Aidan3

Nah, I think you can already do that via a mobile phone with the right software. It's much easier to get your unsuspecting kid to carry a mobile phone than it is to wear a collar anyway ;) ;) I just had a quick look, and there are dozens of these devices on the market now! Even some for "elderly children"

I wonder if people might secretly be buying them to keep track of their kids?

I have worried about my dogs, especially now that they are old. It helps me to put things into perspective, and ask questions like "what is the real risk of that?" or "what is the risk of this relative to the risk of the thing the worry is preventing me from doing?" It's a good strategy for a lot of things, really.

I hike with my dogs a lot, I think it's a great idea. I've only lost one of my dogs once, and I believe (from his injuries when I found him) that he fell off a ledge or became trapped somewhere. Previously this sort of system has been much more expensive and, as I was lead to believe, illegal in this country so I didn't ever invest in one. I will definitely look further into this. As an anti-theft device? Agree with MrsRB!

Temple Grandin has probably explained it the best I've ever seen in her recent book "Animals Make Us Human: Creating the Best Life for Animals" (2009)

I encourage clients to encourage their dogs to sleep during the day, when dogs would naturally sleep if left to their own devices. But interactive toys for dogs with lots of prey drive include spring poles, staffy balls, and there are even automatic tennis ball throwers with a bucket that your dog can be trained to put the balls back in.

Soft mouth, marking the fall, not bothered by gun shot... so many little things that would be such a hassle to have to train. I regret not doing formal retrieving with my Golden earlier. He's fit, but he's old and he'll only perform so many retrieves before he wants to have a little rest It's so much easier to train a dog who doesn't want to stop, like my GSD, but her mouth is very hard, she doesn't mark long falls, doesn't get along with other dogs and isn't eligible to compete - being a herding dog Other than those things she would be perfect.

I do, but I respect those who think it's weird too. I don't think anyone takes it literally.

Yes and yes, but it doesn't need to be a lot of fear and environmental factors can be a big influence (e.g owner's response, attack by another dog etc) There are always signals unless those signals have been punished or extinguished.

It's common enough in working lines too.

Yes, it was Dunbar, extrapolating from the literature (I think it was Fox who first documented the role of bite inhibition conditioning in very young pups). As far as I know there isn't any research in support of either theory (teaching prohibition or teaching inhibition of biting humans). I suspect that if it is a factor, it's probably not a big one. Of all the reasons for a serious bite, I really can't see much harm minimisation coming from teaching inhibition or prohibition. Good targeting for tug or bitework, as you have mentioned, is very useful though.

One of the subtle signs after a while can be the dog becoming less active and engaging less with you. To some degree this might be a good thing, the dog fitting in better with the owners lifestyle, but I think it's a real loss.

Yes, but when I say "good dog" she's always here... and yet if I offer her a treat she won't take it when sheep are there. I really need to take her back up the hill and try again. I'm not sure what you're trying to do, but when a dog is working sheep, food is probably not a reinforcer - the opportunity to work sheep is. I would use that, if it's appropriate. I wouldn't let her chase them. Long line if her recall isn't strong enough. Sounds to me like a trip to a herding instructor might be worthwhile, might solve both these problems.

But when they are working sheep, their reward is always there!

Well I have both, and your comment has me stumped. The application of the theory might be wrong, and people with experience might do this better, but the theory doesn't "lose" in either case.

But I find it insanely confusing terminology even if it is technically consistent. Ahh, OK, gotcha. at some point is your dog going to give up on the idea that he might get some food if you stop that occasional reward process ie no treat (ever again for sitting there) will decrease the behaviour? Yes, probably fairly quickly. If a dog is used to being reinforced on some schedule and then you make a dramatic change to that schedule they try a new response fairly quickly. Not necessarily. It is a procedure, it means that reinforcement stops. The behaviour may continue for some time. In many cases to the point of self-harm, but this is not a consistent phenomenon, i.e not every individual will do this even with a schedule designed to produce it. Not really, either of my dogs would quit fairly quickly if I stopped reinforcing sits. I don't take food with me everywhere we go so they must be fairly resistant to extinction, but there would be an expectation of reward if I were to deliberately ask for sits repeatedly until failure. They would try something else, especially if I had a clicker in my hand. The example was to illustrate an aspect of why extinction and -P are not the same thing.

-R just means a stimulus was removed contingent upon a response and the rate of responding was increased or maintained. Does this prove that the stimulus was aversive? How do we define what is aversive? It becomes a circular discussion and I don't think it really matters.

The part that I have bolded is incorrect. I'll explain - Negative punishment is when you remove a stimulus (it doesn't have to be a reinforcer) and the behaviour diminishes as a result. It is a consequence. Extinction is when you fail to provide the reinforcer that has previously reinforced the response under extinction. You didn't give it or take it away, you did nothing. If a ball rolls under a fence, just out of reach of the dog's paws, the fence isn't punishing the dog for not having long enough front legs to reach. I have a bag of food in my laundry. I sometimes give my dog some of that food for sitting, but at the moment the bag of food is still in the laundry and my dog is sitting. I have not punished my dog. Operant extinction is a necessary part of reinforcement, including negative reinforcement. Any schedule of reinforcement necessarily includes extinction. I am not aware of any code of conduct that forbids negative punishment, nor would the example given be negative punishment. Preventing the antecedent is just management.

If we had a large dog jumping on a small child I would be looking a lot deeper than "a couple of good corrections" That is the sort of overly-simplified approach to behaviour that we are trying to get past. Why is the dog able to jump on the child? What is the dog supposed to do instead of jumping on the child? What is the probability of the dog still jumping on the child when off-leash, or not wearing a prong collar? How are we going to demonstrate that our correction is reliable over time, possibly long after we've left? If spontaneous recovery is a problem with extinction procedures, what happens to the avoidance response when we stop correcting the dog? The jumping might be suppressed, but what behaviour takes it's place if all that we have done is to correct it?

None of it makes any sense at all. I would suggest to your friend to see a trainer with some genuine qualifications, in fact with the problems you have described, a behaviourist might be a better use of time and funds. How committed is your friend to the dog? Seems like quite a challenge for this person, contact with the breeder might be worthwhile.

Are we discussing anyone in particular? Have you got an example? A bad trainer of any persuasion is going to waster their money, what makes this example special or relevant to this discussion? Why do some dogs respond "to aversives best of all"? Would it not be a combination of factors, most notably the behaviour they are trying to modify? What if you send me a dog who responds to positive reinforcement best of all, but it has chronic pica and probably won't survive the next operation? What if you send me a dog who responses to aversives best of all but we need to teach it to indicate low blood sugar? Would you want a trainer who understands the science of learning, or someone who attributes all behaviour to dominance/submission relationships, or someone who doesn't use food treats on principle and does a great deal of teaching with a chain in a bag and a loud "Bah!!!"?

Extinction training doesn't always work because behaviour can be reinforced by someone else and/or takes too long to achieve in the case of a large dog jumping up on a small child. I didn't say that it was always viable (although it does always work, it's just not always possible). I was responding to the assertion that "purely positive" was a misnomer because it necessarily includes negative punishment. The story goes that withholding a reinforcer is punishment, but this is incorrect (and probably irrelevant anyway).

Yes, I agree most definitely that positive reinforcement is used more today then ever before, but the question is: Is it used as more to avoid the use of aversives or because it provides a better training result???. It's a good question to ask, but I think you would really have to have your head in the sand to deny that it provides better training results. Almost any measure - precision, attitude, reliability - are all improved with +R. This is true at the elite level, and perhaps most surprisingly, at the level of complete novices.

No doubt there are plenty of trainers out there who you have described quite accurately, but your history of animal training and learning theory and the motivation behind using predominantly +R has a few gaps. Whilst animal welfare is an important aspect of our training procedures, some rather cold and unemotional science is behind the push for the emphasis on +R contingencies, and that began with Skinner. If +R contingencies are leading to slower learning, then we can quite comfortably blame the trainer and not the learner or the technology. Or we might look at the observer, "slower" is relative and I think a lot of people only see what is immediately in front of them without any basis for comparison. Sometimes we "make haste slowly". You can't build fine furniture with a chainsaw. Winifred Strickland probably had a lot of wash-outs. Selection (which I think is very important in the breeding of dogs) is a big part of Schutzhund (or was). A lot of dogs don't do well with a slap on the nose, and arguably those dogs won't be producing the best workers, but then again those dogs who can bounce back from a slap on the nose would probably also be exceptional with the methods we find more acceptable today - and let's face it - Schutzhund has better tests of courage and hardness than whatever abuse the handler can dish out.

I think you might have misread clipandcoach's post then. She was referring to the removal of a reinforcer (an aversive) to increase behaviours, thus gaining control of the dog through those behaviours. That is negative reinforcement, the aversive is referred to as a negative reinforcer. If we use an e-collar for escape training, the stim is a reinforcer. The same term is used in avoidance learning, although admittedly the conversation gets hard to follow when we go there We don't have to use punishment. We necessarily have to use extinction, and I think most "purely positive" trainers would use negative punishment at some point, but they are not the same thing. I agree. No-one who has ever seen me use +P or -R has ever had any cause for concern, and that includes other trainers who refer to themselves as "purely positive".