What’s a Positive Interrupter?
Decades ago I worked with preschoolers and I can tell you that it would have been easy to spend the entire morning saying “No” to this behavior or that. I learned pretty quickly that saying “Yes” was far more effective and constructive in terms of relationship building with these kiddos than saying “No” 100 times before lunch.
By saying “No”, I found I was focusing on what I didn’t want to happen, e.g. “No Jamie, stop painting on the wall,” would inevitably result in Jamie just inappropriately painting on something else. Jamie needed fewer “No’s” and more guidance on how to earn a “Yes”–in other words, where did I want Jamie to paint? Did Jamie understand the parameters of where to apply the paint? By focusing on the “Yes”, I could show Jamie the appropriate place to paint and recognize his behavior when he painted on the paper pinned to his easel rather than the wall, floor, or lots of other creative spots. 🙂
Since dogs don’t speak the same language as humans, saying “No” really has no meaning. If I said “te” to you, would you understand that I’m saying “no”? Probably not as the number of humans who understand Khmer language is not overly large. To give “No” meaning to our dogs, this generally requires a stern tone, loud voice, other accompanying sounds like slamming our fist on a surface, jangling a can of rocks or coins, tenseness, glaring, or other body language signals like shaking our finger at them in order to make our verbal “No” mean no.
To a dog, all of the stuff that tends to accompany this “No-ness” can be alarming if not downright aversive and scary. For a new dog trying to figure out the rules of the household, it can be kind of scary when they do a behavior that may seem natural to them (e.g. digging in your flower bed) and the human goes ballistic. Have you ever thought your dog is intentionally doing something when you are not around? I’d argue that they’ve learned to not do the behavior in the presence of the human who is being scary but that it’s ok to do this when they are not around. So at the end of the day, your dog is still doing what you didn’t want them to do because we haven’t focused on the “yes” or a more appropriate behavior in that particular situation. For example, you can create a digging pit in a spot away from your beautiful flower bed and teach your dog to perform their natural dog digging behavior in that spot and not destroy your garden.
Many pet parents I work with will say “I use positive reinforcement” or “I use treats” to teach my dog a cue. At the same time, saying “no” may happen a lot which may be counter productive to building the positive relationship and bond that they want to have with their dog. Sometimes it takes a little brainstorming to figure out, for example, why is my dog doing this annoying behavior and what would be a more desirable replacement behavior. Jumping on people who come into your house is a classic example. Exuberant Fido may be thinking “oh fun, some humans came over just to see me”, let me jump on them to play cause that’s what a lot of dogs do when they play. Teaching and reinforcing an alternative behavior where Fido needs to keep all 4 paws on the floor would help in this situation. Since Fido wants to greet his human friends you could teach Fido to boop the human’s hand or shoe which makes it pretty difficult to jump at the same time.
What do I say instead of “No” or “eh-eh”?
There are times when your pooch does something that you’d like her to stop doing and either you haven’t taught an alternative behavior or management has failed. Rather than focusing on the “No”, I use a well rehearsed positive interrupter to get my dog’s (or cat’s) attention and then engage them to do something more constructive–in other words, focus on the “Yes”. For example, when our dog See Kao gazes at our cat Take in a way that I know means trouble might be brewing, I say “Pookie”, which is See Kao’s positive interrupter cue; See Kao looks away from Take and at me, then I ask her to come over and boop my hand and we move to another part of the house. Note in this example, I proactively interrupted the scenario before both my dog and cat were all ramped up. Ideally we want to practice the use of a positive interrupter in a variety of situations and “proof the cue” so the behavior will be fluent and reliable. It’s not fair to expect See Kao to be able to respond to the positive interrupter if we haven’t practiced it under difficult distractions and scenarios. Conversely, if the situation could possibly harm your critter and you’re iffy about whether your positive interrupter will work, that is not the time to trial and eval – do what you need to do to keep your pet safe, hopefully in a calm manner that won’t damage your pet’s trust in you.
Cheers, Tracy
P.S. I will be the first one to admit “no” has come out of my mouth when the situation is unsafe, or I’m taken by surprise but I try to intentionally focus on what I’d rather a dog do whenever I can.
