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.
They consider them not just pointless, but disastrous, and many of them wouldn’t be caught dead using labels.
You might think I’m exaggerating for dramatic effect, and yes, I do have a penchant for hyperbole so it is entirely possible… but sometimes I do wonder.
As an ethologist, I had merrily been using labels for decades without even realizing that they could be problematic. It was not until I started hanging out with behaviour analysts that it was pointed out to me.
I had two main reactions to that insight:
Wow, it’s really useful to realize that labels can be very detrimental!
Wow, some people really don’t seem to realize how useful labels can be!
When are labels useful? Well, as is the case with literally everything related to animals and their behaviour, it depends on the context.
Labels are sometimes useful, sometimes irrelevant, and sometimes harmful.
I can think of three useful types of label, and one label type that is harmful. And yet, the harmful labels are getting all the attention!
Why telling the difference between The True Truth and The Fake News is so difficult.
There’s lots of information out there on the internet. And sometimes it’s contradictory.
About the state of the climate crisis.
About who won the 2020 US election.
About how best to train animals.
In this blog post, I will not discuss these topics at any length (although if you’re insatiably curious, I’ll reveal my position on them), but rather beg the question: how do we know which information to believe?
You may think it’s by somehow recognizing truths and rejecting false information.
It’s just that we humans are not very good at doing that.
We very often reject information, even though it’s true.
And we accept information, even though it’s false.
And we all do it.
Every. Single. Person. Does this.
Me.
You.
Aunt Peggie.
Our view of the world is skewed, in some way or another. We’ve all built our personal understanding of the world on a mix of truths and falsehoods. Hopefully mostly truths, but still…
In essence, we all look at the world through partly broken glasses.
The glasses may be more or less broken – but they are not perfect.
Disconcerting as that realization may be, I think that simply being aware that our glasses are partly broken will make it easier to fix them.
The purpose of this blog post is to alert you to your broken glasses, give ideas about how to fix them, and also how to go about helping others with their glasses.
Last week, I asked the people on my email list, and my Facebook community, whether they listened to any animal-related podcasts, and if so, which ones.
I don’t know what I expected, maybe a handful of answers. Little did I know…
Podcasts – yes, no, or huh?
517 people answered, and I just summarized the wealth of data that they provided.
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.
