An acquaintance sends me a link to a blog that she is writing about rescuing dogs. In it she laments the fact that many dogs are being returned because the owners are finding objects chewed by their new pets. While she does talk about management in her blog, in the end she offers up as her favorite technique for curtailing the chewing, a squirt bottle.
She had sent me a link to her blog with an invitation for feedback but when I emailed her and suggested that she used a lot of punishment (squirt bottle, bitter apple) for a behavior that could be completely managed, she became quite upset with me for suggesting that she was punishing behavior. To quote her directly “I don't view the squirt bottle as "punishment" but as a tool to be used and then the positive behavior reinforced. I prefer people use this method than spanking, flicking the nose, getting frustrated and giving the dog back to my rescue, which ironically enough, has occurred four times in the past two months.”
Don’t kid yourself, a squirt bottle is punishment. Anything that a dog will work to avoid is by definition punishment. Is it a tool? Yes, but so are shock collars, citronella collars, choke chains and prong collars. Have I ever used any of these things in training? Yes, I have, but I try not to use any kind of punishment except as an absolute last resort. And when I counsel clients about squirt bottles and the like, I don’t sugar coat them as “tools”. I tell them they are punishing their dog, pure and simple.
What I often confronted with in my line of work are people who expect that I will be able to come in and wave a magic wand and “poof” the jumping, the chewing, the running away, or the resource guarding will disappear. They want the problem behaviors to go away and they don’t want to have to work that hard to eliminate them. This is why the training programs that you watch on t.v are so appealing. Everything is resolved in the course of a half an hour.
This of course is untrue. It takes work to retrain the brain of an animal that has been rehearsing problem behaviors for a period of time. That’s why it’s so critical to spend the extra time that it takes to manage the animal early on to prevent it from ever having the opportunity to get into trouble. If a dog never discovers that the shoes taste good, chewing shoes will never become an issue. Lazy people reach for squirt bottles and choke chains.
Punishment works, there’s no doubt about it. And clearly we as a society condone it. It’s funny that we have a spectrum of punishment that is okay and that isn’t. To quote my blogging acquaintance again: “I am a trained MSW working with kids from 6-18, my training in animals comes from hands on work I have been doing, free of charge, for rescues for years.” My question to her was, “if you saw a kid who was about to do something you didn’t like, would you squirt him in the face”? Food for thought.
Next week I will write about what I counsel new or old dog owners to do with their pups to prevent bad things from happening around the house. And I won’t once recommend a squirt bottle.
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