Pain and Suffering in Dog Training

I think about the use of pain in dog training every day. I pretty much think about it constantly. Every time I put an e-collar, a prong collar, or a bark collar on a dog, I have a philosophical conversation with myself about what I'm doing. I think it's important to do this kind of thinking pretty much in all areas of life, but as human beings with inherent power over creatures in our care, I think it's important to have an ongoing dialogue about what we're doing when we're working and living with dogs.

I'm less concerned with having a set of pre-determined principles than I am with being flexible and willing to change. I'm open to the idea that someday I may learn a new piece of information and decide that I will never use another "aversive tool" again. That day has not come, and with all my experience, research, and philosophical musing, I am still of the opinion that it is what works best for my dog, and for many dogs I work with. People like to allude to the research that's been done regarding the notion that arguments often lead to people holding their own beliefs more firmly as opposed to changing their minds. I think one of the most damaging things that's come of the force free/positive reinforcement vs "balanced" training debate is the pre-ordained categories that one must situate themself before participating in this broad, philosophical discussion. The rigid principles that formulate a methodology are of much less interest to me than the thought process leading to that methodology. The categorization of a tool or technique as "aversive" or "force free" disregards the process by which one determines what is most humane and ethical to utilize in training. Take the e-collar for example, a tool I use every day. I was opposed to the idea when I started out in the dog world, for the same reasons most people opposed to aversive tools are: I didn't want to intentionally hurt my dog. The idea of putting a collar around my dog's neck and delivering a shock was unappealing. I imagined myself as one of the unsuspecting participants in the Milgram experiment, pressing a button and hearing shrieks from the other room. This unwillingness to use tools obviously didn't stick. Seeing happy, bouncy dogs experience off-leash freedom helped ease my concerns, and learning more about the possibility of using the tool in a controlled and calculated way made it seem less mustache-twirly sadistic. I think a lot of people's aversions to aversives is a strong gut reaction. The idea of willingly causing a dog pain is viscerally upsetting. I'm no different today than I was years ago when I didn't like the idea of using a shock collar, but I do have a different conception about pain from a philosophical standpoint.

I think a big issue with the debate surrounding aversive tools is that we don't have a solid working definition of pain, or aversive, and we understandably don't have a good metric for measuring one kind of aversive versus another one. Something that is seldom invoked in these conversations is the idea of suffering, though I think pain is often conflated with suffering. I found a helpful way to distinguish the two in an article from the National Library of Science. The article was about pain and suffering in human cancer patients, but I think that the sentiments stands when we're talking about other living creatures, i.e. dogs. Here it is:

"Pain is a physical sensation or signal indicating an event within the body. Suffering is the interpretation of that event and involves thoughts, beliefs, or judgments, and reflects the human experience of pain. Pain can cause suffering when it is uncontrolled or persists. Uncontrolled pain can lead to further physical impact and to major disruption in quality of life…" <https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7009317/#R4>

Obviously there are caveats when we're making the translation from people to dogs. Human judgment, belief, and thought does not easily map onto the canine brain in a one-to-one way that would make it easier to talk about these things, but there's something at the heart of this that we can draw from, namely, that pain and suffering are not one and the same. Anyone who's spent any amount of time with dogs would agree that they've seen a dog experience pain, and that they've seen dogs suffer, and I think, given a little time to think about it, most would agree that, while related, they are not the same. When asked if a dog who just had his paw accidentally stepped on (but recovered in seconds) is suffering, most would likely say no. When asked if a dog who spends 24 hours a day in a small crate is suffering, most would, hopefully, say yes. One of these scenarios does involve pain in the typical, clear-cut, obvious sense. The other does not involve "pain" in the same sense. Though one is arguably more cruel, more inhumane, than the other. This isn't the best example because there's an issue of duration etc, but the point stands. Pain and suffering are noticeably different concepts.

The idea that pain can cause suffering, but does not necessarily cause it, is an important thing to note as well. E-collars cause pain, that's how they work. Anyone who wants to argue that an electric shock delivered to the skin is not pain, waste your breath somewhere else. However, where so-called "balanced" trainers and R+ trainers diverge is in the hypothesized interpretation of this event of pain. I don't believe that, when used properly, the pain caused by an e-collar causes suffering. How I know goes back to process versus final product in methodology. It relates to integrity, observation, and critical thinking when we're working with living creatures. In the four years I've had Lewey, I've spent nearly every day with him with the exception of a handful of overnights away from him, and one three week road trip. I've learned this dog inside and out. I've seen him sleepy, I've seen him at the height of scent-induced arousal, I've seen him recover from surgery, I've seen him nauseous, I've seen him scared, I've seen him inquisitive, and I've seen him so hell-bent on following his nose that he'd crawl through a sea of barbed wire and molten lava given the chance. I know this dog as well as any human being can know a dog. And I love him as much as any human being can love a dog. I use him as an example, and not just a client's dog that I've worked with, because I want to eliminate any shadow of doubt that I don't spend every waking moment painstakingly investigating the deepest realms of my psyche to figure out what is the best for him, in all regards. This is a dog I've happily reoriented my life around. This is the dog that turned my into a dog professional. He's the first thing I think about when making big life decisions, and small decisions. I opt to include him whenever possible, and not because he has separation anxiety (he doesn't) or out of guilt, but because I enjoy myself much more when he's around, and I want to share my life experiences with him. Anyway, he is the principal focus, the foundation, of my approach to ethics when it comes to dogs. I never say that I love dogs in my care as if they're my own, because that's bullshit. I don't love other peoples' dogs like I love my own, that's like saying you children that aren't yours like you love your own. I do, however, treat other peoples' dogs like I treat my own. That is to say, the way I treat all dogs is informed by an ongoing, dialectic process as opposed to rigid methodology. I'm rambling a little big, so let me break down what I mean a little more concretely.

Jay Jack talks about "hope" versus "struggle". This is a pretty foundational concept for me when using tools. When I put an e-collar on a dog, I weigh the hope, and I weigh the struggle. The hope being off-leash freedom, the ability to roam and sniff and run, etc. The struggle, in this case, is dealing with an electric shock as a possible consequence for not coming when called. For any dog, with any tool, the hope must outweigh the struggle to be fair. For some dogs, the shock from an e-collar is not worth the value of off-leash freedom. For Lewey, the hope of fulfilling his genetic drive, of doing what he's been bred to do, vastly outweighs the struggle of the collar.

I also think there's a great irony when those who are opposed to the use of aversives in training try to circumnavigate the problem they create. I see this with the use of things like citronella collars, head halters, and ultrasonic devices to name a few. When you have a knee-jerk reaction to the pain that comes from a localized, tempered electric shock without investigating your reaction critically, you start recommending things that target arguably the most important system in a dog's body and brain, their nose. In some peoples' haste to disparage anything that causes a pain, they utilize things that are aversive in other, less measurable and less controlled ways. I would argue that one causes pain, while the other causes suffering.

Let's talk about drive, in both people and dogs.

Anyone who's done anything that requires time, effort, and accumulated skill is intimately acquainted with their own concept of pain, whether they're a weight-lifter, an academic, a marathon runner, or a musician. The pain of practice, of repetitions, of tedious effort, is their struggle. But if you ask an athlete, musician, or writer to give a sense of suffering, many of them will delineate times when they were unable to pursue their chosen passion. What they're driven to do, their hope, is so immense that the struggles of pursuing what they're driven to do pale in comparison. Some might even say that the struggle folds into the hope after a certain point; the painstaking effort is as vital a part of the process as reaching the goal that it becomes a motivator in and of itself. To an athlete, burning muscles and an elevated heart rate are as dear as crossing a finish line, sometimes even more.

To put this in a dog perspective, let me use the example of sled dogs. Dallas Seavey, a 5-time Iditarod winner, has talked about some of his techniques for training sled dogs. Now, these are dogs who are genetically driven to do exactly what they're doing. These are dogs who want to run and pull for hours and miles on end with everything they've got. These are dogs who would be miserable couch companions. These are dogs who would genuinely suffer if they were stripped of the ability to do what they're bred to do. These are the type of dogs who do suffer living in a small apartment in the city with nothing but a walk around the block and a puzzle toy every day. Dallas talks about his feeding regimen, and how he needs to teach these dogs to eat food when they get it. This is because when they're out doing a thousand-mile race, dogs need to eat when they're given food, because they might not get it until they get to the next shelter, which might be dozens of miles away. It's a necessary struggle that the dogs must undergo if they want to do what they're bred to do. To do this, there's some level of food deprivation that needs to happen in the training process. For the dog to learn that food refusal is a bad idea, there are instances where food refusal is followed by a stretch of time without a meal. Even I had a strong reaction to hearing this. It sounds pretty cruel, to purposely withhold food from a dog as a training tool. There is, of course, much more to it. The dogs aren't truly starved, they're not emaciated, but they do learn that sometimes there's a long stretch of time between meals, because this is the reality of long distance mushing. I chose to examine my strong negative reaction to hearing this, and I found that it wasn't as bad as the gut reaction I had to it. The hope of living a fulfilled life, of doing the one thing the dog is driven to do above all else absolutely outweighs the struggle of being a little hungry for a couple hours less than a handful of times. This is just the dog version of waking up at 5am to train for a marathon before work, of giving up on social events to study or practice or write, of dealing with the pain of burning muscles to life heavier weight than you did last week. People who don't experience this kind of drive won't necessarily relate to dogs with analogous drive, but anyone who feels their life's purpose in their heart and soul and body should understand a genetically driven dog.

We have to be careful when we're deciding things for creatures who can't talk. We have to use our powers of observation and integrity when deciding what life they're going to lead. When using something that causes pain, we need to think long and hard about what we hope to achieve, what we hope the dog will get out of it. If our hope outweighs our struggle, and the pain we use is not causing suffering, I think we're on the right track. And it's high time that low-drive people stop making decisions for high-drive dogs. Pain is a sensation, but suffering can encompass a whole life.

A meandering love letter to aversives

Part of the reason I didn't absolutely lose my marbles with the interaction I talk about here is because I recently listened to Ivan Balabanov's Training Without Conflict podcast episode where he interviews Michael Ellis. It's comforting to know that there are sound and critical conversations being had by people with much more reach and influence than me. I highly recommend listening to the full interview. It's long, but worth it.

About an hour ago I was headed back from a hike and swim with my dog, Lewey, and a dog I’m boarding for the week. Long story short, I was verbally harassed by a woman in her car because she took issue with my training techniques, which I will go into detail about shortly. First, I’m going to give some background on why I do some of the things that I do, because these interactions are virtually never a channel for discussion between disagreeing parties, they’re platforms for people to treat others like verbal punching bags under the guise of some vague moral justification.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been using a prong collar on my dog. You know, the metal ones with various points that you put on around a dog's neck to make pulling uncomfortable enough that they’ll stop doing it. I do not labor under the delusion that it does not hurt my dog, but this is also not the sole purpose I use it. When I first got my dog and had to have him on leash, I was not taught that harnesses are a great way to circumnavigate dogs learning to pull on a collar. My incredibly strong, nose-driven dog learned that pulling on a collar gets him what he wants, and also that leash pressure on a flat collar basically means nothing except “dig in so you can drag the idiot attached to the other end”. I poisoned the collar. I wasn’t a very good trainer then, and I had been pretty wildly misguided by a lot of R+ rhetoric I found on the internet. I wasn’t as open to aversive tools, and so I basically taught my dog to choke himself on a flat collar and that he could willingly ignore any directives that came from me verbally or through the leash. This was a problem I was able to circumnavigate for a while once I got wise to better training techniques; thanks to the e-collar, Lewey is primarily an off-leash dog, and often when he needed to be ON leash I’d just put him in a harness. Problem avoided. No need for the flat collar. No collapsed trachea.

But then I realized there were scenarios where I would probably want my dog on leash and not encourage to pull me around with a harness. Attending group training classes, going into stores, or just doing any training where I want leash pressure to mean something became a problem I needed to face head on. Out came the prong I’d shelved for a long time. The pulling stopped immediately. A small tug on the prong signaled to Lewey what I’d been trying to teach him all this time: pulling on a collar is dangerous. I couldn’t effectively convey that to him with a flat collar because even though he could do some real damage to his neck by dragging me around on the flat, it didn’t feel as concisely irritating as the prong. And a small tug on the prong isn’t suppressing him, it’s not creating a fear response, and it’s not preventing him from being his normal, dog self. I know my dog and I know his body language. When we walk with the prong he does all the things he can normally do, except now he gets that pulling on the collar is off limits. All I had to do was create a controlled, low risk scenario to teach him about a real life problem.

Which brings me to my next point: aversives are ways that we as humans create a controlled, low risk, teaching scenario to teach about a dangerous, real life phenomenon. We live in a world where dogs often need to be on leash. Whether or not you agree with this, this is reality. This is the real life phenomenon we, and dogs, need to contend with whether we like it or not. Do we want to learn that pressure on the collar means a small irritation, or do we want to let it get to the point where pressure on the collar means a hospital visit? The latter is a scenario in which the dog will almost definitely suffer, but may not even make the connection between cause and effect if it’s delayed enough. The prong collar, which puts equal pressure around the neck of the dog, and creates an irritating sensation before it creates a dangerous one, teaches the dog that hey, you probably don’t want to dig all four feet in and put all your body’s strength into a piece of leather around your neck, just a thought. Personally, I’m gonna opt for the one that’s physically safe and that I have complete control over.

Another real life phenomenon that I may need to create an artificial teaching scenario for is called “roads”. There’s this phenomenon in the world we live in where huge, multi-ton slabs of metal hurl themselves down stretches of asphalt at speeds of up to 90+ miles an hour. The braking power on these modern contraptions is good, but definitely leaves something to be desired. For example, if one of these hunks of metal were to go speeding down a stretch of asphalt at around, say, even 50 miles an hour, and my dog were to drag me into the middle of the road because he saw a raccoon on the other side, and our being in the middle of the road we’re to spatially coincide with the metal hunk, the laws of physics say we likely couldn’t occupy the same space at the same time, and we’d probably be a blood and guts salad spread out for all the world to see. This may seem like a digression, but I promise, it’s important.

Now, I’ll explain what happened today. We had just gone for a hike and a swim. There was a fair going on near the parking entrance for the pond. We walked by all the vendors packing up their wares just fine. I had Lewey on his prong collar, and 95% of the walk to the car, the leash was slack in my hand. Then, for whatever reason, Lewey decided that there was something across the busy street that he simply NEEDED to get to. He’s a coonhound. I live with it. I’m used to it. In fact, I love it. I wanted a high-drive dog because I think it’s fun to work with. And on a spiritual level, I get it. Life seems infinitely more worth living when you have something that you want to do with every ounce of your being and you get to do it. Lewey often gets to pursue things he smells, and I work sniffing into our training as a motivator. I would never dream of suppressing this drive in him, I only aim to teach him how to control it for his and others’ safety. And this was a scenario where the pursuit of a scent would likely get him killed; if he didn’t get flattened on the street by a speeding car, he might have gotten kicked or pepper sprayed by someone who mistakenly thought this howling coonhound in drive was about to bite their baby. Also, he had just swam and ran for about two hours and was ignoring the fact that he was tired to try to pursue something he couldn’t have. On went the prong. As soon as I noticed him trying to cross over in front of me to get something across the street, I gave him a tug on his prong. He unsurprisingly ignored me. So I gave him a few more. These weren’t overly aggressive tugs, they were just me trying to be enough of a nuisance to him so that he would learn that ignoring me in the face of a dangerous choice he was about to make was not an option. I didn’t increase intensity, I didn’t pull any harder than I do when he gets to the end of the leash or tries to cross the street before I’m ready. The main difference was frequency. Just a persistent “hey, I’m going to keep doing this irritating thing to your neck until you decide to pay attention to me”. Because if my dog is about to chase an animal across the street, I want me saying “hey, don’t do that” to mean something. I want me tugging on the leash to mean something. This is a real world phenomenon that requires a somewhat artificial, and aversive, teaching technique to contend with. Would I rather my dog feel an uncomfortable tug on the prong collar than get hit by a car? I don’t think I need to answer that.

Another thing that’s important to note is that the entirety of this interaction between me and Lewey, Lewey’s tail was up, his eyes and ears were alert, and his body language, aside from him fixating on the thing across the street, we’re relaxed. I’ve seen him scared, I’ve seen him upset, I’ve seen him anxious. He was none of these things. He was enthralled by his surroundings, and admittedly not annoyed enough with me. My main gripe with how this situation went is that the tugs on his collar were ultimately not even really enough to break his attention from the object of interest. Oh well, something to work on down the line. We’ll build up focus and motivation in play and in settings with fewer distractions. And honestly, a big part of why it didn’t really work in this scenario is that I was jarringly interrupted.

So, the point of all this, is that a strange woman in a car rolled past me slowly, rolled down her window, and said, “why are you yanking his collar! That’s not nice!” And every time I tried to respond, interrupted me with repetitions of this mantra. The fact that her first bit was rhetorical is obvious, but also telling. There was never any curiosity on her part, only a prejudiced loathing for what she thought I symbolized. The fact that she didn’t slow down was the kicker, too. The only plans I had for the evening were to check the dogs for ticks and figure out what I wanted for dinner, and I was in a pretty good mood up until this point since I’d spent the day outside hanging out with a couple dogs and people I care about; I actually probably would have taken the time to explain why I was doing what I was doing. How many dog trainers do you know that would pass up the opportunity to educate people about their techniques and also wax poetic about how high-drive their dog is? I would have welcomed the opportunity. Instead, the woman drove off thinking I’m a sociopath who abuses animals and I went home thinking she was fairly misguided and pretty rude. Neither of us changed our minds. Also, if I was doing something that was messed up and abusive to my dog because I was misguided or mistaken, I'd probably still do it after this interaction. Similar to how abstinence-only education only keeps kids from engaging in safe sexual activity, yelling at people using techniques you disagree with is only going to drive them farther into the shadows and limit the space for education that actually makes people better to dogs.

And to be clear, I have a lot of respect for people who speak up when they see something they think is wrong. I don’t have much respect for people who think they’re doing this when in fact they’re just doing a morally-driven flagellation of a stranger in public. And there are a couple of reasons for this. The big one is that it doesn’t work. I haven’t done any research on this, so I’ll correct myself in the future if I find that my hypothesis is wrong, but I have a hunch that when someone witnesses (actual) abuse, and their response is to yell at the abuser, the abuser is much more likely to take out their emotional response on their victim. I wasn’t abusing my dog, and my metric for this is that my dog didn’t think I was abusing him. So even if that woman, and whoever reads this, thinks that I was, I know in my heart of heart that my dog doesn’t think or feel that, and that’s what’s important to me. But, I was in a pretty terrible mood after this encounter. If the scenario was such that someone was abusing their dog, and this woman rolled up, screamed at them, didn’t let them talk, and drove off, I imagine the fury an actual abuser might feel in that situation would only end up being redirected onto the dog. Logically, this sort of interaction does not confer any benefit on the supposed subject of contention: the animal. If this woman genuinely thought that what I was doing was abuse, I can tell you right now this interaction didn’t change anything. Case in point, I went home and began writing a lengthy treatise on the benefits of aversive tools in dog training. I feel confident saying that that wasn’t exactly how I was going to spend my evening if I didn’t have this interaction.

The other main reason that I have no respect for this kind of faux activism is that it’s void of any empathy. The idea that this woman took one look at me and decided that what I was doing was wrong implies that there’s a feasible option for me to not be doing this. In all fairness, I could probably spend the next six months with a bunch of food in my hand reconditioning the flat collar, but I think my dog would probably kill me if we had to do that many on-leash training walks. I don’t blame him. There are definitely abusive sociopaths out there, but in my opinion, they are overrepresented in peoples’ view of society as a whole. Evolutionarily, it makes sense for bad things to be more salient than positive things. Avoiding danger has higher stakes than pursuing desires, ergo, bad things tend to stick out more. It’s a product of our alienation from one another that people like this woman see someone like me and jump to “abuse”. The amount of critical analysis, hands-on training, mentoring, and education about everything from dog body language to learning theory has led me to the point I’m at. Every tool I use with my dog is carefully examined with a precise cost-benefit analysis in mind; the cost being discomfort or pain and the benefit being the net enjoyment or fulfillment my dog will get out of it. I used to be hesitant to put an e-collar on my dog. Then I saw how miserable he was only being able to run on long leads or in fenced in areas. His favorite thing in the world is running and sniffing in the woods, and the e-collar gives him that freedom. The prong has a less fantastical cost-benefit, the cost also being discomfort, but the benefit being that he doesn’t destroy his neck on a collar or drag us both to our deaths. He’s also probably a lot happier now that we’re not arguing through the leash as much.

This kind of rhetoric is void of empathy, intellectual curiosity, and patience. Neither of us is the better for it. No one learned anything. Disagreeing with someone while still being able to listen to them is an important skill that I think a lot of people on opposite sides of the dog spectrum really lack. I’ve never said this publicly before, but there’s always an open invitation to anyone that wants to teach a hunting-bred coonhound off-leash recall in the woods, on a hot scent, without aversives. If someone can do this, I’ll give up the e-collar for recall forever. I promise.