Conflict Training, 101

I got a request this week for help from a woman with three dogs: a Rottweiler, a female Malinois, and a beagle. The behavioral problem was that the Malinois had developed a fixation with eating the Rotti’s feces. I asked a number of questions about the past history, the type of training, exercise levels, etc., and there didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary that could be causing this behavior. My suspicion was (and is) that the dog’s prey drive wasn’t getting enough of a workout. The owner had done some drive training, but in my view, it wasn’t precise enough for this dog (or maybe for this breed). Also, part of my suspicion is that the dog was acting out to reflect something she felt was lacking in her relationship with the owner. The owner had also been given the suggestion of using an electronic collar, but was hesitant about it.

Conflict Training, 101

The way I see it all canine behavior—whether learned or instinctive, normal or abnormal—is done in an attempt to reduce or release some kind of internal tension. When you think about it, even breathing is a matter of tension and release. When too much tension builds up inside a dog’s system, that’s when we tend to see abnormal behaviors.

The normal way for a dog to reduce tension is through some activity related to the prey drive. From the wolf model, we can see that wolves are an anomaly in the natural world. They’re one of only three types of mammals that routinely hunt animals that are larger and more dangerous than themselves: canines, homo sapiens & orcas All three originally hunted large prey by working cooperatively, though humans later developed weapons, so we no longer need to hunt in groups.

The bottom line is that a wolf’s social instincts are based on their need to hunt large prey. For instance, wolves who settle near a garbage dump don’t really form packs. They have looser social arrangements. It also turns out that coyotes—whom it was thought for years did not form packs—actually do, but only when they need to hunt large prey.

(I’m getting to the point, trust me.)

Bison, elk, moose, etc. have horns and hooves. It’s very dangerous for an individual wolf to hunt one of these large animals, so they also evolved strategies like scavenging, hunting small prey, and will even at times eat vegetation. The survival instinct sort of dictates that they not put themselves in harm’s way by hunting large prey unless they are absolutely driven to do it.

This is where Nature becomes a clever taskmaster. If she wants wolves to hunt large prey she has to design a strong enough motivation for them to leave the safety of the den and foray into the path of those hooves and horns. And the basic underlying mechanism for motivating wolves to hunt large prey is a build-up internal tension or stress. When the pack gets hungry enough, the prey drive starts to kick in. Once it’s strong enough to override the need for safety, the wolves are driven to hunt. That’s not entirely accurate, though, because it doesn’t reflect the wolf’s actual experience or point of view. What these animals are really driven to do is to simply get rid of their tension. Think of the way a male dog goes after a female in heat. If you look at it from this angle you can see that he’s not interested in mating per se, he’s really only interested in getting rid of the overwhelming levels of tension and stress he’s feeling. The higher the stress levels, the more driven he is to complete his “task.”

Another factor for wolves in particular (and dogs to a lesser extent) is that at every step in the predatory sequence—the search, the eye stalk, the chase, the grab bite and kill bite—a wolf's body produces endorphins, providing internal rewards for each behavior phase of the sequence.

So in nature (and no matter how domesticated they are, dogs are still a part of nature), the ultimate release of stress comes through acting on the prey drive with no (or very few) inhibitions. And the primary reason stress builds up in the first place is because the animals are inhibited about acting on the prey drive because doing so is dangerous.

So when I hear of a dog like your Malinois, whose behavior is outside the normal range (and coprophragia is normal in puppies, but not in a two-year old), I automatically see it as being related in some way to a blocked flow—an inhibition—of the dog’s prey drive.

So how do we fix it?

I don’t like to use punishment in cases like this, because in order for it to successfully override an instinctive, compulsive, or habitual behavior, it has to be so strong and so severe, that you run the risk of making the dog shut down in other ways. True, an electric shock can accomplish that goal, and may do so safely in some cases. But even if it were to work, there’s a downside to it, which is that the nervous system runs on electricity, and one of the last things you want to do is download more electric energy into a dog whose nervous system may already be overloaded.

In general terms what I might do in this type of situation is put the dog in conflict between something that she wants to do vs. obeying my command. In Natural Dog Training we call this “conflict training.” You don’t necessarily have to use the Rotti’s poop to do it, as long as it’s some activity that your Malinois has the same or a similar level of attraction to. Once she’s developed an ability or skill-set to give up one attachment in favor of obeying you, others will start to naturally fall into place.

Something similar that comes to mind, which illustrates this approach, is a compulsive behavior my own dog had years ago of digging in sand boxes. He particularly liked to “bury” his favorite toy—an empty soda or Poland Spring water bottle—in the sand. Conflict training is basically what I sued to cure him of his compulsive digging. (Now that I think about it, he used to love to eat wino shit in Central Park, too; but after I did the sandbox exercise with him, it was much easier to call him away from that unappetizing habit; and calling him away—followed by a game of chase—cured him of his coprophragia, so it might very well work for you!)

Here’s what I did:

I put him on a long leash, in a down stay near a sand box and put a soda bottle close to him, but off to the side a little, at an indirect angle to him. Then I walked away, backwards, facing him directly the whole time, holding the end of the leash. Then when I got to the end of the leash, I called him to me: “Okay, Freddie, come!” If he went for the bottle instead of running to me, I ran over and without saying anything used the leash to put him back into his original position, using short, fairly hard pops on the collar*, acting as if we were both in a dangerous situation the whole time. Then, once he and the bottle were back in the original position, I reminded him, “Stay!” and did it all again. *(You have to be careful that the pops don’t cause him to lose focus on you; they should actually motivate him to work harder with you.)

Once we got to the point that he ran straight back to me on command, instead of going for the bottle, I rewarded him with another bottle I had hidden in my training vest, though I didn’t just give it to him: I made him chase me around first for about 15 secs., then I threw it for him to chase on his own. (I had put a small amount of water inside so I could throw it farther than if it had been empty.) It also helped that his other favorite activity was de“cap”itating those bottles. So even though he had an impulse to take the bottle back to the sand box and bury it, all I had to do was say, “Take the cap off!” and he would settle down with the bottle and take the cap off with his teeth.

He was a Dalmatian, so it took a while before he “got” the “point” of the game. And I had to do it with him holding the stay at various places around and even inside the sandbox so he could cross-contextualize it. Once he got it, he actually “locked-in” to me. And I only had to re-acquaint him with the exercise once the next day after that first session. He never showed any interest in digging again. (And as I mentioned before, it was instrumental in stopping him from eating human feces in the park.)

Going back to what I said up top, my point is that digging is actually one way a dog has of sublimating his prey drive, meaning he’s expressing it in some way that doesn’t involve chasing and biting a prey object. Freddie had inhibitions about chasing and biting in play. Now your dog doesn’t seem to have the same inhibitions that Freddie did, but my suspicion is that she must have some issues, because scavenging and eating feces are also ways a dog has of circumventing and only partially satisfying their prey drive. In my scenario, once Freddie’s inhibitions were resolved he no longer had a need to dig in sandboxes or eat feces.

Another approach I’d take with your dog is I would hand feed her all her meals outdoors, using what’s called the “pushing exercise.” I’ve posted a link just below. One thing I didn’t describe in the sandbox exercise was the fact that I had taught Freddie to jump up on me on command, and that was part of the “chase me” game I played with him when he obeyed the recall. Jumping up basically causes a dog to plug a lot of her energy into you. It overcomes some of those natural inhibitions dogs have about seeing us as “prey” in the same way they see a Frisbee or another dog they like to play with as something to chase. The pushing exercise accomplishes the same goal as jumping up but without some of the drawbacks. So print out the article found in the link below and follow the instructions carefully. It will increase your dog’s levels of social attraction to you, which will increase the reliability of her recall, and might even reduce some of her need to eat feces in the first place.

“The Pushing Exercise” (pdf)

Doing the “eyes” exercise (below) may also help. You may have already taught it to her as “watch me,” but I think this version has a wrinkle or two that makes it stronger. Basically dogs alternately see us—or I should say they feel, us on a knee-jerk level—as either prey and predator. The more prey-like we become, the more interested in obeying us they are. However, to some extent, the more predator-like we are the more that increases their obedience skills too. The difference is that in the first case the dogs obey us willingly, because it makes them feel good, it makes them feel connected to us in the strongest way possible. But the more predator-like we are, the more their obedience is based on fear. (This is why dominance training works; it’s also why dominance trainers think dogs see them as the “pack leader,” when they actually sees the trainer the way a wolf sees a moose who suddenly turns and brandishes his antlers.)

“The Eyes Have It”

If I were you, I’d wait a few weeks of doing these two exercises before attempting the conflict training. Remember, I had already done the jumping up with Freddie.

One thing that will give you a clue as to how this is going to help is that after you do the pushing exercise, you may find that your doggie plays tug- of-war with a lot more energy and focus; she’ll probably bite and pull a lot harder than she did before. You can also integrate the pushing dynamic into your games of tug, which will up the ante considerably. And always remember, the key to reducing tension in the canine species comes primarily through chasing and biting.

Sorry for the lengthy reply. I hope this helps!

LCK

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Positive Mental Associations v. Reduction of Tension

If you've followed the comments section on "Chasing Squirrels," you'll see that someone calling him or herself "anonymous" has a bad taste in his or her mouth about the idea that dogs don't learn new behaviors or get rid of old ones by making "positive mental associations." Hopefully this article will spell out my reasons for the view that dogs actually do learn through the reduction of internal tension and stress, not the outdated, Skinnerian view (though it's not really Skinnerian, as you shall see).

Do Dogs Learn by Making Mental Associations,
or Through the Reduction of Internal Tension?

I think it's very important to make the distinction between two ways of looking at the general “Chasing Squirrels” phenomenon. Does this training paradigm work by a) satisfying a dog’s prey drive, thereby reducing his internal tension and stress, or b) by giving him a positive mental association with something that previously seemed to have caused his misbehavior. The reason I think it’s important to differentiate between these two ideas is that the concept of teaching the dog to make positive associations with formerly unsettling stimuli—while fine in theory—doesn't really work in every situation. And it’s junk science.

For example, many positive trainers make a huge mistake in my view by thinking that if a dog is aggressive on the leash, for example, they can change the behavior simply by feeding the dog “high value treats” while another dog is passing by. This is supposed to work by teaching the aggressor to make a positive association with the aggressee:

“Hmm…every time I feel aggressive toward another dog on the street my owner gives me food that is of high value to me.”

Do you see the multiple errors in logic there?

Part of the problem is that sometimes redirecting the dog’s focus away from something distressing—like another dog coming toward him to something enjoyable like eating tasty treats—actually does to work. The fact is +R trainers are not total idiots. In fact many of them are anything but. And yet if “making positive associations” only works sometimes, and not all the time, why does it work at all? Shouldn’t creating a positive association with something that was previously distressing to the dog always work? I think so. And I think we need to ask ourselves why does it work sometimes and not others.

So let’s look at the situation with a dog whose leash aggression is actually (or rather, seemingly) cured by using high value treats to change the dog’s “mental associations” toward other dogs. To understand this we first have to figure out what’s actually causing the dog’s leash aggression.

One of the primary causes of leash aggression (or at least the primary flashpoint) is that the aggressee is usually coming toward the aggressor. It’s rare for a dog to exhibit leash aggression toward a dog who’s walking in front of him. It’s also rare for a dog to show aggression toward a dog who’s walking next to him. He’ll certainly do so initially. But once you walk the two dogs together for a few blocks, the aggressive feelings almost always dissipate and don’t rear up again until the dogs are face to face once more. (See “Walking 2 Aggressive Dogs.”) 

Another rarity is the big dog who gets aggressive only with small dogs. In the most general terms, it’s usually the other way around: the smaller dog is generally more nervous when a bigger dog is approaching. And even big dogs who do seem to have a kind of ingrained aggression to any and all dogs—regardless of breed type or size—usually display less tension toward dogs whose level of gaze is below theirs and more tension toward dogs whose eyes are either on the same level or higher.

So it seems to me that eye contact is what initially sparks the stressful feelings in a dog who then makes those feelings manifest by barking, snarling, lunging, etc. Eye contact isn’t the whole enchilada, but it certainly seems to be the meat. Of course there are normally all kinds of other contributing factors, typically involving past negative experiences with other dogs, or generalized fear issues, mistreatment by his previous (or present) owners, etc. But while those factors may always be present in the dog in a sort of latent form, it’s really the direct eye contact that provides the spark that sets the dog off.

So if a +R trainer distracts a leash-aggressive dog with a treat, in 99.99% of the cases, the aggressor will have to break eye contact with the aggressee, just to get the treat In and of itself, that automatically reduces some of the tension inherent to the situation. If the +R trainer does this enough times then that might create a situation where when the aggressor sees another dog coming he may develop a positive expectation of something good coming his way—not from the other dog but from his handler. If there’s a lot of praise, or a soothing word or two in the equation (like “Easy, big fella…” or “It’s okay, Sparky…”), that will also be part of what helps reduce his tension.

But this is still operating through a reduction of internal tension, not through a process of making mental associations.

And here’s where it gets really good: If the aggressive dog’s tension is reduced enough, and he’s able to actually make friendly contact with the second dog, that’s what really changes things. And that’s because no dog ever wants to attack another dog. It’s simply not in a dog’s nature to want to be in conflict, socially. On the most basic level all dogs want to be in harmony with other dogs. (Even forming a detente with another dog is more harmonic than being in conflict with him.) The lunging and snarling and barking is actually an expression of the first dog’s attraction to the aggressee. If he had no attraction he would either run away and hide, or he would ignore the dog entirely. The more a dog barks, snarls, and lunges, the more attracted he is. The problem is he’s simply attracted at too high a level given his inability to offload tension normally, through sniffing, circling, play bowing, etc.

So by making a surface reading of what’s happened, we might be fooled into thinking that the dog is making a positive association with the movement of another dog coming toward him because of the treats alone. Or we might more rightly see that there was more to it than the treats, but still mistakenly believe that the dog is now making a positive association with the aggressee as a result of the redirection of his focus and attention. And I think in a very marginal way there may be some truth to that second way of looking at this. But the real reason this technique works is that the handler has accidentally reduced the dog’s inner tension and stress. That’s the deciding factor, not this fanciful idea that the dog is now making a positive mental association with other dogs coming toward him.

Here’s what Kevin Behan says on the subject in Natural Dog Training:

While dogs form associations, they don’t directly learn by forming them. First they learn through the flow of drive and then they associate the level of pleasure or stress they experienced with them.

I’m going to correct Kevin here a little and say that dogs have no ability to know what levels of pleasure or stress they experience with any given experience. The way a dog’s mind works, through energetic principles of attraction and resistance, they feel more attracted to experiences that reduce internal tension and more resistance to those that don’t.

Now back to Kevin’s words (with a few thoughts of my own thrown in):

In the human mind a [mental] association is the linkage between thoughts, ideas, feelings, or sensations. These linkages from concepts that the human mind can then carry around and apply in novel and abstract ways and in new situations. A concept is a complex intellectual feat based on events that transpired over time [dogs have no sense of time-LCK], and it acknowledges that there may be other perspectives on the experience [dogs have no ability to see anyone else’s perspective, at least not mentally, though they have the ability to feel what others are feeling, and even to pick up mental images from us-LCK]. In order to articulate something this complex Man requires an intricate language to communicate the vast range of possibilities.

A dog, not having an intellect, can’t range through time, nor can he entertain any other possible perspectives on an event [at least not mentally, though he can do this on a purely emotional level-LCK]. He can only know his own point of view [I would say that he can’t know it, he can only feel it-LCK] in any one particular moment.

Now B.F. Skinner, who, like it or not, is the font for this idea that dogs can form positive mental associations, would clearly not agree that dogs have such intellectual capacities. Skinner would be on Kevin Behan’s side of the above argument. In fact one of Skinner’s main rationales behind the development of behavioral science was to remove the mind/intellect/black box from the equation, which to him was voodoo. He wanted to be able to rely purely on conditioning. Yet this idea that dogs can from positive mental associations depends entirely on dogs having certain intellectual capacities that they clearly don’t have!

This is a bit of a puzzle to those who don’t study cognitive science and don’t understand the differences between certain evolutionary pre-cursors to logical thought and language, because those pre-cursors operate in both the human and canine brain. For example pattern recognition, which requires no conscious, intellectual thought process, and which dogs excel at, is clearly a pre-cursor to logical thinking. You can’t engage in logic unless you can recognize patterns. In fact chess masters are said to rely far more on pattern recognition than logic. And computers are getting better and better at pattern recognition on an almost daily basis. But computers do not have any real intellectual or logical abilities. And I hate to say this but the same is true for dogs.

(Discussing these issues always upsets a lot of people, so let’s get back to the discussion at hand, which is that solving a dog’s leash aggression by feeding him treats works because the handler has accidentally reduced the dog’s inner tension and stress, not because the dog is now forming positive mental associations.)

Does it matter that it’s accidental? Isn’t the result the same either way?

In the case of leash aggression, yes. However there are other cases where attempting to use this model gets us nowhere. If that’s true then there’s obviously a problem with the underlying philosophy, and we have to look for another explanation of behavior, and another means of producing “positive” behavioral changes in dogs, one that makes sense in all cases.

Let’s forget about leash aggression for a moment and go back to the two cases that sparked this debate: 1) how I got Freddie to stop stalking squirrels by stalking them with him and then playing tug with him when the squirrels went up a tree, and 2) how Anonymous’ friend reputedly got his dog to stop stalking children by having the kids play fetch with him. In both cases good results were achieved through redirecting the dog’s hunting instincts into a bite-able object. There’s no question that that’s the primary cause of whatever changes took place in each case. However, would anyone in their right mind believe that Freddie somehow formed a positive association with squirrels because of what I did? Was he now going to hang out and roll around and play in the grass with them and lick their noses? Even if any of the squirrels were crazy enough to let this happen, what would Freddie have done if given a chance to get that close (provided I wasn’t there to supervise)? I’ll tell you what would happen because it actually did happen twice: he would grab the squirrel between his teeth and jaws and bring it to me. Luckily the two times this did happen I simply said, “Out!” and he dropped the frightened animal, who quickly ran up the nearest tree.

Here’s another angle to see this from: while it’s normal and instinctive for a dog of Freddie’s persuasion go into a stalking position when seeing a small prey animal (Dalmatians are essentially setters/pointers), it is decidedly not normal and not instinctive for any dog to stalk a human being, even a child. So when something of that nature happens it means there is something badly out of whack. And on a certain level even the dog knows it, or I should say, he “feels” it.

So why does Anonymous think his friend’s dog formed positive mental associations with the kids he was formerly stalking? Since the friend reputedly changed the dog’s behavior by having the kids play fetch with the dog, we might be tempted to believe that this is true. But isn’t it more likely that the dog now sees the tennis ball that the kids are throwing for him as the release point for the internal tension that was causing him to stalk them in the first place? Remember, he didn’t really want to bite the kids. I mean sure, he sort of did. But mainly he was just looking for an outlet for his prey drive. The kids gave him one. Does he see them differently now? Perhaps he does, though I doubt if he could articulate the difference or explain why he feels differently toward them. But if there is a difference, is it because the dog has thought this through logically?

“Those kids were a negative in my mind before but now that they play fetch with me they’re positive!”

The more probable answer is that the kids were always positive in this dog’s mind/experience. Or rather they always held a strong level of attraction for him. But his attraction for them also had this baggage, the feeling that something was out of whack. It didn’t feel 100% right to the dog to be stalking them, yet he felt driven to do it anyway. Now that he’s playing fetch (reportedly), and he’s able to bite the ball (so we’re told), the underlying impulse that caused the stalking behavior (the urge to bite anything acting preylike), was satisfied. And while the kids were (reportedly) the avenue by which that impulse was satisfied, I doubt very much that this dog feels much differently toward them than he did before, except that now he feels more satisfaction of his prey drive because of the ball, and feels that they’re a viable delivery mechanism for that ball.

Isn’t that the same thing as making a positive mental association?

I don’t think so because the dog never had a negative mental association in the first place. Just as Freddie never had a negative mental association with the squirrels. And when you think about it, even a dog who wants to bite every dog he sees usually has no negative mental association with any of them personally. It’s always about the dog’s levels of internal tension and stress, and finding a way to release that tension through biting an acceptable object instead of biting another dog or a human being (or a squirrel, for that matter).

So while dogs do learn by seeing patterns and associating this or that experience with either a pleasurable (positive) or stressful (negative) feeling state, it’s a big mistake to think that learning takes place by making mental associations because as a trainer or dog owner it puts you in situations where you aren’t getting the results you were expecting, the dog’s behavior doesn’t improve, and you don’t know why. The reason is simple: you’re using the wrong model for learning and behavior.

I think even B.F. Skinner would have to agree on that.
 

LCK

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