Clean Run Magazine - November 2008 - 38

Purely Positive The Myth By Kathy Keats Positive Reinforcement Negative Punishment Positive Punishment Negative Reinforcement One of the principal precepts medical students learn is “First, do no harm,” or, Primum non nocere. It reminds doctors that they must consider the possible harm that any intervention might do. Most often it is mentioned when debating the use of an intervention with an obvious chance of harm, but a less certain chance of benefit. Primum non nocere can be as aptly applied to dog training as it is to medicine. • Positive reinforcement: Adding a “treat” after a behavioral response in hopes of increasing the frequency of the target behavior; for example, you give your dog a cookie every time he sits. • Negative reinforcement: Removing an aversive after a behavioral response in hopes of increasing the frequency of the target behavior; for example, the dog won’t let go of the toy so you hold him by the collar against your leg until he drops the toy, at which time you release the collar. • Positive punishment: Adding an aversive after a response in hopes of decreasing the target behavior; for example, your The philosophy of “positive” dog training stems from the concept of using positive reinforcement as the primary means of modifying behavior. On the list of possible training tools an instructor can give a student, positive reinforcement is relatively easy to use and the least likely to do serious damage to a dog if used incorrectly.Yet, positive reinforcement in isolation does not deal with every training problem. Every dog is different. In trying to do no harm, somewhere along the way we’ve lost the balance in our training and the use of other valuable training tools.The chance that these tools will be misused increases because of a lack of education and a lack of understanding. dog barks and jumps up and tries to bite you while you’re working and you spray him in the face with a water bottle. • Negative punishment: Removing a “treat” in hopes of decreasing the target behavior; for example, removing the dog from the course and giving him a timeout in his crate after he leaps over the A-frame contact. Positive reinforcement is only one of the four quadrants of operant conditioning, 25% of the available operant conditioning tools. The other three quadrants use some form of punishment (applying a punisher or removing a reinforcer) or negative reinforcement Are You Really Purely Positive? Agility training is trick training. We teach our dogs many different behaviors in agility that are not natural. We primarily use positive reinforcement to do this. There is a small percentage of the time, however, that we must use the other tools of operant conditioning. If we don’t talk about them, we won’t understand or use them when needed, or might use them incorrectly. Operant conditioning consists of four quadrants, or tools, that when used appropriately, can create black-and-white rules for your dog. The four quadrants available for use are: 38 (pressure and release). One of the big misconceptions is that a correction or punisher involves a physical correction.This is not the case, but poorly used punishers of any kind can still be damaging. If you have ever used a timeout, you have used a negative punisher and by definition are not purely positive. If you have used a Gentle Leader head halter to redirect your dog by putting some pressure on the halter when he started thinking about misbehaving and then released the halter as soon as his intent changed to a better choice, you’ve used negative reinforcement. If you’ve ever said “excuse me” to your dog when you don’t like what he’s doing, you’ve used a Clean Run | November 08

Clean Run Magazine - November 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Clean Run Magazine - November 2008