| Written by Jean Donaldson |
| Wednesday, 29 October 2008 14:31 |
This is the use of negative reinforcement (removal of or increasing the distance of the unfamiliar person) to shape more desirable behavior in dogs who behave aggressively to strangers. I have not tried this and it doesn’t fall within my personal method constraints - I am philosophically opposed to the use of aversives in training, so for the same type of cases use differential reinforcement using positive reinforcement or desensitization and counterconditioning (D&C). I am asked several times a week what I think of it. I must therefore preface my comments with two enormous caveats:
- I’ve not tried it (and I won’t, any more than I’ll go back to jerking dogs with metal chains)
- I come to the table with a bias against the use of R-
Here goes:
On the plus side, operant conditioning (OC) appears to be much more intuitive to people than Pavlovian conditioning, and so the use of OC could generate better compliance and more competent execution, among both trainers and clients. It also has the nice benefit of teaching people to observe nuances in body language. In the current climate of jaw-dropping body language illiteracy (freaked out, stressed and shut down dogs being labeled “calm” on national television being the most glaring example), this is good.
On the negative side, I wish they would call a spade a spade. An increase in responding contingent on the removal of a stimulus makes that stimulus an aversive by definition and the procedure negative reinforcement by definition.
One of the claims is that the procedure is “faster” than D&C. Proponents describe sessions of one hour or longer that employ the same unfamiliar person as stimulus. Stranger aggressive dogs routinely habituate to a particular individual in that amount of time, or gain a positive CER via treat tosses during history taking in the first session.
Finally, I would respectfully submit that some of the disciples of this stuff are engaging in straw man arguments. Anybody who says systematic desensitization and counterconditioning, a technique with one of the most robust track records in pure and applied settings, “doesn’t work” is advertising their incompetence at executing the technique. Now, that said, if a given trainer is better at doing OC than CC, do OC. Play to your strengths. But please be aware of the rather large contingent of practitioners who have had quiet success with D&C for decades.
|
