A number of years ago when I was working in a pet shop, I was unpacking some boxes and placing the unpacked items in a metal shelving unit – the shelving unit was one of those galvanised metal shelves that you would usually see in a a garage or shed that in a cold room. Never the less, I had packed this shelve several times, and would do again in the future, but on this particular day how I felt about the shelf changed, and it would never be the same. I know that may sound a little melodramatic – but it is the truth. You see that day while I was packing the shelf I cut my finger – sliced it deep and painfully. Blood spouted from my finger, I had to try and find something to stop the bleeding and the bruising – while my co-worker was busy serving customers. It shouldn’t have really been a big deal right, but somewhere in my brain it was a big deal and it stuck! Every time I went near that shelf again, i felt a sense of dread, my brain would play over the finger cutting incident. I would try to suck it up, and get on with my job – but that feeling was there and it wasn’t going to move.
I think of this event any time someone tells me that they have done something to their dog, but they only did it once. A common statement for people who use electric fences for their dogs – “oh he only got shocked once but now he never gets shocked”. You see your dog doesn’t have to physically be shocked to relive the memory of being shock (including the pain and fear that it invokes). Tools that are aversive in nature mean that the dog only needs a reminder of a potential threat to feel scared. Just as I did – my fear wasn’t limited to just that one location, when I moved stores and was stacking on new shelves with rounded edges where cuts were improbable, I still experienced the same fear reaction.
This is why electric fences come with beeps and little flags – to illicit a response from the dog that inhibits their behaviour due to a past experience of pain. It is why choke chains rattle, and some trainer condition a word “Ba” – to illicit an emotional response derived from a moment of pain or fear.
I get it, I get why as a dog owner you don’t want to hurt your dog, and I get why you would want to convince yourself that these products don’t hurt, especially if you are using one on your dog right now, but I think that honesty is a better option – that you are trading off your dogs sense of safety for your own sense of control. It is often easy to scare an animal into compliance – but unnecessary almost all of the time.
Personally I don’t want my dogs to have to re-live fear or pain – I want them to be happy, confident as well as well behaved – there has to be a better way right? Have I told you the tale of clicker training …
