desire to instill competing behaviors differentially reinforce other or competitive behavior or incompatible behavior then what you're going to need to do in the meantime is make sure that your animal is not confronted with any stimuli eliciting predatory pursuit ever until you're done with your fix right or until you're prepared which which demands an extraordinary control of the environment which in my experience very very many clients cannot achieve because of real world practicalities and constraints right there's there are literally people that are walking their dogs at 3 30 a.m simply because to try to avoid problems you know yeah yeah so here is your next one which kind of goes a little bit uh and i i do want to talk about the study eventually and let me let me go back and that's a welfare issue for the owners

these people are doing this because they love their dogs they are in distress it is profoundly stressful to own a dog that causes anxiety that causes shame that causes expenditure of mass amounts of money that causes frustration inconvenience that's the owner's welfare we're talking about there it's not just the dog's experience that matters it is also the guardian's experience that matters but that also ties back into the relationship with the dog because welfare we we always think about the animal animal welfare is just the animal but there's the there's the caretaker welfare and if the caretaker's welfare is uh poor the animal is not going to benefit from that right like the better your welfare is the owner the better the dog's welfare is going to be as the recipient of that yeah agreed agreed i mean if you start resenting your dog and you're not enjoying your life with your dog you're i guarantee your dog is does not have an optimal uh level of welfare yeah very good point yeah all right so there is the other one cortisol levels cortisol levels are higher in dog strain using aversive methods indicating stress and harm so when was the cortisol taken right afterwards right i mean but but we know that cortisol level arise during both positive negative emotional states uh i mean you get up your cortisol i mean cortisol level we know that it's not a and and without the context that that kind of claim is really meaningless and it's just designed to to kind of skew the and vilify the the the aversive anything aversive that's involved in training it's it's totally false it'll come down anyway it's not like that happens and it stays like that forever and i will tell you in the in the study that we did that uh uh steward uh keeps coming back to which i again i we will talk briefly at least about it because there is some interesting things and i'm sure you will be interested in and everybody that's listening um but in that study if you look at the charts of cortisol level measurements the the the force-free dogs were off the roof because they couldn't stop running they just couldn't stop running while the other dogs are just laying around trying to bring sticks to the trainers to do something but they're just in a just in a very calm state compared to so so cortisol level is just a very bad idea to measure really anything only as a separate indicator yeah yeah there there are many many indications in the literature that interpretation of corticosteroid levels in blood through feces through saliva especially

are complicated and have to be nuanced and there's not a straight line relationship between uh distress and absolute cortical cortical cortisol uh corticosteroid levels um in particular i'd refer the the listener back to the work of colehaus uh in which they show a really interesting plot showing uh substantially higher corticosteroid levels as a result of um sexual encounter on the part of a male rat with female rats than on the part of uh rat encounters with electric shock significant electric shock so as as um i've been alluded to um elevations in corticosteroid hormones hormones are associated with with high levels of mobilization for important events with exertion with diurnal rhythms like waking and all kinds of stuff like that um and what coleus is coleus and a large number of contributors to a paper the name of what the publication data which i cannot remember what they say is important is essentially the rate of recovery of a corticosteroid spike not the absolute magnitude of the corticosteroid spike um so uh levels of circulating you know levels of corticosteroids are worthwhile and important indicators to look at but it is far from as simple as looking at one time point right corticosteroid levels that is why most researchers also use converging measures of behavior and a number of the researchers even in the list of abs abs 20 or 21 articles or whatever basically say as a matter of fact i just i just read one what is it oh it was on my desk but basically i said we didn't we didn't mess with corticosteroid levels because we consider them not reliably interpretable we just looked at behavior right yeah course on by itself it's just not useful but they would yeah they would plug something like this just to kind of double down on the narrative um yeah here is another one all animals learn best when given appropriate structure routine and guidelines sure i don't disagree i know yeah you weren't perfect i'm okay so far however it is imperative that these boundaries be taught without the use of fear intimidation or pain they're using emotive terms right yeah they're using emotive terms and saying i keep hearing people these force-free trainers so we really need to do better for animals and move into a space where we can start training without the use of fear intimidation and pain and it's like but who's doing that right you know what i mean like they're making some value judgment and even i mean i mean expecting to teach boundaries without confronting the undesirable behavior it's it's naive it's it's just right how how do you go about that

and and we're back to really unmeasurable things as well here we are again with a whole bunch of to to stephanie's point emotive words that we have no way of measuring so if you say fear like what do you mean by that how do we measure it in dogs and what's the difference between fear and mild anxiety and when human beings certainly we know that we will seek out certain types of activities that are kind of scary right there is a thrill-seeking personality yes a certain level of anxiety and things like that there's an awareness there's a lot of stuff that's happening there and like that's a blanket statement that could all be lumped under fear and there's everything from tiny tiny levels of mild anxiety to catastrophic fear where you're paralyzed and can't move and everything in between and how are you getting that information from a dog right well there there's the terminological difficulty and then also there's the implication that if you use aversive control that you are generating fear you're exploiting intimidation and what was the other adjunct what was the other uh noun fear intimidation and pain that that's what you're doing and and that remains to be that remains to be demonstrated um there are i am not i don't think anybody here is endorsing the use of fear or intimidation in dog training what we are saying is that we think that there's room in dog training for um the use of aversive control i think you'd all agree with me that one reason we think that's the case is that very efficient and very effective aversive control can be conducted in the absence of evidence of strong fear or intimidation techniques or any of that kind of stuff and and one of the uh one of the interesting things is that many critics critics critique many uh critics of aversive control techniques in dog training appear to know very very little about the ways that aversive control is employed by technically strong dog trainers right in particular they focus on positive punishment um as a sort of a blanket term for the use of any aversive control and they appear to be not considering or i dare say in some cases ignorant of the use of negative reinforcement and escape and avoidance uh conditioning and dog training um so one of the places where you see fear mentioned most often in the canon of psychological literature is in the context of escape and avoidance learning and so for instance if you go back to the the work of of solomon and win they refer to a traumatic avoidance learning um condition suppression was was and often still is

called fear conditioning and rats etc so these these kinds of intuitive terms were used to get at what might be the motivation or the emotional experience of animals that were undergoing procedures in laboratories uh directed at looking at the way that animals deal with with aversive and learn about aversive contingencies but one of the insights is that and this this arises from from recent neurobiological studies i would direct the the listener uh specifically to the writings of christopher kane who i think is at the new york university school of medicine um and one of the lessons of recent neurobiological uh studies of avoidance conditioning is essentially in kane's words the relevance of a motivational construct of fear becomes less and less relevant uh lesson becomes less and less in the context of avoidance conditioning and instead we have to evoke things like habit formation and a positive reinforcement process based on safety signals instead to to explain what's going on avoidance conditioning and another a a very eminent scientist who whose work i admire a lot sisminica uh in many different convergent ways tested for fear in independent ways tested for the presence of fear in animals that were showing very very high levels of avoidance responding in shuttle boxes shuttle box uh responding where the animal goes from one side to the other in response to a signal that says hey an electrified grid is going to go on was explained by maurer in i think the late 40s or the early 50s in terms of uh essentially pavlovian fear conditioning but the puzzle the central puzzle about avoidance responding is this incredibly durable behavior that animals can show specifically dogs can show hundreds of repetitions of fluent avoidance responding and they can be tested in various different converging ways for presence of fear they do not show fear and this is the kind of evidence along with neurobiological evidence that that kane amasses and puts together to say hey i don't think fear is as relevant to learning in this specific way about aversive contingencies as it has always been said to be and when i summon when i i sort of sum up this kind of stuff in in uh in discussions in kynology symposia uh with michael and with forrest mickey one of the things that i'm fond of doing is is to go back to the words of a trainer whom i admire very very much who's pat nolan who is a technical um who is a technical expert of electric collar of a very very high standard and one of pat's ways of getting across uh what is going on in

well-conducted avoidance conditioning is he points out how relevant avoidance conditioning is to human life and he says look when if i have to go outside to my car to get my you know whatever out of my car i'm going to wear sandals because there's pebbles in the parking lot it'll be uncomfortable and so i'm going to wear sandals well that's avoidance behavior and here's the thing when i wear my sandals i'm not afraid of sandals and i'm not afraid of pebbles and i'm not afraid of walking outside i'm not afraid of anything but i'm practicing avoidance responding that is so substantial and durable that i have done it for decades and i will do it until i die yeah and this is the essential insight about some forms of aversive control that are conducted by dog trainers with a high level of technical accomplishment is that it is done in the absence of strong evidence for fear or anything more than discrete and limited periods of stress yeah exactly that's well put so essentially what i'm saying is you know despite our conversation i don't think any of us are endorsing the use of fear in dog training and for that reason uh i tend to not use the expression fear when i'm talking about dog training i tend to use the word apprehension and and what i mean by that is not apprehension in the sense of i'm worried i'm afraid but apprehension in the sense of i when i put on my sandals to walk outside i apprehend i understand that my excursion outside will be more pleasant if i practice the avoidance response of putting on my sandals to do it right and i think in many cases well-trained dogs are apprehending the contingency that is both predictable and controllable that has been constructed for them by their technically strong trainers they apprehend what the situation is and they make the choice to do it this way partly in order to avoid an adverse uh contact with an aversive and also in order to gain the positive reinforcer that is promised at the end in the most efficient and the quickest and the most pleasurable and convenient manner yeah and and this is very interesting um um stephanie let me i'll forget what i'm have in mind here but like like even even when you look at speeding on a on a freeway you know like or or you're driving with a normal speed you're totally comfortable then you decide to speed up you're a little bit afraid that you're gonna get caught but you're willing to get caught and you're willing you're you're actively pursuing that element of fear and and and what what we need to kind of fear is such a broad

like it we cannot just keep piling things that everything means fear they're they are levels as you and michael was saying and and you know and some are very you know there is a whatever functional punishment and like contingent upon i'm gonna speed up right now and i'm gonna take the chance but i hope that i'm not gonna get caught i i'm a little bit afraid that we'll get caught but i'm very willing to to take my chance right absolutely yeah it's not universally a bad idea to be afraid a little bit i mean imagine if we are not afraid i mean i mean we were dead we don't have that podcast yeah yeah yeah no yeah no chance no chance yeah absolutely every every living thing is avoiding we can watch dogs that uh the initial driver for some behavior was fear or anxiety we see it all the time in reactivity cases in a protection work and in lots of places where we deliberately put a dog in a position of some discomfort like psychological discomfort they're obviously anxious they're obviously some fear there's some avoidant behavior all that kind of thing and with proper uh education and opportunity they'll start to seek those situations out like you can watch a dog go through a period of fear and then decide that the activities that they uh exhibited under that in that state of mind become reinforcing to them and they'll seek those activities out when they're not afraid anymore right routinely we see this in protection work all the time right when we manipulate defensive aggression and things like that there's a period where a dog who's going to be afraid like some level of anxiety they respond in a certain way and it doesn't take much practice for those dogs to begin to say like hey i like this actually i'm seeking it out they'll they'll show you all independent measures of attempting to engage in that activity and be very persistent about it so well that we have a complicated relationship with fear and anxiety anyway right to some degree and the idea that that going through life without it is of course nonsense but on we we have places where we deliberately seek it out on purpose right and i i don't and i think dogs are no different like anecdotally like i've watched dogs do it for so long that you just know somebody when we're talking about reactivity cases we're doing it all the time like well you know you got to be careful because the dog's afraid right and you look at the dog this dog's been doing this for six months and you're like that dog's not afraid anymore that's not afraid of anything this is a hobby for him this is a hobby the dog likes doing this now

this whole thing is fun right this is a hobby yeah exactly and sometimes they really take a chance like i have a i have a such a cool video and i don't know how i got it but i i like in one of my lessons for my school i i we discuss fear like this and and there is this malinois walking and there is this plastic back on the sidewalk and the wind is just wiggling tripling kind of trembling and now he's shaking with he's like low to the ground and he's like i'm gonna get it no i'm not gonna get it i'm gonna get it no i'm not gonna get now he's this close and he's like just debating and and then he goes back and he and he cannot leave it and he's clearly not comfortable in some level but there is also that curiosity and that desire to overcome it on its own nobody's forcing him to deal with it and and finally just he's and walks off with it like a king like a king and there is like it doesn't need any commentary when you see the end result of it and it's just observational you're not even part of of but the interaction i i i kind of hesitate to bring it up both because i guess because it leads to a highly technical discussion of of the mechanisms that underlie avoidance responding in particular proprioceptive um condition cues and safety cues and i'll try to kind of stay out of those waters where we've talked about the possibility that animals that uh are not exposed to aversive contingencies in training they may be impoverished of information right they may lack information that animals that have additional contingencies layered on top that involve aversives those animals may have more information we've also um we've also discussed the ways in which stress is inevitable so that we may do a disservice to a dog that we spare from all stress possible when later on he inevitably encounters stress without the inner capacities and the learned resilience and the learned coping that would ease the animal through that experience what we're starting to and then we we talked about nuanced descriptions uh definitions of welfare etc etc and now we're on entirely more provocative ground because i think what yvonne is flirting with and in a way michael is flirting with and something that i'm willing to consider as well is the question do we impoverish dogs that we protect from all stress in training and when i contemplate this question what i think about is the role of the role of proprioceptive feedback cues proprioception these are the sensors that tell me what the parts of my body are doing so that i can shut my eyes and i can move my arm and i know how my arm

is traveling through space and if my arm is paralyzed but i still have sensation and you move my arm i still know where it winds up in space right these these are proprioceptive cues and there is a a long and a dense literature about the role of proprioceptive cues as pavlovian cs's associated with responses that avoid unpleasant outcomes and essentially there is evidence that these things become positive reinforcers not negative reinforcers but positive reinforcers what i relate this to is my personal experience of what i call peak experiences so when i was younger and stronger and dumber and every other thing um i engaged and i still occasionally engage in some high-risk activities whitewater kayaking riding dirt bikes riding street bikes faster than the police want me to and stuff like that and if you talk to people michael was a rock climber um i think i think yvonne your practice you're studying jujitsu now um stephanie i don't know you but but but you look like a sportive person i'll bet you we can identify something that you do for pleasure that you eagerly seek out that is associated with risk right and and my experience of engaging in risk associated with sports where there are consequences for errors of technique is that the reinforcement is a product of having executed a difficult motor skill correctly so that i can ride a motorcycle after having apprehended the consequences of messing up on my motorcycle and winding up suddenly on the ground after i've apprehended that contingency and then also apprehended the negative reinforcement contingency of doing that corner just right those cues of having distributed my balance on the motorcycle control the throttle just right control the rear brake just right all that kind of stuff become to me intensely reinforcing so that i will chase that behavior again and again and again and again and i will even look for it in the context in which there is little risk in other words i'll try to do a corner really really well and even if i mess up i'm not going to get hurt it won't be unpleasant it won't be expensive it won't be any i'll just tip over but having done it well is intrinsically crazy reinforcing and that is there is evidence that that is based on a pavlovian conditioning process and i think that it is well worth considering the possibility that dogs also experience something like these kinds of sensations and that the very joyful and high-spirited dogs that i've seen performing trained routines in circumstances where they were exposed to aversive

contingencies i think are related to this phenomenon and i this is not just speculative this is a discussion of 30 or 40 years in the scientific literature and there's a sizable contingent of scientists behavioral scientists who think that proprioceptive cues work this way and they work as positive reinforcers and they underlie the crazy persistence of avoidance responding by trained animals in the absence of fear yeah that's awesome very very very well put and and on top of that there is a personality traits like not not everybody wants to get punched in the face but there is no there is people that from little kids that's their objective to become the best fighter in the world and and so on you know like that like we cannot neglect again like the the and and and where we are going actually why don't i just read that question because i kind of probably jumping into it as i was giving this example but here it is trainers with certifications from programs like the karen prior academy should be recommended that raises my eyebrows a little bit yeah i mean it's the one size fit all right it's the it doesn't it also doesn't sound like an impartial statement it's an endorsement oh it is an endorsement hundred percent it's an endorsement it's a value-laden endorsement but that's how it doesn't say it doesn't say anything about the individual trainer right like could you have a crappy lawyer that graduated from harvard sure like like that has nothing to do with it like their their personal skills and abilities and life experience and their ability to help you is not in any way connected to where they went to get certified right so like and we all know certifications are very like they're not able to there there's no comprehensive well-structured certification for dog trainers in in the u.s in the world that i know of right like the anybody that goes through a program and receives a certification that's just one piece of a puzzle has nothing to do with their necessarily their skills their life experience or any of that kind of stuff right it just seems but people like certifications and the general public look to pieces of paper and certifications as somehow extremely valuable over just experience and i feel like for whatever reason like this avsab or the cluster of organizations um that make these statements i feel like it's it's very unfair because in my opinion it's almost like having you know vegans write the national food guide right like if you if you pick a certain group and you're not inclusive of the group

uh who who write those statements right you just pick one certain group just like if you say hey we're gonna have vegans and they're gonna write the national food guide well you are pretty sure that meat and all animal products are not going to be part of that food guide it's just not and then what they're going to say is oh but we have a lot of science showing that eating red meat is associated with maybe like cardiac health problems right and the issue is are they lying no there is a lot of research that actually does state that but there's also research showing that you know eating red meat can contribute to a really healthy diet in moderation as part of like a balanced healthy diet as well but you'll never see that you'll only see the stuff that they cherry pick and because they just like boom this is what we've shown cardiac health and you don't want to get a heart attack they basically make everybody feel like you have a burger and you're going to drop dead of a heart attack right but that scope they don't widen the scope to include maybe uh you know other people other sectors to contribute to the writing of that document and then when that one document is the thing that's touted as you know the be-all end-all and nobody knows any better than they believe it and i think that's where we are right now it's like they have that ideology and everybody trusts that there is sort of the body to trust nobody else gets to be part of that uh conversation no yeah no it's true i i think um i mean there is a few mores but i think uh uh we we all got kind of the the gist of it and uh where where what the direction is and and i think the you know plugging in karen priors academy basically it's kind of the well where do i get this kind of training well you can do karen prior you can do i don't know victorious whatever there's many of them right um but um this is our problem and that kind of statements coming from you know i i i cannot i i was gonna say with somebody with authority but but i cannot give them authority of any kind simply because of their their ridiculous statements that there is no way i can give them any credit and any authority because just so ideologically biased and and um but where do we go how do we tackle this nonsense and this nonsense it's not i think i think go ahead for sure go ahead no no you go right i've already talked too much oh no i was gonna say uh that um you touched on it i think a a little bit ivan in that the um the idea is that position is a um emotional position right so all

the language around it is full of attempts to scare you into thinking that if you do things that are outside the pure the force-free community you're causing damage psychological physical emotional damage to your dog to your relationship so there's a whole driven by fear and emotion kind of connection to the whole message and they have the easier job when you're talking to the average person about dog training when i was first exposed and you two right we around the same time exposed to um the the ideas around reward-based training super exciting huge revolution and the way things were done before that to now we that's appealing like it's it's nice who doesn't want a really well-trained dog with a super reliable without having to to use any aversive that would be wonderful like and so the people that have bought into this like in my opinion and yours as well i'm assume unfounded uh uh ideas around that they have a really easy job you talk to somebody that doesn't know anything about dog training that all sounds good like oh look there's scientific information on it no i don't want to hurt my dog no i don't want to scare my dog no i don't want my dog to hate me no i don't want my dog to be a pessimist like i don't want to cause fear yeah i've been told it causes fear i'm yeah yeah and so for us we have a much harder job like they can make really blanket emotional emotion driven statements like that and get away with it because people want to believe it the average person wants to believe it right and that goes a long way and we have to be much cleaner about everything we say and we have to be more persuasive and i think for me the bottom line is the way we combat it is it has to be what you see with your eyes like no study is going to do it go out and see a lot of good dog trainers what we would consider well-educated technically skilled dog trainers and look at their dogs and look at the dogs that are being turned out and those dogs are engaging in life they're going places they're hiking with their owners they're doing sports they're doing all kinds of stuff do those dogs look like they have impoverished lives does it look like there's any welfare issues there does that dog look scared does that dog look like it doesn't want to be there with that person none of that stuff and if you just believe your eyes and you actually get out and look there's abundant evidence and so i think just the more we show that and then the the flip side the way we we have to tackle it is that we have to be willing to call out people in the

community that are doing bad training because there it doesn't take very many people to set what our progress back you can go on the internet and get up a whole bunch of examples of people doing really stupid with e-collars and right everything else and but all of that we're the only industry that you know like if if somebody uses a knife kitchen knife incorrectly kitchen knives don't get banned if somebody kills somebody on the street with a car cars don't get banned like like pretty much anywhere else we make sense and we we target the person that creates the problem and in the dog training world there is this initiative to universally control and dictate that one specific methodology like i don't know if in any other uh anywhere else that this is happening in in that kind of uh with this kind of drive and animosity you know not not even wanting to to come to to talk and and and i know um i don't want steward to go all the way crazy but i will tease him a little bit because uh i i also love talking about this and and one of the the the roots like if we start really peeling the onion where where all this is coming from you know we're gonna go back to skinner and even further down but ultimately we're gonna end up with murray sideman and his course and and the fell outs that's that's really the for them the bible and and and and it's just so beautifully written if if you don't stop and kind of evaluate what it said then then we have a big problem but you know i mean it's praise for for his critique on aversive control but but but every time we we kind of go a little bit there there's significant flows in in logic and empirical and and that whole flow conflation of of coercion and aversive control and and uh but this is basically the roots of kind of what gives i would say power to the force free and and it's the idea of creating the society free of aversive control and we know control is control positive or negative i mean there there is no you know you cannot just kind of isolate one and pick on that one that's just wrong um and the the whole fallout of punishment it's just it's not interesting but it's contingent on on poor applications and in if anything we need to re-evaluate if if something is going wrong what's going wrong but it it's just throwing the baby with the water you know and what is extremely like i i i spend a lot of time on this like a lot like like literally years on on trying to resolve that puzzle and it was very uh kind of refreshing to hear uh uh stewart also bring this up but ultimately before i give him the the

mic here ultimately their answer because let let's say let's say that is okay this is super cool and you're right with regardless that you're not but let's say we assume that you're right what is our alternative how do we how do we move on now and the way they want to move on is through errorless learning this is the the ultimate idea what is errorless exactly define that for me well defining errorless learning even that becomes very difficult but the idea of when skinner had the experiments and had the all this whatever they were not computers i don't know um you know the little things that those kids were working on and and they make a mistake and analog teaching machines he was very interested in in in automating education yes but it started with pigeons and colors and of course in a simple task you can do errorless learning and that the more complicated the task becomes the more impossible becomes and if we didn't if if that was not the case the errorless learning was introduced in a big way by skinner so this is many moons ago then sidman took over on it now we have um uh eduardo fernandez with his life which he made the life uh uh model to replace lima so no aversive whatsoever and then immediately immediately he made a research paper on errorless learning so so so it's a really it goes the same way it's punishments bad skinner errorless learning zidman punishment bad errors learning uh fernandez punishment bad errors learning but it all errors learning from the time being we would assume that we have mastered it by now so good that it will be applied pretty much everywhere and the only places that i know it's with kids with some mental disability it's with it's on a very very basic level and there is a very good reason for it but i will let stewart take over here if he wants anybody else anybody else want i'll tackle that one i would just i would just argue that errorless learning isn't really learning like you don't you haven't learned a task unless you've made errors right so ultimately you can set up contingencies in the early stages of teaching where the dog has very limited options so they do the thing you want them to do and they get reinforced for that which can you know build persistence in the learning process and can help control motivation but they don't know what behavior until the mistakes have been made yeah at least just like all of us yeah i i think you learn to do by making the doing it right and making the mistakes it's inherent in the process and and to thinking within like to think about designing a plan a training plan

one with somewhat in errorless learning paradigm it makes you really think through how you're going to move forward and then adding that trial and error it makes it brilliant but without the trial and error it's ineffective it's when when it comes to complex behaviors yeah i i think it's supposed to be a strategy of learning where the learner can achieve the outcome with the least amount of errors by like greatly controlling the environment in a such a supportive way that they basically don't make any mistakes which i mean all good trainers would do anyway as part of their program but i would say initially anyway yeah initially but as things get more progressively difficult i would say if you they don't want them to make mistakes because they're saying that um the repetition of mistakes is associated with frustration anxiety but i would say that if you don't actually give them the guidance and you let them flounder and try to figure things out you don't give them any guidance the actual extended length of time which they're floundering and they're throwing different behaviors at you is that this is about do you want me to sit do you want to do you want to roll over that in itself causes frustration wouldn't it be just a lot easier faster more effective if you would just give them the guidance right off the bat and there i think sometimes the the punishment actually spares them from making repeated oh repeat the errors for sure right right right and and and the irony of that is that the uh holy grail of their approach to training the force-free community free shaping is driven by frustration yes the whole process because you're going to reinforce some behavior on the path to the behavior you want and once you've reinforced it a few times you've created an expectation of reinforcement and then you need to raise the criteria and when you raise the criteria that you're not going to reinforce a behavior that's been reinforced they get frustrated they try harder or they put more energy in and that's what allows you to move behavior forward right so free shaping is frequently driven by that violation of expectation of reward and the frustration that it engenders in the dog right like once you're expecting to get rewarded when you don't you're not happy about that and it creates a mindset how's that different like you can't you you don't have free shaping without frustration because otherwise the animal says oh well i don't care i didn't get rewarded i'm quitting on this behavior nor do you have strong

stimulus control without frustration right because in order to get strong precise stimulus control the animal has to have experience of non-reward for uh stimuli that are related to uh resemble the target stimulus that you're trying to put in control of the behavior right i i just want to run like so lapsed with with really upset about the whole uh sidman's thing because when every time there is a conversation that goes a little bit deeper that's kind of where they would drive it into and this is really where it comes oh what about the fallouts or what about the fallouts and it's always about the fallouts and and the description of anything aversive in his work at least in in the book i i cannot claim i know all of his work because uh from what i know he actually was pretty good at one point and then there was a flip but but the the you know the universal suppression versus contingent upon something it's just all the way from from as far as i have studied and learned and everybody that's trying to bring out the the the bad side of aversive use never describes or talks about contingent functional punishment or or use of aversive it's it's like including our little studies of 2003 whatever van de bork or whatever you want they are all brilliant examples of how shitty somebody can do uh using non-contingent right right to where it's like no i i absolutely don't want to walk in that room why would i yeah yeah well let me address sidman for for for just a moment and give us some some perspective to it so so murray sidman was a an extremely eminent uh behavior analyst which means that he was essentially a skinnerian in in in orientation and he made seminal and extremely important contributions to ironically um the study of aversive control so he was the originator of a series of brilliant experiments to look at avoidance responding in a free operant or a non-discriminated setting and posed some real problems for at that time i think in the late 50s early 60s the prevailing uh theoretical model that explained avoidance responding so mur and his his career was long and illustrious i just looked him up he only died in 2019 i think he he died at like the age of 100 or something like that a great humanist i believe he was a very kind man who was who was revered by his students um and made some really really seminal contributions and a fair amount of the stuff that i discuss in kinology symposia about avoidance conditioning was brought to light by murray sidman right so um the book that that um ivana's alluding to

a coercionist fallout is is a popular work of sidman's that was published in like late 80s something like that um and it's a curious book it's essentially a book length essay without data uh my copy looks just like that and and in it sidman gives his view um of punishment and he includes uh not only positive punishment but also negative punishment so he acknowledged that that the withholding of reward was also a coercive technique i believe um but what sidman was known for most in in formal theoretical circles was a rejection of positive punishment so he agreed with skinner and also with estes that suppression of target behaviors by an aversive event that follows that those target behaviors is not a consequence of specific suppression of that target behavior by the aversive it is instead non-specific so essentially what he was saying is that that an aversive stimulus that is contingent upon a target behavior does not specifically affect that behavior or anything about its learning all it does is essentially this is the expression i use harsh the animals mellow so it it puts it suppresses the animal's overall motivation all overall levels of activity everything and and um suppresses all responding including target behavior responding and that's why something that sidman said is not really a punishment effect looks like a punishment effect and when he talked about fallout essentially what he's saying is what's going on when you harsh the animals mellow by bumming him out by doing something unpleasant to him while he's freely behaving in a chamber what you do is not only suppress a whole range of responses but also through pavlovian conditioning you make the stimuli of that situation fearful to the animal and the animal begins to and that's the mechanism by which behavior uh is suppressed overall behavior is suppressed um and the animal therefore seeks to avoid the situation the animal resists the situation a bunch of stuff like that and in the context of dog training the contention is that the animal associates bad stuff with it with his his handler as well the core claim is essentially that punishment doesn't work punishment does not specifically suppress a particular response um the the to to put it in a nutshell this claim on the part of skinner and astis and sidman was wholly wrong punishment does work as a specific process that suppresses a specific behavior in a way so as to change its probability of occurring in the animal in future independent of other independent of other behaviors but that does not mean that

fallout is not a thing fallout is a thing if one uses powerful aversives in a particular situation it tends to be associated through pavlovian mechanisms with stimuli in the situation that is fallout and that can have deleterious effects on the animal's mood on the animal's willingness to engage with stimuli with training with the trainer all that kind of stuff that's a thing that's a real thing that one has to consider technically as one of the difficulties of using aversive control and specifically using positive punishment techniques um some of the best work but but what you have to know about fallout is that although it is a thing there are ways of mitigating it specifically these are technical terms to make it make sure that you have maximal contingency between the target behavior and the aversive you're using as the positive punisher and also maximum contiguity and we can go in another setting exactly what that means but you can mitigate the strength of the fallout and also fallout has a time course it dissipates and and for me some of the most interesting work on this is done by bob bowles who is a very theory important theorist in in learning uh learning psychology and specifically in the 60s and the 70s was was very important in considering theories of punishment and he did some cool studies in which you can chart the development of fallout where the animals a number of of aspects of the animal's behavioral repertoire are suppressed by the use of positive punishment but then the responses that are not selectively punished recover to normal levels and the specifically selected punish target behavior remains suppressed so so that that's what's important to know about sidman and fallout and all that kind of stuff the central cool the central claim about punishment has been proven beginning with the work of nathan azrin in the 60s to be wholly incorrect the i use i love the term fallout i use it all the time i think it's an important contribution of of sidman's um but the important thing to know about all that it is that it's not inevitable it is not permanent it can be managed it can be minimized etc if you're going to do technically strong dog training using aversus you have to know about it and you have to know how to mitigate it how to minimize it and how to restrict its time course so it's just a little phase the animal goes through until he develops mastery which sounds like another squishy term i brought in it is not the term comes from the learned helplessness literature it was coined by uh uh by uh seligman martin seligman and it

refers to the persistent coping under harsh circumstances of animals that have learned previously to be i'll go to another one optimistic because they have previous control they have previous experience of control of aversus right right so mastery is a thing and mastery is something that an animal can develop and will develop if the animal is properly handled and dealt with in the course of training featuring aversus and the period during which the animal looks like it might be vulnerable or its welfare might be in question can be rendered relatively innocuous and short in time span to be replaced by mastery which is associated with prevailing positive affect meaning the animal looks like he enjoys training he looks like he enjoys things he's controlling things he has agency he has power he has the power to dictate his immediate circumstances within the contingencies that we dictate as his trainers who are responsible to him and to society and to other animals to globally take care of everyone's welfare by optimizing optimizing the behavior of that animal and i better quit there before i get mixed up about what i'm saying i hope that was a complete statement that was really good that was really good um um it just made me think even more you know like now i'd just like to point out we're going on two and a half hours here perfect perfect you know the the must not to be debbie downer but it is two and a half hours and we're doing great we just broke into so so no i want to touch touching a little bit further on on the on the mastery i think mastery mastery mastery is uh um it's something everybody has to i mean ultimately strive forward towards i what i was thinking as you were talking is that punishment or you know just the the the most fundamental thing on or for any living thing right approach and avoid and baked in the dna we we we know intuitively the majority of people the majority of animal how to apply punishment how to apply punishment how to be effective and how not to have the fallouts and i'm not saying there are no fallouts but somehow we are all programmed to understand and work with it it now getting to the mastery it's a i i i'm not i'm all for it but it's it's in us and i i was in i was talking about this i think you know anyway i was in hong kong with with some clients and and they had trainers and i did something really interesting and i encourage uh uh i i have to show this to you guys like uh uh i did with the trainers there a really cool experiment of somehow i came up with the idea how how come how how people did all this without knowing the words

the lingo without looking youtube videos we are like people used to train dogs still maybe not great but and i went really deep into that hole i'm like okay guys and and we had bunch of dogs and i have bunch of handlers and i'm like i want you to teach them to uh in a little basket to send them and put their feet on the basket and you do you come up with whatever i'm not i'm just gonna watch you for a week like as a as a something very different for for what i was there that was just like a a very cool experiment for me to see human nature and a dog and when there is motivation and cooperation and sometimes something that really looks very wrong comes to the end the desired end simply because both sides are trying to work through that and and it involved everything like i i am i have i have like a so i don't know how many hours of video of this and i don't know what i'm gonna do with it but you have i mean you can talk about overshadowing and blocking and positive and negatively inform like everything in this one week of uh these guys doing this and where where i was going with it it's that i it is in we cannot like we cannot uh uh be careless about how use punishment because it can go bad but as a general unless it's something pathological we intuitively understand how to how to make things happen in life i don't know if i i make sense even with everything that i just said i don't know if i'm not going to be able to do it but um yeah i think you're you're hinting at the fact that both humans and dogs are wired to work through these kinds of difficulties that's i mean we're designed to be able to to resolve these problems as a part of biology right you don't live otherwise you learn from aversive experiences you learn to seek the things that you want and we're kind of set up to to do that and so if one tiny mistake would have catastrophic yes lifetime uh damage to any living being we wouldn't still be in the gene yes like there's no way we're designed to filter through that so that a lot of the stuff that people describe as potential downsides potential extreme fallout you'd have to deliberately go out of your way out of your way to do the worst dog training possible to make that happen full of non-contingent punishment you're just punishing the dog randomly for nothing connected to its behavior right in a lot of experiments when stewart was was talking about a lot of the original experiments that defined the shuttlebox experiments and a lot of the early experiments on punishment and stuff like that in order to measure the effectiveness of punishment they

would start punishing a behavior that had already been constructed of course because they they they have to have a behavior something like a lever press or something like that so they would construct a behavior through the use of positive reinforcement and then they would study the effects of punishment on it right afterward and then in between those reps in order to maintain the behavior they're still theoretically reinforcing it no dog trainer would ever do that right to like so there's a whole bunch of stuff in literature where somebody looked at a concept that is theoretically possible right that in a practical sense is almost impossible and yes there are people out there that are psychopaths and that sort of thing but if you're trying at dog training even though yeah you it may not go smoothly your dog may have more discomfort and more difficulty and you may see larger amounts of fallout for longer periods of time you'd have to really mess up yeah to make permanent damage in those cases but that's the boogeyman that's out there yeah like oh yeah this this stuff is so fragile and this fallout is so scary that one small mistake and that's it right there's no fixing that dog i i tell you we back to this back to that yeah that uh i'm sorry stephanie what what were you saying i'm just saying that that that's the whole point of this problem is whenever four three trainers talk it's just like they never allow for recovery they never allow for resilience and they whenever they talk about you know punishment and fallout it's like it's always the most catastrophic thing that can possibly happen and that's just not the way anybody actually trains reasonably that's that's the problem and a lot of the literature like that they like to cite sometimes i guess they just talk about the actual punishment like punish punish punish and then they talk about their reaction to the punishment but like like you were saying michael there's like if there's no contingency to it and they don't understand where this is coming from and what you're saying steward with like the actual importance of control and the ability to anticipate and control the outcome that's the most important part but they never talk about that part you know it's kind of like this whole thing about coercion it's like oh you're coercing your dog if you're using punishment and you're forcing them um to do things but that's not what actually is happening because the whole point of good training is to teach animals that they have indeed control over the outcome and that's kind of like you know

learning to turn pressure off for example right like you got to teach your dog how to turn the pressure off and then they become very adept at that and they don't get stressed out at it at all because they know that they can actually make a choice they do actually have a choice but i think the rhetoric that's happening out there is that we're forcing things onto dogs and they have no choice they have no choice you're just coercing them but in fact it's all about teaching where they have no agency so they have no agency yeah they assume since the animal cannot opt out of the procedure that they cannot have agency but in fact which which i disagree right it is full of agency because we teach them what choice what choices they have and it's completely within their control how they want to behave in the outcome that they actually choose yeah um so i i think it's just a false it's a false story is all it is and we don't live under that paradigm like we would never accept that paradigm for humans like you would literally have to have to consent to everything no society has all kinds of rules right like all kinds of rules that you may hate them you may not want to comply that's part of living in in civil society and dogs are a part of that like they've evolved with us the domestic dog and our lives are intertwined so the overarching rules that we all have to follow to function are things that are there regardless of whether or not we opt in or opt out like yeah we don't have that choice and we're trying to give that choice to a to an animal but we don't have it ourselves and just how you were saying michael way in the beginning about uh you know as a trainer you will make mistakes and you have to kind of it's inevitable just like with everything as you said and uh going back to this trainers in hong kong you know like it was so so interesting in on so many levels and one of the things was there were mistakes after mistakes after mistakes and but you look at the person and you look at the dog and they are forgiving each other at the moment that things are happening and struggling to solve it like like the dog is like man he's really trying very hard to make me do something and i have no idea what and and and and they keep going with it and some sometimes there is a okay we can say punishment and i'm like man why did he do that and the dog is also like why did he do that but they're right back in it okay let's continue we're gonna we're gonna come out of this you know against any laws of learning just the desire to work together and recognizing in each other the that

ability that we are here to to actually get to something it's like it probably pretty much like people not knowing any language and now we're faced and and here we are we're gonna have to somehow work together and we find how to and we're gonna make mistakes and before i tell you that the stove is hot and i learn how it's what is hot in in english or dutch or whatever most likely i'll burn myself one time and i'll burn myself probably after i learn that too um but but this cooperation and forgiveness was very very interesting and and we underestimate nowadays we are we are so focused on on the theory of learning that we have forgotten that we have a natural ability to communicate with with each other and with with the dogs and with pigeons and whatever else you want you know like yeah i mean i i so wish to go somehow back in some time machine and see what they did with dogs like thousand or two thousand years ago like how how did it look was it was it that horrible because if it was that horrible dogs wouldn't stay around them right right yeah yeah it's fascinating dogs are i think kind of special in that front too you know right they in a way like due to whether it's it's a quirk of of evolution or modern selection they try really hard they want to be in it with you like they want to do stuff with you and especially when they recognize that it's two ways that they yeah you're on the same page then then it's beautiful to watch it it's beautiful to watch it the struggle agreed yeah i don't know how much time we have if we want to go into the the study uh or or we leave it for i would i would argue not this time yeah yeah we need a part two yeah i think we should because um that study and and there is some other there is always things to talk about that that could be a you know something that we could do more more often but uh i definitely want to share some insights about the study that um you know from reading and from just hearing people talking about it it it gets kind of uh very twisted and there is there is a lot a lot of cool stuff about that study like a lot of cool stuff so um but i think this was very cool i i really enjoyed the conversation and uh i don't think there is anything to edit this is so beautiful see i told you ivan is like it's perfect put it on air i told you the pressure starts the pressure starts guys thank you so much for this that was you know like i i think we we all kind of needed to have this out because um um a lot of people are genuinely confused of what the reality is and what is good and what is bad and

and and i think we at least try to touch upon everything and and hopefully the the thing that i want to leave it with is there is no such thing as consensus in science yeah there is there is no like like it never does it never is never like and and that's in all science that that's not science isn't a settled thing ever it's not meant to be science is a method for evaluating information it doesn't have a point of view in that way and like there's there are ideas in science that have got a lot of momentum but they're entrenched and everybody's like looking down their nose at new information until a new theory paradigm shifting thing happens and then every you can't even imagine that you believed what we believed before even though that was the best scientific information of the point right it's just you're evaluating at the time and it's constantly shifting like science is never settled that's the process well it's it's um i i would shy away from the idea that there is no truth that it's all relative it's all subject to being overturned in the next moment some things are super super well established in science yes particularly particularly in the physical sciences and even in in the behavioral biological biological sciences but it is a fact it is a logical um premise that is accepted and has been accepted for hundreds of years that one cannot prove something as true all that one can do is to support it with another instance of phenomena empirical observations that are consistent with a principle or a theory being true at any point that theory is subject to disproof and and one of the one of the processes by which science navigates ever and ever closer to the truth is by being continually open to and constructing theories understandings of reality so that they are disprovable like a theory that is not disprovable it explains everything is no good to anybody and that's very very well understood since since karl popper um but the the idea is that what we perceive to be that that science scientific principles and theories are always subject to disproof and there are often even in very well settled questions there are often scientific experiments experiments the results of which fall outside of the broad consensus and which represent a theoretical problem to the prevailing explanations of what's going on and so what you what you have to do sometimes is is not try to explain every single little anonymous anomalous result but to cleave to and pay attention to theories that explain important masses of data in useful ways right yeah and most of the

things that we'll talk about in uh in kynology and in discussions like this they are controversial in terms of their interpretation but they're not controversial in terms of the science the science is quite well established yeah it doesn't mean you're not going to find one paper one theorist that doesn't agree but it means if you do a good job of reviewing the literature you'll go hey there's there's basically a broad consensus here and there's an enormous mass of data out there and guess what the learn helplessness theory as explained by stephen mayer right now accounts for the vast majority of it in a very very useful way right doesn't mean it couldn't all be you know sort of turn on its head in an interesting way tomorrow by an important finding but it does mean that science is a progress it's not an established fact that's no that's perfect that's perfect i mean i think what michael was uh alluding to and i and i i i think i started but it's the the canine science the the claims of what is actually evidence-based and who supports it and there is like 10 people with phds that are supporting it and therefore it should be accepted then and right right so yeah yeah and i would say that the problem is not that the the problem is that the claims and the data upon which the claims rest and the language in which the conclusions are interpreted must be inspected critically and that's what we're gathered here to do and that we'll gather here to do in future and one of the problems with some of the statements that we've addressed tonight is that they appear to have been immune to critical review on all of these counts right right yeah beautiful way to end this guys stephanie steward michael great lovely to talk to you uh ivan and michael always you and stephanie it was my pleasure to meet you virtually i hope i have the pleasure to do so in person i'm sure we will do something in person as well guys thank you thank you very much good night thank you you