Fundamental Behavior Concepts

Although it is important to recognize that dogs are different from humans in what they value, the basic framework of learning is quite similar.

ALL behavior is motivated by pursuit of reward.

Whether you would describe the behavior as "good" or "bad", anything the dog finds rewarding will be repeated. The more "delicious" (salient) the dog finds the reward, the more difficult it will be to stop the dog from doing that behavior.

Effective training takes advantage of this idea in three ways:

1. You can make sure it is very difficult to stop your dog from doing the behaviors you like by providing properly timed salient rewards.
2. You can eliminate unwanted by ensuring that your dog no longer has access to the rewards incurred by unwanted behaviors.
3. You can communicate with and teach your dog new (and fairly unnatural) behaviors by deliberately providing or removing access to motivators.

In some ways, dogs learn more efficiently than humans, because they are able to assess probabilities much more effectively than humans. A dog does not assess based on what happened the first time or the last time, but on the probability of reward based on all his previous experiences. For this reason, a single event generally does not have a significant impact on the whole of training.

Mistakes are often made in training because of a lack of comprehension of potential rewards. Most people recognize food and affection. Some other rewards dogs value include:

• sex or interaction with the opposite sex
  
• play/social interaction
• touch/getting more or less
• attention/getting more or less
• sniffing/olfactory stimulation & processing
• proximity to novelty/going to or avoiding
• social status/higher or lower
• shelter
• visual access to stimuli/gaining or avoiding
  
• intellectual stimulation "work" -- digging, tracking, scent work, sports, etc.
  

This is by no means a comprehensive list! It appears to me that the entirety of what any individual dog values and works for is probably unique to that specific dog.