Positive vs Negative Reinforcement: What’s the Difference?
18 May 2025 · 16 min
In this episode of The Dog People Podcast, host Jack Lawrence and professional trainer Max O'Neill break down the concept of reinforcement in dog training. They start by defining reinforcement as any stimulus a dog finds highly appealing and explain that it can be delivered positively (adding something desirable) or negatively (removing something aversive). Concrete examples illustrate both types: giving a ball, food, or praise as positive reinforcement; releasing leash pressure or softening eye contact as negative reinforcement. The conversation highlights how individual dogs differ in what they find reinforcing—some are food‑motivated, others respond to toys, affection, or freedom—using anecdotes about Max’s dogs (Nelson, London, a previous dog) and Jack’s dog Kira. They discuss the pitfalls of relying solely on positive reinforcement, noting that without a clear consequence dogs may lack compliance, especially when faced with high‑prey‑drive situations. The hosts critique “positive‑only” or “force‑free” terminology as often misunderstood, and they argue that a balanced approach that includes negative reinforcement (and, by extension, negative punishment) is necessary for safety and reliable behavior. They preview a future episode that will cover the full operant‑conditioning quadrant (positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, negative punishment). Throughout, they intersperse sponsor reads and encourage listeners to ask questions in their Facebook group. The episode serves both as an educational primer on reinforcement theory and a practical guide for dog owners to identify and use the most effective motivators for their individual pets.
Chapters
Hello, dog peeps. Jack here. Just a quick one before we get into this episode. You may or may not be aware that when I'm not talking dog stuff with Max, I in fact interview people who are incarcerated in prisons across the United States on a show called One Minute Remaining: Stories from the Inmates. And that show has been nominated for an award in America. And I would love your support if you've got 60 seconds to click the link in the show notes of this episode and just vote for my show. That would be amazing if you could. Thank you very much indeed. Oh, and don't forget to verify your email address. Otherwise, the vote does not count. Thank you.
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We can start from the top. Yeah, let's do it.
It's the Dog People Podcast with your host Jack Lawrence. Secretly, I decided to start this podcast for some free dog training advice. You know, Malinois seem to be like the dog at the moment. Like, I think people People see them on Instagram doing these incredible things. Yeah. Go, oh my God, that's awesome. And then I get one like, oh my God, what the fuck? And Max O'Neill.
You would not believe how many people I meet and I go, what made you want to get, say, an Aussie Shepherd? They go, I don't know. I'd go, had you met one before? They go, no. If you want to ask me how often I walk my own dog a week, it's only twice a week.
It's the Dog People Podcast, a podcast giving you a no-nonsense approach to dog training so you never have to shout, it's okay, he's friendly. My name is Jack Lawrence, not a dog trainer, just dog training enthusiast, but joined of course by the man who is the professional, Max O'Neill from the Down Under Dog Trainer. Of course, we've spoken about punishment, negative and positive. If you missed that episode, check that out for us right now before you listen to this one, I'd suggest, because right now we're going to be talking about the next on from that, which is reinforcement, Max.
So by definition, reinforcement is anything that, in this case, our dog finds highly appealing. And if they learn they can Gain that reinforcement through behaviour, it'll make them far more likely to repeat the behaviour or repeat it with more effort next time. So, basically just anything our dog finds really rewarding. As with punishment, reinforcement, you've got positive and negative reinforcement. And again, positive reinforcement isn't just like positive reinforcement, like praise and, hey, I'm so positive. And negative reinforcement isn't like negative vibes or anything like that. It's purely mathematical. We're either adding or subtracting something. As a way of reinforcing our dog. So, we can add a lot of things to our dog that our dog will find reinforcing. We can give them a ball, we can give them food, we can give them praise. We can do all these sorts of things that we can add to our dog to make them feel reinforced in that moment. So, if we were to take something away from our dog as a way of reinforcing, as a negative reinforcement, we'd obviously have to take something away that they want as a way of negatively reinforcing them. So, for example, we would have to take something away like leash pressure. Hey, this uncomfortable situation, I will take this away as a way of reinforcing you. So, if you were pulling on your dog's lead and they stopped pulling and then the pressure went away, that's negative reinforcement. You might be giving your dog strong or heavy eye contact, and when they finally go into the sit, you soften your gaze on them. That's negative reinforcement.
Just so, when sometimes Kira will stare at me while I'm in the kitchen preparing her food and starts whining, like I told you, she starts whining. If I stop dead in tracks, look at her with a death stare and lift one eyebrow. I do the lifting of the one eyebrow.
Yeah.
She suddenly like looks at me and then she goes, and she turns and walks back to her mat and lies down. And then I stopped staring at her. So that is me giving her some negative reinforcement.
Yeah. So negative reinforcement is just again, taking something away that our dog doesn't like as a way of reinforcing them. So it's removal of some type of pressure. So How you can, you know, again perceive this or how the dogs perceive this is so, so, so different. Because again, some dogs are very highly food motivated, some dogs are not at all. Some dogs are really into their toys, some dogs aren't at all. And the same could be said with virtually any resource, you know, even freedom, even praise, even pats and affection, etc. For example, my last dog could not care less for affection. You could touch him all day of the week, all over. You try and find his little magic spot. You could deprive him of pats for a year and then go, Hey, here's a pat. Not that we did that. He just wasn't concerned. Yeah, he was just like—
My old dog was like that too, Kimber. She was not a cuddly dog.
Yeah, just, just not into it. And, um, and neither was London, my Weimaraner. But now Nelson, if anyone's met Nelson, he is the biggest slut you've ever met in dog form. He just— you touch him on the head for a second and it makes his day. He's just like, oh. So it means we can genuinely use it as a resource. And same with food. Again, beauty of Nelson is he's so driven, so he'll do anything for food. But I've also had some dogs, same like my last dog, who could not care less for food. So quite often we think we're providing positive reinforcement for our dog. We're really not at all. I see people sometimes, whether it's, you know, they're a client or even just out in public, who are trying to shove food into their dog's mouth and the dog's turning their head away and they go, I'm trying to give them a treat. Well, the dog's not going to find that reinforcing at all. If you're trying to shove something in my mouth I didn't like, I'm not going to go, oh, that was amazing.
Yeah.
Okay. Like if you tried to shove a mushroom into my mouth, I'm going to bite you. And the same for our dogs. And same, I see some people patting their dogs and again, your dog either might get so much of that free during the day, they're like, again, I don't need this. Like, I'm not gonna now increase my effort and do this again to get that pat you gave me because I got 100 of them this morning. Or your dog goes, I just don't like being patted. Or I get people who try and go, if you do this, I'll give you this. And the dog goes, I don't care if you give me that. I, again, I don't want it. So it's really looking at your dog and going back and listening to our dog training currency episode and really kind of find what does your dog actually need, what will your dog actually pursue, and what will your dog actually work for. Once we've found something our dog will really work for, the obstacles we put in the way of that are behavior. Hey, if you give me one behavior, I'll give you the thing. If you give me 2 behaviors, I'll give you the thing. Give me 3 behaviors, I might give you the thing. So on and so forth. It's just gradually putting more and more space.
And I think there'll be people listening to this that will probably be going, oh, but I just don't know. My dog doesn't have a thing. They're not into food, they're not into toys. And that's where you have to then go back to where you need to build that drive in one of those things or all of those things. Exactly. You know, again, with me, with Kira, Had no food drive whatsoever when I first got her. I came to you, I said, you know, she's just not interested in food. It's like, and then, and then you said, look, go to hand feeding, stop bowl feeding. It gets there. Like I had the seeing eye dog that came to us, Wombat, was overweight, was not interested in food whatsoever. In food, he was not motivated because he was overweight. He didn't want it. He's like, I get it all the time. What do you mean food? Just put it in my bowl, idiot, and I'll have it in a minute.
Yeah.
So it's— and then as soon as I took it away from him, I was like, no, your food's coming from me, mate. So you better do what I want you to do.
Yeah.
And he would, after that, he was a monster, you know, it's just like, oh, let's go.
Yep.
So yeah, if you are sitting there listening to Max going, but I don't know what my dog's is, it's like, well, then you need to build that drive in some form or another.
Yep. Supply and demand. It's a very easy way of affecting that. But yeah, it's like that. So that's positive negative reinforcement. Either give something your dog needs or take away something they don't like. So you go, hey, like this leash pressure or this uncomfortable situation or this or this or that, like we will take this away if you give me what I want. And we as humans experience negative reinforcement all the time. Like if you leave your fridge open and it starts beeping and that's putting pressure on you, auditory pressure, beep beep beep beep beep beep. And when you finally shut the fridge and that beeping goes away, your fridge has just provided negative reinforcement.
You've used— you said that one in the past before and I was like, it may suddenly make me go, oh my God, that's— we've literally been like conditioned by— literally I'll be sitting here and I can hear the fridge going and I'm like, I know I've got to get up because if I don't get up and close that door It's just going to keep beeping. And it's the same, and it's the same with the dogs. It's like, I know if I don't, if I don't do what I'm told, I'm just not going to get— this isn't going to stop. So I'll just do what I'm told.
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You know when people say, oh, I don't I don't, I don't like negative reinforcement. I don't agree with it. I go, well, you're going to go protest out the front of LG for your fridge doing it to you every single day?
But again, when people say, I don't like it, it's just, it's not— and fair enough. Look, for some people they don't, they don't like it and they don't, it's not for them. And I get that. And there's different ways, you know, as they say, there's many ways to skin a cat, but sometimes unfortunately, if you want to have a good relationship with your dog, much like with your children, They have to know that there's consequences. They have to know where they stand. You know, you have to teach them, yes, that's good. No, that's not good.
Exactly. And that's the problem with, you know, relying on positive reinforcement as a strategy alone. You know, this is getting into a deeper topic, but just to touch on it is a big part of the reason why it doesn't work, or the majority of the reason why it doesn't work, is because at some stage, whatever you've got on offer,
it's not going to be—
it's not going to be as valuable as something else. You know, you might be offering a 50 and your dog's found 100. Your dog's like, Sorry, mate, like, this is better. Whereas that negative reinforcement, that like, hey, you can go and access that, but that will turn on this pressure and that pressure won't turn off until this, you go, okay, I'll do the thing. It can just make compliance more likely than positive reinforcement alone.
Well, I mean, you could, you could not have a dog like I've got on purely positive only situation because she would walk all over you. Absolutely. I mean, you've seen her, like, even with negative reinforcement, she's just like, you know, come out, you know, you really have to, it's, it's, it's a lot of work. And if you just tried positive only, I'm just sorry, it just, it just would not work because as you said, she will find, and she has done, she has found things that are far more interesting to her than what I've got. You know, she's got the highest prey drive of any dog I've ever come across in my life. Like she just wants to chase everything and just hunt them down. Yeah. And it has taken so much to try and squash that and just to be like, no, like we don't go chasing after motorbikes. We don't go chasing after birds. We don't go chasing after electric bikes, even though I'd love you to get hold of them and bite them. But just, you know, you can't do that. And me, just with a treat or so, even with the toy, she loves the toy.
Yeah.
But there's always something that's going to trump that because yes, she loves the toy. Yes, she loves chasing the toy. Yes, she loves biting the toy. But you know, if one day we're out and about, this probably won't happen in Queensland, but a rabbit ran past, I know for a fact The ball is going to be like—
Toys are all a simulation of prey. The real deal pops up. Oh,
like you can't—
Quite often your dogs go, hey, like, this is what we've been pretending to do, but that's the real deal.
Well, we had a thing the other day. She'd never— she's never seen a horse before. And we came out of our area where I take her and all of a sudden I see a horse. I'm like, right, well, she's going straight on the lead because there's just— because we were coming to the exit and they were coming sort of up towards us and I put her on the lead. And again, like she was just locked, like just locked and just, you could just see like, and I'm just, you know, she's not interested in me whatsoever. She's like, what is this new thing? What is it doing? I want to chase it.
Yeah. And if you were in that moment, go, hey, I'll give you this if you don't chase it. She goes, yeah, thanks for the offer, but I decline.
Yeah. I've built her food drive. I've built her toy drive. But in that moment right then and there, if I did not use some sort of negative reinforcement, which was for her was a lead pop or a couple of lead pops it took to to actually gain her attention. And if she was off lead, forget it. See you later. She's gone. She's after that horse. We've seen the videos. We've all seen the videos online of people with their dogs who've chased horses, you know, and other animals that, you know, I've seen. I saw one the other day with a dog chasing a frickin crocodile. Yep. A Labrador jumped into the water and was paddling after, and they, you know, they're calling him back. He's like, nah, nah, I'm not. I'm going after this thing. What's this? So it's about like safety for your animal too. Like, you know, because you don't want your dog getting in a dangerous situation.
Exactly. We'll go into this in a 3rd episode of talking about the full quadrant of operant conditioning. And what that really is, is, you know, with operant conditioning, you've got 4 options you can use: positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement, positive punishment, negative punishment. And we'll break down what that full quadrant looks like and have a bit more of a chat about it. But—
It's getting scientific.
It is getting scientific.
And I mean, and I was terrible at school with science and math. So, I'm hoping you can, you know, break it down for the idiots in the room, i.e., Me over here.
And myself included. Well, uh, we'll, we'll break that down and give you guys a nice easy way of looking at it. But just while we're on the positive reinforcement alone, one little, I suppose, red flag to look out for in the training world is we've obviously talked about, you know, positive reinforcement and positive punishment, okay? And as you know now from listening to these episodes, positive doesn't refer to like positive energy, positivity, anything like that. Positive in dog training means to add something, either add something your dog finds punishing or adding a reinforcer. So when people say they are positive only and thinking that that means that they're all just treats only, take that as a bit of a red flag. Okay. I'm not saying that style of training. I'm saying that terminology. Pretty much day one of any good dog training school, you'll learn about this. Okay. That's why we're discussing it in one of our early episodes of the podcast is like, hey, this is something you guys need to know. So that you understand all the things we're going to be talking about over the next X amount of days, months, weeks, years. Okay. So when people say they are positive only, take that as a bit of a red flag because if they're not realising that they're inadvertently saying positive reinforcement, positive punishment, and they think positive simply means positivity, it kind of shows a lack of education. I'm not slamming that whole training style. When people say that they are force-free, like, that's cool. That shows that you No, you can't advertise positive only because again, it's also impossible, which we'll talk about in a second. But I'm just saying, when you see people say positive only, it's a pretty dodgy terminology and shows they probably haven't done a whole heap of study, if I'm really honest. Whereas if you say something like force-free, you know, you can't actually say positive only. It's a bit more like, okay, cool, like that's a preference, but you are not denying its existence. Where it's really red flaggy is when people deny the existence or efficacy of any type of punishment or negative reinforcement whatsoever. When they say, well, that— Doesn't work. And I exclusively use this one. Again, that's kind of silly because let's say you're doing a session with your dog, you ask them to sit, they don't sit. If you go in that moment, I'm not giving you a reward, well, that's done negative punishment. When people say I don't do it, it's like, well, and it doesn't exist and it doesn't work. I'm like, well, that kind of— you do do it every day unless you give your dog a treat for literally everything they do. Punishment occurs.
And— But, and this is, and this is the thing, and this is where I, I always find that whole, oh, we're only— we're positive only, you know, trainers confusing. Because then in my head I'm like, well, then how does the dog know What is right and what's wrong? And I probably it's probably on me to do a bit more research into what they mean by that. But I mean, as you said, positive we sort of lure the dog into a sit or we lure the dog into a down. They get the treat. Great, fantastic. But when they don't do it, how do they know they're not doing it right if you're not saying well no? Because like with Kira, right? So I've got the ah ah ah ah and that she knows is like no no no. But to a positive only trainer, I would suggest that that is a punishment. It's going ah ah ah ah ah.
Yeah, probably to a lot of them that would that would be over the line, so to speak. So it's
um yeah it's it's it's a really tricky. It is yeah and.
And that's the thing. Like, if you look at the whole training journey, we did an episode of this, go and listen to it, 4 stages of learning and training. And you'll see in there, there's, you know, the teaching phase, training phase, proofing and maintenance and things like that. And if I'm working with a dog, and in fact, our puppy school is pretty much positive reinforcement only. Of course, our dogs will get negative punishment and whatnot, but we're not sitting there cracking down on these puppies. Or if I'm trying to teach a dog a skill, it pretty much is what a lot of people would call force-free positive only, because I'm trying to create something. And that style of training of just, just reward-based and not using anything else is really great for teaching your dog skills.
Yeah.
The problem is it's really crappy at getting any level of compliance for your dogs.
Yeah.
Again, your dog have all these skills that they know how to perform, but if they don't feel like performing them in a moment, you're kind of out of options.
And that's where you can't foolproof.
Exactly. So that's reinforcement, positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement. Um, and hopefully you understand a little bit more about, again, how to apply it. Different types of it. And I guess just some pitfalls to fall into because it can be really powerful, but it can be very limiting if that's all you try and do.
And this is a lot of information. So if you've got any questions, you're feeling confused, don't feel embarrassed. Jump on that Facebook group, The Dog People Podcast, and chuck your questions up in there and we'll get to them for you as we move along. The Dog People Podcast is a Mashed Pumpkin production hosted by Jack Lawrence and Max O'Neill. Edited, produced, and audio production by Jack Lawrence.
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