Valid Question

Melanie, I am always amazed at how much you can type in the time that it alots you. How fast do you type? If I was to try and type the amount that you do I would get cut off lol. Ok, sorry for getting off track. Continue with the thread now.

Sorry for the typo.

The purpose ot Education Thread is to Educate. If you want to instill on the common dog owner that they, the shock collar not the common dog owner, are tools that take serious training, why wouldnt you post there?

I got the impresion you started this thread to ruffle those who do not believe in any sort of negative training.

I apologize too for my edginess .. have had a sick dog, through she'd had a stroke and it scared the crap out of me .. I KNOW I'm more reactive when I'm stressed (aren't we all?). LUckily it looks like it's a vestibular condition and not a stroke so it's not so bad, but I still have a dog that can't manage stairs and she staggers and falls over just trying to walk in a straight line. Not much fun.

I'm not going to say much about the e-collar, only that the discomfort I provided to my dog with the level of stimulation was less than she would have had if she'd hit the end of a long line in the way you described. I am fully aware that some people don't want to believe that (not you specifically) but it's the truth. Not only that, but the potential for injury in hitting the end of a line at a run is much higher than it is from a low level of shock from a shock collar. The training you described is one of positive punishment paired with positive reinforcement. Hitting the end of the long line is a physical aversive. Hitting the end of a leash (as most dogs do when we do the "be a tree" type of loose leash training) is a physical aversive, regardless of what type of collar you're using. It's more aversive with a harsher collar, of course.

I think that most trainers here have admitted to the use of some level of correction, so it's not correction overall that we're debating - it's how MUCH correction is acceptable. Kind of reminds me of the old joke about the guy asking a woman if she'd have sex with him for a million dollars. When she said yes, he then offered her $10 instead. She indignantly replied, "What KIND of a girl do you think I am??" .. and his response was "We've already established what kind of girl you are - I'm just negotiating the price."

So we're all negotiating the price as to how much correction we're willing to use. I'm saying the price depends on the dog. Some are saying they would never (evidently under any circumstances) use a certain type of correction. I'm also saying that the level of correction I offered with the e-collar was the same "price" as some of the corrections others are offering with other methods. And, at the most base level, we've already established what kind of girls we all are .. *L* .. (that was meant in a JOKING way!).

Unfortunately there is no true resolution to this debate, because people's minds are pretty much made up already. We each say things, some are interpreted badly and elicit an equally bad reaction, some are MEANT badly and then of course they get a response that creates more heat .. and so on. What I said before still stands though .. I think we are all basically on the same side, but somehow we've got the 99% positive people and the 95% positive people fighting and arguing.

And isn't that just a tad bit silly? (that includes ME, of course .. I have to admit I like to debate things .. or argue, if that word makes people happier .. *L*).

Melanie and the gang in Alaska

Ahh, okay .. I thought you were saying I had already posted it there.

While I can certainly see why you got the impression you did, and at the time I started this thread I WAS at a high level of irritation, the truth is that I did want an answer to a question that had been ignored several times already. I think that the question has received a good number of answers at this point and some of the conversations in this thread were interesting and informational. The other thread was started by someone else after this thread had already been posted. As the OP of this particular thread, it does not bother me that the thread has wandered a bit - it's the nature of most threads and fine with me.

The reason I'm not posting a detailed explanation of my use of a shock collar (here OR in the other active thread) is that the last time I did it, it really upset some people. They viewed my explanation as something that "swayed" (word in quotes because it's the word that was used) other people into using the e-collar. Even though I've said over and over that I'm not trying to encourage anyone to use shock in training, it still remains true that I've been accused of that simply because I chose to post my experiences with it.

Regardless of how obnoxious and pigheaded I may seem at times, I don't really want to upset people. In real life I'm a pretty likeable person .. *L* .. I get along with most people quite well and I never even run with scissors. Children and puppies actually like me.

Melanie and the gang in Alaska

You know, I'm not sure what your point is here. Are you just trying to create more dissonance?

As I've already said, I previously posted in great detail my use of the e-collar. It was taken badly by some people. Why would you want me to do that again? I have said over and over that I don't encourage people to run out and buy a shock collar. I've said over and over that it's important to only use this type of consequence in a very structured, controlled way at a minimal level of discomfort appropriate for each particular dog. I've reiterated ad nauseum that people should use positive reinforcement training as MUCH as possible in training.

The quip about "is that how you get clients" is just plain trying to cause trouble. There would be no other reason for you to say something like that. To insinuate that I am withholding information just to get clients would be like saying that the 99% positive trainers refuse to use corrections because they know that the corrections would often provide a quick resolution to a problem and by not using them, they can keep a client longer and therefore rake in more money. There's no validity to your question, and I seriously doubt that there's any validity to my little example either.

That comment was not a dig at 2little .. I think she would fully admit that it did upset her when I posted my use of a shock collar in a previous thread. If you look at her posts in that thread, it's pretty darn obvious that it did. I don't particularly want to upset her again. What in my words makes you think it was a dig?

I'd love to hear an educated, experienced response from you regarding the training being discussed on this thread if you have something to offer. Otherwise, it just looks like you're here to cause trouble. And surely you wouldn't do that ..

Melanie and the gang in Alaska

The quip was a dig I thought of after my comp crashed and I thought the other post didnt go through, the one dig was enough plus the double posting was more than even I would want. The second dig was too much and I admit that , I hoped I deleted it before you saw it. I hope you accept my appology.

You seem to feel she cant take a description of a E-collar training session from another professional dog trainer. You have trained with an E-collar and should be able to explain it shouldnt be used by the untrained trainer/owner, you should be able to word your experience without upsetting people.

I am uneducated and that is why I whited my digs, surely I would do that. I was hoping you would educate us in the right and proper time to use an E-collar from somebody experienced with their use. Reconsider posting in the Education Thread, feel free to emphasise on the negative aspects of MISUSING the tool.

You really should reconsider posting the appropriat time, circumstances and usage of an E-collar in the Education Thread, as well as the negatives of using an E-collar incorrectly.

nah, i havn't read any books on it yet. basically, i'm broke. and don't have acess to a decent library, i'm ALSO saying. i'm not an expert. AND i have only used postive reinforcemtn on buster and his behaviour is so much better. i used to loose my temper and yell and stuff. but i feel awful for ever doing it. he's not stupid, i wasn't explainging it well.

with buster, i use "My versions" of positive reinforcent (because i'm sorry, i relaly don't know what its really about) wiht this philosophy.
don't get mad
ignore/stop bad behaviour
reward good behaviour
end traingign on a high
make it a game
set him up for success
see the training from the dogs point of view
move away if things should stop
use your voice as a tool
slowly introduce your dog to stressful situations

and "my version" of positive reinforcemtn only comes form what people of this forum have told me so i dunno. maybe everyone should study it more efore giving any advice.

doberluv, i like you. you've given me a lot of good advice and i thank you for it. disagreements are disagreements and thats all. i hope you don't dislike me over this thread because we both seem pretty strong willed.
PM me if there is anything else. thats fine
thanks


the specific situation is that he looked like he might bite a cyclist! i'm sorry but that isn't excusable. he's also the sort of dog that if you don't correct it, it becomes a bad habit and he's very dominant.
its not abuse, in this case it was discipline. . it was slap on the backside to get his attention. and a loud "NO!" harry has been bought up knowing that he isn't to be hit or yelled at. so by a year old, just a stern"NO" makes him relise that what he's doing he'll never do again.


you go back to wolves. even dog mothers with their pups when their miss behaving will growl and push them at the ground, then release. no grudge. and the same thing works with harry. you get his attention and make him know its wrong. and problem solved. he won't even look at cyclists now.

You're describing an emergency situation with Harry. That's a management issue, not a training issue. We do what we have to do sometimes. Hitting, could cause a dog to re-direct his agitation and high state of arousal on you, however. I've had to yank my dog back from situations that were emergencies. When we're in our own fight or flight, we react like any "well-put-together" primate would. LOL. No fault there.

I'm talking about training. Using some of the basics is always good. It sounds like you're getting a good handle on it. It never hurts. What I'm talking about is, when people say that their dogs need some sort of pain (physical or mental) because PR doesn't work, then come to find out, they left out some very valuable tool or trick, that's what bothers me, as if there's something wrong with the well established method, established by top trainers/behaviorists in many parts of the world.

Ignoring all unwanted behavior doesn't work. Ignoring attention seeking behavior works because you're not giving them the reinforcer they want....attention. You're right....re-directing, giving alternatives, setting the environment up so the dog succeeds and the other things you wrote is all part of it and is effective.

Again, dogs are animals, not perfectly oiled machines and to punish them with harsh aversives as a matter of course in the name of training goes against my morals where dogs are concerned.

And, something has to be good or bad to change behavior. Neutrality doesn't alter behavior. So, to say that shock collars or prong collars don't cause any pain is not only ridiculous, but they also wouldn't be changing the dog's behavior if they didn't cause pain or something bad. Saying the dog barely feels it, I do not buy. That's not going to deter a dog then from anything.

"Positive reinforcement" training does not mean that you don't tell your dog not to do something or that he's doing something wrong, do this instead. It means not including harsh aversives in one's training repertoire. Harsh aversives such as jerking a collar for the purpose of correcting the dog or using devices which cause moderate pain, intimidation, undue force etc. This is something that some owner/trainers who are into using more harsh punishment like to pretend to misunderstand....to imply that positive method trainers are permissive and don't know how to get their dog to do something since they don't use pain, force, intimidation and in general....avoidance. I tell my dog, "nah" or "leave it!" And sometimes I do use a firm sounding voice when it's something I have not conditioned him to do very well. Or if I have to get above the noise level that might be going on. I use NRM a lot. "Eh-eh, nah," And then show him what I want instead. The point is that pain is not necessary to train a dog.

Mother dogs don't do the things that humans do to dog. We can not possibly begin to emulate a mother dog, especially by using such mechanical devices and roughness as has been discussed. My dog knows I'm not his mother. If I scruffed him or attacked him, I'd risk ruining my relationship with him that we've built. And that relationship is my most important training tool.

Anyhow Mrose, it sounds like you're doing great with your dog. The more you learn, the better. Kudos!

I spent lots of $ taking Weston (dalmatian) to obedience classes..All positive reinforcement, and he still will not come when he is called, even if it is in the backyard...

All positive methods used on Emily, my foster Dal, and she will not come when she is called either. (of course I have had less time to work with her)

However, my other Dal who is deaf, will always come when she is "called" (motioned at), and she has never had a training class, although of course I use positive methods..

I think it depends on the dog...

My GSD has a perfect recall that I never had to work with him on.

I do believe certain breeds are prone to be less efficent at recalls..But I think it depends on the dog..

the other thing is, i'm not an expert. untill i joined chaz i really thought negaitive reinforcemtn was what you did more or less. we were NEVER encouraged to hit our dogs but since discovering PR and developing it to busters particular needs and attitude. i found that its amazing. he picks up things really quickly and loves to do things right.

i am interested in learning more. but i gotta learn over time to. in just a couple of years (well less than that but thats when i made the change) i went from throwing a temper tantrum when i couldnt teach him something and storming off, leaving him feling like he'd doen somethign wrong and not knwoing what, to calmly leading him back to try it again. and i'm so glad for that.

Sometimes more has to be done with some dogs, a different game plan, but I do not believe that some dogs can not be taught to come when called. And the reason I don't believe that is that they may be different breeds, with variations on their tendencies or what they excell at but they're still the same species. And more important, they're still mammals. Learning behavior is learning behavior. I think the reason you may not have had success is not on account of the way dogs learn or because you didn't use aversives, but that you have not found the motivator or something was left out of the process. If they can train llamas, wild animals like tigers to "obey," I have a hard time accepting that any dog can not be taught to come when called. What did you do, (in detail) to try to teach your dogs to come...the ones that won't come? How did you start out and how long did you spend on each phase? When and under what circumstances did you call your dog to come when he wouldn't? That sort of thing...just trying to get a feel for it.

The classes I took we used food (various foods..tiny cheese pieces & tiny hot dog pieces, as well as treats). Weston responds very well to treats & food, he acts like he is hungry all of the time and always has, so food is usually a good motivator for him. Weston was older when I took him to training classes. He has just never seemed to care enough about what I say to do anything I tell him. Now, if I have a treat in my hand he will do what I say (or if he thinks there might be a treat involved somehow) but he just doesnt care what I say.

I also tried NILIF with him and it didnt seem to work.

Despite the NILIF training (yes he did get better but there was never a drastic improvement), he still barks at me when he wants attention. I never give him attention when he barks but I am certain that is my fault.

His issue now (although he wasnt when we took the classes) is that he is doped up on phenobarbital all of the time & it seems to mess with him a little bit. However, if I stop giving him the pheno he will start having seizures so it is a lose-lose situation. He seems pretty confused sometimes, and is very slow...

The training classes taught us first to teach "watch me", which he is perfect at. With leashes on, we them sit/stay a short distance away. Enticing him with a treat, I would call to Weston. Eventually we got to where someone on the other side would hold the dog and I would call with a treat in my hand, and he would be rewarded for obeying.

Weston ALWAYS did perfectly in the class, he always came when he was called, did everything I asked. It was once I got him home when he wont listen. He is very stubborn...He will do every single trick (even a couple more I taught him) except the most basic-come here...

He used to be really reliable. I took him from my mom's house when he was just under a year. When I got him I was going to college & my mom who lives in the country was keeping him since I lived in a dorm and couldnt have animals. Weston was allowed to roam freely.

A month after we moved here, I brought Weston with me. He was WONDERFUL for the first 4 months, would come every single time I called him. We took him along when we went to the park, never had a problem at all with him comming when he was called. I trusted him 100% because he was super good about listening. Then one day all of the sudden, he just didnt listen. It took me 3 hours to catch him.

Maybe he was "ruined" by being able to free roam at mom's when he was a pup?

I see some problems already, right in your post. Of course the Phenobarbitol can make it difficult for one to remain on task, to stay focused. My daughter was on the stuff when she was very young due to an unusually long febrile seizure. That was the drug of choice to prevent seizures. Then later, the discovered some real pit falls to the drug. And staying on task can be one of them.

At any rate, I do see a few things that jump out at me. I'm just about to head out the door to return home to Idaho after being in Seattle for a little over a month. So, I'll have to come back to this. Dr2little or Otch may be able to zero in on this and give you some ideas.

You arent kidding. I would take him off the stuff and try some "natural cures" but to be honest, I am a big sissy and I cant handle him having seizures while what "works" is being figured out. I know pheno works...Its hard to decide, Weston definintly isnt the same dog on the medication, but I just cant handle having him seizures..

Thanks & I would appreciate any tips. They were group classes, so that might be why we didnt have such great success. Weston was very good in class but once the classes were over, he stopped obeying despite NILIF.

Tell you what. If 2little wants me to post about my use of the e-collar on the shock collar thread, she can respond to this in the affirmative and I'll re-post on the other thread. I gave a full description including the why's and why not's on the earlier thread but I can certainly bring that to the new thread if she wants. I don't think you realize her full thoughts on this matter, however, if you're encouraging me to post it again.

The wording of my post had nothing to do with anyone being upset - I wasn't attacking anyone or being nasty. I simply explained how I used it and the training I did prior to using it and why I felt it was a valid use in that particular case. It was the very fact that I talked about it at ALL that upset people. They seemed to think that because I was willing to honestly share my experiences, I was encouraging people to run out and buy shock collars. I'm not sure how they took that step, but they did.

And, while personally I think that's their problem, there's no need for me to continue on with it although I think that some of these "there's NEVER a need for physical aversion" type comments are just ludicrous. That's just an empty claim because there is no way to prove it. It's a personal belief, not a fact.

Melanie and the gang in Alaska

You know, it's interesting to me that people will claim that all dogs learn the same because they're the same species ..

I earned a degree in education in 1981. I've taught in the public school district, done adult education, taught in a pre-school (3-5 year olds) and done private instruction. In one way or another, I've been teaching since I graduated from college. And one thing I CAN say is that not all humans learn the same way.

Of course, there are similarities that all humans share. But some are extremely visual, some are extremely auditory, some are extremely tactile. With some, just showing them what to do worked well. With others, a hands-on physical interaction allowed them to understand better. And with some, simply telling them and letting them work it out was the best way to go.

Some of the students I had needed to be coaxed along with lots of smiles and praise and no hints of "you're wrong". Some did MUCH better when I told them immediately that they were wrong. Some learned best when they made the mistake - even if it hurt - because then they remembered not to make the mistake again. Keep in mind that I was teaching anything from piano lessons to CPR/First Aid to horse riding lessons to dog training concepts. There WERE times when a student got stepped on by a horse or nipped by their dog or even closed their fingers in the piano lid (even though they'd been told to be careful and not pull it down). Their style of learning involved avoiding those things that they found aversive.

So then we come to dogs. Yes, they're all the same species. But the huge range of dogs has been developed through selective breeding for various traits. To say a yorkshire terrier is the same as a bloodhound would be ridiculous. To say they even learn exactly the same would be ridiculous. Bloodhounds (overall) are going to be much more into scent and a yorkie is likely to be much more visual. The way they process information is not going to be exactly the same either. Yes, some of the basic premises are the same, but the reality of their reactions is hugely different.

Wolves are the same species as dogs. Are we to say that wolves act like dogs or learn exactly like dogs? Do we honestly think that aversives are not a huge part of the way a wild wolf learns boundaries? Of course they are.

I had the unique experience of working with a full-blooded wolf. The reactions of that animal were only remotely similar to a dog's reactions. I met with the wolf for several sessions and it was truly interesting to see the differences between the wolf and the dog, even though they are the same species.

To say that all animals in a species learn exactly the same way is, to me, incredibly short-sighted. If all dogs were, over the past several hundreds or even thousands of years, bred for the same behaviors and same traits then it might be that they could all be trained the same way with little discrepancy. But I guarantee you that my chows do not think or learn the same as the shepherds I have had. Can they learn a large number of behaviors the same exact way? Yes, they can. But not all.

It's really easy for a trainer to say "all the dogs I've trained have been trained this way and it's worked for ALL of them". I'm sure it DOES work to a certain extent. But I'm talking long-term consistent behaviors. Just because a dog comes to a class or takes a series of private lessons and appears to have learned a consistent off-leash recall does NOT mean that it's an established reliable behavior long-term. There's no way you can claim that the dog is consistent or reliable unless you monitor the dog throughout the dog's life. So we can say our OWN dogs, who we see on a daily basis and know, are trained to a certain level. But we can't honestly say that all those dogs that we've worked with over the years are consistent because we really don't know.

So to me, every time I see someone make a claim that a certain method works 100% on every dog, I am absolutely sure that the claim is bogus. You can only truly make a statement like that about your own dogs and that's an extremely limited number of dogs to base a claim on.

I will continue on with training in the way I have for a long time - taking each dog individually and finding the method or methods that work best with that particular dog.

Melanie and the gang in Alaska

I, for one, just on the remote chance you're referring to my statements, did NOT say that they learn EXACTLY the same way. I, in fact, stressed that there are variations, different motivators for different dogs, different drives and various ways different breeds excell. However, they most certainly learn by operant and classical conditioning, the same way all mammals learn, that is....to quote Jean Donaldson, "You do this and that happens, you do this this and that other thing happens." There are good things and there are bad things. There are all kinds of documented reasons why harsh aversives are bad for ANY dog. And there are reasons why motivation and reward with the addition of NRMs are successful, as documented over and over.

I think you already knew what I meant. You're just purposely "misunderstanding."

You can train however you like. But when you expound and praise "positive methods," as your method of choice, if you're going to talk the talk, walk the walk.

To each his own. I'm bored with these threads.

That was one of the reasons that a thread to educate the uses of an E collar was started. Im sorry you wont rise above whatever issue is holding you back from extrapolating on the issue.

Canis Lupus and Canis Familiaris are in the same family but not the same species.

By refferring to Doc as 2Little seems a little backhanded, or is it passive agressive?

How about we all just agree to disagree?