#overly idealistic millienial

[gymnasioargos]

Hello fellow force-free trainers!

I wanted to introduce myself. I am CJ from Gymnasio Argos which is a company I founded in February of this year. I am a force-free trainer who is on break from my PhD in Chemistry.

If you want the details:

I have completed my coursework and my Qualifying Exam, which was a defense of a research proposal entirely of my own design. My defense included a closed-door session with a committee of experts in Chemistry who had full latitude to ask me any chemistry questions they would like (it was a grueling hour-long session), which was preceded by a public presentation and Q&A session that was widely announced, as is legally required. I have not yet completed my research requirements in order to receive my PhD (which isn’t to say I didn’t do research). I don’t know if I will yet or not. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes.

Moving on:

Like many of us, I have always had a gift with connecting to dogs. However, I am relatively new to the dog training scene. I have only been into dog training earnestly for about the past four years. I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve gone through many modality phases. I’ve been LIMA, Milan-esque, “balanced”, R+ force-free, and now I have my own spin on Bond-Based Choice Teaching*, which is also a force-free approach to dog training (or “dog education”, as I’d prefer to call it if I didn’t have to worry about SEO).

I don’t want to step on toes, but Bond-Based Choice Teaching was such a departure from everything I felt I knew about dog training that I feel incredibly lucky that I’m new to dog training. It took so much un-learning and revisioning that I couldn’t imagine trying to do it after a lifetime of understanding dog behavior through the lens of the Behaviorism most common among dog training.

I also feel very lucky for the training I received during my incomplete PhD. While Chemistry is an unrelated field, preparing for my Qualifying Exam taught me how to parse journal jargon and how to rank the epistemological** value of information. When I happened upon Jennifer Arnold’s Love Is All You Need, which is where I learned Bond-Based Choice Teaching (BBCT), I had the skill set to convert my incredulous reaction to fact-checking. Again, I don’t want to step on any toes, but I have yet to run into a dog trainer who is as up-to-date on research, empirical, and adaptable as Jennifer Arnold of Canine Assistants.

Regardless, I know that my approach as The Girl Who Talks To Dogs is unique and considering it is unsettling for all. It’s fine. It was for me, too. I won’t demand you consider it, but please know that Canine Assistants places 75-100 working dogs each year with a 95% success rate. It works.

However, if I could ask one thing of my fellow force-free trainers, it would be to note your own feelings about such a radically different approach. Does it seem uncomfortable and non-intuitive to you? (Yes.) Do you trust that it will work? (No.) Are you tempted to try to explain any success I’ve had with my approach within the framework of your own methodology? (Yes.) I’m familiar with the feeling as I’ve crossed over training philosophies several times.

I’m not pointing this out to sell you on anything. I do want to make a point about reaching out to punishment-inclusive trainers. They feel the same way about force-free as you do about The Girl Who Talks To Dogs. To punishment-inclusive trainers, force-free doesn’t seem like it will work. Many punishment-inclusive trainers believe force-free trainers have a “backroom” where we harshly punish our dogs. ...because they don’t believe force-free works. If you don’t believe an approach works, then it naturally follows that someone who claims success with it is obscuring information.

So, while we have ideas and deep sentiments about canine welfare, those aren’t particularly useful things to share. Punishment-inclusive trainers are torn by the cognitive dissonance of “wouldn’t that be nice” and “but this what I know; it is what I have to do”. This dichotomy is a perfect recipe for pushback. As an example, it is hypothesized that a similar element of dissonance is why vegans are regarded so poorly. Do you like to taunt vegans about bacon and meat? Do you feel a little attacked when someone declines a food you would eat with “no thank you, I’m vegan”?

If there’s anything I could change about force-free activism, it is the realization that no amount of science or moral appeals are going to “set them straight”. That sort of thing worked for us, but we were already inclined to consider force-free approaches. A recent study on owners of reactive dogs found that dog owners felt incompetent applying force-free techniques, that they didn’t trust force-free techniques would work, and that they were often incredibly desperate. There’s not a place for “this is abusive” in that perspective. Instead, I feel the burden is on us to make force-free widely accessible and enviable.

While I also struggle to restrain myself sometimes, I believe antagonism towards punishment-inclusive trainers only deepens their commitment to it. Who wants to hear that some stranger thinks they are abusive? It’s not healthy to worry so much about the opinions of hostile strangers. When I fail to restrain myself with punishment-inclusive trainers, I do my best to focus on what is effective and how I’ve personally addressed their challenges in a force-free manner. Does it mean I do some free work sometimes? Yep. If the goal is to reduce the overall utilization of punishment in training, then force-free needs to become accessible.

Which is a decent prompt for the niches I think BBCT fills.

1. First and foremost, all reinforcement training requires good timing. Research indicates that the response time to sustain a previously conditioned behavior is less than half a second. I was not able to find a study on the reaction speed a dog owner is capable of, but I was able to break down the neurological requirements to find an equivalent response time test. The Driver’s Break Reaction Time Test adequately measures the average person’s ability to recognize something unexpected during a task they do all the time, switch mental gears to respond, figure out an appropriate response, and then the speed of that response. The average response time was 0.9 seconds, with a quarter of people taking a full 1.2 seconds. Which was a really technical way of saying that I don’t think everyone is cutout to maintain a dog trained through reinforcement. I see BBCT as less technically demanding, which I believe gives it an advantage with dog owners who will struggle with reinforcement due to neurological limitations.

2. While many dog trainers find BBCT incredibly non-intuitive, those who are unfamiliar with formal dog training find it incredibly intuitive because it does not treat canine cognition as a black box. While they might be prone to naive anthropomorphization, we are learning more and more that informed anthropmorphism is highly appropriate. It is simply much easier to reach people when they get to be mostly right.

3. BBCT allows handlers to build the sort of relationship with dogs that we all dreamed of as kids. As far as building envy to encourage force-free handling, I can’t imagine a better motivation.

So, I guess, hello. My name is CJ. I have an unhealthy amount of formal education I don’t use and I have a lot of ideas. I hope I don’t offend you, but I do hope I’ve made you think. Let’s stop calling punishment-inclusive trainers abusive.

Please know that I am happy to engage in discussions so long as conversation remains levelheaded and that I am very excited at the prospect that you will chat with me. :)

*While Arnold’s approach also eschews obedience training and incorporates sentences with several parts of speech, cooperation over compliance, and yes/no questions, I am the only person I know who uses head gestures for real-time conversations with dogs using yes/no indications. I also really dislike “sit” and refuse to teach it, though Arnold teaches it to her dogs using a technique similar to Do As I Do called Like Me.

** My preferred term is “truthiness”, but I don’t want to come off too flippant. There really aren’t a lot of good words to explain this skill, so please forgive my word choice.