Psychology in Working with Dogs.

As one of my recent Facebook posts points out, I use ABA as a psychological strategy in training dogs. In all honestly, I use this in every aspect of working with dogs. I use it during grooming, massaging, meditating and more!

I broke down what and why, in that post. There’s so many different ways this works and stems from Pavlov who founded classical conditioning and Skinner who founded the principles of behavior while Lovaas who applied the early methods of ABA.

While the beginning of the psychology relied on punishment, we have evolved this science to work with reinforcers instead. This has created connection through positive association rather than negative. Many believe ABA focuses only on compliance, and if not used properly it absolutely can.

What makes ABA work is understanding classical conditioning while allowing your “student” to decide if the action is worth working for.

Now, dog’s don’t exactly speak English so how do we allow them to make that choice? We show our dog what action we want from body language, tonal vocation, and emotional language. We then reward them with a high value treat the first time they do the wanted action. That’s how we get the desired consequence.

What happens if the dog deems the reward not good enough for the behavior. We take a step back and look at the why from the dogs perspective. I’m going to explain a few examples below:

Training: Does chasing squirrels have a higher value than string cheese? Some dogs may say yes. What we do next is find a reward that aligns with the feeling of chase. This creates a compromise between you and the dog showing connection. We understand the why; in this case: the chase. Instead of a high value treat, we play a game of hide and seek. Now the dog is focused on you, instead of the squirrel, but still gets the desired behavior: run.

Grooming: Your dog doesn’t like nail clippers during the groom because they associate them with pain from the time they accidentally got their quick cut. The Antecedent: clippers cause pain, the Behavior: pulls paws back, the Consequence: The dog doesn’t have to deal with the clippers, but has long nails that can cause injuries. How does ABA fix this? First, we expose the dog to the clippers but not bring attention to it. This is a technique called planned ignoring. This lessens the connection that clippers equals pain and slowly starts building a new slate to work with. Overtime, they will naturally get curious and go over to them, that’s when reinforcers come in. Give a treat, a pet, a quick falsetto “yes” and leave the clippers alone. This is rewriting their association with clippers to something positive. Now, we can pick the clippers up, and the paw. More reinforcers. Soon enough, we’ll be able to start clipping nails.

I could go on and on about this psychology and why I love using it so much, but I won’t for now at least. These two examples break down how it works. The one thing, I think we all struggle with when implementing this technique is the amount of patience and time this can take. We all have busy lives naturally wanting instant gratification but we should focus on connection over obedience.