Daisy Peel

and to be fair because there's been such an emphasis over the years on getting better with reinforcement your timing criteria reinforcement which is as it should be we want to be good at that there hasn't been a good way to help people understand how to employ the use of aversive skillfully and the word punishment has been co-opted

by a large group of people to mean abuse.

So you can't even say the word punishment without somebody saying, oh, well, that word is poison.

Can we use a different word?

And for me nowadays, I'm like, no, I'm going to say it more.

Just say punishment, punishment, punishment, punishment, like Bart Simpson at the chalkboard.

Just write it a thousand times.

It is just a word.

You know, taking something with a feather could be punishment.

That's an aversive experience.

Walking outside barefoot is an aversive experience, depending on what you're walking on.

You know what is interesting?

We just don't have the skill because we're not willing to talk about it.

And for me, it's never been a question in my mind

that punishment and aversives are part of living and part of the biological experience but if you don't have a strategy if nobody's taught you a strategy then then in the moment you're going to end up resorting to really ham-handed

methods and they will work but that doesn't mean we can't be better about it and for sure for me that you know especially in the last couple of years with the help of people like Michael Ellis and Forrest Mickey and Stuart Hilliard and watching your content and some of the other stuff finding ways not just to be more clever about that kind of stuff but also figuring out how to prepare the dog for it and then how to teach other people about it has just been really lacking

And so for me these days, I actually teach my dogs now different responses to a no reward marker in different contexts.

And a lot of people have trouble even wrapping their brains around it.

They're like, what do you mean?

Teach your dog a response to a no reward market.