Punishing Your Dog Is A Waste of Time*

Posted on May 13 in Small Dog Behavior, The Small Dog-Human Bond, Training A Small Dogby Jeff K.Print

*and it carries a lot of risk.

Punished pup.
(photo courtesy of ~ggvic~ at Flickr.com)

.
Justice Served

For many of us, in some strange way, punishment feels like the right thing to do. Punishment, for lack of a better word, is traditional. It is justice served. You’ve heard comments such as these:

1. “Back in my day, we didn’t put of with that sort of thing. If a dog did wrong, we let him have it.”
2. “You are spoiling that dog. You should teach him some respect with a good whipping.”
3. “The best way to get a dog to stop pooping in the house is to rub his nose in it.”
4. “If that were my dog, I’d let him know who’s boss.”

I’ll Take Action

For some of us, there may another reason why we resort to punishment. Punishment can feel rewarding. I am not talking about satisfying a sadistic streak. I am talking about the relief you feel when you convert your own inner tension into physical action. Yelling at, or spanking your dog can be a stress reliever. I absolutely do not support using punishment as a personal stress reliever. I am merely pointing out that taking physical action can provide some stress relief for humans in the same way any gnawing problem seems to lessen when we take action.

Here is an example: Your dog is in the backyard barking at something on the other side of the fence. Perhaps you are sitting at your computer trying to get some work done while your dog continues to bark outside. You believe your dog is acting crazy. You know you should do something about it, but you are too busy at the moment to get up and address your dog. As your dog continues to bark, you can feel the stress building. Finally, the stress becomes too much. You rush out the door to take action against your dog. Whether or not your dog stops barking after you respond, you will likely feel better, (initially,) for having done something.

How Your Dog Sees It

That is the human side of the punishment equation. Let’s look at the canine side. Your dog has no sense of morality. Any behavior your dog engages in is the result of self-interest. A behavior gets a dog something it wants: food, shelter/territory, relief from discomfort, or satisfying stimulation. A behavior can also help a dog avoid something it does not want: injury, physical discomfort, loss of food, loss of shelter/territory, or loss of satisfying stimulation. When your dog barks non-stop at something over the fence, it is not doing so to annoy you. A dog barks non-stop to ward off what it perceives to be a threat. That pretty much kills the idea that delivering punishment is justice served. Justice and morality are not part of your dog’s understanding of the world; and punishing him will never teach him anything about justice or morality.

Does it Work?

That leaves the question: will your dog’s “inappropriate” behavior stop if you punish that behavior? I worded this question very carefully. From a dog’s point of view, there is no such thing as inappropriate behavior. All canine behavior happens in order to get the dog what it wants or avoid what it does not want. Also note that I said the behavior is punished. I did not say the dog is punished. There is a huge difference between punishing a behavior to make it go away and punishing a dog to make a point. That still leaves us where we started, will punishment make a behavior stop?

Here is the answer: Maybe.

The two keys to making punishment stop a behavior are:

1. Correct timing of the delivery of punishment.
2. Punishment severe enough to outweigh the benefits of continuing the behavior.

Whoa, whoa, whoa. I know I got your attention with statement number 2. I’ll get to that in a moment. Let’s look at timing. In another article, I said many professional dog trainers use clickers during training. A trainer will first teach a dog that when the clicker clicks, a reward—usually a treat—is coming soon. If trained correctly, the sound of a clicker becomes so tightly associated with treats, the mere sound of the clicker becomes a reward. The reason a dog trainer uses a clicker has everything to do with timing. When a dog does something the trainer wishes to reward, he sounds the clicker immediately. The dog gets instant feedback that it has performed a correct behavior and a treat is forthcoming. The clicker’s value is in its immediacy. In a dog’s world, a treat that arrives at a dog’s mouth even a few seconds after a behavior occurs is too late to give the dog meaningful feedback. Seconds later is not good enough! The dog needs nearly instantaneous feedback to make a connection between the behavior and the reward.

Timing is just as critical with punishment. Unless punishment is delivered nearly instantaneously after the undesired behavior, that punishment will have no connection to the undesired behavior. Let’s say, for example, a person sees value in hitting a dog with a rolled up newspaper for peeing inside the house. How many seconds or minutes do you think will pass between the moment the dog pees and the moment the owner hits the dog with the newspaper? In this scenario, hitting a dog with a rolled up newspaper will be completely disconnected from the actual act of peeing in the house. Badly timed punishment will not only fail to stop an undesired behavior, it will have lousy consequences in other ways. I’ll get to those consequences soon. Let’s talk about severity of punishment.

Numerous studies have shown that mild forms of punishment are either ineffective, or produce diminishing returns. Dogs are thick-skinned. A light spanking, for example, may surprise a dog, but it probably does not hurt in any punishing way. Yelling at the dog, may only confuse or agitate him. Further, the more frequently a dog is punished, the more likely it is he will get used to the punishment. This tendency is known as habituation. It has been proven time and again that dogs and other animals, humans included, can actually build up a tolerance for punishment to a point at which punishment becomes nothing more than background noise.

In no way am I saying you should beat the daylights out of your dog. Just the opposite. Each dog has a different tolerance level for punishment, and there is no way for you to know what is not enough and what is too much. The risk of going too far and injuring your dog makes severe punishment out of the question.

Earlier, I said badly timed punishment will not stop an undesired behavior. Worse still, badly timed punishment may stop desirable behavior that was occurring at the moment the punishment was delivered. You may intend to hit your dog for peeing in the house, but if the first hit happens as the dog is walking towards you, the act of coming to you will be punished. Unless delivered with surgical precision and timing, punishment almost always impacts behavior that has nothing to do with your dog’s original crime.

The Consequences

If I still have not convinced you that punishment, in the traditional sense, is not the way to stop your dog’s undesirable behavior, let me put the last nail in the coffin. A dog’s loyalty to you, and his desire to work for you, is based on kindness and trust. Your dog responds positively to you because you are the kind and benevolent center of his world. As soon as you break out the strap, the rolled up newspaper, or even a loud and hostile voice, you begin to associate yourself with pain. As I said earlier, much of what a dog does hinges on avoiding pain and discomfort. Once you become known as a source of pain, your dog will begin to avoid you. Worse still, your dog may respond aggressively to fend off punishment. People who train dogs for the fighting ring use punishing stimulation as a method for promoting aggressive fighting behavior.

Let’s sum it up. If you yell and rant at your dog for barking, will he shut up? Probably. If you whack your dog for jumping up on you, will he stop jumping up? Probably. Will he learn a permanent lesson and not bark the next time in similar circumstances? Absolutely not. Will he never jump up on your again? Probably not. Will he begin to mistrust you and avoid you as much as possible? Almost certainly.

If physical punishment is not the answer to bad dog behavior, then what is the answer? That’s coming up next time. If you would like to read an excellent article that supports everything I have talked about here, check out this link to a position paper on punishment from the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Related posts

• Talk and Point, Point and Talk (1)
• How to Ruin a Good Dog in One Step (2)
• Anti-Bark Collar Review (3)

One Comment

Trackbacks / Pingbacks

• Dog Anti-Bark Collars says:

  July 3, 2009 at 4:21 pm

  [...] believe in punishment-based training, (There is an extensive article on the pitfalls of punishment here,) my dilemma goes even further. Forcing my dog to carry around a pain delivery system on his neck [...]