The Relationship Between Punishment and Aggression
The internet—and social media in particular—is full of wildly divergent opinions on how to train dogs. Some sites, channels, and individuals push “purely positive” training, others advocate for “balance,” and still others for “dominance.” It seems sometimes that there are as many opinions out there as there are trainers and owners.
However, quite a bit of behavioral science has been done since Skinner wrote his influential The Behavior of Organisms in 1938, and the work from the last thirty or so years has largely confirmed a couple of key ideas that can benefit dog owners and trainers. If you are not an avid consumer of canine behavior research, you can simply listen to what the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior has to say on the subject. These are the folks that study the issues, have the training and expertise to evaluate the data, and work on the front lines with the most challenging dog.s Don’t take the word of a TV trainer or a TikTok star over the research and insights of real veterinary behaviorists!
That brings me to today’s subject: there is a strong correlation between dogs who are trained with aversives and dogs who show aggressive behavior. Contemporary dog trainers push owners to avoid yelling, hitting, leash corrections, e-collars, and other dog training tools that involve pain, discomfort, or intimidation, not just because we love dogs and those things aren't nice. We mainly push people to avoid those things because we see the very real consequences when dogs sometimes become reactive and aggressive. There are many causes of aggression in dogs, and obviously not all dogs trained with aversive tools become aggressive, but there is abundant research demonstrating an increased risk of aggression when dogs are trained with intimidation, discomfort, or pain.
I can't tell you how often I have to encourage a client not to yank up on the leash and yell "no" when their dog stares at another dog and then barks. They want him to stop it—and fair enough, he ought to—so they punish him for it by using a stern voice (intimidation) and a tug on the collar (an unpleasant sensation). However, while some dogs might learn to stop the behavior when subjected to leash and voice corrections, the handler isn't really addressing the fact that the dog is nervous, energized, or possibly even afraid when he's barking. In fact, more often than not, the behavior actually becomes worse, because the dog is barking out of a kind of anxiety, and the owner is showing the dog he is absolutely right to be anxious. After all, if you're anxious already, wouldn't it make you more anxious if somebody yanked on your neck and yelled at you?
Instead, we work on building a relationship where you learn to catch the dog when he looks back up at you, and you reward him. He begins to learn that if he gets nervous, he can look at you, and you'll do something calm and nice. You work to create a positive feedback loop so your dog learns that you are a source of safety and trustworthiness. Over time, through repetition and reinforcement, this becomes a habit that runs deep enough to overcome nearly any situation. Instead of seeing another dog and thinking “I’m not sure about that other dog, and I’m a little afraid, and when this happens, I get yanked on the neck,” the dog thinks “I’m not sure about that other dog, let me check in with mom, and when this happens, I get a cookie.”
As trainers, we have to get out of the habit of doing things that are uncomfortable, intimidating, or even painful to dogs. It’s just not sporting to punish a dog in that manner for misbehaving when it's often a lack of understanding of context that makes the dog misbehave, but it goes beyond the fact that it's not fair. It's also counterproductive and even dangerous, and it stands to reason that the more you rely on intimidation and discomfort, the more you run the risk of creating fear, aggression, and other truly serious problems.
So while it might seem to make sense to be "old school" and use collar corrections, prongs, chokes, e-collars, and rolled up newspapers to punish behaviors you don't like, the more research that's done, the more we learn how counterproductive or even dangerous those tools are. Modern trainers don't just recommend dog-friendly training because we're froofy hippies who think dogs are people. In fact, many of us used those more old-fashioned methods back when they were the best tools we knew of at the time.
But we know better now, and we have methods available to us that are nicer, more effective at addressing the behavior, and carry lower risks of side effects like increased aggression or reduced trust. In fact, in this study, the found that intimidating a dog or using discomfort to shape behavior can double—yes, double in this study—a dog's chances of showing aggressive behavior towards strangers, and triple a dog's chances of showing aggressive behavior towards a family member. This study does not prove that such punishments always cause aggression, but they underscore the concern in an ever-growing body of scientific literature that dogs who are punished in this fashion are more likely to develop reactive and aggressive behaviors than dogs who are trained through more progressive, dog-friendly means.