PetKnows

Despite the title, Don’t Shoot the Dog, often called the bible of positive reinforcement training, is actually not a book about dogs — and I don’t mean in the “if you really think about it hard, there are universal implications” sense. I mean, the book barely mentions dogs at all; it’s about leaning how to communicate with all types of animals.

Dogs get a couple of mentions, but so do dolphins, elephants, pandas, lawyers, bosses, grandmothers and teenagers.

So if this book isn’t about dogs, why is it called Don’t Shoot the Dog? Karen Pryor — who wrote this book in 1984 and is credited with bringing positive reinforcement training to the general public — explains that there are eight methods for getting rid of an undesirable behavior in an animal.

If you have a dog that barks incessantly at night, these are your options:

1. Shoot the dog
2. Punish the dog for barking
3. Negative reinforcement
4. Extinction
5. Train an incompatible behavior
6. Put the barking on cue
7. Shape absence of barking
8. Change the dog’s motivation

Obviously, the first option presented is drastic in order to make a point. If the way to solve a problem was simply to make the source of the problem go away, she could simply have said get rid of the dog. But that’s often not an option. What if the annoying barking dog belongs to your neighbor? Or the “dog” is really an unruly teenager or overbearing boss? The list of solutions is presented to show you the progression of training techniques from crude or simple, to complex and effective.

The premise of the book is that positive reinforcement training is the best method to “manipulate” our training subjects to do our bidding. Positive reinforcement rewards a desired behavior and causes that behavior to occur more often. The important thing to understand is that in this type of training it’s all about giving the subject choices. Do as you’re asked and you get a reward; don’t do it, and no reward is forthcoming. Again, it’s about eliciting voluntary responses. (When you’re training a dolphin, Pryor discovered, it simply swims away unless you make it worth the dolphin’s while. Making the subject want to train, she learned as a result, was simple the most effective way to teach anything.)

Dolphins respond to positive reinforcement training.

While this seems like common sense among most pet owners nowadays, especially in dog training circles, this was far from standard practice prior to the success of Don’t Shoot the Dog. A lot of training at the time relied heavily on punishment for behavior modification.

But even if we know that positive reinforcement is “good” and punishment is doesn’t work, how does this help us become effective trainers? The book gives us the tools not only to understand operant conditioning and positive reinforcement training, but also to put these theories into practice for real results. You’ll learn the steps you need to take to stop a bad behavior entirely or teach a complicated “trick” and put it on cue.

The book is divided into 5 chapters with scientific sounding titles including words like reinforcement, shaping and stimulus control, but it’s a fascinating and fun read with anecdotes from Pryor’s dolphin training days, specific examples of how these training principles apply modifying specific behaviors, and plenty of food for thought about how we related to each other as well.

Don’t Shoot the Dog is about teaching you how to motivate others, and to make them not only do what you want, but want to do as you ask of them. Whether you have a dog that misbehaves, a cat you want to teach tricks to, or simply an interest in learning what motivates various animals (humans included), check out Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor. I promise it’s worth it.