Does punishment work?

The short answer is yes, punishment does work, but at what cost?

In this blog I will explore what punishment is, what it is in regards to training your dog, and the unforeseen consequences of using it.

What is punishment really?

You may have heard of the phrase 'positive reinforcement' (+R), especially in reference to dog training. It describes the 'modern style' of dog training which bases all of it's methods on what is currently known through scientific research about dog emotion, behaviour and how dogs learn. The goal of positive training is to create strong human-canine relationships based on both trust and respect. Gone are the 'traditional' days of pack leader, being your dog's master or dominating dogs into submission. Instead now we form working partnerships with our canine companions, with an emphasis on choice, motivation and payment for desired behaviours.

Positive, however, doesn't refer to the emotive sense of the word, but instead to the scientific sense. Positive, means to add, rather than negative, which means to take away. +P, is in fact, just one of four quadrants of B.F. Skinner's theory of 'operant conditioning'.

Therefore in training, +R means to add something desirable for your dog in order to increase the likelihood of a behaviour occurring more in the future. E.g. if you teach your dog to sit with a food reward (and they enjoy that reward), you are positively reinforcing the behaviour that you would like to see more of going forward.

It is, however, worth distinguishing the difference between 'positive punishment' (+P) and 'negative punishment' (-P), because these quadrants are very different in meaning and how they are used in training.

+P means to add something aversive/ undesirable in order to decrease the likelihood of a behaviour occurring in the future. E.g. applying a kick to your dog's ribs every time they jump up at you (we absolutely do not condone this at all!) -P, however, means to take something desirable away from your dog in order to decrease the likelihood of a behaviour from happening in the future. E.g. your dog jumps up at you and you turn away whilst withholding any attention until they stop. You can see from these two examples, working on the same behaviour, that one is far more ethical than the other, and one is far more likely to break down the trust in your relationship with your dog. Both kicking your dog and taking your attention away are forms of punishment, and both work, but which would you rather use?

It would be misleading to state that all +R trainers never use punishment at all. Even withholding a food reward when your dog does not perform a desired behaviour correctly is technically a punishment. Within the +R dog training field there is a wide spectrum of how far some trainers learn towards solely using +R methods, or how much they might also apply -P. The cardinal rule of +R training is that we never use anything but +R and -P. Here at Wanderdog, we like to consider that in all circumstances +R must be the first point of call. It is far better to teach a dog what we would like them to do, rather than focus on what we don't want them to do. E.g. continuing with our example of jumping up, instead of using any punishment to decrease this behaviour we could instead consider, 'what would I rather my dog does instead?' Now with this new state of mind, wouldn't it be nicer if our d