THIS IS A monumental work arising from the love of dogs and the pursuit of knowledge. Cynophiles, academics, animal behaviorists (with and without institutional degrees), literate dog owners, and anyone who has ever wanted to know something spe- cific or just plain more about dogs are in- debted to Steve Lindsay for this labor of love.
See Full PDF See Full PDFContemporary dog training and the ongoing changes within this field, particularly ones related to perceptions of dogs and their roles, are interesting topics for academic inquiry. Present practices generally rely upon either the pack-and-dominance concept—leading to top-down, discipline-heavy treatment—or behaviorism and operant conditioning, where great emphasis is placed on positive reinforcement. The “positive” approach underlies state-of-the-art training programs of the second decade of the 21st century. Authors of such programs go beyond the limitations of behaviorism, embracing up-to-date information about the emotional and cognitive abilities of dogs—something that trainers strongly attached to behaviorism are prone to overlook. Such a new approach to dog training does not oppose critical anthropomorphism, and it challenges prior understanding of the dog-human relationship. The relationship in question ceases to be unilateral and becomes a bond of mutual benefit, where a force-free, reward-based method of training is in unison with advertising the self-development potential for humans.
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Journal of The Experimental Analysis of Behavior
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Applied Animal Behaviour Science
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Historically, pet dogs were trained using mainly negative reinforcement or punishment, but positive reinforcement using rewards has recently become more popular. The methods used may have different impacts on the dogs' welfare. We distributed a questionnaire to 364 dog owners in order to examine the relative effectiveness of different training methods and their effects upon a pet dog's behaviour. When asked how they trained their dog on seven basic tasks, 66% reported using vocal punishment, 12% used physical punishment, 60% praise (social reward), 51% food rewards and 11% play. The owner's ratings for their dog's obedience during eight tasks correlated positively with the number of tasks which they trained using rewards (P < 0.01), but not using punishment (P = 0.5). When asked whether their dog exhibited any of 16 common problematic behaviours, the number of problems reported by the owners correlated with the number of tasks for which their dog was trained using punishment (P < 0.001), but not using rewards (P = 0.17). Exhibition of problematic behaviours may be indicative of compromised welfare, because such behaviours can be caused by or result in a state of anxiety and may lead to a dog being relinquished or abandoned. Because punishment was associated with an increased incidence of problematic behaviours, we conclude that it may represent a welfare concern without concurrent benefits in obedience. We suggest that positive training methods may be more useful to the pet-owning community.
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