Tag archives: positive

Training: Anticipating Problems and Positive/Negative Reinforcement

Training: Anticipating Problems and Positive/Negative Reinforcement

Great trainers don't just run drills or take their dogs into a field and let them chase birds. Great trainers start each session with a goal and specific task to accomplish. They set up drills and scenarios that help teach the dog bits and pieces of a larger concept. By micro-focusing on areas that might prove problematic to the dog, they can anticipate trouble and administer well-timed corrections, praise or avoid the issue altogether.

If you're not anticipating how your dog is going to behave to a situation, you're not really training; you're just reacting. If your dog makes a mistake because you didn't anticipate the problem, you're effectively teaching him to do it wrong. To train after reaching that point requires that you correct the dog to teach him that's not what you wanted.

Sometimes negative reinforcement is the way to go and what is required, but to wholly rely on it is not only lazy, it's unfair to your dog.

With a balance of positive and negative reinforcement properly administered, you can teach your dog how to react to very complex scenarios. And, as George Hickox and Dan Irhke both pointed out at a ...

Training: Carrots, Sticks, Drive and Enjoyment

Training: Carrots, Sticks, Drive and Enjoyment

There’s generally two camps when it comes to training: the positive-only camp and the aversive camp. Positive-only trainers eschew any use of punishment and use rewards to motivate, reward and shape behaviors. The aversive camp, in an overly simple explanation, tends to shape behaviors by punishing, in one form or another, the wrong behaviors – which doesn’t necessarily preclude rewarding proper behaviors. This is simple carrot-and-stick training: do this correctly, get a treat; do that incorrectly get punished.

Chad Culp, a certified dog trainer in California, does a great job outlining the carrot-and-stick approach to training. However, he takes it further and discusses a study done with human children (you can read it here http://www.thrivingcanine.com/beyond_carrots_sticks). The basic premise being that continual rewarding reduces, even destroys, intrinsic motivation (which is very interesting) – the child, or dog, no longer wants to work for the pure joy of it; they hold out for a reward. This has been one knock from the aversive side of the aisle: that sooner or later that cookie isn’t enough of a reward to counter the desire to carry out the undesirable act.

The knock on aversive training is that it can destroy ...