Poisoned Cues, Fallout and Shutting Down

Or, Why Stephani Really Really Dislikes Aversives!

When a trainer combines positive punishment (P+) or negative reinforcement (R-) with Positive Reinforcement (R+, mostly food), it can really screw up a dog. Not just the dog, but the relationship between the dog, its owner and the environment around it.

Terms like: poisoned cue, fallout, and shutting down all refer to cases where both food and punishment have been used.

For the sake of this post, I am going to use "food" for positive reinforcement and "punishment" for positive punishment. Please note that there are other instances that also cause fallout.

So, a typical scenario in positive reinforcement based training might be: dog sits, gets a click and then a cookie. Happiness all around! If the dog does not sit, then we wait a few seconds and do something else (like a down or loose leash walk) and then re-cue. If the dog sits, click then treat. If the dog doesn’t sit, then no cookie. As easy as that.

In a scenario that combines food with punishment it looks like this: owner cues the sit, dog sits, gets clicked and treated. Owner walks a few steps and asks for a sit. Dog doesn’t sit, so owner leash pops the dog (or smacks the dog’s butt or pushes the dog into a sit), the dog sits and then is clicked and treated. The cue no longer means something good. It becomes poisoned. The dog has no way of knowing if the cue will mean something good or something bad, so it avoids the bad and sits.

You can poison a cue quite easily with a soft (sensitive) dog if you are training while frustrated. You can also poison a cue by introducing a shock collar into the mix and shocking the dog.

Retraining a dog that was trained with punishment or a combination of punishment and food is a long, long road to recovery.

If a trainer tells you that the only way to “proof” your dog for certain behaviors is to start using punishment, then I say bullshit (proofing is another traditional trainer term, but I use it in class and mean the same thing, but without punishment). Proofing means testing the dog in a number of scenarios to see if they really understand the cue. You don’t need to correct (punish) the dog if they screw up - you need to back up your expectations and train more. In other words, you have not trained enough!

 
Note: Part of this post was originally written in another forum.