“The lower animals, like man, manifestly feel pleasure and pain, happiness and misery.” — Charles Darwin in ‘The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals’ Training a dog to heel through jerks often turns into a frustrating and self-defeating exercise. In the face of continuous leash jerks, dogs often start moving increasingly slower and…
“Positive reinforcement results in lasting behavioral modification, whereas punishment changes behavior only temporarily and presents many detrimental side effects.” B.F. Skinner (1970) Balanced and dominance trainers tend to present reward and punishment as opposite sides of the same coin, as if choosing one over the other was a matter of taste. This simplistic picture ignores…
For the sake of argument, let us imagine that Cesar Millan is right. We will imagine a universe where punishment causes no adverse psychological effects. In Millan’s reality punishment does not elicit fear and it does not cause aggression; punching a dog will not cause it to bite. Confrontational methods don’t result in defensive aggression;…
This is an old study and it is not about dogs. What caught my attention though was the age of the subjects and the species it involved: Giant Aldabra tortoises. Weiss E., Wilson S.(2003) The Use of Classical and Operant Conditioning in Training Aldabra Tortoises (Geochelone gigantea) for Venipuncture and Other Husbandry Issues.Journal of Applied Animal…
Another example of Brad Pattison’s twisted view of dogs seemed appropriate before the upcoming book review. When is submissive behavior an attempt at dominance? In an episode of At the End of My Leash, Pattison meets a black GSD with some fear-aggression issues that manifested in a lot of barking and some lunging. It also…
Science and Dogs 
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