{"id":43810,"date":"2014-11-20T21:40:10","date_gmt":"2014-11-21T01:40:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/miserybay.usanethosting.com\/wordpress\/?p=43810"},"modified":"2014-11-20T21:40:10","modified_gmt":"2014-11-21T01:40:10","slug":"pets-138","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/pets-138\/","title":{"rendered":"Benny and Jessie's Pet Info"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nThe Right Way to Punish Your Dog
\nAre you familiar with the term “negative punishment”? Both words have such poor connotations that it\u2019s hard to believe we should all be striving to use more negative punishment when it comes to training dogs and cats, but that is exactly the case.
\nFirst let\u2019s take a look at the opposing form of discipline \u2014 positive punishment or the administration of an unpleasant stimulus in response to bad behavior. Here is a classic example of positive punishment:<\/p>\n

Hercules is a 2 \u00bd month old puppy who likes to play rough. His teeth are needle-sharp, and when he gets overly excited he tends to playbite hard enough to break the skin. His owners have tried to stop the behavior by yelling at him and even swatting him on the butt with a rolled up newspaper but it only seems to rile him up more. Now he will sometimes growl at them when they try to correct his playbiting.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The problem with positive punishment is that has to be delivered in exactly the right way for it to be effective, which frankly, most of us cannot do on a regular basis. To work, positive punishment needs to be unpleasant enough to stop the behavior but not so unpleasant that it invokes fear, pain, or aggression. Positive punishment should also never be used when an animal is reacting out of fear. Given the fact that when frustrated, we tend to react without thinking things through, it\u2019s not too surprising that the chances of our using positive punishment correctly are slim.
\nOn the other hand, negative punishment involves removing something of value as a consequence of bad behavior. An example of negative punishment in Hercules\u2019s example would be for his owners to walk away and ignore him when he playbites. By doing so, they have taken a much desired resource (attention) away from him. With consistency, Hercules will soon figure out that whenever he bites playtime stops. Animals are quite good at making correlations. Once the bite-no-play connection is made in Hercules\u2019s mind, he\u2019ll stop the former to continue the latter.
\nOne of the reasons we should all be relying primarily on negative rather than positive punishment is that when we make a mistake, for example Hercules\u2019s owner thinks he\u2019s about to playbite but he actually picks up the ball that she didn\u2019t notice was lying next to her hand, the consequences aren\u2019t nearly as dire. There\u2019s no taking back the yell or swat once you realize you were wrong, but with negative punishment, you can always apologize and give back what you\u2019ve taken away.
\nI want to end this discussion on how to punish bad behavior with a reminder that praising good behavior is just as, if not even more, important. Our companion animals crave attention. In their minds, interacting with you even when you\u2019re angry is better than being ignored. Next time you catch your dog or cat being good, make sure he knows how happy he has made you and watch that behavior take hold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Right Way to Punish Your Dog<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pets"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43810"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43810\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stjindy.com\/archive1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}