BEHAVIOR PROBLEMS IN DOGS 3RD EDITION

By William Campbell

All veterinarians and most dog owners should have this one! Here is the book veterinarians refer to when solving challenging behavior problems. Correcting problem behavior begins with understanding what caused the problem in the first place. Problem solving includes understanding what is going on inside the dog’s head and learning how human interactions can cause or worsen the problem. Humane, efficient, and effective ways of dealing with negative behaviors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Behavior RX systems
• Release date: Jan 1, 1999
• ISBN: 9781617810756

William Campbell

Bill Campbell has been quietly training behavior consultants at his "Counseling Workshops" since the late 1980s. Up to this time, workshop candidates have been selected from among pet professionals who have sought him out for assistance. Now, on the verge of 2,000AD, he has decided the time has come to publish the philosophy, principles and techniques that have proven themselves over years of practice by scores of workshop students.

Book preview

Oregon

1

Understanding Problem Dogs

---

Problem dog owners are always acutely aware of the behavior that stimulates their complaint, but rarely do they have a clue about its cause. The behavior consultant’s job is to help the client understand that the dog’s behavior problem is the expression of some underlying problem. When this relationship between cause and effect is appreciated, careful fact-finding by the consultant will find the owners actually describing those causes themselves, after which they can be guided to develop and take effective actions to remove them An animal behaviorist who advises a dog owner merely how to counter-condition the act of flank-sucking, on its own, ignoring the causes, is as unethical as a child psychologist who simply advises topical repellents for children who chew their fingernails to the quick

Interestingly, aggression in one dog and destructive chewing in another may share many common causes. Chief among the causes is a lack of leadership by the owners. The reason two dogs respond differently to this lack is intertwined with the other aspects of daily life in the household and the dogs’ individual behavioral tendencies, many of which are based in its genetic predispositions.

Because of this interaction between the inner dog and its environment, it might seem unwise, or even impossible, to develop profiles for problem dogs without discussing at the same time the environmental factors. Even so, if we first understand the physiological factors that influence the way a given dog tends to react to its environment, then deal with the environment, we gain invaluable insight into how problems develop. The entire picture, then, forms the basis for the type of program that will best succeed in correcting them.

While we may not be able to use the following profiles to predict which dogs will definitely develop behavior problems, we can recognize certain types of dogs as more problem-prone than others. And, lest I seem to be dooming such dogs, I should mention that the vast majority respond favorably to corrective methods that avoid physical punishment and capitalize on the dogs’ innate and learned responses to positive social reinforcements.

Nervous System Types and Stress

Dogs of any breed, size or type can suffer from stress. In fact, a certain amount of stress is necessary for a healthy life. Hunger begets a form of stress that motivates us to find food, a healthful activity. However, a pet dog that receives a doting owner’s petting and praise on demand all weekend tends to build an insatiable appetite for constant social gratification. Later, left alone on weekdays, the dog is frustrated by an un-solvable, hence frustrating, problem: it cannot find its emotional food. Whether this condition results in problem behavior depends on the stability of the dog’s nervous system and how the animal behaves to relieve tensions that will always arise from frustration. A chewing problem develops in the orally oriented animal. The tension relief is manifested by chewing up objects that smell and taste of the owner, or things that, to the dog, are symbolic of the owners.

I have seen litter mates of the same sex, one a chewer, the other well behaved, while both have been equally overindulged. On the other hand, I have seen the same situation in litter mates living in non-indulgent homes where the problematic stress was created simply by the owner returning home late.

Developmental Neurophysiology and Behavior

Each puppy is born with and develops a nervous system that is unique in many ways. Both genetic and environmental factors produce these individual variations. Some important developmental yardsticks may be applied to the canine nervous system to explain many kinds of behavior.

Turn-over of RNA (ribonucleic acid, a vital chemical messenger in the memory process) in a pup’s brain does not reach adult rates until 22 weeks of age. This helps explain why a puppy may have accidents during its housetraining program, or why training pups to simple Come, Sit or Stay commands is best conducted in brief sessions no longer than 5 minutes. This may also bear on the 13-to 16-week-old pup’s behavior, when it apparently does not recognize, growls at, or runs from visitors with whom it had friendly previous contact, or a pup who starts barking at objects previously ignored. In this case, the optic tract also may not have reached maturity.

During puppy programs which include 13-16 weeks of age, we often have seen pups who had heeled at 10, 11 and 12 weeks, off-leash, quite dependably in an area where eight horses were corralled some 40 feet distant The following week many pups were totally distracted by the horses, acting as if they had never seen them before. Perhaps they had not!

Mammals normally born blind but reared without light until maturity develop apparently normal eyes that are nerve blind due to failure of the optic tract to develop normally—a good reason not to shake puppies as punishment. Stimulus deprivation of various sorts produces animals with comparatively lighter and less precisely structured brains, according to Russian studies in the 1950s.l

Puppies drastically restricted from sensory stimulation and exercise in special cages from weaning until maturity failed to avoid painful burns on their noses from matches or pin pricks, while normally raised puppies quickly learned to avoid them. The deprived pups appeared to feel the pain, but did not learn to associate it with the match or the pin. Even more bizarre, these deprived puppies spent more time close to the human experimenter after being burned or pricked than before the painful stimulus. This was not the case with normally reared puppies. This work may explain why so many behavioral problems are experienced with puppies bred and reared in the restrictive environments of puppy mills, where litters are reared in stacked cages and then shipped to pet shops, where they spend more time in cages. It should also be noted that the same sort of sensory deprivation can occur in house-reared puppies whose owners confine them in crates while working and at night. This practice results in a pup spending more than two-thirds of its developmental life in a deprived environment, unable to respond to natural, spontaneous bursts of physical activity.

Gross physiologic and behavioral abnormalities produced experimentally are fortunately no longer duplicated for the sake of science. However, a sad counterpart occurs outside the laboratory in the homes of naive, ill-advised or uninformed dog owners. In one case, a 2-year-old male Sheltie, raised in a dark garage with a mature cat, did not know how to run and avoided all human contact except with its owner. A 5-month-old mixed Labrador Retriever kept in a small travel crate up to 18 hours a day since 8 weeks of age as an ‘aid to easy housetraining" displayed precocious aggression to strangers and other dogs. While these cases were resolved successfully, better public education could have avoided the problems.

A recent study published in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association (Vol 209, No. 3, Aug. 1, 1996) revealed that Dogs that spent most of their time during the day in crates (odds ratio 3.12) were at increased risk of relinquishment (to shelters) compared to dogs that spent most of their time unrestrained in some portion of the living area of the family home. This indicates that, while ’crate training’ may be popular and appealing, it has serious, detrimental effects on the continuity of life in a family home as well as community animal resources.

Early stimuli that produce fearful responses, especially around 8-10 weeks of age, tend to be retained by dogs.² Though this principle was based on an electric shock applied to the pups’ ears, anyone who has made the mistake of clipping their 8- to 10-week-old pup’s nails and hitting the quick will appreciate how right it is, as they struggle to clip the maturing dog’s nails!

Applying the 8-10 week fear-imprint principle to a pup’s family life, it is advisable to avoid situations that may cause pain or fear. However, mild pain, such as veterinary inoculations, need not produce fear if the owners laugh and make jolly before, during and, especially, after the treatment. Both puppies and adult dogs tend to follow emotional and behavioral examples set by their owners during mild or severely traumatic experiences. I refer to this as the interpretive factor.

An example of the effect of this positive, upbeat interpretive feedback occurred with our 8-week-old Dalmatian bitch, Tally. While being taken at night in pitch darkness for her final toilet trip, she walked into our swimming pool and was heard splashing around. Peggy wisely knelt by the edge of the pool and happily praised the paddling pup while I turned on the flood lights. Tally was joyously lifted out, roundly praised and dried off; then, tail wagging, she went to her original destination and was cheerfully praised for eliminating. A couple of months later, when she was large enough to climb the steps at the shallow end, Tally swam almost daily.

The situation could have produced a water-shy dog if Peggy had screamed, picked her up and reacted normally by cuddling Tally with a concerned, sympathetic tone of voice.

Excitability and Inhibition

Overexcitable describes most of the problem dogs we see, especially when they are stressed by new surroundings, strangers, other dogs, social isolation, physical restraint or stimulation, and sudden or loud noises. At the other end of the spectrum of behavioral reactivity, we see highly inhibited animals that react to stress by total inaction or slow, stiff movements, sometimes catatonia, and apparent depression, seeming to lose contact with environmental stimuli. Between the extremes lie the gradations of these responses. Pavlov developed the descriptions presented later in Table l.³

Two German Shepherds, a 5-year-old spayed bitch and her sexually intact male son: The bitch had been defecating in the living room and her offspring urinating there, as well as in other areas of the house. Early in our first interview, the owners were persistently nudged by the dogs and were fondled about t he head and ears in response. To see what might happen if the dogs were ignored, I suggested they ignore them while we continued talking. After fruitless nudging for about 5 minutes, the bitch went to a corner, lay down and licked and chewed at a forepaw, another minor complaint of the owners. The young male began pacing between the office’s front and back doors, whining and occasionally returning to nuzzle the owners.

The eliminations usually occurred while the owners slept at night, or when the dogs were left alone. By ignoring them, even in our office, off their home turf, we were witnessing symptoms of the problem. The stress of being ignored, even if the owners were not absent, stimulated the bitch to introverted behavior (self-mutilation) and stimulated the extremely excitable son toward extroverted over-activity.

Excitable vs Inhibited

Pavlov struggled with the theory that inhibited dogs had a weaker nervous system than normal animals, a concept largely discarded due to later findings that a combined structural-chemical interaction determines the balance of the nervous system. ⁴ ⁵ Both excitability and inhibition can be heightened or abated by many herbs and synthetic drugs, as well as those extracted from living tissues. The fact that such drugs do not affect all individuals (dogs or people) in the same way supports the belief that the balance among internal neurochemicals may be the primary factor influencing the behavioral expression of excitability or inhibition.⁶

The individual body chemistry of animals develops and fluctuates throughout life. Hormonal imbalances produce not only structural and physiologic, but behavioral changes as well.⁷ Among the body’s hormone-producing glands and controlling organs, the emotional centers of the brain’s limbic system appear to exert considerable influence. It may be that excitability and inhibition depend to a large degree on what has been called the brain, pituitary, adrenal, gonadal axis.⁸ Further, not only can drugs influence the balance among these factors, but mild or extreme psychological stress can produce subtle and gross neuro-chemical imbalances.

Table 1. Pavlov’s classifications of nervous system types and their associated behavior.³

The fact that seemingly mildly stressful experiences induce these reactions may help explain a good deal of what is generally described as spontaneous aggression or the popularly labeled Springer rage syndrome if we consider yet another nervous system process called facilitation.⁸ In this, the nervous processes responsible for defensive behavior, such as a dog’s biting, can be sensitized but not fully activated by mildly threatening stimuli. However, depending on the particular dog’s nervous system makeup, repeated stimulation can push the dog over the brink and into a full-blown rage avalanche, wherein up to several minutes of furious behavior are necessary to exhaust the imbalance and restore equilibrium. The dog then often resumes its usual gregarious personality or appear contrite, confused..

In investigating the histories of many aggressive cases, I find most of the dogs to be excitable or highly excitable types exhibiting a behavior problem for which the owners have applied various degrees and types of punishment. These included finger-in-the-face scolding (a stimulus that can facilitate a snapping response), muzzle-clamping with the hands, shaking by the scruff or jowls, physical take-downs, and mild to severe hitting with the hands or objects such as rolled up newspapers.

A young married couple called about their 6-month-old intact female Springer Spaniel that was overprotective of its food. The dog, an eager eater, needed its muzzle wiped after eating twice daily, a duty that initially fell to the wife. The Springer was excitable and highly oral (mouthy) chewing on the hand of anyone trying to pet her. The husband’s roughhousing nurtured this behavior. The wife was shocked when she used a paper towel the first time she cleaned up the dog’s muzzle and the pup bared its fangs, a reflexive response to having its upper lip held. As a correction, the Springer’s mouth was held shut and No bite was shouted, followed by milder scolding. After several of these experiences, the pup growled, which elicited even harsher scolding. This all started at about 4 1/2 months of age.

The couple then followed advice to desensitize the dog to what they perceived as food-related aggressiveness. Her food bowl was presented and she was hand-fed bits of food by the husband before being allowed to eat freely. He also placed his hand in the bowl as the dog ate. The Springer was unwittingly being teased with food and her defensive mechanisms effectively conditioned to respond to any action at her food bowl. She was muzzle-clamped, No’d, slapped and grabbed by the jowls, lifted and shaken as corrections. She then started growling when the owners merely put down her food, or if they stood within a few feet of her while she ate. When the clients called, the Springer had bitten the husband’s hand and drawn blood during the hand-in-the-bowl ritual.

Fortunately, this sort of negative neuro-physio-psychological conditioning toward defensive/aggressive, emotionally driven responses has a positive counterpart. Once the owners understood their Springer’s nervous system makeup and the mechanisms controlling it, they were quick to grasp corrective measures.

They first fed the dog outdoors to avoid the former context of kitchen feeding. This allowed the owners and dog a cooling-off period and avoided confrontations for about a week.

At the same time, paper towels to clean the muzzle were replaced by a soft cotton towel, as many dogs in my experience do not enjoy the texture or sound of paper. Whether this is rooted in early punishment for chewing up papers, or is due to an innate defensive response to high-frequency sounds made by rustling paper, perhaps associated with reptiles, is not certain. Roughhousing was also stopped. The pup was taught to sit on command when she sought affection, and hands were withdrawn at the first sign of mouthiness. The couple was advised to apply an upbeat jolly routine (see Chapter 8) before and during meals and cleanups. This procedure usually takes only 1 or 2 applications before the owners see a positive result. About 6 weeks of treatment are usually required before the dog permanently adopts, or internalizes, its new emotional and behavioral responses.

It is probably easier to create stress and hyper-activity in excitable dogs, but I have seen inhibitable types become extremely depressed, failing to wag their tails when praised, petted or happily approached for play, activities that only weeks before had produced joyful canine responses. However, creating such depression in inhibitable dogs usually requires stronger, more persistent stress than is required to create imbalances in excitable types. inhibitable dogs seem to withstand negative treatment longer before showing visible effects. However, dogs with balanced nervous systems, neither predominantly excitable or inhibitable, adapt to life’s negative influences most successfully.

Summary

Most problem-prone dogs are excitable types, but some inhibited types also develop problems. Excitable dogs react to stress with outwardly directed activity, such as chewing, barking or digging. Inhibited types tend to direct their behavior inwardly, as with self-mutilation, excessive salivation, soft whining, loss of appetite, and depression. Balanced dogs may respond in either direction, depending on the nature of their environmental stress.

While behavioral tendencies appear to be genetically determined, the general environmental and social atmosphere and/or early emotional trauma can influence development of the nervous system, as well as a dog’s emotional response tendencies throughout life, becoming important both in creating and overcoming behavior problems. Perhaps, in considering the nature versus nurture (genetics vs. environment) question and its effects on behavior, one pioneer of animal behavior, D.O. Hebb, put it most succinctly: To paraphrase him… The answer is that behavior is controlled 100% by genetics and 100% by environment!

Behavior’s Foundations: Reflexes

Reflexes occur where nervous pathways transmit impulses from one pathway to another. The well known unconditioned knee-jerk reflex occurs when the incoming sensory nerves from just below the knee cap sense a jolt, which is transmitted to the spinal column, where there is a junction (synapse) with a motor nerve, which is activated, transmitting a message to the extensor thigh muscles, which suddenly constrict, causing the lower leg to jerk forward. Knee-jerk reflexes are easy to understand, since they do not involve the brain. However, thousands of other reflexes involving the brain are constantly at work. Some of these are activated consciously, others operate unconsciously. Hence, the nervous system is defined in two branches of control; voluntary (under conscious control) and involuntary (controlled unconsciously).

In Ivan Pavlov’s experimental work with dogs, he sounded a bell and then gave the dogs a bit of solid food (meat or bread) which produced salivation. This was repeated until the dogs salivated for the bell just as if it were food. He called the food an unconditioned stimulus and the bell a conditioned stimulus, even though solid food for dogs is actually a conditioned stimulus.

Surprisingly, salivating for solid food is not an inborn, unconditioned reflex. In another Russian experiment, puppies were weaned and fed only milk for several months. They did not salivate when they smelled, saw or ate solid food until they had eaten it several times!

So, Pavlov’s famous bell-food experiments actually conditioned salivation from one conditioned reflex to another. On the other hand, injecting lemon juice into a dog’s mouth and producing salivation, or pricking a leg with a pin and causing a withdrawal movement, were genuinely innate reflexes. Pavlov’s work, and the resulting publicity, have helped explain a great deal about both animal and human behavior, some of it to the benefit of dogs in general. Pavlov’s most important principles will be presented later in this chapter.

However, there is a down side to Pavlov’s publicity: It created the general impression that discoveries about laboratory dogs, in a totally unnatural environment, explain the behavior of wild animals and/or domestic pets living in active, often hectic social environments. The result is that some behaviorists still struggle to diagnose and solve behavior problems using purely conditioned behavioral theory, disregarding principles derived from empirical (practical) experience. Perhaps more unfortunately, Pavlov’s work tended to validate some popular concepts that animals can’t think, they merely respond to stimuli and behave… like robots.

The late Polish behavioral scientist, Jerzy Konorski, M.D., wisely recognized, then commented on, the severe limitations of obiective exnerimental work ¹⁰ He warned that it. is very unscientific to apply laborotory-based behavioral principles to animals in a relatively free-living environment. Even so, properly applied, many laboratory findings are useful in understanding canine behavior. We will consider some of them as they apply to dog behavior problems.

Types of Reflexes

There are 2 major types of reflexes: unconditioned reflexes are inborn/instinctive; Conditioned reflexes fall into two categories, because they mediate two types of nervous functions.

Unconditioned Reflexes

Most unconditioned reflexes are vital for survival of individual animals and their species. The basic rooting reflex of sightless newborn puppies causes them to move toward the mother’s teat, but they will also blindly root for great distances toward a warm hand.¹¹ Shortly thereafter, as a pup’s brain develops the ability to discriminate between a hand and its dam’s flesh, only the nipple will be sought for food. This perceptual discrimination, Le. the ability to inhibit unproductive unconditioned behavior, is one of the earliest signs of natural conditioned learning in puppies. Without it, a puppy might starve to death suckling on a litter mate’s paw.

Other unconditioned reflexes, such as startling in response to a loud sound, appear as the puppy’s sensory capabilities develop. Still others, such as eliminative, orienting, investigative, chase, active flight/fight and passive freeze defense reflexes, require appropriate environmental stimulation for normal expression, keeping in mind the effects of early and prolonged deprivation mentioned earlier (see Table 2).

Conditioning and the Involuntary Reflexes

The reflexes to urinate and defecate after eating are among the first conditioned reflexes in dogs. Unless the mother licks the pups’ genitals and anus, elimination would not occur, and the puppies would die. Urine and fecal matter, which is sterile, are then ingested by the mother to maintain a clean environment for her litter. In a few days the pups usually begin eliminating after eating without the mother’s stimulation. At about 3 weeks of age, when the pups can see and move with some efficiency, they follow the dam’s example, obeying a developing tendency to act-like her (allelomimetic behavior) and eliminate away from the nest area if the opportunity is available. This behavior is used to advantage by many knowledgeable breeders who move their litters to areas with outdoor access. Then, the eat-then-eliminate cycle virtually prehouse trains the pups. Later, because the new owners must be present to feed the new pup, it is a simple matter to allow them access to the outdoor toilet area soon after eating.

In an experiment to see the age pups begin to learn, Scott and Fuller ¹² conditioned a leg-withdrawal response to mild electric shock with various stimuli, touch, odor, taste, sound and light. Though some success was achieved as early as 14 days of age, stable responses were not shown until 18-21 days of age. After that age, conditioned reflexes form with dramatic speed and are well retained, especially when conditioning is done almost daily and spans 6 weeks. This is vitally important when we consider that a dog is not consciously deciding to respond, but rather its involuntary nervous system is responding. Another Russian, V.S. Rusinov, performed brain wave experiments on dogs. Well-retained conditioning procedures produced unique electroencephalographic wave forms in each dog. Then, on days when conditioning sessions were not held (but at the usual time for the procedures) the dogs still produced wave forms typical of those in the experimental conditioning situation, though they were out in their kennels. The dogs’ biological clocks proved to be accurate to within 30 seconds in a 24-hour period.¹³

Rusinov helped to explain why most pets become highly active and alert when homecoming time draws near, especially when regular departures from home are highly emotional or when feeding times approach.

Conditioning and Voluntary Reflexes

Voluntary conditioning using either operant or classical/Pavlovian procedures, requires the dog to actively perform some movement that brings a reward or avoids or curtails a painful or unpleasant stimulus or set of circumstances.

Pavlovian research showed that when a buzzer was sounded just before a mild electric shock was applied to the foreleg of a dog, most dogs learned to raise the foreleg to the buzzer’s sound alone. In this type of conditioning, the leg is raised at the shock as a purely involuntary, unconditioned defense reflex action. The dog then consciously learns that the buzzer signals the shock and voluntarily raises the leg to avoid getting shocked. However, involuntary conditioning is also occurring—the dog’s adrenal glands are being conditioned to secrete both adrenaline and Cortisol, both of which are indicators of stress, a critical factor in both problem behavior and physical health.

This type of combination conditioning was also used to inhibit previously learned as well as natural behavior. In this work, the buzzer was sounded as the dog performed some unwanted behavior, and the shock applied with, or soon after, the buzzer sounded. After a few applications, the dog learned not to undertake that behavior. This sort of work forms the theoretical basis for many of the electric shock devices in use today. However, only recently has the impact of involuntary conditioning on the a dog’s immune system been undertaken. In this work, loud sounds and mild electric shock produced acute stress, as measured by elevated Cortisol hormone content in the dogs’ saliva and blood.²¹ The dogs also showed fear behaviorisms of crouching, trembling, lowered tail positions, etc.

In experiments with appetitive rather than defensive reflexes, buzzers were sounded while a cord was pulled to lift a dog’s foreleg, shortly after which a morsel of food was presented. In this procedure the dog is initially forced to lift its leg, but quickly starts raising it voluntarily at the buzzer, learning that doing so at the buzzer’s signal brings food, a voluntary conditioned response to a passive motor movement, in that the dog does not actively take part in the initial leg lifting. This conditioning applies to dog training systems wherein the dog is physically forced to sit as a command is spoken, after which a tidbit and/or praise and petting are given.

It is important to mention that all the canine candidates for Pavlov’s experimental schooling did not qualify. Many were washed out because they failed to adapt to the close confinement, the restrictive harnesses, or the uncomfortable, sometimes painful, conditions. In fact, these wash-outs caused him to document his freedom reflex, which we will discuss later.

As we have noted, classical conditioning procedures are often mis-defined as dealing only with involuntary glandular and smooth muscle responses. Pavlovian investigators also worked with voluntary motor responses. To describe a dog’s behavior as purely acquired through classical conditioning, or to design remedial programs based on them, is to oversimplify the nervous processes of an extremely complex animal, especially since most canine behavior derives from operant learning.

Operant Conditioning

E. L. Thorndike first proposed the idea of conditioned reflexes in 1911 in his work, Animal Intelligence.¹⁴ He put his cat in a small cage and released immediately when it happened to scratch itself. After release, it was replaced in the cage until it scratched again, which the cat resumed very quickly after caging, indicating the cat had learned that scratching led to freedom. When the cat quieted down and looked quite serene after its release, Thorndike called it a satisfying state of affairs, now known as homeostasis. Conditioning so-called spontaneous (accidental) behavior came to be known as operant or (often) instrumental conditioning, while the cat’s part in the affair was called operant learning. Later, food rewards were most often used and widely publicized through B.F. Skinner’s work, The Behavior of Organisms.¹⁵

The laboratory animals used most by early investigators were rats, mice and pigeons. Even so, the operant method of acquiring behavioral conditioning aptly describes development of many kinds of problems in pet dogs.

Example: A puppy put in the laundry room on its first night in a new owner’s home may at first whine fruitlessly, but soon elevate its whines to yowls, which may bring the owner and punishment, verbal consolation or complete relief via a night in bed with someone. Behavior driven by strong emotions tends to be more quickly conditioned than other motivators, even hunger. So, the next time the pup is isolated in the laundry room (usually the next night), the whining may be brief, but the yowling usually starts more quickly and gets louder, as the previous night’s conditioning intensifies the pup’s emotional distress. If the unwary owner who punishes the pup (trying to apply aversive conditioning) is actually using negative reinforcement, i.e., removing the puppy from the negative social isolation, even if it means scolding or spanking. This is an example of another behavioral principle. Positive emotional/social drives are often stronger than avoiding pain.

Another classic example of accidental operant conditioning by owners also involves social gratification: A pup who feels lonely, even while in the owners’ presence, approaches and nuzzles them, then receives attention, quickly learns to repeat the behavior and becomes a pest. If we accept that both its lonely emotional state, i.e. its motivation to seek attention and its attention seeking behavior are both being reinforced, the reason for the persistent pestering becomes apparent.

I have seen puppies who pestered almost continuously, even though they were scolded, even slapped by the owners, a phenomenon described earlier by Scott and Fuller. Though the puppy did not know it, it had been applying an operant conditioning procedure to its owners. They had unwittingly become the pup’s behavioral subjects! The puppy stimulates, the owner responds and also feels rewarded by the pup’s affectionate behavior. But the pup is also learning to lead, to control the social interactions with the owners, i.e., it is learning about leadership. (Most owners also gain a health benefit, i.e., their blood pressure goes down, at least until the puppy becomes an obnoxious pest.) The result of this interaction is a puppy that feels abandoned and deprived without human company. When owners grasp the importance of this scenario, they develop new insights about the origin of their dog’s problems, especially those with dogs