What's wrong with using punishment?

There are so many problems with using punishment to change a dog's behaviour that it's hard to know where to start! One of the biggest problems is that punishment will teach your dog that you are scary and not to be trusted. Do you really want your relationship with your dog to be based on fear?

Here are some other things for you to think about:

• If punishment is to be effective, you must meet a number of criteria. These include delivering the punishment immediately (within about 1 second) of the behaviour, and using the appropriate intensity of punishment. Meeting these criteria is very difficult, even for skilled trainers, and not meeting them is very risky for your dog's wellbeing.
• Dogs can respond to punishment with aggression, stress, fear, frustration, and ‘shutting down'. Shutting down is when the dog becomes afraid to do anything at all, for fear of being punished.
• Punishment does not teach the dog what she should be doing, only what she should not be doing. This is an inefficient way of teaching.
• Punishment usually only suppresses behaviour temporarily. Unless the dog's motivation for performing the behaviour is addressed, the dog will find other ways to work around you, and will go back to the original behaviour as soon as the punishment stops.

When you consider all these things that can go wrong when using punishment (and the list above is just the start), it begins to make sense that training using positive reinforcement is much safer. After all, if you mess up your training when you are using food rewards, the worst that can happen is that your dog will remain untrained, but will still love you and enjoy the training sessions. If you mess up using punishment, you might end up with a dog who is scared of you, scared of training, aggressive and neurotic, as well as being untrained. Which would you prefer?