Sit

By Bill Barnhart

The Chicago Literary Club

October 13, 2008

Sit

By Bill Barnhart

The Chicago Literary Club

October 13, 2008

A few days before Christmas last year, the Barnhart household was in mourning. Kate and I were forced to put to sleep our Weimaraner, Sophie, at age thirteen. For many years, we owned two Weimaraners, Molly and Sophie, but now our home was empty. We wanted another dog, but what happened next was, I suppose, something of an over-reaction to our loss, in more ways than one.

One of the best expressions of American consumerism came from songstress Patti Page, in a 1952 recording: “How much is that doggie in the window; the one with the waggley tail; how much is that doggie in the window? I do hope that doggie’s for sale.” As a household purchase, a dog is nearly as ubiquitous as a television. Like all areas of consumer tastes, fashions come and go in the dog market The popularity of breeds changes over time. The Rottweiler and Dalmatian have declined in recent American Kennel Club rankings. At the same time, French bulldogs and the Cavalier King Charles Spaniel have jumped from obscurity. Concerns about human allergies are prompting breeders to mix low-dander dogs, especially Poodles, with other popular breeds. Thus, you can buy a Goldendoodle or a Labradoodle.

The dog market has evolved in other ways since Kate and I were last in it. Years ago, when we took our dogs to a nearby park, we would meet a woman exercising her Greyhound that had been rescued from the dog racing world. Saving Greyhounds from the sad fate that often awaits them at dog tracks has been the mission of dog fanciers for many years. Today, thanks to the overpopulation of dogs in America and to the Internet, nearly every major breed has its own rescue organization. Some of these groups operate shelters. But most work through pet foster parents, who agree to care for pets before they are “re-homed,” as they say. In either case, rescue networks save animals from an early death and provide, in effect, a secondary market when owners want to or are compelled to give up their pets. The recent rise in home foreclosures has increased the demand for pet rescue services.

In this spirit, Kate and I decided this time not to select a new puppy from a breeder, as we had with Sophie and Molly, but to adopt an older dog. We planned to visit the Anti-Cruelty Society of Chicago and at least one other well regarded shelter. We were aware of rescue networks, but we had no experience with them. That was until a friend of ours told us about a neighbor of his who knew a woman in a rescue organization who was caring for a two-year-old foster dog named Duke. This word-of-mouth process led us to the Illinois Doberman Rescue Plus web site. We weren’t looking for a Doberman. But, as his picture on the web site revealed, Duke was no Doberman. He was a Mastiff, or, as we were told later, a Mastiff/Great Dane mix. We agreed to consider the prospect of an adoption from a rescue organization and telephoned Duke’s foster mother, Elaine.

Of course, rescue organizations are eager to find new homes for abandoned pets. Some stage adoptathons; others work through local news media; you can check out rescued dogs on a multitude of web sites. Rescue groups will be glad to hear from you. But there is another side to their work. Don’t confuse pet rescue organizations with used car dealers. How many car dealers insist that buyers grant them an option to take back the car if the new owner becomes dissatisfied? Car dealers seldom seek to prevent their customers from reselling or otherwise disposing of the merchandise once it leaves their lot. Pet rescue organizations present just such covenants, in formal contracts that adoptive parents must sign. That’s what comedian Ellen DeGeneres tearfully found out a year ago, when she gave her rescue dog, Iggy, to a friend, only to be called out by the rescue service where she had obtained the animal. It seems Ellen violated the contract. Indeed, Patti Page might have been in trouble, as well. According her hit song, she wanted that doggie in the window as a gift for her boyfriend before she left on a trip to California. Oops.

Today, would-be pet owners shopping for waggley tails at shelters or rescue organizations have to pass muster, frequently including a detailed questionnaire, at least one home visit and an interview, not about the pet’s suitability but about their suitability. Such requirements have become commonplace, to the point that some pet fanciers are complaining. A recent Chicago Tribune article reported, “After years of public education campaigns urging would-be adopters to visit shelters for their cats and dogs, many prospective pet owners say they feel about as welcome as a case of fleas.” They are being scrutinized and rejected if their incomes or life-styles seem unsuitable. In one case I heard of, would-be adoptive dog owners were not allowed to select a pet from a rescue service, even after they make they grade. Instead, the organization assigned them a dog based on its judgment about what will make a good match.

After Elaine gave us the stamp of approval as adoptive parents for Duke, she handed us the contract. In the fine print, we were required, among other things, to hold harmless and indemnify Illinois Doberman Rescue Plus, Inc., in case Duke caused death, injury or property damage and to provide love as well as food and shelter. We were to give the organization the option to take Duke back rather than have him transferred to another owner or otherwise “dispose[d] of.” And, in covenant No. 15, we promised “to attend and complete a basic obedience course with the dog and send proof of completion within six months to Illinois Doberman Rescue.” If that weren’t enough, Elaine repeated the point in a handwritten covenant, No. 19, at the end of the contract’s bill of particulars – “obedience class.”

Most dog fanciers, including us until we read the contract, consider formal training a luxury and, frankly, find people who obsess on it a bit creepy. Anyone who puts a house pet through rigorous, competitive obedience trials in the hope of winning a ribbon may have personal adequacy issues that should be dealt with outside the show ring. Scientists debate whether prehistoric man domesticated wolves or wolves domesticated prehistoric man. Apparently, evidence exists that wolves conducted themselves around humans in such a way to guarantee being fed and that humans complied. On the other hand, early man no doubt saw advantages in making friends with wolves, from hunting and guard services to body warmth on those two dog nights. Thousands of years of encounters between people and dogs have turned this bargain into a universally accepted assumption, or instinct if you prefer, by dog and man. As a result, most dogs never receive any formal training. We had taken Molly to a few training classes. Sophie seemed to adjust to us without any intervention and we, make of it what you will, didn’t mind living with headstrong Weimaraners.

Things are different with Duke. Dr. Samuel Johnson said, “The prospect of hanging concentrates the mind wonderfully.” So does inviting into your home a 135-pound animal with a head as large as your own and an unknown background in the hands of unnamed previous owners who provided a nonworking telephone number when they abandoned him to a shelter. When Duke arrived for his first visit, like any orphan hoping to impress a prospective family, he seemed well adjusted and comfortable, as we ooed and aahed about his size. Try to imagine yourself, your house and everything in it suddenly becoming noticeably smaller. Standing on his four feet, he measures 38 inches high at the top of his head. He can – and does --jump well above our heads from a standing position. On the other hand, Duke’s foster mother is a slight woman, who nonetheless with a few gestures and remarks seemed to have Duke under perfect control. No problem. Yet she kept insisting to us, in a pleasant but firm voice, that Duke must have formal training. And not just any training but what she called “clicker” training. Elaine steered us to an organization, aptly called Canis Sapiens, that recommended a nearby trainer skilled in the clicker method.

A contract is a contract. I have a clicker with me. You’ll recall that Dorothy clicked her heals together and was transported, with her dog, Toto, out of the Kingdom of Oz. Our journey in the last few months, with this little device, has been in the opposite direction. The clicker, a standard tool in the dog rescue world, opens the door to a philosophical debate that has been boiling in the kingdom of academia ever since Charles Darwin returned from his cruise. Free will, pragmatism, social engineering, human progress – controversies about these and other fundamental concepts reside in this little piece of plastic and metal.

The intellectual pedigree of the clicker begins with one of the best known psychologists of our lifetime – B.F. Skinner. Burrhus Frederic Skinner, known as Fred, was born in 1904 and lived his early years in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, a small town in the northeast part of the state. He was a precocious student. He wanted to be a writer, but, as he wrote, “I had failed as a writer, because I had nothing important to say, but I could not accept that explanation. It must be literature that was at fault… I was to remain interested in human behavior, but the literary method had failed me.” He turned to science, especially psychology. As a graduate student at Harvard University in the late 1920s, Skinner became convinced that the essence of psychology as a science should be observing behavior, not speculating about the unobservable inner workings of the mind. This viewpoint, labeled behaviorism, was and would remain controversial in the field. But there is no dispute about the strides B.F. Skinner took in perfecting the craft of observing behavior precisely. He invented experiments and apparatus that could provide accurate data and be replicated by fellow scientists.

A basic device became known as the Skinner box. In its initial form, the Skinner box was a container for observing the behavior of laboratory rats. Inside the box, the theories of Charles Darwin found new life and new controversy, and the idea of clicker training was born. In keeping with the principles of random selection and chance, which are key elements of Darwin’s work, Skinner’s breakthrough in understanding behavior came by accident. Like most psychologists at the time, Skinner’s initial experiments inside the box employed the process of stimulus and response most commonly associated with Ivan Pavlov. In one of Pavlov’s typical experiments, which were labeled reflexology, a bell would sound as the stimulus and the subject under observation would salivate in response, because the bell was associated with food. In 1930, Skinner was using a telegraph key with its clicking sound to coax a rat in and out of a tunnel inside the box. As his biographer described the experiment, “the first click sent the animal scurrying back into the tunnel, where it waited for several minutes before reappearing. Each subsequent click, however, had less frightening effects on the animal.”

Skinner wanted to measure the process of the rat adapting to the clicker stimulus. But the rat wasn’t providing predictable results. Later, Skinner introduced food into the experiment and discovered, to his surprise, what you might call the opposite of the stimulus/response dynamic. He attached to the box a food dispenser that opened to release a pellet. The dispenser was designed to open, delivering the food, when the rat pressed a lever. But at first, Skinner operated the dispenser without the rat doing anything, simply to get the rat used to the noise the dispenser made when the door opened, just as he had hoped the rat would adapt to the telegraph key click. At one point, without any stimulus, a rat acting on its own depressed the lever, opening the dispenser. Then, the rat repeated the behavior, depressing the lever and hearing the dispenser noise followed by a food pellet. Skinner realized that the immediate noise of the dispenser, just after the lever was pressed, was conditioning the rat. The rate at which one rat and many rats in succession pressed the lever was regular and predictable, thanks to the immediate reinforcement of the dispenser noise, no matter how quickly the food pellet emerged from the dispenser. The dispenser noise was providing the stimulus, but only after the rat had performed the intended response, pressing the lever. Skinner’s observation is the basis of the theory of positive reinforcement. By altering the reinforcement, he discovered, the experimenter could change or shape the rat’s behavior. The dispenser noise was an early version of the clicker used today by dog trainers. Skinner published his first lengthy exposition of his observations is a 1938 book titled The Behavior of Organisms.

Ken Ramirez, a positive reinforcement practitioner who heads animal training at the Shedd Aquarium, told me that one way to understand positive reinforcement is to think of the ink in your pen. When you start writing, the flow of the ink is like the sound of a clicker. The appearance of ink immediately reinforces your choice to begin writing. If the inked stopped flowing, you would stop writing. But if the ink flowed before you started writing, you would hardly be stimulated to write. You probably would throw the pen away. According to its proponents, positive reinforcement works in training any animal. It is best known as a tool for training dolphins and killer whales. These massive animals can’t be leashed or bridled and don’t respond to typical training stimulus. Any stimulus intended to spur the animal might simply cause it to swim away. Karen Pryor, a veteran dolphin trainer, explains the difference in her book, Don’t Shoot the Dog: “Reinforcement is an event that [a] occurs upon completion of a behavior and [b] increases the likelihood of that behavior occurring in the future… The elements are connected in real time -- the behavior engenders the reinforcement and then the behavior occurs more frequently.”

Positive reinforcement shifts the source of the desired behavior from the trainer, trying to nudge the animal, to the animal, which moves randomly through a series of acts but is rewarded instantly when and only when it performs the correct action. Astonishing animal acts featuring pigeons, dolphins, chickens and, yes, dogs result from positive reinforcement. If you would like to see a demonstration with rescue dogs, Ken Ramirez and his team are staging a series of public performances beginning this month in the Shedd Aquarium. While the whales and dolphins are away during renovation of their space, Ken will show how the techniques of training large sea mammals can be applied to your own pet. Assisting him will be rescue dogs Nico, Barney, Harley, Olivia, Widget and Wylie. Check last Friday’s Chicago Tribune for an article about the program, which runs through next spring.

In teaching a dog the basic command “sit,” a traditional method involves voicing the command “sit” in an authoritative way and slightly jerking the dog’s head upward, using a leash and collar. Often, the trainer also pushes down gently with a hand on the dog’s hips as the command “sit” is uttered. After many repetitions of this process, the dog may well sit on command, in order to avoid having his neck jerked or his hips pushed. Who wouldn’t? Many trainers place a great deal of importance on the assertiveness of the voice in sounding the command, “sit.” The idea is to communicate to the dog that you mean business, in a calm but authoritative way.

By contrast, when a positive reinforcement trainer teaches a dog to sit for the first time, he or she issues no voice command. The dog doesn’t know and can’t be taught what the word “sit” means before it sits. Instead, the trainer uses whatever nonthreatening lure works – a treat held over the dog’s head, a hand gesture – never a collar jerk or push on the hips -- to lead the dog into a sitting position. A lure is employed merely to short-circuit the time that might be necessary waiting for the dog randomly to sit on its own. But the moment the dog sits, an immediate click with the clicker and a treat reinforce the move. Only after several successful sits, followed by clicks and treats, is the word “sit” introduced to begin the process. It makes little difference to the positive reinforcement training how authoritatively the word “sit” is spoken. The critical sound is not the human voice before the sit but the clicker click immediately after the sit. A clicker sounds the same no matter who uses it, a child, an elderly person with a weak voice, whoever. Indeed, professional dog trainers work to remove, or fade, the initial voice cue to the animal and replace it with a physical gesture, which will be undetectable to an audience. One famous case of such conditioning was a German horse named Clever Hans. The horse pawed the ground to count out answers to arithmetic questions and other puzzles. Clever Hans was considered a genius until expert observers realized that the horse would paw the ground until the trainer’s head ever so slightly moved up. The horse could perform the trick with the trainer absent, because people watching almost always raised their heads in amazement when the horse reached the correct number.

B.F. Skinner was convinced that the surprising evidence of positive reinforcement he had discovered in laboratory animals could apply to humans. “I am quite sure,” he wrote, “that when I did work with rats and pigeons I was always imagining parallel cases in human behavior.” Pryor and other advocates of positive reinforcement also claim universal application of the process. “I stopped yelling at my kids,” Pryor writes, “because I was noticing that yelling didn’t work. Watching for behavior I liked, and reinforcing it when it occurred, worked a lot better and kept the peace, too.” She quotes one of her professional associates, saying, “Nobody should be allowed to have a baby unless they have first been required to train a chicken.”

The Shedd’s Ken Ramirez told me the technique is the same “whether you’re training and earthworm or a Harvard graduate.” Skinner disciples play a parlor game with the method. A group selects a player and, in his or her absence, pick an activity to be performed – such as turning off a light switch in the room. Like a game of getting hotter or colder, the player enters the room and receives reinforcement from the group by trial and error until hitting the light switch. Knowledge, logic, personal drive, guilt, fear and love play no role in shaping the player’s behavior. The player’s actions are random unless and until they are guided by their consequences, just as Darwin described the evolution of species.

Obviously, this technique of intervention raises controversial questions. You may have noticed that the trainer and the subject are not on equal footing. The trainer is the only one who knows the goal of the exercise and the only one who can debate or rationalize the goal. The process doesn’t work if the subject of an experiment is in the loop. In a society or a family, who gets to decide what behavior will be rewarded and how? What is the place of human free will, apart from the reinforcing and shaping interventions of an outsider? What becomes of individual moral principles when behavior is simply conditional? Aren’t you being deceitful when you try to shape my behavior without forewarning? These are visceral issues for many people.

Initially, Skinner’s theory of positive reinforcement was the product of his scientific observations, not a sweeping prescription for human progress. But he ventured into dangerous territory with his 1948 novel, Walden Two. The book depicts a utopian community that shuns materialism and industrialization and operates on the basis of communal striving toward perfection. In the 1976 edition of the book, Skinner wrote, “Those who know the importance of contingencies of reinforcement know how people can be led to discover the things they do best and the things from which they will get the greatest satisfaction.” Despite his entirely optimistic and nonthreatening research and teaching, Skinner became a lightening rod for critics from the left and right. Early in his career Noam Chomsky, the linguist and future darling of the radical left, denounced Skinner: “…Consider a well run concentration camp,” Chomsky wrote, “with inmates spying on one another and the gas oven smoking in the distance, and perhaps an occasional verbal hint as a reminder of the meaning of this reinforcer. It would appear to be an almost perfect world… With Skinner’s scheme there is no objection to this social order. Rather, it seems close to ideal.” To pick just one well known name from the political right, here’s what Vice President Spiro Agnew had to say about Skinner in 1972: “America as a society was founded on respect of the individual and an unshakable belief in his worth and dignity…. Skinner attacks the very precepts on which our society is based, saying that ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ were once valid goals but have no place in 20^th Century America or in the creation of a new culture as he proposes.”

Meanwhile, the science on which the theory of positive reinforcement rested itself evolved. In 1961, two Skinner disciples, Keller and Marian Breland, published a paper in the scholarly journal American Psychologist that reported an important glitch in Skinner’s theory. The Brelands had been students of Skinner at the University of Minnesota. According to one biographical sketch, “Marian was running down a hallway after being bitten by a laboratory rat and literally ran into Keller.” The two worked with Skinner during World War II on Project Pigeon, an experiment in training pigeons to guide bombs. The Brelands had greater entrepreneurial instincts than their professor. In 1955, they opened IQ Zoo in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The “zoo,” which featured acts by chickens, rabbits, ducks and raccoons, became a popular tourist attraction. The Brelands are credited with developing training techniques applauded everyday at marine and bird parks. The theory of positive reinforcement gave them a comfortable living in the commercial world, but they continued to contribute research findings to academia.

The title of their 1961 article, “The Misbehavior of Organisms” is a play on the title of Skinner’s first book. The article begins, “There seems to be a continuing realization by psychologists that perhaps the white rat cannot reveal everything there is to know about behavior.” The Brelands describe several instances in which chickens, raccoons and pigs they had trained to perform failed to carry out tricks quickly, despite the immediacy of the trainer response, and instead engaged in behavior that was not rewarded. In one example, a pig taught to carry wooden coins to a piggy bank would drop a coin, root at the coin, toss the coin in the air and root again – ignoring the food payoff to be had by making the deposit in the bank. “The examples we listed we feel represent a clear and utter failure of conditioning theory,” the Brelands wrote. “The animal simply does not do what he has been conditioned to do.” To the Brelands’ chagrin, they realized that the recalcitrant animals were lapsing into behavior inspired by something Skinner and other behaviorists had never acknowledged -- instinct. Pigs have rooted for food for thousands of years and apparently are not dissuaded from the activity by positive reinforcement. They termed their observations “instinctive drift.” “After 14 years of continuous conditioning and observation of thousands of animals, it is our reluctant conclusion that the behavior of any species cannot be adequately understood, predicted or controlled without knowledge of its instinctive patterns, evolutionary history, and ecological niche.”

The Brelands did not contemplate, nor will I, what instincts imbedded in human beings might interfere with our own conditioning by positive reinforcement. But their critique brings us back to dog training and Duke.

Perhaps you’ve watched Cesar Millan, who bills himself as the “dog whisperer” on his popular series on the National Geographic cable channel. The foundation of Millan’s efforts at correcting bad behavior by dogs is the notion that dogs, like their wolf ancestors, are pack animals and that certain instincts arise from the effort of the pack to survive. The chief instinct he claims to exploit is the idea that dogs recognize and respect a pack leader. His 2007 book, written with his TV show’s executive producer, Melissa Jo Peltier, is titled Be the Pack Leader. Practitioners of positive reinforcement training have no use for Millan, whom they see as the latest popularizer of punishing animals to force desired behaviors and imposing discipline that is a human, but not an animal condition. Indeed, Be the Pack Leader mischaracterizes positive reinforcement training as little more than stimulus/response bribery. “Too much positive reinforcement can create the appearance of weakness in the one giving the praise – or the treats, or the applause, or whatever that reward might be,” Millan writes. He especially rejects positive reinforcement as a tool in handling problem dogs. ”Can you imagine trying to click and throw treats while you are struggling with all you might to keep your dog from attacking someone or another dog?” Of course, clicks and treats would play no part in such an episode in the hands of a positive reinforcement trainer. No competent trainer would reinforce dangerous behavior.

Shedd Aquarium’s Ken Ramirez, who has spent thirty years in handling animals, acknowledges the reality of instinctive drift. “No matter what you have as a reinforcer, it may not be greater than the reinforcement value of chasing that squirrel,” he said. But, he says, dog owners need to be careful in assuming what instincts are foremost in dog behavior. After thousands of years of domestication, he says, “a dog is not a wolf.” The notion of pack leaders and alpha animals may no longer apply, if they ever did. Some researchers of wolf behavior question whether these instincts exist even in the wolf world.

Given the ongoing uncertainty about the theory and practice of animal training, it is remarkable and, in my opinion, troubling how easily experts in the field extrapolate from animal behavior to human behavior. Making the transition may be critical to broadening the audience for dog training books. But a visit to your local book store will demonstrate how far-fetched some of the claims have become. Ken Haggard, a popular evangelist, titled his book Dog Training, Fly Fishing and Sharing Christ in the 21^st Century. Claims of mystical connections between dogs and dog owners are a staple of this genre. Karen Pryor’s popular book, Don’t Shoot the Dog, includes advice on child rearing and improving your putting as well as “how to deal with a crabby boss.” The subtitle of Millan’s book Be the Pack Leader is “Use Cesar’s Way to Transform Your Dog … and Your Life.” His case studies frequently feature dog owners who improve their social relations by adopting what he calls a calm assertive demeanor traced back to the behavior of a wolf pack leader.

I began by describing the noble work of pet rescue organizations. Many of the pets obtained by these organizations were abused, sometimes horrifically. Techniques of positive reinforcement, which shun even mild coercion, naturally appeal to individuals who deal with rescue dogs. A recent cable television series on the rehabilitation of dogs features pit bulls rescued from Michael Vick’s dog fighting compound. The show is a convincing demonstration of the power of positive reinforcement. Cesar Millan also demonstrates success with difficult dogs, using very different methods.

The debate continues. Indeed, Kate and I disagree somewhat on these competing theories. I am persuaded by Karen Pryor and the positive reinforcement camp; Kate finds Cesar Millan’s approach practical and effective. Unfortunately, dog trainers of all stripes will tell you that members of the family should be on the same page. We are not. Does Duke know or care? I doubt it. I suspect that instinctive drift leads him and all dogs that are house pets to recognize the foibles of their human guardians and to make the best of them. As any dog owner knows, dogs are working everyday to train us to sit.

Sources:

Bjork, Daniel W., B.F. Skinner: A Life, Basic Books, 1993.

Breland, Keller and Marian Breland, “The Misbehavior of Organisms,” American Psychologist, Vo. 16, 1961, pp. 681-684.

Gillaspy, Jr., Arthur and Elson M. Bihm, “Keller Bramwell Breland,” The Encyclopedia if Arkansas History & Culture, University of Central Arkansas, 2007.

Millan, Cesar and Melissa Jo Peltier, Be the Pack Leader: Use Cesar’s Way to Transform Your Dog…and Your Life, Harmony Books, 2007.

Pryor, Karen, Don’t Shoot the Dog: The New Art of Teaching and Training, Ringpress Books, 2002.

Richelle, Marc N., B.F. Skinner: A Reappraisal, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993.

Rubin, Bonnie Miller, “Can You Pass Pet Muster,” Chicago Tribune, Aug. 24, 2008.

Schmidt, Veronica, “Ellen DeGeneres dog drama sends America into spin,” The Times Online, Oct. 17, 2007.