Gently does it

The recent boom in dog ownership means there have never been more people out there trying to train their dogs – just as everything we thought we knew about canine psychology is coming into question. Oliver Franklin-Wallis reports on the new empathetic approach

When we got a puppy, I thought we’d thought of everything. My wife and I crossed things off our mental checklist, one by one. Breeder or rescue? (Breeder.) What breed? (Miniature Schnauzer.) Name? (Boudica.) The list went on: what to feed her, where she’d sleep, which brand of compostable dog-poo bags to buy. We read puppy books, consulted YouTube, knew our sit from our stay. But as is often the case, there was one thing we hadn’t taken into consideration: delivery drivers.

Delivery drivers are the scourge of modern canine life. It’s as if the postman – that age-old foe! – has suddenly multiplied exponentially. And while Boudica is, on the whole, a very good dog, growing up in the pandemic years meant she rarely had visitors, which led to her becoming a little territorial. So while she’s a delight with children and other dogs, at home that means persistent barking: at delivery drivers, the milkman, window cleaners, pretty much anyone passing by. For a while, we wrote it off as forgivable. Dogs will be dogs, after all. But recently it has ruined enough Zoom meetings for me to finally decide that something needs to be done. The question is: what?

Training a dog has never been more accessible, nor more complicated. Books, courses, YouTube, TikTok – it’s easy to find advice on how best to teach and bond with our furry friends. But knowing exactly which advice to follow is harder, in part because many of our age-old notions about canine training and behaviour have been upended in recent years. Multiply that with a lot of post-pandemic puppies, and we have an awful lot of badly behaved pups around. “There are more dogs in the country than there have ever been, and people have less time, so there’s a lot more pressure –and that causes conflicts,” says Steve Mann, founder of the Institute of Modern Dog Trainers, and author of the bestseller

Easy

Peasy Puppy Squeezy.

Dog trainers can be broadly lumped into two schools of thought. The first, the traditionalists, might be described as advocating tough love – rigid rules based on harsh discipline, centred around ideas of pack superiority (with the human owner as “alpha”). Then there are what might be called the gentle trainers, who are averse to domineering methods and focus instead on building a more empathetic relationship with the animal.

Much of the traditional training methodology was informed by decades-old thinking around animal pack behaviours, first proposed by the behavioural scientist Rudolph Schenkel in the 1940s. However, more recent science has discredited Schenkel’s research, and shown that “pack” politics don’t apply to dogs (or even wolves, for that matter). “All of that kind of narrative around pack structure, hierarchy and alphas came out of early studies of captive wolf populations,” says Rachel Casey, director of behaviour and research at Dogs Trust. “And actually, subsequently, the same researchers who did all that work started looking at wolves in a wild environment, and they don’t have that structure at all. So it was all built on this kind of misinformation.”

Dog behaviourists and veterinary scientists are now coming to a better understanding of dogs’ behaviour patterns, to understand why rewards might actually work better than punishment. “There’s a lot more empathy in dog training now than there ever was,” Mann says. “It was very much focused on ‘how to get the dog to do this, how to stop the dog doing that’. There was no ‘why is the dog doing it?’”

All dog training is based on operant conditioning, centred around the ideas of reinforcement and punishment. You can reinforce or punish using negative methods (crating the dog when it starts barking, thus removing the stimulus that caused it to bark) or positive methods (offering a treat when your dog stops barking). Traditional training methods often relied on using punishments – a slip or “choke” lead to stop dogs pulling, for example. Gentle training eschews punishment in favour of a strictly reward-based routine, based on changing a dog’s emotional response to a stimulus – in Boudica’s case, the aforementioned delivery drivers.

You don’t need to be Dr Doolittle to sense that gentle training feels kinder to dogs. But now there’s growing scientific evidence to confirm that this is the case. A 2020 study by scientists at the University of Porto in Portugal found that dogs exposed to harsher training methods had greater concentrations of cortisol, the stress hormone, in their bloodstreams, and displayed more “stress-related behaviours” afterwards. “I think there’s been enough research now that we can confidently say using a positive, rewards-based method of training is definitely better for dog welfare,” says Casey. “It’s also better in terms of developing a good bond between owner and dog. And it’s also at least as effective as using punishment.”

For Mann, who has trained countless dogs as well as trainers, the findings are unsurprising. “If I was asked to do a choice of 100 behaviours, and I got punished for 99 of them, it’s going to take me ages before I do the one behaviour where I don’t get punished,” Mann says. This is true, he says, regardless of breed. “My history is with working dogs, security dogs. I’ve worked a lot with breeds like German Shepherds and Rottweilers, and the rules are the same.”

That isn’t to say old-school methods don’t work – they do, and it’s easy to find influencers teaching strict dog correction techniques even now. (“It makes better TV,” Mann says.) But excessively cruel methods can lead to worse behaviours in the long term. Shock collars, for example, can lead dogs to associate people with pain, which might trigger aggression. “A lot of the problem behaviours I deal with are a result of people trying stressful remedies – quick fixes,” Mann says.

A more modern behaviour-led approach to dog training looks at why behaviours happen. When addressing a problem,

Mann and his pupils will consider multiple factors, from specific stimuli down to diet and welfare. For example: a dog being aggressive around food might be starving; it might have toothache, and be associating that pain with the owner. “Dogs don’t learn to use bad behaviour, dogs learn coping strategies,” Mann says. “So if it is an inappropriate behaviour, we teach a way to change a dog’s emotional response to that situation, or we teach the dog an alternative, more acceptable behaviour.”

Which brings me to Boudica and the delivery driver problem. What I hadn’t considered, as Casey explains, is that for dogs, delivery drivers are their own reinforcement system. “She hears a bad man, she barks, and from her point of view the bad man goes away again,” Casey says. Rather than using punishment – sending her to her bed when someone arrives –it would be better to arm new visitors with treats, so they can reward her when they arrive, thus teaching her that strangers at the door mean good news.

The best advice for new dog-owners, Casey and Mann agree, is to seek professional help and to start early – with a vetted, in-person dog school. (It’s not just puppies: Dogs Trust also provide lifetime behaviour support for rescue dogs.) Crucially, we should remember that dogs are complex animals, and that teaching them takes time and effort. “It might seem a little slower to use positive reinforcement,” says Mann. “But the results are far more longer-lasting.” And your dog will thank you for it, which itself is its own reward.