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Heart-Wrenching Study Shows The Long-Term Effect Yelling Can Have on Your Dog

7 NOV 2019

Your dog may be the apple of your eye, but let's be honest: she is an animal, with her own instincts and idiosyncrasies, and there are going to be times when she makes you want to tear your hair out.



According to a new study uploaded to pre-print server bioRxiv, aversive training such as positive punishment and negative reinforcement can have long-term negative effects on your dog's mental state.

"Our results show that companion dogs trained using aversive-based methods experienced poorer welfare as compared to companion dogs trained using reward-based methods, at both the short- and the long-term level," the researchers write in their paper.

"Specifically, dogs attending schools using aversive-based methods displayed more stress-related behaviours and body postures during training, higher elevations in cortisol levels after training, and were more 'pessimistic' in a cognitive bias task."

This sort of research has been conducted before, and found that aversive training has negative effects, but it's primarily been on police and laboratory dogs. In addition, the aversive training tends to be shock collar training, which is only one of several tools used.



The animals were recruited from a number of training schools in Porto - 42 dogs from three schools that use reward-based training like food treats or play, and 50 dogs from four schools that use aversive-based training, such as yelling, physically manipulating the dog, or leash-jerking.

Each dog was filmed during the first 15 minutes of three training sessions, and saliva samples were taken to assess stress levels from training - three from each dog relaxing at home to establish baseline levels of stress hormone cortisol, and three from each dog after training.

The researchers also analysed the dogs' behaviour during training to look for stress behaviours, such as yawning, lip-licking, paw-raising and yelping.


By contrast, the positive reinforcement dogs were pretty chill - far fewer stress behaviours, and much more normal cortisol levels.





This suggests that reward-based training may actually be more effective, although the researchers suggest this may be because the dogs already understand treat-based training methods. It's possible that the other group would learn more quickly were an aversive method applied - more research needs to be done to determine this.

Overall, though, the results seem to imply that aversive training doesn't necessarily have an edge over reward training, and that reward training is much better for your dog's happiness.

"Critically," the researchers said, "our study points to the fact that the welfare of companion dogs trained with aversive-based methods appears to be at risk."

The full paper is available on bioRxiv ahead of peer review.