The (only) Two Ways to Motivate Your Dog

adogslife/stock.adobe.com

We dog trainers think quite a bit about motivation to create behaviors we want. It’s discussed at workshops, seminars, online courses, and conferences. There are tons of studies on the topic - and more coming all the time. And for good reason - it’s important to understand how to motivate animals in order to produce the behaviors we want. And, in the end, it comes down to two things.

The carrot or the stick.

Sure, we call it something else when we trainers and behavior geeks get together. You might hear about reinforcements (anything that causes a behavior to maintain or increase) or punishers (anything that causes a behavior to decrease or stop). At other times it might be framed as an appetitive (something the animal wants) versus aversives (something the animal wants to avoid). Let’s go over these so you, a dog owner, will better understand what’s motivating your dog to do different things and how you can modify the behavior by modifying the motivators.

Appetitives are, as mentioned above, things that the animal wants. It’s there in the word - think “appetizing” when you hear that word. Obviously, that brings to mind food and treats. But it could really be anything that the dog likes including: play, praise, petting, the chance to socialize, the chance to hunt, cuddling, heck, even sunbathing out in the back yard. We can offer these things to animals as rewards to get the animal to do a behavior. Of course, not all appetitives are created equally. And WE don’t get to decide whether or not an animal sees something appetitive - or appetitive ENOUGH to do various behaviors. Some dogs are more attuned to the value of these good things. They might work for food, but not praise (that’s actually very common - studies have been done showing that food will almost always trump things like petting and praise). And many dogs will work hard for stinky cheese, but not for the kibble they get daily for free. Good trainers will “pay better” when we’re asking for harder behavior. For instance, a small morsel of an off-the-shelf dog treat might be all it takes to get a dog to sit upon request in a room with no distractions. But getting that same dog to jump through a hoop when it’s especially tired or in the presence of squirrels and chipmunks might require something far more interesting like stinky cheese or raw meat. So, if your dog isn’t doing what you want during training, one thing to consider is the value of your pay compared to the difficulty of the behavior and the level of distractions in the environment. Moving to a quieter location and “paying better” might very well solve your problem. If the dog performs the behavior more in the future because of the appetitive you’re using, we call that appetitive “reinforcement.” It’s ONLY considered reinforcing if the behavior goes up. So, if I ask the dog to sit but the sitting behavior doesn’t become more and more reliable with time, the dog didn’t find the treat reinforcing.

Aversives are things that animals choose to avoid if given the choice. Like with appetitives, there are many types of aversives. Let’s focus on the ones that we see most often in training contexts. We can typically boil these down into three categories: things which are painful, cause fear, or which intimidate. Examples of each include:

• Pain - keeping in mind that discomfort is, by definition, mild pain, this could be electric shock from shock collars at any intensity, prong collars, bark collars, choke chains/slip leads, leash jerks (corrections), hitting/kicking, etc.

• Fear - anything that startles a dog or causes them to be afraid - yelling, stomping, using an air horn, throwing things at the dog, exposing the animal to something we know scares it.

• Intimidation - Anything that predicts something painful or scary is about to happen. For instance, a beeping collar which indicates that an electric shock will happen if the dog doesn’t change their behavior immediately is working because the dog has learned about the application of pain coming after the beep. A dog who no longer pulls when wearing a prong collar is behaving because they’ve learned that pulling hurts. A person shouting no is meaningful to many dogs because they’ve learned that it predicts that something very scary is about to happen by the person saying that word.

So, what works best?

Well, they all work. But they all have pros and cons too. And an honest trainer should be able to describe those pros and cons and explain honestly about which methods they will use. Unfortunately, there are many trainers who don’t understand these things and choose also not to be transparent about their training methods. Let me tell you what I use and why (and why I don’t use the other things).

I do my best to stick to appetitives. I figure out what payment is going to be most valuable to the dog in front of me and I offer that desired thing in exchange for the dog doing the thing I’m trying to teach them to do. Most of the time, that’s something yummy to eat because it’s well known that all living dogs are food motivated and dispensing food is easy and efficient. When I’m working alone with a dog, I can often get the animal to perform a new behavior 8-12 times every minute. And most dogs will happily accept payment of something yummy that fast too. But, if I have to stop and play a round of fetch between each behavior (because a specific dog is far more interested in the ball than in a treat), it’ll slow things down. He’ll likely learn in the same number of repetitions as the more-food-motivated dog but the same number of repetitions might take me hours instead of minutes simply because fetch takes longer than eating a treat. As a professional who charges by the hour, I feel a strong obligation to be as efficient as possible. So, my first choice is always going to be food - and then I’ll adjust based on the needs of the individual dog in front of me.

I try to avoid the use of all aversives in training. Look, I can’t protect my dogs from every single thing they find annoying, painful, fearful, etc. (though I admit that I do generally try to do that). They occasionally step on something sharp, get scared by a truck or thunder boom that’s louder than usual, or even get stepped on when they move unexpectedly under my feet. Accidents and real life happen. But - and this is really important - I don’t need to use any of those types of things to train a dog. Never. Not with my own dogs and not with any of my client’s dogs. No matter the breed. No matter how big or small the dog. And no matter what behavior I’m trying to teach or change.

And, if I don’t need to use something painful, scary, or intimidating to effectively train a dog, why would I? Choosing to use pain, fear, or intimidation when it’s entirely unnecessary feels unethical to me. So, I won’t do it.

But do aversives work? Sure they do. If I burn my hand on the hot stove, I learn not to touch it when the burner is on. If you punched me everytime I did something specific that you didn’t like me doing, I’d learn not to do that.

But I’d also learn not to trust you. I’d know you weren’t someone I feel safe being around. I wouldn’t love engaging with you for training since I might sometimes get a treat - but I might also be on the receiving end of something unpleasant. I might even start associating training/learning with scary things no matter who the teacher is. I might, if I were a dog, also make rather illogical associations about other unrelated (or possibly quite related) things in the environment. For instance, if every time I pulled toward a group of kids in order to go say high to them (because I love kids) I felt something hurting my neck, I might start thinking, “uh-oh, here are some kids - I hate kids because when they show up, there’s always some pain involved.” (Yes, I’m simplifying and anthropomorphizing there - but dogs are masters at forming associations and what I’m describing is just one of the potential unintended consequences of using prong, shock, or choke collars in the real world since we can’t control every variable outside a laboratory).

By the way, an aversive is only considered “punishment” if the behavior drops. I’ve seen dogs wearing prong collars who continue to pull right through the discomfort (there are a number of reasons they might do that). If so, they aren’t finding the discomfort/pain punishing enough to change the behavior - so then what’s the point of using the device? We could, instead, teach the dog what we want him to do and make it rewarding to do so.

All animals - including humans - behave to produce a consequence we want (an appetitive) or to avoid one we don’t want (an aversive). All animals.

When we understand how animals are motivated we can each decide which motivators to employ to change behavior. I choose to use methods which provide animals with things they like and not by using things they dislike.