November 12, 2024 · 20 min
"Daddy's Home, and He's Pissed": What Bad Dog Training Can Teach Us About Authoritarianism
In this episode, recorded on November 6th, I recap some of the weird moments having to do with pets and other animals in the run up to the election, from Peanut the Squirrel to Kristi Noem shooting her puppy, several stories about people eating dogs and beyond. But the apex of the weirdness came to me in in a speech where Carlson Tucker starts off talking about how American’s are too nice to dogs, and then devolves into talking about how those on the left need to be, well… spanked.
As a positive reinforcement trainer, I cannot help but reflect on the Trump’s win through the lens of animal behavior, as I’ve come to understanding it through working with dogs. This leads me to wonder what would happen if political governance wasn’t rooted in punishment? Is it possible that helping people to better understanding and applying positive reinforcement in dog training could have broader implications for society? Maybe? Maybe. Maybe if we all spent more time training, we’d at least spend less time doomscrolling…
This episode includes parts from the last two chapters of my new book, How To Train Your Dog With Love + Science, one about studies that have been done on spanking kids and the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior’s recommendations on using punishment with dogs, and the other on BF Skinner’s suggestion for change people’s behavior on a societal level without force.
An audiobook version of the book has just been released from Tantor Press, narrated by Eunice Wong. If you’d like a review copy of the audiobook, I have a handful of download codes I can share to the first few people who email me to ask! Put audiobook in the subject.
Ruff timeline
00:00 Reflecting on the Election Through a Behavioral Lens
00:52 Donald Trump's Childhood and Authoritarianism
02:01 Weird Moments in the Presidential Campaign
Note: I edited both the Carlson and Noem clips here for length but without changing the meaning. I felt that playing the clips in full was just too inhumane.
05:54 Tucker Carlson's “Daddy’s Home” Speech
07:05 The Role of Punishment in Behavior
08:19 Positive Reinforcement in Dog Training
11:28 The Importance of Good Dog Trainers
13:02 Book Excerpt
Boston Globe article I wrote about Romney and his dog in 2012
Youtube: Dog Bonking
Audio montage clips
Kristi Noem reads from her book
JD Vance on peanut the squirrel
Transcript
This transcript was made automatically from the audio, so it may contain small errors.
I'm recording this on November 6, 2024. And of course, I've been reflecting on the election, and certainly there are so many lenses through which we can look at this moment in time. The lens I have been using a lot is the behavior lens, thinking about animal behavior. As I have come to understand it as a dog trainer, I just cannot help at looking at the whole situation with dogs and with people and punishment and coercion as a kind of fractal of... Repeating Patterns in the Human and Animal Realms.
And I talk about something that has led me to this question for you. Do you think that Donald Trump was spanked as a child? Not as an adult. I mean, I'm sure he has been spanked as an adult. His niece, Mary Trump, goes into a huge amount of detail about his childhood in her excellent book, Too Much and Never Enough, and while she does not talk specifically about spanking, I would guess it's something that happened in his household.
This is just from the back of the book. Donald's mother became ill when he was two and a half, suddenly depriving him of his main source of comfort in human contact. His father, Fred, became his only available parent, and love meant nothing to Fred. He expected obedience. Are we on the road to an authoritarian government because Fred Trump was a really bad dog trainer?
Over the last months and weeks of this presidential campaign, there were so many weird moments. And an astonishing number of those weird moments had to do with the candidates and their treatment of animals, pets in particular. In 2012, I was asked by the Boston Globe to write about an incident in the news at the time having to do with Romney, who was running, having strapped the family dog to the roof of the car in a crate in order to bring him on vacation. And I actually, in my piece, kind of came to Romney's defense in saying, you know, there's so much disagreement about how we should be caring for dogs. At all that we shouldn't be so quick to judge.
He had good intentions. Hey, let's bring the dog with us. But bad judgment. My conclusion was that it's pretty pointless to attempt to judge politicians by the way they treat animals, especially when you remember that the 20th century figure that probably had the most progressive ideas about how to treat pets was Adolf Hitler. This year, the pet stuff got so much weirder.
Here I've put together some clips of and about Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, Kristi Noem, and RFK Jr. I think you'll be able to tell who's who. So I know Don's fired up about Peanut the squirrel. We were on the way down here from Cincinnati.
He was like, you know, is it really the case that the Democrats murdered the Elon Musk of squirrels? And I said, yeah, it sounds like, have you seen the videos of this squirrel? He's like, he's a genius, or he was, unfortunately, but the same government that doesn't care about hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant criminals coming into our country doesn't want us to have pets. They said that I, you know, they did this story that I ate a dog, and they have a picture of me supposedly eating a dog. We're effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies.
RFK got word there was a dead whale washed up on Hyannis Port Beach. Kennedy cut the dead whale's head off. With a chainsaw, and then he took the decapitated whale head and he bungee corded it to the roof of the family minivan and drove five hours back to New York with his family in the car. As his daughter remembers it, every time he accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car. This morning, an admission from RFK Jr.
that solves a decade-old mystery. Kennedy posting a video in which he tells Roseanne Barr that he was responsible for a dead bear cub that turned up in Central Park in 2014. A woman in a van in front of me hit a bear and killed it. A young bear. I said, I had an old bike in my car that somebody asked me to get rid of it.
I said, let's go put the bear in Central Park and we'll make it look like he got hit by a bike. Cricket systematically grabbed one chicken at a time. There were bloodied bodies and feathers everywhere. I hated that dog. Cricket was untrainable.
I decided I had to deal with this problem myself. I got out my gun, grabbed Cricket's leash, and I let her out into the pasture and down into the gravel pit. It had to be done. In Springfield, they're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats.
They're eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what's happening in our country. This is what's happening in our country. But, you know, out of all of these moments, there is one that didn't get as much press that relates to pets that really stood out to me. It's Tucker Carlson speaking at a rally two weeks ago in Georgia.
This country is so nice. It's so polite. It's so thoughtful and empathetic and sweet. It's the kind of country that loves dogs and gives directions to strangers that we put up with it for four years. But we can't anymore.
If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous, If you allow your two-year-old to smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room and you do nothing about it, if you allow your 14-year-old to light a joint at the breakfast table, you're going to get more of it. There has to be a point at which dad comes home. He's very disappointed in their behavior and he's going to have to let them know. He's going to have to get to your room right now and think about what you did You've been a bad girl. You've been a bad little girl and you're getting a vigorous spanking right now.
I'm sorry, dad's home and he's pissed. So much to unpack here. Now, first of all, he starts off by saying how we're a country of people who are so nice to their dogs. I would disagree. I would say we're a country of people who generally like dogs.
And we have a lot of dogs, but are we so nice to dogs? Based on popular media of today and the last, I don't know, hundred years, I would say not only are we nice to dogs, but we're downright abusive to dogs. In fact, in fact, there's a whole training school devoted to exactly... How You Should Hit Your Dog. Dog spanking, if you will.
I cover this a little bit in my new book, but you can also go to YouTube if you dare and type in dog bonking. Now, of course, Carlson is using spanking as an allegory here about how he feels the government should be treating the people. And it's all about punishment, about fear and control. Interestingly, Bob Woodward has a new book out about Trump, and it's literally called Fear. The spanking analogy maps onto the political approach he's suggesting in a pretty...
It also maps on to how people are dealing with their dog's problems from the top down rather than from the bottom up, playing whack-a-mole with problem issues rather than addressing the root causes. of the issues. And I feel this really stems from the fact that most people are very confused about how behavior works. They're confused about punishment and its fallout. I mean, just look at the world around us.
Now, this might sound obvious to you, or it might sound crazy, but I can tell you that I only got clarity about all of this when I started training dogs. Because whether we like it or not, a lot of our behavior, just like a lot of our dog's behavior, is controlled by consequences. And a lot of those consequences are arranged by the government. And you can say it's impossible to use positive reinforcement to change the behavior of large groups of people because look how addicted we all are to our screens. No one's forcing you to look at your iPhone 150 times a day.
No one's questioning whether or not punishment works. You can certainly force many kinds of animals, dogs included, into submission. But there's always going to be fallout if only because the animal you're training is going to associate Discomfort with you. It's going to associate punishment with you. But then you, as the person wielding the punishment, you're going to be more likely to punish the animal again because the behavior of punishing has been reinforced because it's made whatever the annoying thing was go away.
And in this way, it's so easy to get caught in this like punishment loop. And I think what really excellent dog trainers do is try to Help people either get out of that loop or never get into it to begin with. One of the things I love about dog training is that I can look at these problems on a really micro level and practice my ability to use positive reinforcement in a way where the consequences are really low. When I... See someone who's having an issue with their dog, I'm going to think about how I can address this issue with as little upset as possible.
Is it possible to figure out how to use scalpel-like precision to affect behavior change here? Or do I really need to Wield a sledgehammer. How can I focus on keeping the dog in front of me safe and happy and how can that lead to me getting the behaviors I want? How can I change the environment in order to get the behaviors that I want? How can I select consequences?
How can I keep them wanting to engage? I mean, let's face it, everyone loses their shit sometimes. I was spanked as a kid by... People who I know love me and had very good intentions. And I'm not always the good dog trainer.
I would like to be in all parts of my life, for sure. I would like to be in all parts of my life. Just last week, I was really at the end of my rope, like many of us were, and my dog was being really annoying and begging at the table, and I yelled at her, which I have never done before. And everyone in the room, my kids, my husband, everybody was shocked. And it worked because punishment works, at least in the moment.
She stopped what she was doing. I can't say she didn't do it again the next day. It wasn't part of a training plan. It was just me being a human being who snapped the way we all can once in a very blue moon. You know, it's interesting.
Right afterwards, my youngest daughter did something she has never done before when quarreling with her sister. She screamed at her. There's a big difference between sometimes losing it and baking punishment into your training. Like if your first move is to literally take the dog out back to the gravel pit and shoot him, I think it really speaks to a lack of education about the basics of the science and makes me think that the world really does need more. Good Dog Trainers.
I feel pretty helpless in this moment, like I'm sure many of you do, and the only way that I can make sense of it is to be the change that I want to see in the world. in the realms that I can exert some control over in a way that is not authoritarian or authoritarian-ish. I really believe that if you can help someone change their point of view about How they deal with the pets in their lives, it can trickle up. To quote Gandhi, the greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. The more helpless a creature, the more entitled it is to protection by man from the cruelty of man.
This is something I've certainly seen myself on a small scale. I know some incredible positive reinforcement trainers who are beyond excellent at changing behavior in animals, be it squirrels or birds or cats or dogs. And most of these people are also really great friends and great parents. And I'm pretty sure none of them are going to have kids that are going to grow up to be like Tucker Carlson or Donald Trump.
I want to read a couple passages from the last two chapters of my book. How to Train Your Dog With Love and Science, which you can learn more about at AnnieGrossman.com slash book. It is a book about dogs, but wouldn't you know the topic of spanking children is touched on. This is from chapter 21 called The Least We Can Do. Most people can agree that children and violence don't mix.
The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child issued a directive in 2006 calling physical punishment legalized violence against children that should be eliminated in all settings through legislative, administrative, social, and educational measures. In 2012, the American Psychological Association quoted Sandra Graham Berman, Principal Investigator for the Child Resilience and Trauma Laboratory at the University of Michigan, quote, It's a very controversial area, even though the research is extremely telling and very clear and consistent about the negative effects on children. People get frustrated and hit their kids. Maybe they don't see there are other options. Later in the article on the topic of spanking, Dr. Alan Kasdan, a former head of the Yale Parenting Center, says, quote, We are not giving up an effective technique.
We are saying this is a horrible thing that does not work. Are there cases where dogs are better off being shocked or smacked as the only alternative is euthanasia? Possibly. But if the goal is to save dogs from euthanasia, we can start with good dog training. I would put money on there being a lot more dogs euthanized because they've been the subject of coercive or punishment-based training than there are bonked dogs thanking their lucky stars.
Here in the US... There is no federal regulation of the use of shock collars or physical force in dog training, but at least we have the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behaviors recommendation. Punishment should not be used as a first-line or early-use treatment for behavior problems. This is due to the potential adverse effects, which include but are not limited to inhibition of learning, increased fear-related and aggressive behaviors, and injury to animals and people interacting with animals. How we care for the vulnerable among us has a huge impact on the kind of world we live in.
I don't think we should be so lighthearted about the behavior experiments we are inadvertently running when we have someone in our care, human or dog, who isn't there by their own choice and may be poorly matched for the environment. Alas, given a field that isn't regulated, it's too easy to follow the advice of whoever's methods seem to work first. The other day, I opened up the mail to find a yellowed 1971 issue of Time magazine I'd ordered. Its cover was by Don Punchatz, an illustrator best known for drawing science fiction monsters. He's most famous for doing the cover art of the video game Doom.
Here, his monster was B.F. Skinner. Punchatz painted him entirely blue. The story inside says that Skinner argues that man's behavior is already controlled by external forces, just too often the control is haphazard or not in people's best interest. Skinner hopes for a society in which men of goodwill can work, love, and live in security and in harmony, the article states, quote, observing that society is already using such ineffective means of behavioral control as persuasion and conventional education, he insists that men of goodwill must adopt more effective techniques, using them for good purposes to keep despots from using them for bad ones.
They were not talking about dog training, but they could have been. We can look inward to find ways to help the dogs in our lives, but not in the kind of made-for-reality TV way that involves a cleansing of past demons leading to self-revelation. Rather, we can look at how we learn in order to try to understand how our dogs learn, and vice versa. In the world we are governing for our dogs, we control most of the resources. This means we can do a lot to arrange their lives to help them succeed in our worlds.
We can work to create environments where they can be offering behaviors that can be positively reinforced. You can build that world. There, you can live together in the sunshine of positive reinforcement. That's good dog training. If you need help finding someone to help you structure this kind of world, you can always get some help from a teacher.
At our school, we call them good dog trainers. That is from my new book, How To Train Your Dog With Love and Science, which you can learn more about at Annie Grossman dot com slash book. If people just had more information about this area of science that's so often dismissed as a pseudoscience, how would things change? I think we'd live in a world that might make a lot more sense. If our dogs can help us get there, if training our dogs is part of the answer, I'm all for it.
An audiobook version of How To Train Your Dog With Love and Science was just released. It's narrated by Eunice Wong, who does such a fantastic job. If you like listening to books, make sure to check it out. I actually have five codes that I can give to anyone who is interested in leaving a book. Review, I will give them to the first five people who email me from this episode.
Write audiobook in the subject line. I'm at Annie at schoolforthedogs.com.
