Tag Archives: dog training

04/14/12

Messages for Dog Trainers from Ian Dunbar

This post is part of the series in response to Dunbar’s 2012 Australian seminars. See index.

There were a few gems of advice throughout the seminar on things dog trainers should acknowledge and do when working with clients.  They can be summarized as:

 

  • When you’re working with an owner, don’t get slugged down with data transfer, explaining things, and ‘telling’.  Don’t waste good dog training time talking about dog training, instead: Do some dog training!
     
  • Use and promote the resources on DogStarDaily (especially Before You Get Your Puppy and After You Get Your Puppy).
     
  • The ‘best’ method for dog training is normally the quickest, easiest, and most effective for a pet owner.  (Explaining learning theory is normally not quick, easy, or effective.)
     
  • The 6 Es of dog training: Easy, Efficient, Effective, Enjoyable, Efficacious (do its job but not produce side effects), Expedient (techniques should be suitable for pet owners).
     
  • Use games.  Games are fun, they motivate everyone (the dog, the owner, spectators, and the trainer).  They allow a way for you to quantify a dog’s performance without the ‘pressure’ of performing, and owners often comply more with games than standard instructions.  (Owners will do almost anything for a ribbon!)
     
  • Remember that the dog owner has zero years of experience and none of your dog training skills.
     
  • To be successful in dog training, you need to be a people person – especially in order to motivate people to do what you ask.
     
  • Start taking stats on dog training – and use your stats in marketing and use them to motivate clients (it shows that their dogs are doing better!).
     
  • Use ‘the Bozo Game’ to help you practice correct responses.  The Bozo Game entails getting your dog training buddies together, and your goal is to create appropriate responses that keep the owner on side, despite the ‘bozo-y’ things they are saying.  For example, “I rub my dog’s nose in it’s mess when it poos inside.” or “I can’t walk my dog unless I put it on a prong collar”.  Your job is to respond in a way that means you don’t lose your client!  (And the implications of that is, potentially, they’ll use a trainer that is less refined as you, and the dog won’t improve, and the dog may end up being euthanised.)  Answers to these statements could be, “It must makes heaps of mess when you rub the dog poo into the carpet! I’ve got a cleaner way for you to housetrain your dog.” or “After attending my classes, you might be able to find other ways to walk your dog.”  If you come up with an inappropriate response (e.g. “You’re so cruel to your dog!” and “You’re an idiot!”) then you have ‘lost the dog’ and lost the game.
     

 

03/15/12

Puppy Classes (Dunbar)

This post is part of the series in response to Dunbar’s 2012 Australian seminars. See index.

Dunbar-style puppy classes aim to teach puppies bite inhibition, allow one (of many) venues for human socialisation, and teach owners to control their dog off leash.  They should be conducted offleash, inside on hard (sanitisable) floors, and with big and little dogs in the one class.

 

Dobermann puppies playing together offleash

These dobermanns are playing offleash – an important learning experience for them and their owners.

Bite inhibition

By puppies playing with one another, they are learning rules for dog-dog interactions and also the appropriate force of bite while playing.

 

Socialisation

Puppy classes only form part of the socialisation picture.  While socialisation happens in puppy classes, it is too little too late.  There is a lot of work the owner needs to do before puppy class, and puppy class won’t make up for undersocialisation.

 

Control Offleash

Often the lead can become a ‘crutch’ for dog owners, and they cannot get the behaviours they want without this level of control. By training off leash from the outset, the puppy and owner learns to work with distractions and use them to their advantage. Our control needs to be independent of a collar and lead.

 

Dunbar is often credited as the father of puppy classes, but he has become concerned about how puppy classes are currently run.  Particularly, most puppy classes are on lead, and most puppy classes use too much food and never phase the lure.  To Dunbar, 10 minutes of offleash play is simply not good enough for a puppy class.  Puppies need to learn to remove themselves from play, and humans need to learn how to engage in dog play and make dog-dog play a valuable reinforcer.

Of course, we use food to train puppies, but the food should be faded immediately.  Furthermore, off leash behaviour will allow an experience trainer to note puppies with problems and start to address them sooner-rather-than-later.

Dunbar stressed that puppy classes are only part of the socialisation picture. The next post will talk about what puppy buyers should be doing immediately on bringing a puppy home.

12/21/11

McGreevy: General Dog Training Thoughts

This post is part of the McGreevy seminar series. Click here for the index.

 

McGreevy described animal training as “a bit of an art and a bit of a science”. ‘Training’ animals means changing the frequency to which animals show certain behaviours. Learning theory is a universal language that clarifies the nature of training, explaining what will work and will not work, and its general principles apply regardless of the species being trained.

Training often seeks to establish connections between two or more events, and does so by using operant conditioning (i.e. rewards and punishments) and classical conditioning, and often these two work together.  ‘Conditioning’ is any relatively permanent response that occurs as a result of exercise (that is, any responses formed by maturation or debility are not from conditioning).

Trainers often have exquisite timing, and have the ability to self reflect on their progress.

 

 

Photos © Ruthless Photos

“Life coaches”

McGreevy prefers to use the term ‘life coach’ to describe the relationship between a dog and a person.  Life coaches have opportunities for the dog to have success, but also rules.  (The concept of ‘alpha’ asks for people to adopt an unrealistic, pseudo dog role that is not very useful for dog training.)  How dogs and people interact is relevant to the dog’s success.  The handler of a dog needs to be relevant to the dog – a boring or passive life coach is irrelevant for the dog, and the dog will not work.  Dogs will form a bond with their owners, and a trust, but this trust is not generalisable to all situations or to different people.

‘Trust’, itself, is an interesting concept.  It is difficult to measure, and is built on consistency.  During training, trust is built be trainers being caregivers and companions rather than ‘leaders’ or ‘dominant’.

Generally in dog training, we seek dogs that will respond to cues (e.g. the word ‘sit’) with appropriate behaviours.  It is an ongoing process that requires maintenance in many contexts and environments.

 

Dog social order

Dogs with one another have a social order, but it’s not so much a hierarchy. Dog social order is built on difference, not dominance.  This ‘difference’ is a different desire for different resources, meaning some dogs are more inclined to seek some resources than others.  The ideas of social order shouldn’t be ‘thrown out’ with dominance theory.  In short, dogs have evolved to compete with one another.  Excellent coaches tap into the resources that dogs compete over, and use them in training (as rewards).

 

This concludes our section on training dogs, but we will continue to investigate more McGreevy topics in posts to come.

 

In the meantime, I wonder:

What do you think are the ‘art’ and the ‘science’ bits of dog training?

How does your self-reflection as a trainer go?

How would you measure trust with your dogs?

 

This post is part of the McGreevy seminar series. Click here for the index.

12/9/11

McGreevy on Classical Conditioning

This post is part of the McGreevy seminar series. Click here for the index.

 

This is a short summary on Classical Conditioning, as mentioned at Paul McGreevy’s recent seminar.  For a more inclusive approach, please see this post from the Reactive Champion blog or Roger Abrantes’ post on “Unveiling the myth of reinforcers and punishers“.

Classical conditioning is also called Pavlovian conditioning.  In classical conditioning, an association is made between two things.  That is, when I hear the letterbox clang, I associate this with getting mail.  When I walk past a bakery, I associate the smell with the taste of bread.  When I see dark grey clouds, I think about the forthcoming rain.  Sounds, colours, smells, pretty much anything, can be associated with other things.

Puppies are more likely to experience novel events and form strong associations. (Picture courtesy of Yorke Peninsula Puppy Rescue.)

Simply, classical conditioning makes the world predictable with “X goes with Y”, where ‘X’ could be anything and ‘Y’ could be anything else.

The more closely X is followed by Y, the more likely the association will be made.

When an animal makes an association (i.e. “X goes with Y”), and it forms an involuntary response, it is has said to be classically conditioned.  Often, trainers feed dog-reactive-dogs in the presence of other dogs in order to have them associate ‘dogs with food’ and, involuntarily, feel more comfortable in the presence of other dogs.

When this association is novel, then the association is more rapidly acquired because there are no ‘undoings’ to be done.  For dogs, puppies that are attacked by a particular breed may associate that breed (appearance, smell, colouration, body language) with being attacked, and have a fearful response as a result of this classical conditioning.  A single bad experience, if novel enough, can elicit a fearful response for life (this is also true of operant conditioning).

Sometimes, dogs may make associations based on slight cues in the environment.  This can lead to them responding in ways that can confuse human counterparts.  Indeed, during any training and any interactions, classical conditioning may occur.  Some are simple: The dog may associate the car with fun.  Some are more complex: The dog associates your brother with thunderstorms, because that was the context on first meeting.

McGreevy provided some insights into other animals and the classical conditioning that is typical in their species.  He described how stallions used at stud often associate particular bridle gear with sex, and so become aroused and otherwise agitated when that bridle gear is brought out.  (My stud dog associates ‘new little wirey dog’ in the house with sex, which is not always great when it’s actually a male foster dog!)  McGreevy also mentioned how dairy cows associate the sound of the vacuum with releasing milk, and sometimes release milk prematurely upon hearing that sound.

Further reading: Ian Dunbar on Classical Conditioning 

 

This post is part of the McGreevy seminar series. Click here for the index.