Treats are better than electric shocks for training badly behaved dogs

By Christa Lesté-Lasserre

What is the best way to train your dog?

Peter Steffensen/Kennel Club/Shutterstock

If you want to train a badly behaved dog, a tasty treat is more likely to succeed than an electric shock, animal behaviour researchers have found.

“We advocate the use of reward-based training in modifying dog behaviour, as our work indicates it is more effective than training which involves aversive stimuli, and it carries fewer risks to dog welfare,” says Jonathan Cooper at the University of Lincoln, UK.

Cooper and his colleagues compared the two training methods using 63 dogs split into three groups. All the animals required …