Aranda Dog Training

THE PROBLEM WITH FEAR BASED PUNISHMENT.
YOU CAN’T PUNISH FEAR OUT OF A DOG
So often when a dog has aggression issues dog owners and some trainers attempt to correct the behavior with punishment. However, if the aggression is motivated by fear, stress or anxiety, punishment will seldom or never work.
Let me lay the foundation about my point by talking about reflexes.

Physiological Reflexes
As you know, reflexes are involuntary. The Dr. taps you just right on your knee and it will jerk up and you can’t stop it. That’s a reflex. Come out of the movie theater where it’s dark and into the sunlight your eyes are going to dilate and you can’t stop that, even for a million dollars. Again, reflexes are involuntary.

Psychological Reflexes
Now let’s talk about Psychological Reflexes. According to the literature emotions are reflexes. In other words, emotions are involuntary.

Some emotional reflexes are Conditioned!
Examples of Conditioned Emotional Reflexes:
Conditioned Pleasure:
When a cat is eating tuna fish the emotion will be pleasure, not fear. Pleasure is an emotional reflex elicited by tasty food. Pair the can opener with the tuna fish two or three times, and through Pavlovian Classical Conditioning, you will condition the emotion pleasure to the sound of the can opener. Again, this conditioning is involuntary.

Conditioned Punishment:
When the dog hits the boundary of the invisible fence he will get punished with painful shock. Now the Emotional Reflex with painful punishment will always be Fear, never pleasure.
Fear is an emotional reflex; it’s involuntary elicited by punishment. The first time the dog hears the warning beep before he gets shocked it means absolutely nothing. But after pairing the beep with the actual shock two or three times, you condition the emotion fear to the beep.

FLIGHT & FIGHT
Fear, an emotional reflex, may elicit the Flight & Fight responses.
Flight & Flight are genetically programed survival responses that come into play with fear-base situations.
Let’s say you have a dog that is afraid of men. Most dogs that are afraid of men, given the option, will move away (flight). The flight is a genetically programmed survival response, instinct!
However, if dogs have no flight option, or they perceive they have no flight option, they may use the other genetically programed survival response Fight and that’s instinct!
Now that we have established that all emotions are reflexes let’s talk about the problem with punishing fear-based aggression.

FEAR BASED AGGRESSION
The aggression is motivated by fear. We already established the emotional reflex with painful punishment is fear. Keep in mind that the dog is already afraid. Consequently, what people are doing when they punish a fear-based behavior is they are actually Conditioning MORE FEAR to men through Pavlovian Classical Conditioning, which is learning by association.
“But Ted, the aggression stopped when I punished”
Now here is what’s really happening. When you punish fear-based behavior, it may stop the aggressive display at that moment, and people may think that the punishment is working. But the aggression keeps coming back and you punish again and again trying to stop the fear-base aggressive behavior. If it was really working, then why does the aggressive behavior keep coming back?

What’s happening here is that when you punish the fear-based aggression, you are punishing the SYMPTOM of the aggressive problem. You are not getting to the ROOT CAUSE of the aggressive behavior, which is the emotion fear of men. With punishment you may get temporary suppression of the behavior, but it keeps coming back because you are not getting to the CAUSE of the aggression, which is fear.

I like to use human analogies and metaphors so that this, sometimes-complex stuff, make sense to you.
Think of it this way, say you have a headache, you take an aspirin and the headache goes away. But the next day you have another headache, and you take a couple of more aspirins and the headache goes away. For a week you keep getting those headaches and the aspirin keeps giving you temporary relief. However, if you keep getting that headache every day you better quit treating the SYMPTOMS of the headaches, even though you get temporary relief. You need to go to the doctor and get to the CAUSE of the headaches, not just deal with the symptoms!
It’s the same thing when you punish fear-based behavior. Punishment may stop the aggressive behavior (symptom) temporarily, but it will keep coming back because you are not getting to the CAUSE of the problem, which is the emotion fear of men, dogs or whatever. The aggression will only go away permanently when you change the dog’s emotion of fear when he encounters men, dogs etc. to Pleasure & Relaxation.

Then how do you treat the CAUSE of fear-based aggression? It’s called Systematic Desensitization & Counter-Conditioning.
I have already written a couple of post on Systematic Desensitization and Counter-Conditioning so you might want to go back and review.

Ted Aranda
CPDT-KA Certified
Aranda Dog Training

Aranda Dog Training Problem Behavior Specialist: Aggression - Barking - Chewing-Housetraining - Jumping - Separation A