In the advent of the new point system I thought I would write a book review for Coercion and Its Fallout by: Murray Sidman. Although I’m not done reading it, this book addresses coercion and how it affects people from a psychological standpoint. Basically if you are coerced into doing something, (which is basically the norm for your average American) you will end up despising whatever it is you are doing and do a bad job on purpose so that you will encounter more coercion and the circle continues. Sidman states that we expect coercion and when faced with choices or doing something because we want to we are confused, and tentative about doing it.

The new point system on Agility Vision feel like coercion and may have negative effects on the content. People who would have made a comment just because the want to might not because they will be afraid of the points, once you have a few you want more, the system coerces you to add content, even if it is not high quality.

E had me read this book. I super recommend it! The descriptions of the processes used to train the dolphins makes you think about psychology, even if you aren’t into training dogs.

Some of the things they did were crazy! Pulling a plastic float out of one dolphin’s rumen through its mouth, training deep sea dives, coming up with original plans for their performances. This book made me think about my own training practices. How many times have I reward something wrong un-intentionally? Theoretically you should be able to train any behavior, but training is hard. You have to be super cognitive about it and the process to come through with a reliable behavior.

One particularly interesting story describes a period when they wanted to train the dolphin to do something that was un-scripted during the public performances. It was interesting to see how different animals reacted to the process. One of them figured out very quickly that the desired behavior was something unique. Another dolphin went through a sulking period before it figured out what was expected. This shows that animals have higher order thinking skills.

One of the things that would be beneficial to people who train dogs would be the ‘shaping game’ that they played with each other. In a group of people, one person is the trainer, one person is the trainee, and the rest of the group decides on a desired behavior, “have Joe stand on a chair”. The trainer had to create the behavior by shaping it, no talking, no luring, etc. It was interesting to read about the different things they tried and the results they got with different personalities being the trainer and the trainee. This would be great to do in an agility class that focuses on clicker training. Can you shape a behavior on a person? If so then you should be able to shape a behavior on a dog.