09/12/2024
I often say to my clients, that one thing trainers can’t do…. Is train out instincts.
WHEN CLICKER TRAINING FAILED
In yesterday’s post, I detailed the work of Keller and Marian Breland who not only discovered "shaping" and bridging stimulus, but also invented clicker training.
Keller and Marian Breland trained animal acts featured in movies, circuses, museums, fairs, zoos and amusement parks across the nation, and also trained many of the trainers that worked in these facilities as well.
By 1951, the Brelands had trained thousands of animals from dozens of species, and in an article for American Psychologist, they said they thought rewards-based clicker training might work on any animal to train just about anything.
And then something happened.
They noticed that clicker training was, in certain circumstances, beginning to fail in ways that they could no longer overlook.
In a 1961 paper entitled, ‘The Misbehavior of Organisms,’ Keller and Marian Breland described their first experience with the failure of reward-based operant conditioning.
It seems that when working with pigs, chickens and raccoons, the animals would often learn a trick, but then begin to drift away from the learned behavior and towards more instinctive, unreinforced, foraging actions.
What was going on?
Put simply, instinct was raising its inconvenient head.
Though Skinner and his disciples had always maintained that performance was driven by external rewards or punishments, here was clear evidence that there was an internal code that could not always be ignored.
The Brelands wrote:
“These egregious failures came as a rather considerable shock to us, for there was nothing in our background in behaviorism to prepare us for such gross inabilities to predict and control the behavior of animals with which we had been working for years.... [T]he diagnosis of theory failure does not depend on subtle statistical interpretations or on semantic legerdemain - the animal simply does not do what he has been conditioned to do.”
The Brelands did not overstate the problem, nor did they quantify it. They simply stated a fact: instinct existed, and sometimes it bubbled up and over-rode trained behaviors.
Clearly, every species had different instincts, and just as clearly, a great deal of animal training could be done without ever triggering overpowering instinct. Still, the Brelands noted,
“After 14 years of continuous conditioning and observation of thousands of animals, it is our reluctant conclusion that the behavior of any species cannot be adequately understood, predicted, or controlled without knowledge of its instinctive patterns, evolutionary history, and ecological niche.”
What does this have to do with dogs?
Quite a lot.
You see a small but vocal group of clicker trainers believe everything a dog does is learned by external rewards, and internal drives are nothing but "old school" fiction.
While the Brelands argued that a species could not be adequately controlled without “knowledge of its instinctive patterns, evolutionary history, and ecological niche," the most extreme militants in the world of clicker training now seek to minimize and disavow the very nature and history of dogs.
Dog packs? There are no such things, we are told.
Dominance? It does not exist in feral dogs or in wolves, and never mind the experts who disagree.
Prey drive? Not too much said about that!
Of course, instinctive behaviors and drives do not disappear simply because they are inconvenient.
As Keller and Marian Breland put it,
“[A]lthough it was easy to banish the Instinctivists from the science during the Behavioristic Revolution, it was not possible to banish instinct so easily.”
Of course, one must be careful to qualify the role of instinct.
Yes, dogs have instincts, but the history of dog breeding has largely been about reducing instinctive drives. As a consequence, most breeds have instinctive drives that are sufficiently attenuated that they are not much of an impediment to basic rewards-based training.
That said, not all dog breeds are alike. Not every dog is a blank slate, as the owner of any herding dog or game-bred terrier will tell you. Prey drive does not disappear because you want it to. Many problematic behaviors in dogs -- especially behaviors in hard-wired working dogs that are being raised as pets -- are self-reinforcing behaviors that express themselves without any external reinforcement at all.
Clicker training, the Brelands remind us, cannot solve everything.
Is rewards-based training the most important tool in any trainer’s box of tricks and methods?
Absolutely. There is not much debate there.
But the Brelands remind us that dogs do not come to the trainer as a tabula rasa, nor should we think of all dog breeds as being more or less the same, or that all responses are equally conditionable to all stimuli.
Dogs and other animals, it turns out, are a bit more complicated that white rats, and the real world is not a laboratory.
In the wild and on the farm, animals have managed to learn, all by themselves, since the Dawn of Time and long before clickers came on the scene.
How did they do that? Does the real world have as much to teach us as the lab? Keller and Marian Breland thought it did.
