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Yes, you love your dog beyond all reason. But, some days, he can be wholly infuriating.
But as much as you want to, a new study says you might want to think before you yell at or physically punish your pet.
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Last year, research found positive punishment and negative reinforcement, also called aversive training, can negatively affect your dog’s mental health.
Researchers wrote:
Our results show that companion dogs trained using aversive-based methods experienced poorer welfare as compared to companion dogs trained using reward-based methods, at both the short- and the long-term level.
Specifically, dogs attending schools using aversive-based methods displayed more stress-related behaviours and body postures during training, higher elevations in cortisol levels after training, and were more ‘pessimistic’ in a cognitive bias task.
Aversive training has been studied before, but only on how it affected police and laboratory dogs with a focus on the use of shock collars.
To expand the research to companion dogs, biologist Ana Catarina Vieira de Castro of the Universidade do Porto in Portugal lead an international team on a new study.
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The team worked with two groups of dogs. One group was made up of 42 dogs recruited from three obedience schools that used treats and play as rewards. The other group of 50 dogs came from four schools that used yelling, physical manipulation and leash-pulling typically involved in aversive training.
For the first 15-minutes of three different training sessions, the dogs were filmed and had their salivas sampled to measure stress levels. The researchers took three saliva samples from each dog while they relaxed at home, as well as three samples after training.
The dog’s behavior was also noted for signs of stress during training, such as lip-licking, yawning, paw-raising and yelping.
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The dogs that showed the most signs of stress in both behavior and in their saliva samples were from the aversive training group. In comparison, the dogs in the reward based training were much more calm and composed. Their behavior showed far less stress and the coritsol levels in their saliva where closer to normal.
As for the longer term effects of aversive training, the researchers experimented with sausage snacks. One month after the initial assessments, 79 of the dogs were trained to find the bowl with the snack in one part of a room. If the bowl was in this spot, they would find the sausage. If it was on the other side of the room, then no snack. All the bowls smelled like sausage regardless of whether one was in there or not.
The bowls were placed in random spots around the room, then the dogs were observed as they searched for the bowl with the treat. If the dog ran up to the right bowl with enthusiasm, then it was noted the dog was confident in getting the snack. If the dog moved slowly and cautiously, then it showed a reluctance to be wrong.
The researchers found that the dogs from the reward-based training schools were much faster than the dogs who received aversive training in accomplishing the task of finding the snack.
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This suggests reward-based training is more effective. However, researchers acknowledged a part of this may come from the dogs’ previous experiences with rewards. A different outcome may be found if the experiment was set up as aversive-based training.
But, it also tells us that reward-based training can get results as fast as aversive training and with less stress to your best friend.
And, their mental health, like yours, is worth protecting.
