Review written by Jessi S. Clark-White

In my opinion, this is one of the best dog training manuals ever written and it’s not about dog training! Don’t Shoot the Dog is a complete, practical guide to the use of positive reinforcement to train anything from a fish to a human. And yes, I have seen the video footage of Karen Pryor’s trained fish.

This is one of those books which I think should be issued to any person who trains or ever will train dogs, especially if you have even the slightest interest in positive reinforcement. Even if praise is the only reinforcement you use in training, Don’t Shoot the Dog will show you how to use it more effectively.

It goes far beyond the scope of a treat training manual by showing how positive reinforcement affects what we (and our dogs) learn, and how to be a more effective trainer by learning how reinforcement should really be used.

Unlike many training books, it does not give recipes such as “How to Train the Recall.” Instead, it teaches the principles you can use to cook up a superior training plan for your dog.

This very well written (and entertaining) book begins with a chapter on how and why reinforcement works, then goes on to explain shaping behavior (training) and how to do it effectively. Pryor’s excellent examples of how shaping works are a pleasure to read and may improve the way you train yourself and the human members of your family, as well as your dogs!

One of the next chapters deals with stimulus control, or commands. Ever wonder why your dog seems to know a command, but sometimes doesn’t respond to it? After reading this, you will know that the behavior is not under proper stimulus control and what to do about it.

And what not to do. As Pryor points out, one common human reaction is to escalate the signal if the dog doesn’t respond. “The waiter doesn’t understand your French? Speak louder. Usually this doesn’t work. The subject has to recognize the signal; otherwise it doesn’t matter if you yell, or blare it through a rock-band amplification system, you’ll still get a blank stare.”

Sound familiar? How many times have you watched novice trainers out on the field screaming commands to an animal whose hearing is six times better than ours, somehow expecting that doing so will improve the dog s performance?

After that comes a very complete section on untraining or getting rid of behavior you don’t want. She discusses in detail the following 8 methods, giving examples of how they could be used in problems ranging from cats getting on the counter to surly bus drivers:

Method 1: Shoot the subject. (As she points out, “This one definitely works. You will never have to deal with that particular behavior in that particular subject again.”)

Method 2: Punishment.

Method 3: Negative reinforcement.

Method 4: Extinction; letting the behavior go away by itself.

Method 5: Train an incompatible behavior.

Method 6: Put the behavior on cue (teach the dog to do it only on command, then never give the command).

Method 7: Reinforce the absence of the behavior.

Method 8: Change or remove the motivation behind the behavior.

After that comes a section on reinforcement in the real world, which discusses how positive reinforcement is used effectively in a huge variety of situations, including the US Navy’s use of trainer-sea lion teams to mark and recover spent missiles, and pigeons trained to act as spotters in air-sea rescue operations.

My advice is to buy it before you even step out onto the training field!