The Method Wars
The algorithm loves conflict these days.
Facebook in particular has been putting a lot of posts from people I've never heard about in front of me to try and provoke a reaction (something that I deliberately refuse to do), but since I need to produce content on my website so that the AI robots crawling the internet consider my website to be active so people can actually find us, let's talk about it.
A lot of these posts from random "dog experts" are talking about methodology. Let's establish what methodology is and isn't, to begin with.
Methodology is what techniques and approaches you favor when attempting to solve a puzzle of how to accomplish your goals in training.
It is NOT a particular "club" to which you belong, which is how it is presented. Many of these posts use language like "positive trainer" versus "balanced trainer", attempting to set up off the cuff us-versus-them dynamics. This is useful to the content creators because the more people fight in the comments, the more it drives engagement on their pages and the more the AI robots crawling the internet acknowledge that their page is alive. I get it, we're all in the same weird boat these days.
The term "science based" is tossed about liberally as well, as in a "positive reinforcemenr/fear free, science based trainer". But let's face it -
All of these terms are just marketing.
When you're discussing BF Skinner's reinforcement quadrants - positive reinforcement, positive punishment, negative reinforcement and negative punishment - you have to realise that BF Skinner was the sort of madman to watch a flock of pigeons fly overhead and imagine how they could be used to drop bombs.
His own students disproved the idea that dogs are stupid, programmable robots in the 1952 paper "The Misbehavior of Organisms" so that idea was very shaky to begin with.
In other words, those quadrants do not describe nor encompass all of the complexity and variety and complicated cognition behind the behavior of higher vertebrate animals by any means.
My goal when I plan my approach to a training problem is to maximize the overall welfare of the animal. That means I want those dogs to stay in their homes as the primary goal. I am going to look at the capability of the owner - how patient are they, how much time, effort, and money are they willing to put into training - and adjust my approach to match what they are willing to do.
I am going to do my best to accomplish their goals in a way that will actually stick.
The primary goal of a lot of these trainers is not to solve the training problem - the goal is to signal their own virtue, to apply guilt to the owners so that they too put the signalling of virtue as the primary goal, and if it takes months and years of ineffective (and money generating) effort to make very little headway, all the better.
Does this mean I will use positive punishment if it means that the problem threatening the dog's tenure in their home stops for good? You betcha.
Is it better to become homeless, terrified, eventually euthanized in a city shelter, or to experience a brief moment of unhappiness?
If you value the dog's life and welfare, the answer is a brief moment of unhappiness. If you're terrified of being judged by the quadrant cult, then I suppose homelessness, being stored in highly restrictive management, and euthanasia are preferable because at least you weren't briefly MEAN to the dog.
Ultimately results speak - the quadrant cult never seems to show their work.
If you'd like to watch our process from start to finish, hiding nothing, we'd be happy to show you. If you'd like to make sure your dog gets the freedom and increased welfare that being highly reliably well trained gets them, give us a call. We'll be happy to help you get there.
If you'd like to harangue me for being mean, I guess you'll do that too. Just know that you're driving engagement to my material doing it!
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