Category: Ethics

Does your animal have control?

Post author By Karolina Westlund, PhD
Post date 26 July, 2017
14 Comments on Does your animal have control?

Many animal trainers, veterinarians and pet owners highlight the importance of controlling animals. Controlling them, as in restricting the animals’ movement, their choices and their opportunities to control their environment through their behaviour.

Sometimes you have to, for safety reasons.

Obviously.

But often you don’t – and more often than you might think. Actually, the trend in modern animal training is to deliberately and strategically shift control from the handler to the animal, while still staying safe.

Who’s controlling the cut? You – or the dog?

Ethics Problem Solving

How behaviour management improves animal welfare

Post author By Karolina Westlund, PhD
Post date 23 February, 2017
50 Comments on How behaviour management improves animal welfare

In 2017, I held my senior lecturer’s exam lecture (docentföreläsning).

It was a 45 minute long lecture, where I introduced the concept of behaviour management and how that relates to animal welfare.

Ethics How we learn

WTF?

The world of animal trainers is divided.

You might not be aware of that rift, but it’s there. It took me some time to catch on to it, myself. Basically, there are two animal trainer camps, and they’re hardly on speaking terms.

Actually, there are at least two camps. Camps within camps, perhaps, even. It’s not the purpose of this blog post to define or analyze all the potential animal training fractions, however.

Animal Training Ethics Problem Solving Weathering scepticism

20 problems with punishment in animal training

Post author By Karolina Westlund, PhD
Post date 6 October, 2016
14 Comments on 20 problems with punishment in animal training

Revised February 2023 – original written in 2016 .

Recently there was a video post in my Facebook feed that caught my attention.

Typically, on Facebook, I’m a bit of a lurker. I’m not very active, and when I do watch videos I often don’t share, like or comment – even when perhaps I should.

This time, I watched, feeling my jaw gradually dropping in disbelief, and then I actually left a comment.

I wrote:

“I’m speechless”.

And that was it.

I know, kinda lame.

But I didn’t have time for an essay, and then I was flooded by the rest of the FB flow, so the film slipped to the back of my mind – where it’s been festering.

A few weeks ago, I wrote that I was speechless. But in the time that’s gone by, I’ve realized that I should do the opposite.

I should speak up.

Animal Training Ethics

7 ways to get behaviour

Revised May 2024.

There are two important question to ask before teaching an animal a new skill.

In another blog post, I discussed the first question, one that is extremely basic but often overlooked: “what is the cost/benefit of the behaviour?” Is it useful, useless, abuse or an ethical dilemma?

Once a behaviour has been found to be useful, it’s time to consider how to best go about teaching it.

And this brings us to the second question.

Which is the best technique to teach the animal how to perform a new skill?

You know the old saying “All roads lead to Rome”..?

With regards to animal training, the same is true. There are many ways to teach animals what you want them to do.

Many ways to “get” behaviour, as it were.

Animal Training Ethics Weathering scepticism

The cost/benefit of animal training

Post author By Karolina Westlund, PhD
Post date 7 August, 2016
34 Comments on The cost/benefit of animal training

Updated December 2023

dressage — *This would qualify as **abuse** as defined below.*

When planning to teach an animal to carry out any new response, there are two questions to ask before even getting started.

What is the cost/benefit of teaching the behaviour? Should it even be taught in the first place?
If so, how should it be taught?

Let’s look at the first of those two questions, as it will help decide whether a behaviour should be trained at all, and identify potential situations where we simply shouldn’t bother.

Oh, and I address the question of how to chose the best training method in this blog post.

Training new behaviour could in some cases cause suffering to the animal.