This page is part of the Auxiliary section of the Beginner's Course of the
D.S. Dog Training Workshop - an element of the Dog Science Network
On the Effectiveness of Punishment
If you are using the terminology of behavioral science to discuss and describe the behavior of your dog, then, punishment always works to successfully reduce the rate of your target response. It has to, because the way the world's leading experts define the term, the presentation of a potential punisher is not actually considered to be punishing unless it succeeds in causing your dog to make the targeted response less often. Therefore, beyond the slightest doubt, punishment always works because, by definition, if your attempt to punish your dog out of a certain behavior does not serve to reduce the rate of that behavior, then, by defintion, what you did was not punishing. it was just an attempt to punish.
However, in a move meant to foreclose the possibility that someone might use punishment in an inhumane way, dog training experts often spin a yarn for the general public, telling them that punishment does not work, which is of course, by definition, a semantic impossibility.