Welcome to Scrutinizing the Science!

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About

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

— Carl Sagan.

Hello, everyone!

Welcome to Scrutinizing the Science, where I’ll be reviewing scientific publications about dog training. There’s an incredible level of polarization in the dog training world, where purely positive/force free advocates and balanced trainers butt heads on a regular basis, often leading to bullying, harassment, and occasionally threats of violence. There are numerous lies and vast amounts of misinformation circulating about training tools and methods. I don’t want to get into the ethical arguments here, but I will use this platform to address some of the fatal flaws in the scientific research being conducted on dog training. Each entry will be focused on a particular peer-reviewed paper or group of papers, which I will summarize and scrutinize for my readers.

Here’s a bit about me: I grew up with dogs, started working with horses starting in high school, and have spent a lot of my free time over the years absorbing everything I can from numerous horse and dog trainers. My philosophy has always been to listen to what experts have to say, reflect, ask questions, and store the information until it becomes useful. Some of that information will NEVER be used, just as there are some tools I would NEVER put on my animals, but I have always found it important to understand the proper use of every tool that may come into my life, whether I’m dog sitting or riding a horse whose owner requires the use of said tool. Regardless, I believe we can learn something from everyone, even if it’s that we learn we do not agree with what someone else has to say.

My personal dogs are both “rescues” and mainly German Shepherd Dogs. They each came to me with no basic obedience and a number of behavioral issues, ranging from unreliable house training to extreme dog reactivity (which some trainers may have labeled as aggression). I started out thinking I’d try purely positive training methods, and quickly learned that a 90 pound highly reactive dog in a dog-dense neighborhood in a major city was not going to be rehabilitated with cookies, and I would not be able to afford legal fees or stomach the idea of rehoming or euthanizing an animal that could be retrained using other methods. Now we live in a tiny cabin on a horse farm where there are 20+ horses, 10 other dogs, barn cats, pigs, chickens, and all the vermin my boys could ever want to hunt. The dogs coexist peacefully with all of the humans and animals on the farm (except the rats…), spend rainy days happily in my small home, participate in sheep herding and barn hunt, and one of them is now my service dog who accompanies me when I travel around the country for work and pleasure (see @themobiustrips on Instagram to follow our daily lives!). We’re working towards earning titles in barn hunt and will hopefully begin doing some low level trialing in herding next season. I trained my dogs using balanced methods, including prong and ecollar work, and have helped train dog and human reactive foster dogs using the same methods for the rescue I volunteer with.

My scientific background is quite intense and diverse. I spent my undergraduate years participating in biomechanics research, and my honors thesis research was published. I started a PhD program in ecology and evolutionary biology, but left after a couple of years when I realized, among other things, how detrimental academic bias is to scientific progress. Some of my graduate research was published, and I moved onto working in pathology and psychiatry, where more of the research I worked on was published. I have spent countless hours reading and analyzing peer-reviewed scientific publications and discussing results with my colleagues. I have taken numerous courses on statistics and experimental design, and take pride in my ability to find weak spots in both. While I am no longer an active participant in scientific research, I love keeping up on research in areas I’m passionate about.

I envision that this blog will be a place for me to share my love for science and dog training, encourage those of you who use “science-based dog training” or who are attacked for not using “science-based dog training” to learn more about what the science actually says (or doesn’t say), and promote sound scientific research in the world of dog training. I also hope this will be a positive conversation starter and a place where people who love their dogs, professional or not, can have open and fair conversations about training. Harassment and bullying will NOT be tolerated, so please keep any comments and discussions civil. If you would like to share PDFs or links to articles with me, please send those to themobiustrips@gmail.com. If you are a fellow science-brained dog lover and would like to contribute to this blog, please let me know!

Owner Attachment and Problem Behaviors Related to Relinquishment and Training Techniques of Dogs by Kwan and Bain

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In honor of my anniversary month with Möbius, I decided to write my first post on this paper that had a lot of positive-only trainers chattering recently regarding relinquishing dogs to a shelter. I am working through how I want to structure these reviews, so if you have any feedback on how I can organize these better, please feel free to weigh in! Anyway, let’s get rolling…

To start, the main hypotheses of this paper and the subsequent conclusions are as follows:

1) Owners who are relinquishing their dogs to a shelter are likely to have lower attachment to their dogs than those who keep their dogs. Relinquished dogs were also more likely to have behavioral problems than dogs who are kept. This was unsurprisingly shown to be true.

2) The authors hypothesized that dogs who were relinquished were less likely to have been taken to a training class than dogs who were kept. This hypothesis was not supported, but this may have been because of low numbers of owners who took dogs to training. This study also didn’t control for owners who already had prior training knowledge.

3) The authors also hypothesized that dogs trained using aversive tools were more likely to be relinquished than dogs trained without them. This was also not supported. The authors did note that their data showed a correlation between use of aversive tools and lower owner satisfaction with a dog’s behavior.

I don’t find any of these results particularly surprising, but a lot of the methods used and conclusions drawn by these authors are shoddy and inherently biased. Let’s talk about the methods here:

First of all, this study is based on owner-reported survey information. Dog owners were surveyed at shelters (SPCA, county, and city shelters) where they were relinquishing their dogs, and at shelter-based vaccine clinics for surveying owners that were keeping their dogs. The authors’ reasoned that this was a controlled way of surveying owners, assuming that the owners who are bringing their dogs to the shelter vaccine clinics would likely bring their dogs to the same shelter to relinquish their dogs, should that event occur. I find this set of owners to be a less than stellar choice. Owners do not always relinquish dogs to shelters, so the set of owners who rehome dogs with friends/family/other methods themselves, who have dogs euthanized for behavioral problems instead of rehoming, or who bring their dogs back to their breeders are being left out. The set of dog owners who pay more to have their dogs examined and vaccinated annually at a veterinarian’s office and owners who do not bring their dogs to be vaccinated at all are also being completely ignored. There is no evidence that the set of dog owners who visit inexpensive vaccination clinics represent all dog owners. This makes me question: would owners who are bringing dogs to an inexpensive vaccine clinic be willing to pay for expensive training? Are these owners educated about how to best care for their dogs to prevent the need to relinquish their dogs? Are these dogs choosing well-bred dogs suited to their lifestyles? I suppose that owners who are making responsible, informed decisions about acquiring and caring for dogs are less likely to visit vaccination clinics AND less likely to relinquish their dogs. Surveying at shelters like the SCPA also makes me believe that many of the owners surveyed are going to be advocates of positive-only training, given that many shelters and rescue organizations push owners to pursue positive-only training and claim that balanced methods and aversive tools are abusive.

Second, owner surveys are going to be inherently biased. Owners’ opinions of and satisfaction with their dogs’ behavior will vary greatly. For example, I am completely unsatisfied with a dog that pulls on a leash at all when I’m walking, even when they have permission to sniff and explore. Other owners are okay with their dogs pulling on a retractable leash and dragging them everywhere. Some owners are okay with jumping and accept that their dogs will steal food if it’s available, while others refuse to allow their dogs to exhibit those behaviors. Some owners see a reactive dog as “protective” and are happy their dogs exhibit those behaviors, while many of us are mortified by those behaviors and work tirelessly to curb them. There is very little control with owner surveying.

The authors also did NOT survey owners of dogs they deemed aggressive-looking, acknowledging that this left a lot of dog/owner pairs out of the survey, especially dogs in the “pit bull” category. They did not mention how they deemed which dogs appeared to be aggressive. If you’re looking for bias in a study, we’ve found a huge one in the surveying methods.

Behavioral data about which behavioral problems are exhibited by dogs was NOT collected for dogs being kept. The conclusions drawn about why dogs are being relinquished or which behaviors were deemed more likely to make owners relinquish their dogs are not valid because equivalent data weren’t collected from each group of dog owners.

Surveying owners who are relinquishing their dogs in the moment of relinquishing the dog is potentially methodically dangerous, given that this is an extremely difficult decision and emotional time for pet owners. Even if the written surveys are submitted anonymously, owners may have a difficult time answering honestly, and some surveys were conducted verbally, which, even if results are collected anonymously, is likely to generate dishonest results.

While the information about training data wasn’t great in this study, given low numbers of dogs/owners who had attended training, I would like to see a breakdown in TYPE of training in these situations. My guess is that people who bring their dogs to a 6-week box-store puppy kindergarten are less likely to be satisfied with their dogs’ behavior than people who spend more money going to a reputable positive-only or balanced trainer for ongoing private lessons, board-and-train, etc. Seeing a breakdown of training methods would also be interesting. And comparing this to the owners who take their dog to veterinary behaviorists instead of training would also be interesting, as well.

The bias towards different types of training tools is extremely evident in this paper, as well. The fact that owners use an aversive tool, such as a choke chain, ecollar, or prong collar, does not mean that these tools were used fairly or correctly. The authors also seem to automatically assume that the lower satisfaction scores of owners who use aversive tools is a causative relationship — that use of aversive tools creates behaviors that are ones owners are unsatisfied with. What the authors do not acknowledge is that dog owners often don’t buy these tools immediately, but eventually turn to these tools BECAUSE of unwanted behaviors in their dogs. The other conclusion that they miss is that many of us who use “aversive” tools do so because we have higher standards for our dogs’ behavior. For example, an owner who uses a prong/pinch collar is more likely to want their dog to walk alongside them than an owner who has a dog on a back-clip harness and a retractable leash. The first owner would be extremely unsatisfied with the walking behavior of the second dog, which may not be the case for the second dog’s owner. Many owners are unsatisfied with their dogs’ behavior while training them, as well. When an owner has a reactive dog, for example, training reactivity out takes time, even when aversive tools are used. An owner surveyed in the process of working with their dog (or who simply purchased the tool thinking it might be the magical fix for their dog’s bad behaviors) will still be unsatisfied with their dog’s reactive behavior, even if they’re making progress towards becoming satisfied. While I am not totally surprised by the conclusion that owners using aversive tools are more likely to be less satisfied with their dog’s behavior, I believe the reasons for this conclusion being true are varied and the authors’ explanations are biased in favor of using positive-only training methods, as is common in academic literature about dog training.

Finally, while I appreciate that the authors do advocate for potential dog owners educating themselves on choosing a dog that fits into their lifestyles and families, they exhibited a MASSIVE bias in their recommendations. “If we encourage owners to select dogs based on compatible behaviors, provide an appropriate environment, and train using positive reinforcement methods, we may be able to enhance the human-animal bond and decrease chances of relinquishment to shelters.” There is NO evidence in this study that says that positive reinforcement methods prevents relinquishment to shelters; in fact, the study showed that training tool choice had NO correlation with relinquishing a dog. There are no citations to papers that show that positive reinforcement is what increases the human-animal bond, either, so this statement alone leads me to believe that these authors are incredibly biased in favor of positive reinforcement training and opposed to balanced training.

This study could have been incredibly interesting, had the methods been much better and the authors less biased. Unfortunately, I do see a high level of bias in the academic community in canine science, hence the creation of this blog. When the academic community as a whole is biased, papers with shoddy methods and inherent bias are more likely to make it through the peer review process, so beware of people who say they promote “science-based training” or conclusions when they haven’t read the papers and analyzed them from an impartial point of view. I see a number of positive-only trainers using this paper’s results to promote their training methods as a counter-argument to the balanced trainers who say balanced training saves dogs. If they actually read the whole paper, instead of just the abstract, they might see that the conclusions drawn are irrelevant to their arguments and do not necessarily support positive-only training as a way to save dogs or create happier owners.

Please feel free to engage in civil discussion below, whether you agree or disagree with my breakdown of this paper. Also let me know if you have papers or topics you’d like me to review, or suggestions for how to structure these reviews better.