Training Without Conflict® 팟캐스트 에피소드 47: Douglas Elliffe Ph.D.

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that that's where you'd like to start but I've worked with a variety of animals most most of them I worked with pigeons but a bit with horses bit with cows uh Rats of course um every of [Music] course lots of different animals and also dogs and in in in various various different forms amazing amazing those kind of sideline interests for me um so I'm more interested in uncovering fundamental principles of behavior than I am in applications directly um but I've been really kind of interested uh lately uh to talk to various dog dog training professionals you know who do this kind of thing and and seeing the sort of interaction between the basic science you know where we might be be able to tell you things about the fundamental principles and you might be able to tell us things about the practicalities of doing these things in the real world and what you found to work and what you found hasn't worked so I think that that's you know quite a a sort of useful interaction for all of us translational research we could thank you yeah I I very much I'm absolutely 100% on the same page like this these conversations uh can only lead to something good uh on on every side of it um yeah you know since since we started with pigeons and since that that's the thing and I know you did the one study that was a interesting one with the um and I probably will you know the the under matching you know the research were um like matching the behavior with the reward and and I mean that that's a very interesting thing and and totally can like like any dog trainer can get something out of this so so I would love for you to to break this one down for us because are definitely a really interesting stuff right okay I didn't I didn't think you were going to go there but I can I I can certainly talk about that um so I got interested in the kind of work that I'm that I'm doing now as an undergraduate student really and and one of the first papers I I read in the area was by Billy Bal um in 1974 which was which is about sources of deviation from the matching law so up to up until then based on hein's work um we'd had this this notion that animals matched or made equal the percentage of responding that they do on two different alternatives to the percentage of reinforces that they would obtain from those two Alternatives and it was it was B who first said I think well nearly well it was probably John John Sten who first said this um several years earlier but but but B kind of summarized quite a lot of research to say well nearly but not quite that indeed the portion of reinforces does control choice choice being measured in terms of the

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proportion of Behavior Uh but it doesn't do it perfectly and that they tend to be a bit less sensitive uh to the allocation of reinforces between Alternatives than strict matching would predict so quite a bit of our stuff since has been you know about under understanding whe why why that might be true and and you know just to kind of cut to the chase we think the problem probably relates to how they're able to to discriminate which alternative the reinforcers are coming from and and there's various things we can do to make them better or worse at doing that uh so I guess we we would probably say now that what they're doing is matching to what they perceive to be the relative reinforcers on the two Alternatives that might not be actually the true you know MH or the arranged ratio of reinforces on the two Alternatives uh one of the things I I liked best that I did was about maybe 15 years ago we did something when there were four Alternatives rather than three and also that every 10 reinforces that is about every six or seven minutes the distribution of reinforces between those four Alternatives changed in a random way and the interesting thing was how well pigeons were able to track that kind of rapidly changing four-way distribution of reinforces so know I where we come from what we come to with this is that animals are trying to predict what's what's likely to happen in their future and that they will you know behave in order to you know to to try to Maxim well POS possibly to maximize but uh to follow the way that they think things are likely to change and of course coming to what I think you're likely to want to talk about mainly that will apply to positive contingencies know to things being being presented but it will also apply to negative REM equally with negative reinforcement so that's a little bit on that yeah and and but it it's basically there there was something that like the pigeons or whatever the animals are that they don't always match the the behavior to the reward rate they don't match it perfectly no yeah but but I'm I'm I'm saying that our current theory is that they match it to what they perceive the all right but they are wrong about that in various ways yeah so what what could be like a takeaway from this for a for a dog trainer you would think a takeaway for that for the for a dog trainer I think I would the most important takeaway is that I think henin's right that all behavior is ultimately Choice behavior that there's always something different that we could be doing and there will be reinforces attached to that and those might be reinforces about avoiding bad stuff happening or getting

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good stuff to happen and you know I'm you know I'm going to say that it doesn't necessarily matter which of those we're talking about according to the principle and so that um yeah this is probably jumping ahead to something that I wanted to you know to talk about later and perhaps let's live it then let's leave it let's go with the let's let's go with the uh Kia version training program um could I could I I just make a couple of General points about punishment and aversive consent I love it I have it on my list anyway so go on yeah so it it it seems to me that most animals behavior is sensitive to uh to well is is controlled by avoiding bad things happening just as it is just as much as it is by trying to get good things to happen and I was I was I was thinking just before talking to you I was I was standing out on the side of the street having my cigarette because I was nervous before coming to talk to you and thinking why is it that I don't just blunder off into the traffic yeah and the reason why I don't do that is of course because I know something bad would happen so nobody's been saying good you're staying on the foot path you're safe there um so a lot of my behavior and I think you know a moment self-reflection would lead us to think that most of everybody's behavior is actually controlled by avoidance contingencies rather than by you know by leading to something good happening right because if we're not alive who cares if we can eat right yeah yeah yeah yeah um so there's there's among some behavioral psychologists and as I see now you know among quite a lot of dog trainers too yes there seems to be an almost utopian vision of of of the world where there is no punishment and and everything must be you know must be controlled by positive contingencies by presenting something nice and you can kind of Trace that back almost intellectually to BF Skinner I guess who who who again had he you know Skinner was an unabashed henst and and and wrote this utopian book called called wal which was which was imagining a world you know where there were only positive consen gencies and everything was uh controlled like that and I'd say that that might be a very nice world but I also think that it's probably not the world that we live in and that and that when we're trying to when we're trying to modify the behavior of any other organism whether they're animals or whether they other other other humans we would be foolish not to take advantage of the of our evolutionary history which will be about learning to avoid bad consequences as well as trying to produce good consequences learning to get good consequen it's just it's so

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deeply programmed in us right I mean yeah I think so uh yeah yeah I think we're all like that and you know you can you can also think back to people like like Dr Spock you know with with raising children and the idea that you know you should never say no and and I think that that you know again I think that this is this is a very nice thing to think um but I also think that it doesn't sort of really recognize realities and what it is that that controls Behavior that's not to say that when we can you know if we've got an equal choice between equal efficacies of two different treatments no question interventions then it would be nice to use the positive one um it's certainly true that humans tend to feel that that when they're choosing controlled by positive contingency sorry I should Yeah by repetitive contingencies by nice things things happening because there's a there's a different technical difference between positive and negative contingency um but but about let's let's call them good contingencies yeah then they feel as if they're doing it of their own free will oras if they're doing it to avoid punishment then they tend to think that they're being coerced so in so far as that goes it would be nice to go for the you know for the for the good contingencies if we can do that but we will not always be able to do that and and you know we'll talk later I think about some of the some of the pitfalls with the notion that you can decrease an undesired behavior only by reinforcing an alternative Behavior to that and and maybe that won't be enough I I would love to talk about this as well yes uh since we're since we're on this a little bit when we're talking about avoidance we we are we cannot avoid to say something about fear and fear right now at least in the dog industry it's like like there is this notion this narrative that fear is a very bad thing and nobody should ever no dog should experience any any sorts of fear but just as you gave the example of you hesitating to cross and making aware should you or not there is some element of caution which is based on on some here or am I wrong oh well I don't think I don't think you're wrong I think the first thing I I would say is that you know coming from a kind of Fairly strictly behaviorist condition um tradition I would say that adding the term fear into it is almost a mental was station you know in in the sort of term Skinner talked about it so I would be wanting to say here's the consistency that produces this change in behavior and that we can we can reliably show that that's the case and putting this idea of fear and so okay an a more

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mentalistic explanation would be to say the animal or the organism is is is fearful of the aversive contingency and is therefore trying to reduce the fear and I'd say I'm not sure that that adds anything to the explanation um but I would say also that there there are things of course there are things in the world that very reasonable for us to be fearful of and and and you know trying to trying to deny that that's the case doesn't seem a good thing to do and if there are actions that we can take that reduce our fear then that's not irrational either and doesn't seem to me to be particularly UNH inhumane either right I listened to your podcast with Michael Peron um who I also know and and and he was he he was talking about know the calmness of rats that he is working on avoidant schedules and and and how this this in in in in fact doesn't seem to produce a terribly nervous and and and and terrified rat that's difficult to handle but they're at least as easy to handle as rats that are working solely on positive reinforcement schedules working for food and that would be my experience of that too um so you know I've I've I've seen rats working on on on Sidman avoidin schedules or or or free operant avoidant schedules which I've never done any any of that myself but that the the difference between those and normal avoidance is is that normal avoidance works as as a series of Trials whereas Sidman avoidance schedules and it's kind of odd that Mary Sidman became you know one of the one of the strongest opponents of punishment yes uh in that he did a lot of research along these uh these these lines where sidon avoidance schedules are defined by shock shock interval where if the animal doesn't do anything this will be the interv the interval between shocks and also by a response shock interval so every response postpones the next chock for for a certain am I remember that diagram yeah yeah yeah and and what you'll get is animals responding in quite an an efficient way responding within the the response shock interval therefore postponing the next shock and actually never receiving any shocks and you know like kind of really perfectly happy about this and and there's lots of things humans do that are kind of you know analogist to that yes we pay the phone bill on time so that we don't you know so that we're not punished by having the phone removed and and you know we do this without feel feeling particular fear of the phone company or or even electrician would go up those high level voltages and they know what they're doing so they're not like afraid to go to work in the morning no they're not um but but they are you know

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sensibly weary and you know because they should right yeah they should they should so so how how they behave is being very well controlled by these avoidance avoidance contingencies so the world ranges of aversive contingencies bad consequences that we can avoid just all the time and I think it's it's an unrealistic utopian Vision to pretend that those aren't there yeah it's a it's a very difficult one because uh on top of everything I mean it's like a very serious war in the doctrin in community like like it's insane and and they you know the one side wants to just be like no there is a scientific consensus that this is we we know better we have better ways right now and we don't need to use any form of aversive um we have differential reinforcement which um yeah well you know we'll we'll probably come back to some some some possible problems with yes I would love problems problems from a theoretical perspective but I would I would say just you know to get to a littleit a little bit of of a conclusion about some of this that there is of course a moral and ethical question about whether we're justified in arranging ofs of contingencies with other humans with other animals things like that but what I'm what I'm kind of reacting to and and why I was quite happy to come on to onto your podcast is the idea that there is a scientific consensus about these things being co-opted to serve that moral argument and so far as I can tell um that that based on largely cherry-picking the evidence so that that you know I don't want my science to be coopted to serve you know yeah to serve this this this aim when I don't think that the the the research is nearly as clear as that as they might be aing yeah and you know like I I also like when I do training I I do a lot of play Based training so I'm I'm like very like for my whole time that I've been training dolls it's been probably 40 years now and play has been a a really big deal for me and the reason I'm bringing play is because like when you watch two dogs play there is it's like a play playful aggression if you want to call it that right there is Challen challenges there is it's definitely aversive based if we can say it this way uh and there is infinite number of benefits of how they develop and how they learn their social skills because of those experiences yeah and and even with humans when when we think of most interesting games you know that there is they are challenging games and there is some element of competition and added some level of discomfort we're not talking Abus by no means but that's kind of what can make a game very interesting and yeah

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absolutely sorry to Ken so so I take it that you're talking about things like situations where a big dog's playing with the little dog and the little dog goes a bit too far and nips nips the big big dog he gets annoyed you know and and and therefore you know bites back or something and the little dog learns don't do that again and the consequence of that because they don't do it again is then they can have the interaction playing with the big dog and everything's good right yes yes and then and then they makes them learn how to cooperate how to make up again and yeah it's very very yeah so so clearly dogs are you know are very kind of social animals just like us and and you know we we we learn that there are things to avoid under different under different context because they lead to not very satisfactory cont consequences don't don't swear in front of your grandmother you know do that with your friends so different things are being reinforced and punished under different circumstances and and and that's that's how we learn to interact in our social world just as it is how we learn to interact in the physical world I think what about the like uh if we if we stay a little bit with I guess it's in my head right now about the differential reinforcement and and and basically the the effect when you know like like the again it's always not always but very often is Ted as the that's the alternative to aversive method and and it can do everything and we don't need to use uh any form of aversive ever uh which that that word ever is where it gets very tricky because as you said if we have the choice to choose not to use and be successful why would we right but yeah yeah but like from from your perspective why why do some um I mean do you think some behaviors that are especially like problematic dangerous behaviors you know they they are often resistant to strictly uh uh differential reinforcement alone yeah yeah so so there's there's there's a number of of reasons you know a number a number of things that I think would bear on that on that question but I'll I'll start off by saying that I think henin's right that all behavior is choice so that in principle you can reduce an undesired Behavior by reinforcing an incompatible alternative Behavior that's fine and I guess that's what you're talking about when you say different reinforcement that's what they mean but if you were to you know say that say that you're trying to trying to train your child not to put their fingers in the electric light sockets right then then you well first you've got to get that right in one go right so that that that really you know this this

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is a behavior that I need to eliminate now it's not a game it's not a game yeah and and and so one of one one of the things we that we know about aversive learning is that when you get one trial learning which is something that's often talked about you know where things are just learned immediately one consequence and behavior changes now most most this comes from pavlovian conditioning rather rather than oper operant conditioning but never mind the same sort of thing applies that these are almost invariably about aversive contingencies as opposed to positive contingencies so it will take you know if you were trying to train your child not to do that know by by okay put your finger somewhere else and I'll give give you a reinforcer for doing that then it's going to be sort of terribly inefficient to do that because there's such a range of behaviors that are other than putting your finger in the light socket do you want to in the you know the power socket do you want to try to reinforce all of those individually or do you want to say look here is a behavior that you must not do anymore we're going to try and cut that one out okay so trying to do that and and and one of the one of the I think so in in in human human stuff we often talk about well a good idea when you're getting a bad behavior going on is distraction right and you could think of distraction as as being providing an alternative behavior that they can engage in which will give positive reinforcement that'll make sense but the trouble is that that you've got this danger of producing a kind of Behavioral chain where where what you get is is you don't actually do any of the distraction until The Unwanted behaviors beginning right until the thing that you want to get rid of starts so person dog does something you don't want it to do and you provide and you immediately step in and say don't do you know here's this thing instead go and do this right and that's an opportunity that they didn't have until they did the undesired Behavior so what you built up as a kind of chain where the undesired behavior is actually being reinforced by the second link of the chain which is the opportunity to do the other you know the new Behavior so uh is this where you're going with the uh like the the behavioral momentum the the ne yeah that's that's that's really a separate question I was going to that later um um um so this idea about about chaining I I just think a problem okay because because we know that you can you can you can train long behavioral chains where the only primary reinforce like you know the only access to food or whatever it is is at the very

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end of of of the chain and the thing that that that reinforces the earlier links the things they do first is getting in position to earn the primary reinforcer yeah so there's a whole lot of condition reinforcement going on so what you you know so what you can have is say um uh child pulls the cat's tail okay the bad behavior you want it not to do that and so what you do is to say no don't do that come and have a biscuit or something like that yeah and so the child know okay if I pull the cat's tail then what that means is Mommy will offer me the chance to go and get a biscuit yeah so actually you know it's kind of going to work in theory if you provide the alternative behavior all the time before The Unwanted Behavior ever begins happen then that could work in principle but the thing is that I don't think anyone will ever do that because you'd have to spend all your time kind of dishing out positive reinforcements for other behaviors all of the rest of the time and and so very often you're going to be providing more opportunities for that when the undesired Behavior has already started to happen and therefore I think that you've actually reinforced the undesired behavior I'm not saying you can't do it but you would have to be just enormously dedicated and actually reading it in in in some of the dog training literature it talks about oh it's really hard and will'll take a long time to train these things and we say well yeah damn right of course it's going to do that if you um if you're only trying to do it by reinforcing an alternative and especially if if we're talking some instinctual strong inate like then then then we're going even in a different level of stubbornness of of of behavior correct so yeah well I think so yeah so so in a way that might be a nice segue into the Kiwi version training stuff because that was one of the one of the issues that I think came up there do you like me to talk about that now or well I'm just to stay a little more like because I think we end up something interesting here like in like in your opinion like in in cases where differential reinforcement kind of fails to to do it job what what factors are at play would you say okay so I've talked about one of the uh well really two of those factors already I think one one of the most profound will be this inadvertently training up a chain of behavior that starts with an undesired Behavior there'll be that there'll be the the real kind of non-specific thing that okay if all Behavior Choice then in principle any Behavior other than the one you want to get rid of should be reinfor forced yes and and but there's an awful lot of

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those and so that the you know the reinforcement density for each of those is is likly to be really low and therefore that's not likely to be particularly strong and you haven't actually taken the reinforces for doing The Unwanted Behavior away right so so the idea there is almost that you're just trying to distract them to get them to do something else instead and really what you want is is to get the undesired Behavior your animal your organism child whatever it might be to learn that that undesired Behavior doesn't have positive consequences anymore it seems to me that might be most efficiently done by having it learn that it has negative consequences not just neutral because you often don't have control over what the positive consequences that we maintaining that behavior were and that is a problem that's a big problem yeah right so and and and there's there's a third phenomenon and and this this is where I wanted talk about behavioral momentum which is I think you know not an area that's all that kind of widely recognized and so far as I can see it hasn't really come into the animal training literature all uh so this is a line of research that began uh by Tony Nevan in the 1970s um the idea there was that we've tended to say okay reinforces reinforces strengthen Behavior yeah so it reinforces increased response strength and what Tony speculated was that well yes but the way that we traditionally measure response strength is in terms of response rate how much of the behavior do we get yeah and his his his speculation then was well maybe that's just one aspect of how strong a behavior is and the other as aspect the other dimension of response strength if you like could be how resistant is it to change so if we put it on extinction say then how long does the behavior persist before it goes away and that might be correlated with response rate and of course we've we we tended to think that will be the case that these are just different ways of measuring response strength that the more of a behavior you get also the more persistent it will be but whether that's actually true or not is an empirical question so Tony suggested that maybe it would be better to think of behavior as having momentum and that that you could consider momentum to be strength and in in in classical physics momentum is the product of mass and velocity right so talk about the example with the Newton low right yeah yeah yeah yeah so so maybe Tony thought Behavior has both of a velocity like property that is how fast is it going response rate but it also has a mass-like property and that might be resistance to change and so in

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a series of of studies mainly with pigeons but with other animals too and also with with with humans he was able to demonstrate that that's so that these are actually independent properties of behavior that things that you do that so often things that you do interventions that you do will increase both of those two Dimensions but there are there there are circumstances where it doesn't where you can increase the rate and at the same time reduce the persistence all the other way around okay and so one doesn't make it easy no it doesn't make it easy but it does does make it easy when he started to break down what was the what was the difference between those two things and what he identified to cut to the cut to the Chase and it wasn't just tiny lots of other people work in this area too uh quite a lot in New Zealand actually um was that the rate like the rate properties velocity like properties were were controlled by the contingency between responding and reinforcement okay so the more you reinforce the behavior the higher the rate it will get fine but that the resistance to change ones were controlled by an almost pavian contingency classical conditioning contingency about the relationship between the stimulus context and reinforces so what that kind of means is that it doesn't matter which behavior you're reinforcing in a particular stimulus context you will increase the the the resistance to change properties of all Behavior is in that stimulus context including the one that you're trying one that you didn't want yeah so if you reinforce an alternative behavior and I'm I'm I'm not saying this is not a good thing to do but there are pitfalls things to worry about you will indeed reduce the rate of your UND let's let's just call them Behavior A and B so a is your target Behavior you want to get less of a so I'll reinforce Behavior b instead and you'll reduce the rate of a right because Hon's are right will Behavior's choice and be matching to the r but at the same time what you've done is to in is to increase the overall reinforcement in that stimulous context and what that can mean is that you lead to is that your behavior a Becomes of lower rate but of Greater resistance to change becomes more persistent so you end up thinking I've reduced the behavior this is good but I've actually made it harder to get rid of it completely uh so uh so with humans um and with uh various colleagues particularly bu Bud mice did did some of this sort of thing in in in in institutional settings you know um so trying to eliminate unwanted behaviors like food stealing say and and doing that by reinforcing an incompatible

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behavior and found that actually when you took the reinforces away the food stealing persisted much longer for that group even though it was of a lower rate so there is a problem that if you reinforce an alternative Behavior then what you are partly doing is increasing the whole reinforcement density in that stimulus context in that environment say and therefore you run the risk of in of increasing the persistence the resistance to change of UR UND desired Behavior now there's a way around it and it's it's that you reinforce the alternative behavior in a different stimulus context we did some work on an analog of this with pigeons where we we we reinforced the competing behavior in a different stimulus context and then brought the two contexts together and then measured resistance to change and we found that indeed that worked that we could get all the benefits of doing that um with without the the momentum related byproduct that we didn't want to have so um so yeah I think you can do it but it seems so obvious at first sight that just reinforcing something else is the way to go differential reinforcement in your terms but I've highlighted three kinds of problems with that so far so that yeah you work but you're going to have to do it right and it's not just all that obvious yeah and but but I think that the most Salient of those will be that if you only introduce the competing behavior when The Unwanted Behavior has already started then you really set up trouble for yourself for both of those last two reasons the chaining reason and the momentum reason cuz now the as you're talking I can see how they're paired yeah right yeah yeah so I think that the mechanism for the two is different but that they both but they both lead to the same outcome which is outcome you want that that's super super interesting and and uh if if a behavior has that strong momentum does that make it also probably more resistant to Extinction yeah absolutely so so that's that's that's what I mean by resistance to change I mean hard to extinguish yeah yeah so there there are various ways to measure resistance to change um resistance to Extinction is the is the most obvious but there are others like um like if you decrease the deprivation of the scheduled reinforcer so if you're using food as your reinforcer and just start with an animal that isn't very hungry then then you know that's another way to measure it allow them to satiate on whatever the reinforcer is that you're using uh lots of different things that you can do uh prefeeding feeding between multiple schedule components and they they all come out the same way um extinctions

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actually probably the one that's least often used and and the problem is that arranging Extinction you've got to consider the how discriminable is the change from the reinforced condition to the ex Extinction condition and that really takes us back to to to Skinner's original not very good study that led him to reject punishment right whereas that was that was that was confounded yeah yes they doubled down on that so much after that too look they really did um so just just maybe for your listeners do you want me to go over that one abely absolutely what I think really happened yeah so what what what Skinner did this was with rats and he had two uh two different groups and both groups were trained to press a lever using variable interval reinforcement so intermittent reinforcement un unpredictable reinforcement by no means every response being reinforced is probably about one in 10 given the schedules that he used so he did that and then both groups went into Extinction but the difference between the two groups is that one group just got reinforcement first Extinction second and the the second group experimental group got reinforcement first and then Extinction plus punishment and I think that the punishment was kind of por por slaps from the lever so the lever you know sort of flecked and and hit the rat's pores and it didn't I don't think it was electric shock in this case and that happened for every um for every lever press and so that group stopped responding much more quickly under Extinction but then what he did was to take away the punishment condition so take away the poor slaps and found that oh that group recovered and started responding again and his claim was that actually you got about the same number of responses in extinction for the two groups and therefore all punishment was doing was just temporarily suppressing responding and therefore it's not worth doing you don't need to do it but the problem was this and the the problem was that actually adding the adding the Punisher when every response was being punished increas the the discriminability of the transition so so if you think of what the first condition was was like variable interval schedule re uh variable interval schedule reinforcement so most most responses are not reinforced and then you start Extinction and that's going to be relatively hard to detect if you're only getting a reinforce for one in every 10 responses on the average side yeah yeah well well yeah but it's going to take you quite a long time to notice hey I haven't got to reinforce it for ages they must have gone yeah so that'll take a while but adding a signal

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and to say things have changed now so adding The Punisher adding the poror slaps made that transition easier to detect and therefore you got a faster change but also when you took those away again then what that did was was apparently to reinstate the original conditions the poor slaps have gone now the punisher's gone now so what does the rat think think oh the reinforcers are probably back yes and so therefore they started responding again okay so so to to test that so what that interpretation says is Skinner was was confusing the the direct sort of as a consequence of behavior effects of of the punishers with the discriminative effect of the punishers of the fact that they you know they act as a signal for what to expect and so to test that out somebody and I think it might have been bises but I'm not sure of this did exactly the same thing but rather than rather than use poor rather than use a punishing stimulus he used a neutral stimulus it was something like flashes of green light and got exactly the same results okay so what the rats Learned was the green light signals that there are no reinforces available now take the green light away and have you comes back so so Skinner's interpretation of that just wasn't right and of course naturally you know being being Skinner great great deal of respect for for for Skinner my whole field wouldn't exist without Skinner but because he he was you know kind of morally committed to the idea that everything should be able to be done by positive reinforcement he's delighted to find punishment doesn't work and therefore I can reject that but I think he was just you know misinterpreting what the data said and this this this is common in so many branches of science but perhaps particularly psychology where people remember the first dramatic finding and they don't remember all the reputations of it that came up later all all all the things that show well actually you know we couldn't replicate that's probably not true this is not really right and of course if it serves you if it serves you I could call it a moral agenda or perhaps a political agenda then you're likely to pick the piece of research that you think fits with that this is the difference I think between being an advocate and a scientist no that that that that really that's a that's important thing to to share with us for sure yeah I I I'm imagine you probably come across that that before but yeah anyway yeah no no that's that I mean that's really where it starts where but but it's a yeah it just how we're talking about persistent behaviors and and this narrative that notion is as strong as ever even

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2024 like I in some Minds this is just how it is well well if you if you for you know for for moral reasons and you know I don't I don't discount those I think these are you know people people have things that they think are just wrong you know and say I don't want to do that no matter what the evidence is I don't want to do that but it's it's only human if you can find a piece of evidence that seem to support that that that's the one that you will pick but of course you know science is always always changing we may come to different conclusions about the effectiveness of punishment in the future know who knows whether that will be true um but at the moment all the evidence would seem to be that it changes behavior in a way that's exactly symmetrical to reinforcement you know the reinforcement increases behavior and Punishment decreases Behavior just as Thorn dark thought in the first place right right what about uh um what can you tell us uh about um like like how well how well differential reinforcement generalizes across different environments and and what because that's a that matters right it's very easy to to get a result in a certain specific environment but that's not your objective if you want to transfer that and I yeah you really do so this this is always a problem with training any new behavior um so what we're know fundamentally what we're talking about here is a phenomenon called stimulus control which is that that that what the law of effect really says is that reinforcement makes Behavior more likely to occur again in the same context where it was already where it was previously reinforced and so that would you know apply just equally to punishment it would apply to you know to differential reinforcement procedures anything you might do so what we know is that um I mean it isn't kind of doomed it may well be that things will that behaviors will generalize to new situations and according to stimulus generalization kind of theory they're likely to do that more or less according to the extent that the two environments are similar to each other so the more simar it is the more it should generalize standard stimulus control stuff but you can train an animal to generalize simply by training it in more than one context um so if if I if I reinforce um uh a pigeon's key PEX to a yellow light and I change the light to Green then I would expect to see a decrease in responding no doubt about that but if I've trained it in you know to to pick both yellow keys and green Keys then I can probably try blue keys and lots of other things and it will still pick those because effectively what I've said is don't bother attending

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to the color of the key it's not important it's like the concept of of yeah yeah so so the key to getting Behavior to generalize to new context is train it in more than one context yeah and then there is the the other thing that we need to make sure that we can maintain that behavior what the desired Behavior over you know to to last longer than than just this initial training that we're doing um I find one of the like for me one of the issues I I personally have sometimes with differential reinforcement is the the go around a problem or or like that there is times where I find that I would really like the person or the dog or the kid to know that I don't like him to do that instead of just choosing to do something else like the the whole errorless learning if you we want to go that far and and like okay well there might be a cable or or something that or the outlet the electrical as we said and and I think it's important to in some cases to know that that if you're playing with that that's not good for you think right yeah but that's very much avoided that's like a nobody at least in the the the doctrin world when we're talking about differential reinforcement we always say well we will convince the dog to do BNC but we the dog doesn't know that a is a not good thing to do right right so and I have a problem with that yeah sometimes yeah yeah yeah that you know if you think of you know things like academic knowledge as that might go you know you do need to know that some answers are wrong as well as that other answers are right yes right right and and and so we're really talking about the same kind of thing and you know just just to go back to the point I was trying to make at the start not very well um the world arranges these aversive contingencies all the time you know so so we need to why would we not take advantage of that that you know that evolutionary history and and yes you do need to if you want to stop Behavior a and there are 99 other behaviors that can go that that could be done instead you don't want to reinforce all of those know you really want to try and make it efficient by saying anything else will be okay but don't do this one and so it and when you're talking about maintenance so I talked a bit about um about cnon avoidance schedules before you know with with the rat's pressing a lever to postpone a shock and if it keeps on doing that every so often it will postpone all the shocks indefinitely and what that means is it never receives any shocks and the sort of interesting consequence of that would be well you could go away you could change the rules you know you might never have been going to give it any

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shocks dog doesn't you know the animal doesn't know that um so because each of those each of those behaviors then is perhaps being maintained by negative reinforcement because it's the avoidance or at least in you know in the perception of the animal the avoidance of of something that might be going to happen yeah um then um then in fact that behavior is being reinforced all the time so you can make an argument that long-term maintenance is going to be easier when you you know when you've trained it in the form of avoidance because you don't always have to be there giving the periodic reinforces you will have to do that if youve train to Behavior by positive reinforcement so of course you know what we hope with with human behaviors is the kind of the naturally occurring reinforces that that The Wanted Behavior produce will eventually take over so that we don't have to be there you know it's often often called the middle class mous trap right you know that you do these sort of things because they lead you know because they lead to good consequences if for some reason in your history you've never learned to do those then we have to reinforce those explicitly so that you do and then you come into contact with the usual consequences but I think that might be a bit different for you know but dog so yeah I mean like like it's so different with the human you can you can still instruct it and and you know a dog has to experience it you just has to that's right yes so you cannot say to the dog if you do that I will you that won't work so you can and and actually if you try to do that if you try to you know and I noticed that some of the more extreme of these dog trainers say you know pretty much never say no to your dog right that's just as Dr Spock used to do do with never say no to your children you can only use language with the dogs in so far as you've trained it to respond to a particular sound that means something it doesn't doesn't have syntax it doesn't understand the meaning of the word it just knows and you could argue this is true of humans too though that takes us you know to somewhere different um but um but what I yeah where I was was going with that is if you try to do it by sort of telling you dogs things then you're going to be doing it in a kind of a firm cross voice and wagging your finger and things and so you could argue that what you're actually doing is is preventing aversive contingencies based on something that the dog hasn't done yet yes so that so that you you'll be punishing whatever the behavior was which might have been sitting and attending to you you know so that's obviously not what you want so I

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think with you know with all of these things you just just need better understandings of what contingencies are actually operating here you know I mean one of one of the the examples I used with my stage one students is what contingency is it when we send somebody to prison you know so you could argue and and and of course what we think we're doing we think we're punishing the undesired Behavior but if it's the case that that that that removes them from a more difficult real world social situation puts them you know puts them into one where at least they get fed and things we might be reinforcing it you know right and so we really we really need to you know we can't just our priority decide this would be an effective contingency because it would be effective on me you know everybody's going to be different and every dog's going to be different and you very much as a time out with a kid sometime the kid is like thank you I I got out of this you know a fantastic I I would I would have Lov that I can go and sit down and read my book you know making me do these things yeah they're great yeah lovely so all all that come into it I also think that sometimes because it's a to do to do right to do it correctly that there is so many factors so many things that need to happen and it takes time to happen and and meanwhile in some way at times not always but at times we may very well end up just delaying to address something that's kind of urgent that actually uh uh it can be dangerous to self or others or or um and we're kind of putting it in it's lingering in there you know yeah yeah yeah so so if they never experience any consequent know if they if they're just prevented from doing the behavior in other ways then then if if there is some kind of you know I'm weary of talking this way but if there's some kind of motivation to do that behavior and Instinct say um then that would have gone away by just distracting it by getting to do something else instead yeah I will give you one example of I don't know when we were talking if I mentioned this or no but uh back in the '90s I used to be a a guide dog trainer yeah and um cool back at the time we had a very specific training to make the dogs a aware that cars are not something you mess with so as long as there was a car moving in front even if the the blind person tells the dog to go the dog knows better not to go Y and that's as we are talking it cannot happen by explanation and instruction that's a direct experience yep today um I I still have that very interesting about uh uh how how things are done especially because it has shifted very much to to that extreme of

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everything is positive and there is a differential reinforcement so what happens is we they they're the way they're teaching the dogs is well you stop at the curb and then you're not Crossing but you never know that car actually can be a problem for you yeah and that like like me being a guide dog instructor at one point this is a very scary thing especially that now we because they what happens today they are relying very much on the on the orientation skill of the the blind person and that means that they are probably way more selective today who can have a dog than back in the 90s um and and when you're a blind person you you know you're not just blind there's like a bunch of diabetic I mean you have a a package of of of problems um and now the dogs only know how to go from like let's say from home to the bank and from home to the grocery store we used to train the way that we used to train and it was trial and error dogss were like I you can drop me anywhere with a dog that I have trained mm and I can navigate everything I need to navigate and it's a like today especially with having the more and more electric cars that have no sound whatsoever that creates a very different problem for a blind person where they can tell a dog go because they do not hear traffic and that dog's want to go because they have never experienced anything uh uh you know association with the car to be careful with that's interesting I was I was just thinking about just the same thing and even you know maybe even more uh I don't know whether you have these so much in the States but but but we have a lot of of of E E Scooters here you know being electric electric scooters being ridden on the foot path and they're silent and they're you know they're actually terrifying even if you can see you know because and so so the dog really you know you have to train the dog these are a danger you have to avoid those I don't you know maybe maybe there are people clever than me who can see how you could do that entirely by differential reinforcement but I can't see how you could that goes also like I don't know if you do anything I don't know if you have this like a like in the states in some states not everywhere but in some states we have like a lot of bad snakes like rattlesnakes and so on and there is this snake no snakes really no none W you're blessed very very lucky it's one of the reasons I still than Australia so we we do you know that there is actual training that goes on with like snake aversion training snake avoidance and and of course there is a uh quite a few trainers that do it in Force free way to where they're just deflecting the

1:01:30

dog to do something else as we're talking but the dog never really understands that the snake is a problem can be a problem I think you're right and and and so yeah I mean it's successful it's the dog most of the time most likely will go and do whatever it's reinforced but they still really don't understand that the SN is not your friend yeah so the only way they can learn it is if they're treating the the snake as a discriminative stimulus but reinforcement for doing this other behavior and That Could That Could in in principle that could work but learning the Discrimination is going to be relatively slow and it's also one where you know you really can't afford any mistakes right it has to be so I would think that you boost that by making you know making the snake actually aversive not just a discriminative stimulus yeah and and and and in fact you know you could argue now I I don't know where this this would happen but if but if the snakes become a discriminative stimulus where it signals to the dog you can get reinforcers for doing a different Behavior then the dog could come and so a positive discriminate stimulus in that case so that can itself become a condition reinforcer so you can end up with a dog that's seeking out snake the chaining thing so it can then avoid them you and you say that's not actually what you want yeah and to go even further with where you're going I'm just thinking now if for some reason the owner is not paying attention so they don't get reinforced yeah and now we have this little moment of Extinction burst where the dog is like hey no no there is a snake here yeah I need to get paid and actually tapping on top of the head of the snake yeah so that that is as we were saying before that's that's one of the kind of theoretical advantages of avoidance in the the reinforcer is always there if you don't get the you know if you don't get the aversive consequence even even if if the owner is not concentrating or whatever the reinforcement will still be there super cool let's uh let's talk a little bit I I I'm dying to hear the like everything you have to tell me about the the Kiwi studies because we did a very different like what we did we just published a study I don't know I send you the link probably it was good yeah we we focused mostly on a on a the predation sequence on the the chase Instinct not not so much on the on the the aversion and one of the the really good things that came out of the study that a lot of people just cannot accept and that was the fact that whatever this discomfort was it was very shortlived and there was no like the bag of fallouts was just not there um but but

1:04:36

let let go go with the your your because it's like a so big and so like through like and and I know there is a caveat to it but I I will just let you there is there is a caveat to it but it it's interesting because it you know cut to the chase on that it does doesn't say that you shouldn't use aversive methods here it does say that you need to do it right okay so so doc here the Department of Conservation that I'll call Doc have have this program that you can put your dog through and get it licensed so that your dog you're allowed to take your dog into into kiwi habitat okay so the Kiwi is our kind of national bird we're very sentimental about them and things and you we we treat them as treasured as protected they are threatened all their numbers are coming back and dogs indeed will kill kiwi there's no doubt about that but it's also true that that one of the advantages of having dogs that are able to go into kiwi territory is that pigs are a big danger to Kiwi wild pigs and so there's a lot of people here who do pig hunting with dogs as a hobby and so if they can have their dogs licensed then they can take them in there they can kill the pigs and that'll reduce the pig numbers and that will be better for the keep so it isn't just you know be nice for the dogs to go places this this would be of benefit to the Kiwi so the the the kind of training protocol that they've used they the first thing to know is they don't train with live kiwi so they train with what they call kiwi props and I would call kiwi related stimuli so things like kiwi feathers and kiwi feces and nesting material and a a silhouette of a kiwi K I think they used a stuffed kiwi under some sort circumstances so lotss of keyway related things and the idea is you put uh an an e-collar on your dog and it gets walked past these and if it shows any interest in those which of course they always do because of the smell um then the dog gets a shock you know and and learns to avoid it and and it's usually only done once single shock and there a one trol learning this will work and so what we showed um This was um this was one of my PhD students um PhD project the first thing we did was to show that yeah that works that they will they will avoid the props the kywi related stimulate right no trouble and then we did it you know we did a big kind of analysis of a whole because that was that was that was being done where my student conducted the research herself and then then we looked at a whole lot of training records that they had and found that all that worked and that there were there were no differences between breeds or anything

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or ages that we could detect nothing like that there didn't seem to be any welfare implications the owners were happy everything seemed good but then of course we had a concern because the idea of this is of course not to get the dogs to avoid the Kiwi kiwi feathers and things like that it's to get them not to attack live kiwi so we thought well we better just check this out so will that training generalize to avoiding a live kywi or not because it's likely that there'll be you know there'll be quite a strong kind of instinctual drive to go and do that they're hunting animals you know of course so naturally you know because of the protected status of kiwi we couldn't do the training with a live kiwi so what we decided to do was a kind of analog where the target bird was a chicken an ordinary domestic chicken rather than and did all just all just the same training you know so so chicken nesting material and the stuff chicken and all that sort of stuff train that okay the dog avoids those stimuli perfectly well but then the critical test is does that mean it will avoid a live chicken and the answer to that was no at least not reliably so a much higher proportion still attacked the live chicken than so nearly all of them avoided the props but that but the quite a quite a number still attack the live chicken so that would suggest you know that therefore aversion you know avoiding the prop does not necessarily generalize to avoiding the live of kiwi yeah so um at that stage you know you kind of have to say well this is this is not this is not an effective basis for licensing these dogs to go into kiwi territory that there is still a risk that they're going to do the predation and that and that that risk is you know relatively large where we want it to be pretty close to zero to know to do that right that's not to say that the method's wrong uh CU there are various ways that the that the procedure might be tweaked with the most obvious one of those being you've got to train with a live ke right because we we then trained the dogs so this this is our last condition we trained the dogs in just the same way but this time the target was a life chicken and they all avoided the life chicken virtually all of them did so that worked so Doc's assumption you know the original training protocols assumption that training with the stimula things related to Kiwi would be just as good the answer to that was no it's not just as good but it does work if you train with the live kiwi exactly doct you know for understandable reasons you know there's there's all sorts of you know protected status of kiwi for various different kinds of reasons they

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don't want to do that they don't want to train with a live kiwi um and also partly because there an all that many kiwi around the place um so would it work my guess is it would probably work if you gave them more shocks with the original training but I don't know that empirical question we need to find out whether that would be true I think we can be confident that it would work with a live keyword but why I'm I'm always wary of mentioning this is that that could be taken by the you know only positive training ad Advocates to say well look you know I mean they've shine it doesn't work so you can't use they are saying that already that's why we're having the conversation yeah yeah yeah yeah so they um they I mean they don't know about that result because we hav't published it not because we don't want to but um so the reason there really is a kind of um the reason for not having published it is because doc were enormously helpful and what they really wanted us to do was to kind of validate their program and so my student you know given the kind of relationship she'd built up with them she happy did indeed communicate to them privately and write reports and things to say this yeah it's not really working uh but she doesn't want to kind of run them down and so I had an interesting conversation with another dog trainer um not as good as you guys who who was um again recruited by doc to do another evaluation of the program because they didn't like our evaluation um because it didn't come out with the answer they wanted and essentially this guy didn't want to know um so he I was saying well look here are the problems we found these are the things you might have to do so and and to paraphrase him a bit what he was kind of saying was well yeah but I really you know really the most important thing is the kind of public relations aspect of this and it raises awareness and so forth so that's all right and it seems to me that if you're saying you know we've got evidence for thinking this doesn't work then continuing with it anyway in a Public Relation sort of way is is pretty questionable it's a bit like um um various Studies have shown that that the the the impact of reusing the same coffee cup all the time when it has to be washed and and bring bring that back that actually if you take everything into account the difference between that and the poly staring throwaway capup is nothing like the that they would see but nevertheless people advocate for doing the other one because it it it kind of raises awareness and shows the right attitude so it's this difference between what's a what's a signal of a behavior

1:13:08

that we think would be good as opposed to what is actually effective if we look at the look at it a bit more dispassionately than that so um you know the message from that should not be it doesn't work the message is doing it in this particular way didn't work and that and so there is a danger that with with with your study um what what I think you you've shown quite nicely is that you're much more much better able to prevent them from chasing lures Yeah but whether that would generalized to the live pre situation is kind of an open question yeah and most likely I wouldn't even argue that it would no I don't think you would right but but we know what we can do yeah so what what what all of those all of those different studies in all their various ways have shown is that punishment does indeed affect Behavior yes there's no doubt about that but you need you need to optimize the training you know you need to get everything right and you need to to conduct your your study fairly um so one of the things that I objected to in that very widely cited um China red aleis paper you know you know the one from from Britain where they were the Lincoln study the yes yeah yeah yeah the Lincoln study like so I wrote a critique of that for a lobbying firm in Great Britain um and you know again they they hadn't randomly assigned to groups they they they' assigned to groups according to what the probab you know the severity of the problem Behavior they they done all kinds of things that just meant that scientifically there were a lot of un uncontrolled variables where they just couldn't attribute the difference in the results they got unambiguously to the difference in the treatments um and it was even very like like you you no matter how well versed you are in reading and understanding a study you it's not possible to to understand clearly what was done with each group it's really not possible that's right that's right yeah and and interestingly as I seem to remember the the their pilot experiment came out the way that I think both of us would predict that the ecol was more effective and so they had to try and find ways of doing it differently so that didn't come out because it wasn't the result they wanted and uh I think this is this is dishonest and um you know it is very strange that we are we are in this time because um I think it's just such a fundamental laws on Earth and we cannot just because we want to we cannot get rid of it just like I mean we can say oh well let's nobody needs oxygen anymore we we can do we can live in a different way it's like okay but but until we can actually do we do need oxygen and we better learn

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how to how to be efficient and ethical because it's possible if we put the effort to to educate self and and advance and do more research and and so on but to totally reject the idea this is the the mindboggling yeah yeah look and there's there's there's a kind of distressing tendency in in quite a lot of areas these days where people are are so morally sure that the that that the conclusion that they want to come up with is right that they they feel that that you know that that end just a almost any means you can you can just just pick the bit bits of evidence you like and ignore everything else so one of the one of the you know one of the one of the kind of principles of science which is one of its strengths in the sense of discovering things about the world but one of its weaknesses in terms of public relations Is that it's always provisional the results are always you know open to challenge when new findings come up things might change and and and taking that perspective makes you vulnerable to people who for ideological or religious or whatever reasons have a kind of a certainty of their own rectitude you know and and so it becomes it becomes difficult to to fight these things do you think it's becoming even more problematic and and it kind of almost doesn't seem if it's going to we will come back to some reason do you think or or it just prog rively going into this direction that we look look what really H eventually we have to reset it there is just no way yeah yeah so this this this probably takes us you know some way from where we're going but to to one of my one of my other interests which is kind of kind of political and and and about concern with the rise of a postmodernist you know social constructivist ideology and things which essentially says that there is no objective truth that everything it's just uh you know that everything's socially constructed and in its most kind of radical form that it's just a means of perpetuating the power of the powerful class and continuing to repress and and this this you know this this is having a huge rise in in you know Academia just just sort of and they're rewriting biology and evolution books yeah absolutely you know I mean mean you know how many Sexes are there that's that sort of thing you know so there there's a whole lot of stuff where you know I think that I think that as the public is getting more more involved and more interested and I think that that universities are beginning to lose some of the kind of social get more and more confusing also confused yeah oh it is they're getting more confused but they're also starting to think you know hang on a minute what

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you're coming up with here is just that's just rubbish you know none of us believe this and so I I think think that's some kind of reset towards you know you know I want to say rationalism but rationalism has a particular philosophical meaning that's different from that but if but if you if you like um scientific realism you know that that there is a real world that there are things that are true and are not true and it's not about you know how much we want them to be true and how much they might serve other interests and that um whenever we do something that is other than seeking what the truth is we you know we're letting our down we're living Humanity there yeah and and then you have the like the the whole social construct thing like the like people at home they know but but you step out in public and now you have to put the different face and you have to go along and it's a big serious problem unfortunately but serious problem yep if we go back to to the study with the kiwis yeah how was uh how what did you guys observe as far as the again like any any of the studies like the one uh Dr Daniel Mills and and Van Der Borg and like like all this from early 2000s to 2015 there were few studies that were done and and they basically had a just this insane list of huge fallouts that the dogs would would be afraid of the owners they' be afraid to go to the training field they' be afraid to go on the street like they just just this crazy Scare Tactics we didn't we didn't see anything like that nothing like that at all they were scared of the Kiwi stimuli but you know and that was the objective but that well that's what we wanted yeah I mean the idea was to get them to avoid those saw no sign whatsoever of them being scared of of of Their Own and in fact what they do would be to run to the island and it's it it's it seems to me this is a different question really but that ecers you know as a means for delivering aversive contingencies have this huge advantage and and that the dog doesn't know who's done it you know that so you can have the remote control in your pocket the dog doesn't see you do any of that so they don't you know they don't and and you know I mean and the intensi very strictly controlled and it's not like you're hitting with a stick or some damage how they used to do experiments like there is no like like it's it's really it sends that impulse to the brain we're in danger yeah make Association yeah yeah it does hurt I mean i' I've I've right I mean I put one on myself you and so because I feel I should do that and know what that it's like yeah I'd ra I'd rather that didn't happen again but it

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doesn't do any you know longlasting damage I mean it has to be aversive so we did I did an ear an earlier study years ago which was about about um trying to trying to trying to reduce un unwanted backing in dogs you know when when when everyone's Got Away by by sound activated colors and the idea was to assess this citronella spraying caller uh um and to see whether that would that would work because that would be more Humane and the answer was of course that it worked for some dogs but not really very many um and we and we gave them in the end we gave them shot callers instead and that were perfectly and and that's what they wanted and everybody was happy um and but but when we thought about it this this whole kind of notion that we want to produce something that's less aversive was never really very likely to work because the whole point is that it needs to be aversive that's that's that's how it works you know so um yeah and I mean one one thing that that that you know opponents often bring up is the idea of learned helplessness right that that that if you apply punishes then you end up with you know an animal that just freezes but that was that was based on you know a the original search used very intense punishers you know this is dogs were themsel like was horrible yeah so nothing like that and also the whole point I mean what what produces learn helplessness is if the if the aversive event is unavoidable that there's nothing they can do to make this not happen that's what it means and it's really non contingent on anything either yeah yeah non contention or anything you know so so you're just going to get that and and of of course and you can see this with humans too when they they're in situations where terrible stuff happens and there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop it happen then you will get problems but that's not the case when you're arranging it as a contingency for a particular Behavior they can that all they have to do is not do the behavior and that that works and even with the Learned helplessness experience there is a a very interesting moment paragraph h that talks about the dogs that have previously had experience of escaping that they of course they were not responding CU they know there is nothing they can do in the Box yeah but that did not carry over in their life because they know that they can yeah that's right that's right and that's such an important piece that gets just shoved in the dirt right right yeah yeah so so so far as I can see all all that research although it keeps being cited this way this is just not evidence you know it's not an argument against using contingent

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punishment it's an argument you know there there's certainly an argument against non non-contingent punishment which effectively that's just a be I would say correct that's that's just like I always give this example like going into your house and it's booby trapped and you just don't want to walk into your house versus having a bad light switch and you just don't mess with the light switch Yeah Yeah Yeah fix the light switch but most of the studies and most of the things when if you pay attention they are always have that element of non-contingent punishment which leads to of course it would lead to this kind of problems yeah well yes and so so not not only non so non non-contingent yes that will definitely happen I think that' be that that just says people are applying it badly but of course the other problem is lack of immediacy you know so that so that if you and again this seems to me that this is an advantage of shot cers in that if you're using other punishment methods then all you're doing is punishing the dog once it's actually done the behavior you wanted it to do which has come back to youh yeah now now none of this is to say that that you know and we might disagree here so you using using shock call as a negative reinforcement as a method for recall you know getting dogs to come when they're called kind of wouldn't be my first choice you know but but I would say using it as a method of reducing an unwanted Behavior the running away you know predation obviously things like that I would say yeah in those case I think it's actually the first choice yeah for sure like I I I tell you a funny story here and everybody like I um I I also make dog training videos and one of the videos that I wanted to make was exactly this like how how would you teach a recall with the electric colar but the dog that I had in mind to do it with never had electric color on so that was you know one of the the factors but I um it was it was it's one of my dogs so I've done a lot of just positive reinforcement recalls like just throughout his life so now he's 10 months old and he likes to come to me so we we couldn't film the video we couldn't make it because I could not make him not come to me yeah right right I mean to the point that I would let another dog to play to kind of distract him leave some food and toys like did did plenty of things to create a little problem and eventually I'm like okay there's you know that that's that's what that's about but having said that just like how sometimes people this is one of the the the it's a serious problem in the dog Community when when we're comparing apples and oranges and we say well my

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dog is he never chases squirrels for example but then there is that dog that never has killed a squirrel because never had the opportunity but that instinct is so strong that if they have the opportunity they will kill the squirrel I don't know if they lead it but they will kill it and you cannot compare the two dogs and tell me that you will the same glove going to fit both ABS absolutely that you know somehow yours is a moral dog that wouldn't do these things yeah so so I guess that was that was that was one of the messages from the Kiwi stuff is is you know the evidence from the chicken analog is that trained in the way they were doing there is still this strong urge and also dogs you know when they're hunting they get hurt and they keep going you know so they're breed to tolerate pain I'm sure and and and and so under those circumstances the The Urge override it but if we had actually as as as we did in the final condition paired the electric shock with the live chicken that was enough to overcome it so it can overcome it but it's that you you know you need to do the training right you need to yeah this this was a excellent conversation like I'm very happy that we made it and yeah even with the time change and the confusion but it was beautiful that's okay I mean we we always we always get this wrong we only have one time zone here but yeah it's I will keep in touch with you because uh like I I have some other ideas about studies and stuff and and uh yeah look absolutely I like I like the way you you've conducted your stuff it's is very like like there is like a very methodical way there so yeah so if you like one of one of my you know one one of my Ambitions and what I might hope to have an influence is to turn more dog trainers into what we might call scientist practitioners who are you know evaluating what they do more carefully and and and and it might be that you know scientists are trained or should be trained in thinking of the alternative explanations of the results the confounding variables and designing things so as to try and Rule those out so that you know we we'd love you guys to be doing research on what it is you do all collaboration absolutely and maybe we can help um you know send your master student send your PhD students get work with you that sort of thing that' be really that would be amazing I think we are on to something thank you look I really enjoyed that thank you very much and I'm I'm most flattered to be asked appreciate it very much do so like thank you from all of usant have a good uh rest of the day I know you have to go and teach yeah I could have get a

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lecture in a wall yeah let's go thank you so much thank you [Music]