Dog Training Equipment Horrors

When I was a kid the book Black Beauty by Anna Sewell was one of my favourites - a book that I loved and wept over in turn.

The parts that particularly stayed with me into adulthood and my ongoing love for and fascination with horses and other animals was the description of docking the horses’ tails so that they were unable to whisk away flies, and the dreadful Bearing Reins. These reins forced the horse’s head up in an unnatural position in the name of fashion, and there were no Anti Cruelty Laws to prevent anyone from tightening them relentlessly until the horses were in screaming agony throughout their whole bodies.

By the time I had started training horses myself, it was illegal to dock horses tails or use Bearing Reins. This seemed to be wonderful evidence that humans were evolving to become more respectful and kind towards animals as they learned more about how animals think and feel and process information.

Fast forward to me setting up the Assistance Dog puppy education and dog training programme for Canine Partners (UK). We were the first in the UK to use behaviour shaping, clicker training and motivational reinforcement for teaching puppies to become highly skilled and creative Assistance Dogs.

By rewarding each animal with what they specifically preferred, we were able to tap their hidden resources of problem solving and insight and they were able to use a range of basic “Component Behaviours” to come up with ways to assist their disabled partner as that person’s needs and requirements changed over time.

The dogs could for example, use a gentle slow tug to help a person to sit up and then move over to the curtains and, standing sideways along the wall, use a series of short tugs to pull a curtain open, and then go to a heavy door and pull strongly to get the door open and hold it for the person’s wheelchair to get through. In other words, we can train dogs to do highly specific, skilful and difficult things willingly and enthusiastically.

So you can imagine my horror and sadness when I saw dogs on social media being strapped into harnesses that fixed their heads up and forced them to walk at heel looking up and sideways at the handler. Why? To win points in obedience competitions. I have seen ramps that have a shock collar (also called E collars, or Stimulation collars) and a prong collar hanging down from a cable. The dog is locked into these, a dumbbell pushed into the dog’s mouth and the dog forced to walk along the ramp carrying the dumbbell - receiving a shock and a jerk on the prong collar if the dog tries to spit out the dumbbell.

There are also structures for attaching prong and shock collars to dogs via a lead which goes down through a hole in the table, and if the dog doesn’t immediately comply when told to “Down”, the lead is jerked from underneath and the dog is dragged head down onto the table whilst receiving an electric shock. All in the name of winning points in a competition…and the worse part of it is that the trainers are proud of the ways in which they can force an animal to comply with their demands.

The hope for the future of animal welfare is that more research is coming out all the time that repeatedly proves that using positive reinforcement is more effective for teaching any skill; it is faster than force; the animals become internally motivated to continue to comply willingly and enthusiastically; the animals tend to then offer more behaviours without being asked or commanded; and the animals are more relaxed, less stressed and develop a deeper bond with their owners. In other words, the Positive Force is with You!!!!