K9 Cuisine: What is your story-how did you get into pet behavior/training?
Marilyn: I started studying training in earnest when we adopted Tommy at about two months of age. When I saw that little brown face and yellow eyes — that puppy was going to be mine. Tommy was never a cuddly pup. He was always curious, always interested in his environment. Before he was a year old, he had decided his job in life was to be our Sheriff. He took his job very seriously. My fat, round puppy grew into a 90-pound dog that was solid muscle.
I wanted to be as good a partner to my dog as I could be. I learned different techniques, training, behavior analysis, more body language specific to dogs, and environmental management. I became a Certified Professional Dog Trainer (CPDT). I used every tool I could find to help my dog.
A more complete story is on my website on the page entitled, “Tommy.”
K9 Cuisine:What is the secret to your success with your business-how have you gotten to where you are today?
Marilyn: When training for other organizations, I was always asked to do something with which I was uncomfortable. Even if it was something as minor as putting on a Gentle Leader when I didn’t think the dog needed it, I didn’t want to have to do it. So I started my own company, Korrect Kritters, LLC. Now I can help the dogs in any way I think is appropriate. And I do.
About that same time, my husband and I decided to foster dogs. We were lucky enough to meet the District Director with Labrador Retriever Rescue of Florida (LRRoF). We have fostered several dogs over the years. Once she found I was a professional trainer, I started fostering the dogs with problems. I also do in-person or phone consults for behavior problems on any dogs owned by the rescue. I’ve made amazing progress with a couple of dogs and improvements with all of them.
K9 Cuisine: What makes you different?
Marilyn: I use skills such as analysis, team building, and managing multiple projects in manufacturing (in the Midwest) and the Federal government (in the Northeast). Decades of being a “hobby trainer” preceded becoming a professional trainer. As a parent, stepparent, and grandparent who has lived with dogs of all sizes, ages, and temperaments over the years, I have insight to many family situations.
I am willing to meet people and dogs “where they are” when I do an in-home consult. In the beginning, I do a lot of listening and watching to get an idea of household dynamics. I am usually calm and quiet around the dogs, sometimes whispering to get their attention. I am usually calm and quiet around the people, sometimes teaching them relaxation techniques. Timing and technique in both scenarios is key.
K9 Cuisine: What is it about dogs that you love?
Marilyn: Their almost constant communication. The way they live in the moment. In even bad circumstances, their efforts to make the best of any situation. Their talent for reading people.
K9 Cuisine: What is the neatest part about your work?
Marilyn: I get paid to play with puppies!!! How great is my job!!
I use reward-based training and teach people how to ignore what they want to go away and reward what they want repeated. For some dog owners, this is a new way of thinking about the interaction with their dog. I like seeing the way it improves the relationship. More broadly, a change in the behavior of my clients and their dogs has a ripple effect within the community. Their friends, families, and neighbors often begin to use my techniques, too, because the dog is behaving and having fun doing it.
K9 Cuisine: Where do you see the pet training/behavior industry going?
Marilyn: Dog trainers are becoming professionals, not just people doing a job. Different organizations are developing standards of operation and methodology. More of us have college degrees and/or specialized education. Most of this is going without the attention of the dog owning public currently.
K9 Cuisine: How do you fit into that-what are your future plans?
Marilyn: I’m a member of several professional dog training organizations. I’m on the Board of Directors of the Certification Council for Professional Dog Trainers. I also work behind the scenes in many ways.
K9 Cuisine: How can people find out more about you and your organization?
Marilyn: My website http://www.korrectkritters.com, or my blog http://korrectkritters.blogspot.com , or at Lab Rescue of Florida http://www.labradorrescue.net .
K9 Cuisine: Tell us a little about you!
Marilyn: My parents had dogs before they had me. I’ve lived with dogs most of my life and consider myself lucky to have been able to do so.
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K9 Cuisine is a provider of premium dog food. We’re committed to providing our customers with the knowledge, and the products, to help their faithful friends be the best they can be.
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.
Patricia McConnell, Ph.D., is a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist and one of my personal heroes in the dog training world. She is known worldwide as an expert on canine and feline behavior and training, and for her engaging, knowledgeable, and accessible books, which are available on her website or through Dogwise.com.
I’ve asked Dr. McConnell why she chooses to use reward-based training:
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I’m not sure if there was a specific moment in time when I became aware of how powerful and satisfying reward-based training is, but here are some highlights from the past that I remember:
~ When, in 1968, I took the first dog I owned to “dog training class” and the trainer hung a Basenji when he wouldn’t sit on command. The trainer explained that his dominance was being tested by the dog, and that he had to win the battle. He held the dog up in the air, on a choke collar, with all four paws off the ground, as the dog struggled and gasped and growled. As I stood, horrified and transfixed, my adolescent Saint Bernard had the sense to get up from his sit, turn around and face the other way. He lay down and… I’m serious here.. put one paw over his face. I took one look at him and left the class, never to return.
~When I heard Ian Dunbar say “There are a hundred things a dog could do wrong at any given moment, and if you correct one behavior, what is to stop him from doing something else you don’t want? Why not teach him what you DO want him to do? How else is he going to know?” I’ll never forget sitting in the audience and thinking about how clear and logical and sensible that was. It was as though the clouds had parted.
~ When I first used a treat to teach a puppy to sit, and discovered that in a couple of sessions my 8 week-old pup had learned to sit, lay down, and wait at the door on cue. It was easy, it was fun and it made using collar “pops” seem antiquated, ineffective and well . . . I don’t know any other way to say it: stupid.
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Dr. McConnell’s blog is http://www.theotherendoftheleash.com
For seminar and book information, http://www.patriciamcconnell.com
I can’t help but put in a quick plug for a 2010 seminar with Patricia McConnell in Seattle on dog aggression and play. Info is on the Ahimsa website http://ahimsadogtraining.com/workshop.php
Reward-based trainers focus on what the dog does correctly, and builds the ‘perfect’ dog from that foundation. So rather than a chunk of ice that we’re chipping off to make a statue, think of reward-based training as being made from clay. You can build it up exactly how you want to, without fear of making a wrong move and ruining the whole thing.
Dog trainers often fall into two camps: reward-based trainers or more traditional trainers that focus on punishment. There’s another camp that’s in between that calls themselves ‘balanced trainers’, but for the sake of brevity, I’ll lump those two together and say that anyone who punishes via force or fear falls into the more traditional camp. I’m a reward-based trainer, and I’d like to tell you what that means, why I do what I do, and what got me started in the first place.
When I got my first dog as an adult, I took a class at a big-box store. I already had a little aversion to prong collars, but after a couple of sessions with Spoon being too interested in the other dogs, the trainer convinced me it was a good way to get control. And it was, for about two weeks. At that point, I realized that I had put myself on the opposite team from my dog. Instead of working together to make progress, I felt like it was always me versus Spoon.
Here’s how I fell out of love with the prong collar…
I had heard a little about clicker training, but the teacher for my class told me that it was a silly gadget, that I’d be stuck using it forever. But the books I was reading said that wasn’t true, and they just raved about clicker training. One day, my curiosity got the best of me. I took a little lid to a juice bottle and used it as my first clicker.
The idea was to pair the click sound with a treat, so every time I made the juice lid pop, I fed Spoon a treat. I decided to click and treat every time she looked at my boyfriend. So when she’d glance at him, I would click and feed her a dog treat. She didn’t look at him because I asked her to, but because it was a small apartment and there wasn’t much else to do. Half a baggie of dog treats later, she would take the treat and snap her head back to him as soon as she could, to earn the next click.
Wow! I was hooked. I soon learned that to add a cue at this point, I just needed to say it right before she did the behavior, and only click/treat if I had asked for it. So I said, “Where’s Steve?” and she’d look at him (because she was going to anyway) and I clicked and treated. Five more times and then I didn’t say the cue. She looked anyway, but just like the Simon Says game, Simon didn’t say “Where’s Steve?” so no food for that. Then back to cuing and feeding for when she did it.
Once she got that down, we didn’t need the clicker – that was just to tell her what I wanted in the first place. For years, we’d play hide and seek in the woods and Spoon would always be able to find him.
After the little clicker experiment and the teamwork I felt, popping her with a prong collar made me a little sick to my stomach. I tossed it in the trash. From that point forward, I’ve been doing reward-based training with my dogs and loving it. I even started a business in 2003 called Ahimsa Dog Training, and we use reinforcement for regular training, but also for big problems, like aggression. I picked the name “Ahimsa” because it’s a Buddhist doctrine of non-violence toward all living things. Punishment is so seductive that I wanted to pick a name that would keep me on the reward-based path.
I’ve since learned that you can’t really combine rewards and punishments, or you end up with ‘poisoned cues’ – so my instincts to trash that collar were right!
Look for more stories from reward-based dog trainers from around the world!
