How to find a positive dog trainer in Singapore

Because this is a longer post, here’s the breakdown of what is being covered:

1. The naggy introduction :P
2. Dog training 101: Positive reinforcement – one of the quadrants in Skinner’s Operant Conditioning model
3. How do I find a basic obedience course works for me?
4. Who are the positive trainers in Singapore?
5. Three questions to ask the dog trainer
6. Asking ourselves the three questions
7. More responses from Dog trainers and a dog owner [videos]

The naggy introduction :P

When we adopted Donna, we found that she had pretty bad thunder phobia. That made the quality of life for both the humans and the dog really sub-standard. When you adopt a dog, you take on a responsibility and commitment which means you can’t throw the dog back to the shelter just like that.

But given my own temperament and shortcomings, there was no way living with a thunder phobic dog could be good for either human or dog psychologically.

The truth, at one point, Mr P did wonder if we should just return Donna back to the shelter because her thunder phobia was just taking a toll on both of us.

Now, if your dog is already pacing around, climbing furniture, fear pee-ing because the weather got her all panicky, you can’t just stop her and push her to lie flat on the floor and call it “calm submissive”. It doesn’t work that way. (Note: I didn’t do that, but I recall an episode on TV when some guy was jerking a dog on his prong collar until dog stopped prancing from separation anxiety and just stayed very still on his bed and the guy called it being “calm”. If it was Donna, I would have called it being “overwhelmed by fear”, because that’s how she reacts to anything too threatening. )

But anyway, I don’t remember the timelines well, but I do remember a time when I was still new to managing a dog and trying to understand this training method called Positive Reinforcement and how it could possibly help Donna.

Positive reinforcement – one of the quadrants in Skinner’s Operant Conditioning model

Research told me that this was proposed by this guy called Skinner. B. F. Skinner was a Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. More about Skinner.

Fun fact
During WWII, Skinner worked for the military on an experimental project to use pigeons to guide missiles. – Havard Film Archive

Pigeons playing ping pong

So anyway, Skinner’s studies resulted in the approach he called Operant Conditioning, which described the following four quadrants – Positive punishment, Negative punishment, Positive reinforcement, Negative reinforcement. More about this in A Brief Survey of Operant Behaviour.

The Four Quadrants can be used to describe any action a person/living thing takes towards another living thing – human, dog, cat, pigeons. And what Skinner did was to study the consequences on the behaviour that the action was directed towards.

In the context of dog management and training, this is what the Four Quadrants can mean:

Note: This image of Lili Chin’s is pending an update, you can see her notes on the wordings she is intending to update here on her original download page. Image is some rights reserved and can be used for non-commercial use with attribution.

 

How do I find a basic obedience course that works for me?

Now, I did the research and reading up on my own because frankly, I wanted to send Donna for Basic Obedience Training since quite a long time back but the prospect of finding a trainer we are comfortable with was daunting.

How do I qualify a trainer? I didn’t have the necessary knowledge to decide who is potentially good or bad for Donna. Who really knows his stuff? Who is really just gonna be giving me unsubstantiable marketing spiel about his “street cred”. Like come on, that guy on TV has tons of “street cred”, no?

But after much reading and interacting with Donna, where I arrived at today is this:

I wanted a trainer who can

• read and understand Donna’s body language and behaviour
• teach me to train her in a fun (for both human and dog), force-free way
• correct the mistakes I am committing because much of what I am doing is based off Internet video tutorials from overseas positive trainers, so it’s really my own interpretation and I may not see my own blind spots. 

I wanted it to be positive because I see it as the gentlest way of training my pet dog without causing her even more stress.

• Not a trainer who requires Donna to be on a choke chain from lesson one.
• Not a sometimes “positive” trainer who uses a mixed bag approach from the toolbox where it suits him.
• But basically, a trainer who understands the science and the theory and who has applied it in his work and believes in it.

Because who else to learn from but someone who is truly passionate about it? Who else is better at motivating and inspiring the dog owner, than a trainer who is totally committed towards the chosen approach?

 

The truth,

The positive dog trainer in Singapore is a rare animal

Somehow the stars fell into place and we managed to have a group of friends come together wanting to form a private training group with a Positive Trainer.

We contacted all the trainers in the AVA (Agri-food and Veterinary Authority of Singapore) accredited list and guess what – none of them (who responded) are positive trainers. Zero.

Who is a potentially Positive Trainer in Singapore?
Based on the information our group pooled together:

• Pup Pup ‘n’ Away
• KasPup UniFURsity
• Cheerful Dogs
• Supernova

I used “potentially” because I haven’t met with them personally and I have never worked with them in real life.

And no, they are all not AVA-accredited. So if you want to get one of these breeds in the Second Schedule, you probably have to consult with AVA if you may use non AVA-accredited trainers for the obedience training.

 

Three questions to ask the dog trainer

So, the reason why I’m writing all these today is because right now there is this interesting event going on called the World Dog Trainers’ Motivation Transparency Challenge.

Quoting the dogthusiast,

Jean Donaldson of The Academy For Dog Trainers noted there is a disconnect between the marketing language used by dog trainers, and what they actually do in practice… Do not trust a trainer’s marketing on websites on its own.

Exactly the same questions I had when I first started looking for a prospective trainer, how do I qualify them? Sure, the four trainers I listed above all claimed on their websites to be positive.

But how do I know they are really positive?

The World Dog Trainers’ Motivation Transparency Challenge seeks to highlight exactly that. It suggests to you three simple questions to ask the trainer you are sussing out:

1. What will happen to my dog if she gets it right?
2. What will happen to my dog if she gets it wrong?
3. Are there less invasive alternatives to what you propose?

I haven’t really had the time to look at a lot of the videos yet, but the questions do help you to determine which quadrant(s) the trainer says he employs for the proposed training. The rest then lies on your own comfort level with his answers and whether you think you can work well with him.

So in case you are interested in checking out the four positive trainers listed above, these are the three questions you can consider asking them. (Besides the checks on background profile and word of mouth effectiveness that we are likely to do when looking to hire somebody.)

 

So what do we do with Donna?

So after more than a year since we adopted Donna, we are finally enrolling in Basic Obedience Training. The training is positive, and we take it to mean force-free.

We haven’t really asked our trainer those three questions ourselves, haha! But in our conversations we understand she may use the following:

Positive reinforcement to reward desired behaviour

Negative punishment which means the dog is not rewarded because he did not perform the desired behaviour or action.

She won’t use the following:

Negative reinforcement can mean taking away a variable that could be distracting or “punishing” your dog in some way and so prevents him from the desirable behaviour.

Note, in some cases Negative reinforcement can be considered as undesirable. So do pay attention to what the trainer says in his answers to questions, and always ask when he uses jargon/terms that you don’t understand. Ask him to explain until you do.

But it is not all bad e.g. when Donna perceives a broom or mop leaning against a wall near her, she is more likely to be apprehensive and distracted and not respond to a command. This is because she worries that the “unstable” object will fall on her. Once the object is removed, she is no longer distracted and happier to sit, etc on command.

But what I would avoid are trainers who say they are “balanced trainers” and may use tactics from all four quadrants, particularly Positive punishment.

Positive punishment means the dog is punished when he does not perform the desired action or behaviour.

I say so because I already know the consequences I could get with Donna after more than a year of living with her. Note: This is my dog. Every dog is an individual, so what works with my dog may/ may not apply to yours.

So out of fun, here’s my own answers as a pet owner to the three questions:

1. What will happen to my dog if she gets it right?
She gets rewarded with a treat (positive reinforcement) so she knows this behaviour is encouraged and that she will get rewarded if/when she repeats.  And she is generally happy to repeat.

 

2. What will happen to my dog if she gets it wrong?
I tend to turn a blind eye when she gets it wrong. And wait to reward her when she gets it right.

I am aware that taking too long to reward or taking away the reward can cause her to show signs that she feels frustration. Depending on the context, the training may or may not engage her because of the frustration that is allowed to build.

So I try to avoid that to some degree, and make sure the frustration doesn’t build up to make it an entirely disagreeable experience for Donna nowadays. A lot of things are not life and death for her to learn right away. So when we get stuck, we try doing something else, and coming back to this at a later time.

Learning to set her up for success is an ongoing process. I have found it helpful to keep training sessions short so we can end on a positive note without her feeling bored or worse frustrated from it.

Sometimes I need to figure out how to distract her from the undesired behaviour or to lure her into performing the behaviour I want in order to capture it and reward her.

My experience is that if Donna perceives herself as being positively punished or forced into doing something, she cowers and shrinks back in fear.

She becomes hesitant to respond and so she does not learn as fast as she could have had she felt confident and encouraged to test and learn what works to get her more treats. So when I say “No”, she listens too well. She stops trying altogether.  So I consciously try not to positively punish her in that way.

 

3. Are there less invasive alternatives to what you propose?
I am a dog owner with only a year’s experience, so I’m definitely not an expert, so I have to agree with Eileen from Eileen and dogs!

I will get a better trainer than I am, and that is exactly why we are attending a Basic Obedience Course in October, more than a year after adopting Donna.

Sure Donna already knows her basic obedience stuff, but she’s not perfect and I’m looking forward to the new things we may  learn together in a high distraction environment with other dogs.

 

More responses from Trainers and a dog owner

There are a number of responses posted on the  World Dog Trainers’ Motivation Transparency Challenge facebook page. But if you only have the time for two or three, I would recommend: –

1) For beginners wondering what a positive trainer’s approach to training is,
I’m not familiar with this trainer, but his video is very easy to watch and understand compared to the others.

2) For dog owners who already have a basic understanding of positive training and some knowledge of what is *BAT (Behavioural Adjustment Training),
this video by Grisha Stewart from Ahimsa Dog Training in Seattle may be interesting.
*You can learn more about BAT here, there is also a Bat seminar coming up in Singapore in November that you can check out here. 

3) For dog owners who already have a basic understanding of positive training 
This video is softer in volume so it may be harder to catch what she is saying, but a fair bit of what I learn about fearful dogs and dog training actually comes from dog owner and blogger Eileen and Dogs, among others like Ahimsa mentioned above.

I found the videos via My imperfect dog who did a great job of narrowing them down for us on her post What happens if the dog gets it wrong. The comments on raising criteria are as interesting as the post so go take a look if you want to know more about the topic. :)

Updated

Here’s a video from Pup Pup n Away in Singapore.

 

Note: Skinner’s original operant conditioning model, when applied to dog training can be somewhat confusing because of the terms used, and how trainers interpret them. If you find I am mistaken or inaccurate in any way, I would very much like to be advised on the inaccuracies. Thanks!