A correction teaches a dog what to do by applying pressure that stops when the dog performs the right behavior, unlike punishment which just says no. The dog must first learn that the specific action releases the pressure, whether using a prong collar, electronic collar, or slip lead. Without that learned association, pressure alone won't work.
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Alright, Colby Cash. I have an embarrassingly simple question or two. How would you define a correction? And can you give a specific example of an appropriate correction and how the dog would ideally respond with prong, e-collar, and anything else you have time for? I heard somewhere, probably TCP, you talk about corrections in a way I had never been exposed to before, but that wasn't the actual topic that was being discussed at the time, so you moved past it pretty quickly. I'd just like to hear more. Thanks in advance. Okay. So for me, the correction is different to say an aversive stim. So a correction implies that the dog has done something wrong. It is not doing the thing that you want it to do. And the correction is a form of pressure that makes the dog correct, right? So that's why I believe that a correction can only be given following a command that has, or whether it's a verbal command or an environmental command, right? A circumstance, a situation. But a correction can only be given after a command that has not been followed, and that correction makes the dog correct, right? So it allows the dog to then do the thing. What's important to note of a correction, and this is sort of the crux of NePoPo, and not like necessarily like it— what's important to understand about NePoPo is it's a brand name, right? But the style of training is not specific to that brand name. If you ever see the NePoPo logo, it's the dancing bear. And the reason it's a dancing bear is because Russian gypsies have been using NePoPo to teach bears to dance for 300 years, right? So, um, the truth of the system and all dog training— the truth of all dog training is that if you ask the dog to do something and it doesn't do it, and you want to be able to apply a correction in that moment, right, like a force that compels the dog to do the behavior— now whether that's via the prong, the electrics, the slip lead, whatever— if after a disobeyed command you want to apply a pressure that will bring on the behavior, there has got to have been a learning phase that involved that pressure turning off when the behavior is complete. So if you want to use a prong collar then to correct the dog because you said to sit and it didn't, and you're going to give it a pop on the prong and hope that that brings on a sit, unless the dog has learned along the way that sitting turns off the pressure of the prong, it will not do that. And in fact, because of the— like, I put a video into the Patreon yesterday— because of the nature of the hierarchy of signals, more often than not the pressure that you would apply via the prong, the electrics, whatever, is going to act as a command to do a specific behavior given the context which it is. So if the dog has never seen that context, it won't perform the behavior. So what we see a ton of— I was just doing this with a dog, um, on the weekend where like the dog needed to be corrected, right? Like it wasn't doing what it was meant to be doing and we're attempting to correct the dog, but the dog kept trying to go into the heel position. Right? Because the dog understood, I turn off that prong collar via going into the heel position. And the behavior that we were actually trying to bring on, the dog had no understanding of being able to turn off that pressure via doing that behavior. It's probably not fair to say no understanding. It certainly thought that it was a better option to come into the heel position than to perform the other behavior that we're asking of the dog. So a correction by definition makes the dog correct. And in order for the dog to be correct, it has to have learned what is correct. So a correction can only come after a command that has been disobeyed. Now that command can take many forms, right? Like, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a verbal thing, but the context, the command, whatever, has to be there. The dog has to choose to do the wrong thing. A pressure is applied, no matter how it is— slip, prong, e-collar, whatever— and then that pressure should bring on the behavior. That is a very different thing to an aversive stim or a punishment, right? Because a punishment is different from a correction because a punishment is just saying to the dog, don't do that. A correction is saying to the dog, do, do that. And so they're different things. One says to the dog, just don't do that. You can do anything else, but you can't do that one thing. And a correction says to the dog, you can't do anything else. You have to do that one thing. Okay, so that's the difference between a correction and a punishment. People, you know, correction, unfortunately, as a word, has just kind of, you know, worked its way into the dog training vernacular pretty easily. And people tend to use it, and I've been guilty of this myself. You know, you might say give the dog correction, and in reality you may give the dog punishment or punish the dog. So it happens all the time. But really, when we're sort of getting to the crux of it, and if we're talking definitions, that's the definition of a correction.
