This year, millions of dogs will die because of the absence of proper care. Their numbers exceed all the animals treated in
all the veterinary hospitals across the country. Their common failing is behavioral, not medical or nutritional. This behavioral
train-wreck is composed of several innocuous but highly lethal behaviors: jumping on people, darting out the front door, destroying
property, tugging on leash and biting. Each of these behaviors can be stopped through the use of operant conditioning – but
not if your only tool is positive reinforcement. Positive reinforcement cannot create inhibitions that will prevent an animal
from offering normally occurring behaviors. Only positive punishment, the presentation of a stimulus that causes a behavior
to weaken or cease, is capable of stopping a behavior, cold. If you wish to slow down or stop the slaughter, you must be able
to skillfully punish a behavior. That presents a bigger problem. Virtually every academic institution and many professional
psychological associations tacitly endorse and enforce a bias against the study or practice of positive punishment. This bias
is integral to the version of operant conditioning created by B.F. Skinner and now universally used as the template for operant
control. This quote, from the Association for Behavior Analysis International, a scientific organization founded by Skinner,
acknowledges this bias.
"Throughout his career, Skinner opposed the use of all forms of punishment; he advocated positive ways of changing behavior."
The obvious question is why a scientist would "prefer" one behavioral effect over another, regardless of context? Physicists
don't prefer momentum over inertia, biologists don't prefer plankton over fungi and veterinarians do not prefer medicine to
surgery. Without a context, preferences are meaningless. By definition, punishment weakens or stops behavior and reinforcement
increases or strengthens behavior. These are Skinner's own terms for these roughly symmetrical behavioral effects. If your
goal is to stop a behavior, why would you use positive (reinforcement) methods? If your goal is to increase a behavior, why
would you use punishment? This pro-positive bias is plainly illogical but worse, completely unscientific. It is also the most
widely held belief about behavior modification.
To see this reflected in modern veterinary circles, this is an excerpt from the position statement of the American Veterinary
Society of Animal Behavior (AVSAB)
"AVSAB's position is that punishment should not be used as a first-line or early use treatment for behavior problems. This
is due to the potential adverse effects which include bat are not limited to: inhibition of learning, increased fear-related
and aggressive behaviors and injury to animals and people interacting with animals."
This statement implies that behaviors that need to be stopped should not be exposed to the behavioral effect most likely to
stop them. The harmful side-effect of jumping on children, destroying property and biting people is almost always death. To
shun a tool that may prevent a premature death because it might impede learning is literally ludicrous. You cannot teach
a dead dog. Additionally, this statement implies that punishment, an effect that decreases a behavior, somehow increases aggression.
The vast evidence is to the contrary. If Cindy Mears, a teenage kennel worker, knees a 90 pound Chesapeake in the chest,
what does the scientific literature say about her application of punishment triggering "rebound aggression"? The science should
confirm what actually happened. As the dog hit the ground, he quickly scrambled to his feet, darted toward Cindy and sat,
wagging his tail. He was "sucking up and getting straight." I have seen that scenario play out thousands of times. Is the
knee to the chest an application of punishment? Yes. Does it result in aggression? No. Dogs that do respond to this form of
punishment with aggression are anomalies. If the scientific literature somehow demonstrates that Cindy Mears was bitten by
the Chesapeake the scientific literature is either incomplete or incorrect. If a high-school student can apply punishment
to stop an unacceptable behavior and not trigger aggression, why are learned scientists unable to do the same? Why is Cindy's
experience not part of the body of knowledge used to formulate acceptable training protocols? (As a side note, the Chesapeake
was adopted the next morning. The family selected him because of all the dogs in the kennel, he was the only one that didn't
try to jump up on them.)
Another common belief stemming from the Skinnierian ideology is that punishment should only be used after extensive positive
reinforcement protocols have failed. Again from AVSAB...