It may "work" - if the punishment is strong enough and lasts long enough. Then the unwanted behavior may, for all practical purposes, disappear. You should remember that the affect of punishment is to suppress behavior, so you can never be sure if or when the behavior will come back.
It may "work" - if the punishment is used carefully to interrupt a chain of behavior allowing the trainer to teach and reward a better behavior, while never allowing the dog to "practice" the misbehavior. Of course, management without punishment will accomplish the same goal.
It may "work" - if the rules for using punishment are followed precisely.
Rule Number One The dog identifies the correct behavior causing the punishment and there must be no chance that the dog will link the punishment to some other "cause". This requires exquisitely perfect timing and complete control of the environment.
Remember: The same perfect timing will make you a superb reward based trainer. The same complete control of the environment will make you a great reward based trainer.
Dogs are "associational" learners and they are highly visual in their perception. So when punishment is delivered, the dog will tend to associate the punishment with whatever she is looking at or what she is near. For example: if you yell at your dog every time she barks at people walking by your yard, she is likely to think those people walking by cause her to "get in trouble", so now she has even more reason to want to bark at them and make them go away.
A study of programs to teach people to stop smoking found, for those programs that used any form of punishment (even very mild ones) the most common reason people gave for leaving the program was "not liking their counselor". One such program had the client put a rubber band around his or her wrist and snap it (causing mild discomfort) any time they saw or thought of a cigarette or smoking. At every session, the counselor shows the clients a slide show (cigarettes, smokers, advertisements, ashtrays) and the clients practice snapping themselves.
Even though this was a very mild punisher, in addition to discouraging thoughts of smoking, it discouraged the clients from wanting to be near the person who was most often there when it happened, the counselor. Your dog may learn to avoid you as well as the bad behavior.
Rule Number Two The punishment must be something the dog will work to avoid every time.
You must know exactly which punishment will be the most effective at any given time and you must never be wrong. Punishment based training is not very forgiving.
Rule Number Three The punishment must be strong enough to interrupt or suppress the bad behavior. It must be a great deal more punishing than the bad behavior is rewarding (most bad behavior is self-rewarding). At the same time it must not shut down other behavior, much of which you may want now or later.
A punishment that is strong enough to do all this has a greater likelihood of being associated with more than the bad behavior you are aiming for and it is more likely to be associated with the person that delivers it, you.
Rule Number Four The punishment must be consistently applied and perfectly timed EVERY time the misbehavior occurs.
Remember: The same perfect timing will make you a superb reward based trainer.
Any time the dog does the bad behavior and isn't punished, the absence of punishment is the same as a reward for the bad behavior. Also, that random non-punishment "reward" is on a variable schedule, the strongest kind of reward, which makes the bad behavior even stronger than if you'd never punished it in the first place. See reward or reinforcement labels.
Gimme here: Food on the counter is very tasty. I only have to get it once to KNOW how great it is. You have to be perfect at putting ALL food away EVERY time and you would have to punish your dog for even looking at food on the counter EVERY time she looked. Admit it, you don't even know what your human friends are looking at ALL the time. Its much easier to teach your dog to look away from food on the counter and then reward her with even yummier food from inside the refrigerator. I'm just saying.
Rule Number Five A good behavior must be put in place of the bad one.
Nature abhors a vacuum. You must have identified a new behavior to replace the bad one and you must teach it carefully and completely. If you don't teach a new and better behavior, then the dog is likely to develop a new and equally bad replacement behavior. It is much easier to teach the one good behavior you do want than it is to one-by-one punish away all the myriad of bad behaviors that might crop up by themselves.
See problem solving label.
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