The Science Doesn’t Bear It Out….
Originally published August 2013
"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties." —Francis Bacon (1605) The Advancement of Learning, Book 1, v, 8
Doubt is perhaps my strongest suit. When I first started to train dogs seriously I was enrolled as a biological sciences student at the University of Guelph. While studying there, we spent a lot of time learning about observing, measuring, recording, and then using the data we collected to formulate hypothesis, null hypothesis, and conclusions. We also spent a fair amount of our time learning to determine if a resource was actually worth consulting for information.
In dog training we face some interesting issues when it comes to looking at both the credibility of the people who are giving us information and the science behind what we do. If I had a nickel for every person who said to me “well that may be your opinion” about established facts of behaviour science, I would be really rich. I should be considered a credible source as I have three separate professional designations in the field, but if you are watching some lady in stilettos, or some man with pitbulls on the TV and they tell you something, that often trumps my education much to my frustration. Furthermore, if you join a group that espouses only clicker training or only force free training or only collar training, then you will hear from them that the science supports what they are doing. The question is, how do you critically evaluate what people are saying and doing when they offer up training information and advice?
Let’s just start with credibility. When someone puts out their shingle as a dog trainer, they need to have some sort of proof that they have some formal education in the field. They should also be able to present some of their work to you; a dog they have trained is a good starting point. If your dog trainer hasn’t ever cracked a book on the theory behind what they are doing and they haven’t actually trained a dog, then it doesn’t matter if they are really nice, or if they are polite, or if they are pushy, or if they talk a good line, they are not the person you should be asking if you are going to find out about how to train your dog. So the first thing to understand when talking about the science of dog training is to establish if the person you are listening to has any credibility at all. As an example, if you want to know something about the amoebae, then you would not consult a physics professor for that information. You would want to speak to a microbiologist to learn more about them. If you want to know about dog training, TV is not a terribly credible source, but someone who has third party accreditation in dog training from the International Association of Animal Behaviour Consultants[1] or the Counsel for the Certification of Professional Dog Trainers[2]
The next thing to understand about the science behind dog training is to understand what science is.[3] There are a few important basics to know about science to get started, so here they are. Science is the gathering of knowledge. Biology is the gathering of knowledge about life. Ethology is the gathering of knowledge about normal behaviour of animals. Chemisty is the gathering of knowledge about the way that matter behaves and interacts.
Within each science, we have definitions. A definition is an agreed upon meaning for a given word. In training, reinforcement is defined as anything that increases the likelihood of a behaviour occurring. This isn’t MY definition, and it isn’t MY opinion. It is the definition that those who study behaviour agree upon for the word. If I had a nickel for every time someone would challenge a given definition with “that’s your opinion” I would be rich. When we are using terms, we have to use them the way that they are defined within the discipline that we are talking about. This can a little bit confusing because sometimes the definition in one discipline will disagree with the definition in another discipline. For this reason, we need to be able to source our definition. If anyone is in doubt about the definition that I am giving for reinforcement, you can reach for any Applied Behaviour Analysis or Behaviourism or Psychology text and look it up, or you could visit any of a number of professional websites to check if I am using the definition properly. A great place to look might be the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behaviour (avsab.org); they have a lot of credibility because the society is made up of members who are both veterinarians and who have studied behaviour.
Facts are units of information that can be verified and repeated. The sun is a star is an example of a fact. Dogs are quadrupeds is another fact. Dogs are carnivores is a fact, but it is a slippery fact, and you need to know a little about some definitions to understand what that means. Dogs do indeed belong to the order “carnivora” which is the group of animals that all have large prominent fangs and slab shaped molars that shear food when it is eaten. That is the definition of a member of the order carnivora, as outlined within taxonomy, the science dedicated to classification of living things.
Not all members of the order carnivora actually eat meat; in fact, the Giant Pandas, which are members of the order carnivora, don’t eat meat at all. What an animal eats defines which trophic level they reside within, usually defined as the typical food that an animal eats by those in the field of ecology. Ecology is the study of the interplay between living things and the environment within which they live. There are carnivores who eat meat, and herbivores that eat plants and omnivores that eat a both meat and plants. There are also a whole raft of specialty eaters; the piscivores who eat fish, and the apivores who eat bees and the ovivores who eat only eggs for instance. There are as many other ways of describing the specialized ways that living things take in energy as there are sources of that energy. Coming back to the Giant Panda, they eat bamboo, making them herbivores who are also carnivores. This is confusing but depending on who you are talking to it can make perfect sense. If you are talking to someone who wants to know how closely related the Giant Panda is to the North American Raccoon, you might start by describing both of them as carnivores. If you are talking to someone about supplying an environment for Giant Pandas to live within, then you would describe them as herbivores. This may seem confusing but once you understand which definition you are using it is no more difficult than understanding the difference between they’re, there and their.
Giant Pandas can be considered carnivores in that they have prominent canines and molars that shear. They can also be considered herbivores because their diet consists primarily of plant matter, specifically bamboo. Definitions such as carnivore and herbivore can be used in different ways depending on what we are talking about. If we are talking about what taxonomic order the Giant Panda belongs in, we would say he is a carnivore. If we are talking about what he normally eats, we would say he is not a carnivore. If we are out walking in a bamboo grove and we see one of these rare and special animals we would say he is beautiful, every single time. © Norman Kin Hang Chan /123RF.COM
What makes dogs being carnivores slippery is that in one sense of the word, carnivore refers to membership in a taxonomic order, and in the other sense of the word refers to what they normally consume. In the sense of the order carnivora, the dog is indeed a carnivore. In the sense of the trophic level or the way that a dog actually eats, he is an omnivore. Give the dog the choice of what to eat and he will always include both animal and plant sources in his diet. What does this long discussion really tell us? It tells us that when we are talking about facts with other scientists we have to be careful about how we define and use our facts or quanta of information. When we are talking about training and behaviour, we have to make sure that those who are telling us about the science of learning are credible with a strong background in the field they are talking about, and that they know not only what branch of the sciences they are talking about, but also what the definitions are according to that discipline and if there are any conflicting definitions that might confuse their audience. Is it any wonder that people who meet me for the first time challenge me about if the definitions that I use are “my opinion”?
Moving right along, we come to theories. Generally we think about theories as the ideas that lie underneath the things that we see. So when we watch a balloon rise up into the air we can have a theory that a giant is sitting in the sky sucking the air above the balloon with an invisible straw and it is a perfectly good theory, in the colloquial sense. In science we would call this a hypothesis, which is a proposed explanation for an observed phenomena[4]. In science, when we talk about theories, we are talking about the substantiated explanations for what we observe, based on known and accepted facts[5].
The theory of evolution is a strong theory because it is the explanation of how genetic change happens over time. It isn’t an idea we throw around; this is the change we see over time in a population when one trait is more successful and gets passed along. This change is a fact that we can observe and that happens over and over again. Roaming into the world of entomology (the study of insects), we know that before the industrial revolution in Great Britain, there was a small grey moth with dark dots on its wings. [6] This moth was called the Peppered Moth because it looked like a white moth with specks of pepper. Peppered Moths face an interesting challenge. They are very tasty meals for birds. Being light with black dots allowed them to roost on trees and camouflage themselves to look a lot like lichen, which is not a tasty meal for moths. This worked well for the Peppered Moth for thousands of years until the Industrial Revolution. At that time, soot began to cover the tree trunks and the Peppered Moths stood out like fast food signs for birds and almost all of them got eaten. Moths who got eaten didn’t get to reproduce. There were a few moths who survived this situation though. The surviving moths had one trait in common; they weren’t white moths with a few specks of black; they were white moths who had LOTS of specks of black. In fact, the more black specks they had, the more likely it was that they wouldn’t get eaten and that they would go on to reproduce more moths with more black. Eventually, the Peppered Moth was no longer a white moth with black specks; the Peppered Moth became a black moth. When the Industrial Revolution ended and we started to use cleaner fuels with less soot in the air, the tree trunks went back to being light coloured. Once again the moth went through a transformation. Tasty black moths that stood out against the light coloured bark of the trees got eaten and equally tasty but better hidden white moths with black specks survived to breed another day. The “theory” of evolution explains what happened based on known facts, and what makes this a great theory is that it applies across all living things. If a single trait makes the living thing more likely to survive and reproduce, then there will be more of those individuals and the species as a whole will change.
This is a Peppered Moth in his light coloured phase. This is the phase we commonly see today. the dark coloured phase was more common during the industrial revolution when tree trunks were covered in soot and this coloured moth would stand out. © Grzegorz Gust/123RF.COM
Science has lots of theories. In Microbiology, germ theory tells us that some microorganisms can cause diseases. [7] In Physics atomic theory tells us that the smallest unit of pure matter than can be divided out is an atom.[8] In Applied Behaviour Analysis[9] and in dog training which is founded on that science, we use Learning Theory. Learning Theory is based on the agreed upon definitions. These definitions are based on the research of BF Skinner[10]. Research is the systematic process used to gather data and formulate more theories and in science we do this in a very organized way known as the scientific method.[11]
So here is how we evaluate what is said about the science of dog training. We start with credibility. Is the source credible? Then we go to the science or gathering of knowledge about the subject matter; in this case we are talking about behaviourism, as outlined originally by BF Skinner, where we learn about the definitions, the facts and the theories. Does the science end there? Is it enough to know this much about learning and no more? Not for a scientist because now we start to get to the interesting part. Part II.
END NOTE
You will notice that this blog has a lot of footnotes with links, mostly to Wikipedia Articles. You might be asking "Is Wikipedia a credible source for information?" Wikipedia itself claims not.[12] The BBC and Nature Magazine have done studies on the veracity of the information in Wikipedia and have found the information to be at least as credible as an encyclopedia.[13][14] I chose to use Wikipedia because it is generally felt to be a good, quick and fairly reliable resource to get an overview of the subject matter.[15] If you want to know more about any of the information in this blog, you can go to the Wikipedia article and you can look at the citations at the end of the articles and decide for yourself if the sources are credible and supportive of the article. That is an important part of science too; fact checking and reading things critically!
[1] iaabc.org
[2] Ccpdt.org
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science#Victualler
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothesis
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_theory
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppered_moth_evolution
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germ_theory
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_theory
[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_behavior_analysis
[10] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner
[11] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_method
[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Academic_use
[13] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4530930.stm
[14] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v438/n7070/full/438900a.html
[15] http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k70847&pageid=icb.page346376
