About Us
We Look for Good Behavior!
When an animal offers behavior, there are 3 ways to respond.
- Reinforce or reward the behavior
- Ignore the behavior
- Punish or correct the behavior
Rewarding behavior increases the likelihood that the behavior will occur again.
That’s why we look for and reward good behavior.
Bad behavior can also be, unintentionally, rewarded. Ignoring the bad behavior stops or interrupts reinforcement and will reduce or eliminate the behavior.
We do not use punishment at ClearMark and utilize the first two responses to focus on desired behavior.
Why Not Use Correction?
Many people believe that punishing or correcting bad behavior will lead to good behavior. This is most often seen in traditional dog training where choke collars and pinch collars are used to get the dog to obey. While this can work in some cases, there are many problems that come with this approach. Some of these problems are:
Animals will only offer the minimum amount of behavior to avoid punishment. They can exhibit fleeing and sneaking behaviors and will not work with excitement.
- Correction produces unpredictable results. Sometimes it leads to a desired behavior, other times it creates or raises aggression. It will often replace one unwanted behavior with another.
- Correction used with positive reinforcement creates latency. When an animal is rewarded or punished when cued to “sit”, it cannot predict which response will happen after future requests to sit, regardless of compliance. This uncertainty will cause your pet to hesitate before he responds to this “poisoned” cue in the future.
- A “poisoned” cue cannot be used in a behavior chain. A poisoned cue will break down in advanced behaviors such as search, retrieve, etc…
- Correction or punishment is not learning. It is usually administered after the unwanted behavior occurs and is only reinforcing to the individual that is using it.
This is the basis for our training methods at ClearMark. Communication using gentle techniques creates an excitement in your pet to learn and strengthens the human/ animal bond. These methods are used exclusively for marine training at Sea World, Shedd Aquarium, and other zoos across the world. It has proven to be extremely reliable and is supported by the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior.
Our training techniques are recommended by the
John G. Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, Ill.
