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Reward Based Training – Kathy Sdao

August 13th, 2009

Kathy Sdao is an amazing trainer. She’s not just a trainer, she’s an associate Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist, meaning she’s the real deal in terms of animal behavior. What I love most about Kathy is how she has all of this great experience, 20+ years in marine mammals and dogs, and yet she breaks information down into digestible, enjoyable bits. I feel like I am pretty well educated, in terms of dogs, but I always walk away from her seminars with a new gem of information, either a concept that I didn’t fully get or a new way to explain something to my clients.

A few years ago, we got lucky and Kathy agreed to do private behavior consultations at Ahimsa. My clients rave about how well their dogs are doing now and how much they love Kathy. So here’s the story of how Kathy got into reward-based training, in her own words.

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My choice to train dogs with carrots, not sticks.

I’m embarrassed to write this. At first, I didn’t understand that leash corrections, reprimands, squirt bottles and all the other painful or annoying tools traditionally used to train dogs were unnecessary. This was despite the fact that, at the time, I’d already spent more than 10 years successfully training complex behaviors to dolphins, whales, walruses, sea lions and polar bears without resorting to “sticks” (punishment). A veritable pack of professional dog trainers, some whom I knew well, told me that these force-free training methods (often called clicker- training) would never work on dogs. And, for a while, I believed them.

Then, in 1994, I attended a clicker-training workshop that Karen Pryor presented in Tukwila Washington. I’d met Karen once before and decided to attend mainly to say hello to her and to support her work. I wasn’t expecting to have my entire dog-training paradigm shifted! So I was stunned when her first comment was to request that none of the many attendees use any leash corrections on their dogs during the two days of the workshop. I couldn’t figure out why popping a dog’s collar – a standard training technique – would have any connection to using a clicker to mark instants of good dog behavior and using food-treats to pay the dog for these desirable behaviors. But Karen explained clearly how the frequent use of punishment, even mild stuff that’s more irritating than cruel, erodes the trust that is the foundation of all great training. (Check out Karen’s brand new book here “Reaching the Animal Mind: Clicker Training and What it Teaches Us About All Animals.”

Since then, I’ve spent 15 years learning everything I could about the amazing power of reward-based dog training. And I’ve never looked back. Once you experience the incredible “shivers down your spine” level of two-way communication you can develop with your dog (or cat or colt or kid) using positive reinforcement (e.g., food, toys, play, praise, butt-scritches, etc), you lose the excuses you had for “needing” to use punishment. And you discover potential in your trainee that you never imagined. Clicker-training is an infinitely creative process, in the truest sense of the word. It creates behavior – useful moves like coming when called, settling on a dog bed, and sitting at doorways or silly tricks like spinning, sneezing or waving. Punishment, which suppresses behavior, is a destructive process. Not much fun, for the animal or the trainer. Thank goodness all of us who train pet dogs, service and guide dogs, competition dogs, search & rescues dogs – all dogs – can choose a better way.

Next to my desk, I’ve hung a scrap of paper, on which is written this quote from the life-changing book Coercion & its Fallout by Dr. Murray Sidman (2001; available here): “An overworked and incorrect bit of folk wisdom pronounces the carrot to be of no avail unless backed up by the stick. But the carrot can do the job all by itself.”

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Find out more about Kathy Sdao on her website. You can also get videos of Kathy’s excellent seminars from Tawzer Dog Videos.

This was provided by Grisha Stewart of Ahisma Dog Training.

Tags: dog, dog training, dogs, reward based training, reward-based dog training
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