This short video goes over why a trainer who uses Positive Reinforcement methods for an emotional and behavioral modification plan would avoid using intentional punishment in response to a dog’s warning signs, undesirable behavior or when the dog goes over-threshold. “Don’t punish a growl” is common knowledge in a lot of dog training communities, as the problem with that is the dog can possibly start to hide their warning signs and might skip to the next step such as biting, without communicating discomfort beforehand in the future. Emily expands this concept to other behaviors that signal the dog is getting stressed or going over threshold when using counter conditioning or training a dog an alternate appropriate behavior. Emily also discusses what would be done instead, which is to cue the dog to do a highly trained alternate behavior such as a recall or leave it that has been trained and conditioned using Positive Reinforcement.

Here is a link to training 10 interrupter cues using Positive Reinforcement:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yLr3ame9Ptk

That being said, the learner is the one who decides what is punishing. So it’s important that the trainer is able to know how to properly reinforce, condition and use the interrupter behaviors so they don’t end up inadvertently turning into punishers, as well as to be able to read the dog’s body language to see how they respond to the cues and constantly monitor to see what affect they have on the dog, and adjust training accordingly. The goal of the training plan is to avoid the animal rehearsing the undesirable behaviors as much as possible as a new behavior and emotional response is being conditioned. So if the warning signs and undesirable behaviors continue to happen I suggest drastically rethinking the training set up. I suggest if you notice something undesirable happens 3 times within the training session, it’s time to stop and rethink the training plan and how the environment is set up.