In addition to avoiding training procedures that are needlessly aversive, cynopraxic trainers avoid procedures that intrude excessively upon a dog’s freedom incentive (see Hydran-Protean Side Effects, the Dead-dog Rule, and the LIMA Principle). Training efforts that inappropriately restrict a dog’s ability to initiate goal-directed behavior not only adversely impact the dog’s quality-of-life but often do so without contributing any real therapeutic benefit. For example, inappropriate restraint or isolation, pointless deprivation procedures, intrusive rules of interaction, and tedious extinction and training rituals may be of little positive benefit with respect to training goals but impose time-consuming hardships on the owner, impede the bonding processes, and impair the dog’s ability to adjust, perhaps making the problem worse. Although highly intrusive procedures do not generate physical pain, they can produce significant emotional pain and distress while augmenting interactive conflict.

Pharmacological Control of Behavior

Mechanical Suppression of Behavior

The restrictive loss of freedom imposed by excessive crate confinement is especially prone to cause harm in cases where the procedure is used in the absence of constructive training efforts; that is, where crate confinement is made into a way of life or a steel straitjacket for the purpose of preventing some undesirable behavior by mechanically suppressing all behavior. The word crate carries the implication of a temporary container used for the purpose of stowing an animal away, whereas the word cage has the added onus of being a permanent place of restrictive confinement used to control an animal’s behavior, particularly an animal regarded as dangerous and untrustworthy. A cage serves to isolate and restrain an animal in a way that makes it constantly available for various exploitive purposes that are generally performed against its will, such as a spectacle for public viewing in zoos, for entertainment on a stage, or as an object of scientific investigation. Whereas a dangerous wild animal might be briefly crated for transport or medical treatment, its permanent place of confinement and isolation from other animals and people is a cage. In contrast, domestic animals are housed in pens, coops, stalls, and so forth, depending on the needs of the species and the uses made of the animal. In the case of dogs, long-term confinement generally involves the use of a kennel and adjoining run appropriate to the dog’s size, an arrangement that gives the dog access to both indoor and outdoor environs to rest or move about freely and to eliminate away from its sleeping and eating areas. When a dog must be kenneled on a long-term basis, at a minimum the arrangement should include the company of another dog, preferably of a similar size, friendly disposition, and a compatible same or opposite sex companion. In designing and managing environments used for animal confinement, appropriate consideration should be given to making the living space compatible with species-typical social predilections and group-organizing tendencies. Of critical importance for the housing of dogs is the provision of adequate opportunities to engage in pack-coordinated activities, which require access to large open areas for social interaction. In the case of a dog living in a home, putting the dog in the backyard alone is inadequate with respect to social needs — space alone does not confer significant benefit. Social activity needs are nicely satisfied within in the home by the combination of daily training, tug-and-retrieve play, and neighborhood walks.

Many advocates of long-term crate confinement claim that dogs are phylogenetically preadapted to live in a crate. These conclusions are based on various fallacious assumptions derived from inappropriate comparisons with the use of dens by wild canids and feral dogs. In reality, a crate has far more in common with a trap (or grave) than it does with a den. Further, a den actually has far more in common with a home, the natural environment of a dog, providing access to communal indoor and outdoor living spaces via a two-way door. An obvious distinction between a den and a crate is physical entrapment, isolation, and inescapability. While the den provides the mother with the seclusion and security that she needs to deliver and care for her young, it does not restrict her freedom of movement, as the crate does. Instead of providing a safe environ for her young, the crate serves the express purpose of separating the dog from social attachment objects. Further, instead of promoting comfort and safety, the inescapable exclusion imposed by crate confinement appears to confer an increased vulnerability for disruptive emotional arousal and insecure place attachments. Most puppies and dogs show a high degree of aversive arousal when first exposed to crate confinement, which is consistent with the foregoing comparison. After learning that the crate is inescapable, however, dogs appear to treat the crate in a paradoxical manner analogous to persons affected by the Stockholm syndrome; that is, they appear to form strong attachments with the crate, which becomes the place they identify as home.

The primary motivation governing the use of crates is similar to the reason certain wild animals are isolated in cages; viz., a dog’s freedom is perceived as representing some sort of threat or risk, usually in association with destructive habits or elimination problems. The daily ritual of cajoling and luring the dog into the crate may also gradually result in the dog acquiring a growing mistrust toward the owner, as reflected in its refusal to cooperate in other ways not directly related to confinement. The widespread practice of routinely caging a dog at night and then again during the day for periods totaling 16 to 18 hours (or more) is an extremely problematic practice that should not be condoned or encouraged, because it probably underlies the development of many adjustment problems, including aggression.

For many pet trainers, pet-trade breeders, and like-minded veterinarians, caging is frequently promoted as a humane alternative to more time-consuming and skill-intensive training efforts. Although crate confinement can be a useful asset when integrated into a competent training program, to expose a dog repeatedly to 16 to 18 hours of daily caging makes no sense. The fact that a dog can survive many months of such solitary confinement in a space barely big enough for it to turn around is testament to its flexibility. In addition to crate confinement, various devices are used to supplement intrusive control efforts, such as muzzles used to restrict barking, thereby extending mechanical control over the dog’s vocal behavior while it is in the cage. In other cases, owners use various behavior-activated collars designed to deliver a deterrent spray or electrical charge to control undesirable behavior while the dog is inside the crate. To restrain compensatory excitability and impulsivity, some ill-informed advisers might further recommend that the owner stop all play activities, especially tugging and roughhousing. To complete the picture, the owner may be sold on homeopathic remedies and vitamin supplements, fragrant odors and pheromones, or flower essence drops put in the dog’s water to help reduce its stress!

In recent years, the introduction of a medical model of dog behavior has led some practitioners to treat adjustment problems as mental disorders having physical causes and often to emphasize the role of disease as the underlying cause of behavior problems. Although the medical model is not entirely without merit, as some valid parallels exist between certain psychiatric disorders and canine behavior disorders and undoubtedly some behavior disturbances are the result of disease, overly speculative assumptions, problematic diagnostic labels, and an excessive reliance on psychotropic drugs based on rationale borrowed from human psychiatry serve only to compound the current puzzlement regarding the etiology and functional significance of canine adjustment problems. In addition to emphasizing disease etiologies and the importance of drugs to treat behavior problems, many practitioners who stress the medical model claim special authority pertaining to matters of diagnosis whereby the “physical” causes of the problem are purportedly identified, usually by means of speculative inferences from emotional and behavioral signs. These putative but unproven physical causes are then targeted with various medications believed to mediate a resolution of the problem. Unfortunately, the various inclusion and exclusion criteria used to make behavioral diagnoses and related drug-treatment decisions tend to cause referring professionals and owners to defer treatment until the canine adjustment problem reaches a form that threatens the dog with relinquishment or euthanasia, rather than initiate behavioral treatment at the first sign of a problem. The pharmacological approach resonates with the low-power owners basic assumptions, placing the causes of the dog’s adjustment problems beyond the scope of conventional training and socialization efforts. The adjustment problem is encapsulated within an involuntary subdomain of physiology that places it outside of the dog’s voluntary control and prevents its resolution without the help of drugs. In contrast, the cynopraxic approach views the physical changes to brain that mediate disturbance as the result of the accumulative effect of conflictive social exchanges and reactive adjustments in response to environments chronically lacking sufficient predictability and controllability to promote an adaptive coping style. Conversely, by changing interactive habits of social exchange to promote interactive harmony in combination with appropriate quality-of-life changes that support the dog’s needs, the physiological causes of disturbance are replaced by physiological changes conducive to adaptive optimization and social adjustment.

Although drugs are potentially useful in some refractory cases, the current state of the art remains investigational, and the ultimate benefits of drug therapy are uncertain, especially with respect to the control of domestic aggression problems (see Pharmacological Control of Aggression). Even in the realm of human psychiatry, the efficacy of the most commonly prescribed mood-altering drugs used to treat anxiety and depression disorders has been questioned. Kirsch and colleagues (2002), for example, who performed an extensive meta-analysis of treatment data submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) between 1987 and 1999, found that 80% of the clinical response of humans to six commonly prescribed antidepressants was duplicated in placebo control groups, suggesting that the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) tested may have little clinical effect separable from that of placebo. A remarkable neuroimaging study of human patients treated for depression has shown that placebo responders and fluoxetine responders show similar changes in glucose metabolism in specific cortical and limbic areas, concluding that the “administration of placebo is not absence of treatment, just an absence of active medication”. In addition, the study revealed that the two groups responded differently to fluoxetine, with the drug producing specific changes in the hippocampus and brainstem of fluoxetine responders after 1 week of therapy that predicted a long-term response to the medication. Responders also showed a switch effect in response to drug therapy that resulted in an initial elevation of posterior cingulate metabolic activity followed by a decrease and then a gradual increase over the 6-week period of therapy — a pattern of change not exhibited by placebo responders. These distinct metabolic changes that differentiate responders from nonresponders suggest that tympanic temperature fluctuations might be present among dogs that could be tracked to help identify serotonergic responders from nonresponders (see Functional Lateralization and Tympanic Temperature).

Although the FDA appears to enforce strict standards of efficacy to gain approval on certain classes of drugs, there appears to be a troubling double standard with respect to others, perhaps including the level of stringency applied to psychotropic drugs such as SSRIs. However, the most egregious and disturbing example of a double standard used to evaluate drug efficacy is the special and protected status afforded to homeopathic substances, described by one FDA representative as “kinder, gentler medicine”. Incredibly, homeopathic remedies are approved as drugs without meeting the rigorous standards of proven efficacy set for other drugs issued FDA approval. A meta-analysis of 89 studies using homeopathic substances to treat various medical conditions concluded, “Our study has no major implications for clinical practice because we found little evidence of effectiveness of any single homoeopathic approach on any single clinical condition”.

With regard to serotonergic antidepressants and dog behavior problems, even when apparently efficacious in the short term, aggression-controlling medications are unlikely to succeed in the long term without the support of complementary behavior therapy. The therapeutic use of social placebo is acknowledged as a valuable tool in the cynopraxic treatment of behavior problems (see Social Placebo), but the administration of costly psychotropic drugs that exert potential health-threatening side effects for the sake of questionable benefits that do not rise above placebo alone raises serious ethical and welfare concerns. In any case, no drug or combination of drugs currently available can provide the sweeping range of dramatic and subtle balancing and integrative effects that are mediated by cynopraxic training and play therapy (see Modulatory and Unifying Effects of Play). Comprehensive cynopraxic training and therapy efforts promote changes that facilitate a functional equilibrium at virtually every level of neural organization. Cynopraxic therapy is based on the assumption that social exchange promoting adjustments conducive to an adaptive coping style and secure attachments serve simultaneously to mediate physical alterations of the neuronal substrates mediating social ambivalence and reactive behavior. In particular, play therapy represents a potent tool for adjusting autonomic imbalance and reducing the allostatic load perturbing the complex feed-forward trafficking of neuronal networks that contribute to the etiology of adjustment problems (see Cynopraxis: Allostasis, Adaptability, and Health).

When drugs are used to manage intractable behavior problems, the goal should be to alleviate allostatic load and to promote neurobiological changes conducive to social affiliation and playfulness. Pharmacological efforts used merely to suppress undesirable behavior seem wrongheaded, violate the dead-dog rule, and are intrinsically problematic with respect to the basic bond and quality-of-life tenets of cynopraxis. Dogs that engage in autoprotective behavior usually do so out of emotional extremis associated with chronic stress and allostatic load. Using behavior modification, restraint and isolation, emotional deprivation, or drugs to suppress undesirable behavior, without alleviating the underlying social and environmental causes hindering a dog’s ability to cope adaptively, violates basic welfare principles.

At every step in a dog’s ontogeny, predictive relations are refined and integrated into a base of genetic and experiential prior knowledge. These predictive relations are organized to promote stability through change, referred to as allostasis. Allostatic adjustments enable dogs to anticipate and avoid future risks to stability, thus enhancing adaptive efficiency by responding to predictive signals. The genes that regulate neuronal activity depend heavily on experience for the information needed to maintain the brain’s functional stability and capacity for coping proactively with change. The feed-forward unfolding of genetic information via experience-dependent gene activation and suppression is consistent with the notion that regulatory genes are responsive to positive and negative prediction-error signals. Consequently, causing neuronal activity to increase or decrease results in the production of structural proteins and enzymes, and thereby alters the neurophysiology in the process of mediating allostasis. Thus, the process of emergent individuation is seamlessly interwoven into a multitude of neurobiological changes that mediate cognitive, motivational, and behavioral adjustments. During such accommodation and allostatic change, the activation of neural protein synthesis and synapse building serves to integrate predictive information into the physical substance of the organism, leading to far-reaching benefits or harm influencing not only behavioral adaptation but also biological adaptation. By such means, knowledge acquired by experience is directly integrated into the neurobiological phenotype from where it exerts numerous adaptive and maladaptive effects on the developing organism. Acute stress is triggered in response to the detection of discrepant events that exceed the normal safe range of accustomed variability in combination with a perception of uncontrollability; that is, stress is a biological response to the violation of expectancy or a failure to establish predictive control over significant motivation events. Such events elicit intense state arousal, active vigilance, and increased action readiness in anticipation of reactive emergency or defensive adjustments. Thus, chronic and uncontrollable challenges (loss of comfort), threats (loss of safety), and unconditioned aversive events mismatching prediction-control expectancies promote stress and allostatic load that adversely affect a dog’s adaptability. Chronic exposure to aversive conflict situations perceived as uncontrollable tends to become increasingly problematic when they are also inescapable. Allostatic load associated with social ambivalence and entrapment is hypothesized to orchestrate widespread neuronal changes and emotional disturbances that adversely affect selective attention and impulse control.

Under social and environmental circumstances where a balance of predictive exchange is lacking, the ensuing instability and allostatic load make the work of adaptation increasingly costly. A failure to integrate a mutually satisfying household relationship based on predictable and controllable relations is not only disruptive at the level of social exchange — the consequences of such influences impact at various levels of a dog’s biology and may gradually impair its capacity to adapt. According to cynopraxic theory, many maladies affecting canine health and well-being are traceable to disease associated with chronic interactive conflict and compensatory allostatic load adversely impacting critical biological systems necessary to sustain health and survival fitness (see Immune Stress and Cytokines and Stress, Thyroid Deficiency, Hypocortisolism, and Aggression). As such, cynopraxic therapy serves to promote both behavioral and biological stability by mediating changes that reduce interactive conflict and promote mutual appreciation and interactive harmony while enhancing the human-dog bond and improving the dog’s quality-of-life (QOL). The capacity of cynopraxic therapy to promote beneficial changes depends on the integration predictive control relations mediated by social exchange and transactions governed by a principle of fairness promoting mutual reward, cooperation, and affectionate playfulness between interactive partners around points of common interest and potential conflict.

Aversive procedures are legitimate and valuable tools for controlling undesirable behavior, but such techniques can be rapidly debauched into a form that substantially complicates matters. Technically, punishment results when established control expectancies are discontinued, for example, when the trainer discontinues an attractive or aversive contingency. Punishment occurs when the dog recognizes that some previously successful action no longer controls the occurrence of some attractive or aversive event. Severe and sustained aversive stimulations in the absence of options to escape (e.g., beating) are of no use in dog training and for whatever reasons such nasty actions are performed they are likely to foster a far worse problem.

Just as chopping off the mythical Hydra’s head only caused her to sprout more monstrous and threatening replacements growing out of the severed stump, the use of inappropriate physical punishment, restraint, and manhandling may only serve to stimulate autoprotective behavior and initiate various unanticipated vicious-circle effects. In such cases, the escalation of conflict and aversive arousal evoked by severe physical punishment may cause difficult behaviors to transform into even worse forms, especially in cases where the root causes of the problem are left unresolved. Homer’s story of Proteus illustrates other aspects of potential harm wrought by inappropriate punishment and interactive conflict. For ancient seekers wishing to foresee the future, the water divinity had to be seized and held tightly as he morphed through a frightful array of threatening forms, until he finally gave in and returned to his normal form to give prophecy. The myth has obvious positive implications related to the constructive use of response prevention and blocking techniques, but more importantly with respect to the present topic, the myth resonates symbolically with the adverse effects of interactive struggles and tensions around points of conflict where the future is left uncertain until the conflict is resolved. Actions that emerge in the context of persistent conflictive exchange are often highly reactive and pose many significant training challenges and risks. Further, as a result of a history of contentious interaction, dogs and people may gradually lose their capacity for mutual attraction and tolerance, becoming increasingly ambivalent, intolerant of uncertainty, and reactive toward the ordinary losses and risks associated with social exchange. Instead of engaging in friendly cooperation, the owner and dog may engage one another as adversaries in the process of morphing a veritable pantheon of adjustment problems out of the toxic conflict dynamics that bind them together.

All variation in canine social behavior develops in the context of coping styles emerging in various ways around interactive conflict. As such, the intersection of human and canine control vectors define the field of interactive possibility. Only by working through conflict by holding protean advantage-seeking efforts at bay and by opening a space of fair exchange and mutual appreciation around conflict situations can the other be perceived as a cooperator rather than a dominator or exploiter. With the restoration of normal exchange, the unifying relations and governance needed to promote an adaptive coping style can be pursued as a harmonious social space is extended over the field of conflict situations.

Despite obvious limitations and risks, aversive procedures are a necessary aspect of dog training and behavior-problem solving that cannot be neglected or substituted for (e.g., by drugs) when competent inhibitory control over highly motivated behavior is being established. These procedures are of great value in the context of basic training, the treatment of adjustment problems, and the integration of secure attachments. To maximize the benefits and to minimize the adverse effects of training procedures that compel dogs to act or not act in particular ways, two general guidelines appear to be useful: the least intrusive and minimally aversive (LIMA) principle and the dead-dog rule. The LIMA principle addresses the excesses and abuses that might arise when aversive or intrusive dog-training procedures are implemented. As such, it applies to both positive and negative punishment, and covers procedures that generate states of emotional pain and deprivation (e.g., long-term cold shouldering, crate confinement/isolation, and various restraint techniques). The least intrusive and minimally aversive principle entails that trainers use the least intrusive and minimally aversive technique likely to succeed in achieving a training objective with minimal risk of producing adverse side effects. Essentially, the LIMA principle is a competency criterion, since only competent trainers possessing the necessary know-how can make the required assessments and have the skills needed to ensure that the least intrusive and aversive procedure is in fact used. To speak of the effective and humane use of dog-training procedures in the absence of competency criterion borders on the ridiculous. Accordingly, incompetent uses of attractive and aversive motivational stimuli to modify dog behavior are liable to produce harmful effects that violate the dog’s interests and breech the trust of the responsible dog owners seeking help.

A second general guideline that promotes the effective use of training procedures is the dead-dog rule, which recommends that training criteria and objectives be defined in terms that a dead dog cannot satisfy. In essence, the dead-dog rule is a complementary logic for framing the least intrusive and minimally aversive principle. By converting training goals into affirmative statements and identifying objectives that can be achieved only by a live dog, the resultant perspective is biased toward reward-based training efforts. For example, instead of training a dog not to bite (dead dogs do not bite), the dog is trained to be friendly and trusting, that is, to show affectionate, cooperative, and playful behavior incompatible with aggression — behavior that a dead dog cannot do. In the case of aversive motivational stimuli used in the context of aversive inhibitory control, the training objective is best described in terms of positive behavioral change that places the primary emphasis on escape-avoidance adjustments and the establishment of a training space, based on the acquisition of predictive information and a socially acceptable escape-to-safety response that result in reward. When properly performed, all training is reward based insofar as the dog learns how to control attractive and aversive events while negotiating conflict. In the context of reward-based training, the dead-dog rule and the LIMA principle provide general guidelines for the use of attractive and aversive motivational stimuli to modify dog behavior. When aversive procedures are used, the trainer should possess an objective rationale and the skills necessary to implement the procedures safely and effectively. The suppression of behavior by means of inhibitory procedures is appropriate and useful when regulating behavior governed by an excitatory imbalance and impulsivity but only to the extent that it is performed in the context of coordinated reward-based activities aimed at filling the void.

Cynopraxic trainers acknowledge and respect the dog’s preference for pleasure by advocating the use of procedures that utilize reward and minimize punishment. However, to train a dog to a reasonable degree of reliability, the use of both attractive and aversive motivational incentives is an inescapable fact of life. In an important sense, reward and punishment are not properties of motivational stimuli or evoked attractive or aversive states but rather flow from the dog’s ability to produce outcomes that either meet or exceed prediction-control expectancies. Training is not about making dogs feel good or bad — rather it is about enabling them to adapt well.