why-animals-do-the-thing:

eruditionanimaladoration:

books-and-barns:

mango-pup:

h42el:

mango-pup:

themotherfuckingclickerkid:

tashahatesfun:

allbarksomebite:

themotherfuckingclickerkid:

As a contrast to the previous gifset, I wanted to make one with the classic video by Dr. Sophia Yin showing counter conditioning in action. This is a dog that had been displaying aggression severely enough to be up for euthanasia. The stimulus prompting aggression in this video is having his face blown on. While we don’t hear anything about the dog’s history, it’s pretty easy to assume that this is fear-related, as shoving your face at a dog’s face is pretty aggressive body language, a lot of smaller dogs have fear-related aggression due to their boundaries being ignored, and I don’t see any resource-guarding behavior.

You can’t draw a complete parallel, but there are a lot of similarities between this video of an aggressive dog and the video of the aggressive horse. This dog seems to be making a big aggressive display and then retreating, instead of continuing the attack with the intent of causing serious injury. The horse had its movement restricted to the round pen, and this dog has its movement restricted by a leash. Both are unhappy and dangerous animals.

Dr. Yin resolves the aggression by pairing the provocative stimulus (blowing on the dog’s face) with food. After only a few brief sessions and a bit of time, the dog no longer exhibits aggression when prompted. He doesn’t enjoy the stimulus (he still moves his head back and away, and there’s a bit of lip licking) but having his face blown on no longer provokes aggression. Instead you can see eagerness for the treatment and what looks like enjoyment of the exercise (tail wagging, what looks almost like a play bow or an attempt to get a reward with a behavior he was taught, ears forward, open relaxed mouth, looking up at her face). His emotional reaction and outward behavioral response are dramatically different.

I don’t present this as an example of why counter conditioning with food is a preferential miracle cure (dogs are a lot more likely to exhibit aggressive body language, so the horse probably had way more of a backlog of fear, whereas this guy’s fear could be worked around relatively quickly. I also wouldn’t ever recommend anyone tackle aggressive body language straight up with a leash restraining the dog, and definitely not by blowing into the dog’s face, where it’s so easy to get bit) BUT this shows a similar scenario, similar aggression, and a different protocol for resolving the problem that doesn’t involve the use of an aversive stimulus to work around aggression.

I remember watching this video in around 2010 and being amazed that this “counter-conditioning” was such a powerful technique. It was one of the videos that made me up my training game big time, and learning about CC was a massive help in socialising and rehabilitating Breeze. 

I did think she was totally mad and was about to lose her nose! Definitely not a dog or situation for novice trainers, but a really useful video about hugely helpful technique.

I’m definitely into this, but I do have a question- why does this work, as opposed to making him display his aggressive behavior more? It seems like this could also been seen as Dog displays aggression->give treat-> dog acts aggressive to receive treat. What would the difference be between this counter conditioning and training a dog to be more aggressive?

The difference there is the difference between operant and classical conditioning. Operant conditioning is training as we usually think of, which is controlling conscious behavior. Classical conditioning addresses involuntary reactions, like Pavlov’s drooling dogs.

In this situation, Dr. Yin isn’t trying to change the dog’s behavior, she’s trying to change the dog’s emotions. Once the emotional state has changed, the behavior goes away by itself.

I also get that this works, but I don’t understand your explanation of why you don’t just accidentally capture the aggressive behaviour? The dog doesn’t know your counter conditioning not operant conditioning.

This is something I struggle with teaching mango not to bark at the window, I definitely taught her to bark once and look at the human when trying to counter condition. We are doing better now by treating pre-bark and giving an alternative behaviour if she’s already barking, but it would be interesting to know more if you have the time?

Maybe another way to put it:

“Dog displays aggression->give treat-> dog acts aggressive to receive treat.”

So why doesn’t this teach the dog to be aggressive?

Because the dog is not thinking operant-like about the aggressive behavior. He’s not thinking “oohh I behaved aggressively and I get a reward!!” He’s feeling scared of something, but that something is always followed by a reward, so he learns it’s not scary. The aggressive response associated with his fear goes away too.

It’s the same reason why you can give your dog a reward at every thunderclap, and it doesn’t teach them to be scared of thunder- the fear response wasn’t operant. You’re not rewarding their fear, you’re associating the stimulus, thunder, with good things.

Dogs don’t think “oh, I think I’ll experience some fear now” it’s not something they (or you for that matter) can /will/ themselves to feel.

Plus fear is so aversive you wouldn’t even if you could. Counter-conditioning does “risk” accidentally creating fake on-purpose behaviors. A la the story of the barking dog from Reaching the Animal Mind who was given treats for barking, but when he tried to bark on purpose, it was more of a uncertain high pitched yelp.
That said, those are easy to stop because the behavior is no longer fueled by the underlying emotion.

We humans have a profession that’s all about rewarding people for pretending to have all kinds of emotions: actors. And they still need to practice at it for years. Think about that- you can have a fight with your mom or a heated thanksgiving dinner debate and it’s genuine emotion- but a team of actors staging the same thing have to really work at making it seem real. And someone who’s portraying a criminal doesn’t then become one after the director says “cut!”…. Fake on-purpose behaviors are just not the same, for the same reason- you can’t will yourself to feel emotions on cue. Maybe method actors would disagree lol but that’s the gist of it.

OK, that makes sense, trying to train a dog when they’re over threshold gets you nowhere, and that’s what you would be doing if you were trying to capture aggressive behaviour . And we got rid of ‘bark look at human’ behaviour but just ignoring it, which was a lot easier than getting rid of barking (still working on that, but we make progress).

Thanks

The above explanation works for the layperson, but it doesn’t have a lot of scientific basis. The reality is that we’re only just coming to understand reactions and ‘feelings’ in animals, particularly because of the efforts of some incredible trainers and dogs who are letting us get a glimpse into the conscious mind of a dog via MRI machines. It’s what we THINK might be happening, but realistically all we have to go on is hormone interactions and other foundations in behavioural science.

This is, of course, one of the main challenges of training dogs and interacting with dog trainers. Most people owning a dog do not have any sort of training in applied ethology. Most dog trainers have no idea what applied ethology is. But it’s important, and it helps us to understand consistencies as well as inconsistencies.

To make an explanation with a bit more evidence behind it, we’re performing a chemical override using differing hormones that are released as a response to eating, over the stress hormone cortisol that is heightened when experiencing ‘fear-inducing’ stimuli. There’s also usually a motivation present for the dog to eat, so the dog may have been deprived a meal in the morning (not unusual, many trainers withhold regular meals and choose instead to feed them as rewards, but by doing so you create a motivation in the animal to perform consummatory behaviours, like eating. It’s a perk that motivation increases for the reward.) and is driven to perform a consummatory behaviour to satisfy that motivation.

It has also been shown that if you create a motivation in an animal, and don’t allow them to perform consummatory behaviours to decrease their state of motivation, the existing high state of motivation can actually cause stress. Performing consummatory behaviours to decrease motivation lowers stress. So realistically, there are many small factors coming into play here, many of them related to hormones within the body, that are contributing to associating certain stimuli with good things.

This is a multifaceted issue, but from a physiological and behavioural standpoint, these are just some of the many factors contributing to altering an animal’s perception.

You can indeed capture the wrong behaviour (this is because there are multiple factors working in tandem, you can choose to appeal to classical or operant conditioning while training, but it doesn’t mean you will completely turn the other off, we’ve learned dogs are making inferences in ways many young children are, they are constantly absorbing information.) which is why narrowing the criteria is important. You cease to reward for just anything other than, for instance, biting your face off. You shape a new behaviour as an alternative. Many trainers will just reward ‘not barking’, but you’ll also notice that people will instead reward not barking to start and then will start to reward when the dog lays down, when the dog goes to their crate or lays in their bed. They shape ‘not barking’ into a new behaviour, increasing the criteria from ‘don’t bark’ to ‘don’t bark and turn away from the window’ to ‘don’t bark and turn away from the window then walk to your bed’ and finally ‘don’t bark and turn away from the window and lay down in your bed’, versus leaving the dog to their own devices where they might pick a new behaviour that isn’t ideal. Especially if we’re talking motivation that was previously satisfied by the undesired behaviour, and they are now having to perform displacement behaviours to try to satisfy the motivational state.

You’ll see the idea of teaching an alternative behaviour or task a lot, and you can probably think of a couple you’ve taught your own dog even accidentally. My dog had an issue jumping up, so I realized I was teaching him a replacement behaviour as I continuously asked him to get toys for the visitor instead, as when he retrieves a toy and comes to offer it he keeps all four feet on the ground. I often remind him, but without intensive training or focus on it, he has started to go looking for a toy after being told not to jump up. He is making the connection himself, even without training, that if he has all of this pent up excitement…to use it productively.

@why-animals-do-the-thing

This is an incredible breakdown.

For laypeople who follow this blog – I highly do not suggest trying to recondition aggressive behavior by yourself. Yin was an amazing and skilled professional (rest in peace) and you’re way better off getting someone with training to help you than trying to work with aggression yourself. It’s not worth the risk.