There is a misconception that surrounds positive reinforcement training that I think needs to be addressed. It is something that trainers need to apologize to dog owners for. You see we have deceived you slightly into thinking that if your dog is doing something wrong then you need to ignore that behaviour.
I remember very early in my career one of my clients advising me that their Bulldog had clamped their teeth on her leg (no puncture, just a good hold) and my client said that she remembered that she had to ignore bad behaviour so she did nothing. I was floored, I expected whole heatedly that if your dog had grabbed your leg that common sense would tell you to at least remove the dog.
At this point I began to change this message slightly and remind clients to reinforce the behaviour that they want to see – sitting over jumping up, toileting outside over punishing for toileting inside and giving a place to dig over stopping digging – reinforcing anything that wasn’t the bad behaviour that they did not want to see.
The truth is though we don’t really ignore bad behaviour, it is an overly simplistic and confuses the general public about the steps they actually need to make when their dog is displaying a behaviour that they don’t want. Saying, ignore the behaviour gives people permission to do nothing – they then don’t change the behaviour and get frustrated with training and give up cause it is not working for them. So it is time that we became clear in our language, to help dog owners progress with behaviour modification.
Proactive Correction: Let’s address this word “Correction”, it isn’t what you have been lead to believe, a correction is just something that rectifies an error or inaccuracy. In “traditional” training this may have meant a jerk on a lead, a kick to the abdomen, a noise designed to startle (throw cans, chain-links, yelling a word or a imitation growl, a tssst sound), The issue with attempting to use violence and intimidation as a correction is that it fails to provide the actual information that corrects the error, at best it may stop an action, but it is like teaching someone to spell by only telling them they are wrong and waiting for them to somehow, eventually get it right. It relies on the dog to find a different option, with out information about what actually is the better choice it is also a very reactive form of training as you wait for the dog to step out of line.
So Force Free trainers do correct behaviours, except we attempt to do it pro-actively through management rather than re-actively with intimidation. Management is simple and practical steps that rid the dog of the opportunity to practice the behaviour in the first place while we train what we want, our aim is to set the dog up to be successful as much as possible.
Our interactions with trouble makers should be dealt with the 3Rs of dog training – these are remove, redirect and reinforce.
Remove: Remove the dog from the environment or things in the environment from the dog. Dog eating your shoes? Remove your dog from when the shoes are (puppy pen) or move your shoes to a place where your dog can’t get to them.
Redirection: Remove the dog and give them something else to concentrate on. Give your dog enrichment based toys to play with rather than them digging up your plants.
Reinforcement: Remove the dog, redirect and start rewarding either incompatible behaviours (you can’t jump up if you are sitting) or anything that is not the behaviour that you don’t want (standing quietly is not barking at the postman)
These 3 concepts allow dog owners to understand the steps that they should be taking to deal with problem behaviours, and not without the tools and know-how when dealing with problem behaviours. They allow you to plan your reponse to problem behaviours, which are generally normal dog behaviours, and not to be a victim to your dog where you have to try to startle or intimidate them into line.
