My dogs have dynamite go-outs and I refuse to accept that they were trained by “crank-and-yank” methods simply because I didn’t click at them.
? yes, there are actually many other methods of training dogs that are neither punishment-based nor use clickers. Perhaps you used one of those methods. Hopefully you KNOW what method you used. Since you don’t say.
Since schutzhund requires the dogs to exhibit drive and enthusiasm, you don’t usually see the really heavy-handed type of yank n spank training that you’ll frequently see in regular formal obedience training, or sadly, often see in pet-dog training. Some schutzhund people today use predominantly positive reinforcement in their training, with or without the overt use of clickers. Others use a mix of positive reinforcement and punishment. Others use mostly negative reinforcement via ecollars.
It is certainly possible to teach dogs to have dynamite go-outs even if you do use punishment-based methods. Particularly if you’re training certain hard high-drive breeds. The kind of breeds that are traditionally used in schutzhund and formal obedience.
People who are used to training hard high-drive dogs are often the ones that scoff the most at the advantages of clicker training over “traditional” punishment-based methods, and refuse to believe that many dogs really do suffer from serious adverse side effects from punishments- because they haven’t seen the way many soft or non-working breed type dogs respond to aversives. If you give your hard high-drive working breed dog a hard collar-pop he’ll barely notice and will keep eagerly working for you; if you give a hound a hard collar pop he’ll probably just quit on you. Possibly forever.
There’s a reason why certain breeds are considered to be “stubborn” or “difficult to train” and it’s because they don’t respond well to punishment-based training. How many hound-dogs or basenjis have been successfully taught to retrieve using ear-pinches? very few. But I can clicker-train a hound to retrieve with great enthusiasm and reliability in just a few days of work. Never tried with a basenji, but I’d bet they’d pick it up even faster.
However, all dogs respond remarkably well to clicker training. Hard high-drive dogs, soft low-drive dogs, they all learn faster and with more enthusiasm in response to clickers than in response to collar-pops.
If you’ve never owned an experienced clicker dog, you won’t quite understand the primary advantage of this method of training is that the more you train the dog the faster the dog learns and the more enthusiastic the dog gets about training and working with you. That simply is not true for dogs who have been punished a lot- punishment suppresses drive and inhibits/blocks future learning. It’s just a fact of how the brain works.
You kind of have to see it or experience it to grasp how different the learning speed and enthusiasm is for an experienced clicker-dog vs. a punished dog.
For example, how long does it take the average person to teach a go-out after spending a lot of time punishing the dog for leaving heel position? A long, difficult time. I personally believe it’s considered a difficult exercise only because of the inhibitor effect of the punishments traditionally used to teach the beginner exercises like heel. Because it’s really easy to teach if you don’t use punishment to teach heel. Just last week we were training something else in agility class, and I thought being able to do a classic go-out would be helpful, so I spent five minutes teaching the dog to do the go-out and sit, and we then proceeded to use that go-out in our training. I didn’t realize until later that the dog had been flawlessly peforming the so-called “advanced” go out and directed jumping exercise after only five minutes of training. A week later I asked the dog to do it, and the dog didn’t even hesitate and whipped through the exercise.
