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Kynology Europa: Science and Modern Dog Training

February 4, 2027 @ 9:00 am – February 6, 2027 @ 5:00 pm CST

Kynology returns to its roots in Europe, homeland of working dog breeds, working dog training, and the science of Ethology.

Join Dr. Stewart Hilliard at KynoTec GmbH in Payerstetten, Austria for three days of intensive lecture and deep discussion about behavioral science and modern dog training. The intended audience is kynologists– dedicated  students of dog behavior, learning, and training. Topics will be relevant to any thoughtful trainer of companion dogs, sport, police, and military working dogs, or hunting dogs. We’ll discuss:

  • The mechanisms of Pavlovian S – S conditioning (including Pavlovian inhibition) and instrumental R – S conditioning; the ways S – S and R – S learning processes interact to produce effective dog training, and the ways they can interact to produce misbehavior and turn our training session into a $%!@ing dumpster fire. 
  • The nature of reward and signaled reward, the processes of sign- and goal-tracking; the role of dopamine neuromodulation, and the differences between liking something, wanting it, and being reinforced by it
  • The essentials of aversive control, including the mechanisms of negative punishment, positive punishment, and negative reinforcement, the transition from escape responding to avoidance, and the importance of safety signals
  • The ethics of dog training– The learned helplessness effect, the critical factor of subjective control, and data and theories of stress and welfare; the concepts of beneficial stress, and instrumental agency and choice agency, and the issues surrounding moral standing, animal welfare, and ethical accountability  

The objectives of the event are to help participants:

  1. Master the behavioral science they need in order to understand the mechanisms of modern dog training, and formulate their individual positions on the critical technical and ethical issues in kynology
  2. Understand on a deep level why certain procedures work well, and why some procedures that seem to make perfectly good sense work poorly, and analyze their own work to get better results
  3. Articulate and also – when necessary– defend their individual ethical positions and technical dog training approaches when speaking with clients,  colleagues, and policy-makers.

We’ll have fun with this and there will be plenty of $%!@ing cussing, because nothing unites Americans and Europeans in these times of……..er………misunderstanding…….like the Seven Words of that Great American thinker, Mr. George Carlin. 

Three days, 12 lectures

  • Day 1 – Pavlovian Conditioning, Instrumental Conditioning, Misbehavior, Reinforcement Theory
  • Day 2 – Contingency Square 1, Aversiveness, Negative and Positive Punishment, Negative Reinforcement, Contingency Square 2
  • Day 3 – Learned Helplessness, Stress & Welfare, Agency & Accountability
Register at Kynotec