If we come downstairs before Juno she will often sneak into the bedroom (where she isn’t allowed) and steal socks from the laundry basket. (Somehow she always manages to steal a matching pair!) When she comes downstairs she will then dance around looking somewhat ashamed, with her tail between her leg, as if to say: “Look at me, I’ve been a baaaad dog. Shouldn’t I be punished?” Of course, it is all just an elaborate ruse for attention, so we mostly ignore her.

Unfortunately, ignoring her hasn’t cured her of the habit. Nor do we always remember to close the bedroom door. So we decided on a new approach: rewarding her for coming down the stairs without socks in her mouth. We thought this worked when, this morning, she came down without any socks; but, it turns out, that she had still stolen the socks, but simply dropped them at the top of the stairs so she could get her cookie!

While it is still officially the year of the pig, for us 2007 was the year of the dog. Juno was already seven months old when we met her in December of 2006, and we took over full time ownership of her in February of 2007. Young retrievers are a handful, and despite her age, Juno still wasn’t fully house-trained when we got her. So the first task at hand was to learn something about dog training.

Dog training is a big business. Just about everyone seems to think they are a qualified dog-trainer these days. As a result there are an abundance of dog training books out there. But after going through about a dozen dog training books (here’s a list of my favorites) it quickly became clear that the basic principles of positive dog training are fairly well agreed upon. Below I try to explain my understanding of dog training based on my reading and my limited experience with one dog. While Juno is much better behaved than before, she wouldn’t win any dog shows, and she certainly isn’t ready for any free-style competition, so don’t mistake my random musings for the advice of an expert!

Basics

There are numerous benefits to having a well trained dog. Most importantly, it teaches the dog self-control, which leads to overall better behavior. It also helps build new neural pathways by providing the dog with a stimulating environment. And, of course, it makes it easier to live together with your dog. But dogs are not robots and a lot of dog training actually involves training humans to be better owners. Dogs need exercise. A large dog will need at least 90 minutes a day running around outside. If you can’t provide the dog with regular exercise and play you have no business owning a dog. Similarly, when you are away from home either put your dog in a crate, or hide anything that she might damage. It isn’t her fault she’s bored when you are away. Better yet, buy a Kong toy and stuff it with treats to keep her busy till you get back.

Operant Conditioning

The current thinking about dog training owes a tremendous amount to two students of B. F. Skinner, Marian and Keller Breland. While their ideas were widely applied at zoos and ocean parks, etc. since the 1940s, it took a while for a more scientific approach to be adopted by dog trainers. All training involves some kind of operant conditioning, but it is only recently that dog trainers have begun to rely upon research about how dogs respond to such conditioning, as opposed to personal experience and industry lore.

Operant conditioning defines four possible consequences which can be used to shape a dog’s behavior:

• Positive reinforcement adds something to the situation to increase the chance of the behaviour being exhibited again (for example, giving a dog a treat when he sits.)
• Negative reinforcement removes something from the situation to increase the chance of the behaviour being exhibited again (for example, releasing the tension on an uncomfortable training collar when the dog stops pulling on the leash).
• Positive punishment adds something to the situation to decrease the chance of the behaviour being exhibited again (for example, verbally growling at a dog to make it stop jumping up).
• Negative punishment removes something from the situation to decrease the chance of the behaviour being exhibited again (for example, walking away from a dog who jumps up).

The scientific consensus, broadly supported by the literature, is that positive reinforcement is the most effective means of training your dog. That does not mean that there are not situations wither other types of consequences could or should be used, but simply that 99% of the time the same desired effect could be better achieved by using positive reinforcement. For instance, rather than hitting your dog every time she chews on your slippers, give her a treat every time she chews on her rubber dog toy. Pretty soon that dog toy will seem a lot more interesting than the slipper. And, amazingly, you can slowly fade out the treats and the dog will often still continue to prefer her dog toy over the slippers.

Thoughts on Punishment

While positive reinforcement has its limitations (see below), positive punishment can have very serious negative consequences for both dog and owner. For instance, an owner who hits a dog on the nose every time she jumps on guests might find himself with a dog who is afraid of guests. She may even start snarling and biting guests, which is worse than the problem he set out to solve. Juno had this problem, and we found the best result was a combination of negative punishment (having guests ignore her while she was jumping and pulling) combined with positive reward (petting her and giving her attention when she sat still). The other problem with positive punishment is that the dog may not understand what she is being punished for. Dogs have poor memories and if you don’t catch them in the act, punishment won’t accomplish very much.

I personally differ somewhat from the Skinner folks on the issue of negative punishment. While I think it is generally a bad idea, and I’m opposed to anything that might hurt a dog, I do think that the objections to negative punishment depend upon the same faulty dog-as-automaton theories which led a previous generation of trainers to overly rely upon such methods.. Unlike other researchers who observe dog behavior in the home and around other dogs, the behaviorists tend to restrict their analysis to the laboratory. For this reason they tend to see dogs as incapable of having a theory of mind with respect to other dogs or their owners. But I’ve always liked David Hume’s observation that a dog can distinguish between being kicked and being tripped over. Moreover, some recent research shows that dogs are capable of more complex reasoning than previously thought.

Juno’s previous owner trained her to understand a simple “No!” command (actually the Chinese “Bu!”) which we still use to mean “stop what you are doing right now” and only use when we catch her in the act of being bad. We always try an alternative positive command first, like “sit” or “drop it,” but if she still doesn’t behave we use “No!” If that doesn’t work I hold her on her back with my hand around her snout and look into her eyes. I think it is important for the negative punishment to be a consequence of not listening to the “No!” command, and not to say “No!” after punishing, which would confuse the dog.

The idea about holding a dog down and looking into its eyes comes from the dominance theory of dog training – and is based on the idea that dogs respect authority. Many authors are now very critical of the “dominance” theory of dog training for good reasons. For one thing, humans are not dogs and it isn’t clear that they will ever think of us as dominant dogs. Also, any loving pet owner will allow the dog to dominate some situations, thus making it very confusing for the dog just who is dominant in what situation. Despite that, I do think Juno understands this action as a form of non-violent “negative punishment.” If I’ve yelled “No!” and she hasn’t responded and I move towards her, she will sometimes immediately roll on her back into the position I put her when she gets such punishment.

In short, if (a) the negative punishment is not harmful to the dog, and (b) the dog has already been well trained to execute a positive substitute behavior, and (c) the negative punishment is a direct consequence of not obeying the “No!” command uttered while the bad behavior is ongoing, I think it is OK to use negative punishment. Considering that this is a lot of ifs, ands, and buts, I understand why many dog training books advise against using any negative punishment. But because it is hard to avoid using negative punishment altogether, I think it is useful to have a theory about when and how to use it appropriately. For very similar reasons we use a head-halter when walking the dog in places with lots of distractions.

Notes on Positive Reward Training

The biggest problem with positive reward training, one that is not well discussed in many books, is that it is a skill. It isn’t enough to just read a dog book. One needs practice and one needs to watch experienced dog trainers in action. I was getting very frustrated with some of these methods until I was able to find a good dog training film online. There are a lot of great clips on YouTube, but I ended up buying this nice little video (warning, video uses annoying DRM technology). It really helps to watch a good dog trainer in action. I read about one study which compared expert trainers and novices and found remarkable differences. Novices were much less able to suppress extraneous sounds and movements which confused the dog. They were also were far more stingy in doling out treats. You don’t spoil the dog by treating her, you condition her.

Another difficulty with positive reward training is getting your dog to associate the treat with the specific behavior you are working on. This is accomplished with a “clicker.” I bought a bunch of noisy light switches at the dollar store and they do just fine. The important thing is that you make a unique sound at the exact moment the dog does the behavior you wish to reward, and the treat comes after the sound. The dog quickly learns to associate the sound with both the behavior and the reward. When I first started using a clicker Juno loved it so much she would bring the clicker in her mouth to ask me to play. You only need the clicker to train new behaviors. Once the dog has learned the command you can slowly phase out the clicker.

Finally, another major obstacle to positive reward training is that dogs are not very good at generalizing. Something they do very well in the kitchen they might not do at all when you are outside. It takes constant practice under a variety of conditions. Unfortunately, some conditions cannot easily be controlled – like behavior towards strangers and guests. No matter what, you inevitably end up with situations where your dog is getting petted by strangers as a positive reward for jumping up on them, exactly the behavior you are trying to avoid. Even worse, when you try to remedy the situation the strangers will tell you that they don’t mind, as if it were all about them and not about the dog. It helps if you have a regular visitor to your house whom you can work with, or if you can find friends the dog hasn’t yet met to be “strangers” and train them on how to behave towards your dog before she meets them. A good side to the dog’s inability to generalize is that you can allow her up onto one couch while still keeping her off all the other furniture.

Goals for 2008

Currently, Juno knows the following commands: sit, stay, down, fetch, leave-it, touch (she’ll touch her nose to your hand), shake, wait (i.e. wait at a door before going out), easy (don’t pull on the leash), and heel. She doesn’t know them particularly well, for instance she’ll heel for about 15 seconds before forging ahead, but its a start. Our goal for 2008 is to work on duration, getting her to do sit-stays and heels for minutes rather than seconds. Also, she can either run and fetch a frisbee or jump and catch one from sitting, but she can’t yet run and jump to catch one in the air …

I don’t have too many good pictures of Big Ears (the black dog) because when she was around the dogs were usually moving too fast for me to capture on film. Either they were running, or they were wrestling and all I photographed was a big ball of fur with black and brown paws sticking out.

Big Ears was Juno’s best friend. Now she’s dead. The community placed a dog trap in our housing complex and Big Ears went into it. The rules say all dogs in the community must be kept on a leash and any dog that goes in the trap gets taken away.

We first noticed Big Ears about a year ago. At the end of the semester some students must have left her behind when they moved away. A lot of dogs end up stray that way, but this dog was so sweet tempered that she was adopted by our neighbor who fed her and took care of her. Along with Happy (the white dog) and Spot (not pictured) these three abandoned dogs are cared for by our neighbor. She doesn’t exactly “own” them, but she makes sure they are fed, and if something happens she’ll take them to the vet. Otherwise they live like street dogs.

At first we were nervous about letting Juno associate with such riff-raff, but over time we discovered that they played very nicely together. When we took Juno out for a walk they would follow us to the field. Dogs need other dogs to play with and only Big Ears could really tire Juno out. Playing fetch with me just isn’t the same. Nor could Happy or Spot keep up with Juno. Big Ears was a perfect match. We’ll miss her …

UPDATE: Here’s another pic:

UPDATE: Turns out I was lied to. Or perhaps the guard I spoke to didn’t know the full story. But I was assured by the woman who previously cared for Big Ears that she was adopted by a student. She said they told people she was put to sleep because neighbors were complaining about the dog. I don’t really see how this makes any sense, but if its true I’m glad to know she’s OK.

After much deliberation I finally got a Panasonic DMC-LX2. The main competitor was the yet-to-be-announced LX3, and what finally made my decision was spending some time looking at this timeline of camera product announcements which made it pretty clear that it was unlikely for any new camera to be announced before the new year, and certainly not in time for me to get one before my January trip to India.

I’ve only spent one day playing around with the camera, but I already love it. It is a huge improvement over my old FX7. The biggest downside is the fact that the lens sticks out a bit from the camera which makes it a bit bulky to stick in my pants pocket, but the detachable lens cap isn’t as bad as I thought it would be and it is still a very compact camera.

The two things I wanted most, a wide angle lens and better ISO performance, are particularly satisfying. The 16:9 wide screen format offered by the LX2 gives it a cinematic quality to the wide angle shots which I really like. (See above.) And while pictures shot in low light are still pretty noisy, I find I can dispense with the flash far more often than I could before. (And the flash gives a much more even and diffuse light than on the FX7, with less red-eye.)

The pictures I’m uploading to Flickr these days are still mostly from the FX7 as I’m still learning how to use the LX2, but I’ll try to get some more LX2 photos up as soon as I can.

I’ve been meaning to write about training Juno for a while now, but never got around to it. To make a long story short, Juno wouldn’t win any obedience contests, but she is much better behaved than before. Lately, however, she’s picked up some cute-but-annoying new habits. For instance, she used to be perfectly happy to go out for a walk with either Shashwati or myself, but now she wants everyone to be together. If one of us goes to take her out, she’ll run into the room where the other one is working and dance around. Often she’ll pick up something in her mouth, like one of our slippers, and poke us with it as she dances in an effort to herd us to the door. The best way to deal with this is to put the leash away and pretend that the walk is over, trying again a while later. Unfortunately, sometimes we are in a rush, so whomever wants to stay behind has to walk to the door and pretend to go out, thus reinforcing the dog’s behavior.

The problem is, the dog has nothing to think about all day except training humans, while we have only a little time each day to spend training the dog. Guess who wins?

Fortunately, she prefers playing with her prey to eating it. After she (reluctantly) dropped the lizard it was a little dazed, but still in one piece.

But I don’t think she’ll ever catch a fish:

Or a monkey:

{dog, monkey, lizard}

Although my students are all quick to say that the problem with Taiwanese education is that it is based on cramming information (they use the term tian ya 填鴨 which means “force-feeding a duck”) rather than learning how to think critically, none of them saw anything wrong with hitting students. They all insisted that while not hitting students might work in other countries, it was part of Taiwanese culture and not allowing teachers to do so would make it difficult for them to function in the classroom.

Since I’ve been spending lots of time lately training Juno, our golden retriever, I shared with my students the current thinking about using punishment to train dogs, which is that it is simply not very effective and can have unintended consequences. The dog doesn’t really understand exactly why you hit it, but it will just know to be afraid. A dog who gets beaten for peeing on the carpet my not understand that peeing on the carpet is what brought on the punishment, since the transgression probably took place too long ago for the dog to remember the deed. Moreover, the dog probably is only getting caught and punished half the time, so it never fully makes the connection. On the other hand, the dog is very likely to become afraid of the owner, and maybe even some other environmental variable that is present at the time of the beating such as the keys the owner puts on the table before seeing the damage to the carpet.

A survey of over 300 studies conducted in the last sixty years came to a similar conclusion with regard to the effects of corporal punishment on human children. While “immediate compliance” increased with punishment, “internalization of moral rules” actually decreased, and “as the frequency and severity (abusiveness) of corporal punishment increases, so too does the risk for negative outcomes.”

I’m not saying Taiwanese students are like dogs, but I do think it is very likely that the teacher is not effectively teaching the student to behave in class so much as instilling a general fear of authority, a fear of making mistakes, of taking risks, of asking questions, etc. In the US studies have shown that victims of corporal punishment are much more likely to be “poor, male, of ethnic minority status, or live within specific regions.” This fits with the conclusions of Bowles and Gintis who argue that the educational system is designed so that poor students are trained to be obedient workers who respond to strict discipline, while wealthy students are trained to be independent minded critical thinkers using more experimental and student-centered teaching methods.

I would argue that it is simply not possible to foster the kind of education my students would like to see in Taiwan unless corporal punishment is abolished. But unfortunately it is going to be very difficult to break the vicious cycle.

More information can be found on the site of the Humanistic Education Foundation 財團法人人本教育文教基金會 which conducted the above-mentioned survey.

One reason for the relative lack of Juno posts lately is that we’ve had quite a scare. Juno got really sick a while back and we weren’t sure what the problem was. Initially she just had gunk in her eyes, but then we found out she had a fever as well. She went on antibiotics, but then she also developed weird breathing problems. This led to X-rays, blood tests, and an EKG … the end result of which was that Juno seemed to have heart troubles. Her EKG showed an abnormal delay after every third heart beat. The blood tests also revealed some mild anemia. The breathing problems went away soon after Juno finished her antibiotics, and we started giving her some chicken liver with her breakfast for the anemia. She seemed fully recovered, but it wasn’t till today that I went back to the vet for more tests.

The good news is that the EKG now shows a normal heart beat, but she seems to still have some mind anemia. We have no idea what caused the heart problems. Possible causes that have been suggested include: eating wild plants, pollution in the lake where she went swimming, side-effects of the antibiotics (the vet thinks this is unlikely as they were fairly mild), eating some fertilizer etc. The latest EKG seemingly rules out the most scary possibility which was heart disease, so that is a big relief. Juno is way too young to be having heart problems! We’ll still keep a good eye on her, but the scary part seems to be over.

The other day we saw someone whose golden retriever was swimming in the lake and ran over so that Juno could learn from a friend. At first she was afraid to dive in, but when the other retriever (who is about the same age as Juno) came out and played with her a little, she followed him right back into the water. The next day she was able to go swimming all by herself:

Now, if we can just get her to stop trying to eat the towel when we dry her off …

UPDATE: Turns out that Juno swimming is a spectator sport! We went back today and were playing fetch in the water when I looked back and saw about 7 kids and their mothers sitting on the bank watching us! We should charge money…