In our Puppy Socialization classes, one of the lessons we try to teach new puppy owners is how to recognize the signs of appropriate and healthy play between dogs.
On one hand, we have some owners that are “helicopter parents” and at the onset of anything more physical than polite sniffing, they feel like their dogs are in mortal danger.
On the otherhand, we have some owners who believe their dog who is bullying or over-aroused is just playing with good intentions, and we are being too uptight. “Let dogs be dogs, let them work it out”, they’d say.
As instructors, our job is to either help those who are worried feel safe that their dog is having a good time – yes that includes facial and ear nips and tumbling and wrestling.
Our job is also to identify when a dog is getting overaroused, or is *not* picking up on the cutoff (please stop!) signals of other dogs and to interrupt or time-out.
To help our students (and anyone, anywhere!) we commissioned Hyedie Hashimoto to create an infographic. Please download a copy and print it off for your dog training facility, dog daycare, dog park – wherever it might be useful!
Sorry for the delay (gasp, it’s been nearly a month) since posting last, and entering, and competing at my first Rally-O Trial. For those that follow me on Facebook and Twitter well you know Petey did just fine – two runs, and he earned his first two legs, with a score of 183 and 186.
Things I learned:
The crating area is really tight. You can see what it looks like here. Generally the dogs in attendance that day were quiet, but there were a few that would bark sometimes.
Crating Area at Red Barn Event Centre
Getting your dog used to crating is a must. Petey is decent at crating now. I can even leave him there and attend the competitor’s meeting, walk the course, go to the bathroom, etc. without hassle.
Petey in Crate. He’s stressed here, but settled quickly to sleep.
Warm Up Area. There was a space in the crating area reserved for practicing. I took Petey out periodically while we waited our turn to practice.
Practice Area Warm Up
Things Falling Apart in the Ring. In the practice area, Petey looked as good and was working as good as the absolute best practice sessions I had at home or at When Hounds Fly. As it was approaching my turn to take Petey into the ring, he was in the ringside area awaiting his turn – we kept on practicing. Wooo, he looked hot. Sharp pivots, amazing focus, etc. So much so that other people in the area took note.
As soon as was entered the ring, I put Petey in heel position. The judge said I could start, and I took my first step forward and – Petey pulled like a freight train to go sniff the first station sign – they used terracotta pots to hold the signs up. I couldn’t help but laugh. I didn’t get stressed, but I suddenly realized that my expectations had to go down and I would need to go back to the drawing board.
Pretty much all my deductions that weekend were for tight leash, caused by Petey forging ahead to go sniff something interesting.
We did good enough to get a passing score each time. Here’s Petey with his two ribbons.
Petey and Ribbons
Musings
Get Terra Cotta Pots. They smell interesting. They’re novel. They look like little paint can perches. I need to proof them as things to ignore on the course. A lot of the tight leashes on my first run were caused by targeting the terra cotta pots.
Going back to ClickerExpo 2010 – Cecilie Koste had a few pearls of wisdom that I went back to. 1) Your dog should volunteer to get things started. No kissy noises or nagging or begging your dog to work – that reinforces a lack of focus. 2) Your dog is ready for trial when he performs perfectly the FIRST time, the exercises are backchained, and he is used to working on the required schedule of reinforcement. I am short on a couple of points here (future blog post?). Trial a dog like this too soon and you will have a ring-wise dog (a dog that knows no or limited primary reinforcement occurs in the ring. Or, I guess with correction trainers, that no or limited corrections occur in the ring)
Fun Match – yesterday with Mirkka, I attended a Rally-O Fun Match at All About Dogs. I tested out a few theories. The courses were CARO Rally-O Novice courses, and the environment really did replicate that of Red Barn. A few things I tried:
1) I waited at the Start Sign for Petey to volunteer to get started. Instead of feeling pressure to get moving, I left him sniff the area near the start sign. When he volunteered eye contact, I cued a few simple behaviors. He was ready. I was ready. We started the course. Much better. I have a feeling that at the trial, when I entered the ring, and I was asked if I was ready – I was, but Petey wasn’t finished investigating the area.
2) I stationed him in a crate, but kept the door open. He stays inside and is more relaxed than with the crate door closed. This might keep his anxiety down and allow him to save more for the ring.
We weren’t scored but I feel like Petey did much better at the Fun Match, so I am going to keep on working on some of these theories and get him ready some more. I’m going to wait till September before entering another trial at this point.
Last point: Red Barn Centre in Barrie is a great venue, and the judges, volunteers, staff, and other competitors at the CARO trial were really a friendly bunch of people. Not a single sour face at the venue. If you aren’t sure about trying, I would strongly encourage you to give it a shot!
Very last point: THANK YOU, Petey, for doing an amazing job. You have come a long way from the shelter rescue that didn’t even know how to sit.
Petey had kennel cough (or perhaps just a cold) for a week so not much training until recently. But he’s as good as he’ll be for this weekend so we’re done.
All that’s left is to make sure I don’t choke. This is the first time I have done a “dog sport” but not the first time doing timed, scored competition. I used to be active in amateur motorsports. Appropriately, the sport I competed most in was autocross, which was also a solo sport and involved a sea of pylons.
Things I learned from motorsports (especially autocross, since it looks like a confusing sea of pylons)
Visualize the entire course in your head while you’re waiting your turn. I used to sit in the car and drive the course, including when to throttle, brake, turn, shift.
Once on the course, look ahead! We were always at least two stations ahead in our head, so that nothing would surprise us, and we could plan our entries efficiently.
So hopefully my previous experiences will help me stay focused and cool.
All that’s left is to cue clean and consistently.
One exercise that I did with the Karen Pryor Academy was to demonstrate a ten part behaviour chain. We had to have the ten behaviours pre-selected, trained to stimulus control, and also cues clearly defined. When under pressure, there’s a tendency for our cues to change (due to stress, our bodies stiffen, our voices change tone, or we just totally forget what the cue that we’ve trained for is) so the better we can define our cues and practice them, the more likely they will stand up under fire.
So here are all my cues for the behaviours needed for CARO Rally Novice. Within the rules of the sport, I chose them to incorporate verbal + visual components simultaneously, because Petey is terrible at verbal cue discrimination.
I just came back from the third and final day of the Professional Animal Behavior Associates symposium for 2011 – this year, the presentation was focused on working dogs (search and rescue, detection, etc.) I’ll let you read about the lineup here. The PABA conference draws a lot of folks from across Canada, including my friend Katherine Mutzke from Clever K9 Sports in Squamish, BC, Alice Fisher of Dogsmart from Vancouver, Carolyn Clark, Karen Pryor Academy Faculty, and Nicky Barnham of Carolark in Ottawa.
This year I knew I had to go, because I knew absolutely nothing about the topics being presented, and only knew of one of the presenters speaking (Steve White). Having no expectations going in, I went in and right off the bat with the first speaker I was delighted with what I was learning!
The headlining speaker that I found brought the most new information to the table for me was Dr. William “Deak” Helton, the author of “Canine Ergonomics – The Science of Working Dogs“. He had a ton to say, and MOST of what he said I had never heard of before – enough to fill multiple blog posts for weeks… so in the interests of brevity I am going to write about his discussion of the Viligence Decrement. I believe it has tremendous application to us in pet dog training, because it can explain why our dogs fatigue and stop working in class or in dog sport. In class I often point out to students that their dogs “look fried” or “check out”. Here, a scientist was actually going to explain what might be going on in our dogs when this happens!
(Before I begin, you have to understand a bit about my background – I stopped taking sciences in Grade 11 – public school, I focused on Liberal Arts, and in university, I majored in business. So go easy on me if I get anything wrong)
Vigilance Decrement – What is it?
Vigilance decrement is defined as “deterioration in the ability to remain vigilant for critical signals with time, as indicated by a decline in the rate of the correct detection of signals”
In real life, it is as simple as an airport security officer missing contraband items hidden in baggage under x-ray, or a working dog failing to detect and indicate the presence of a landmine. For the airport security officer, that might be the shape of items on screen that fuzzily match what contraband looks like. For a detection dog, that might be the scent of a landmine. In both cases, shapes and smells are just signals.
In my opinion it’s reasonable to assume that a verbal or visual cue is also just a signal. A cue is a signal to indicate there is an opportunity to perform a behaviour and earn reinforcement. Why would a dog respond to a cue one minute, and assuming motivation is sufficient, and the cue is delivered identically, why would a dog not respond to the cue?
Important to note – we are always assuming that the learner is sufficiently motivated. For training, we would assume the food is appealing enough, or the toy desirable enough to want to continue doing work.
Two Competing Theories of Vigilance Decrement
The first theory is boredom. The task is so easy and repetitive that the subject withdraws effort and stops paying attention – and the subject is then distracted and daydreams.
The second theory is fatigue/resource theory. Mental energy is limited, and task performance draws on mental energy. Unless replenished, mental energy is depleted.
Helton does not believe the boredom model holds true. If it held true, you should get greater vigilance decrements if you gave people easier tasks vs. harder ones. In fact, the opposite was true – in studies with humans (male and female) and rats, the harder the signal detection test, the faster the decrease in performance.
In plain English – if I gave you a book on quantum mechanics and said “hey read this”, you’d probably look very bored by page three. But it’s not because it’s too easy – it’s because it requires a ton of mental energy to follow it.
Applied to dog training? In class, many students (especially newer ones, with greener dogs) often attribute the dog’s unresponsiveness as boredom. If a dog stops responding to a known cue in class, assuming sufficient motivation, it’s NOT because their bored, but in fact, have run out of mental energy. I believe their brain is no longer detecting the signal/discriminative stimulus.
Evolutionary Function of “Shutting Down”
Simple! As Helton explained, the brain is not unlike an engine. Excessive use will cause damage, so by shutting down, it is protecting itself. The brain, literally, heats up from use, which is why brain damage can occur with high fever, and we’re mentally more capable if the brain is kept cold. Helton shared that you can measure the temperature inside the ear canal as an accurate way to monitor when the subject is going to burn out!
Refilling Mental Energy
Through rest! That’s why agility people swear by Crate Games – so mental energy is preserved or restored between performance.
Drawing from human-models, Helton shared his model for predicting whether the expert (in this case the detection dog) would correctly respond:
P(A) = sS – eFEF + (ex EX + vV)
Probability of Attending = Salience of of the Olfactory Target – Body Movements + Expectations + Value of Information
Salience = How big/obvious is the target?
Body Movements = How much does the dog have to worry about navigating the environment while working? i.e. searching in dangerous rubble vs. a lab environment
Expectations = If you only train the dog to search the floors, he’ll never think to sniff up high where the item may be hidden
Value of Information = I think this means the importance of the consequence to the dog – What’s in it for me if I respond?
Applying his Model to Scent Detection
Rather than have the dog do the search on-site, Helton suggests the dog could stay inside a controlled laboratory environment, and just be given air samples of the targets to smell inside the lab. For container search, for example, air samples of containers could be captured and then brought to the dog to sniff one by one. The salience increases, and body movements are minimized. Another example would be for detecting breast cancer. Rather than have the dog sniff the actual patient, patient breath samples would be collected, and then sent to the dog.
I have thought about how I might apply this to training (and already do):
Salience = make cues easy to discriminate for the dog. If verbal cues, avoid using similar sounding cues (down and bow). Keep them clean and consistent so mental energy doesn’t have to be wasted thinking “was that really the sit cue? or was it something else?)
Distractions/Interruptions/Noise = I think that anything that causes mental energy to be expended, either consciously or subconsciously, will cause performance to drop quickly. So that’s why we follow good training practices to train with high intensity and make it easy for the dog to focus and preserve mental energy.
Expectations = I think this closely relates to the process of generalization and gradually training in as many environments, with as many variables (over time) as possible.
Value of Information = This is just creating good reinforcers, to make sure that our cues are worth paying attention to and acting upon.
Other Ideas (Buck Rogers Stuff?)
Random musings, but…
Should I put an ice pack on Petey’s head between training sessions? Or right before we do our runs at the CARO trial?
Caffeine reduces vigilance decrement in people AND honeybees (yes, it was in the presentation). Caffeine pills for Petey before training sessions or at least trials?
Fun Fact (PABA Related)
The Canadian Border Services Agency’s detection programs were created with the help of the University of Guelph. Their dogs are trained using positive reinforcement – they work for a ball! Three working dogs were brought for demos over the course of the weekend. This black lab cross was too much for his past owners – not a good house pet for the average dog owner – but perfect for working dog life – and worked like a champ looking for currency in the room (he catches people that lie when they say they aren’t carrying over $10,000 in currency).
Currency Detection Dog
The next post I’ll do about this topic will delve into Helton’s findings regarding breeds and dog characteristics and their intelligence and suitability for work. As a Beagle owner I loved hearing this. Maybe I don’t need that Malinois after all… ?
Quick update! With two weeks left to go, here’s what I’ve gotten done so far:
All of the basic behaviors are at a decent level of fluency
I actually did drive to the trial location in Barrie and did a class there, just to see if Petey could work in the environment. He can, so we’re good.
I have been training all around town, including training right in front of the house where there is an understimulated Doberman that barks incessantly, and also training right next to dogs playing fetch and wrestling.
So, finally, I am going to work on actual stations and signs. I started with Weave (four pylons) and magically I noticed that for this station, Petey started doing strange things with the first pylon. He jumps it, bumps it, bites it, paws it, you name it. All the stuff I have done so far always involve the pylons on my right, so I guess this threw him off.
To address it, I just broke down the weave station into walking through gates of pylons and then slowly closed the angles off.
Also, I came to realize that Petey also has limits. You’ll notice in the videos I start with two distractions. One is a tupperware full of beaver urine. The other is a stainless steel food bowl full of rollover. In the beginning of the training session, he pays no attention to them at all. By the end (last part of the video) he starts smelling and pulling towards them. I’ve got to ensure he stays rested and I don’t overwork him. As mental stamina fades in training, so does willpower!
And lastly with all the hard work lately, I try to make sure he has a lot of good downtime to sniff. Also I recently picked up a very nice Bowser dog bed from The Dog Bowl down the street.
Today was my 2nd day having a chance to work with Petey to get him ready for his Rally Trial… now exactly 1 month away.
CARO Rally Novice is actually a pretty simple class with a fairly short list of behaviors. There is one though that has been missing from Petey’s repertoire for a very long time – a stand!
He has a long history of reinforcement for sits and downs (having started with him three years ago with a very “family dog/pet manners” orientation, stand was not a behavior I thought useful to teach), so up until this point, the instant any food/toys/training regalia comes out, he’s frantically offered sits and downs. If I used targeting to get him into a stand, like how Susan Garrett featured this on her Facebook page, the moment I clicked, he’d sink into a sit or down, unlike MANY dogs I’ve seen in class that hold the stand much more naturally.
At ClickerExpo this year, I attended a lecture by horse trainer Alexandra Kurland. She challenged the trainers in the room to teach a single behavior using multiple methods – luring, targeting, shaping, even modelling, and using pressure. I also attended lectures by Kay Lawrence on Luring and Targeting, and in the luring lecture, she emphasized that each teaching approach has pros and cons, and its dependent on the learner, the behavior, and the teacher on which is the most appropriate. In her own words, the quality of the final behavior is not determinable by the method used to teach it, assuming a sufficiently talented trainer.
Back to my elusive Stand with Petey –
In the past, I’ve tried shaping it, but he’s a squirmy little bugger, and has a tendency to tap his toes and wiggle around in between the click then treat.
Hand targeting was challenging as he’d sink into a sit well before I could deliver a treat to his mouth.
So, I just gave up on teaching him Stand. Fortunately, by committing to a Rally trial I forced myself to just do it, so last week I started. Here’s what I did:
Worked on a raised platform to minimize forward steps. In this case I placed him on a stair landing, and I worked two steps below. A must for short dogs!!!
I initially lured from a sit to a stand.
Prior to releasing the lure, I applied downward pressure on his rear-end to engage his opposition reflex to push up, so he’d resist sitting
When I felt enough upwards pressure, and he had maintained correct position, I released the lure.
I removed the lure and simply used a hand target to get him up.
In CARO you are allowed to touch to stabilize the dog in a stand, so all that is left of the downwards pressure is a very light touch on the rear as a cue to hold the stand.
Finally!!! Enough duration for the CARO Novice Stand.
(At the 0:35 mark you can see what my rudimentary stand looks like now)
A definite pro of luring is you end up getting very clean, precise behaviors. No garbage behaviors have snuck in with Petey’s new stand. The bad rap that luring has is with trainers who don’t have an understanding of training to know when the dog is, in Kay’s words, “going operant” – at that point it’s time to switch to targeting or shaping.
If you haven’t heard of Kay Lawrence before – shame on you – but that’s OK, because I actually only heard about her for the first time last year at my first ClickerExpo. She does some really funky stuff with luring and targeting. I also looked at her YouTube channel and unfortunately the best videos she played at ClickerExpo are not on there – but I did find this – a 9 minute video of a student of hers showing her technique to teaching trotting for the show ring – using a “follow” target stick – that has a measuring cup at the end of it and a treat inside!
On the topic of pressure – I think I’m a few days away from not even having to touch Petey’s rear end to remind him to stay standing… but without that pressure during the early stages I don’t think I would have gotten any stand as quickly as I was able to. A few words about pressure – either body pressure or leash pressure – both are very useful tools. Prior to this, the only pressure work I had ever done was Shirley Chong’s “Give to Pressure” or Grisha Stewart’s “Silky Leash” – applying leash pressure, engaging opposition reflex, and then clicking/treating for the dog giving into lease pressure, counteracting their own opposition reflex, and moving into the direction of the pressure, vs. against it. At ClickerExpo, Michele Pouliot showed video of how guide dogs are trained not to pull on leash/give to pressure, so that a small pull in any direction of a guide dog will trigger them to promptly move into, away from, or walk backwards. The video she showed was amazing and unfortunately does not live on YouTube or anywhere else.
In a nutshell, I’m glad that I was able to dust off luring, and take advantage of body cues/pressure, to produce a serviceable stand for the upcoming trial in a short amount of time.
I’ve been on the busy side lately, with opening our second location in uptown Toronto on Avenue Road and Lawrence, getting our online dog training school, Treatpouch.com, off the ground, and attending ClickerExpo in Nashville… oh while I was doing that I also sat for the CPDT-KA examination in March (results pending). But all that is past now and things are settling nicely, so I’ve decided to enter a Rally Obedience trial scheduled over a long weekend in May (perfect, since we close the school over long weekends!)
Now the world knows, so I have willingly put a lot of social pressure on myself!!! Nothing like a little negative reinforcement for motivation!!!
I like being methodical about my training, so by my count, I have approximately 14 available afternoons for getting Petey ready for the trial. So I’m putting together my training plans of all the behaviors I need fluent and on-cue, and what criteria elements I plan to introduce to try to proof the behaviours as best as possible.
Before starting training, I decided to take advantage of Pavlov and I am in the process of conditioning both a special collar for Petey, and a special article of clothing for me. I won the collar at a raffle at Whattapup’s opening party. It’s made by The Hydrant, which is a Toronto-based collar/leash manufacturer. For me, I bought an inexpensive zip-up vest from Mountain Equipment Co-op to use as a poor-man’s training vest. I’ve just been putting on the collar, and putting on the vest, and feeding or training Petey.
Petey’s working collar by The Hydrant
The first “unofficial” training day was on Friday evening when I took Petey to Whattapup’s training hall, as Mirkka had planned to do some training with our fellow trainer-friend Nancy after classes had ended for the night. Check – in a new indoor environment, with dogs milling about and even wrestling, he was focused and worked just as well as when at When Hounds Fly.
This evening was the first “official” training day where I worked on three behaviours primarily.
Front – Just getting it reasonably straight and reasonably close, with a finger point to crotch as the cue
Finish Left – Just getting it reasonably straight and tight with a verbal cue plus either the shoulder lean or left hand swing
Heel – Working on building duration and around and over various articles (I scattered treats on the floor and left novel items around)
So far so good! I look forward to blogging more in this mini-series all the way up to the trial itself.
After slacking off for two weeks while on holidays (When Hounds Fly was closed, and I also slacked off on Petey’s training) I’m back at it and yesterday I taught Petey a new behavior – “Around” – which is just to go out and go around an object, either left or right, based on how I send him out. The whole exercise took approximately 20 minutes (of course, broken up into many short, high intensity sessions).
Here are some comments about the training plan:
1) Initially Petey has no idea what to do. We’ve been doing a lot of “go in/on” so he was just jumping on top of the bucket. That’s why I put my leg there – I was hoping he wouldn’t jump up.
2) I moved onto using “Aim for It” (described in Agility Right From the Start) – which is basically just click for action, treat for position.
Click 1 – for heading towards the object
Click 2 – for looking at the intended path
Click 3 – for moving along intended path
Click 4 – for turning head towards intended path, and then cue to mat
Subsequently, less intermediate c/t are required and very quickly, the dog understands the whole path to take as one behavior.
3) Good Agility Practices / Loopy Training
There’s no time for dead time in training! Like I mentioned in my previous post about training with high intensity, the dog is either working, or on their mat.
I use the tug toy frequently as a way to deliver the reinforcer, and transport the dog back to their mat – at which point, another loop in the training starts again.
When using food, it’s important to deliver the food in a way that the dog does not have to get frustrated to find it. Usually, my aim is pretty good, but you’ll see on the video there’s a bad bounce (2:11) and Petey has trouble finding it. Having to sniff/scan/search for food breaks the loop. This is inefficient training and can also cause superstitious behaviors to creep into your training.
When it’s time for a break, I send the dog to their mat.
4) The opposite direction: I didn’t include any video, but I started with Aim for It to teach the other direction.
5) Object Generalization: My goal for our first session was for Petey to go around a pylon. So I started with the Pylon on top of the bucket, then moved to a small paint can with the pylon, and then just the pylon. It was nice and easy.
What do you think of the training plan I used? Comment below if you have feedback!
I’m now a month into the Silvia Trkman course and beginning to crack open the 3rd set of bi-weekly lesson plans.
One of the new exercises I’ve been working on is the 2-on 2-off, which is where a dog learns to go onto a platform, and only have the front two paws come off. This is, as I understand it, used for coming off of obstacles like the A-Frame or Teeter so that the dog doesn’t jump off prematurely, but completely walks off the obstacle.
I started working on the 2-on 2-off, and my first session looked like this (go to the 1:08 mark)
Silvia said it was going fine but I should vary my position, so I kept on working on it, and started working on building distance and some duration. By the third session a few days later I had something like this (starts at the 1:08 mark):
Class was on hiatus for about a week so no comments or questions. So I did a couple more sessions like that. Something dawned on me after the fact though. I was creating a superstitious behavior chain of overshoot the platform and then back up on it! Woops, duh, that should be obvious right? The dog would come off the A-Frame and then back up onto it again.
So today, humbly, I went back and started working on it again. The next clip is a bit on the long side (6 minutes) so you can jump around, but now I’m only c/t if Petey finds the 2on2off position on the first attempt (jump ahead to the 2:35 minute mark):
Fortunately I didn’t get too far along the path before getting back on track.
The other thing I have been working on in this program is perchwork and hind end rotation. If you’ve seen my YouTube channel, you might know that I first taught Petey to perch and rotate for Finish a year ago. But, there’s a problem! I only taught counter clockwise, so he could not go clockwise! This course is forcing me to deal with that, so I am working on a clockwise rotation.
His clockwise rotation is still weaker than counter clockwise, but, it’s coming along nicely. I don’t have much footage of when I first started working on clockwise, but let me tell you, it was like trying to get the toilet bowl to flush the opposite direction. Counter clockwise was so heavily reinforced it was incredibly difficult to get the first movement towards the other way.
Last year I was just greedy and wanted the perfect finish fast, and I got it. But, I should have been thinking about developing Petey symmetrically, because equal awareness for left and right would be important for exercises like cik and cap for faster jumps in agility.
Cik and Cap
All these considerations – should be obvious with experience. Having no experience in serious competitive agility, they weren’t obvious to me!
I’ve always felt this way, but these little roadbumps in my training really confirmed that what I already knew. There is a reason why Mirkka teaches our Rally-O class – she has trained dogs to Competition Obedience standards (which are much higher), and why Julie teaches our Tricks class – she has choreographed, trained, and performed full Canine Freestyle routines, and why Emily teaches our Canine Good Neighbour class – two of her dogs are CGN titled dogs.
There’s no such thing as overqualified when it comes to selecting your instructors because only with experience do good training decisions become obvious.
Today during new student orientations, When Hounds Fly welcomed a new student with a 16 month old English Bulldog. Their owner had completed three levels of classes at another dog training school (a typical Toronto dog training school – mostly positive, old-fashioned lure-reward type school). She had watched a lot of our videos and was excited to come to our school and do our Foundations Skills program, even though her dog probably knows many of the behaviors taught. I was really happy to hear that, as it was clear she knew that she was coming to learn how to be a clicker trainer!
“We’re really anal here about good training. You came to the right place.” I said.
“Great, because I don’t want my dog to be confused, wondering what he’s supposed to do, yawning and stressing out anymore.” she replied.
What a brilliant observation. Being a sloppy trainer is not just detrimental to you, in terms of lack of progress. It is highly unfair to the dog. They feel stress and anxiety with poorly timed clicks, low rates of reinforcement, or confusing criteria. Being a great clicker trainer means the dog should seldom, if ever, feel stressed during training.
When you train your dog, what kinds of signs of stress do you observe? For Petey, the first sign is stress lines around his eyes and mouth. If it continues to worsen, he whines quietly while moving frantically. At its worst, he stops moving and lays down, panting and whining. Other dogs bark at their handler in frustration. Some lay down and look depressed. I knew of one that would start growling. None of these feelings are helpful as we are trying to condition good feelings about training.
In my previous post I mentioned I had just enrolled in an online distance course. The first exercise I’ve been working on is to train Petey to put four paws inside a food bowl. The instructor does not give very explicit training plans – figuring it out yourself is part of the learning process. In the below video, I have taken snapshots of the four sessions I did over three days:
In the series of four training sessions on video, I started with a US postal service box, then a black ikea box, then a cardboard box that housed my kettle, and finally the water bowl dish. In each session, Petey never showed signs of anxiety or stress. While he sometimes struggled to get his paws in the container, he knew what he was doing.
Good training means the dog is never stressed or confused. A good training plan is needed first. This four paws in a food dish exercise is a great exercise in thinking about how to shape properly by splitting criteria. It’s so easy! Start with a giant box and work your way down to progressively smaller boxes until you get to the final size you wish. Move down a size/raise criteria whenever the dog hits a certain success rate (80% typically). Box dimensions (length/width/height) are easily quantifiable, so criteria is black and white. Instead of starting with a tiny box, or a food bowl, and getting frustrated, I just spent a lot of time finding perfect size boxes. Then the training went quick!
Unfortunately, not all behaviors have criteria so easy to split and identify as the dimensions of a box. That’s the skill of a great clicker trainer – determining how to split criteria to the smallest increment, devising ingenious ways to setup the training environment so criteria is easy to identify, and ensuring the rate of reinforcement is high enough that the exercises are easy for the dog.
In my earlier videos and training sessions a year or more ago, Petey often got confused and would lay down and get stressed out. I kept on training and pushed through. From now on, if any dog I train shuts down that way, it’s time to stop training and go back to the drawing board.
Always be asking yourself – how can I make this easier for the dog?
Answer: Split Criteria Like Nesting Dolls
*Update: A mere hour after I posted this on our Facebook Page, Casey Lomonaco posted a really great comment: “I partially agree. Learning is stressful, but there is a big difference between eustress and distress.” Thank you – yes – learning is stressful, and I think during a great training session, especially when you are raising criteria, our dogs are buzzing and feeling eustress. And that is a good thing. Thank you Casey!
