Laddie's Swimline Phobia

I've read previously of the cumulative effect of negative reinforcement in phobias arising, and I suspect that Laddie's difficulties with land-water-land retrieves, only now nearly overcome after weeks of daily practice, might be a good example.

When a dog does something and receives a reward for doing so, the dog is more likely to do it again. That's positive reinforcement.

But when a dog successfully avoids something he knows or suspects he will find it unpleasant (that is, an aversive), learning that avoidance behavior via negative reinforcement, the effect is doubled:

• The behavior has the result of avoiding the aversive.
• The behavior also has the result of the dog feeling better once the avoidance has been accomplished.

The next time the dog encounters the same aversive, he now has two reasons for avoiding it: because he again knows or suspects he will find it unpleasant, and because he felt good the last time he avoided it.

The third time, the reinforcement history has again grown, and now he has three reasons: the original reasons, and two experiences of feeling better afterward.

It is perhaps that mechanism that enables a mild aversion to grow over time into an intense aversion, that is, a phobia in which the sense of fear seems irrationally exaggerated.

I suspect something along those lines may have happened with Laddie, eventually hampering his ability to accomplish land-water-land retrieves (LWL). The sequence may have been something along these lines:

• Most dogs seem to find it at least mildly unpleasant to enter shallow water and then, as they walk further out into deeper water, feel the ground finally disappear under their feet, forcing them to begin swimming. Even if they love water and love swimming, that transition over what I call the swimline, the line where they must begin swimming, takes some getting use to.
• Most retrievers are sufficiently motivated to enter the water to complete a retrieve on the other side of the swimline that they quickly acclimate to the transition. They may show the aversion again when they start LWL retrieves, but they have the foundation for alligatoring into the water and overcome the aversion quickly. In doing so, the positive reinforcement, intrinsic and/or extrinsic, they receive for completing the retrieve soon becomes the controlling force in their conditioning, and the aversion to the alligator entry is forgotten.
• But Laddie took a different route. As a puppy, he invented a different solution to the problem of crossing the swimline: he would leap over it. His big air water entries looked like high-drive exuberance and were a joy to behold, but it's possible that for Laddie, they were primarily an avoidance behavior for the swimline transition.
• Over time, the more Laddie did this, receiving additional positive reinforcement from the oohs and aahs of spectators, the more his aversion to swimline transitions grew. By the time he was a year old, he had entered the water thousands of times, and had almost never used an alligator entry.
• Finally it was time to begin training LWL retrieves, in which Laddie could leap over the swimline on the send out, but had trouble with such a leap on the return. Perhaps the weight of the retrieval article made leaping more difficult. Or perhaps landing on the water with something in his mouth was uncomfortable or even painful. Whatever the reason, Laddie needed an alligator entry for the return, and that's what he had spent the first year of his life developing a phobia for.

As I mentioned, it took weeks of work to overcome that phobia, and it remains to be seen whether the job is yet done. I thought he was completely over it several days ago, but a couple of days later, it had returned almost as bad as before.

I would say the key to repairing it was Alice Woodyard's explanation to me of exactly what aspect of the LWL retrieve was causing Laddie the problem. I had watched him maroon on the far bank repeatedly, but until Alice explained it to me, I hadn't understood why it was happening.

Once I realized that it was because Laddie had never learned an alligator entry, I stopped working on full LWL retrieves and instead developed a sequence of drills that focused entirely on the swimline transition. Because of Laddie's strong reinforcement history avoiding such transitions, the project was long and complex. An example of a complexity was that even when Laddie could pick up a dummy and bring it straight into the water, he could not pick up a dummy behind him, then turn back to the water and bring it in. As Alice explained, he had developed picturitis, an aversion to a particular visual context, in this case, carrying an article and suddenly coming face to face with a water entry.

We've gradually encountered other complexities: retrieving a bird rather than a dummy; retrieving from a point further inland from the bank; encountering high cover at or near the shoreline; retrieving a mark thrown by someone else, rather than by me now waiting at the start line. As Laddie showed discomfort with each of those challenges, one by one we found ways to practice them until the difficulty appeared to have been solved.

Yet I suspect Laddie's swimline phobia still lurks under the surface, waiting to rear its head in some future context we've not yet proofed for, such as the excitement of a competitive event. My hope is that by then, Laddie will have experienced so much pleasure from completing LWL retrieves in other contexts that those feelings will take precedence over any fear that he again experiences. Time will tell if that's the case.