06/25/2021
Great information here!
But how should I respond in the moment?
The other day on a support group for positive reinforcement horse trainers, I saw a question from someone who had been bitten by her horse asking how she should have responded to the bite when it happened. This person was specifically looking for guidance as to how one could respond to a situation like that without resorting to punishment. Sadly, several people jumped in and started quoting supposed horse experts who advocated for hitting the horse as hard as possible – in fact one quote suggested having 3 seconds within which you should “try to kill the horse” and then after three seconds you make friends again and move on.
We regularly get asked about the correct response at the moment that a dog shows aggression. Understandably, people want to know what the best thing to do is when their dog snaps at them, has a scrap with another dog or rushes and barks at a stranger. The unfortunate part is that most people have been told that if they let their dog “get away with it”, they will have reinforced the behaviour and so there has to be a suitable punishment applied, so most people are really asking for the optimum punishment to make sure the dog learns his lesson.
What I am going to say may come as a surprise, but it is this: The moment of aggression is not the time when one resolves a behaviour problem of this nature. Nothing you do in that moment is likely to change what led up to the incident of aggression and prevent it from happening again. Think about it for a minute: How many “reactive” dogs that you have come across have ever stopped being “reactive” after another dog has bitten them, snapped at them, chased them or barked at them? I am willing to bet it is absolutely zero – in my 20 years of working with dogs, I have certainly never come across one. While we expect punishment in that moment to stop the dog from performing the behaviour again, it seems that in real life, this seldom happens.
Why would this be? Well, likely because of the following reasons:
1. An aggressive response is not something that happens in isolation – there is usually a chain of events and circumstances that leads up to the point where a dog resorts to using aggression to deal with a situation. The dog’s general mood and outlook on life develops over time, according to the environment the dog is in. Whether this mood is positive or negative depends on whether that environment meets the dog’s needs to feel safe and content or not. The dog’s past experiences with a specific trigger will determine how the dog feels about that trigger and influence the dog’s response to that trigger. How the dog feels on the day will influence how well the dog is able to process and respond to an event at that time – if a lot of unpleasant things have happened that day already, the dog’s emotional resources will be depleted. Punishment will not negate all these underlying factors.
2. For punishment to be connected to a behaviour, it must occur within 1 second of the behaviour. 1 second – think about it. The chances of applying punishment so that it is connected to the behaviour is almost zero.
3. Operant conditioning (learning about the consequences of one’s own behaviour) is not the only type of learning taking place in any given situation. Classical conditioning happens all the time too i.e. learning what different stimuli or events in the environment predict. If a dog is bitten by another dog, it is far more likely that the dog learns that other dogs are a predictor of being bitten, than the dog learns that barking or lunging at another dog causes the other dog to bite. This explains why reactive dogs do not become less reactive when dogs “punish” their behaviour with aggression of their own. The nasty thing that happens, rather than teach the dogs something about their own behaviour, teaches them that the thing they already had a negative emotional reaction to, really is nasty after all and the aggressive response often escalates.
So how does this all relate to how we should respond to our dogs if they do end up “using” aggression? Well, it tells us that it is a waste of time trying to work out the best punishment for the behaviour, because punishing our dogs in that moment is really NOT going to achieve anything. In fact, we will likely only exacerbate all the circumstances that led to the dog using aggression in the first place: we will be adding another unpleasant event to their day which will create further fear and stress, we will likely be creating even more negative associations with the exact situation they reacted to and we will be creating fear and distrust of us, which will, in the long run, make them generally feel less safe and content in their daily lives. In all likelihood you will simply be adding more fuel to the fire.
Now, I do understand that we are human and we also have a fight or flight response to situations. Sometimes we may lash out without thinking if we get hurt or get a fright. However, understanding that punishment is not going to help resolve the issue or prevent our dogs from using aggression again in the future, can help us to inhibit that instinctive emotional reaction, so it is good to think about these things. Knowledge is power, as they say!
So how do we respond in the moment when our dogs use an aggressive response? The answer is to try and remain as calm as possible and focus on getting the dog out of the situation as safely and quickly as possible, so that there is no opportunity for the dog to repeat the behaviour. That’s it. That is really all we can do at the time. Get your dog to safety or remove whatever triggered the response. Give your dog time to calm down. Give yourself time to calm down. You are not going to resolve the problem in that moment, so forget about trying to teach your dog anything right then and there.
Once everyone is safe and calm again, that is the time to start assessing what happened and working out what needs to be done to prevent it from happening again. And this will usually be a long and complex process where the dog’s needs, lifestyle, past experiences and general frame of mind will be examined thoroughly so that the root causes and circumstances that led to the incident can be addressed properly. In the meantime, management is your friend: Don’t put your dog in that situation again – remember that the more a behaviour is rehearsed the stronger it will become (surviving the situation is internally reinforcing) and the quicker it will generalise. Protecting your dog from triggers is the number one priority, until you are able to address underlying causes.
