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Posts Tagged ‘positive reinforcement’

As in all areas of educating, there are different methods of doing things, and different beliefs about what is right and wrong. Religion is at the top of this list. The next thing that occurs is that parents can train their children in more than one way. To hit or not to hit, that is the question. How to train your dog might run a close third with questions like Pinch collar, or Choke Chain or none of the above?

There are 3 ways of reinforcing a dog’s behavior in order to get what you want.

1. Positive reinforcement is a reward that encourages a response. Your dog will likely repeat his good behavior if you reward him more than once for that postiive behavior.

2. Negative reinforcement means that something is taken away in order to encourage a response. A dog learns that it is better to not get shocked and will repeat the behavior that gets that result. After behaving there is no shock, hence he learns to behave to avoid the shock. When you left early for work one day and suddenly the traffic was diminished you valued what was missing for your action, hence you repeat the action of leaving early for that result. More and more times the traffic is less and less which makes you want to leave the house early. Traffic is taken away.

3. Punishment is an unpleasant thing that is added to the situation. This is different from “Negative Reinforcement”. When your dog acts aggressive to you or another dog you might hit him. Parents might get loud and in a child’s face when that child is not behaving well. Punishment only encourages fear which will give you the desired response.

Eventually they all work. Your dog will follow you when you yank on his leash. The dog will come when you give it a reward for coming. Also, dogs will chase after running people.

Rough or noisy behaviors coming from you can result in the response you wanted when the dog was misbehaving. Or, he knows that if he is good he will get from you that wonderful treat.

Does this mean what it sounds like? Would you rather your dog respond to you out of love or out of fear? You choose.

By

Dr. Marika Zoll

DrDogTalk.com

The biggest secret to dog training is understanding the method of positive conditioning. All that’s really necessary after that is patience and consistency. Most problems in training a dog stem from not understanding conditioning or from not applying it consistently.

To utilise it consistently, you will need lots of patience. You need to understand the levels of time needed to train a dog. You must also understand that being consistent doesn’t just mean during a short training session but whenever you and anyone else are interacting with your dog. This means that you also need your family members and anyone who interacts with your dog to be consistent also.

Positive conditioning means that a positive reinforcement i.e. an enjoyable stimulus when your dog does some action will encourage him to perform that particular action again. It’s a sad fact that many owners positively reinforce problem behaviors in their dogs without being aware of it. For example, they enter the house, the dog is jumping up on them and they give affection to the dog. They are positively reinforcing their dog to jump up on people without realising it.

If you ever watch the Dog Whisperer on TV, you will see that even though the families have watched his program, maybe even read his books and know intellectually what they should do, they still reward all sorts of unwanted behavior without realising it. The Dog Whisperer is very different which is why the dogs behave differently with him. He behaves consistently and ignores the dog if it’s doing unwanted behaviors. In virtually every case that he helps, most of the problems start with inconsistency on the part of the owner.

Lots of awareness and self-discipline are needed to stop yourself giving affection to a misbehaving dog. You also need to be aware that any attention, even when it’s shouting at your dog “stop barking”, may act as a positive reinforcement. So, the best response to unwanted behaviors in your dog may be to ignore them by turning away from your dog and giving no attention.

It’s more effective to focus on reinforcing positive behaviors rather than focusing on using negative reinforcement for unwanted behaviors. As the dog is encouraged more and more in positive behaviors, less time will be given by him to negative behaviors which go unrewarded.

Obviously, you may have to stop your dog doing unwanted behaviors For example, if he jumps on the food counter, you can just pull him off.

How do you positively reinforce behaviors you want to encourage? Possible rewards are tasty treats, affection or a toy to play with. Using small tasty treats is probably the easiest method. The treat needs to be given as close in time to the action as possible. Because of the importance of timing, the use of a clicker makes the reward process clearer to your dog. The clicker sound is used to mark the behavior precisely as it happens and the treat comes immediately afterwards. I encourage you to look more into the whole subject of clicker training since it does streamline process of positive reinforcement.

Read more about the Secrets to Dog Training, about clicker training with dogs and about dealing with dog behavior problems in general.