Punishing Dogs Does Not Lead to Faster Results Than Reward Training
I’ve heard multiple times in the last two weeks that forcing dogs and using punishments on them is faster than positive reinforcement training. Not only is this a blatant false statement used to justify using aversives that are harmful on dogs, it’s even worse than simply examining speed of training.
1. It’s the equivalent of saying it’s easier to just beat a child rather than teach and raise them to learn manners, what’s appropriate in human society, and different subjects like mathematics. It’s easier for the person hitting the child maybe, but it’s not easier on the learner. It doesn’t do anything to speed up the rate that the child will learn. And this is the same thing for dogs. If you apply aversives to punish and force dogs to do things - relying on fear and pain as motivation - it shuts dogs down. It puts them into a fight/flight/freeze response (basically an emergency situation where an individual is simply trying to survive a threat). This isn’t conducive to learning new subjects.
2. It ignores that the learner sets the pace. You can’t force an individual to learn something in a specific timeframe. Each person or dog is an individual and will have his/her own rate at which they learn something. If someone is slower, he won’t learn faster by being shocked. If a dog is dealing with a medical issue or pain, he might respond slower or not at all - and so yelling at him or jerking him on a leash attached to a collar isn’t going to speed up learning. If dogs are stressed or in a fight/flight/freeze state, they won’t learn faster by distressing them more. If a dog is anxious, you can’t resolve anxiety by punishing dogs and adding more anxiety to the situation. This isn’t how learning works. It’s how torture works.
3. If you scare a dog, you can permanently cause trauma to that dog. It’s possible to cause essentially Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) symptoms in dogs by single event learning - meaning one scary situation causes basically irreversible damage. Think of people in the military who panic and duck when they hear a car backfire, because of the PTSD they have from being shot at or having bombs dropped near them during their war experience. It’s a survival mechanism, but it’s not pleasant. It’s not something we should intentionally cause in dogs to train them.
4. Reward training results build upon early foundations and progressively lead to happy, confident dogs. There are no negative side effects to treating dogs kindly and humanely with positive reinforcement training methods.
While you can’t build confidence in a fearful dog by adding fear/pain, you can by using rewards and creating positive connections/associations with things in the environment (with stimuli).
In addition, once dogs learn the system of perceiving a cue -> doing a behavior -> and receiving reinforcement (rewards), they can learn new behaviors incredibly fast - including often times in a single trial - meaning the dog figures out the behavior you are trying to teach; but the dog would still need more repetitions for working around distractions, distance, etc. to proof the behavior and help the dog learn that it applies in general contexts.
This is because there is no fear involved in the teaching the process. The dogs are free to test and try new behaviors, they are only receiving positive things like praise and treats, and they are enjoying themselves. That’s a conducive environment for learning. Not one where the dog has to worry when the next painful shock or jerk on the collar is about to occur, or feeling like they have no choice because people force them to do things like be dragged on leash towards something that scares them.