Pulling Is An Instinctual Behavior and A New Collar Won't Help

Martingales, choke chains, harnesses, and head collars. These are just some of the tools that I’ve seen people use to get their dogs to walk loose leash. I even read on a dog training forum yesterday that someone likes to wrap the leash around their dog. (Note: when I read these things, I won’t be posting the link to where I read. I don’t want to start a witch hunt for the person.) While some of these tools are arguably more inhumane than others (when used incorrectly!) they all have the same thing in common: they don’t teach a dog to walk loose leash.

What they do is put a bandage on a stab wound. Sure you can’t see the problem anymore, but you haven’t actually done anything to fix the problem. The problem will still be there because it’s not a problem to the dog. Pulling on leash is instinctual and letting it happen is a reward.

Try this experiment. When your dog is standing next you to, with one finger, push into your dog’s ribs. Your dog will push back against you with some amount of force. Puppies will do this before they’ve even had a leash and collar attached to them. Because this is an instinctual behavior, every time the dog performs it, it is rewarded and will then continue to do it even more than before.

The special equipment and wraps and anything else will not unteach an instinctual behavior. Proper training and reward is what will replace (NOT get rid of) an instinctual behavior. This is the same reason why it is impossible to say if even the kindest dog won’t bite. You cannot remove instinct from a dog. You can only make other behaviors more desirable to perform.

Using a special collar also does not teach anything if you keep walking forward. The reward for pulling is forward progress. That’s why dogs will choke themselves out on these (most of the time. some of them of course have their place.) useless special training collars. Even though they are choking themselves, it’s more rewarding to move forward than it is punishing to get choked.

It’s a gross misunderstanding of how any animal, including people, learns to put a choke chain or martingale on a dog and expect it to walk loose leash. Not only that, but it always seems to be that the dog’s handler feels a sense of retribution from choking their dog for doing a behavior that the handler doesn’t like. Even though the handler never taught the dog the right thing to do in the first place.

To summarize, special training collars do not replace actual training because they do not teach or unteach anything. And often times indicate, to me at least, laziness in training and frustration in the handler.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave one here, on my Facebook, or shoot me an email at Michael@concentricdog.com

Human Projection of Morals onto Dogs Revisited

I’ve touched upon the idea of dogs doing good and bad before. In that post I was more focused on how people project their own moral system onto their dogs. In this post, I want to focus more on the personification of animals in the media. Most notably, two big examples lately, the bear that pulls a crow out of water and a dog splashing water on a fish.

Here is the first video I want to cover, the one of the bear pulling the crow from the water

Only the first 2 minutes of this video are relevant. The first thing I noticed was in the description of the video. The person who posted it says, “even animals can break away from instincts.” I think this expresses the general sentiment most people have while watching this. They get warm fuzzies from watching wild animals befriend each other. While I’m no expert in bear behavior, and nor am I going to pretend to be, there are certain things we can take from this video that applies to most animals.

The most important thing I noticed was that the bear was eating before the “rescue efforts” started. And the entire habitat the bear was in also had food coating the ground. To me, this indicates the beginning of meal time. With the abundance of food and the eating before and after the rescue, the bear seems hungry and hasn’t finished its meal yet. So far the bear hasn’t strayed away from instinct. If hungry, then eat. It’s a fairly simple recipe.

This raises the question of why the bear is bothering with the crow. Following the same train of thought as the previous paragraph, I think the bear is just hungry. A skim of information about bears online finds many sources agree that bears are not active predators (when they do find food from meat). Seeing a crow flopping around, defenseless, the bear probably sees this as an opportunity to eat something different than what the keepers provide, which is most likely boring to the bear. It’s simply a matter of opportunity.

In the same vein as boredom, another possible explanation is that the bear was playing with the crow. Zoos often run into the problem of entertaining their wildlife. As soon as the bear pulls the crow out, it stops moving and play has ended. It’s no longer rewarding (read: fun) for the bear to keep messing with the crow. That’s why so many species of animals have a ‘play dead’ behavior.

The next video is one in which a dog is splashing water on a fish. With all of the fish around, it seems as though the setting is at a fish market or a dock.

Here is the video:

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The comments are all related to how much people like dogs more than humans, or how this animal has a heart of gold. But in reality, this dog’s heart is as full as its stomach. The dog could not possibly know that fish die when taken out of water. That’s orders of logic beyond what I dog can do. And if the dog did know that fish die out of water, why would the dog care about it? What reward would the dog get for “saving” the fish, as opposed to eating it? In this instance of an animal “saving” another, just like with the bear, the dog is simply trying to secure food.

(NOTE: There is evidence suggesting that animals can be altruistic. The evolution of altruism is a fascinating subject, but I won’t be discussing it in my blog because I do not feel it has much to offer in explaining dog behavior.)

What we see the dog doing is attempting to bury the fish to eat later. He’s either full at that moment, or understands the scarcity of resources in his current environment. Once again, the animal in question is not going outside of instinctual behaviors. The dog is totally within the confines of the “if hungry, then eat” explanation of behavior.

I realize some of this can be a buzzkill. It’s nice to believe our dogs are capable of showing a human level of compassion, but without a bigger brain, the ability to have complex emotions is not something a dog has (though who knows what future research will show).

It may seem unfortunate that almost every single behavior our dogs do is for food, but when we try to speak their language, instead of getting them to speak ours, it actually encourages a stronger relationship with your dog. Everything I just explained is essentially the premise behind positive reinforcement training. And every time I talk about positive reinforcement training, I always explain that it helps create a bond with your dog. That understanding is how you form a family with your dog involved.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave them here, on my Facebook, or email me at Michael@concentricdog.com