“I’m not a PEZ dispenser, I want my dog to listen because I told them to.”
This conversation happened in just about the last place you could imagine. Seriously, go ahead and guess. Where do you think I heard this sentence?
You’re wrong. It was in my gynecologist’s office.
Going in for my yearly check-up, my doctor and I engaged in the usual small talk. She hadn’t seen me since I quit my job at the hospital. I enthusiastically told her how I had begun apprenticing with a dog trainer, working at a shelter, and looking into certification programs to become a trainer myself.
That’s when she started telling me about her experience with going to training classes. She said how much it helped her dog… but not at first. The first training center she went to had them giving the dogs lots of treats. She expressed how she disliked the feeling of bribing her dog to listen to her. That wasn’t how she taught her children to behave! So she found a new trainer that focused on training you to be the “leader” in the house. Her dog learned to “respect” her, and she was very pleased with the results of this new training style.
Try to imagine the expression on my face during this time. I tried very hard to smile softly, and look relaxed and inquisitive. In actually, I bet my face looked more like a possessed bobble head. Eyes wide, teeth clenched, head stiffly moving up and down as I nodded along to her story… When she finished I gave a short and sweet elevator pitch that at this time I had almost nearly perfected. I said how positive reinforcement continues to prove a more effective and humane form of training and if it has worked for zoo keepers for decades then it probably worked for dogs. I didn’t push much more than that, as I don’t think the time to change someone’s mind on a topic is when they are gloving up to give you an invasive exam.
A COMMON VIEW
As strange as this encounter was, it wasn’t surprising. At this point, I was really getting used to seeing the way people view their relationships with their dogs. Fast forward to present day, I don’t think there is an opinion I haven’t heard.
“I’m the pack leader in the house and my dog should respect me”
“My dog should listen to me because I commanded them too.”
“My dog has to come when I call.”
“My dog knows how to do this.”
“My dog is stubborn and doesn’t want to listen to me.”
“My dog is challenging me.”
This kind of attitude is so pervasive that even I will admit that as a child I thought I was “in charge” of my dogs. When my dog didn’t respond to my commands, I often thought she was ignoring me on purpose. I expected her to always obey my command, and I grew up in a house that used reward-based training!
So why does this mindset seem so commonplace? After studying animal behavior and realizing just how wrong these ideas were, I started to really wonder. Why do we humans misinterpret our interactions with our pets so deeply? Why are people so adverse to training their dogs with rewards? Why does it seem natural for us to resist this method of training? Let’s see if we can break this down, shall we?
HOW WE VIEW OUR RELATIONSHIP WITH OUR DOGS
I think it all starts with the context in which we see our dogs and ourselves. It’s a contradiction of sorts. We see dogs as vastly different from us, yet expect them to understand the world in a human context.
While we are both animals, we see dogs as intimately different from ourselves. We are different species after all, but it is more than that. We believe ourselves to be supremely unique in the animal kingdom, to the point where we feel we must distance ourselves from other animals. In science when discussing the animal world, we will sometimes refer to ourselves as humans and to other species as “non-human animals.” It makes it sound as if the kingdom animalia has two branches; one for humans and one for all other animals. I assure you, however, it does not. Yet this type of distinction is prevalent across many fields, and I myself have encountered it numerous times. Sometimes it is clarifying and useful, other times it just seems redundant. It has always struck me as a strange phrase.
You can’t deny that humans are indeed unique in many ways. While we are not the only animal to use tools, we certainly have developed highly sophisticated ones. While many animals experience emotions, humans share theirs through beautiful manifestations of art. We are different, but maybe we measure that difference as so extreme simply because we are measuring from inside the equation. One might argue that, behaviorally, a chicken is miles away from an earthworm. Chickens have sophisticated social structures, can learn tricks, and even be taught to play video games! (1) Compare that to an earthworm, and even they seem like aliens from different planets. Still, they are both animals and we group them together in our “non-human” animal world. Along with our dogs. Our dogs, who we perceive as inferior to us and thus subordinate.
THE “GUILTY” LOOK
At the same time we often put human-human context on a human-dog relationship. Somehow, we expect dogs to share with us some of the most intimate parts of the human experience. Human constructs like right and wrong, authority, social rules, etc. When we come home to find our shoes chewed up and destroyed, we scold our dogs and expect that they should understand that we are upset because they have broken a social rule. You don’t take things that aren’t yours, and you don’t break those things. We expect dogs to understand ownership outside the realm of possession, and let me assure you, in the non-human animal world, possession is 10/10th of the law. Or maybe we are just plain mad, and we believe our dog will understand why we are mad as we wave the remains of our shoes around.
When we scold our dogs, we expect that the emotion we see them display is guilt, thus reinforcing our belief that they understand why we are mad. Might this not be a bit of confirmation bias at work? I mean, what is our evidence that they “know” they did something wrong (if we are even entertaining the idea that dogs understand a moral right and wrong)? Tail tucked, ears back, whale eyes, hiding, and other avoidance behaviors. Couldn’t this all just be a reaction the the fact that we have raised our voice, stiffened our posture, tightened our jaw, stared our dog directly in the face as we said “bad dog” in a rough tone? In fact, research continuously shows no correlation between disobedient behavior and the associated “guilty” behaviors (2,3,4). Remember, dogs are extremely good at interpreting the slightest change in our facial expression (5,6). Even if you aren’t scolding your dog, they can likely read your facial expression, body language, and tone as you clean up the pieces of destroyed shoe and mutter to yourself. Something is clearly different from how you usually greet your dog upon arriving home, and they can tell. Cue avoidance behavior and “guilty” looking dog.
THE TRUTH
In the end, it make sense why we behave the way we do with our dogs. We try to understand the relationship based on our past experiences, most of which are from human-human relationships. Unfortunately, those experience simply don’t transfer to this scenario. We are working with a different species, and thus we need different methodology.
We share no common language with our dogs. We can’t explain what is “right” and what is “wrong” in the human world they now live in, so we shouldn’t expect them to ever understand such social constructs. What we can expect is that we will see an increase in behaviors that result in the dog getting something they want or like. We know this works because it is a key aspect of operant conditioning, a method of learning that applies to all animals (including the human kind). If we want our dog to chew on their toys and not our shoes, we can reinforce that behavior! Give our dog treat dispensing toys, play with the toys to make them exciting, or even give your dog a chew that is more appealing than a shoe! You could also just keep your shoes out of reach of your dog, but that’s in the realm of management and a topic for another day. By providing positive consequences directly after a desired behavior, we can likely increase the frequency of that behavior… provided we choose the appropriate reinforce. We may not have a shared language with our dogs, but through the power of consequences we can modify our dogs behavior all the same.
At the end of the day our dogs are dogs, and we must respect that. This means removing our human bias when evaluating their behavior or choosing our own. Is our dog chewing on our shoes because they know it is forbidden? Probably not. Will they understand what we are mad about if we scold them when we get home? Also, probably not! They will be able to perceive our anger, and it will likely cause them discomfort or fear, but they wont understand why our shoes are off limits. They will never view the world through our eyes, but maybe we can try to see it through theirs? Because really, that stinky leather shoe IS kind of a great chew toy, isn’t it?
SOURCES
2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19520245
3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376635714003210
4. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0168159112000652
5. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982214016935
6. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsbl.2015.0883