I want to talk about a game most of you already play: It’s Your Choice. Closed fist, treat inside. Dog pulls toward it, hand stays shut. Dog backs off, hand opens.
(If you want to skip to a video of me demonstrating how I train my conditioned reinforcers (markers) and conditioned punishers (no reward markers), jump to the video below, from my puppy blog with my current puppy, Alice!)
Simple, right? Here’s the part that gets glossed over or not mentioned at all, and it’s arguably the most important lesson that the It’s Your Choice procedure is all about: the moment your hand closes on that cookie is absolutely a punishment event. You’re taking away something the dog wanted and expected.
It’s called ‘negative punishment’.
And if that closure happens with zero warning; no cue, no sound, nothing, which is how we’ve been taught to play the game, typically, then your dog experiences it as a sudden contradiction of what they THOUGHT was about to happen.
We tend to think of this as a fairly benign game that we play with our puppies, but closing that fist is far from a neutral event. I’ll go one farther, and say I think it’s not FAIR. This is definitely a change in my thinking from when I started out as a dog trainer. But, as I’ve continued to strive to be clearer in my communication, fairer to my dogs, and more interested in welfare and developing resilience in my dogs, my thinking has changed.
This blog post is me explaining HOW and WHY my thinking has changed, with the hope that you too can benefit from these insights when it comes to your own journey as a dog trainer.
Why I think “fair” is the right word hereFair doesn’t mean easy. It doesn’t mean we never say no. It means the dog gets to KNOW the rules of the game before we enforce them.
Think about it from your dog’s side: if you got in trouble for breaking a rule you were never told existed, you wouldn’t just be frustrated — you’d feel like the ground shifted under you. That’s what an unsignalled punishment does. The dog had every reason to expect the treat. Then, without warning, they didn’t get it. No signal, no way to see it coming, no way to understand what changed.
Now compare that to a game where a consistent sound or word, a.k.a. a no-reward marker – tells the dog “that’s not it” a half-second before the hand closes. Same outcome but different experience.
The dog isn’t just reacting to a surprise anymore. They’re getting information they can actually use.
This isn’t just a feeling. It’s backed by real researchDecades of learning theory research1 point the same direction: signaled consequences, even negative ones, are less distressing than unsignalled ones, because a reliable signal also tells the animal when they’re safe.
Take the signal away, and you take away the safety along with it; the whole game becomes less predictable, and more “anything could happen at any moment.”
There’s a parallel body of work on what happens when an expected reward doesn’t show up. Psychologists call it frustrative nonreward2. The finding that matters most for us: it’s not the missing reward itself that’s the problem, it’s the gap between what the animal expected and what actually happened. An unsignalled hand-close maximizes that gap. A marker narrows it.
What this actually looks like in practice – AliceLike I said, I’ve been playing ‘It’s Your Choice’ type games for literally decades with my puppies, and it’s only been recently that my thinking has changed regarding the signalment of conditioned reinforcers (verbal markers) as well as conditioned punishers (no reward verbal markers). Because of that desire to constantly up my game with my communication with my dogs, I built it into how I’m raising my current puppy, Alice, from the start.
Right alongside “yes” and “good”, my two reward markers, I taught her a no-reward marker just as deliberately. Not as an afterthought, not as a tone-of-voice thing, but as its own clear cue with its own clear meaning. She learned it in It’s Your Choice. She learned it in place/bed training. Same consistency, same clarity, every single time.
The results have been nothing short of astonishing to watch. Alice knows what my NRM means. Not because I raised my voice. Not because I got quiet or disappointed or did any of the emotional signaling so many of us default to when we want a dog to know they got it wrong. Just a word, delivered the same way every time, that tells her “not that”, and she adjusts, without any drama on either end of the leash.
That’s the whole point. She’s not guessing what my silence or my face means. She knows.
The bigger problem with NOT using a No Reward Marker: what “no response” starts to meanHere’s the part that should really worry competitors. If you never use an NRM, your dog doesn’t just miss out on clarity in the moment; they start drawing their own conclusions about silence itself.
Think about what “neutral” has to mean for duration behaviors to work at all. A start line stay. A table. A weave entry hold. In every one of these, your dog has to sit in a stretch of “nothing is happening yet” and trust that nothing happening is fine. They have to know that that silence isn’t a verdict and just means “keep doing what you’re doing”.
If the only information your dog ever gets is reward or nothing, “nothing” becomes overloaded.
It starts to mean two completely different things at once: sometimes it means “keep going, you’re fine,” and sometimes it means “that was wrong.” The dog has no way to tell those apart. So don’t be surprised if you start seeing creeping, checking in, breaking stays early, or a dog who can’t hold still without constant reassurance… Your dog’s not being disobedient, they’re trying to solve a problem you never gave them the tools to solve.
An NRM fixes this by taking “wrong” out of the neutral zone entirely. Silence goes back to meaning what it should: keep doing what you’re doing.
Now, duration is just duration, not a dog anxiously scanning you for a verdict every half second.
What this doesn’t meanI’m not saying every unsignalled moment is a welfare crisis, and I’m not saying frustration has no place in training. Inciting and then managing frustration is how impulse control gets built. What I AM saying is: if you’re already marking the right choice, mark the wrong one too. That’s not softness. That’s just finishing a sentence you already started.
The takeawayFair training tells the dog what’s coming — the good and the not-so-good. If you want your dog to trust the process, they need to be able to predict it.
If this got you thinking about your own training, share it with someone else who needs to hear it or who you’d like to discuss it with! Forward them this blog post, or point them to www.daisypeel.com/start to get started.
P.S. If you’re intrigued and want some more resources to look at to dig deeper in to topics like this, here’s some further reading for you:
Quick note: the first four studies were done with shock/avoidance paradigms, not withheld treats. They’re the foundational research on predictability and aversive events in general, not agility-specific. The frustrative nonreward review is the one that maps most directly onto what happens when a dog expects a reward and doesn’t get it.
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