Has anybody thought of or tried to use ecollar technology on a raptor?

[outhawkn]

This is precisely how I use an e-collar with my dogs. An e-collar is a tool I use for a short period of time in training. The e-collar is valuable in helping "generalize" a known cue and bring it under better stimulus control. George Hickox calls it contrast training and is a master at this. I don't know if I will explain it well, but here is the premise...

You use a CR (clicker) and rewards to teach a desired behavior. Once the dog is offering the behavior consistently you overlay a cue. At that point you begin only CRing and rewarding the behavior when the cue is given. When the dog will give the desired behavior on cue 80% of the time, you can move on to generalizing the cue. This is where the e-collar comes in. This also assumes you have gone through a process to teach the dog how to turn off the collar and that the dog has received some other form of negative reinforcement other than the collar (i.e. a bonker). You give the known cue to the dog. If the dog offers the behavior you click and reward. If the dog does not offer the behavior you give a different Marker Signal (One that will always precede the negative reinforcement) and the give the negative reinforcement. The trick to this working is the use of the Marker Signal preceding the negative. Because the dog understands the positive marker, they quickly understand the negative Marker Signal. Another key is that if the negative marker is given it is ALWAYS followed by a negative. Since a variable schedule reinforces a behavior (either positive or negative) you want to be consistent and always follow the Negative Marker with the negative. Otherwise, this is how a "collar wise" (or really "Correction wise") dogs is created.

What happens is the dog quickly learns that when the know cue is given, if it complies, it gets a reward. If not, it is notified with a Negative Marker and then a negative. The collar is used to teach the dog that if it does anything other than offer the desired cue, it will be given a negative. VERY quickly you see the dog offer the behavior when the first sound of the Negative Marker is given. The temptation is once the dog starts offering the behavior in response to the Negative Marker to not follow up with the actual negative. If you are consistent and give the negative anytime the Negative Marker is given, you will soon not need the negative or the negative marker. The dog will offer the behavior on cue in very demanding situations with lots of distractions.

This method works great. I've seen it work on very soft dogs and on very stubborn dogs. The e-collar is just a tool in one's training bag. It is a way to get a behavior very reliable in a relatively short period of time without putting a lot of force or pressure on the dog.

I should also mention that when I use the e-collar I use VERY LOW levels of stimulation. I go through a process of collar conditioning that teaches the dog how to turn off the collar and what the Negative Marker is. In 1-2 short sessions the dog is responding to stimulation so low that I am unable or barely able to feel it on my hands at that level. Once I took my my hardest headed wirehair through this process, he responded to a correction level of 10 out of 50 on my collar. I can't feel the stimulation on my hand until it gets to six. My current female wirehair that passed her NAVHDA Utility test with a 192 out of 204 possible points was trained with a correction level of 6.

I agree and this is where I was going. I've attended Georges training seminars in the past and I personally dont see any damage being done to the dog. An example would be my dog gets up in the early morning and lies down in the sun. Ahhh... nice warm sun. Then the sun gets to hot so he moves to the shade. So with all this new age thinking the sun warmth was a punishment....

I'm glad to see many people understand the downfalls of punishment.

First, stopping a behavior is punishment. If you add something aversive to stop the behavior, you are using positive punishment, positive in the mathematical sense (+). Ecollar is positive punishment, no matter how you word it or want to see it.

When you stop using the punishment, you are using negative reinforcement, negative in teh mathematical sense (-), you remove (-) an aversive as a reward. You can use negative reinforcement to reward a behavior: the dog bakrs, he gets zapped which stops the barking, thus it is a positive punishment, then as he stops barking yo stop zapping, earning the dog a negative (-) reinforcement for keeping quiet. So ecollar also brings negative reinforcement, that's the way it works.

Any positive punishment can lead to mental damage, and negative punishment (removing a reward) as well but it takes longer. It does not always happen, for if it did we would never ever use punishment, but the risk is high. What side effects can happen? The strain on the relationship is a very real one, as demonstrated by the policeman analogy. The creation of fears/shyness/agression is a very real one as well. One has to understand, before using any type or strenght of punishment, that animals will try to link the punishment to their environment way before they link it to their behavior. They will take a mental picture of the world around them as they get the punishment, and make associations, then decide later on how they will act toward the things that were in the pictures. They kind of decide that they were zapped because of the things that surrounded them, not because they acted wrong, so they may become fearful/shy of the things they saw in the picture, and even react agressively toward them later on. The fear pathways that are activated in the brain when the animal receives a punishment are impossible to erase; one can ease the fears, but they will come back under stress. And yes, the falconer can very well be part of the picture.

Finally, to be effective, punishment has to be timed perfectly at the precise moment when the animal thinks about acting "wrongly", up to the point where he starts acting. Punishing even a second after the act won't work. Moreover, punishment has to be strong enough not to be used more than once, max 3 times. So before to put the ecollar on an animal, you have to have perfect timing (try throwing a tennis ball in the air and zapping as it stops moving before going down, then zapping as it touches the ground... you'll see our timing is lousy!) and perfect strenght of stimuli to obtain teh desired response. Even when used perfectly, you could still end up with mental damage and unpleasant, long-lasting side-effects. And there is always a way to train the exact same behavior out or in an animal without the use of any aversive. Always.

Why do people like using punishment? A british study showed that, unbeknownst to the punisher, the pleasure pathways in the brain are strongly activated when the punisher delivers a punishment for a behavior he deemed wrong. Delivering a "deserved" punishment brings a very strong positive reinforcement to the punisher, regardless of the result of the punishment, weither it worked in preventing the occurence of the punished behavior or not. The pleasure pathways can then build shortcuts that will activate at a hairtrigger, thus being even more reinforcing. The neurotransmitters used in this pathway also have a very strong addictive effect, they act like a drug would act and one will want to experience the feeling again. Those are some reasons why we, as human beings, have the reflex to punish, not to reinforce, and we have to train ourselves to become positive trainers...

I'm sorry and I'll leave this conversation before it gets too silly, but this is some far out ideas being thrown around as truth. G'day ya'll....