Why it is okay to say no, but never okay to punish!

I haven't written a blog post in a very long time because, well, I have a full time job now so have NO TIME TO WRITE ANYMORE! But the issue of not being able to say 'no' if you are a positive trainer of animals (which I consider myself to me) and the lack of understanding of what we are actually doing as we train animals by many who claim to be 'purely positive' (something that is impossible if you plan on having a safe, well rounded animal to live or work with) has driven me to write another slightly ranting blog post :D 

I will put a disclaimer though - animal trainers and animal behaviourists are two different things, and I like to consider myself as a bit of both. I work mainly with dogs and horses, so my information is focused on those two species. Before using any kind of training process you must understand the behaviour of the animal you are working with or else you will just become severely frustrated (i.e. if you say to your dog 'no' when he is barking, and find he keeps barking, it is most likely because he thinks you are reinforcing his behaviour by barking back at him) or injured, (if you can't read when a dog is fearful, no matter how much you click your clicker, he will resort in biting you if you don't stop what it is you are doing that is causing him to freak out). Finally - animal behaviour, and training, is very complex and here I am talking about the more general concepts and instances... and not every animal responds in accordance to scientific princples so just always keep that in mind!!

Anyway... onto the blog post :D

In animal training, as most people know, the concepts of classical and operant conditioning are the key to success. The modern way of training focusses on positive reinforcement and positive punishment, and how as a trainer you should be either one or the other. The problem with this is that we miss out both negative reinforcement and negative punishment, and in the process we lose all boundaries and undesirable behaviour elimination. Or, as is often the case, we actually are using these techniques – we just don’t know we are and so become hypocritical when we tell people they should only use positive reinforcement training methods.

So, first things first, what is positive and negative reinforcement, and positive and negative punishment, and why is it important? If you already know the answer to these questions then please do bear with me while I explain it to those who are unfamiliar with these terms – which is mostly anyone that hasn’t studied animal or human behaviour and learning to a degree level!

In this context, the word positive means ‘added’ and the word ‘negative’ means removed. Reinforcement, as you can probably gather, means ‘keep doing this’ and punishment means ‘stop doing this’. So one promotes a behaviour and keeps it happening, the other attempts to eliminate it. So when you positively reinforce a behaviour you are adding a reward to keep the behaviour in existence, and when you positively punish a behaviour you are adding an aversive (bad) stimulus (thing) to eliminate it. When you negatively reinforce a behaviour you are using an aversive stimulus to promote a new behaviour, and when the desirable behaviour occurs you remove the aversive stimulus and so have reinforced the desirable behaviour. When you use negative punishment you are taking away a positive to eliminate an undesirable behaviour. It sounds complicated, but it really isn’t and we all do this sort of thing every day in how we interact with our animals and each other.

For example, I vocally ask my dog to sit and he does, so I give him a tasty piece of chicken – he has been positively reinforced. I ask my horse to walk on by using the heel of my foot to put pressure on my horse on her side, by her ribcage approximately, this is uncomfortable to her and so is aversive, and makes her move forward - she has been negatively reinforced. My dog jumps up and I turn away from him, removing the attention he desires, and so he stops jumping up – he has been negatively punished. My horse refuses to walk through a puddle so I hit her with my whip, she then walks forward – she has been positively punished. I must say here that I never use positive punishment with my horse, and so this is purely hypothetical ;)

Classical conditioning is the process of association that creates the stepping stones for trainers when using positive/negative reinforcement and punishment. Classical conditioning is when an animal, or person, creates a link between one stimulus and another, which can then create instantaneous physiological or emotional responses. I.e. when you hear the kettle boil you might start feeling saliva build up in your mouth and possibly even feel ‘happy’ or a positive emotion because you have associated that sound with a cup of your favourite hot drink.

So in the context of animal training this is commonly seen when people use a clicker as a precursor to a treat, and therefore creates an association with the click noise and the reward of a treat – again both a physiological and emotional response is elicited by a treat. A whip can be used in horse training in the opposite way, where you create an association with the sight of the whip and the pain, and also fear, of its contact with the horse’s skin. And these classically conditioned associations form the building blocks of operant conditioning training because we can use the positive association with the clicker to instantaneously positively reinforce a behaviour, or the negative association with a whip to instantaneously positively punish a behaviour.

Hopefully I have explained that so we can now all understand the basic science behind it, which I do think is very important if we are to successfully train our animals.

And back to my original statement: Why it is okay to say no, but never okay to punish.

The clicker in clicker training is a ‘marker’ for the desirable behaviour, it tells the animal that the thing they have just done is correct and in the near future they will receive a reward for doing the correct behaviour. In my mind, the use of the word ‘no’ is also a marker, but a marker for an undesirable behaviour and that in the future you will lose a reward for doing the incorrect behaviour. So where a clicker perfectly utilised positive reinforcement, saying the word ‘no’ utilised the concept of negative punishment.

If my dog jumps up and I turn away from him, I am punishing his jumping up behaviour by taking away the positive that is my attention. This I have already said. If I say no, or ‘ah-ah’, as I turn away, or just before, then I am using the same principle of the clicker in positive reinforcement by marking the undesirable behaviour. The whole point of the clicker is to improve timing and reduce the amount of treats, because the dog has a classically conditioned response to the clicker it will have the same emotional and physiological response to the sound of the click as it would to eating a treat, therefore you don’t actually need the treat every time. Is it not also logical to assume then that by using the word no, or maybe even a whistle (or another type of clicker with a different but non-human sound to the rewarding click), we can improve timing and reduce the amount of punishment we need to give to the animals we are training? Furthermore, by marking behaviours as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ (‘desirable’ or ‘undesirable’), we can use those markers in new situations to ease the training process in novel contexts.

I.e. my dog knows that a click from my clicker means he has done something good, or desirable, because it has been used to train him sit, stay and lie down. If he barks at the door but my desired behaviour is for him to be quiet, and this is something I have never trained, then when he stops barking and I click he knows instantly that something he has just done is correct. It may take him a couple of times to know it is his silence that was the correct behaviour but he will know that I am marking something he has done as correct, and he will then try to do it correctly again so as to gain his reward.

If my dog pulls on his lead and I say ‘no’ and stop walking, then he knows that something he has done was undesirable and has so removed the reward of moving forwards. Again, after a few tries, it should become clear to him that it is the moment when he strains on the lead that is resulting in the ‘no’ marker and thus the loss of reward. And of course if you use a clicker as well to mark the walking on the lead which is good, then you are just going to increase the learning process massively!

By using markers we can precisely and accurately teach our animals, dogs, cats, horses and everything else that is reward driven, which behaviours are desirable and which are not – all the while without using fearful or painful tactics that we see in positive punishment.

Positive punishment in learning can be extremely detrimental to an animal’s wellbeing because it utilises fear and pain to eliminate behaviours, and timing is absolutely crucial. The problem is humans aren’t always able to be precise in timing and when you get this wrong with punishment you can quite quickly punish the wrong thing, in turn making your situation a whole lot worse: i.e. your dog bites you, and as he lets go you smack him on the nose, punishing the moment of him releasing you rather than the thought process he had that made him bite you. Secondly, and possibly more importantly, undesirable behaviours to us humans are often behaviours that an animal performs out of fear or discomfort. So the reason that dog bit you just now wasn’t because he was biting you for the sake of it, but it was most likely because you had done something that had caused him to feel intense fear – or enough fear that it warranted a bite, the most severe of dog warnings, and so by punishing him you will just spiral that situation out of control by injecting more fear into the mix. Not only will you lose your dog’s trust in you, but you may create an animal that is experiencing learned helplessness which is possibly the most damning psychological state any animal can be in.

So to finish, (because I really hadn’t planned on waffling on for so long), using the word ‘no’ is okay (in my opinion it is actually very good!) – it can make training your animals more precise and therefore better for them (because confusion can be the most stressful thing for an animal in training). This also means that negative punishment is not a bad concept either because it allows you to eliminate behaviours in a non-harmful and unaggressive way, creating boundaries and discipline – something that is massively important when working with animals, especially those that do pose a risk to us, (dogs and horses primarily in this pet context). But using positive punishment is the worst thing you can do in an all manner of ways! Yes, positive punishment will eliminate behaviours in certain circumstances, as seen when watching programmes such as the ‘Dog Whisperer’, but these animals will be experiencing high stress, fear and often pain – which creates a very unbalanced animal. And an unbalanced animal is one that does not learn cohesively and will either become listless and unresponsive (will be showing signs of learned helplessness), or it will resort to more desperate measures to fight against whatever it is that is causing them to be fearful or stressed in the first placed – which might be as simple as your presence or your touch.