Natural Dog Training

If you think you know dogs and animal behavior, take the test that follows below. Also note whether or not the questions you can readily answer, jibe with the orthodox theories of mainstream behaviorism.

1) A dog chases a deer and he fails to catch it. This happens every time. Since the deer always gets away, is the dog going to learn to stop chasing deer? Will his chasing behavior be extinguished as operant conditioning predicts?
2) An owner calls his puppy and each time in the first year of his life, the pup comes to him and is always reinforced positively, with praise, attention, and often with a biscuit. Two years later, his owner calls him as he's chasing something; will he come back to his owner?
3) A puppy is walking down a city street with his owner and he chases a pigeon putting it to flight. 2 years later as an adult dog, will he still chase pigeons or even be attracted to them, - will he even see them?
4) A bird dog such as a Weimeraner is walking down a city street and sees a pigeon, he chases it and like all the other pigeons he chases, it easily gets away. Will his drive to chase birds be extinguished?
5) A young puppy is mauled severely by an older dog. His attraction to big dogs is thereby severely reinforced negatively. Two to three years later after he has matured, how will he most likely behave around other dogs?
6) A dog constantly loses every fight he gets into with another dog he lives with. Will his aggressive response to his dog-mate lessen or increase given all the negative reinforcement he experiences? And also, which dog is most likely to initiate fights, the one who always loses or the one who wins?
7) A male moose, all its life, has fended wolves off merely by brandishing its rack in their direction. He's at his most vigourous stage in life, when most able to outrun a predator, but yet he apparently learns that the least amount of exertion, simply standing still and facing the wolves, the suggestion of a fight, is the most effective means to intimidate his attackers. Finally, when he's old and weak and confronted by a pack of wolves, operant conditioning would predict that he would stand his ground as if ready to fight as this has always been successful. Yet what would the moose actually do?
8) A cat runs from a dog in a household and then one day fights back, and the dog learns to leave it alone. The cat is able to generalize this lesson to all dogs and learns that the best defense is a good offense. How is this possible in a cat and yet not in a moose?
9) Only the dominant male and female in a wolfpack, the so called "alpha pair" are the only individuals which get to breed given the reproductive priveleges of their rank. Why then isnšt there a concentration of dominance genes in the canine gene pool? Why after millions of years of supposedly, selective pressure for dominance, is submission in dogs and wolves a far more prevalent trait than dominance?
10) A behaviorist charters a boat with buckets of chum to the middle of a lagoon with dolphins all about. Will he be able to train them to perform tricks using operant conditioning?
11) Can salmon, a fish endowed with an innate, natural ability to perform incredible jumping feats, be taught to perform like killer whales at sea world?
12) Operant conditioning correctly notes that a dog which is positively reinforced each and every time, begins to lose motivation for the behavior once the reward becomes predictable. Whereas a dog which is only intermittently reinforced, becomes more motivated and energized in its performance of the behavior. Yet, drug and bomb detection dogs as well as search and rescue dogs, only work well if constantly reinforced. Why the discrepancy?
13) Intelligence is seen as a function of higher brain function, the dividend of an evolved nervous system. Learning is seen as a function of intelligence. Being adaptable is seen as the ability to learn and as a mental phenomenom. The reason most often cited for the dog becoming man's best friend is because their wolf ancestors had become socially organized into hunting groups as a function of superior intelligence. And yet, why is it that the more an organism learns as it matures, the less flexible it gets? If learning has something to do with being flexible, why is it that adult dogs are less flexible than puppies and yet this is clearly not the case. Puppies are more socially adaptable when their nervous system is at its most least developed stage. This is particularly observable with wolf cubs. Were we to raise a wolf cub, their behavior would be indistinguishable from a dog until they reached a certain level of maturation. At first they would be outgoing and social. However at maturation, adult wolves are obviously distinct from adult dogs, they become reserved and panicky to change. Adding to the paradox, note that wolves have a brain that is about one third larger than the domestic dog. Why then are dogs more social and adaptive?.
14) One theory which purports to account for the social flexibility of the domesticated dog is the theory of neotony. This is the idea that infantile characteristics and tendencies of the wolf, which the wolf outgrows as it matures, are in dogs, carried over into adulthood and this is said to explain why dogs are so social, outgoing, and ameanable to direction from humans as authority figures. Dogs are seen as emotionally retarded wolves. If this is true, why then is it possible to train dogs for guard and police work whereas a wolf would be unable to defend itself against a man? A Canadian trapper once jumped into a pit dug to trap wolves, and one by one snapped the necks of six adult wolves who offered no resistance. If dogs are infantile versions of wolves, why are dogs so more aggressive than wolves?
15) Apes are clearly more intelligent than dogs. Some researchers claim that apes can learn the rudiments of human language. Of any species of animal, they are the closest to man on the phylogenetic tree. The difference in an apes' genetic makeup and a human beings is only 4%. Why then aren't apes adaptable enough to be man's best friend rather than dogs?
16) A prevailing theory of social behavior asserts that sexual hormones promote aggression. Neutering of dogs is therefore said to promote social behavior. In the wild, wolves are never neutered and yet they are the most social and cooperative species of animal on earth. Why?
17) Why does it take 2 to 3 years for a wolf to grow into an effective hunting asset for the pack as well as for a dog to be trained to be a productive police, search and rescue dog, herding dog, or working dog of any sort? Why does it take 2-3 years for a dog to have been tractable all his life, to then become anti-socially agressive towards those people, dogs, or animals he may have previously tolerated and accepted? What single mechanism is at work here?
18) Male dogs are more aggressive than female dogs. Statistically, dominance is the most prevalant form of aggression according to modern behavioral interpretation. Why then in any mixed-sex grouping of dogs in a household, is the female dog always the most dominant? Also, dominance is interpretted as a function of superior physical size and strength, the biggest puppy generally becomes the most dominant in the litter, but why then in any household with a big and a small dog, is the small dog invariably the most dominant?
19) The effectiveness of wolves as hunters of large, dangerous prey animals, is generally interpretted as a function of their highly developed pack hierarchy, a so-called "chain-of-command". But why is it that hunting is such a silent affair with no commands being issued? And if the strategizing is occuring at a silent instinctual ritual, why hasn't it been detected by research, especially given that research has been able to decipher the dance of the honey bee? Where is the dances of wolves?
20) Survival is always reported to be the baseline and fundamental criteria of animal behavior and instinct. But even when wolves are well fed on moles and voles, they will still seek out large prey animals which decrease their chance of survival. Many dogs likewise will chase cars which also decrease their chances for survival. What is hunting and chasing satisfying therefore other than survival?

Hopefully this brief test demonstrates that the prevailing models for animal learning and canine social organization are lacking a model which can account and contain the many intricacies of behavior and learning. There is a simple answer, one that's intricately nuanced however, which can easily accomodate all the anomalies and seeming paradoxes of natural behavior and the phenomenom of learning.

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