Picking up with an earlier discussion, I would like to make a few points about what compulsion is and isn't. First I will start with a quote from Susan Barwig to get the ball rolling. (Susan knew her stuff, I believe she held a masters degree in behavioral psychology.)

"Compulsive training punishes and rewards the animal through the use of unpleasant stimuli. The handler punishes the dog by presenting it with something unpleasant. For example, if the animal breaks a down stay, it is corrected with a slap of the leash on its withers. The handler rewards the dog by taking away or omitting something that is unpleasant for it. For example, he shows the dumbbell to the dog, begins pinching the animal's ear and stops pinching only when the animal takes the dumbbell into its mouth."

Comments??

I don't see how it applies to me. Very interested in more comments.

Don't you love it? She uses compulsion, correction, and punish all in the same way. The scenarios she describes are punishment in the first example, and avoidance conditioning (a form of negative reinforcement) in the second example. But her definition of compulsion training is no clearer than what anyone on this board already said yesterday. It seems we are all able to agree that compulsion includes any and all forms of physical force, such as the two scenarios that Barwig describes. However, it doesn't address the question of verbal "corrections".

If we were to discard the word compulsion and change it to AVERSIVE, as in using aversive stimuli, then I think almost all of us would be in agreement. A warning word to the dog that is about to poke his head in the trash is AVERSIVE. Is it compulsion? Not in my book, but then I equate compulsion with physical force. An ear pinch is aversive, a prong is aversive. And verbal stimuli can be aversive also.

Here is the problem:

the deffinition of compulsion in a dog training context, is very different from the dictionary deffinition

in dog training "we" use compulsion to mean any force based method of trainin/teaching.

but... by denotation, compulsion means to cause an organism to do something that it would not normally do... meaning that inducive methods can compel...

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Merriam Webster says:
Main Entry: com·pul·sion
Pronunciation: k&m-'p&l-sh&n
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French or Late Latin; Middle French, from Late Latin compulsion-, compulsio, from Latin compellere to compel
Date: 15th century
1 a : an act of compelling : the state of being compelled b : a force that compels
2 : an irresistible impulse to perform an irrational act
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using deffinition 2, we could go on to say that a parent could use a ticket to Disney World to "compell" their child to clean their room.. but no person would consider the use of the ticket to be "aversive" would they?

I guess what I am trying to say is that compulsion based training is simply OC based training... you are actually giving the subject the choice, just stacking the deck a little <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Now your getting into bribery vs reward. The bribe in this instance(Disny tickets)would be inducive, IMO.

I'm in agreement that an aversive does not need to be compulsive, such as in the case of a verbal correction or punishment.

What I'm thinking, to put it in the simplest terms possible, is that compulsion means that the dog has no choice but to do what he is being forced to do. In Sch3FH2's example, the ear pinch is not compulsion because you are not forcing the dog to do anything; it is an aversive (or punishment) for not complying. When the dog complies, you remove the aversive. The dog still has a choice whether or not or when to comply.

No. I'm saying that compulsion means that the dog has no choice.

 Quote:

Originally posted by oldearthdog:
Now your getting into bribery vs reward. The bribe in this instance(Disny tickets)would be inducive, IMO.

Yes, but if the bribery is emotionally "undeniable" wouldn't that fall under compulsive??

this is getting close to the line of OCD, but I think it is somewhat simmilar... if you "know" that a subject cannot refuse a certain "reward", youcould compell that subject to do anything...

case in point: religious extremists, they will do anything, no matter the extreme, to reach their "goals"... that is compulsive, is it not??

furthermore, if a dog is hungry (truley hungry) and you used food as an incentive, in his mind, there could be nothing mor important than eating, so it would do things that it would not normally do, in order to eat.. he is "compelled"

another example is the extremes that a dog will go throught to reach a bitch in season.. he is "compelled"

it doesn't have to be a Positive Punisher, to be compulsive

Originally posted by L Swanston:
the ear pinch is not compulsion because you are not forcing the dog to do anything; I can't accept that. Regardless of what the dictionary says, IMHO, in the vernacular of dog training, when a person says he trains with compulsion, he means he trains with force. And an ear pinch is most definitely compulsion.