If you want to train a badly behaved dog, a tasty treat is more likely to succeed than an electric shock, animal behaviour researchers have found.
“We advocate the use of reward-based training in modifying dog behaviour, as our work indicates it is more effective than training which involves aversive stimuli, and it carries fewer risks to dog welfare,” says Jonathan Cooper at the University of Lincoln, UK.
Cooper and his colleagues compared the two training methods using 63 dogs split into three groups. All the animals required training for failing to come when called and for repeatedly chasing livestock.
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The team asked professional handlers nominated by the Electronic Collar Manufacturers Association (ECMA), a trade group based in Brussels, Belgium, to train one group. They used e-collars that can deliver a shock along with additional methods, including pulling on the dog’s leash or offering food and praise. They also trained a second group using the same training methods, but without the use of e-collars, as a control.
In the third group, professional members of the UK-based Association of Pet Dog Trainers used their reward-based training method, which incorporates praise, play and food as rewards. All of the dogs were trained in the presence of penned livestock and wore 10-metre leashes and e-collars during the study, but the collars were deactivated in the latter two groups.
Analysing videos of up to 150 minutes of training over a five-day period for each dog, Cooper and his colleagues found that those in the reward group responded to commands faster and with fewer reminders, he says.
For example, the reward group came to the trainer on average 1.13 seconds after the “come” command, compared with 1.35 seconds for the e-collar group and 1.24 seconds for the control group. And 82 per cent of those dogs responded after a single “come” command, on average, compared with only 71 per cent in the e-collar group and 72 per cent in the control group. In other words, the e-collar dogs more often needed to hear the command more than once.
“The e-collar trainers were good, as they consistently improved recall in dogs that were referred for poor recall, but the reward-based trainers were better,” Cooper says.
ECMA spokesperson Jamie Penrith, who wasn’t involved in the study, says the results don’t mean e-collars aren’t needed. “A food reward method is dependent on the owner being there to give the reward, but in 85 per cent of dog attacks on livestock, nobody is present,” he says. “The e-collar conditions the dog to associate a livestock attack with something aversive, independent of the owner’s presence.”
The research shows there is “no significant advantage” to using aversive methods, says Carlo Siracusa at the University of Pennsylvania. “Does that mean e-collars are terrible? Not necessarily. But the approach that’s most positive for dog welfare should always be the first choice,” he says.
Frontiers in Veterinary Science
