June 4 – June 7 CDT
Opportunity Barks, The Farm, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Essentials of Modern Dog Training – General Training Emphasis
Instructors: Forrest Micke and Dr. Stewart Hilliard
This event will be appropriate for trainers working in a broad variety of disciplines, including companion dog, working dog, and obedience dog training. If you haven’t seen how Leigh hosts an event, then prepare yourself for an exercise in masterful organization, impeccable taste, good humor, and nostalgic music– not to mention fresh fruit and little &%$#ing chocolates and stuff she puts out to make you feel at home, and all loved and shit. As jaded, disorganized, and irreverent as Forrest and Stewart can be, they loved the first Kynology/Opportunity Barks event and can’t wait to go back.
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Program Overview:
Join us for four days of in-depth conversation, scientific analysis, and practical work. The seminar will be approximately 40% lecture and theory, and 60% demonstration and hands-on training with participants’ dogs. We will focus on core aspects of modern dog training, including the application of functionally-defined aversive control. The ambience is intimate and the venue is small, so slots are limited. Dr. Hilliard’s lectures will provide insights on topics such as:
- Pavlovian Conditioning: The mechanisms of stimulus — stimulus learning and their relevance to dog training, including inhibitory conditioning, counterconditioning, and the technical problem of extinction.
- Instrumental Conditioning: Essentials of response — consequence learning and practical applications.
- The Contingency Square: A deeper understanding of the distinction between the valence (feels good or feels bad) of the stimuli we employ to train the dog versus the valence of the consequence the dog actually experiences
- Pavlovian – Instrumental interactions: How Pavlovian-Instrumental interactions determine the effectiveness of training techniques, and procedures used to “insulate” the target instrumental response from interference by embedded Pavlovian contingencies
- Aversive Control: Distinguishing between aversive stimuli (those that are unpleasant for the dog to experience) and functionally-defined aversive control (defined by the effect on behavior), and understanding why the distinction is important for dog welfare.
- Negative Reinforcement and Positive Punishment: Mechanisms of negative reinforcement and positive punishment, including the critical distinction between escape and avoidance, and the importance of safety cues
- Signaling: The roles of secondary reinforcers and secondary punishers in dog training.
- Dog Welfare: The truth about learned helplessness, the nature of stress, and why dog welfare should not be defined in terms of the presence or absence of stress, but instead in terms of the dog’s ability to predict and control stress
- Training Methodology: The Agency- Accountability Approach to dog training and how it provides for training techniques that are kind and fair to dogs, ethically-defensible, and consistent with scientific data on animal learning and animal welfare– while also providing real-world results for dog trainers