Professor Nickie Charles and Dr Justyna Włodarczyk share their experiences as academics who train their own dogs and are interested in exploring how different cultures of dog-training shape the animal-human relationship. Drawing on their skills as social researchers and their knowledge of dog training, the interview discusses key themes of their work whilst exploring the relationship between practical and academic involvement in training dogs.

 How would you describe the influence of your knowledge of dog-training on the development of your research processes and projects?

 Justyna Włodarczyk: I have been living with dogs and training dogs for most of my life, since a time that precedes any kind of academic career. When I started working on my PhD, for a while it seemed to me as if I was leading two separate lives: my academic life and my dog training life. It did not occur to me that it was possible to use the tools of cultural studies to conceptualize humans’ relationships with animals. In the mid-2000s, with utter and absolute amazement, I learned about the emergence of animal studies in the humanities. I was hooked; I knew this is what I would become involved in after I was done with my doctoral dissertation. I gorged myself on the available animal studies scholarship and noticed that few people with dog training experience were producing scholarship in the humanities (there were obvious and key exceptions, like Donna Haraway’s work); while most of the people who were doing research related to animal training came from the broadly understood life sciences and were engaged in the emerging and exciting fields of animal cognition and behavior studies. These were fascinating and informative, but of course these were not the methodologies I was trained in. Furthermore, as I read these new studies of animal behaviour I found myself constantly jumping to the meta-level and conceptualizing and historicizing the emergence of this interest. I found myself asking: why has dog training become so interesting for scientists? Has it always been this way? What questions are we asking about dog training now that would not have come up fifty or a hundred years ago? How have the priorities of the trainers changed? Why?

 

Nickie Charles: Like Justyna I’ve lived with dogs all my life but until my involvement in the ‘Shaping Inter-species connectedness’ project my participation in dog training hadn’t really influenced my research. Mostly my research had focussed on gender relations and how they shape work, kinship and politics. Some years ago, though, I was involved in a project exploring families and kinship and found that people often included their companion animals as family members. This enabled me to explore sociologically something that I’ve always been fascinated by and which has always been a hugely significant part of my life – how human and animal lives shape and are shaped by each other. I’ve also learnt a massive amount by being involved in activities with my dogs and am fascinated by their behaviour and how they learn. This fascination goes back to my teens when I was an avid reader of Lorenz and Tinbergen and wanted to study animal behaviour at university – I became a sociologist instead!

There is a danger when working in multi-disciplinary contexts that research findings can be framed in terms of a polarity between good training/trainer vs bad training/trainer – such framings can potentially alienate colleagues from different disciplines. What advice could you suggest to researchers who find themselves in this position?

Justyna Włodarczyk: I think what drives us as humanities-based scholars - forgive me if I am generalizing - is the desire to understand the (human and non-human) other’s perspective. I think this genuine curiosity coupled with respect creates a kind of vaccine against one-sidedness. I do not investigate trainers’ methods to laugh about them behind their backs. I do it to understand their narratives, their stories, their choices. And I try to record these findings as objectively as I can. No one thinks of oneself as a bad trainer; no one (and this rings true for the entire period I have investigated) considers oneself a cruel person. Of course, I have to make certain choices as a trainer myself, but – if anyone asks - I always offer an explanation for where my choices come from in a manner that does not posit my methods as the only acceptable ones. Would I want to see change in some cultures? Yes. But preaching to anyone from a position of authority is never the answer.

 

Nickie Charles: I don’t know about advice, but in this project we’re definitely not passing judgment on the merits and de-merits of particular training methods, that’s not our area of expertise and it’s not an objective of the project. I think it’s really important that we don’t set ourselves up as arbiters of good/bad training/trainer – as social scientists we need to recognise that our expertise doesn’t allow us to do this. On a bit of a tangent, I’m learning about some of the misunderstandings that can arise when working across disciplines. In this project we’re engaging with people who have been trained in the natural sciences and in animal welfare - one of them, Francoise Wemelsfelder, is the project consultant – and, because of this, I’ve become acutely aware that words have different meanings in different disciplines and that some words are particularly problematic. This was brought home to me when talking about dogs being ‘stressed’ – animal scientists measure animal stress in very particular ways and, in the absence of such measurement and resulting evidence, talking about stress is seen as problematic. I was blithely talking about dogs being stressed without having any evidence that was recognised scientifically, although I did have evidence that was sociologically recognised – a very experienced dog trainer had told me that a particular dog was stressed and had shown me the bodily signs they were reading. I was interested in this also because the trainer’s practical expertise led them to understand the dog’s stress without the need for scientific forms of measurement. This raises all sorts of interesting questions, some of which we’re looking at in the project.

Dog training is very much entangled with the human-animal divide - scholars like Despret and Haraway speak about how human ways of being are changing – as they are tangled up in co-becomings – can you share insights from your own experience about how dog-training can reconfigure new ways of relating (moving away from notions of traditional views of dogs being acceptable in a “human world”)?

Justyna Włodarczyk: In my journey through all the various dog training activities, I have dug deep into how the culture of the particular activity and/or method shapes the participants’ ways of perceiving the world. The members of the different dog training cultures focus on different aspects of a dog’s natural behavioural repertoire when assessing the potential suitability of a dog for that activity. It reminds me of close reading, a method used in the study of literature, where you basically dissect a text with great attention to detail. The funny thing is, multiple close readings of the same text (sometimes even a very short one) can coexist and both can make sense; both can be admissible as interpretations. This is also the case when different trainers look at the same dog. I appreciate that eye to detail that many dog training people have developed; that intense, one would think excessive and obsessive preoccupation with seemingly trivial details. Interacting with these trainers truly makes me notice things that many “lay” people would have glossed over. Of course, these are issues that the “human” world usually finds trivial at best, and more often the sign of some unhealthy preoccupation. Dog training cultures offer a kind of support network here: with who else could you spend hours on end discussing a dog’s technique when catching a frisbee or his tail posture while walking at heel. Will it change the world if you talk for three hours about improving a dog’s grip on a dumbbell?

There can be a bit of a dark side to this; when people become increasingly involved with a particular training culture, and their entire social life revolves around a particular activity – whether this is therapy work or search and rescue – they can feel disappointed when their dog (often: new dog, second dog) does not pass the cut. They can see what others (those not involved in that activity) cannot: the dog’s predispositions are elsewhere. In the worst case scenario, this can lead to dumping the dog simply because s/he does not fulfil’s the trainer’s high expectations. Luckily, this is rare in the new dog sports. Most people get involved in them in order to find an outlet for their dog’s energy and look for an activity that best fits the dog they share their life with. This in itself is also a testament to how important the recognition of a dog’s needs has become. And that is absolutely wonderful.

Nickie Charles: On a slightly different note from Justyna, I don’t think we are moving away from dogs having to behave in ways that are acceptable in a human-centric world – lots of companion dog training is geared specifically to enabling dogs and their people to live in towns and cities where animal behaviours are hugely circumscribed. At the same time, though, people argue that living together in multi-species households blurs the boundary between humans and animals, dogs are valued family members, and training methods and philosophies are increasingly recognising the importance of dogs enjoying training with their humans and doing something that’s fulfilling for them. This is associated with ideas of dog-centred training and recognition of the strong emotional bonds between dogs and their humans. But in all types of training dogs are cajoled and encouraged – and sometimes forced – to do what humans want them to do. It’s just that - in many contexts - the way this happens has changed since the 19^th century - something which Justyna has written about in her book.

Despite the emergence of more progressive reward-based training, dog-training retains a ‘coercive’ element – the dog must still do as they are told. Justyna in her book further argues that all training apparatuses involve dog-human entanglements with power. Can you speak about this from the perspective of trainer-academics – and about the ethical obligations and implications that may open up from exploring and incorporating critical theories that problematize modernist notions of human exceptionalism.

 

Justyna Włodarczyk: Oh, I am certain that all dog training – regardless of how positive it is – is to a certain extent coercive. This is also the reason why so many progressive trainers want to do away with the label of training: they think they can break away from what they see as a negative legacy. While I understand where this desire comes from, I honestly think it is more productive to acknowledge that yes, coercion is always an element of human-canine relationships. We can try to minimize it, but the very fact that we are trying to influence the behaviour of another being is, by many definitions, coercive. But I do not think this needs to be a bad thing. Opening one’s eyes to how purely positive training is also a way of exerting control over your dog can actually make it possible to be more observant of a dog’s needs. The fact that you are not physically forcing the dog to perform a behaviour, does not mean that magically all the dog’s needs are met. We need to keep our eyes open to what dogs are telling us and not just assume that all is fine because we’re not using a choke chain. In fact, positive training has the potential of being dangerous precisely because it modulates the training subject’s motivation: it makes the dog truly want to do something that s/he did not want to do before. And this is why we need to be accountable for what we make our dogs want.

I’d like to finish by recounting an example from my current research project, which is about animals in behaviourist science. During World War II, B.F. Skinner came up with a project of teaching pigeons to guide missiles by pecking at a target. The birds were taught using purely positive reinforcement; a very detailed protocol was enforced: the pigeons were first accustomed to being inside a strange device, to being strapped into a harness; the pecking behaviour was strengthened through specific reinforcement schedules; distractions were gradually introduced, etc. At no time were the birds punished. Skinner ended up with a flock of birds that really wanted to carry out their missions. Except... these were suicide missions; the bombs would – of course – detonate upon making contact with the target. Skinner taught the birds to actively desire to perform a behaviour that would result in their own self-destruction.

Using positive methods is never an end-all solution that means all ethical dilemmas are solved. It also doesn’t have to be the kind of brain-washing that it was in the example above. When working with non-humans ethical dilemmas never end, and this is why we need to continually hone those observational and analytical skills, both as academics and as dog trainers.

Nickie Charles: Some of what I said in response to your previous question addresses this one but I’d like to query your use of the term coercion. Like Justyna, I think that dog training involves – if not coercion – then persuasion or manipulation. What training cultures have in common is that the dog is being persuaded to do something that humans want them to do, or prevented from doing something that humans find unacceptable – and this can in some senses be understood as coercion. The question of ethics is huge – I feed my dogs meat but don’t eat it myself and every time I feed them I ask myself how I can reconcile these two things – philosophically and ethically they don’t add up. The ethics of training are obviously of huge importance. On a practical level, my dogs love the activities we do together – whether it’s ploughing through the endless mud and wet that we’ve experienced this winter or flying around an agility course with me bringing up the rear – and I do things with them that I know they enjoy. The training that’s possibly more problematic is the everyday stuff - walking through a residential area with a dog who’s on the lookout for cats to chase, for instance, when I don’t think that this particular dog should be allowed to exercise his ‘natural instinct’ – it’s not fair on the unsuspecting cats apart from anything else. I suspect there may be people who wouldn’t share my view – and this raises questions about the ethics of keeping dogs as companions and not ‘allowing’ them to behave in certain ways. On the other hand, we all have to behave in socially acceptable ways and are sanctioned if we don’t, so I don’t see that dogs need to be treated differently - except that it’s us who decide for them what is acceptable and what isn’t – it’s a species-based power rather than a class, gender, and racially-based power (although they are also involved). I think we need to take the power relations structuring dog-human relations into account in everything we do with dogs – we need to try and do what is beneficial for them as well as for us and recognise them as fellow beings who happily share our lives and, for that, are deserving of huge respect, both for their differences from us and their massive tolerance of our behaviours – they’re far more tolerant of ours than we are of theirs. Our intolerance and our ability to shape dogs’ behaviours – whether through persuasion or coercion - point to the power relations structuring the canine-human relationship. We may no longer punish our dogs physically or pin them to the ground (although I’m sure there are still people who do just these things) but we manipulate their behaviour so that it conforms to what we want, and this raises profound ethical questions particularly as dogs internalise these relations of power and comply willingly with our wishes. This resembles Foucault’s conceptualisation of the way normalising power works to ensure subjectification – although happily for most companion dogs their training isn’t so effective that they no longer want to do any of the things that they enjoy and that we might prefer them not to do!