@godspurpose07 I’ve also seen such research in order to make an informed assessment myself. You have to understand that the research is often not perfect and I feel not conclusive enough. Especially for certain populations of dogs (reactive anxious dogs).
Their findings are kinda obvious. Aversive training alone is “bad” for the dog but they really haven’t gone very deep into the issue. I believe I saw one where they measure the stress hormones. And they conclude that any aversive training increases the stress in dogs. So it’s bad? Wait. Think for a bit. If more people tend to send their messed up reactive anxious dogs to last resort aversive training places while sending their easier dogs to positive only places your whole entire study is already ruined with confounds.
What I haven’t seen being studied also is the efficacy of the method in relation to whether the dogs are already balanced dogs or have behaviour issues. Would be happy to look into those if you have come across any papers. But i think the proper study design should be to take the same dog and apply one method for 6 months and measure the improvement vs. another method. Or A\B testing.
Since you are into research, you should know that to properly conclude that one method is just generally bad, you need to look at the interaction between the training method and the personality of the dog to avoid the confounds.
A lot of times they just look at the correlation and you can’t really say anything about causation.
Lots of people send dogs to schools for different reasons. At least from what I can tell studies don’t really differentiate the personality of the dogs. And they don’t differentiate the reason why the dogs are in certain schools in the first place.
You can have 10 aversive trainers and I’m pretty sure only 2 may know what they are actually doing. Aversive training is just generally bad I agree. And overall if you have a stressed out dog, your dogs just gonna respond to aversives with more stress initially obviously. And it’s really quite obvious that if your dogs nervous, stressed and you inflict pain and send it into overdrive, there’s a chance the dogs going to break and lash out. That’s so obvious. But that’s not what we’re trying to do here are we? And that’s the problem with the research. And makes people stop thinking about what their doing because experts say “x”.
But it’s not so simple. Dog training is not so simple. The end goal is does my dog actually start behaving in a manner where the human is actually comfortable with it? Because believe me, I know most people wouldn’t care if they have an anxious dog but the dog never reacts. Your dog was born anxious and that’s not going away. But you rather have a dog that doesn’t react in front of every trigger or would you rather have one that displays his anxiousness and goes crazy? The problem is very clear though. If you have a dog prone to lashing out but just “hides” it then yes you absolutely will not benefit from such methods. There is that danger.
What is the alternative to aversive training though? And does it work? Sure positive only training means that your dog is less likely to respond aggressively because you’re always avoiding triggers. But you are measuring the wrong thing in the studies. You should be measuring other outcomes and I really could go on and on about this.
The first step is always to contain the crazy. No one is saying the dogs going to be happy immediately. But allowing your dog to follow a protocol in presence of triggers actually allows the dog the chance to respond to positive conditioning. Balanced training done right you should be about 95% positive. So you’re not actually “balanced” literally. More heavily positive with a little aversives for communication purposes and threshold control. And there needs to be more longitudinal studies with much longer term horizons because dog training takes a long time. You can’t just say, I hit my dog today and he reacted poorly vs I gave my dogs treats all day and just stayed home and he had better outcomes.
I don’t believe there are any studies that can look at the efficacies of such methods properly. Sounds incredibly hard to do from the standpoint of academia. But many balanced trainers achieve success like this. I do respect your decision though. I’m not saying the science is wrong. I do believe positive > aversives. Just thought to offer a different perspective.
