There was an article in a Norwegian dog magazine (an English translation is in the comments’ section below) this week, essentially claiming that by delivering an electric shock to a dog a single time as it runs towards a flock of sheep, you can stop it from ever chasing sheep again. Indeed, it gets a diploma to show that it’s “sheep-proofed”. There are no other ways of teaching this behaviour, the article claims, and also, it suggests that it’s a way to increase the overall quality of life of the shocked dogs.
The article implies that a single shock in a single location is all it takes to make dogs sheep-proof forever.
Needless to say, this article has stirred a lot of feelings within the Norwegian R+ community.
And for good reason.
Now, I don’t train dogs myself, but reading through it I found I have four areas of concern:
I find the latest scientific contribution on the issue of shock collars to be frustrating – even outrageous.
Lots of problematic articles are published every day, but this one potentially has far-reaching consequences, and so I feel a lengthy, occasionally nerdy and also somewhat rambling blog post is in order.
I won’t describe the paper down to a T, but lift specific topics that I take issue with, so I encourage you to skim it before reading this post – or not…
In short, the authors found that teaching dogs to refrain from chasing a fast-moving lure was effective when shock-collars were used, however attempting to train the behaviour in a slightly shorter time frame using “food rewards” (50 minutes as opposed to 60 for the shocked dogs) was essentially useless. They also saw no signs of distress in the shocked dogs, except that all of them yelped in pain at some point.
I’m paraphrasing here, obviously.
And I’m using quotation marks to draw your attention to the fact that I’m not quite sure that they actually ever used those “food rewards” as reinforcement for correct behaviour in those treatment groups – the training setup was absolutely bananas, if you’ll pardon the pun (that last bit will make sense in a moment).
TL;DR? Here are the main points of this blog post:
- The “food-reward” training was a travesty with a multitude of problems (e.g. dubious conditioning, unwanted behaviour reinforced, no shaping, no assessment of engagement, no calibration of the reward value, adding distractions and distance way too soon, not using a marker, etc etc); no learning occurred
- The food-reward dogs got less training time than the shocked dogs
- The type of training needed to be successful in the tests was not in the protocol for the food-reward dogs
- The “welfare measures” were inadequate and possibly confounded
- Generalized fear learning occurred in the shocked dogs, a potential concern for their long-term wellbeing
- There was conflict of interest: shock-collar trainers training the “food-reward” dogs
- The authors conclude that shock collars may occasionally save lives without considering the risks of shock collars costing lives, which I suspect is on a different order of magnitude
- The problems are serious enough to warrant retraction of the paper
We’ll get to my detailed objections in a minute, but first off: I think the chosen approach, comparing several treatment groups, where essentially the only difference in training set-up is whether dogs receive a shock for doing the wrong behaviour, or a treat for doing the correct behaviour, is flawed.
It’s based on the proud tradition from other scientific fields such as biomedicine, whereby you compare two different treatment options, subjecting one group to treatment A and the other to treatment B, keeping all other variables identical in the two groups. And so, the theory goes, you can be sure that any differences between the groups will be a result of different effects of the two treatments, A or B, and not some other random factor such as the weather.
Typically, a biomedical study involves genetically identical rodents housed under standardized conditions, so that presumably, the only difference between the two study groups is which research treatment option (A or B) they’ve been given.
And it’s not because I’m a slow reader. I plowed through Brandon Sanderson’s 1100-page brick The Way of Kings in less than a day. So why, then, did this particular book take me so long?
Well, before I tell you, let me frame the context.
It’s a book that’s getting a lot of traction amongst animal trainers lately, specifically amongst the behaviour analytic crowd.
The book is called How Emotions Are Made, and it’s by Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of Psychology and a neuroscientist. In the book she makes a big, and in many peoples’ eyes, compelling, case of emotions being constructed rather than innate. So, many behaviour analysts love the book, and I feel like a complete dissenter in that crowd, because while they’re all nodding in agreement, I shake my head thinking that some of the main conclusions in the book are seriously flawed.
Swimming against the behaviour analytical crowd
We’ll get to my objections in a minute, but let’s start with: what is the central idea behind the Constructed Theory of Emotions?
While delivering one of my free mini-courses recently, I answered a lot of questions about specific problem behaviour in the comments’ section of the course site, in private messages and in emails.
And in one of those conversations, the issue of getting professional help came up.
One person said: “I’ve spent a lot of money on two trainers, and still have the problem”.
After asking what the two trainers had attempted to do, I realized that they had probably made matters worse, due to incompetence. One of them had used aversive techniques that frightened the animal, and the other had advised against using treats in a situation that demanded it – screamed for it.
I wrote this blogpost a couple of years ago, after a summer when I revisited a childhood paradise, Hallands Väderö, an island on the west coast of Sweden.
As a child, I used to catch small shore crabs there, and get a terrible sunburn. I’d spend six hours crouching on the shoreline, with my back to the unrelenting Scandinavian sun.
No sunscreen.
No protective tan. Just very pale, sun-sensitive skin that I’ve inherited from my freckled red-headed father. Those were the days, when nobody knew about melanoma, and having a deep tan was the height of fashion.
Side note: Over the years, I’ve learned to avoid sunburn (I no longer harbor any illusions of achieving a nice tan, wear sensible long-sleeve clothes, avoid direct summer sunlight between 11 and 15, and wear sun screen lotion if I can’t avoid it).
But I’ve maintained that passion for catching shore crabs, or green crabs as you might know them by – they go by the latin name of Carcinus maenas. And that summer, I had my kids along, and they’d inherited my fascination with these little critters.
In case you’re wondering: this blog post is not going to be a nostalgic walk down memory lane. Rather, it’s going to be about discovering that the lane you’re walking on is no longer a place where you want to be.
