Aidan3

Operant conditioning doesn't account for everything in behaviourism either. In my experience there are very few hardliners in any discipline, after all you're not really studying something if you are ignoring it's weaknesses. As you say, this person isn't really acknowledging weaknesses. In fact, many of the things he regarded as weaknesses were strengths, for e.g you can clicker train a dolphin in the open ocean.

He also doesn't believe in operant conditioning, claiming that it is obsolete. His ignorance of everything from psychology to marine mammal training is stunning. Then again, a recent survey in the US suggested that 20% of respondents believe that the sun revolves around the earth. I do agree with his definition that "clicker training" is a sub-set of operant conditioning, although of course you can use a clicker in conjunction with any method you wish. It was interesting that he chose to use the Brelands paper "Misbehavior of Organisms" as the basis of his argument, and claimed that you cannot train a wild dolphin in the open ocean using clicker training. The very same Marion Breland actually taught me quite a lot about clicker training when I first started, she was a wonderful teacher. Her second husband, Bob Bailey trained a lot of dolphins in the open ocean. He would take wild caught dolphins, and within 3 months have them trained to perform very long missions in the open ocean. Free to escape, free to hunt for their own food - yet they did not do either of these things!

No, it's the asphyxiation that takes the dog out of drive. Have a look at some of the other info posted.

See the "Cesar Millan Poll" thread for some discussion towards the end. Please note that the video (of CM) is a very poor example and should not be used as an indication, some trainers (such as Cosmolo and Nekhbet) have provided more appropriate information in that thread. Some trainers suggest that the technique is more of an "emergency" procedure, though deliberately utilised in extreme cases.

Ooohhh, ouch! Does it not have a ring on the back you could clip the leash to?

If anyone genuinely follows Shirley's program and doesn't haven't extenuating circumstances (very high prey drive dog they walk in the bush, for e.g) I would be amazed if they would need the e-collar. If they did honestly get to that point and needed it, I would suggest professional guidance. I'm not sure how many people use the e-collar in the way it is used in Shirley's program these days, you can be more gentle doing things a little differently. If you have dawdling recalls, don't reinforce them. But make sure you take things back a few steps and shape a bit more speed in. It's fairly easy to elicit a bit of extra speed by jogging backwards, tossing the treat or toy behind you and things of that nature, but remember that these will become cues so you really need to make sure you still get the speed even when you haven't done these things.

http://www.cabelas.com/catalog/browse/clot...Y_SEQ_104058180 http://www.cabelas.com/product/Clothing/Wo...WTz_stype%3DGNP http://www.gundogsupply.com/game-totes-and...e-lanyards.html http://www.gundogsupply.com/mother.html Some of that stuff ^ may look a bit too obviously like hunting gear to wear around town, but it has plenty of pockets

I teach it from a drop and from a sit. Have them in the drop or sit facing you, in close, then take a step towards them. As soon as the back end starts to pop up (you know, so they can get out of the way!), click and treat. When you've got a reliable stand, start adding the cue immediately prior to taking the step forward.

He was probably reacting to whatever that thing in the far left window peeking out is. OMG You're right! I see it - there's a spooky face there!!!! Far left window, far right row two up from the bottom yeah? Some people see the scary face, some people see the reflections of the trees and clouds. I think it's probably the same for dogs too. I certainly take a very scientific view and can always think of a rational explanation for things, but I too have had experiences like this. I had one just recently walking in an area that I always enjoy walking in, but on that particular day I noticed there was something sad about the place. Not heavy or painful, just sad. I walked for two hours through the hills, and the feeling kept coming to me over and over. As I was walking out, I came across a couple who were walking in with a red bucket. I recognised them, clients of mine. I didn't know, but the land (which is accessible to the public as a right of way, but privately owned) has been in the man's family for three generations and he had grown up there. He was coming to gather some spinning gum, unique to the area, for his father's funeral the next day. Apart from the small farm adjacent to where we walk, the late owner of the land had gathered commercial quantities of firewood in those hills with his father for many years, using horses to cart the wood out and take it to the ferry to feed the factory boilers across the river. So while I always look for a rational explanation, I do respect that perhaps we are not just bags of meat, only capable of experiencing whatever nervous impulses occur within our bodies.

He was probably reacting to whatever that thing in the far left window peeking out is.

How strange! Is he a purebread Amstaff? Another show you might enjoy is "Dog Town", also by National Geographic. They seem to get a lot of Amstaffs and pitties through the shelter there, ex-fighting dogs. They took the least adoptable of the Michael Vick dogs, for example. You should check it out, some really nice dogs.

Does anyone else think someone might be trolling this thread? Especially in light of another thread by that same person. Certainly seems to know how to hit a few buttons :D

Welcome to the forum, Donegal. Nice first post. Your sentiments echo exactly those of at least one other current member.

That video is Koehler training and looked good for a 10 month old pup, no lures, no treats and the dog had good focus for the stage of training it had completed with distractions. Yes, aversive methods overdone does have a potential to cause a flatter performance, and is the reason why a combination of aversive and reward methods provides the best of both worlds How long would you typically keep up the ground work on that before you would expect the dog to be fairly reliable, Garry? I was actually taught exactly as shown in the video but I wouldn't call it Koehler method, because as I understand it Koehler was very specific about how often you were to train and for how long each time. I doubt anyone (at the club) was doing exactly as he suggested and very few were getting the results that I'm to understand you could expect from following Koehler closely. To be honest, and I'm not saying this to provoke an argument, but at 10 months any clicker trained dog would be performing significantly better than that. The drops would be on voice cue, probably not "out of motion" but certainly drop from a sit. The dogs would typically show a lot more handler focus, which I'm sure you would agree with and would achieve by adding food or toys to basic Koehler.

The issue is that if the dog is loaded, don't deliberately pull the trigger. It's just not good handling. If the dog hadn't been provoked and he was just acting to protect himself and lay down a ground-rule, I would have had no issue with it (I wouldn't personally put the dog into that situation without more ground-work, but that's neither here nor there). I'm not sure how you could argue that the dog wasn't strangled into submission. I don't think he stopped trying to bite because he was bored

The question was raised "Do you agree with Cesars training/rehabilitation methods?" It would have been a bit lop-sided if only those who do had responded

Not unless you want more slow sits :D You get what you reinforce!

Intermittent rewards make a behaviour more resistant to extinction than other schedules of reinforcement and they are also fairly practical once a behaviour is fluent (already very reliable). One of the problems with rewarding every time is that you tend to reward sloppy responses, so it's good to have a picture in your head of what is a sloppy response and avoid rewarding those. If you are competitive or building a behaviour that requires a high level of performance (e.g recall) then it's good to have some clear definitions on what you require and what your dog is currently capable of with that behaviour.

Putting aside any argument about his methods, I'm just honestly not that impressed with what he actually does. Turn the sound off so you don't get all the dialogue and it's often a bit of a non-event, no evidence that anything has really changed. I guess I've just seen it all before, a snap-shot never gives a good picture and I'm more interested in results demonstrated over time. Trainers are going to get bitten, they are in a high risk position, but it shouldn't happen regularly and it certainly shouldn't happen because you just snuck in a sly kick while a dog was already aroused. Clients should certainly never get bitten as a direct result of something you have done, I would be embarassed by that.

Either, and no they don't. I'm sure you will find some if you research it. The same as you will find top level SchH, police service, customs, dual-purpose, Mondio, SAR, herding, obedience, tracking, and personal Service Dogs who are clicker trained (what you might erroneously refer to as "purely positive" training) - if you look hard enough. This debate is dead, and can only be forcefully revived by selective reporting and rigid opinions. Let's discuss something that isn't painfully obvious and actually matters.

No-one was arguing otherwise. My apologies to the OP for letting this get off-topic by my participation. I had only intended to answer specific questions related to the original post and had hoped that this would not turn into a method debate. Least of all a debate of extremes ("purely positive", police dogs, high level competition dogs etc). Somehow Neville (SpecTraining) seems to always bring it back to either an imagined "purely positive" or "all GSDs must have SchH titles" debate, which is a shame because I honestly believe that Neville has more to offer than that. The original question he posed was insightful, unfortunately the forest seems to have been lost for the trees. You specifically asked for reasons other than these. What was happening back then is way out of context with what is happening today.

Is it a similar sort of whinge? Personally, I find it very difficult to tell the difference between anxiety and excitement from vocalisation. Add the physical constraints of a car messing up body language and movement, and the two are hard to tell apart. If he doesn't suffer from SA at home, it is highly unlikely that he suffers from it in the car.

Are you sure that he isn't just excited to be at his destination?

Do you mean the combination of genes and environmental interactions? (If those traits are then inheritable that's almost suggesting epigenetics - a really interesting concept). What you see is the product of genes multiplied by environment, so yes, a combination. The closer a heritable trait gets to zero, the higher the environmental stimulus needs to be to see that trait. It's not a straight linear relationship though, for some traits there appears to be a threshold. You won't see the trait at all until an environmental threshold has been crossed. This has been studied extensively in the context of human schizophrenia which appears to be strongly heritable yet not seen as often as you might expect and often not seen at all unless "triggered" by external events.

I've already mentioned a few, the possibility of the correction actually impeding learning (and I realise that everyone believes that they would never be so unclear with a correction, yet I see it over and over...), the suggestion that it is maybe not always faster (and how would you know anyway? How would one test that objectively? If you can suggest a way that doesn't require an enormous, tightly controlled sample I would genuinely love to know!) So if we don't know if it's actually any faster or that it has benefited learning, and it isn't necessary in the example under discussion, I would make a decision not to based on that alone. I know for certain that we can get a very high level of handler attention amidst distraction using positive reinforcement, and that it is not a long, slow road. We also need to consider the handler. The minute they walk out the door they haven't got you coaching them any more. Positive reinforcement carries a much lower risk than corrections; you can't "over-reward", you can mistime a reward but it usually doesn't cause any anxiety or uncertainty, a reward won't shut a soft dog down, even a poorly timed reward provides useful classical conditioning, food is associated with the parasympathetic nervous system (calming processes), corrections are associated with the sympathetic nervous system (fight or flight processes) - remember we are talking about dog owners here and not professionals. Sometimes the effects of corrections cannot be seen immediately. They might be effective in stopping the unwanted behaviour, but increase other unwanted behaviours. There is always a response to corrections. On the flip-side, reward has behavioural benefits beyond the immediate behaviour. I am also of the opinion that a training relationship strongly weighted towards reward leads to a stronger personal relationship. I can't prove that, but it is the relationship that I would prefer to have. I think it's ugly to be correcting your dog when it isn't necessary. I don't like being around people who do that to other people, either. My rugby coach doesn't mind giving us (as a team) a spray when warranted, but the respect he has earned comes from his ability to make every player (as an individual) feel like they are worth something to him and the team. A note on reliability - it has been amply demonstrated to me through observing good trainers, having done it myself, and thousands of lab experiments that +R can lead to extraordinarily high levels of reliability. So can corrections. +R is generally a little slower in achieving a moderate level of reliability than reward and correction together, but ultimately both end up in the same place in the same time if taken to high levels. There are exceptions, the cat-chaser for example where we can punish something very specific and controlled set-ups would prove very difficult, but the example under discussion is not one of these exceptions. It's a really big topic, debated for many years. Skinner came to the conclusion (based on the empirical data available to him) that punishment was unreliable and unpredictable. Since then we've learned that this is not the case, and I think the positive training movement conveniently ignores the weight and breadth of available evidence on this topic. Still, people seem to attribute almost mystical properties to whatever "method" they prefer. I've never seen very mild corrections work for anything other than very mild distractions for long, turn the volume of the distraction up and the dog continues his unwanted behaviours. At this point you have a choice: - continue with low level distractions, then build up slowly, using more mild corrections - continue with low level distractions, then build up slowly, using reward - increase the correction It's not up to me to convince you which you should choose, but my choice is to build up slowly with reward wherever I can.