Thursday, June 01, 2006

Dog Training: Positive Reinforcement vs. Negative Reinforcement

And so the saga continues...

Oh wait, there was never a saga introduced, so here it is...

We have two dogs, Bandit and Rascal - simple enough. We adopted Bandit first, and being our first dog, we wanted him trained. As a techie, the obvious resource choice is the web. I wanted to enroll him in a school ASAP, so after a quick directory search on dog trainers, I found one locally. My wife and I showed up for orientation and we were amazed at the behavior of the trainers' animals. There were approx. 50 or so people there for orientation and they had 3 dogs lying on mats chewing on bones or sleeping. Okay, so what, they were on mats, they could leave if they wanted to...not so!

The dogs got up a couple of times, but it was like watching a pantomime trapped in his invisible glass box. The dogs didn't go past the edge of their mats. Who can train their dog to do that? We were amazed and we signed Bandit up right away.

The first day of class was a little disconcerting as we were taught the true nature of the training - the leash correction. It started with being a simple leash jerk and progressed more aggressively for subsequent disobedience. Our initial thought was to give it time, perhaps the jerking would subside once the dog became used to the commands...

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