All living animals have to learn in order to survive. At its most basic level learning is all about learning how to find food, water and a breeding partner and how to avoid danger. All these things offer some benefit or reward to the animal and in nature if animals spent time and energy on things that did not bring any benefit their species would soon die out.

Even though neither ourselves nor our dogs have to fend for ourselves nowadays we still both have brains that are hard-wired to repeat those things that are in some way rewarding to us, to not bother with things that are non-rewarding and to avoid things that are unpleasant.

Human beings have the luxury of benefiting, through language, from the learning of our ancestors. Our dogs don’t have this luxury and have to learn everything from their own experiences.

Left to their own devices our dogs are learning all the time. They learn from their own actions and what happens to them as a result of their actions and also from things happening around them in their environment. Unfortunately if we left our dogs completely to their own devices they would learn to do all sorts of things that we would rather they didn’t !

When a dog is left to explore its environment it discovers that when it does a certain thing there will be a consequence. This consequence may be “good for dogs”, that is rewarding, or “of no particular benefit to dogs”, that is non-rewarding or indeed it might be “very unpleasant for dogs”, that is aversive or punishing.

Because we love our dogs and don’t want to harm them and because we are much cleverer than our dogs and so don’t need to harm them to get what we want, when we are training our dogs we only need be concerned with consequences that are rewarding or non-rewarding.

Training dogs is all about manipulating the consequences of our dogs actions so that the things we want them to do are rewarding and the things we don’t want them to do are non-rewarding. To train your dog you don’t have to be big, strong or fierce you just have to be manipulative! The only force you have to use is the power of your superior brain !

If we remember that our dogs’ brains are hard-wired for survival we can see that food is a very big incentive for a dog to repeat a behaviour and one that we can easily use to manipulate that behaviour. (Of course, because our dogs are well fed, we sometimes have to offer them something extra tasty if they are to see the benefit in doing something that is not especially exciting for dogs.)

A final thought: it’s the promise of money to buy food, and the consequence of not having it, that keeps us going to work year after year !

Sue Kinchin MAPDT 00922
Contact : suekinchin@btinternet.com