This is the second of a few emails I’ll be sending out as a recap of my recent week at The Michael Ellis School For Dog Trainers in Santa Rosa, CA, where I attended Kynology 4.0, a symposium on modern dog training. My brain is pretty full right now, so I’ll be splitting this in to several emails, and then converting them to blog posts here at daisypeel.com.
Remember those questions I asked in the last email? Some of those I didn’t even formulate until after my first Kynology Symposium in May 2025. Some of them have bubbled to the surface in the last week, during my time in California at The Michael Ellis School For Dog Trainers. Even more questions and thoughts are still working their way up to the surface.
My focus up to this point in my dog training journey has been on a strategy of perfecting reinforcement and simply trying to AVOID using punishment – not to say punishment never happened, I just never thought to think about it deeply, or work toward being SKILLFUL with it.
Aversives and aversive experiences – something that might be used far LESS than reinforcement but which may have proportionately larger impacts on training. Something that ultimately is a HUGE driver of the behavior of ALL organisms, since all organisms have evolved to grow and change as a result of reward AND punishment. For the last almost thirty years it was a thing that happened when I reached the end of my reinforcement rope and hit frustration. And as we all know, it takes a LOT of skill and emotional regulation to perform well when you’re at the end of your leash and in a state of frustration and agitation.
But now I AM thinking about aversives, and thinking about them deeply.
And as it turns out, and as I’ve learned via Kynology, there’s a LARGE body of scientific literature on aversives. Not just your typical “oh it’s bad avoid it” but how that is NOT the conclusion of science AT ALL. How durable, stable, JOYFUL behaviors can be developed via skillful layering of an aversive over the top of a behavior constructed with positive reinforcement. How shaping and the absence of a clear aversive can be HARMFUL to a dog’s resilience in some cases. How carefully constructed aversive experiences heighten a dog’s sense of agency and also visible wellbeing and resiliency.
And that’s just the beginning of it. What this actually means for how we train — and why agility specifically has left handlers completely in the dark on this, well, that’s next.
And, I should also mention, because I know that there are many who just automatically cringe when they hear the word “aversive” or punishment, that thinking about aversives is what allows us to identify the full range of experiences for a dog. For example, the following may or may not be aversive to a particular dog, but all of the following probably fall outside of what most of us immediately think of when we hear or read the word ‘aversive’ and then shut our brains off to further curiosity:
- Tickling with a feather
- Waving a strong odor under the nose
- Blowing on an ear or face
- Pulling on the leash
- Picking a dog up
- Petting a dog that wants to work
- Removing a toy
- Removing food
- Ending a training session
That last one can be HUGELY aversive to a lot of dogs for whom playing training games with us are their whole raison d’etre, and for a lot of dogs, there are things called omission signals that let those dogs know that the end of a session, is coming. And then that means…no more reinforcement is coming! That’s when dogs start doing things like avoiding you at the end of an agility run, or avoiding you at the end of a training session when you pick up your leash, or take off your bait bag, etc. etc.
If you’re interested in a GREAT podcast episode where Dr. Stewart Hilliard talks at length about omission signals and more, check out this episode on Youtube (you can also find it on Spotify or your podcast player of choice).