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Here are my top-ten favorite reads from 2011 (in alphabetical order).
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pink
er. This sweeping survey by psychology rock star Pinker makes a superb case for a downward trend in human violence over the long, medium and short hauls. It’s a must-read optimism-jolt for anybody on the frontlines of the battle to stop aversives in dog training. Spoiler alert: the good guys are going to win. Yay!
Death by Black Hole by Neil de Grasse Tyson. I listened to the audiobook and as good as it was, I kept wishing Tyson had done the narration himself because he has a warm, booming voice and terrific enunciation. But this is being picky.
I may go back and read the paper version after I get through his latest, Space Chronicles, which is slated for release later this month. If you’re a fan of his, be sure to check out episodes of StarTalk Radio.
The Making of the Fittest by Sean B. Carroll. An evo-devo primer by the clearest author I’ve found on this difficult subject. Awe-inspiring and well worth the effort to understand.
(By conicidence this past year I read an explodohead book about the nature of time by the as-fantastically-smart Sean M. Carroll, From Eternity to Here. It was also tough sledding, which leads me to believe these guys are in fact related.)
Mayhem in Mayberry by Brian Lee Knopp. An absolutely honest and gritty memoir based on the author’s life as a private investigator in – get ready – Appalachia. If you really, really want to know what it’s like being a PI, read this. People are surely at their worst when they seek PI’s.
The author is rather a Renaissance Man – teaches writing as well as being a talented dog trainer!
Mistress of the Monarchy by Alison Weir. Weir’s portraits of the English monarchy are unparalleled in their meticulousness and readability. This one is a veritable page-turner on the life of Katherine Swynford, the third wife of John of Gaunt. Their great-great grandson was Henry Tudor (Henry VII, usurper and father of Henry VIII) whose claim to the throne was derived from his descent in the junior Lancastrian line (Beauforts) tracing back to Gaunt and Swynford.
Moneyball by Michael Lewis. Best book ever. I re-read it in 2011 to celebrate the release of the movie. Brad Pitt = More Readers. Yay! (The movie, BTW, is only verrrrrry loosely based on the book. They did a decent job with what had to feel like an unglamorous thesis to translate into Hollywoodease: empricism and advanced statistical analysis as superior to tradition and intuition for player evaluation.)
If you’d like a thoughtful baseball book published last year, try The Extra 2% by Jonah Keri. It was a nice read although nobody – but nobody – writes like Michael Lewis. I hope to read everything else he’s ever written in the next year or so even though it’s all on scarrrry, foreign topics like business and finance.
Old English and its Closest Relatives by Orrin W. Robinson. If you like words and are curious about how language in general (and English in particular) evolves over time, this is a fantastic read.
It actually might give you chills.
Perspectives on Animal Behavior by Judith Goodenough, Betty McGuire and Elizabeth Jakob. I’ve used Comparative Animal Behavior by Maier and Animal Behavior by Mark Ridley for years but periodically check out other texts and was super-impressed with this one.
A Planet of Viruses by Carl Zimmer. Carl Zimmer can do no wrong as far as I’m concerned and he’s nowhere better than when he’s on the subject of Very Dangerous Small Organisms or, in this case, Semi-Organisms.
(Availability note: I read the hardcover, which now seems hard to come by – the paperback will be released in May.)
Thinking, Fast and Slow by my new hero, Daniel Kahneman. The book is a summary of the fascinating research on cognitive biases, heuristics (rules of thumb), and decision-making. This is incredible stuff: important and impeccably written and organized. A colleague of mine has said it should be required reading in high schools and I couldn’t agree more. Everybody should read this book to have a better understanding of their own brains. Gets my vote for best book since Moneyball.
Finding a Trainer, Finding Good Information
Although APDT does not yet have provisions in place to sanction or remove trainers who violate best-practices rules (part of the problem is that there is not currently a universal standard of care in the field of applied dog behavior), there is a straightforward way to increase one’s odds of hiring an educated, competent, humane dog trainer. Go to the APDT site to peform a Trainer Search and click the box that restricts search results to certified trainers. This will yield only trainers in a designated geographic area that have been vetted by a legitimate independent (independent of any school and independent of APDT) certifying body.
It’s not a perfect system and it will make errors both ways: there will be excellent trainers on their way to certification who won’t be listed, and there are will be trainers listed who squeaked through the certification process or got themselves certified and proceeded to hang dogs, but it’s way ahead of trying to select a trainer based on their self-proclamations vis a vis ethics and ability.
And here are two well-written articles by Lisa Mullinax, one a measured deconstruction of The Dog Whisperer’s philosophy, and the other a series of replies to frequently asked questions by his fans.
Posted in Resources
2 Comments
Read The Whole Thing
For anyone interested, The Koehler Method of Dog Training is available (used but reasonably priced) at Amazon as well as some other online retailers. Anybody up for a book of the month discussion on it? ;)
Posted in What's So Abusive About This?
6 Comments
The Weasel Files Part Two
The International Association of Canine Professionals (IACP) is a body that seems to have been formed by trainers unhappy with the trend toward dog-friendly techniques. They also seem a little rusty on the relevant science. Their 2011 conference theme was “Pack Leadership for Dogs and Their Humans,” and the IACP website has education articles with statements like this:
“For me, the reason I use a dog pack to train is that it rebuilds a dog’s brain from the inside out. What I see over and over anymore (sic) are dogs who are too unstable to even teach a sit.”
IACP has a Code of Conduct, Item 8 of which reads as follows:
“8. IACP members may not seek to deprive any canine professional of his or her ability to conduct his or her business by seeking to restrict or ban accepted and established tools of the trade, or by seeking to restrict or ban accepted and established techniques and practices within the industry through calls for boycotts, restrictions, bans, or other actions designed to interfere with free marketplace participation of a canine professional in his or her business. Accepted and established tools of the trade include, but are not limited to, leashes, harnesses, training collars, slip collars, prong collars, head halters, remote electronic collars, and electronic pet containment systems. Accepted and established techniques and practices include, but are not limited to, those techniques and practices described in published books, videos, and professional seminars. A personal preference shall be allowed in the individual member’s choice of methods, equipment and techniques within their own practice.”
Wait a second. Are they saying that if anybody has ever written it down or described it at a “professional” seminar, it’s an “accepted and established technique?” This policy would allow the grandfathering in of practices such as those of the late William Koehler. In The Koehler Method of Dog Training (Howell Books, 1962, 1996) Koehler describes how to hang a dog until unconscious (p. 37):
“When finally it is obvious that he is physically incapable of expressing his resentment and is lowered to the ground, he will probably stagger loop-legged for a few steps, vomit once or twice, and roll over on his side. The sight of a dog lying, thick-tongued, on his side is not pleasant, but do not let it alarm you. I have dealt with hundreds of these.”
Koehler is – I’m not kidding – an IACP Hall of Famer. Here is an excerpt from his IACP Hall of Fame page:
“Quiet, unassuming, soft spoken and gentle of hand, Bill gave us a way to train dogs while at the same time honoring their very dog-ness. The Koehler Method of Dog Training is just as valid and useful in the Twenty-first century as it was in the Twentieth century and we suspect it will continue to have just as much meaning for as long as we have dogs to train.”
Koehler’s remedy for digging (p. 178-179) is as follows:
“(F)ill the hole to its brim with water. . . . bring the dog to the hole and shove his nose into the water; hold him there until he is sure he’s drowning. . . . fill the hole with water and repeat the experience the next day, whether the dog digs any more or not.”
IACP has a listing of Trainer Schools, which are either “members or sponsors of the IACP.” Recommended schools sponsor the certifying body? This from an organization ostensibly “established to develop and promote the highest standards of professional and business practice among canine professionals.”
On this list of schools is one that initially appears to be an outlier, a school whose link reads “ForceFree Method™.” Seeing as force enthusiasts have infiltrated bodies like APDT, I thought this might represent an attempt by force-free trainers to infiltrate IACP, however it turns out ForceFree Method™, “combines low level remote collar work with excellent body language to engage the dog’s natural Pack Drive. Fast and happy training for both dog and handler.”
If you go to their site, you get this:
“Why forceless? Most people just don’t feel good yelling at their dogs or yanking on a choke collar. Moreover, doing so just turns the training process into a contest of willpower. Anyone who has ever lived with a dog knows they have an endless supply of willpower. So simply forcing your dog to behave leaves them forever looking for an opportunity to outwit you.
We also do not ‘cookie or clicker train.’ These methods do work well for competition dogs who must perform routines under controlled conditions. We find them useless when trying to stop unwanted behaviors in the real world.”
Okay, so no forcing dogs to “behave.” No food and no use of timing markers. So what does he do? Here is what he recommends for food guarding:
“I like to begin by calling the dog away from the food bowl. A 10 or 15 foot line might be in order to help teach this behavior. I will call the dog’s name and apply some gentle leash pressure pulling the dog towards me. As soon as he starts to come my way (by his own choice) I let the leash go slack and continue to encourage the dog. When he gets to me I will have an incredibly tasty treat waiting for him. So he learns that giving something up for me often means he gets something better. In other words, he isn’t giving anything up, he’s simply trading up!”
Wait. This would be “cookie training” but for the bit where we “might” have to use a long line to “apply some gentle leash pressure.”
Notwithstanding this description, one would think he’d boxed himself in motivation rhetoric-wise were it not for our favorite motivation deus ex machina, which headlines the Become a Trainer page:
“It’s all about Pack Drive™”
“Pack Drive” is trademarked?
Here we go.
“The ForceFree Method™ is an intuitive system of training that makes sense to both people and dogs. Effective and gentle, the training method works WITH the dogs (sic) instincts rather than against them. We achieve off leash reliability, even with distractions, amazingly fast. Most dogs perceive the training as simple “pack cooperation” and play. Therefore, they quickly shed rebellious behavior, and give you more focus than you imagined possible. Doesn’t that sound like more fun than correction after correction?”
Are we comparing the funnicity of electric shock versus “correction after correction” from the perspective of the people or the dogs? Speaking of the joy and wonder of inter-species relationships, here is an IACP recall treatise. I’m trying to imagine why I would have such a grim relationship with my dog. And I’m at a loss. We need mental health professionals deconstructing this stuff.
The late author Vicki Hearne is also in the IACP Hall of Fame. She herein babbles on “rote learning”:
“It works tolerably well on some handlers, because people have vast unconscious minds and can store complex preprogrammed behaviors. Dogs, on the other hand, have almost no unconscious minds, so they can learn only by thinking.”
Please re-read the preceding, bearing in mind that a person who took money for training animals wrote it.
“A correction blocks one path as it opens another for desire to work; punishment blocks desire and opens nothing.”
Punishment is any consequence that reduces the frequency of the behavior it follows. Its impact on “desire” is impossible to analyze. The sentence is made-up rubbish. A “trainer” – including one who is dead – who can’t define an undergrad Psych 101 term like punishment is (was) a quack.
“Correction” is weasel-speak for the term Hearne was unable to correctly use in a sentence, i.e. punishment. In this case, she was talking about the violent kind of punishment, i.e. positive punishment. We could stretch and say it’s a fair metaphor to say punishment blocks one path (i.e. reduces the frequency of a behavior, thereby “blocking” a strategy the dog is attempting), but to say it “opens another for desire to work” is unparsable nonsense. But force trainers have to use unparsable nonsense because they have this phobia of the word punishment. Which is pretty ironic.
It’s concerning that the IACP brain trust, rather than seeking to distance themselves from the Bill Koehlers and Vicki Hearnes, enshrines them in its Hall of Fame. But this is a fringe organization, and humans are nothing if not fringe organization generators. Much more concerning is the fact that legitimate organizations such as APDT state outright that members may train any way they please, which means trainers may engage in even the most egregious aversive practices or flagrant unprofessional conduct. It is, in practice, no different from IACP when it comes to the conduct of its members.
The strategy of dog-friendly-in-theory trainer organizations seems to be what a former student of mine calls “osmosis.” If you expose sadists and quacks to technically sound, humane ways of training, they’ll cross over on their own. It’s just a question of education. If, on the other hand, you draw a line in the sand and say “any member who hangs dogs to unconsciousness is out, period,” they’ll get all alienated and it’ll shut down dialogue.
Can we entertain having a statute of limitations on this strategy? There is a nation of dogs waiting to hear if non-contingent water-boarding will be unequivocally off the table any time soon.
Lunch Free at Stockdog Trials?
There is no free lunch in animal training. Healthy animals won’t do something for nothing. Some people are very disappointed by this, or engage in unhelpful denial contortions, most often when the species happens to be dogs.
So what about behaviors that go and go like perpetual motion machines? Understanding what’s actually going on in such scenarios requires us to examine the too-sharp distinction between behaviors and reinforcers, which, while useful in a functional analysis, misses the Premackian point: what we call reinforcers are in fact just preferred behaviors.
Sitting and staying still and coming when called are all behaviors, but so are eating and drinking and playing. Preferred behaviors have the sensational ability to boost less preferred behaviors provided the contingency is made apparent to the animal: “You must do X units of less preferred behavior in order to have the opportunity to do Y units of preferred behavior.” As b-mod shorthand, we call the most preferred behaviors “reinforcers” (for example, we say “food” rather than “eating”) and we call making the contingency clear “training.” A student of mine a long time ago said, “so what you’re saying is it’s all Premack.” Yes. It’s all Premack.
Three behaviors have immutable high preference among living animals: eating, drinking and sex. (You could also say, as many trainers do, that they are “self-reinforcing” behaviors.) They all have refractory periods, i.e. they wax and wane depending on how recently the animal was able to do them, but they are uniformly motivating. Animals not motivated by food or water die within days (water) or weeks (food). The genes associated with animals unmotivated by sex tend to not get themselves passed on very well.
Other strong preferences vary individual by individual (and in dogs, breed by breed). For instance, for some dogs, fetch is a preferred behavior. They do it “for free.” 
Border collies herd sheep “for free.” Terriers play tug “for free.” And so on. I read books about the English monarchy and watch Yankees games “for free” too. And I would pay to do these behaviors with non-preferred behavior. I know many people who would need payment in the form of one of their own preferred behaviors in order for them to watch a unit of baseball. This doesn’t make them – or me – morally inferior or superior, or harder to train. However it would be idiotic to try motivating any of us with a non-preferred behavior. Or to wait for non-preferred behavior freebies.
Voodoo trainers mangle all this. They feel entitled to a free – or deeply discounted – lunch in the form of massive amounts of non-preferred behavior, and mistake dogs doing certain preferred behaviors “for free” as evidence the dog is motivated by praise doled out when the dog does the self-reinforcing behavior.
You won’t come across this error for behaviors like eating and drinking (“He eats because I’m pack leader” or “He drinks water because it pleases me”) but you will see it for behavior that happens to have utilitarian value, such as border collies herding sheep. Because it’s something we find helpful or useful, we make the logical leap that the dog is doing it so that he can be helpful or useful to us, rather than for his own reasons, usually to do with selective breeding. Just as I have been (inadvertently) selectively bred to find watching the New York Yankees reinforcing, border collies have been (deliberately) selectively bred to strongly prefer eye-stalking moving objects. The refinement of herding in border collies – which flanking maneuver to do when, driving stock away from the handler instead of gathering, when to put the brakes on etc. - is achived via a combination of letting the dog continue to eye-stalk if he complies with these cues, and punishment, usually in the form of loud, gruff voices, which for soft dogs like border collies, are a sufficiently aversive P+ to do the trick.
Preferred behaviors are our most precious dog training resource. They are our leverage. They motivate dogs to do the things we would like them to do as well as motivate the replacement behaviors for the myriad things we would like them not to do. As if that weren’t enough, they allow us potent non-violent punishment options in the form of cessation of opportunity to continue them.
Drivey dogs are the cheapest dates as they can be motivated with any combination of fetch, tug and food. But non-drivey dogs are also a cinch as, without exception, they will be strongly motivated by food. One would think there would be universal jubilation that we’ve got this leverage bonanza, and yet so many limp on and on and on in their attempt to duck the lunch check.
Cooked Chicken Also Now Dangerous?
This is from an article on rehabbing dogs with multiple problems, in which the author advises owners to:
“• Develop a positive ‘cult of personality’ with your dog. If she thinks you are an influential rock star, she’ll want to please you. Be confident—even haughty. Stoking her desire to please is the key to good behaviour.
• Distrust the power of treats. Though good for initiating behaviours, they can soon outstrip you as the prime motivating force, and create a pushy cookie monster. Praise, and the cult of personality should become the bulwarks of your authority.”
I don’t know the author from Adam so maybe he really believes that being “haughty” with one’s dog will help stop house-soiling, food-bowl guarding, interest in squirrels and cats, and improve sits, downs, recalls and stays. However my guess is he knows this is ridiculous, probably uses some sort of collar and leash system and has some inkling that without these owners would fall pretty short of rock star influence no matter how “confident” they acted. But to say to people, “yeah, you could motivate effectively with food, but I feel more comfortable using pain and fear” doesn’t have the same evangelical charm.
Or how about this one:
“Don’t let inferior dog training techniques destroy your relationship with your dog.
Why risk it? You could be putting your dog in emotional or physical harm. We’ve seen both the cookie-bribery trainers and the dog trainers who use the super-harsh methods and we don’t agree with either. Using either approach can undermine your relationship with your dog and/or cause physical harm.”
I can connect the dots between super-harsh methods and emotional and physical harm and relationship destruction, but I’m stumped about how cookie-bribery does this. Maybe it’s more tortured logic wherein if the dog finds out how off-the-planet fantastic chicken is, the owner will feel dissed because the dog rarely reacts that way to him. If this is the case, then “the relationship” is weasel-speak for “my narcissism.” It also means, incidentally, that your significant other should get no movies, laughter with friends, football, cake, good books, fun time on fast vehicles or whatever their passions are so that you stand a better chance of ascending to rock star status amid the now more barren fun-o-sphere.
Or this one:
“The food-bribery dog training method is short-term at best and the dog is not taught to respect its human.”
“Respect,” by the way, is code for “fear.” He continues:
“The dog begins biting people as a direct result of owners trying to train their dogs with food, too often resulting in the dog having to be destroyed. Giving an aggressive or dominant dog food to train is dangerous positive reinforcement and can make many dogs even more aggressive and dominant.”
Good heavens, biting people as a direct result of using food to train? Dangerous positive reinforcement? All peer-reviewed research on this actually finds the diametric opposite but I’m betting the positive-reinforcement-is-dangerous crowd doesn’t scour academic journals in an attempt to refine their craft.
This vilifying of food is interesting stuff. If I wanted to spike crime rates in humans, I’d probably not start by offering baked goods to juvie hall kids for desired behaviors. And picture a food-o-phobe telling a zoo trainer that elephants and gibbons should be motivated to comply with veterinary procedures by the keeper cultivating a rock star persona. “Uh, let’s see you try it first…”
Putting aside the *actual* motivators these people use – choke collars, prong collars, electric shock, pinning dogs to the ground and other things designed to intimidate animals into compliance – we could build a continuum of reinforcer chastity:
An item’s proposed location on the continuum is based on: 1) the righteousness (going in) of dogs who find that item motivating, and 2) whether using that item actually corrupts the dog’s goodness. Praise is the uber winner on both counts. Dogs who work for praise are the most noble, worthy and admirable, and the least conniving.
And because of clause #2, the more praise is used on a dog, the purer the dog gets. If it’s not effective, we invoke clause #1: base, attitudinal dog (in need of flagellation – ta-da!).
Door-opening, attention, giving the dog a chew toy and the opportunity to sniff on a walk – so-called “life rewards” – are less virtuous than praise but not as erosive of moral fiber as, say, food. (Eating is apparently divorced from the dog’s “life.”)
Tug is middle-ish but with a bullet. Whereas twenty years ago we all parroted how playing tug was the gateway to anarchy, now most trainers extoll its virtues as a convenient, recyclable motivator and energy-burner for drivey dogs, and one that has the fabulous asset of not being food.
Which brings us to food and the mercenary, profligate dogs who work for it. Notice nobody ever talks derisively about dogs “begging for walks” or “becoming dependent on having the leash removed at the dog park” or the atrocity of “praise bribery.”
The crushing irony is, of course, that for all living dogs, food is insanely powerful, insanely convenient (ever try bringing door-opening along on walks?) and carries the spectacular side effect of the dog liking the training a bit more every time it’s dispensed, liking the trainer and the trainer’s hands a bit more, and liking anything else that is a reasonable predictor of it. This Pavlovian conditioning side effect is squandered on food bowls and 5:00 p.m. I wonder if trainers who hate food feel a pang of jealousy when they are forced – by law – to put some of it down on a regular enough basis to stave off their dogs’ starvation. Or perhaps free food is exempt. I’m not clear on this.
I’ve long thought it is food’s very potency that freaks some people out. It makes dogs look like crackheads, which makes the coercion crowd feel dissed or invisible. A client could get perilously close to an excellent outcome with desirable side-effects using food, but (drum roll) “he wouldn’t be doing it for you, he’d be doing it because of the food.”
Plenty of well-meaning owners, who work hard for a living, are made to pay money for this drivel. And non-aversive trainers actually sometimes kowtow to it by getting all apologetic, rushing to assure owners that this execrable thing, this FOOD, can be phased out once behavior is learned (which would be extinction, which would be bad) or replaced by wholesome, upright motivators such as door-opening, attention, walks and so on.
Of course it’s good practice to employ intermittent schedules to increase resilience to extinction, and of course it’s crafty to diversify the motivator base but some light needs to be shed on this tacit consensus that The Less Food the Better. Do we think owners will fall to pieces if we said:
Yeah, food is an AWESOME motivator with transcendent side effects so let’s figure out how to get you in the habit of having high value food available when you need it so we can train up strong behavior in a wide variety of contexts. He’ll never do it because you’re a rock star, and I’m actually pretty incensed that good people like you have been sold the lie that dogs will do it just for you or just for praise. Trainers who would have you believe this are as dependent on their choking and shocking and pinning and scary stuff as we will be on our food, but that’s how it is with living things. No free lunch.
A student of mine pointed out that it’s actually kind of condescending to assume owners can’t handle this truth. They’re competent adults and won’t tumble into existential obliteration if you level with them about the economics of behavior.
It also got me thinking of an Emperor’s New Clothes challenge where trainers who pour scorn on food are invited to see if they can train up a single behavior on a single green dog, using their haughtiness, desire to please stoking and personality cults but without any choking or pinning or shocking or bullying or yanking on leashes. We all know the result they’d get. Because guess what: dogs aren’t doing it for them either.
Posted in Destruction of Relationships by Food
Tagged Free Lunch, Quacks, R-e-s-p-e-c-t = F-e-a-r
22 Comments
The Weasel Files Part One
I did this piece a while back (it may still be floating around on an unauthorized website) but I’d like to post it here, re-edited, because the topic, that of re-packaging basic behavioral science – sometimes mangled basic behavioral science – as New & Improved training methods, is as alive as ever.
The subtitle of The Culture Clash has the word “revolutionary” in it. The book actually makes a case for training using operant and classical conditioning, technologies that have been around for over sixty years. Marketing gurus have known for a long time that “new and improved” sells stuff. If I were to be generous I’d say that at the time of that book’s original publication, OC and CC were given short shrift in terms of their importance in applied dog behavior (versus, say, preceding dogs through doorways), which made them “revolutionary.” If I weren’t being generous, I’d have to admit that there’s been nothing fundamentally new in animal training and behavior change technology since the early decades of the previous century. This isn’t because the field is stagnant. It’s because operant and classical conditioning are potent technologies with vast explanatory power. They’re under-exploited and poorly understood because they’re not easy to get full mastery of and not easy to sell to clients who watch TV trainers talk about energy. And they’re not new.
New & Improved sells books and conference tickets. But because there isn’t actually anything real that’s new in training and behavior modification, people are tempted to make stuff up. Dog training is a particularly fertile discipline for this, compared to, say, geology. Equal time isn’t given to the latest ramblings of the Flat Earth Society at geology conferences or in journals, in the name of free speech or kindness. But in dog training, anybody can say pretty much anything. Then, if it’s competently critiqued, the quackery purveyor can cry foul in one of three ways:
- Appeal to free speech, open-mindedness or “the more ideas the merrier” – the earth can be flat, round, oval, French fry shaped or tacoid: we need to respect all points of view and teach them at professional conferences. For instance, Rapture-readiness advocates should get equal time at cosmology conferences. Right?
- Appeal to experience or credentials: the earth is flat because, hey, look around you. Or I went to Yale so no matter what garbage comes out of my mouth, you should believe it.
- Appeal to loving kindness, which goes something like this:
New Method Promulgator: This seminar/book/other revenue-generating item is about healing your dog’s brain tissue and limbic system so he is no longer aggressive to strangers. I call it HAT – Histological Alteration Training. It is an exciting, new way to…
Trainer Versed in Learning Science: Wait. I read your stuff and watched the demonstration video and this is basic negative reinforcement with some obfuscating and irrelevant additions. The dogs are stressed, and there are existing techniques that are better-vetted, lower risk and more humane. But aside from that, you really ought to use the existing lexicon of applied behavior analysis. Is it that you don’t know the basics of applied learning science and have just attempted a wheel-reinvention, or that you do know the basics but think you can dupe well-meaning dog trainers? I’m frankly not sure which one would be worse.
New Method Promulgator: Oh wow, you know I worked very hard on this exciting new method and I feel hurt by your unkind attack. You know, what we need is more benign gentle loving kindness in this field. You just don’t get it.
Incorrect. Plenty of us get it just fine.
Cognitive neuroscientist Steven Pinker makes a fabulous point about this. The greatest strength of science, he says, is that it is a societal realm where some of the usual rules governing interaction don’t get invoked. Controls must be applied, evidence must be publicly check-able and findings must be replicable. If not, you’re a quack. Period. In our interactions outside of science, we can employ tools like status or appeals to compassion to deflect criticism. Or free speech. Free speech is critical to a free society. And you can say anything in science too, by the way. It’s just that if you say something that’s palpable nonsense and don’t back it up with evidence, you’ll be laughed out of the room. Which isn’t very nice but it gets us computers and antibiotics.
I take particular exception to the Po-Mo notion that all truths are equally valid. If advocates of this philosophy really believe this, they need to put their money where their mouths are. But they don’t, do they. They want real surgeons trained in real scientific medicine when their appendix ruptures. They don’t leap off buildings based on their conviction that gravity is but one narrative. They communicate with each other about how nothing is real using real cell phones and real computers designed by real scientists. They don’t get on airplanes their friends conjure up in philosophical tangents in restaurants. They want real airplanes designed by real aeronautics engineers. Richard Dawkins once said, “Show me a cultural relativist at 30 000 feet and I’ll show you a hypocrite.” When the chips are down, the all-ways-of-knowing-truth-are-equally-valid crowd vote with their feet.
But in realms where there isn’t the instantaneous death of hundreds of people at high velocity per unit failure, and hence regulation of who gets to build airplanes, and where nobody has called you much on your quackery, and where there’s a career to be had broadcasting your half-baked theories to the credulous, you just might get away with it. At least for a while.
“I Try Not to Think with my Gut”
The above comes from this great Carl Sagan quote: “I’m often asked the question, ‘Do you think there is extraterrestrial intelligence?’ I give the standard arguments — there are a lot of places out there, and use the word *billions*, and so on. And then I say it would be astonishing to me if there weren’t extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it. And then I’m asked, ‘Yeah, but what do you really think?’ I say, ‘I just told you what I really think.’ ‘Yeah, but what’s your gut feeling?’ But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.”
The title of the blog, plantigrade, comes from the idea that the much-vaunted human intuition is flawed – flat-footed – when it comes to discerning reality. Science, while not perfect, is self-correcting over time and so provides the best way yet found to check whether our gut instincts are on the money or not. Dog trainers in particular could benefit enormously from science and critical thinking because not only is our subject matter – behavior and behavior modification – squarely within the domain of science but our field is unlicensed and really full of quacks. Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for his research on human intuition, wasn’t talking about the field of dog training, but he could have been when he said, “What you find is a great deal of confidence in the presence of very poor accuracy.”
