The Floor Is Lava, But For Dogs

This article discusses the purposeful application of pain to dogs.

This article was supposed to be about my thoughts on how why questions are problematic.

I was reading an article about how why questions are problematic, as that is a topic that interests me. But early on the author of the article referenced studies on Learned Helplessness. This concept of Learned Helplessness comes from studies where researchers traumatize dogs so that they  learn not to step on one side of their pen. The researchers teach (read: traumatize) the dogs by electrifying the floor of one half of the pen so that when the dogs step on that part of their pens they get a painful electric shock.

The author of the article on why questions asks us to ask what the dog has learned.

But let’s focus on the dog—human interaction. In my summary of these studies, humans abuse the dogs when they step onto the electrified half of the floor. The dogs test their budding theory that the half of the floor is painful by occasionally stepping on the electrified portion of their pen. Yep, the floor is still painful. The dogs build up data that supports their theory is correct. They learn this through pain.

After a while the dog no longer tests if the painful condition continues to be true. Once the researchers note that the dogs are no longer testing reality, the researchers stop electrifying the floor. The dogs never step on that side of the floor again, and the dogs never find out that the electricity has been permanently turned off.

Why would they? They have tested their theory enough.

The scientists blame the dog! They assign to the dogs a condition they have named learned helplessness. The scientists give dog a mental illness diagnoses—never mind that those humans caused it. Never mind that the lesson was so painful that after a few tests that the dogs concluded it was no longer worth trying to see if it was still painful one more time.

I want to point out that the dogs were not only abused so that the won’t step on the seemingly forbidden side of the pen, but they were also abused to the extent that the no longer even try to see if the punishment is still in place. The dogs have given up testing. They now believe their internal maps of the world and are not interested to see if the world has changed.

The dogs sure learned something, but it wasn’t helplessness—it was how to avoid pain.

If the researchers had stopped electrifying the floor before the dogs changed their findings from theory to just the way it is, they never would have “discovered” a created behavior called learned helplessness. To get to this finding, the researchers had to keep half the pen electrocuted until the dog no longer found it worthwhile to test—the pain was too great for the dogs for the small reward of extra space to roam in.

Talk about blaming the victim. Perhaps a better title for their research could be Researchers Kill Dogs’ Curiosity.