Is there ever a place for punishment?

OK - I admit it. I once hit my previous Labrador, Tessa, with a rolled up newspaper. But please don't shoot me down until you read on.

Tessa "stole" some food by jumping up to the kitchen table, I told her off - but no punishment. A few days later, a family member had left 2 or 3 squares of chocolate on a sideboard and she ate that, Fortunately no side effects. So the next time I caught her in the act of trying to get at food on a table I gave her a good hard whack across the rump with a rolled up newspaper. Loud noise, startled her, but would not have hurt her one bit. After that she never stole food again, even when I tested her by leaving a biscuit on a coffee table.

Was I wrong?

 

Hi @Sigurd Yes on a number of counts. Obvious one. Should be bonding with your dog, not hitting her. Second, suppose you believe in positive punishment. The dog should know how it should behave in order to avoid the positive punishment. You did not do that at all. Consider the issue from dog's viewpoint. Here is the dog doing something it did before and this time she gets belted for it. Not good training. Show the dog how to win. If the dog counter surfs, then teach the dog that the kitchen is out of bounds. That or clear the counter of food.

 

I agree with the view of Michael. An encouraged education is more positive than mere punishment. Give your Lab much time to study it.

 

No there is never a time . Ever. Would you do that to s toddler?
It's your job to stop leaving things that can be reached. It's your failure not the dogs

 

Thank you for your view.
I do not believe using punishment as a training aid, but I must say that your last two suggestions are not really practical. The kitchen is where she (and the puppy we now have) generally live(d). And ensuring table/counters are permanently clear of food in a kitchen is not really practical. The chocolate one, we could have avoided, but food in general is not.
Begging at table we dealt with by proper training, getting her to stay in her crate at our mealtimes and never giving her any food. But I don't see how one can use non-punishment methods in this situation - rare opportunistic behaviour.
And it did work and did not affect our bonding.
I am not trying to justify my action. I am asking if there are situations where restrained punishment (i.e. not done in anger) has a rare place in animal (and child!) training.

 

Not practical? You train the pup to sit and wait at the threshold of the kitchen, and leave nothing within reach. It's not rocket science.
You slow down and think and learn .

 

Hi @Sigurd, if you cannot remove the food and dog from the kitchen, then you will need to teach food refusal. You will have to remove the food while you are teaching food refusal.
I suggest you read about and reflect on the LIMA principle. In that ethical and training framework showing the dog what it should do to win comes before positive punishment. That is, positive punishment is not used as a first port of call.

 

You ask a very good question @Sigurd. We have 3 labs, and whilst 2 of our dogs we can trust completely the 3rd one is a horror for nicking things, I admit to calling him some very colourful names in the past!

I am awful for leaving food on counters, So I understand how difficult it can be. We do endeavor to keep the counters clear, and in the main it works. When we are busy, one of us is cooking, the the other doing stuff in the kitchen, it can get hectic, especially with dogs underfoot. We invested in a baby gate, and it keeps the dogs out of when we are busy, or have guests round. We sit at the table in peace, trying to ignore the mournful looks on the other side of the baby gate!

The thing is, aversives do work, so wacking or startling a dog may reduce the incidence of a particular action re-occurring, if you caught the action at the precise moment, and if your dog actually understood. What can happen though, is the risk of generalising a negative response to not just that incident, but to the area it occurred. An example being getting stung by an electric fence, leading to being scared to going out into the garden. So you holding a newspaper, or anything that resembles a newspaper, could generate an anxious response, because actually there is nothing more motivating than fear. Not saying of course this is true in your case at all mind..

There are also consequences of aversives, of course this also depends on the temperament of your dog. Some are more robust than others, for example one of my dogs have never ever displayed submissive calming behaviour ( lip licking, head low, head turned away... etc...) to me, because we have that kind of relationship, he has never needed too. And I love that. That doesn't mean I haven't accidentally kicked him, well fallen over him would be more accurate! On the other hand, I also have a very eager to please working dog, and if I shouted at her, well that would result in poor psychological outcomes.

Don't worry though, it just sounds like a blip, and nothing you can't fix.

Here is a good link to the consequences of using aversives you might find interesting..

https://www.thelabradorsite.com/punishment-in-dog-training/

https://www.companionanimalpsychology.com/2012/08/positive-reinforcement-and-dog-training.html

 

Well... they must be practical for many of us, because we implement them... So maybe rethink that?

There is a stair-gate on our kitchen. The dogs cannot get in there unless let in. They go in with a person, they get fed in there, they go toilet - then they go right back out the kitchen behind the stair gate again.

I do have pups in the kitchen until about 16-20 weeks (until they no longer fit in the smaller crate under the kitchen table!) but they are not big enough to jump on the sides even if they wanted and they are not left out of the crate when unsupervised in there. After that, the kitchen is a dog-free zone unless they are actually being fed their meals.

The problem you have, with counter-surfing, is that the dog is powerfully reinforced when they successfully get food off the side. And what is reinforced, they will try again and again to do in future. The solution is not punishment - it is prevention. Prevention to the point of extinction, though: That means that you must prevent the dog from succeeding until they have given up ever trying or looking for food.

As for what's wrong with punishment: Firstly, for many dogs a whack on the butt with newspaper compared to stealing a roast chicken, is probably a fair deal - many would continue to risk the whack to get the chicken. Hence why many dogs with electronic collars and electric containment fences still choose to run through the pain of the fence to get to another dog or perceived reinforcer on the other side. What do you do then? Increase the punishment? To abusive proportions??

Second, aversives generalise like wildfire. I have an example of a similar situation with one of my own dogs: This was about 12 years ago, when I was starting out as a trainer. At the time, we did not allow our own dogs on the sofa. One of our dogs still liked to get up there when she could. We were advised (actually by a trainer at the UK's leading clicker trainer centre - go figure!) to get a baking sheet and put some cutlery on it, and place the baking sheet so it was on the sofa sticking out - so that when the dog jumped up, they pulled down the baking sheet and the cutlery with a loud metallic clatter, thereby leading to the dog never attempting to get on the sofa again.

Well - this sounded aversive but it was advice from the UK's leading clicker centre, so it had to be acceptable, right? Wrong. We did exactly as told and at first it seemed like magic, the dog never attempted to get on the sofa again. Then we noticed when we were putting the crate down one day, that she was scared of the metallic noises of the crate. This continued for many months. Then my husband was putting away the metal stairs up to the attic - and at the sound of the metal, this dog ran away and hid. Moving the metal floor fan... dog ran away... From then on, permanently - any time there were metal noises of any description, this dog was scared. It is kinda unpleasant to see your dog scared unnecessarily, and frequently....

This continued for years and over the years, it got progressively worse - despite all I could do as a behaviourist, counter-conditioning and sound recordings... The dog is 12yo now. It moved on from being an aversion to metal sounds, to being an aversion to weird or sudden sounds of any type - someone dropping something, someone knocking into a chair, electronic noises like static and so on - essentially and in short, it generalised. She was worked as a gundog and was fine being shot over and also fine with fireworks - and now she is very afraid of the squealy fireworks (still ok with the bangs). As a puppy and younger dog she had been fine with all types of fireworks - so again, throughout her life, this fear has generalised and spread to areas previously unaffected by it.

So we had a clear generalisation pattern:

• Cutlery and baking sheet = fear
• All metal sounds = fear
• Sudden or unusual acoustic sounds = fear
• Electronic sounds = fear
• Fireworks = fear

So - you don't know what fire you are starting, when you use punishment. You cannot control how the fire will spread, once you start it. It will generalise frequently outside of your control. It will lead to far more problems than it creates.

It is really best not to start the fire which is the generalisation of fear, because it will be out of your control once you have started it.

 

I just want to reiterate the baby gate idea. It has basically stopped counter surfing in our house, as long as the open side of the counter doesnt have anything of interest.

So now he sulks on the other side of the gate when I'm cooking, but better that than him hurting himself by eating something dangerous, pulling down a hot saucepan and learning bad habits.

I know this is simplistic, but it's not fair use positive punishment on dogs because we can't explain our reasoning to them like you can with a child of an appropriate age (not advocating corporal punishment here either, but say... making a child clean up a mess they made). This also leads to all sorts of unintended consequences, as others have touched on.

 

Cooper never counter surfs, but Tilly will, so we have to be careful what we leave out. Our dogs have free range of pretty much all the house including the kitchen. We spend a lot of time in there and so do they.

I would not worry about the newspaper swat but I would not do it again. Most of us have probably spoken harshly to our dogs at some point, and had no ill affects. While I'm am a believer in positive training, it still seems reasonable to tell them NO when you catch them doing something you don't want. We do the same thing with toddlers and children.

 

Thank you all. A good discussion, which was my intention. So don't lay into me for expressing views you don't agree with! I may not agree with them either!

And the newspaper swat I mentioned in my opening post, did her no harm and was definitely a one-off. I am not promoting the use of punishment.

However, many of the comments mention changing things around to suit the dog's behaviour. I can't say I totally agree with that. Firstly, some of the suggestions may be practical for your life style/kitchen/house but not necessarily for others. Also, like Sky Patroller, a lot of us want the dogs to have more or less free range of the house - they are part of the family. So we need to live together and not adjust house and our kitchen practices regarding food or other things to suit the dog.
At present Susie will try and chew anything she can get her teeth into, so we are rapidly running out of high storage space! So there is a limit to how much one can change the house around to avoid temptation to the dog. It will take time using modern methods to train her to leave things alone, and we are working on that. No aversives. . But in the meantime if a strong aversive, to use the euphemism for punishment, is used to avoid her doing something dangerous, as long as it is not cruel, why not? Being told No, or put behind a gate is an aversive after all.

 

Interesting points @Sigurd.

In my pup's early days the downstairs of my house was changed and ordered to try to manage her destructive behaviour. Rugs were placed under the stairs, shoes locked away in a cupboard that I had to buy, magazine rack removed, tables, chairs and other objects placed as barriers in the lounge to stop her getting to certain things, constantly having to be with her (unless she was locked in a crate) to stop destruction of things or herself, huge folded up bits of cardboard shoved in open spaces to stop her getting stuck.
Every surface in the kitchen was kept free from any food and the bin was locked in the larder.

For a good long while the downstairs was untidy and disordered and not that pleasant to live in but it was essential to protect household items and the pup. Even had I wanted to use aversives
/punishment I would have been constantly shouting, manhandling her, removing items from her razor sharp teeth, swatting her with a newspaper (for example) because there were so many things she could and would have destroyed and she would not have learned not to do them all by one swat, if that makes sense.

When my son was a crawling baby and then an on-the-move toddler, it was the same. Everything out of reach, eyes in the back of my head, sparse and less comfortable home, until he was old enough to leave (most) things alone.

Yes, it's an inconvenience, as you say, but part and parcel, in my view, of taking responsibility for the changes a dog, at least when it's a pup, brings to our lives.

It wasn't for long that my house was in upheaval, by 5 months I was gradually able to restore order and now, at nearly two years, it's only the bin still locked away, but I'm sure she'd even be fine with that back in place.

Funnily enough, she's just wolfed down half a prawn sandwich I left lying at her nose level! No amount of telling off would stop her doing that again because it's so instinctual for her to gobble whatever she might find, 'my bad' as the saying goes!

 

Hi @Sigurd negative punishment is inevitable when using mark and treat. When the dog is in the acquisition stage the dog is rewarded for each and every successful repetition. The dog will come to expect a treat. When you move to the fluency stage you may not reward the dog for a tardy sit. As far as the dog is concerned she sat and now expects a treat. The withdrawl of the treat represents negative punishment. I would guess that every trainer on this site has used negative punishment.
Force free trainers do not believe in using positive punishment (the application or adding of an aversive in order to reduce an undesirable behaviour). The entries above have indicated some of the reasons why. In practice, I suspect that mild aversives are sometimes used, although some force free trainers protest even with Uh uh or no. Learned helplessness can be borne by a dog when a trainer has used just words inappropriately.
If I belted you with a rolled up newspaper or yelled no every time you did something different that I disliked would you regard that as a series of mild punishments?

 

Lay in you ? Poor baby at least it wasn't a rolled up news paper eh?

 

But you are missing the point and not quite understanding the learning theory behind things (forgive me!)....

Prevention is an extremely powerful dog training tool. If you put a stair-gate on your stairs when you bring a new puppy home and you consistently use it and NEVER allow the dog through the stair gate, when the dog gets to be around 18 months old you can remove the stair gate - and the dog will never attempt to go upstairs. She will wait at the bottom of the stairs, as if there were an invisible stair gate there.

Similarly, if you are training a gundog and you ALWAYS hold a training tab when running marked retrieves, so the dog can NEVER run in - then the dog really will stop attempting to run in - because it is never possible.

Too often people new to dog training look at prevention and either 1) they don't see it at all - because it is the invisible 50% of force-free dog training - we can all see someone clicking and treating, but we don't notice someone holding a leash or controlling the environment to prevent unwanted learning from occurring or 2) they think it is not 'proper' training somehow, or it is getting around the problem or circumventing things or doesn't count or [insert other phrase here].

Neither of these things are true. If you can shape behaviour through excellent use of prevention, you will simply not see the problem behaviours you would have seen in your dog otherwise - including counter-surfing.

Where things fall apart, is where prevention isn't implemented perfectly and the dog occasionally self-reinforces by doing the thing we are trying to prevent. This will instead put the behaviour on a variable reinforcement schedule and lead to the dog just trying it even harder. Which is why it is so important that prevention is absolute, total, 100% - until you reach the point of extinction (the dog no longer even trying to do the unwanted behaviour).

So: YES, it does involve changing things around to suit the dog's behaviour, but this usually need not be permanent changes.

This is true: Open plan living, where the kitchen area is part of the living area and not a separate room, is extremely difficult. You would still need to implement prevention in some way though - via crating when not supervised, dogs in another room when you are out etc etc etc - but it's just impossible to see how you can expect to have a kitchen counter which is accessible to dogs, and for the dogs not to attempt to get the food. Because even tiny crumbs or dried up stuff is going to be reinforcing and it's impossible to clean sufficiently to remove all reinforcement. Of course there are some people with dogs which have never attempted to counter-surf (and they are very lucky) but to bring a new dog home and just expect this not to happen, would be a bad idea. Instead, expect and anticipate that everything unwanted that your dog can do, they will do - and put things in place to prevent all of this from day one.

Do you really expect your children to be able to reach the knobs on the cooker? Do you put medicines in the cupboards at child height without a child lock on the cupboard doors? Do you use no stair gate on stairs when you have a toddler? Why is it ok to change the house around for a child's safety, but not for a dog's needs? Didn't you just say they are part of the family too?

Being told 'No' is not in itself an aversive. Why would it be? Dogs are not born speaking English, so if you say 'No' to them, why should that mean 'no' anymore than 'banana' means no???

The word 'no' is not an aversive unless it has been associated with actual aversives. That means: It has been said with a raised voice, or in a threatening way, or with anger, or it has been associated with a whack from newspaper or a scruff shake or slap or any other aversive you care to name. Those things are primary aversives. The word 'no' is not.

And the word 'no' also means nothing. It doesn't tell the dog what we do want them to do, instead. It leaves a behavioural vacuum. Far better to teach a dog to do something else instead of the unwanted behaviour, or the unwanted behaviour will just come back again...

Being put behind a stair gate is also not an aversive. Why would it be? Do you not put your dog behind a stair gate every time you come back in from taking them out to toilet? Do you not put them in their crate many times a day, or in a pen? Or in a car crate? Is doing that an aversive, every time you do it?? Poor dog! What if you were giving the puppy a Kong and putting them on the other side of the stair gate, is putting the puppy behind a stair gate still an aversive? Of course not.

Putting a dog behind a stair gate in the way described, is just removing them from a situation. You may be removing them from something they were enjoying doing, which they were not supposed to do - like counter-surfing - in which case, they will be aware that the fun thing has stopped. That is not an aversive. Instead it is removing a reinforcer: It is negative punishment. Negative punishment is used by force-free dog trainers the world over. If you don't sit, you don't get the treat. If you keep jumping on the side, you get put out of the kitchen. The reinforcement disappears (is removed). There are no aversives involved in negative punishment.

Hitting the puppy with newspaper is positive punishment. We don't do that. Positive punishment involves the use of aversives.

Well, many people have tried, many times now - and very politely and in great detail - to explain to you "why not". You don't really seem to be understanding the explanations. Who defines if it is "cruel"? You, or the puppy?

 

Thank you for your comments Jo, but to answer your last point about my lack of understanding, I refer you to my last post, -

My intention was to stimulate debate, which it has done, and produced a lot of good points. Don't assume things about me.

 

Your original question was a good one and definitely has sparked great debate which is useful for all to read, especially new comers to the site.

 

Thank you Edzbird.

 

Agreed, good debate.