# Motivation



## davetgabby (Dec 29, 2007)

by Jean Donaldson.
Motivation in dog training has been far too murky a topic for far too long. You
may have been told that dogs have a desire to please, that they are pack animals
who require leadership, which makes obedience fall into place, that you
have to project the right energy, that you have to speak to the dog in his own
language, and on and on. All this mumbo jumbo is usually the made-up shtick
of someone trying to sell you their one-of-a-kind magical method, which they
developed from some sort of natural gift.
These murky-motivation trainers rarely talk clearly about rewards and
punishments. They will most certainly shun food, the most potent motivator
in animal training. They'll first tell you that praise and projecting the right
attitude is all that is needed. If you then test this by comparing training ease
and outcomes achieved with each, the food will inevitably win hands down.
At this point, a murky motivator will switch his rhetoric to a moral argument,
that using food somehow corrupts the dog. He may try playing to your narcissism:
that it is somehow superior to have your dog do it all for you. He may
warn you that the dog will acquire a dependency on food.
What a murky motivator won't tell you—perhaps because he doesn't know
or perhaps because the truth impacts sales—is that all animal training depends
on consequences. Trainers who do not use powerful reward motivators such as
food use other incentives instead, such as special collars, physical force, and
intimidation. They may tell you that it's energy or leadership or some other
murky-training buzzword, but, again, test it out. Give such a trainer a dog and
ask him to train a behavior using this magical energy but without pinning the
dog to the ground, striking him, or jerking him with some sort of collar, and
see if it still works. Such trainers prey on your wish not to have to motivate
your dog, but it's a scam. All dogs must be motivated. No motivation, no training.
This can be a tough pill to swallow if you've been sold the myth that it will
all happen like Lassie on TV. (Lassie, by the way, was several food-trained dogs,
who all got multiple takes.)
This is an important discussion because it gets at the heart of the matter:
technical competence. Being misled by a trainer unversed in how animals
learn is no different from being told by a self-taught, unschooled orthodontist
that he didn't require a university education because he has a natural gift for
teeth. It would be considered outrageous in any other field—general contracting,
plumbing, aeronautical engineering. (Does anyone want to fly in a plane
designed by someone self-taught with a natural gift, or would you prefer a plane
designed by real engineers?) But in dog training, we fall for it over and over
again.
To come up to speed about motivation, imagine your dog innocently posing
two questions to you when you ask him to do something:
1. Why should I?
2. What do you want me to do?
The order of these questions is important. To change behavior, we must
supply consequences. There are, broadly speaking, three choices: you can use
rewards, use force, or use a combination of the two. People naturally gravitate
to whichever choice feels right to them. Dogs would be better served if we got
savvier at spotting the murky language that obscures motivators and got a real
answer to the following: does the trainer motivate with the carrot, the stick, or
some of both?
I used to train with some of both, but for the past twenty years or so I have
dropped force from my repertoire, mostly because I'm just not comfortable
hurting or scaring dogs to train them. Luckily, I've not had to compromise the
standard of training that I can achieve by training force free.
The method you're going to learn in this book is force free, which means
that we will be identifying rewards and taking control of them, starting and
stopping them to mold your dog's behavior like clay. We have to identify
rewards because dogs vary in what motivates them strongly enough to train.
We have to take control of rewards because if they are available for free, they
are devalued. Animal trainers call this taking-control part closing the economy
on a motivator.
It bears repeating: your dog will not work for nothing. No normal animal
will work for nothing. For generations, dog owners have been sold a lie, which
is that dogs will work for free, or just to please you. It's just not true. All along,
if you look closely, there were always motivators: rewards, force, or the threat
of force.


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