Stuff You Should Know - How Dog Training Works

Episode Date: March 31, 2020

Chuck and Josh explore the age-old question: Should you train your dog by treating it like a living, feeling being or should you beat them up and break their spirit? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant,

and there's guest producer Lowell over there, and that makes this Stuff You Should Know about dogs. We love dogs. Heart them. We talk a lot about dogs. Have dogs. We have dogs. Just love dogs in general.

They're the best. Train them up, the end. The end. Train them right though. Yeah, this was an interesting one for me because I am terrible at dog training. And I just, I do a mix of so many things. I'm just my poor dogs, don't even know what to do.

None of their behaviors, their fault. Well, yeah, I think that's all my fault. That seems to be true among like, I want to say not high end, but the good dog trainers, like professional dog trainers. High end trainers. Yeah. They would agree that not just with you,

but any dog's bad behavior is a result of their human not training them well or properly or at all. True, although I will say, I mean, any dog can be trained supposedly. I've seen those shows, but you know, my dog Niko is just so hot wired when someone comes over. No, she's the brindle.

Okay. Just so hot wired when people come over that I just don't know what to do. What do you mean hot wired? Just so excited and like, so excited she's about to implode into a nuclear fission reaction. Okay.

Like just really, really low nose. He knows Niko. It's like, it's very, very tough to reign her in when someone knocks on that door and comes over. Okay. She'll chill out after 10 minutes, but it's just hard to not get her to jump up on people and stuff

because they got to be in on it too, you know? Well, I would say that probably any high end dog trainer would say that you should give her tranquilizers all the time, especially when somebody's coming over. Just let her sleep her life away. Your instinct as a dog owner is, when someone comes over and your dog jumps on them, it's to say, no, Niko, get down, get off of them.

And even like pull them off. But this article says like, no, it even a scolding is reinforcing that behavior because all that dog wants is attention, even if it's a scolding. Right. And if you say no or whatever the dog gets the attention, it prefer positive attention where you're like,

yeah, jump up, that's great. But it'll take, you know, Niko or any other dog will take the no, what they say to do is to just ignore it. Yeah. Just ignore the dog until they're doing what you want them to do and then reward the dog. And I think that what you just said, and I'm glad you said this

because we really need to get this across, what people have been discovering more and more about dog training in the last like 20 years is that having a dog and raising a good dog is requires way more than we previously thought it did. Way more attention, way more research, way more patience, way more persistence, way more than it used to.

And rightfully so. I mean, it should require this. And one of the reasons why it does require more is because there's been a real shift in mentality over what direction you should take to train a dog. I keep saying raise a dog. I think that's a good way to put it too. Yeah, sure.

But it used to be different. And it still is that way for some people as we'll see, but it used to be much easier because you just asserted yourself physically, psychologically. You yelled at your dog, you spanked your dog, and you basically showed your dog who was boss. And then after that, they would just kind of behave. They're saying like, no, don't do that anymore.

That's not good. It really has really terrible effects on the dog. It harms your relationship with the dog. And instead, you really need to just give 110% whereas before you were giving maybe 50%. That's right. So what you're talking about are the two main approaches, dominance or positive reinforcement.

Positive reinforcement is a straight up operant conditioning technique where you reward your dog for good behaviors or I guess we shouldn't even say good and bad. They say not to do that with children and dogs. Desirable behaviors and a focus on what a dog should do whereas dominance is a technique to discourage unwanted behaviors, what you should not do.

And the whole dominance theory is based on this idea. And this has been around since, well, who knows where it got its original start, but at least since the 70s. There are these dog training monks in Cambridge, New York called the new skeet monks. And they are monks who raise and breed German shepherds and write dog training books.

Right? Well, I mean, the monks are supposed to give something back to the world. Some monks brew beer and these guys train dogs. I like the beer brewers better. But it's been at least around since then, but this is based on the idea that dogs are really just wolves 2.0. In dogs clothing.

Yeah. And that wolves, we should look at the behavior of wolves and they are pack animals with an alpha male and an alpha female, we'll get more into that. And we can extrapolate that to dogs. And so that's how, and this is what these monks say too, that's what you should be doing is mimicking what wolves do in, well, it's about to say in the wild,

not the case really, what wolves have been studied doing in captivity, which is a key point. Right. And then like because they have packs with a leader called an alpha male and an alpha female, the alpha male and female maintain their position through dominance, through acts of like aggression, violence, and that they're constantly challenged for these positions.

So that's so much so that this constant struggle over dominance and alpha-dom is what shapes wolf society. And that if you take that and you just assume, like you said, that dogs are just a different type of wolf, that they're so closely related to wolves and descended from wolves, that the same kind of mentality applies to dogs. If you create that kind of situation in your own home, you will have a happier, more obedient dog

who understands its place in this household, which to your dog is just a pack. That's right. This has started in the 1960s. There were a bunch of studies observing these wolf packs and their social structures. I saw it even earlier than that. I saw a guy named Rudolf Schenkel was doing this in 1947

and that he's the one who coined the idea and the term alpha. And he was also the guitarist for the Scorpions, if I'm not mistaken. I think you're thinking of John Fogarty's guitarist. Which I think was his brother. Rudy Schenkel. Rudy Schenkel. No, no, no.

So yeah, so they're observing these wolves and they're saying that there's a continual pattern in the pack of the male members vying for control, challenging the alpha, then the alpha putting it down, usually physically and also psychologically, I guess as much as you can get into the psychology of a wolf.

And here's the thing. I mean, should we go ahead and say what the deal is? I feel like that's, or should that be a third act spoiler? No, no, I think we can go ahead. All right, I said they were studying captive wolves. That's the rub here. Is that they're studying wolves in captivity. And it took this other guy,

and when was that, the 90s? Yeah, David Mack. Yeah, that actually studied wolves in the wild. And he's like, that's not what's going on at all. Because it's like studying humans in a refugee camp or a prison. Like the behaviors aren't gonna be the same. What I'm observing is these animals

that follow what most animals in the animal kingdom do are many, which is they're families. And the alpha is the alpha, because he's the dad. Right, exactly. That like when they said, like, oh no, wolves are constantly, you know, under these physical attacks for their status as the alpha wolf. They, what they were saying was like,

these wolves are in a completely unnatural setting and situation, and you've got a bunch of different alphas who are trying to figure out who's in charge. And yeah, there was a lot of aggression and dominance, but this was a terrible thing to base this idea on how to train a dog, because it was a totally artificial situation. And it wasn't until, I think, what did you say?

1990 that Mack, he actually revised an earlier book. He wrote a book in 1980 that took these earlier ideas and said, yeah, these are totally correct. And now he's like, I wish I'd never, I got it so wrong. Yes, there is dominance. There are alphas, but it's like you said, Chuck, they're mom and dad. That's what we would call them.

That's right. Just in the same way that your mom and your dad are the boss of you and you're a kid, same thing in a wolf pack. Yeah, and dad goes out and gets the food. Moms takes care of the kids and protects the kids and acts as the defensive guard over their den. And that's just how it works.

And then after a couple of years, the male puppies, I guess, leave. They become alphas of their own families. And he observed the stuff over, where is it, Canada's Ellesmere Island every summer for 13 years. And it really- That island has the best carnival in Canada.

It really changed the way people looked at wolves and ergo dogs. Yeah, for the revision of it or the earlier stuff. Well, the revision of it. Sure, yeah, it totally did because everybody realized that this dominance-based training that people have been doing where you basically beat up your dog.

If there is like a sense of like, alphadome that your dog is following, your dog is basically like, my dad is beating me up and yelling at me all the time. And I'm just scared and anxious about everything. So the dog training world realized that this is what was happening, that it was based on faulty preliminary original research.

And they switched, they changed. They went to a much more respectful, happier, friendlier way of training that doesn't involve punishment. It involves basically rewards and extinctions as we'll look at later on. All right, well, let's take a break. We were talking about beating up your dog,

but when we come back, we'll talk about specific techniques that people that subscribe to the dominance theory believe in. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles. Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends

to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to

when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This, I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me.

Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody

about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so you talked about people beating up their dogs. I know you were sort of kidding. Sort of.

There are actual physical things that they say to do in dominance training. And they are as follows. One is called the alpha roll, not R-O-L-E. That's right, the other one. R-O-L-L. You got it. So this is when the trainer will,

I guess, if you're the owner and trainer, will pin the dog on its back and hold the dog there by the chest or the throat until the dog gives in and stops the struggle. OK. That is slightly different than dominance down. That is pinning the dog on its side until the dog stops struggling.

So same thing. I mean, you've got a dog that is doing something that you don't want it to do. So you are pinning it. You're physically restraining it in an aggressive manner until it just basically dies inside. I will say that I have done the dominance down before because of a dog fight between my two dogs.

OK. Getting the dog separated and then pinning one down until they calm down. One thing I saw somewhere, I don't remember where I saw it, but actually, I've heard it a little while ago. The way that you break up a dog fight is you grab them by the back leg. Is to rub yourself a steak.

Just walk through and be like, who's for steak? Why fight when you can have steak? Grab the back legs. Yeah, that makes sense. Here's the thing, though. If you've ever been involved in a dog fight up close, it's an adrenaline rush. You don't know quite what to do.

And it's scary. It's like super scary. Yeah, well, your brain just becomes totally like, my brain becomes clouded when Momo starts barking at somebody. I'm like, oh, I get all flustered and whatever. Dog fight is one of the most flustering, like, clouding experiences you can have. I've heard there are water on them.

I could see that. I could also see them just fighting right through the water if the fight's bad enough. Yeah, I mean, my dog, Lucy, who isn't with us, got into a fight with my former co-dog, Jake, the pit bull, who my friend Justin ended up taking. And it was ugly, man. And they're both not with us,

and they're both really sweet dogs, but they looked at each other wrong, and it was on from the get-go. And like, Lucy took off part of Jake's ear, and it was just like, it was bad. It was scary. You don't know what to do. Right, and so a person who subscribes to dominance theory training says,

you need to show that both of those dogs that you're in charge and you tell them they're not fighting. That they're acting out, they're misbehaving, because they don't understand their role. But at the same time, I would be like, well, no, it sounds like that doesn't necessarily mean that they don't think you're the alpha. They're trying to figure out

whether they're positioned over one another in this packet. Or just dogs being dogs, man. That's another way to look at it for sure. You know, like Lucy got attacked at a dog park when she was young. And from that day forward was, you know, if a dog was slightly aggressive, it was on and scary. So we couldn't take around other dogs.

That's the upshot. Yeah, and they would say, so one of the other things I want to call out here rather than waiting, when a dog acts aggressively, every trainer I've seen on both sides says that it's fearful that the dog is actually afraid. Oh, that was for sure Lucy's case. Yeah, so yeah, and that's why I thought of that

because, you know, she had a negative experience and she was afraid. So she would act aggressive in the face of fear. So one of the reasons why people criticize dominance training as we'll see is that you are physically and aggressively punishing aggressive behavior. So you're punishing a dog for feeling fearful, which is just going to make it more fearful

of whatever it is it's afraid of at that moment, which means it's actually probably likelier that it will become more aggressive rather than less aggressive. Yeah, it's like a human kid too, you know. If you have a kid who has learned to be aggressive and your way of discipline them is to hit them, it's like, what do you think is going to happen?

I don't know. I don't know anything about human kids. I only know about dogs. They're the same. So back to the physical methods of dominance training. There was alpha-roll dominance down, there's the scruff shake. So when you grab the dog's jowls,

they're scruff with both hands and shake it really hard and stare them, stare them in the eyes. Leash jerk, if you're on a walk with your dog and they're pulling, you let them get up ahead and then jerk back really, really hard. Sure. And then using choke collars or pinch collars

or shot collars instead of like the more humane gentle leader is what they call them. Right. This sort of looks like a muzzle, but when the dog pulls it just sort of pulls their nose down and they don't like that. Right, that's for the other kind. Dominance is where you're physically hurting them

when they pull on the leash. Correct. Or when you jerk the leash back. Right, or the choke, pinch or shot collars are all dominance. Right. Or there's psychological methods too. Staring at the dog till the dog looks away,

like I'm boss, who's gonna blink first? You dog, you. Right. Or growling at a dog or making dog noises to the dog is another dominance technique. Yeah, psychological dominance. Right. So you've got all these techniques

and as far as dominance training goes, if you employ them in a consistent manner, eventually your dog is going to figure out whose boss and the people who subscribe to dominance theory say this is actually a gift to your dog. Right. Because if your dog is acting improperly, if it's misbehaving, if it's being aggressive,

it's asserting itself because it doesn't realize that you're the alpha because you haven't asserted yourself over your dog and so somebody's gotta be the alpha. So this dog is confused and is trying to step up. So if you assert your dominance over this dog, you will reassure it that there is an alpha in charge and it can just relax and be a good, happy dog. That's what people who subscribe to dominance theory say

is the whole purpose of dominance theory. Right. On the other side, you have people saying, no, your dog is not just becoming super happy because they know you're in charge. They're going into shutdown mode, basically, because they're afraid to do stuff and they're basically living in a state of shutdown mode

because they're afraid of being alpha rolled or barked at or pinned or whatever. Yeah, and so what they'll do is, here's the thing, and this is really important to remember. Nobody's saying dominance training doesn't actually, at least in the short term, curb problem behavior in dogs. Right. But the way that you're doing it is actually

like breaking the dog's spirit. You're not providing it this comfortable position in the household, it's pack. You're basically just breaking a spirit so that it doesn't do anything until you tell it to do something. It's that shutdown that you were just talking about. And people who subscribe to the other way saying,

no, there's a different, better way to do this which doesn't involve breaking the dog, which allows the dog to lead a happier, healthier life. And there's what's called the least intrusive minimally aversive list of how to train a dog and using dominance theory techniques are at the bottom of this list. Yeah, I think they listed six things

and that was number six was positive punishment, which is a bit of a contradiction in terms, I guess, but. Yeah, let's talk about that. Yeah, that's what the whole list or just the positive punishment? Well, just about, yeah, the punishment problem. Yeah, I mean, that's when you're delivering, they called an aversive consequence

or I guess averse consequence to reduce probability that a behavior will occur. Yeah, so in this sense, positive and negative doesn't necessarily mean like good or bad. It means the introduction or the removal of something. So you can have a negative reward where something bad is removed in reward for the dog doing the behavior you want.

And then you also have negative punishment where you remove something good when the dog does something you don't want it to do. You also have positive rewards, which is basically giving a treat to a dog. It does something good and you say, hey, here you go or praise or something like that. Sure.

And then positive punishment, which sounds like, oh, okay, that's an all right kind of punishment. That's actually the worst of all of them as far as the most professional dog trainers are concerned. That is where you're introducing punishment because the dog is doing something. So you're yelling at the dog,

you're alpha rolling the dog, you're spanking the dog. You're introducing a punishment as a response for an unwanted behavior in this hope to train the dog. And so they say, well, here's the basic problem right there with dominance theory and dominance training is that eventually you're going to come to positive punishment. It's woven into the fabric of dominance theory.

And if you're punishing your dog, if you're yelling at your dog or alpha rolling your dog, you're going to create this shutdown dog. And what's more, it seems that positive punishment, as far as training techniques, conditioning, operant conditioning techniques go, is the least effective of all of those four. And it's not just dog trainers saying that,

even B.F. Skinner himself, who created a Skinner box and raises poor little barefoot electrocuted children. And he said, yes, positive punishment is the least effective of all of these. Yeah, they say the number one on that list is health, nutritional and physical factors. And this is basically setting up your house

and being assured that your dog is like healthy and well fed. And like there's nothing physically wrong with the dog. Yeah, like if your dog is peeing in the house and won't get housebroken, they're saying the first step you should do is take your dog to a vet and make sure it doesn't have like a urinary tract infection.

Yeah, I mean, let's go over this list because that's really helpful. There was the association of professional dog trainers have a list of misinterpretations. Urinating the house is one of them. A dominance explanation would be like, no, they're peeing on your bed because they're trying to say like, this is my territory.

It's a really paranoid place to come from, you know? Oh, the dog thinks it's better than me. What is really going on, they say, is that it's just the house training has been inconsistent. Yes, which is- Or you have a urinary tract infection or something. Right, and you would find that out by taking that first step,

which is taking the dog to the vet to make sure there isn't a health or medical issue that can solve this problem. Because again, it all comes down to this problem behavior. Why is the dog doing it? Or what do you want the dog to do instead? Right, jumping up on people. This is Nico's deal.

A dominance explanation would be that she's doing this to assert their height and rank over you. Like I'm just as big as you are. Whereas what's really going on is she wants to lick your face and it's fun and she's excited and wants to say hello. Right, so what you would do is you would say, teach your dog to sit whenever you go to open the door or something like that.

Or if your dog is jumping up to ignore it until it's sitting with all four paws on the floor and then you reward it. Because it's like you were saying, one of the easiest ways to train your dog is accidentally. And what you're doing is training your dog to do all the stuff you don't want your dog to do. Yeah, I mean, you come home from vacation

and Nico jumps up on you. Like your first instinct is to kiss her face and tell her how good it is to see her. And that's the wrong thing to do. Like I'm good at that. Like I can come in and just turn my back and ignore and it works. But you got to get people coming in the house while your friends coming in and family.

Like everyone's got to be on board. Yeah, like Momo barks at strangers when they come into our house. She does not like say a contractor coming over to bark or to come to our house. She just doesn't like it. So ideally, I would give the stranger a treat, say the contractor a treat.

I'd be like, by the way, can you show up five minutes early to our appointment? I'm gonna give you a dog treat. Slide a treat under the door. You and I are going to go and sit and get situated at the table at the dinner table. And we're gonna just talk calmly. And then my wife is going to bring my dog into the room

and you're going to give her a treat. Don't stand up in the presence of my dog. Once my wife removes our dog, then we can go on with our appointment. I know, man. That would be the ideal thing. What this thing says to do is, okay, instead of all that, just keep your dog outside.

Go hang out outside with your dog. Make it so your dog has no idea anybody even came over. Yeah, that's easier sometimes. Yes, that's the number two thing that you're supposed to do after taking the dog to a vet is just changing the dog's world so that the problem behavior doesn't exist because the thing that creates that problem behavior

isn't part of the dog's world anymore. Yeah, situation last week where I was out of town. We had our house worked on and the contractor, the framer guy who was there most of the time like hands on really loves dogs and loves our dogs but he had to come over and do something. He hadn't been over in a while and I was gone and I was like, I can tell you how to get in my house

if you want to go put them in the bedroom so the plumber can come in. I was like, this is on you, man. If you want to do this, he's like, sure, I'll do it. And he came in and texted me afterward that said that Charlie, he said, as soon as I walked in, he bolted and ran into the bedroom basically. And that Nico like barked and barked

and then was just like downstairs trembling and afraid. And he said, he eventually was like, come on Nico, come on up and he got her into the bedroom. That is so bad though. That is so sad. It's also really sad too, when you think about your dog barking or being aggressive or something like that.

When you're just like, oh, it's so obnoxious, be quiet. But then if you realize like they're actually doing it because they're scared with this, makes the whole thing just heartbreaking. But I think it's a really important thing to remember too, because it changes your perspective on it. It goes from being like, stop being aggressive, stop being hostile to realizing you're saying,

stop being afraid, stop being a chicken. That's no way to talk to something that you love and that holds true for a dog too. So to think that really kind of changes your perspective. The end of my monologue. And then a couple of other behaviors, pulling on a leash, a dominance explanation might be that, no, they're trying to assert that they're the alpha

and get out in front of you and be in charge. Whereas what's really going on is your dog's excited to be on a walk and they love to get out there and smell things and that's why they're pulling. And then finally, running through the doorway first, I get run over by my dogs all the time trying to get outside. Sure. And the dominance theory is that they're trying to push you

out of the way to show you they're in charge. Again, what they're doing is pushing out of the way because you're blocking them from getting outside to where they love life a lot more. Right. So in this really kind of, I think there's a beautiful job, Chuck, of putting side by side, the dominance theory

and the, what is it? The positive? Positive reinforcement, I guess. Yeah, positive reinforcement theory. Those are the two main ones. But just the almost night and day ways that they see dogs, like what makes dogs dogs, that to a dominance theory person,

the dog's just like, I'm in charge of you, get out of my way. Where the positive reinforcement theory says, no, the dog just likes to go have fun. And it's really not very concerned with, social niceties of letting you go first, it wants to go have fun immediately. It doesn't really have anything to do with you.

It's a dog. Exactly. I just, I don't know if everyone's figured this out or not, but I tend to fall a little more on the positive reinforcement side of that. Same here. So let's take a break then and talk about a little bit more about the problems with dominance training,

but then the joy and the goodness that is positive reinforcement. Beautiful. Learning stuff with Joshua and Charles, stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, God.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander

each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so earlier in the show, you said that dominance training can achieve results. No one argues that that can be effective at times, but we talked about why it's effective that your dog is being shut down, essentially.

Your dog might be fearful. And one of the other problems, besides harming the relationship between you and your dog that you might even know is harmed, is that if your dog is aggressive at all, this can really ramp that up. And that can be a big problem. Yeah, because again, you're punishing your dog

for being fearful if it's, if you're punishing it for aggressiveness and you're just making it more fearful. So two of the other big problems that can arise from dominance training are injury to the dog. If you say, you know, do an alpha roll too hard and you break its rib or something like that,

that can happen. Or if you're instilling further aggressiveness in the dog, an injury to you or the trainer or somebody else. Yeah, there was a study in 2009, so it's a little old, but I imagine it's still pretty true, published in the Applied Behavioral Science, I guess, Journal. Extravaganza.

They surveyed dog owners who had reported problem behavior and aggression. They completed the survey about their training techniques and of the dogs that were physically punished, hit or kick, which I can't even go there in my mind. Beating up your dog. 43% of those dogs responded with aggression. Okay.

And then what else? I think staring. If you growled at a dog, it was 41% of dogs became aggressive staring. If you growled? Yep. Okay. That staring was 30%. The scruff shake, 26% of dogs were aggressive in response.

And then the alpha roll was 31%. Right, and this is one reason, another reason why there's a near consensus, despite what Cesar Malan might say on dominance training not being the way to go. The Association of Professional Dog Trainers, International Association of Animal Behavior, Consultants, American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior,

Pet Professional Guide and the Certification Council for Professional Dog Trainers all say, this is not the way, Cesar. Yeah, they say it's like not only is it bad for the dog, it's not rooted in science, that the whole thing that dominance theory was based on is not correct. Yeah, the whole wolf thing.

Yeah, but Cesar will still say, I mean, he's still out there saying, nope, animals love, they wanna be in a pack and they wanna have a strong pack leader, and that is up to you to be that pack leader. Yeah, so this article kind of says that basically the people who are into dominance are amateur dog trainers. Right.

Unaccredited and I guess not high end is the way to, I would have put it 20 minutes ago. And a lot of pet dominance training tool industry people. Oh, sure, like that sell the shot collars or the pinch collars. Right, exactly, yes. And then people who watch Cesar Milan. Right.

Because he is, he's a force onto himself as far as dominance training goes because people watch his show and they're like, oh, wow, this really works. Like you can go to a dog and the dog will stop doing what you wanna do. And so he does, he produces results, but again, that question of what kind of a dog

or what kind of a mentality he's producing in the dog or that that kind of training produces in a dog, that's what's that question. That's also a heavily edited TV show we have to remember. It is, well, you know, he got in a lot of, I don't wanna say he got in a lot of trouble. Hot water? Maybe a little bit, but there was like a petition

that got like 10,000 signatures to have a show canceled on National Geographic because- Because the pig? Yeah, the pig thing where there was a French bulldog that had killed two pot belly pigs in its past. And the owner was like, I don't want my dog to kill pigs anymore. And Cesar was like, I have just the idea.

Let's put it in a pen with another pig. And apparently it was going very well, but then they let it off of the lead and the dog attacked the pig and took a chunk out of its ear. And they aired this. And I'm sure they aired it because they were trying to be true

to their documentary roots, I guess, rather than just editing the whole thing out and being like, well, we can't show that. They included it. And there was a lot of outrage. And they were like, this is a clear act of it. Animal abuse, like this pig was harmed because of this show's actions and Cesar Law's actions.

And there was an investigation by Los Angeles County, I think, to see whether they could charge him with animal abuse. And they cleared him eventually. But it produced this round of interviews for him, a lot of publicity for the show, but also he did a lot of interviews. And in every single one, he said,

I understand that the people who are, who prompted this investigation care about animals. And the people who are doing the investigating are doing their job and they should. And it's great and I'll cooperate. But in every single one, he stood by dominance training. He did not question it for a second. That's true, he still believes in it.

For sure. So on the other side, we have positive reinforcement. And that's generally like a two-pronged thing where you reward good behavior. And this next part is really key because it's easy to reward good behavior, but not accidentally reinforcing bad behavior, which you talked about earlier,

which is someone comes in, Nico jumps on them and my instinct is to pull her off and say, no, I am reinforcing that bad behavior just by giving her even negative attention. Right, exactly. So the whole point of positive reinforcement is ignoring the behavior that you don't want to happen, which means you're not accidentally reinforcing bad behavior.

And then rewarding the behavior that you do wanna happen. So in the case of Nico, the part where you're ignoring it's called extinction, where this idea that the unwanted behavior goes away, if you do nothing, when you come in and she's jumping up, you just turn your back to her and ignore and just go about your business. Say, unpacking your shoes,

maybe you've got a wet bathing suit that you need to get out of your suitcase with my mattress. That kind of thing. You've just come home from a beach vacation. Dude, she does this when I go get the mail. Okay, all right, wow, okay. So you come back and you're looking through your...

Your mail. Your Garnet Hill catalog and you know, you're thinking maybe I will spend a little more on Halloween decorations than last year. And you're ignoring her. You're just doing your thing. And then the moment she sits quietly and looks up at you, bam, you're there with the treat,

with the tug of war rope, the verbal praise. You're like right there. And then you go back to it. She jumps up and you go right back to your mail. You just totally ignore it. And the moment her feet are on the floor, bam, you're right back there with another treat. So you're very consistently, this is really, really key.

You're consistently rewarding the behavior that you want and you're consistently ignoring the behavior that you don't want. Yeah, and again, I'm pretty good at about this with myself. And she doesn't jump on me, but it's just, it's with other folks. So that's the thing I got to really, really work on. Some of our closest friends that come over a lot

and understand and they ignore her and try and turn their back and stuff until she comes down. She's like, why do they hate me? Oh goodness. Another thing you can use is the clicker. And that is something you hold in your hand that makes this clicking sound.

And you just sort of reinforce that along with the treat, but they hear that click. And I guess it's sort of like that Pavlovian response where the precision of that click, it makes it easier for them to put two and two together. And pretty soon you can make that click and they know like, ooh, you know, maybe I'll just sit down and behave

because the treats come in my way. Well, with the click, I think you're more marking the behavior. Like there's five different things that she's doing, as she say, settling in or whatever. Maybe she was looking up out the window and you said, good girl, because she was sitting down. But to her, you're saying good girl

because she's looking out the window. If you clicked, if you clicked the moment she sat down and settled, she would know that what you were talking about was the sitting part, rather than looking out the window part. The clicker is just, it happens so fast, it allows the dog to mark that behavior more

than your praise. Right, because it takes a lot longer to say, Nico, you're so good. Exactly. Than that little click. So you'd want to click first and then hit her with the praise, but the click is like, oh, that thing.

That's right. And the consistency that you were talking about is so key because you can be going down a good path for a couple of weeks and undo it all in a couple of days or even a single action if you're not consistent with this training. But it's like with the peeing in the house thing. Maybe the house training that you engaged in originally,

that you didn't quite finish, you weren't quite consistent enough. So go start over. It's not like it's like, oh, well, I'll never have a nice rug again. My dog just pees in the house. It's like, no, you go back to house training your dog. Or if you have this, whatever the unwanted behavior is,

you just have to go back to it and do it again and your dog will pick it up probably way faster the second time. And you just stick to it. It's just more consistency, which is why I was saying earlier, it's a little more involved owning a dog than we used to think it was.

But the dogs that we're sharing our lives with I would argue are way happier and healthier mentally and probably physically too than say they were 30 years ago in general. Yeah, and there is a certain amount, you don't get dogs and cats if you wanna have, well, this is not necessarily true, but if you need a pristine house that's hairless,

you probably shouldn't have pets. Like there's a certain amount of giving in to the fact that, I mean, and you may have rules where like pets aren't allowed on any furniture, which is great, that helps. But like in my house, they're furniture dogs. So we know our sunroom couch is never gonna be the nicest, greatest couch in the world.

It's always gonna have some dog hair on it. And that's just the way it is, that's fine with us. Yeah, you, me, and I are defiant. We have not one, but two white couches. Yeah. Luckily Momo doesn't shed. But has Momo ever thrown up on the couch? No, she hasn't, and I know now that I'm saying this,

back at home, she's throwing up on the couch for the first time ever. Our, you know, my friend Justin, he and his partner Melissa have a great dog named Foley, who is Nico's best friend. And Foley is not allowed on their furniture and is really good about it, but he is allowed on our furniture.

So when Foley comes over for spending nights and play times, he fully milks that stuff. But it doesn't, and I was worried it was gonna mess them up at home, but it hasn't, he gets the difference. Yeah, I think probably because dogs are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. Probably, he probably likes his men or two. I can tell you Momo's very smart.

Yeah, my dogs are smart and dumb, you know? Yeah, okay. That's a good way for a dog to be too. It's like sometimes you think, man, what a smart dog. And then you see them eating like poop out of the cat litter box, and you're like, wow, you're really not very smart after all. Yeah, and they're like, oh, so good.

Or they come around the corner with cat litter on their nose, and they're like, what? I wouldn't do anything. Right. Oh yeah? Just play it off, just play it cool. They don't know anything, they can't prove anything. You got anything else about cat poop?

I got nothing else. Don't hit and kick your dogs, man. Yeah, don't beat up your dogs. That's it. Well, if you wanna know more about dog training, there is a lot to go read about on the internet, and a lot of it is conflicting, so definitely choose wisely.

Since I said choose wisely, it's time for a listener mail. I'm gonna call this one, it delighted us. Oh. I think you probably read this one. I enjoyed the short stuff, guys, on barbed wire. I wanted to share the fact that my great-great-grandfather won William Harvey Beale,

and vented the barbed wire titaner. Nice. How about that? Yeah. This is what enabled ranchers and farmers to install their own fencing. I am the 12th generation in a long line of Beals that began in the U.S. in the 1680s from England,

first landing in Pennsylvania, and gradually migrating westward. I don't know why that rhymed. Have you ever, you watch What We Do In The Shadows? I have seen it here, there, yes. So, you know, it was a movie, and now it's a TV show, and a TV show. One of the elder vampires,

any time that, you know, they're on Staten Island, and he talks about Manhattan, he calls it Manahatta. What, that's hilarious, but there's no reason for it to be hilarious, but it is. It just cracks me up that he calls it Manahatta. I like the TV show more than the movie, because, almost exclusively because of Matthew Berry.

Oh, really? I think anything he's in is just priceless. That guy's good. It's great. You know, one of the writers on that show and producers is Tom Sharplin of The Best Show, yeah. Wow. Anyway, I don't know how that reminded me of it.

I think I was thinking about them landing in Pennsylvania and what it was called back then. Pennsylvania. Back to the letter. William Harvey, who was generation eight, was homesteading in Kansas in 1889 and took a job as a barbed wire fence salesman, and he said that goodness knows

there was plenty of fencing being shipped into the country by that time. You couldn't do any good trying to farm without it. Big problem, though, for farmers. They got the fence up was how to pull the wire tight on the post. So he tinkered in a forge and developed a device to pull the wire tight.

So he got a patent and was soon selling the Beale Wire Tightener to, quote, every bedeviled fence tender for miles around, end quote. She sent pictures of the device and the patent and William working on a ranch, and it was great. She said he traveled around the West, he traveled around the West for eight years selling his invention, was able to pay off his debts,

eventually moved to California with the next four generations to remain, I'm writing from San Diego. I know all these details thanks to William's youngest daughter who recorded extensive oral histories and books. What a great letter. That is a great letter. Been listening to the show for about five years, flew to Phoenix to see you live last year.

Nice, thanks. You're the highlight of my week with love and gratitude, Chandra in San Diego. Thanks a lot, Chandra. Pennsylvania to San Diego. No, I love it. Over 340 years. Via Manahata.

That was a great one. Thanks, and for the pictures too, that was just excellent. If you want to get in touch with us like Chandra did, Chandra, right? Yes. Okay, you can go on to StuffYouShouldKnow.com and check out our social links. And if that doesn't work,

you can always try a good old fashioned email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen

to your favorite shows. On the podcast, HeyDude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to HeyDude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass

on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.