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(please note: this post is about dog training. I care about autistic people and abuse survivors, being both, but this is not a post about those issues; it is about using the experiences of people who’ve been through behavioralist training and can tell us about it to interpret the experiences of dogs, who cannot.)

Basically, the goal of behavioralist training methods – whether used on dogs, dolphins or people – is to cut out or deny the role of the brain in decision making, reducing behavior to responses to external cues; behaviors that receive a good response should keep happening or happen when cued, behaviors that receive a bad response should stop. The only context is the cue – no emotions and no internal motivations, let alone conscious decision or thought.

I don’t think this is entirely possible, but you can get pretty far. A lot of autistic adults, and abuse survivors subject to less scientific versions of this spectrum of training methods, talk about being cue dependent – having difficulty initiating actions without an external cue or without being told to by someone else; or conversely, having difficulty not responding to a cue given intentionally or by accident in a way that resembles an old training cue.

(For a while, I had trouble in social situations because if the person I was talking to implied an expected answer I would automatically give it without having time to stop and think, and sometimes that meant I was lying. Fortunately, I’ve been out of my mother’s house for three and a half years now, and this particular problem is mostly gone.)

Interestingly, there are a number of studies that demonstrate that punishment and reward reduce intrinsic motivation (here’s a pop science article rounding them up). This has long been known – if perhaps not consciously – by behavioralist trainers, who sometimes extinguish a behavior by teaching it in response to the cue, and then never giving the cue; when done correctly, the animal or child will never produce the behavior autonomously.

(When I discussed this with my girlfriend a while ago, she mentioned that a behavioral problem seen in some protection trained dogs is biting in response to certain movements as though they can’t tell the difference between a person and a bite cushion.

It’s hard to say exactly what’s going on in a dog’s head, because we can’t talk to them and our understanding of their behavior is filtered through a mesh of body language differences, rewards and punishments for emotional expressions and communication, and their utter dependence on us. That said, I was pretty horrified by the implication that they may know they’re hurting people and be involuntarily biting anyway, unable to stop. I’ve been there, though thankfully not in a context involving assault.)

Obviously, we can’t allow dogs utter autonomy and still live with them, but dogs are living creatures who need some amount of autonomy the same way we do, and I think it’s worth considering whether we’re infringing on it because we need to, or because we think it’s fun, or it scores us dog trainer cred. Minimizing harm is sometimes all we can do.

I am still trying to decide what I think the best ways of doing that are. I think that requiring constant attention or focus is probably bad; that good enough to live with should be allowed to be good enough in regards to obedience training for non-working dogs; and that “extra” recreational activities such as dog sports should be chosen with an eye to things the dog is enthusiastic about initially, and things that involve decision making on the part of the dog.