THE TOOLBOX FOR BUILDING A GREAT FAMILY DOG
by Terry Ryan
DO OVER DOGS - GIVE YOUR DOG A SECOND CHANCE FOR A FIRST CLASS LIFE
by Pat Miller
FOCUSED PUPPY
by Deb Jones and Judy Keller
MINDING YOUR DOG BUSINESS - A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO BUSINESS SUCCESS FOR DOG PROFESSIONALS
by Veronica Boutelle and Rikke Jorgensen
UNLOCKING THE CANINE ANCESTRAL DIET - HEALTHIER DOG FOOD THE ABC WAY
by Steve Brown
DOMINANCE THEORY AND DOGS, 2ND EDITION
by James O'Heare
CAUTIOUS CANINE - HOW TO HELP DOGS CONQUER THEIR FEARS, 2ND EDITION
by Patricia McConnell
KIDS AND DOGS - A PROFESSIONAL'S GUIDE TO HELPING FAMILIES
by Colleen Pelar
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Lee Charles Kelley
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Posts: 12
Joined: Feb 2010
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Thu March 11, 2010 9:57 AM
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I wasn't critiquing the way these or any other wild animals are trained to accept being handled by veterinarians. I was critiquing the idea that operant conditioning is the "gold standard" for training orcas (and dolphins) to do tricks for treats. It's a simple observation. Captivity creates stress. Operant conditioning isn't geared to reduce stress, but to reinforce "desired behaviors." As a result, when these animals are stressed, they stop cooperating, and sometimes they go "berserk."
There are two viable alternatives: don't keep these animals in small tanks. That's not an option for SeaWorld - who make their money on the wow-factor of the tricks their captive animals perform - because the more freedom these animals have, the less likely they are to be influenced by operant conditioning. The other alternative is to recognize that what actually reinforces behavior is not treats, praise, head rubs, whistles, or access to toys, it's always, at the most essential level, the reduction of internal tension or stress. It's easy for us to fool ourselves into believing that what we normally think of as reinforcers are working because we see a smooth data curve in terms of the overall results. But when your subjects stop cooperating, or kill someone, it's time to re-evaluate the efficacy of, not to mention the underlying principles behind, what you're doing.
The tendency with most animal trainers who claim to use behavioral science techniques is they sometimes forget that a reinforcement is not an object, event, or marker; it's essentially a kind of mathematical function. And mathematical functions don't reduce tension or stress. Praise does, sometimes. So do food rewards, affectionate contact, and access to toys. But when these things are actually operating as reinforcers it's always because they've done something to reduce an animal's internal tension or stress, not because they, themselves, are inherently reinforcing.
LCK
Edited: Thu March 11, 2010 at 10:03 AM by Lee Charles Kelley
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Lee Charles Kelley
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Posts: 12
Joined: Feb 2010
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Thu March 11, 2010 11:54 AM
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I would say that there's a huge difference, especially within the context of my article. Just to be clear on what that context is: operant conditioning techniques may be successful at reducing stress in certain cases - at least temporarily - but because of the fact that they're not specifically designed for that purpose, they sometimes fail, as in the case of the entire "pod" at SeaWorld being uncooperative on the day of Tillie's attack, and, of course, the unfortunate attack itself.
And remember, in my article I was responding to the idea/hype that "positive/motivational" techniques are the "gold standard" for animal training. If they're the gold standard, and if they're "motivational," why weren't the whales motivated to cooperate that day? And what exactly motivated Tilikum to kill his trainer? Seriously, what kind of gold standard is this?
LCK
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Ollie and Augie
Senior Member
Posts: 823
Joined: Apr 2006
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Thu March 11, 2010 12:52 PM
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Quote
Originally posted by: Lee Charles Kelley
But I know that the place to start would be to see behavioral science for what it really is, not for what we'd like it to be.
Again, you yourself admitted that the science (the data, the evidence) is in fact behind operant conditioning.
I've yet to read/hear and OC trainer call OC training a quick or simple fix, or claim the process doesn't take work or patience, or that trial and error is never involved. Calling operant conditioning the "gold standard" of dolphin or whale training simply means it's the most effective method they've found, not that results happen overnight, or that people can't screw it up. That's your strawman, not a claim the OC crowd has made.
And I do think they screwed it up at SeaWorld, at least in this case. Keeping these animals in enclosures that are too small, putting them in a show despite very clear indicators that the animals were seriously agitated. No training system in the world is going to prevent problems if you set it up to fail, and no OC trainer I've ever met or read about would advise continuing to work with an animal that was over threshold. Quite the opposite in fact.
-------------------------
aka "Beth"
- but I AM a Dr. Vickery fan 
"Some people just need to be bitten"
-MMC, CPDT
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Shiplesp
Senior Member
Posts: 3235
Joined: Jan 2004
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Thu March 11, 2010 1:30 PM
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Ted Turner is famous for saying that the reason we train dogs with positive punishment and negative reinforcement is because we can. Because we control their ability to escape such punishment so they must bend to our wills if they want to survive. That is our shame.
The Navy, on the other hand, has never been called "soft" in its position on training. Yet they train their dolphins using positive reinforcement because dolphins CAN escape. They are worked in open water and if you punish dolphins, they will leave. There goes many, many thousands of dollars worth of investment. Their dolphins go out into the open ocean for training and voluntarily return to their pens. Not because they are forced to or they have nowhere else to go, but because it has been reinforced as a wonderful place to be. Kathy Sdao has said that it amazed her no end that the dolphins would work, willingly, for little chunks of defrosted herring when they could easily get fresh fish on their own. Pretty amazing training, I think. Training whose reliability is a matter of life and death, a matter of national security, and they use bits of fish. Go figure.
Susan
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Lee Charles Kelley
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Posts: 12
Joined: Feb 2010
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Thu March 11, 2010 1:36 PM
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Quote
Originally posted by: Ollie and Augie
Again, you yourself admitted that the science (the data, the evidence) is in fact behind operant conditioning.
Yes, but you're taking that statement out of context. Here's what I wrote: "Evolutionary biologist Ray Coppinger, when discussing the flaws inherent to the dominance paradigm, as applied to pet dogs, said that even though the alpha theory held prominence within the scientific community for a very long time, 'No one really believed in it. The data wasn't there.' Here we have the opposite. The clinical data is overwhelmingly on the side of operant conditioning. And yet time after time it proves itself to be critically ineffective, and in some cases inhumane."
Experimental data isn't always valid. In fact, Evelyn Fox Keller, a professor of history and the philosophy of science at MIT, put it this way: "As a theoretical physicist, I had been trained to trust only mathematical and logical arguments and to view experimental evidence as fallible." Most behavioral scientists believe the opposite. From my perspective, there are too many errors and too much confirmation bias built in to this particular discipline. And, as Noam Chomsky has said, there's more of a tendency for the social sciences to be influenced by ideology. This couldn't be clearer than with how behavioral science presents itself in dog training circles.
The truth is, I was once an avid Pryorite, and this was long before she became a "dog trainer." I also studied Skinner, and I mean deeply; I read nearly everything he wrote. I became convinced that behavioral science was the best approach to training dogs and solving their behavioral problems. But as I applied its "scientific principles" to my dog training practice it gradually became clearer and clearer that something important, something vital was missing. And I'm not someone who takes these things lightly, either. I mean I studied these principles rigorously, I worked my ass off, and still came to the painful yet inevitable conclusion that "the emperor had no clothes."
Quote
Calling operant conditioning the "gold standard" of dolphin or whale training simply means it's the most effective method they've found.
Perhaps, but it can also be an indicator of complacency, a way of convincing ourselves, or even kidding ourselves that we don't need to look any further. Maybe that's how you and others here feel. Not me. I want something better for our doggies.
LCK
Edited: Thu March 11, 2010 at 1:38 PM by Lee Charles Kelley
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Lee Charles Kelley
Member
Posts: 12
Joined: Feb 2010
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Thu March 11, 2010 2:51 PM
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Quote
Originally posted by: Shiplesp
The Navy ... has never been called "soft" in its position on training. Yet they train their dolphins using positive reinforcement because dolphins CAN escape. They are worked in open water and if you punish dolphins, they will leave. There goes many, many thousands of dollars worth of investment. Their dolphins go out into the open ocean for training and voluntarily return to their pens. Not because they are forced to or they have nowhere else to go, but because it has been reinforced as a wonderful place to be. Kathy Sdao has said that it amazed her no end that the dolphins would work, willingly, for little chunks of defrosted herring when they could easily get fresh fish on their own. Pretty amazing training, I think. Training whose reliability is a matter of life and death, a matter of national security, and they use bits of fish. Go figure.
Since the Navy's success rate is pretty low, somewhere between 15 - 20%, my first question would be why don't the other 80 - 85% of these dolphins become trained? The second question would be, with such a low success rate, how can you or anyone else be sure that the fish rewards are the deciding factor? Maybe those 20% are like border collies; they just really like having a job to do.
I'm not against "positive reinforcement." What I'm against is this kind of rose-colored-glasses attitude toward what can actually be a very negative, and even harmful experience for some dogs*. Of the academic behaviorists I've discussed this with, some have said that in their world, they enjoy a good laugh over how animal trainers misuse clicker training and misinterpret behavioral science. One told me that, in his opinion, even Karen Pryor doesn't understand it completely. And yet we expect our clients to "get" it?
Go figure.
LCK
* "The Negative Effects of Positive Reinforcement"
Edited: Thu March 11, 2010 at 2:54 PM by Lee Charles Kelley
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schmoo
Senior Member
Posts: 904
Joined: Oct 2006
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Fri March 12, 2010 3:39 PM
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LCK - I read your link in your first post, and in your article you seem to be confusing or mixing together operant conditioning with the philosophy of a certain style of training (positive reinforcement training) and mixing/confusing these two with the general field of behavioral science.
Can you state more clearly how you believe that operant conditioning is the cause or leading factor in the tragedy at Sea World?
operant conditioning is a scientific principle and is thus neither humane nor inhumane, it is just what is, like the laws of physics. And like the laws of physics, operant conditioning is at play whether by our design or not.
and obviously is more to animal welfare than just the way in which the animal is trained. The animal's overall daily environment and lifestyle are big factors too, e.g. a shelter may implement a +R training program for the shelter dogs but that doesn't mean the dogs' overall state of welfare is high because the kennel environment just has too many stressors and the dogs may still develop neurotic of aggressive behavior. That doesn't mean the +R training program caused those problems. Those problems occurred in spite of it. If anything, a +R training program may help to improve the animals' welfare but is not the sole determinator of it.
Furthermore, the "originators" of systematic animal training using operant conditioning principles (the Brelands and Baileys) never themselves claimed that operant conditioning is the only way to explain or control all behavior. Instincts and emotions also drive behavior, not just learned consequence. See their article "the Misbehavior of Organisms", reproduced here
http://psychclassics.asu.edu/Breland/misbehavior.htm
the original is here http://www.niu.edu/user/tj0dgw1/pdf/learning/breland.pdf
Those who follow the philosophy of +R training dont' always use operant conditioning. They also use, for example, desensitization and classical counterconditioning which is not operant conditioning. This is because we acknowledge that there are situations where operant conditioing gets overridden for example by situations that elicit strong emotions in the animal and behaviors are easier to modify by classical conditioning than by operant conditioning.
finally, I see the "pushing exercise" on Neil Sattin's website as very much an application of operant conditioning using the +R quadrant, thus lending even more credence to the use of operant conditioning in particular +R. It is the animal, not the trainer, who determines what is and isn't a reinforcer. A dog in prey drive doesn't find food reinforcing, so food doesn't work as a reinforcer in that situation. But things that satisfy the prey drive (like tug) are reinforcing to the dog in that situation, thus they work as a reinforcer. And because the behavior that is reinforced tends to repeat, this allows us to gain some control over the dog's behavior in a prey drive situation. This is the essence of operant conditioning.
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Cupie1223
Senior Member
Posts: 171
Joined: Dec 2008
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Fri March 12, 2010 4:25 PM
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I really don't see the point in arguing about whether oc works or whether it doesn't. Without a doubt it works. Is it the "gold standard"? Well, I suppose that since there are really no other proven models with scientific evidence to back them up I guess it is safe to say that yes, it is the "gold standard". To borrow Susan's example from another thread, is gravity the "gold standard" for keeping our feet on the ground? Until there's another scientifically backed theory to prove that it's not, then yes, it is. And I guess you could say that gravity fails sometimes as well. I'm looking at a helium balloon right now that seems to "prove" that gravity has failed. But upon further inspection, I know that it's the helium compound that is causing the balloon to rise, not gravity's failure. So it is with oc. If the "failures" are looked at, there is always a reason why that can be explained. In the case of dogs, there are many reasons why it can "fail". Most are due to trainer error ie., not noticing the dogs subtle signs of being over threshold etc...
As far as the SeaWorld incident, I personally think that these wild, (and the key word here is wild, as in not domesticated like our dogs are) would be better served if left in their natural habitat. Again, even with the death of this trainer, I don't see that as "proof" that oc has failed. And I have to wonder if in fact, the other orca's were distressed enough that day to have their shows cancelled, and Tillikum was in the same state, why was he still being worked with that day? Regardless, he was. Seems to me another case of trainer error. Surely, he did not mistake her pony tail for a toy. He is and will always be a wild, again not domesticated animal, who is unpredictable as all animals including humans can be but with much larger stakes. Was he frustrated at his living situation? Since he can't speak and all any of us can really do is guess, my guess would be probably. Will oc ever take instinct out of the equation? No, but who says it does or should? That really isn't the point. And most trainers who are good at what they do use instinct in their training, which varies greatly with each individual.
Just to review what OC is, (and it is really quite simple in theory): Operant Conditioning is a process for changing behaviors by reinforcing or punishing a subject each time an action is performed until the subject associates the action with either pleasure or distress. This is Webster's definition which I think does sum it up well. All things in life with all animals including humans, are either associated with pleasure or distress. I might include indiference as well. And with energy theory, all things are associated with pleasure or distress as well. Energy theorists just choose not to label it as such. For instance, using the pushing technique is in fact, regardless of how you choose to label it, oc. The dog is doing this behavior because of the reinforcement... period. The reinforcement may well be the release of built up stress (or not, again, since the dog can't speak we can only assume) but is also most definately the association of the handful of food the dog is receiving. The same with goes for tug. The payoff or reinforcement is the game.
There has been much study of play with our domesticated dogs lately and studies show the effectiveness of play, which is very much associated with the prey drive. Also a great way to get rid of pent up energy as well as build a relationship with the dog. Do dogs need energy/stress release? Without a doubt and if you allow them to have that, your oc training sessions work even faster and are more efficient. One does not exclude the other. And oc does not ask the animal to suppress its instinctual drives, needs or desires. In fact, it does the opposite. If done right, it works with these drives.
I am sorry I ever started with my original thread about the pushing excersize. It is clear that NDT's choose not to really see what is happening. Not matter how you cut the cake, it still boils down to oc. My interest in NDT started with a shelter dog who was not making any progress after several months of work. I was looking for that magic pill and I unfortunately didn't find it. When I watched Neil Sattin's dvd, I can't tell you the disappointment I felt. What I saw was exactly how to do pushing and also how to use tug games but the principle's behind it were no different than anything else I've done. Just more oc at work. Talking further to Mr. Sattin about Prince in particular, he suggested that likely I would not make progress with him because of the stress levels in the shelter. So even NDT was not going to help according to him.
I know very little about Karen Pryor but I do know that clicker training works also. All the clicker does is mark the behavior and buy you a second or two to reinforce. There's no magic in it. It's just another tool, an effective one, but nonetheless, just a tool. I don't use it often because not all the trainers at the shelter use it and we try to use a protocol of consistency with the dogs. Though, I have taught long times targeting or something above and beyond basics with it. The point is, some NDT's react as though it is some evil device. It's not, anymore than a tug toy is, which is also just another tool.
Just a quick anecdote about wild animals, reliability and oc. Recently, my husband and I went to Grand Caymen and we went on an excursion to swim with the sting rays. We went on a boat several miles out and stopped. When we stopped there were no sting rays in sight. As people got in the water the sting rays slowly started showing up. After about 10 minutes there were more than 100 of them surrounding us. Not only surrounding us, but rubbing against us, interacting and when we put our arms out straight in front of us, they layed on our arms. Why do you suppose these wild animals did this? Could it be that they have been reinforced repeatedly by the boat captains feeding them? I suppose it must be since this outfit counts on these wild sting rays to show up three times a day for the 50 people they take out at a time and charge $90 a pop. It don't think there is any other explanation. There is not energy theory going on here, just plain old oc at work.
Laura
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