Hey, everyone, welcome back to Shape by Dog. I am Susan Garrett and today we are talking about

time outs. That is, I mean, it's used with kids. It's used with puppies. It's used with dogs. I want to share

my feelings on the matter and why I feel that every time we give a dog a time out, we are saying,

you please need to take the hit for my inadequacies. Right? So, that's my feeling on timeout. And I've got a

lot to share on the matter and both how they happen, why they happen, and how to make the most of

them. I would say that is one of the most important lessons I learned on my journey to become

a reinforcement-based trainer. And that,

my dog, Buzzy, I wrote the book Shaping Success about Buzz. And Buzzy, he got so many timeouts.

I would say Buzz and the dog following Buzz, my little Terrier Mix, decaf. Those two dogs got a lot of time.

I was because I didn't want to use any kind of positive punishment. I didn't want to scold them

or say, ah, ah, or you know, you correct that, use a physical correction. And so, I didn't actually

have a great understanding, certainly nowhere near what I have today, about

how to have success. I knew I didn't want to do any punishment, but I didn't have clarity about

how to get there. I could use reinforcement in shaping, but what about that gap between when

the shaping wasn't working or the dog did something

unpredictable? That's when timeouts happened. All right? So, scientifically, timeouts are

negative punishment. The negative means you are taking something away from the dog.

And the punishment means it suppresses what the dog is doing.

They don't like it if you put it, you know, in a general layman's terms. So, taking something

away, dogs don't like it. What could we be taking away? Well, let's say your dog is shredding your pair of shoes.

You take those pair of shoes away. They don't like it. We've taken something away and they

found the environment that they were in very reinforcing and you've stopped that reinforcement.

...