Halloween is coming up, and that got me thinking about going trick or treat. It can be a lot of fun to go out in a costume and ask people for candy treats on Halloween, but I can remember not being thrilled with every treat I got. School supplies and toothbrushes are fine, but when you are hoping for chocolate bars and Skittles, they feel more like a trick than a treat. I don’t recall anyone ever giving me tacos for Halloween, but if anyone had, I would probably still be going out trick of treating every year. I think most of us think of tacos as a treat, which is why it’s the only food with its own day of the week. But not every kind of taco is going to be a treat for every person, every time. Individual preferences and context can dramatically change the value of a reward, or even cause the reward to be experienced as a trick, or a punishment.
How could something as rewarding as a taco possibly be a bad thing? Well, personally, I think stuffing a taco with beets and sushi would be a very bad thing, but even a delicious taco can be used for unpleasant purposes. If you are luring someone with tacos into a situation that they find terrifying, (like a child into a dentist’s office, or me into a Pauly Shore movie) you may get them where you wanted them to go, but as soon as they realize they have been tricked, they are likely to feel betrayed. They may not trust you the next time you offer them tacos. It would probably take me years to trust you again if you lured me into a Pauly Shore movie with tacos. Even more disturbing, I may feel a little anxious the next time anyone offers me tacos. My apologies to any fans of Pauly Shore. I don’t think any less of you, because I respect your right to be wrong. We still share a mutual love for tacos and dogs, or you probably wouldn’t still be reading this.
Luring can often work the same way with dogs. If we lure a dog into a situation they fear, they may learn to stop trusting you and see the lure as a predictor of scary things. I do use food lures sometimes to get a behaviour started, like sit, down, or stand, but I try to fade the lure out after the first few repetitions. Sometimes a lure can be fine as a way of distracting a dog away from something they will find scary, but I usually just do that in emergencies. Gradually conditioning a different response is a lot more useful in the long term than luring could ever be.
Luring people or dogs into scary situations with things they normally find rewarding like tacos isn’t the only way we can get unpleasant results with rewarding things. We can also make life very unpleasant for our learners if we are not sufficiently generous. If you show me a giant platter filled with tacos and tell me I can have 1 taco every time I get a question right, but only give me a chance to answer a question once per hour, I am going to be frustrated, bored, and disappointed. If you only ask me questions written in a language I don’t speak, I am going to be incredibly frustrated, maybe even angry, unless it’s in Latin or Greek. My husband knows Latin and Greek, so I would call him, and together we would eat all your tacos.
Failing to be sufficiently generous and setting unrealistic criteria can have the same effect on our dogs. I tell everyone I work with to do 2-3 fun, fast paced daily training sessions with their dogs every day. This can be a lot of fun for the dog and the human, is a great bonding experience, and is a good way to teach dogs what behaviours we find desirable and will reward them for. But if these sessions last for 10 minutes, and the dog is earning a total of just 5 or 6 reward the entire time, it’s probably going to be a frustrating, disappointing experience for your dog. A much more rewarding, far less disappointing pace will be as many as ten treats per minute for at least part of the training session. That’s a good fast pace that will be fun for you and your dog and will keep you and your dog from getting frustrated or bored.
If you want to make me happy, tacos will usually help a lot! But using tacos to trick me into something I don’t want to do will make me sad, and probably trust you less. Offering me tacos but not giving me a fair chance to actually eat them will also make me sad. Whatever it is your dog loves as much as I love tacos, make sure you don’t use it to trick or lure your dog into something they find scary. You can use rewards to gradually condition happier responses to scary things but avoid using rewards as a way to lure dogs into scary situations. Also make sure you are being generous with your food rewards. Give your dog lots of chances to earn rewards and set criteria so that your dog is successful often.
Give them lots of chances to earn treats that they find rewarding in that moment and avoid subjecting them to any tricks!
Until next time –
Daniel