Calling All Elephants: What We Don't Talk About When We Talk About 'Positive' Training

Apologies in advance for an extremely long post. What follows is the transcript of a talk I gave in November, lightly edited for more clarity and (with luck) a little more grace. The talk was presented with the invaluable support (logistical and moral) of Daniela Iancu and Geoff Peterson of Portland's own Animal Community Talks.

Here's the original video if you're interested and are willing to wade through a sludge of 'aaahs' in the first five or ten minutes:

Man, I say "Aah a lot."

Here's an open letter written to Buck Brannaman a couple of years ago that makes a good companion piece, if only to demonstrate my will and ability to champion "positive" techniques:

"Buck Brannaman Kicks Ass, However...

And here's the transcript of the November talk. I hope you at least find it interesting!

Gretchen:    Thanks, Daniela. And thanks to you all. Wow. (laughs) This is what I'm discovering about this weird space I'm inhabiting right now –  you don't even have to do anything for people to applaud you!

My name is Gretchen Icenogle, and I'm the owner of Bridgetown Dog Training. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of training going on at Bridgetown these days. As you all know something about, even from the flyer for this talk, I was diagnosed early last December with a very aggressive form of breast cancer. My mother had died of inflammatory breast cancer when she was only 48. I was born on her twentieth birthday, making us exactly twenty years apart, and I was just about six months younger at the time of my diagnosis than she was at hers.

So it wasn't a big surprise to learn about a month later that I carried a BRCA1 mutation, the type that Angelina Jolie has made so famous. That helped explain a lot of lousy “luck” in our family. The good news is that my sister is clear of the mutation, which means that my niece is clear too.

In my own case, we went after it with big guns: double mastectomy, five months of chemo, and after that an oophorectomy because I was at high risk for ovarian cancer as well. Finished that all up mid-August, and finally reached the carrot that my husband Peter and I had been hanging out in front of our noses for eight months, which was two weeks on the big island of Hawaii.

At the end of September, we did that, and it was phenomenal. We had an incredible time: hiked the volcano, snorkeled with manta rays and green turtles. I had agiven myself a two-week space between when we were getting back and when I was due to start training again, then had classes scheduled to resume at Healthy Pets Northwest in Multnomah Village – my second home and dear second family for the last couple of years.

But a week after our return, I came down with what I thought ... well, I didn't know whether it was a stroke or a really bad optical migraine, but it arrived in the form of some bizarre visual symptoms and a sudden loss of peripheral vision. When we went to the emergency room, we discovered that it was a metastasis to my brain. Four weeks ago Friday, I had brain surgery to remove a tumor about an inch in diameter. I'll begin a very short course of radiation tomorrow. That will just be one week long, and highly focused on the bed of the tumor they removed.
    I was given the option, or actually the recommendation, to do full-brain radiation to try to mitigate the risk of metastases to other places in my brain. Unfortunately, that comes with an immediate cognitive decline and potentially really horrific effects down the line - if you're lucky enough to live six months to a year, there's the possibility that you'd become a vegetable. It can induce necrosis in the brain.

I am really fond of my wits, really, really fond of them. There are some things that ... creative projects, this project ... there are things that I really want to say, things that I really want to get done before I go. Three and a half weeks ago, I was given the proverbial, "We never know. We're always wrong. But six months is a reasonable guesstimate."

The question that was left to me is, what to do with this time? This is one of the things I really wanted to do with this time. All of the energy that I hoped to be pouring into hands-on training and working with individual people and dogs right now is going into actually trying to bring together some thoughts about the experiences I've had in my too-brief time as a trainer.

In particular, the reason this talk is called "Calling All Elephants" is that I feel ... I should say, in addition to my own position in extremis, another big incentive to give this talk is the recent death of Sophia Yin. There's a lot of untapped ... those of you who don't know, Dr. Yin was a veterinary behaviorist who made huge contributions in particular to force-free to gentle handling of animals in a veterinary setting. People  who didn't know her well but knew her like many of us did, through her training videos or just through seeing her public persona, were completely shocked by her suicide about a month ago now. There's actually a memorial going on for her right about now I think, down in California.

She was someone who held herself, clearly, to a standard that she personally didn't feel she was meeting. I'm also thinking of a play that my friend Lauren is in right now that's an adaptation of the Red Riding Hood story but set in a high school, a play about bullying.

But really it's about this free-floating shame that many of us, most of us, maybe all of us, feel about some aspect of ourselves that ... there are raw spots that, when they get touched, open up bigger wounds than we know how to close ourselves. What I am hoping to do through this talk and some other avenues ... my blog, actually, is another place where I'm really trying to tackle this ... is how do we build our reserves of resilience?

It's one thing to be ready to rescue each other from those really dark places where we all sometimes go. Those of us who have big, raw hearts, a lot of us in service professions.

Those of you who are not trainers here – many of you are teachers. Many of you are parents. You all have these places where you're trying to nurture another creature's ability to manage itself, its own strong emotions, to instill that kind of resilience that will get us through those really dark times. It's what's keeping me moving through this, the resilience that was instilled in me by my own teachers, my parents, people who have really put a lot of work into nurturing me.

My feeling, my essential sadness about the positive training community lies in my strong belief that it could meet that description of community a lot more fully if we were brave enough to have certain discussions that we're not having. Actually we could be having discussions with people who don't define themselves as "positive," or actively shrink from the label of “positive training,” if we were willing to tackle some difficult subjects.

My hope through this talk is to crack open some of these subjects and conversations, to invite the elephants in the room – all the things that we don't think we're allowed to talk about– I want to invite them out to play. I want to try to talk about a few of them. These are just a few that I've seen hiding unsuccessfully in the corners of a lot of conference rooms.

If you received a note-taking jot form, I'm curious to know ... those are either for your own use, taking down something that you thought you might want to pursue on your own later, or you can leave them.

You can leave a name, email for me. I may not be able to get back to you personally, but I'm really curious about your thoughts, too, and we'll also have an opportunity ... I apologize. This is not my normal teaching mode, speaking to a crowd of you and not, until the talk is done, inviting a lot of dialogue.

Dialogue is really what I feel I'm about, do best, and I look forward, in whatever way is comfortable for each of you, to engaging in that dialogue with you.

I have one specific agenda I should make transparent here. Something I conspicuously didn't include in my credentials is the fact that my professional training came from the Karen Pryor Academy of Animal Training and Behavior.
    Leaving that off was a specific choice I made last year, after I had a break with KPA that I will discuss in only very general terms a little later in the talk. So in addition to a general agenda of opening these discussions with people who define themselves as positive trainers, I am sending out, actually, a directed message to KPA, because I feel that their founder, Karen Pryor, embodies compassion, creativity, and honesty in a way that I think the organization has recently failed.
  That said, I have great hopes for its future. Ken Ramirez, who has been the longtime head of training at Shedd Aquarium, has become the KPA head of training, and I think he may have the capacity to change the culture there for the better. This, for me, is a time I hope not of  making vengeful or spiteful points, but of trying to do good. Where KPA is concerned, I truly count myself a member of the loyal opposition; I believe that organization and many others like it could be so much stronger if they invited true, open dialogue. I just wanted to confess from the start that I do have a specific agenda there, too.

So. My primary inspirations for this talk are death and heartbreak. That's where we start from.  (laughs) That in itself is opening a taboo in terms of positive training. One of the things we're supposed not to talk about, or that's supposed to be almost irrelevant, is emotion.

If we're talking about the behaviorist quadrants, if we're beginning with Skinner, we're very specifically not talking about emotion, because by his lights and by any behaviorist lights, anything that is not objectively measurable ... what went in, what came out, how many treats, what were the behaviors? ... you can't talk about it, right? It's all that kind of messy, amorphous stuff in the middle that we don't really want to discuss or that we supposedly can't discuss if our training is scientifically-based.

I think there's a lot that's happening right now in neuroscience and psychology that ideally is going to really revolutionize our sense of training. Many of you may already have a good sense of that already. Jaak Panksepp, up at Washington State University, has done a lot of work on what we now call “affective neuroscience,” the neuroscience of emotion. He's performing a really interesting, what he calls a triangulation. We say, "I can't speak about the internal state of an animal because the animal can't tell me about it. A human can report to me, 'I feel sad. I feel angry.' An animal can't do that directly."

With functional MRIs and ways of getting an objective view of the brain, seeing what is happening expressively, behaviorally, in an animal when that brain state looks very like a human brain state, getting the human to report, "This is how I feel when my brain is in this state," when the animal's brain is in that similar state, we can make some pretty good guesses given our evolutionary history as to what that animal subjectively feels.

Panksepp is mainly talking about mammals, but saying that basically it's a pretty decent guess that if it looks in the brain like rage, if it looks in the facial expressions like rage, if a human with that similar brain scan, similar expression is reporting rage, we're not making a big leap to identify that emotion in the other animal.

This is the kind of triangulation that he's performing, though it looks more like a rectangle, the way I've delineated it. We're cracking that nut, between the subjective and the objective. That's a lot of what's happening with this recent research. He's also just changing the vocabulary. The Skinnerian vocabulary, for those of you who know it,– positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, negative punishment – it's unwieldy to begin with. As I noted in the description of the talk, to try to explain to one of your clients or students, what “positive” means in a behaviorist context is totally crazy-making. It simply means I’m adding something, so “positive” punishment means, "I just kicked you. I added something to the situation that wasn't there before. It's painful, it's likely aversive to you, but it's positive because it's additive."

Similarly, negative reinforcement is the one that a lot of people have a hard time with, but it's a very easy thing to describe in perfectly plain English. It's relief. Something unpleasant was going on and it's been taken away – thank you! That's reinforcing. That makes the animal happy. Panksepp's work is really, I think, very useful in describing a much more potentially nuanced, but in some ways also a much simpler notion of disequilibrium.

Every animal is usually in some kind of disequilibrium, stronger or weaker. A perfectly content animal is an animal that doesn't need to do or to learn anything.

One of the walls that I really want to break down in talking about positive-reinforcement versus correction-based training is this sanctimony around, "Oh, I'm strictly rewards-based."

Purely positive, I'm sorry, it's bullshit. Somebody tells you they're purely positive, run the other direction, because what it means is that they're not reflective. They lack awareness of the nuances in their techniques. We are all using pressure of one kind or another. Let me ask you, if you were identifying different forms of disequilibrium that you might feel, like things that needed some kind of response on your part because you don't quite feel right, what are some various forms that that takes? Just call them out, anything.
Audience:    Nerves.
Gretchen:    Nerves. Anxiety, nervousness? Great, great.
Audience:    Hunger.
Gretchen:    Hunger. Great.
Audience:    Anger.
Gretchen:    Anger, great. Others? Sadness, yeah, terrific. Any others?
Audience:    Pain.
Gretchen:    Pain, fantastic. Something that requires a response from you. You're just like, "This is too-"
Audience:    Cold.
Gretchen:    Cold, great, yes, wonderful. The line that we're making as correction-based or reinforcement-based trainers is one that Panksepp might call ... I don't even know how to pronounce this word ... appetitive, something you're hungering for, something you feel you need. It could be literal food. It could be company. It could be warmth, shelter, although that's an interesting one. Are you seeking warmth or are you escaping cold?

Then there are some others that he, like others, calls aversive, where you're trying to escape something. What we go by in the positive training community generally is an idea that by its nature the motivation that’s driven by appetite is somehow superior to the motivation that's driven by an aversive pressure, so that the pressure of hunger, which is what many of us rely upon as positive reinforcement trainers,is implicitly superior as a form of pressure to a literal, physical pressure.
    I do a lot of leash work with my dogs that strongly resembles ground work or rein work with a horse. With my dog, Pazzo, the leash doesn't even go taut and I can lead him in circles around me.

It's so much more efficient than multiple verbal cues or whatever else I might do. It's very intelligible to him, even when he's in a harness. When Michele Pouliot gave an excellent presentation on what she called "The Right Touch" at a Clicker Expo a couple of  years ago, it was aimed at “advanced” students – not because the material itself was particularly difficult, but because there was worry about using what is essentially negative reinforcement, because you’re employing a pressure that's getting relief by the movement from the animal.

"I'm pressing you, that gets relieved by you moving in the direction I want." It is technically a negative reinforcement technique. It could be, at its extreme, yanking you across the hall. It's a matter of degree. If it's done in a way that's immediately intelligible to the animal, that the animal can respond to, can choose, it becomes an invitation to reward.

The way that Michele teaches it and that I often do, is just to take the leash and hold it totally taut, then the moment you get a release you mark and reward. It's combining negative reinforcement with positive reinforcement, but that negative reinforcement component is key. What happens is that the animal engages, has a pretty immediate sense of what's being asked, can do it, is willing, and yet technically that would not fall in a purely positive category.

Panksepp can be extremely helpful potentially in breaking down vocabulary that's become really moldy and, again, we're nearly a hundred years out from it. We need to revamp it. He's really interested instead in what he calls, and what he's seen in the brain, as distinct emotional circuits that play out in some predictable ways.

He talks, for instance, about the FEAR circuit, or about the RAGE  circuit that’s connected with frustration. Any of you working with dogs who have a real intolerance for restraint have seen the way that leash excitement converts easily to leash reactivity. "I can't get to this thing I really want to get to. That's horrible!" It becomes rage.

Play is something that Panksepp has also done a lot of research into and something that we're learning more and more about as being essential to healthy development, for mammals in particular. You might know him for his experiments tickling rats. That's what he's most famous for. It's hilarious.

They didn't realize how intense the rat's reaction was to tickling until they amped up the rats’ laugh at a frequency that we can't normally hear. He had to turn up the, not volume, but change the frequency in order to hear how delighted they were by the tickling. It’s addictive - they’ll come and seek out the tickling hand. They just love to be tickled. If you’ve got rats, tickle ‘em!

I think this notion of disequilibrium is really key to opening this conversation because what you start to realize is that no animal learns without incentive. Discomfort is the incentive. If we're working with hunger ... I don't know how many of us have told our clients, "Please bring your dog to class hungry. Only give them a half meal." Many of you will probably have to gauge, how hungry can I have my animal be before they can't focus because they're too wigged out, they're too excited about the food?

If you’re dealing in positive reinforcement, you're dealing in matters of degree. You're dealing in nuance. You're dealing with the individual animal and his tolerance for a very specific kind of discomfort.

This is not to say that I'm jumping onto the Cesar Milan bandwagon and I think rib kicks are the way to go. Part of the reason I think that there's a good reason to focus on, to keep our techniques as oriented toward positive reinforcement as possible is that it's a lot easier to practice, to fail, and to find the right target with positive reinforcement than with punishment.

If you're tapping into fear, and particularly if you're tapping into the fear of one's life being threatened... choking, for instance ... To take a recent example, I rarely intervene when I’m just out in the world beyond the classroom, but I saw a family in Hawaii with a dog that they were trying to “get comfortable in the water,” and they had the dog on leash and were all, "It's okay baby," and the dog was just doing this,  (motions clawing at the air, trying desperately to get to shore).
    I did approach. I said, "Listen, I've worked with a lot of fearful dogs and you're really in danger of teaching your dog to be terrified of the water." It had all to do with the animal's power in that situation. That was exactly what they said, actually. They said, "She's fine when she's off-leash," and I told them that made perfect sense - but right now she's really afraid she's going to drown, because she doesn't have that control. These were not cruel people - they really wanted to do right by their dog, and in just about every way they were doing just that.

The problem is that, when we're dealing with perceived threats to our very lives, we're wired to understand, "I may not get to repeat that mistake twice." It might only take one really clumsy punishment to instill a phobia in your dog. Cesar, frankly, is very practiced at his correction techniques, very effective. I am not and I will never be, because I'm not going to practice them and find that little band of efficacy with an individual dog where I only needed to do deliver the punishment once or twice, and the animal got the lesson, and that behavior was never repeated again.

That's where punishment “works.” I would never be a punishment-oriented trainer in great part because it's so hard to find that not-so-sweet spot. I have a lot more wiggle room working with treats. My dog Kili, I can't use high-value treats with her, because she just wigs out. She just completely loses it, so it's Charlee Bears for her and the meaty stuff for other dogs who are just like, "Charlee Bear? Nah."

I have that wiggle room. I have that play room. Particularly when you're dealing with multiple clients, there are just lots and lots of reasons to orient yourself toward positive reinforcement, but I think it's really important that we not fool ourselves that we are the saints of the training world because that's our orientation.
    It's finally a very pragmatic choice. Yes, it’s a choice that is oriented toward compassion for the animal, toward effective training, toward training that doesn't traumatize either the dog or the trainer. But here's no big black line between us and the “corrections” people. We're all dealing with forms of pressure, some of which are a little more manageable than others.

The other thing to emphasize is that disequilibrium is not in itself a bad thing. There's more research going on all the time around what we might call "eustress" as opposed to "distress," particularly with regard to the teaching of small children. “Grit” is a huge buzzword right now in educational circles. How do we develop resilience and grit? We have a lot of twenty-somethings who've been rescued from every failure and really don't know how to handle it.

I got to see a high contrast in grit when I taught briefly at Reed College after a number of years at Portland Community College. People at PCC, a lot of those students, they've encountered failure. They've picked themselves up like, "All right. Here we go." Here's another Sam Beckett quotation I always go back to in my own life:"Fail again. Fail better." All right. Here we go through the rinse cycle again. At Reed, I encountered a dismaying number of students whose parents were ready to swoop in whenever they met some difficulty and, students for whom a failing grade or even a C could be potentially devastating.

Again, this is about resilience. I think another thing that can be problematic in positive training circles is the emphasis on error-free learning. It's not that I think we need to fake out anyone: "Ah ha! Fooled you there." It's not getting into kind of a sadistic relationship with your dog, but building up some frustration tolerance, building up some tolerance for failure is really key to making that dog get to a place of, "Okay, shoot. That didn't work. What do I try now?"

We've got a lot of dogs who've been "purely positively" trained who are extremely fragile and totally lose it when things don't quite go their way. That's actually where I want to go here in terms of the hardest case I ever had and, what it revealed for me, and how it compelled me to speak today.

Let me take one more detour first, just to talk about another unexpected ... a toll that training in general can take on us. That is: getting focused on the behaviorist's perspective of what went in, what came out, what's measurable, can cause our focus and attention to drift from the creature who’s directly in front of us, who's giving us her attention and her hopes.

The hungry dog is thinking, "Oh my god, you've got steak! What am I going to do to get that steak?"

Meanwhile, we're going, "Okay, there’s my stopwatch. Where's my counter? Where's my pen, and I'm looking for ... " This was my training program in part, and one of the things I had some difficulties with, partly because I've got ADD and keeping records of any kind is just a horror to me, but also because ...

One of the quotations I put on your note page is from Martin Buber, a German-Jewish philosopher. ‘All real living is meeting.’ I love that. Buber’s best-known book, Ich und Du, is usually translated as "I and Thou" but the more accurate translation is more intimately "I and You".

Buber speaks a lot about what he sees as a fundamental split. If you're regarding another sentient creature, are you in an "I and it" ... relationship? Well, he wouldn't call that a relationship, basically. You're only in a relationship in his mind if your perspective is "I and you," where the creature who's looking back to you, you recognize in his or her full mystery, capacity. That creature is more than you can really take in or comprehend.

He/she is not an "it" that is reducible, that is atomizable to qualities and sensations. Most importantly, he/she is not a means either for you to buck up your own ego or get affection, but is just another creature inhabiting this place as fully as you are with as much right to his or her own desires, needs, and the rest of it as you are.

I think that when we start to reduce the animals we're interacting with, be they dogs or humans, to what we can "objectively" measure, that we're in serious danger of sliding into an "I/it" relationship. There's a big risk that we start viewing that other creature as a tool for our little victories: "You just got 15 consecutive successful repetitions of that behavior! Woohoo, good for me!"

It's not that record-keeping is implicitly evil, but I think we need to start thinking more about the pernicious effects that a “scientific” perspective can bring in its wake. How the nature or flavor of our regard for another can strongly affect the quality of our interaction and may have the most lasting impact on both parties involved. If you are with another human, and this is where things get, really, for me, kind of shaky in the positive training world - there's a lot of training of fellow humans going on! That's pretty spooky in itself, in ways that I'll get into in a little more detail, but more generally I’d say that just thinking about another being primarily in terms of what you can measure from that being's presentation can take on a moral hazard.

So on to what happens when we have creatures who don't have resilience, who don't have the internal resources to self-soothe, to self-calm. Pema Chödrön, whom I also refer to on your note sheet, there’s a story that she tells, and many others do too. I can't remember the original teacher of this, but the basic challenge is that the world is full of sharp things. If I'm going to be walking on the earth, maybe I'd better cover it all in leather. I'm going to cover the entire world in something. I'm going to just try to take all its edges off, because it's really uncomfortable for me to walk over the surface of this pokey, proddy, sharp world.

Then there's the approach that says instead, you know, I'm going to put on moccasins! I'm going to put my protection on myself! If you don't have moccasins, what you try to do is control the world and make sure that the world is safe for you. And you do that often by shutting other creatures down.
    Another place that I think we need to be careful not to lord it over correction-based trainers is in this whole notion that violence and aggression only happen “over there.” Passive-aggression I don't think is passive. I think that's a misnomer. It's covert. It's the kind of aggression that's slathered in nice, so that you can't even respond to it, often, without feeling like a jerk, because, "Why would you take offense at that? I'm just trying to be helpful here."
    The form that it usually takes that I ran into in, I think, in one of its most vicious forms ... one thing to take note of is that, if we're thinking in terms of forms of disequilibrium or forms of pain, they generally fall into some pretty clear categories. Most obviously, we've got physical pain. This is the stuff that correction-based trainers are often dealing in. It's the leash pop or the kick to the ribs.

But let me ask you this, would you rather be kicked in the shins or ostracized from a group? I'd take the kick in the shins any day. I was in boarding school in high school... Here's another taboo. I have to say it's fantastic to see a lot of men here, because, frankly, you call a positive training talk and it's usually almost all women. This is a very gendered deal, whether or not we usually acknowledge as much.
    When I was a senior at my boarding school, I was a monitor on a freshman hall. I was so envious of my boyfriend who was a monitor on a boys’ hall, because on his hall, when guys had a problem with each other they would wrestle, and it would be done. In my hall, it was all in one room and another room and another room. It was like this awful, pervasive poison communicated by whispers– You couldn't find its source.

Sorry, ladies, but this is mostly to do with our social upbringing and how difficult it is for us to be applauded for standing up and speaking our minds, let alone for speaking our minds in a critical way. Men get to do that all day long, and it's totally acceptable. For us, though, it’s  "Oh that bitch. Oh my god. Who the hell does she think she is?"
    It's not okay for us, and so we'll often resort to those covert forms of ... it's all nice up here, but what's happening under here is really nasty, sometimes vicious, and a lot of it takes the form of ostracism, of shunning, of just shutting people out and not responding. It takes the form of waiting until someone says something you wholeheartedly approve: "Oh, yeah, that's with the program. That's cool."

There's a "ignore what you don't like" kind of mantra that goes around in positive training circles. It's been spun in more positive ways, like "Wait it out," and "wait 'til you see what you like," but when it gets used by us against each other ... and it really is against, I think it can be brutally destructive.  The way it often plays out is this: you are saying something I don't like, so I'm just going to pretend that I never heard that and then respond with exaggerated enthusiasm to the person beside you, "Oh, I love what you just said. Click for you!"
    Sorry, Alex, to focus on you, but I want to point out what the rest of you can probably already see, that this is just a bad student right here. (laughs) She keeps saying really inconvenient things, things that I don't really want to talk about or address, but it's really easy for me to just engage with you and with you and with ... "Oh! I can click that, Alex! Yeah, there you go, Alex! All right!"

That Pema Chödrön quotation I have there... Maybe someone can read it from their page, on the recommended reading list. or Alex, could you hand me yours? I'll just quickly, yeah.

I really love this quotation. Pema Chödrön is just an ass-kicker. I'm sorry. She's fantastic. "There is compassion and there is idiot compassion. There is patience and there is idiot patience. There is generosity and there is idiot generosity. For example, trying to smooth everything out to avoid confrontation, to not rock the boat, is not what's meant by compassion or patience. That's what's meant by control."

This is, I'm afraid, pervasive in the positive training community, because it's really about ... there's often a deep discomfort with disagreement, with the thought that ... there's a fear that we can't disagree and still be compassionate and nice, but we can. This can be fun. If we build our resilience for difficult conversations, they can be sport. I think that's the best analogy for them. It's rough and tumble play, and it's actually what we need.
    I forget the name of the man who's done a lot of recent research into how much we need play and rough play, play where we discover what our boundaries are, what we can and can't do without getting ostracized. Here you go: it's Stuart Brown. (Check out the fascinating conversation he had with Krista Tippet on her show On Being.)He started out researching psychopaths in Texas prisons. The one common factor he could find among these guys was that they had severe play deficits going way back.
    We need this stuff. We need it to build our resilience. In human interaction, particularly human adult interaction, a lot of the form it takes is dialogue. We're like, "All right. Let me throw my ideas up against yours and see what sticks." If we're afraid to disagree, dialogue will not happen. A lot of conversations that could make progress just don't.
    What happens when we don't have resilience ourselves, we need to control the world in order to feel safe, to feel comfortable. To achieve that, we sometimes turn into bullies. This is true of dogs as much as it is of people.
Okay, I’m going to try to be as brief as I can just describing this one case that, for me, really crystallized some of these issues.
    This was a case that was referred to me by a KPA trainer whom I really respect and admire, someone I've actually never met in person, but we've been in contact through email. I was very honored ... this was a good friend of hers whom she referred to me, a very difficult barking issue.
    Christin had a dog, Cassie, a Papillon mix who had a horrible, horrible early life. Christin had rescued her from that. She was a very fearful dog, very attached to Christin. You know that expression, "Once you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Barking was Cassie's hammer. She would use it for everything.
    She would use it in defense and she'd use it in demand, which made it a really difficult training case, because as soon as you brought treats or even games into the equation, positive reinforcement to reward her for not reacting to a stranger or to someone walking by, then it switched to demand barking.
    It was, "I'm protecting my owner. My owner is my resource and I'm going to guard that resource and I'm going to protect myself by barking you off." A lot of small dogs will use a bark as their primary tool for controlling the world around them, in part because the poor things get swooped down on all the time. It's like, "If I were a Rottweiler, you wouldn't pick me up at the drop of a hat!"
    Cassie was like this. Her bark was a very effective tool for controlling her owner, for controlling the environment. And a situation that had been tolerable had become intolerable because a new boyfriend, a serious boyfriend, had come into the equation and it was bark-fest all the time, and it was just miserable.

Christin is a doctor. Her boyfriend at the time was a chemist. They didn't have a lot of time to see each other and all their time ... they were extraordinary in their devotion. Christin's devotion to this dog was stunning to me; it warmed my heart and boosted my faith in a singularly unreliable species. It's Christin and Chris and Cassie, that's kind of an amazing trio. Chris was so game. We tried many, many strategies... we even went as far as the "Glove of Love"- I don't know if any of you have read Nicole Wilde's works on dealing with anxious dogs, but we were really trying ... we went through many dusty drawers in the positive training toolbox. Granted, the thing we needed most that we had very little of was time.

When you've got two people who are falling in love and trying to figure out whether they can make a life together, you don't necessarily have months to figure out, "How about if you two just focus first on training this dog together? You're going to orchestrate all of your meetings, everything that you do together, around what's going to keep Cassie comfortable and happy and keep her from going “over threshold” to barking.

This did not feel, to me, like a reasonable burden to put on my clients. I was trying, running as fast as I could, and I felt that I failed. They just reached a point where they were tuckered out, and I was like, "I'm out of tricks here. We'll see, as you guys go through this for the next while, I really hope that something I've given you will be helpful."

I'd been wading into a lot of what I would term covert aggression on the KPA alumni list, continually running into new and newly painful ways of shutting down conversation on that list that had made me uncomfortable being there. I hadn't been on there for a while. I went on one day, and totally by coincidence, Sarah, the trainer who had made the referral, gave a hypothetical to the group about the case and added something I hadn't known: that the boyfriend had finally had success just giving a hard reprimand to Cassie, just, "Shut up!"

I think it was about like that. It might have been a little louder. As Christin reported, Cassie cowered a little bit, and then lo and behold, she shut up. It seemed to have worked. This was the “hypothetical” posed on the list. I made my presence known, going, "Hey, I've got an interest in this case," letting Sarah know that I'd seen the post.

It was not universal, but some of the strongest, and frankly most powerful, voices on the list - because they belonged to instructors, my own included - came in with, "It's just so sad the lack of dedication that these two have to this dog that they would be willing to resort to this. They haven't even tried medication yet," as if medication were a completely innocuous and predictable intervention. (Oh, let me tell you about the unpredictable power of neurochemical intervention! I have a litany prepared if ever you'd like to hear it.)

Some of us tried to say, "Now wait a minute. This seems a relatively benign application of a pretty mild aversive and it seems to have opened a space for quiet and engagement.” Enough of us spoke up in my clients’ defense that we eventually got the big guns coming down from their mountain to say, "Now you apparently do not understand what it means to be a KPA-certified training partner. You need to look again at the pledge that you have signed, which says, 'I will practice only positive reinforcement'."

I did not originally let people know that this had been my case in particular. But if I thought that exposing my personal investment and vulnerability would decrease the level of what was becoming contempt, frankly, and pretty cold contempt, I was completely wrong. I spoke to what I saw as the tremendous dedication and great heart and compassion of these clients and to my own earnest but finally inadequate attempts to help them out and found very little comfort except in a few brave souls who spoke up on the list in support of me and my clients, of our basic decency and sincerity in trying to do right by everyone involved.

Most of what I received instead was private emails saying, "Thank you for saying things I'm too afraid to say. I love it when you say things on here, because I feel there are things that need to be said that aren't getting said." Just the level of fear on that list was so depressing to me. I came to the wrenching realization that I simply was not welcome in this “community.” I was an outlier and someone who would be happily expunged, so I expunged myself.

I wrote a note to admin asking them not to renew my membership and describing as succinctly as I could my reason for leaving, primarily the disappointment of my hopes of finding a true community distinguished by mutual respect. I took the KPA Certified Training Partner designation off all my professional materials. This was after getting shingles... I was just wrecked. I was really emotionally wrecked. The shingles were probably, in retrospect, a harbinger of the cancer, but stress clearly played a role in bringing them on. I had a highly practiced dog bully on one side, and I had a  bunch of covert but ruthless human bullies on the other, is how I felt. I could not find good standing ground between them.

The KPA admin never responded in any way to my note, not even with an acknowledgement of receipt. I'd fallen permanently into the camp of the "best ignored." Wonderfully, however, I have heard more recently from some of the everyday terrific KPAers whom I'd hated to leave, welcome words of strength and support from many after they received a letter I wrote telling of my strange situation. (Big thanks in particular to Shawn K., Sarah O., Dawn G., Mary P., Mary C., and Kiki Y. for invaluable comfort both back in November and more recently. I've missed you and many other great spirits and lively voices on the alum list and over among the "Doggie Angels.") I call it  my "lottery letter," because in there I talk about my weird feeling that I’ve won the lottery, in the sense that, "You've got six months. What are you going to do with it?" is a kind of fantasy that very few of us actually ever get to live out. I personally want "them" to say that I lived more in the last six months of my life than most people manage in ten years. That's my aim.

I've been extremely fortunate in where my metastasis arrived. I've got a great big slice out of my peripheral vision and some spatial issues because of some involvement of my parietal lobe that make training, driving, and a couple other things unsafe. I'm just not going to be able to do them effectively anymore. Things just kind of attack me from the left.

And yet, it could have been my frontal lobes. It could have been my motor cortex. I could be paralyzed. I could be speech-impaired ... well, that might be a blessing to many of you if it took out the speech centers! (laughs.) I've been given six months, or more, or less, and I have no idea what's happening next, where this thing is going to pop up... it's just a highly aggressive growth, which is why my prognosis is so dim.

But for the moment, here I am, and here you are. I get to engage, and I get to enjoy. I get to eat pizza and talk with people and just really suck the marrow out of the bone. It is a kind of fantasy.
Anyway, one of the people I sent my lottery letter to was Christin, my former client, and she wrote me back.
    My husband, Peter, was there when I read her letter, and I just started bawling, because what Christin told me is that she and Chris are married, and Chris and Cassie are the best buds. The one thing I was tempted to bring today on video is a bit Christin sent me of Chris and Cassie playing this game of tug that they've kind of invented together, where Cassie gets a belly rub getting dragged across the floor. She'll grab this toy, and growl very fiercely while Chris is pulling her around -  it's a very sort of "male" game,  their “tiger” game as they call it.

And now Chris, who was never really a dog person, very fastidious, didn't like fur, all his friends are like, "What the f--? You're so attached to this dog!"

Does anyone know the reference  from the name I’ve given the talk?... I know you know, Tim. What is the title a take-off from? ‘What we don't talk about when we talk about positive training?’

Tim:    Tim:    Raymond Carver. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.

Gretchen:    What we talk about when we talk about love. That's actually the thing I think we need to bring back into the training conversation. Love, frankly. Plainly, complicatedly. It's an un-quantifiable relation. One of the reasons I can't find the right punishment for my client’s dog - I don't know a client's dog like I know my own dog.
    Do I ever tell my dog to shut up? Pete?

Pete:   Um, yeah. [Eye rolling and laughter.]
Gretchen:    See, I don't do it as punishment, because I don't do it effectively. Punishment is defined as the behavior decreases or de-intensifies. It's defined by the result. I yell at my dog totally ineffectively. I just administer a mild aversive - Buck Brannaman would call it nagging. It can be strong and it's still just nagging as far as Pazzo's concerned, because his love of his own voice is just so extreme that it completely overshoots the aversive of my yelling and renders it totally ineffectual as a punishment. It’s much more likely to rile him further.

The one thing I did for Christin and Chris and Cassie – I didn't feel I could take any credit for what became their success, but Christin very generously gave me some. The one thing I can say I felt I did right was to say, "You two are incredible. Cassie is incredible. You guys are doing a bang-up job in everything that you know to do. I've given you a few more tools and you can see if those work for you, but there's so much love here and so much potential for love."

That was more key to their eventual success than anything I gave them or could give them as a “positive” trainer. I think the main thing I want to impart today, or to call out for, is just a sense of humility, maybe, to say that we need to be careful not to think that we have all the answers to what might potentially solve a problem in a really difficult training case, but also just to recognize the great potential power of a generous regard for another creature, how much good it can do to take somebody in, not simply as a juicy problem and a set of variables – “Okay, I'm going to try this and see what works-" but as a full, living, breathing, complicated, un-quantifiable being who's there in front of you asking for your attention and respect and who will return it if you give it. That, I feel, needs to be the foundation, and the rest is kind of icing. Not to say that there is no distinction between correction-based and positive-reinforcement techniques... I’ve already gone through some of my own justification for employing one over the other. You've probably all got your own. But whatever you're using, that foundation of regard, of respect ... if we feel like we’re seen, really seen, we're already on the path to some kind of improvement, or just to some kind of joy. Take relish in this engagement. If you feel somebody's really taking you in and that you're being heard, there's something positive happening there, positive in the colloquial sense. There's something good going on.

I really want to thank all of you for giving me your attention. I do want to just thank all of you for being here.

Forza!
Gretchen

"Here's what's about to happen" cues

What?

It's often wise to wait to add cues until your dog is already offering a behavior predictably (because you've consistently reinforced it). Once you have a good sense of when your dog is about to do something, you can throw in the cue and then reward your dog for "following" it.

There are two closely related reasons for using this apparently backward method. The first is that a cue means nothing to a dog until it gets associated with a behavior, and every time you repeat the cue in the absence of the behavior, you actually weaken the association. The second is that our faith in language itself has been built up over a lifetime, but our dogs don't share it. If we repeat a word to no effect, we almost can't help jumping to the conclusion that our dogs are stubborn, stupid, dominant, or all of the above - even when we know at some level that they simply don't understand what we're saying.

I could treat a cue like "sit" as a command ("do it or else!"). I could strengthen the connection between the word and the behavior by making the behavior happen, but I'd much rather not. I don't want "sit" to mean "I'm about to pull your head up by the collar with one hand and push your butt down with the other." I want the dog I'm training to associate the word with an independent choice she makes, with the muscles she engages to execute the behavior, and with the real possibility that good things will follow. The same is true of most other cues I use, cues that function as "green lights" for specific, active behaviors by the dog.

All that said, there are some cues that let my dogs know how I'm going to behave, and others that predict the "state of the world and the things in it." Many of these I give inadvertently (e.g. putting on my coat & grabbing my keys = I'm going out) but others I use deliberately. Cues like these can be used from the start, because the power is ours to follow through on them.

A couple of useful examples:

• "This way." I started using this many years ago without much forethought but with enough consistency that my dogs quickly caught on. I'll say it primarily in two situations. The first is when I'm walking a dog or dogs on-leash and I'm about to pass to one side of a pole, tree, or other obstacle. The second is when we're walking off-leash and arrive at a fork in the path. From the beginning, it signaled "I'm going this way," but it soon came to mean "you'd be wise to come this way, too," so you don't get stuck or lose sight of me. While Barley still likes to test the laws of physics occasionally - maybe this time the leash will pass through the tree! - she and Kili have become adept at changing course when they hear "this way." Pazzo (the dangerously handsome Kelpie-mix in the photo) absolutely loves this cue, as he seems to love all directional guidance. When the path splits, he'll look to me all a-tremble with suspense, then tear off in an ecstatic sprint when I point and deliver the magic words.

• "Leave it." (I actually use the cue "mine," which is sometimes hard to say convincingly when I'm talking about cat poop!) While this cue should eventually prompt a dog to take action - to move away from something you don't want him to have - you can jump start your training by using it to mean "a tempting thing is about to be presented to you, but it is unavailable to you." For instance, if my dog is in a down and I say "leave it" as I set a treat on the floor (well out of reach), I am signaling that I simply will not allow my dog to get that treat unless I release her to do so. If she goes for it, I'll immediately cover it up. But if she hesitates for even a split second, I'll mark that hesitation and reinforce it with another (maybe even a better) treat.

The next time you're tackling a specific training task and wondering whether to use a cue from the beginning or add it later, ask yourself whether you're alerting your dog to something you're going to do or prompting an action on his part. The distinction can save you both some confusion.

Forza!
Gretchen

When to Give Your Dog a New Name

Kilimanjaro, a.k.a. Kili, Kiligirl, ​Kilibear, Wumpus, Wumpy, Fluffer Nutter, First Bassoon (never second fiddle).

Some of us are more alert than others to the psychological complications that name changes can entail. American women, for instance, generally have more occasion than men to wonder whether the ink of a new signature will seep below the skin, whether a second name will more or less truly name us. I used to swear when I was a teenager that I’d marry a Smith or a Jones if I married at all, but when I did eventually marry a Stevens, I ended up hanging on to Icenogle - I’d been lugging that lumpy mess of consonants around long enough to know that I would miss its weight. It also helps people track me down, which has (so far) been a good thing.

Names become loaded for dogs, too, but they don’t seem to inspire the same depth of attachment. Not verbal names, anyway. When dogs abstract their identities into signatures, they write them in urine and other excretions. Dogs have the same interest in names that taggers do: they want the means to say “I was here!” and to know who else was (and when, and in what state of mind).​

Our girl Barley (Latin name Canis familiaris contraricus, vulgarly a Golden Hussy) is Da Bunk, Bunky, Bunkin, Her Royal (or Radical) Bunkness, Bumpy, Bunkarumpus, Bunkass, Nuzzle Rumpus, Wild Rumpus, Barleycorn, Barleyfart, Boodlebutt… I could go on.​

Ed Yong, who writes the invaluable blog Not Exactly Rocket Science, posted back in February about ongoing research into dolphin “names”: the sounds that bottlenoses and possibly other cetacean species use to identify themselves when encountering unknown others in the open ocean. It appears that each of these sonic signatures is unique - you won’t find three Peters in a pod - but also that a single signature may be used as social shorthand to identify one group to another: “Hey, no worries, it’s Jane and her peeps. We’ve always gotten on well with them.”

Dolphins’ names seem to resemble dogs’ marks in a couple of respects: their primary function is declarative (“It’s me again!”), and they communicate vital secondary information about the mood and health of the “speaker.”​

In our lives with dogs, we use names very differently. We rarely need to say a word to announce our presence to each other, though the sound of the car pulling into the driveway makes an effective “I’m home!” And when we use names to communicate our moods, we use our dogs’ names rather than our own.

At one end of the emotional spectrum, affection breeds silliness. (You can often tell how well a dog is loved by how many nicknames have bloomed around her.) At the anger end of the spectrum, dogs’ names sometimes serve as our correction of first resort: “BARLEY! NO!”​ This becomes seriously problematic if we then hope to use a name as a cue. If I want the word “Barley” to mean “come over here” or even “give me your attention,” I’d be smart to load it with as many positive associations as possible, and to avoid loading it with lousy ones.​

Maybe dogs need middle names, to be used only when we scold: “Barley Elizabeth Icenogle, get your nose out of that horse turd now!”​

Like all human words, names function for dogs less as symbols (“I am Barley, hear me roar!”) than as vessels to hold accumulated experience. The “loss” of a name doesn’t cause a dog grief or confusion. On the contrary, if a name has a dark or tangled history, the dog will be well rid of it.​

In sum, a name change is in most cases a bigger deal for you than for your dog (both practically & emotionally). So when should you give your dog a new name?​

• When you're giving your dog a new life. Many people who rescue a full-grown dog worry that a new name will exacerbate the disorientation the dog is bound to feel as she transitions into her new home. Certainly, if your newly adopted dog responds enthusiastically to the name she already has, you should strongly consider keeping it​. If not, you have a golden opportunity to start anew and give your dog a name whose meanings/associations are entirely up to you.
  
  
• When your dog can't stand his old name. If your dog looks away (or flees!) at the sound of his name,​ you can bet that it's been poisoned with strong negative associations. The bad news is that a poisoned name (like any poisoned word or cue) has few antidotes. The good news is that you can simply stop administering it by dropping it from your vocabulary and introducing a "fresh" name in its place.
  
  
• When​ you can't stand your dog's old name. Kili was eighteen months old when she came to us with the name Poppy. I can't tell you why this name bugged Pete & me so much - it's no more ludicrous than most - but we knew right away that we couldn't call "Poppy!" across an open field. Sadly, we quickly went on to poison the name we gave her (when frustrated by her obsessive-compulsive consumption of paper), and my more recent attempts at rehabilitating "Kili" have been only partially successful. (Thus my interest in this question.)
  
  
• When your dog is named Shithead. This may only happen in Steve Martin movies...​
  
  
• When your dog is named Killer. Unless she's the sweetest thing on four legs.​

I'm not ready to go back to "Poppy," but I do wonder whether it could be a good idea generally to give a dog a silly name, one that's difficult to say in anger. Many of Kili's nicknames are inspired by her wild & wooly coat (Fluffy, Fluffer Wumpus, Fluffer Nut), so I've been experimenting with "Shaggy."​ It might help if I were a better mimic of Scooby Doo, but we'll see how it goes.

Forza!
Gretchen​

p.s. I recently visited Iceland, where first names remain first identifiers throughout one’s life, and patrynomic surnames - Jónsson or Jónsdottir - follow like wispy contrails. You can find the stylish lesbian prime minister in the phone book among a host of less celebrated Jóhannas. There’s no telling whether the Icelandic naming system is a cause or symptom of the Icelanders’ strongly democratic turn of mind, but I did enjoy the brief holiday from “Mrs.” and “Ms.” I liked addressing total strangers (and being addressed by total strangers) like friends - especially when these strangers were cavorting naked in underground hot springs. Maybe this kind of deep semantic informality works best in a hard country with far-flung people; it collapses space and generates a stolen bit of geothermal warmth that could be redundant - not to say stifling - in close, southern climes. When spoken by an Italian man, “signorina” already sounds like pillow talk...

Buck Brannaman Kicks Ass. However...

​Photo by Moyan Brenn. Click through to see more of his beautiful work.

Please accept my apologies for introducing Animal Exuberance with the "reprint" of a super long post. On my old blog, As Good As I Wanna Be (R.I.P.), this post generated far and away more traffic than any other, and it helped me understand that there are a lot of people out there as hungry as I am for real, difficult dialogue. I include it here not only because it sets out my evolving philosophy of training as clearly as anything I've yet written, but also because it stands as Exhibit A in my personal definition of what it might mean to "positively kick ass."

Like many who dwell outside the rarefied world of horses and horsepeople, I only recently became acquainted with Buck Brannaman's life and work through the beautiful documentary film Buck that was released last year and is now available on DVD. Buck gave a Q&A at the showing I attended in Portland early in the summer, and made good in person on the charisma so evident on film. It struck me immediately how much his training approach had in common with that of the clicker/marker trainers I most admired, and despite my great ignorance about horses I knew it would be worth my while to attend one of his clinics as a spectator. In late October, I traveled up to Spanaway, Washington with a firm cushion and a warm blanket and planted myself in the bleachers of the arena where Buck taught three separate horsemanship classes every day for four days. (He followed with two more for three days; his dedication and stamina are remarkable.)

I spent most of three days happily lapping up just about everything he had to say and to show about training horses, though I couldn't help remarking that he was somewhat less effective as a trainer of people. But at the end of his second session on that third day, one of his students asked what he thought of clicker training, and he could not have been more contemptuous or less measured in his response. He said he found it worthless at best, exploitative at worst. Good for nothing more than tricks. He recounted a recent encounter with a dangerously spooked steer and joked that a clicker trainer "couldn't click fast enough" to handle such a situation.

Imagine that someone who’d seen the film The Horse Whisperer considered himself competent to judge your methods and principles, to get on his mike and tell an arena full of people, “Oh that Buck Brannaman, what a load of mumbo jumbo."

Well, that got me riled. And when I'm riled I write. A few days after returning home from Buck's clinic, I sent him an eight-page letter detailing all the reasons I was convinced that a) he was already a "clicker trainer" and b) he could be a better one. I would probably not post it here if I had heard back from him, and I am hesitant to do it now, but I don't know whether he's still trashing the people with whom he should be making common cause, and I'd love to jump start the dialogue that might bring us closer to mutual understanding. As I think I make clear in the letter, I admire Buck a great deal, but I think in this instance he's using his influence to real potential harm. I also realized that this letter represented my own most focused attempt to articulate the power and promise of clicker/marker training. (I regret that my summary of its history contained a couple of significant inaccuracies. I have let them stand here in the interests of fair representation of my own fallibility, but apologies are due to the memory of Keller Breland.) Anyway, here it is:

November 4, 2011

Dear Buck,

First and foremost, I want to thank you. I attended one of your recent clinics in Spanaway as a first-time spectator. Even from that remove, I learned more than I could have hoped, and I left powerfully inspired to put that learning into practice. I should say that I am not a horsewoman in either the casual or the proper sense of that term. I came to your clinic because I have a passion for clear communication between individual creatures who may not be of the same species, a passion I have so far exercised primarily as a writer and as a teacher of humans and dogs. I’ve spent about fifteen years teaching the first (high school, college, and adult students), only about two teaching the second (that is to say, only two with focused intent and the least little bit of efficacy). I guessed that I could learn a great deal from you in spite of the gap in our immediate interests, and I did.

One of the things that impressed me most during the clinic (and contributed immeasurably to your credibility) was your frequent reference to the limits of your own knowledge, your insistence that you still have and will always have more to learn. On a few occasions you expressed your well-founded disgust for people who get ahead of themselves, people who speak in tones of false authority on subjects about which they know next to nothing. (In my experience, next to nothing is often more dangerous than nothing at all when it comes to degrees of ignorance.) I would not have taken you for such a person, when you have generally been so careful to build your authority on a solid foundation from the ground up. So I was sorely disappointed and more than a little angered by your casual and insulting dismissal of clicker training in response to a student question on the third afternoon of the clinic. You made it clear from your comments that you know next to nothing about it, and yet you felt entitled to use the authority you have earned in other ways to trash the devoted work of people who might otherwise be your natural allies. You know only a caricature of clicker training, only the crudest sketch, and that’s the picture that may now persist indelibly in the minds of some of your students because you momentarily and uncharacteristically abdicated your responsibility as a teacher to know whereof you speak.

Imagine that someone who’d seen the film The Horse Whisperer considered himself competent to judge your methods and principles, to get on his mike and tell an arena full of people, “Oh that Buck Brannaman, what a load of mumbo jumbo. If you want to whisper to your horse, you go right ahead, but if you actually want to get something done...” Hell, you probably don’t have to imagine it. I’d bet you’ve heard it many a time, and I’d bet it pissed you off every time. I’d further bet that you’d hate to expose yourself for the same kind of fool, so it pains me to be the one to tell you that your pants were on the ground the other afternoon. But I’m hoping that this is what we both might call a teachable moment. I hope I can teach you enough in a few pages about clicker training that the next time someone asks you a similar question you don’t get yourself caught in a cranial-anal inversion but maybe pause long enough to say, “You know, I need to learn more about that before I can really judge whether there might be something to it.”

Here’s the caricature you passed along: treats, tricks, exploitation, inefficacy. Here’s the reality in its ideal: seamless communication across barriers that might otherwise appear insurmountable. Across barriers in perception, expression, motivation, etc. Across barriers between species and between individuals. Maybe you notice some overlap between that ideal and the one you’re after. I wouldn’t have come to your clinic if I didn’t notice it. The real irony in your trashing clicker training lies in the fact that you already use it. And it’s been used on you by at least one of the teachers you most respect. If you only knew that and didn’t shy from it, you might use it more effectively. That sentence probably made you brace, but there’s nothing that should scare you there apart from your own blind prejudice. Please hear me out.

There’s a great German word I just came across,funktionslust : the joy in doing something well. We all have it, as long as we haven’t learned to shut it down. We want to have that joy exploited.​

The first thing you should know is that “clicker training” is a bit of a misnomer, given that it often doesn’t involve a clicker. “Clicker training” is convenient but misleading shorthand for a set of principles; those principles give rise in turn to a set of practices that are infinitely adaptable and potentially very powerful. As with any method, the practice is vulnerable to misuse in the absence of the underlying principles. I already noted an overlap in ideals between your aims and those of clicker trainers: effective communication. It’s not so surprising, then, that there’s a significant overlap in foundational principles as well. I’ve listed below some of the things you emphasized explicitly or implicitly during the clinic, all of which are also at the heart of clicker training when practiced well:

1. Recognizing and channeling (even liberating) an animal’s inborn gifts, whether they be of intelligence, power, quality of movement, motivation, etc. Recognizing and responding appropriately in the moment to distinctions among species and among individuals.

2. Patience; incrementalism; breaking skills/challenges down into manageable steps; being ready to have something take an hour, a day, a year, five years, a lifetime.

3. The power of repetition.

4. The importance of accuracy, precision, consistency.

5. Setting the animal (human or otherwise) up for success; closing off unproductive options.

6. Offering a good deal; always asking what’s in it for the animal.

7. Efficacy; not asking questions you don’t know the answers to.

8. Discovering how little you need to do.

9. Maintaining calm, focus, and life (or reviving it in a dull or anxious animal).

10. Adapting to circumstance, dealing with what is rather than a fantasy of what ought to be.

11. Using smarts in place of power.

12. Teaching the animal to teach you.

13. Building awareness of your own physical, mental, and emotional states. Building your own capacity for equanimity and self-control as a means of building it in the animal and increasing your ability to communicate clearly.

14. Building trust and respect through competence and informed leadership.

15. Striving to be an enlightened monarch; taking responsibility for the well-being of an animal who has entrusted him/herself to your judgement.

16. Finding a “feel” (what I understand as a live current of connection and communication, whether it passes through a rein or across an open field).

17. Learning from the animal even as you teach him/her.

18. Timing, timing, timing.

The practice is relatively simple in broad outline, but in detail as complex as the teacher’s knowledge and creativity can make it. Mark and reward what you want, block/ignore/wait out what you don’t. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat again. If you’ve ever shaped another creature’s behavior using those simple steps, you’re a clicker trainer, whether or not you’ve ever touched a clicker. Whether or not you’ve ever given an animal a food treat. Guess what, Buck. You’re a clicker trainer, insulting as that might be for you to hear.

When you artfully channel your green filly’s longing for peace, when you dole it out to her in tiny sips with every well-timed release, would you call that exploitive? I wouldn’t. A predatory animal’s primary hunger is more likely to be literal. Lots of people will set down a full dish of food for their dog and then disdain treats as bribes. My three dogs work for some of their food every day, one tiny bit of kibble at a time. If I were working as hard as I should with them, they would work for it all. Not because I want to be a hardass but because they hunger for more than food: they hunger for engagement, for challenge, for mastery. They love to learn, whether it’s something silly, something that helps keep them healthy and comfortable (like getting their nails clipped without a fuss), or something that could save their lives (like a rock-solid recall). Would you call that exploitation? Not in any negative sense, not if you could see the light in the eyes of my girl Barley, a supremely independent-minded ten-year-old husky mix who was my happy guinea pig when I first started clicker training two years ago. She learned more in two weeks than she had in her previous eight years (which says a lot about my unenlightened leadership to that point), and I’ll never forget the look she gave me early in our first session: “Why the hell didn’t you tell me what you wanted before?” Of course I had, but never in a way that she could so clearly understand. When I taught my cat Hops to target her nose to a ball or give me a head butt on cue, was it useful? Not in any strict sense. But she purred everytime I got out the clicker, something she’d never do for food alone. There’s a great German word I just came across, funktionslust : the joy in doing something well. We all have it, as long as we haven’t learned to shut it down. We want to have that joy exploited.

And that story leads me to one of the most powerful things about clicker training: it can open a path of communication and forge a fast connection even between a novice teacher and a novice learner. It is difficult if not impossible for a clumsy and inexperienced trainer to wreck an animal if he or she sticks to that simple formula: mark and reward what you want, block/ignore/wait out what you don’t. I work as a volunteer with “behaviorally challenged” dogs at the Oregon Humane  Society, the castoffs from people who have tried “everything” with their inconveniently self-directed animals. Everything except what works, if one only has the patience and fortitude to see it through. I work with dogs whose owners were too busy trying (and failing) to control them ever to teach them self-control, dogs whose strength and intelligence were totally appealing when they were puppies and totally unacceptable when the myth that the human owner was stronger and smarter fell to pieces. We adopted our youngest dog from OHS when he was ten months old and had already exhausted the patience of three other families. It’s easy to see why -- he’s a kelpie mix, a tightly-wound, anxious, prey-driven, and whipsmart dog. Two years later, he’s still a pain in the butt, but miles better than he was. I remain a rank beginner as a trainer, but when I’m at the Humane Society now, I can safely spend a half-hour with a pit-mix who’s launching his seventy-five pounds four feet in the air every time his next door neighbor makes a peep and convince him in that time that there might be a better response. Like sitting quietly with his eyes on mine. You could probably accomplish the same more quickly, but could your students?

You have the tools to communicate what you want but seem to lack the awareness to do it most effectively; you have the ability to reward what you want but seem to lack the will to do it generously.​

Let me tackle your prejudice against clickers head-on. A clicker (or a light pen or any of a thousand things that could be used in its place) is nothing more or less than a simple mechanical tool for communication. It’s a marker in the “mark and reward” sequence. Like a bit, or a flag, or a leg, it’s only effective when artfully employed. A rope only becomes a true lead rope in the hand of someone who knows how to use it: with good timing and good feel. The same skills are vital in the effective use of any marker. In clicker training the marker always means the same thing: “Yes. There. That was it. Good things are coming.” Clicker trainers will often use “yes” and “there” as markers. The same way you do with your human students. The same way Ray Hunt did with you when he taught you to see a horse in balance. “There... there... there.” But a marker doesn’t have to be auditory or visual - it could be tactile. You have the good fortune to work with an animal with whom you are in near constant contact. Even in ground work, your connection is often literal, and certainly needs to be with a green horse. You have unusually ample sensory means of telling your filly, “There. That’s the stuff,” and then of following through with your promise of peace. I don’t have anything like the necessary knowledge to imagine how the use of an actual clicker would improve your communication with a horse. It would almost certainly be redundant, when you have so many other tools at your disposal, and know how to employ them so skillfully.

But I can readily imagine some ways that a clicker might improve your communication with your other students. I have enough experience (i.e., accumulated mistakes and self-corrections) as a teacher of humans to recognize from the outside when another teacher is less effective than he could be. It became clear watching you that you’re aware of a significant gap between your efficacy with horses and your efficacy with humans. It was just as clear that you find that gap frustrating, also that you’re sorely tempted to blame it on the slowness and blockheadedness of humans relative to horses. But at one point I heard you touch on the real problem, when you talked about needing so many words with your human students because you can’t speak to them in the way you can speak to horses, with physical immediacy. It’s no coincidence that probably the most effective bit of teaching you did with a human student took place when you had a rope around Ryan’s ankle. He understood something in his body that no verbal description was going to communicate to him. But it’s just not practicable for you to put a lead rope on twenty different people careening (well, only some of them, to be fair) around an arena on horseback. What to do?

This is exactly what clicker training was made for. I suspect you don’t know much about its history, but it’s not totally newfangled, just semi-newfangled. It was developed about sixty years ago by Bob and Marian Bailey, a couple who had studied behaviorist psychology with B.F. Skinner and (contrary to the callous, mad scientist stereotype) thought they could apply it in a way that would improve animals’ lives, specifically by replacing the methods of brute domination that were  pretty much synonymous with “training” at that time (and sadly remain so in many quarters today). They had a lot of incentive to develop new methods because they were working with animals like dolphins who simply couldn’t be dominated. The question “what’s in it for the animal?” rose inevitably to the forefront, and they adopted an approach that was oriented as purely as possible toward reward/reinforcement (with punishment being the simple absence of reinforcement). So they had the motivation question addressed: a dolphin will happily work for a herring, and stay happier and healthier working for it than having it given to him for free. But they ran into the same issue with dolphins that’s slowing your progress with your human students: how to communicate in a precise, timely, and effective manner with an animal who might be a hundred feet away (and maybe underwater)? How to make the reward as immediate as it needed to be without slinging fish willy-nilly through the air? From their background in the laboratory, they knew that a totally meaningless stimulus could become meaningful through repeated association. By initially pairing a loud whistle with immediate reward, they gave those markers meaning to the animals and thereby created a bridge across distance and time between the desired behavior and the reinforcement.

You’re ahead of the game with your human students because you already have a couple of markers that carry across distance and mean something to them: “There.” “That’s the stuff.” Furthermore, those markers hold their own reward. Your students have that vital funktionslust -- the pleasure in doing things well -- and they clearly crave your approval. So there’s no need to fill your pockets with m&m’s or steak bites, thank goodness. You have the tools to communicate what you want but seem to lack the awareness to do it most effectively; you have the ability to reward what you want but seem to lack the will to do it generously.

At one point during the second session of the third day of the clinic, you talked about the importance of maintaining the horse in a learning frame of mind, of keeping its ears soft and its expression relaxed. You wisely noted that this was the key to the horse’s being able to retain anything it was taught. I wanted to ask you whether you followed the same principle in teaching humans, but I showed unusual restraint (unusual for me) and kept my mouth shut. I knew it would only be a smartass rhetorical sort of question, because I’d seen how much less successful you were at keeping people in a learning frame of mind. Ten or more times, I’d seen Reese flush beet red with embarrassment and frustration. I’d seen Trent get progressively more flustered as he shot multiple blanks into the flanks of his poor horse. They were learning, but learning slowly and sometimes in spite of you. How much would they retain when the tide of stress had washed out?

Consider that prolonged exercise with Trent. Here was someone who had no native sense of what position three should feel like. No internal sense of stillness at all. Looking back on it, how helpful do you think it was to him to hear “no!” twenty times? He got lots of “you did it again,” and a couple of times “relax!!” (Especially helpful.) He got “there” and “that was a little better” on a bare handful of tries. Are you so afraid of relaxing your standards, so wary of “spoiling” your human students, that you’re willing to abandon the principles of incrementalism, of setting them up for success, of working from what is rather than what ought to be? That’s how it looked from the stands. And the price of your impatience is that your students learn much more slowly than they could.

A horse won’t get fluttery when you give it a rub, won’t run out to tell all the other horses what a hotshot he is because Buck Brannaman said so. A human might.​

I bet you that, even with my near total ignorance of horsemanship, I could have gotten Trent settled in his saddle in about five minutes. And he’d remember it the next day, because he never would have gotten so riled. I could do it with nothing more than my eyes and the word “there.” I would break the task down into two steps: pelvis and legs. I’d tell him first that he didn’t need to worry about anything but getting his weight back on his tailbone. Not to worry about his reins, his legs, nothing but his butt. And if he accidentally started his horse, just to return to a stop as calmly as he could and try again. Every time I saw his weight settle totally back onto his tailbone, I’d say “there” and have him shift it forward again just enough to set himself up for a fresh try, ideally not enough to send his horse forward (though if that subtle shift was enough, how wonderfully lively his horse would suddenly be!). Shift it back to a settle. “There.” It might take ten or fifteen repetitions before Trent had a much better idea of how it felt when his weight was where it should be. Then I’d move to the legs. Tense the leg. Release it. “There.” Again. Again. Again. I know what it looks like, and he’d quickly learn what it felt like. Then try both. There. There. Wait for it... there. No fuss, no embarrassment, greater retention.

And no clicker necessary. But I’d probably use one if I had it, and if I were you, I’d definitely use one. The reason that clicker trainers often do use clickers (and other similar tools) is that they are much more precise and consistent than the human voice. I can say “there” with an infinite variation in my inflection, tone, and tempo -- in fact it’s extremely difficult for me or anyone to remove all “color” from a word marker and make it perfectly consistent. So a clicker can bump up the efficiency of my teaching significantly, because the message is perfectly clear and always the same. Never more or less enthusiastic, never loaded with any emotional baggage or doubt. The reason a clicker would be more useful for you than for me in teaching Trent how to find position three in his body is that Trent doesn’t know me from Eve. He doesn’t have any great respect for me, any desire to please me in particular, and he doesn’t need it for me to be effective. He only needs to trust that I know what his butt and his legs look like when he’s relaxed. Anyone in the arena or the stands who could observe that much could teach him just as well (and while teaching him become better aware themselves of the physical signals they might be sending their horses unintentionally).

With you, on the other hand, he’ll have a hard time not getting distracted by his desperate desire to please you. Your praise paradoxically means too much to him to keep him receptive and learning. A click is emotionally neutral in a way that a word cannot be from you to one of your overawed students. Shayne and Randy have been around you long enough to shake off some of the weight of your mystique, but I saw that even they would glow like little boys when you told them, “Now that’s looking a little better.” And that may be one (very sound) reason that you’re so much stingier with people than you would ever dream of being with a horse. A horse won’t get fluttery when you give it a rub, won’t run out to tell all the other horses what a hotshot he is because Buck Brannaman said so. A human might. So a clicker could come in very handy if you were able to overcome your prejudice against it. But if that proves a bridge too far, you could still lighten your burden as the sole locus of authority and the sole source of reward by enlisting your students (or even spectators) as fellow teachers. This would only require that you break skills down into more manageable steps.

I dare you to try this. Just once -- unless God forbid it actually works. Say you want to teach everyone where the hand with the leading rein ought to be positioned when bringing the horse’s front quarters around (this was a stubborn challenge throughout the clinic). Gather your students around you and demonstrate a few times, asking them to look carefully for the moment that your hand arrives where it should be, out from your hip. After a few repetitions, ask them to verbally mark that moment every time they see it: “there.” Once you heard “there” become a unified chorus, you’d know they all knew what that hand position ought to look like, and they’d all be prepared to see it and mark it in someone else. Then have them partner up, with one partner just watching the other and saying “there” every time they saw the hand arrive in the proper position. The rider wouldn’t have to worry about anything else (though they’d soon discover how far they needed to slide down on the rein in order to get where they needed to be), and in a few minutes they’d achieve the beginning of a feeling for that precise relationship between the hand and the body. And they might discover -- lo and behold -- that it improved the turn. Then they could work on the position of the hand with the supporting rein, return to the leading rein when it fell apart again (as it is bound to do for a while). Similarly, a partner could mark the lifting of the horse’s leading foot. “There... there... there.” And maybe the rider would begin to feel it. What does a float in the rein look like, feel like? How about a soft feel? Maybe I was just flattering myself that I could see both the float and the soft feel from across the arena, because I practice them all the time with my dogs on their leashes, but the only rider apart from you who appeared to my untutored eyes to return to them habitually, without thinking about it, was Randy. It was obvious from a glance that he trusted himself, he trusted his horse, and his horse trusted him in return. Many of the rest were so intent on maintaining “control” or keeping their horses’ heads prettily elevated that they continually pulled their horses off their stride.

My point is that you simply can’t communicate your body’s knowledge to other bodies anywhere near as effectively through description and demonstration as you can by marking what’s right when you see it -- marking it immediately and repeatedly. All while blocking/ignoring/waiting out the mistakes, instead of saying “wrong, wrong, wrong” after the fact. This would let you do with people what you do so effectively with horses: take small and isolated steps with them that lead to more complex awareness and skills, set them up for success, tackle some new but manageable challenge all the time. If you enlisted your students as fellow teachers, you’d have the happy side effect of accelerating their progress in competence (and confidence). Everyone might become a little more active mentally and a little more likely to look out for their horses and each other if they were a little less focused on you.

I have a lot of nerve writing you like this. I know it. If you’ve read this far, I can offer only one defense for my bumptiousness . . .

The moment in your brief anti-clicker tirade when your ignorance was most glaringly exposed was when you scoffed that a clicker trainer “couldn’t click fast enough” if you put her in a dangerous situation. It would make as little sense to say of one of your students that she couldn’t yank on the bit often or hard enough to survive such a test. The problem wouldn’t lie with the bit, it would lie with the unprepared rider and horse. A clicker trainer uses the clicker to nurture a feel and to establish, refine, and then occasionally maintain specific cued behaviors. If a trainer hadn’t worked hard and long (possibly with the help of a clicker) to get the feel of her horse and to get the behaviors she would need in such a situation solidly on cue, if she hadn’t already established that she could bet her life on her horse responding as he needed to in order to keep them both safe, she would be a suicidal idiot to get the two of them willingly into such a fix. As would any student using your methods.

As for your underlying message that clicker training is only good for dumb tricks, that it’s inherently worthless for someone like you who might face dangerous and unpredictable animals on a regular basis in his working life, I’d like to call your attention to the uniquely effective use of clicker training by a growing number of zookeepers around the country. To take one example, elephants have killed enough keepers in recent years that most zoos have adopted “protected contact” policies, which dictate that keepers can never enter the pens of their charges and so must find creative and utterly non-coercive means of getting elephants’ wills to coincide with their own. I wonder if you could -- using no more than a couple of words or hand gestures -- persuade a six-ton African bull elephant to stroll over to a gate and lift his foot so you could check it for infection. I wonder if you could get a rhinoceros voluntarily to lie down, then roll on its side and stay there calmly while a veterinarian takes a blood sample? Clicker trainers have accomplished these things, and maybe you could, too. The difference right now is that none of them would mock you and call you stupid to an arena full of people. They’d be impressed and want to know how you managed it. They might even think they had something to learn from you.

I have a lot of nerve writing you like this. I know it. If you’ve read this far, I can offer only one defense for my bumptiousness, and that is my commitment to the well-being of animals who have been thrust -- through no fault of their own -- into the human world and then have to make the best of that deal. The Oregon Humane Society fortunately has enough success placing animals in new homes that it takes in dogs from overcrowded shelters as far away as Los Angeles, and it only euthanizes those who are judged to be incorrigibly dangerous (I have known the behavior department to work for months with a dog before making that painful decision). This is not the norm, as you probably know. So I view the training of people as a life or death matter for the dogs I work with, and clicker training is far and away the most effective and efficient method I’ve encountered for getting a bumbling human into some kind of workable synch with an animal who depends on that human’s goodwill for its own survival. I’m writing in the animals’ defense. And in defense of a host of people who work as devotedly as you do to make animals’ lives better. Some of them have been working to that end even longer than you have, and I really hate to hear them get verbally spit on by someone who ought to know better.

You have a well-earned and growing power of influence, which is all the more reason you should take care not to abuse it. I think you’re a good king, Buck. (Sounds like the title of a new Christmas carol. “Good King Brannaman looked out...”) But you’re not perfectly enlightened, not on this subject. I beg you not to say another public word about clicker training until after you’ve taken a few big bites out of your own ignorance. If you ever want to learn more, just say the word. Karen Pryor has been putting these methods effectively to work for nearly fifty years. I’ve quoted a couple of paragraphs from her excellent (and nicely compact) book Don’t Shoot the Dog below, just to give you some idea of the alliance in your thinking. If you’d like, I would happily buy and send you a copy. I can also pretty well guarantee that Karen would be delighted to talk with you if you ever thought that would be worth your while. She’s extremely generous with people who are committed as she is to improving communication between human and non-human animals.

Thank you again for all that I learned (or began to learn) last week, for the great charge of inspiration I took from your example, and especially for your devotion to the dignity and flourishing of horses and other underestimated creatures. I hope I’ll have another opportunity soon to learn more of what you have to teach.

With sincere gratitude and all best wishes,

Gretchen Icenogle

So there it is. I still haven't heard back from the man himself. I don't take it personally - he's got as much right as any of us to choose where to invest his time and energy. More than most, given how hard he works.​ But I hope he'd like to hear that I've spent almost as much breath defending him to clicker trainers as I've spent defending clicker trainers to him.

Forza!
Gretchen​