Abuse is the improper usage or treatment of a thing, often to unfairly or improperly gain benefit. Abuse can come in many forms, such as: physical or verbal maltreatment, injury, assault, violation, rape, unjust practices, crimes, or other types of aggression.
The shocking number of animal cruelty cases reported every day is just the tip of the iceberg—most cases are never reported. Unlike violent crimes against people, cases of animal abuse are not compiled by state or federal agencies, making it difficult to calculate just how common they are. However, we can use the information that is available to try to understand and prevent cases of abuse. (Humane Society)
Common punishing or confrontational techniques used to control dogs include sharp leash corrections meant to cause discomfort; hitting or kicking the dog; applying electric shock; applying physical force to pressure a dog into a submissive down position; or the “alpha roll,” which forces the dog on its back in an apparently submissive position, plus a variety of other techniques involving shouting, threatening stares or growls, use of water sprays or water guns, grabbing the dog by the scruff of the neck or the jowls and shaking it, and similar procedures.
A new study appeared in the journal Pediatrics. This study dealt with human children, not dogs, and looked at the effects of spanking. Spanking is the most common form of punishment used to control the behavior of human children. Based on data from nearly 2,500 children, Catherine Taylor and her associates at Tulane University report that children that were spanked more frequently at age 3 were much more likely to be aggressive by age 5. "The odds of a child being more aggressive at age 5 increased by 50 percent if he had been spanked more than twice in the month before the study began," said Taylor. Such negative effects of punishment have been reported so often in the scientific literature that the American Academy of Pediatrics has chosen not to endorse spanking under any circumstance. According to the Academy, it's a form of punishment that becomes less effective with repeated use and also makes discipline more difficult as the child outgrows it.
You might ask what relevance a study on human children has to do with our understanding of dog behavior. There is a lot of evidence that suggests that the mind of a dog is roughly equivalent to the mind of a human 2- to 3-year-old child (click here for an example). That alone would suggest that we might learn more about dogs by studying the psychology of young humans, much the same way that psychologists extrapolate findings from animal research to predict the behavior of people. However, in this case we are also assisted by the fact that there is a relevant piece of research that reaches much the same conclusion about the effects of punishment on dogs.
Meghan Herron and her colleagues from the School of Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania reported in the journal Applied Animal Behavior Science that using punishing techniques when training dogs tends to increase the aggression in the animals, in much the same way that spanking increases aggressive responses in human children.
What does come out of this study is a confirmation that the use of punishing techniques on dogs has much the same effect that the use of physical punishment has on human children — namely an increase in aggressive behavior in general, and specifically increased aggression toward the individual who is applying the punishment. Given these findings, recommendations advocating the use of punishing and confrontational methods as part of dog training and behavior control seem to be ill-advised. - Stanley Coren at Psychology Today