Tag Archives: dog training

03/27/11

7 Tips for Improving Your Dog Recall

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

 

One of Paul McGreevy’s training insights was his list of “7 tips for improving your dog recall”.  My notes detail his list as the below, however I may have used my own words to describe some of his tips!

    1. Reward continuously until your pup is skeletally mature
    2. Reward intermittently after your pup is skeletally mature
    3. If dog doesn’t want to come back, increase the reward
      One of the focuses of McGreevy’s overall series was to reward with what the dog wants and likes, not what you think it should want and like.  Dogs have personal tastes and they need to be rewarded with what they want – because otherwise the reward runs the risk of not actually serving as reinforcement (i.e. something that increases the likelihood of the behaviour occurring).

Clover recalling to me and waiting for her reward.

    1. Use the best ever jackpots
      Coming back should be highly rewarded, and including jackpots in your reward schedule is a good practice to secure a reliable recall.
    2. Run backwards when dog approaches
      As we know, dogs like to chase things, and dogs like fun.  In this way, running backwards is a fun game to the dog, and also changes things up, making the recall process more exciting.
    3. Use release command
      This is a good tip that is perhaps under-emphasised.  Dogs need to know when they need to come back, and then when they’re free to do their own thing. If they are confused about this, then there is a risk of tarnishing the recall.

Clover, having received a release command, sets off.

  1. Use the premack principle
    The premack principle is basically that behaviours that the dog does not want to do can be reinforced by behaviours the dog does want to do.  That is, you can use what your dog wants to do as rewards.  So if your dog wants to run, jump, swim, etc, you can recall your dog and then reward him by sending him to run, jump, swim, etc.

A blurry Clover recalls

Though these do provide food for thought, I am not sure if I would put these as the top 7 most important things for improving a recall. I also do not think that this list suits the lay-person, the casual dog owner.  Considering these suggestions, and my past experience, I am pleased to announce my very first guest post at AllYouNeedIsLists.com.  This post covers my 7 tips for improving your dog recall, written for the dog-owner and not the dog-enthusiast.

 

Further reading: Seven Steps to Off-Leash Reliability

 

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

01/9/11

Paucity in Dog Science

I’ve always loved the quote, “If you put two dog trainers in a room, the only thing they will agree upon is that the third dog trainer is wrong.” Any issue in the dog world is like this: Vaccinations, feeding dogs, desexing, dog-dog interactions… Anything that involves dogs almost undoubtedly also involves some conflicting ideas.

In my opinion, these conflicts are caused by the paucity in scientific literature on dogs. There is a lot of material out there about dogs, but not a lot of it has been studied scientifically. If dogs were studied in this way, maybe we would have less conflict and more solid answers on the right things to be doing with our animals.

So why aren’t we researching dogs? Continue reading →

01/5/11

Mini-Jackpotting

I’ve always been somewhat sceptical on the concept of jackpotting.  I don’t know why it has never sat well with me – it just seems a bit much to comprehend that dogs can have an understanding of a degree of success.

That being said, my experience does indicate some benefits in jackpotting.  I guess the best description of what I do is ‘mini-jackpotting’.This is what I use when free shaping behaviours, and I reward ‘more successful’ attempts with more food.

Over the last couple of days, I have been training scent identification and indication.  The process was very slow, until I started mini-jackpotting. In this example, my scent was a teabag and I wanted my dog to scratch/dig at the teabag.

Over the session, I was rewarded different interactions in different ways.  My dog would be rewarded with one piece of kibble if the looked at or moved towards the teabag.  I rewarded touching the object with a paw with numerous bits (about 5 pieces). An actual scratch or dig with about 10 pieces.

My dog was very slow at first, but mini-jackpotting seemed to very much speed up the learning process.  There are several reasons that this may be the case…

  1. I read once that dogs understand the time of a reward more than the quantity of the reward… i.e. Dogs find it more rewarding to be given 5 treats in a row, one after the other, rather than being given a handful of 5 treats.  So, dogs find a long reward more rewarding. (Unfortunately I don’t recall the source of this suggestion.)  As it takes more time to eat numerous treats, perhaps the dog understands this as more rewarding.
  2. Another approach on the time front is that when the dog is eating numerous treats, they are actually having time to think. Perhaps when I reward many-treats at once, the dog has more of an opportunity to think through and the improvements I see towards my target behaviour are actually from this thinking time, rather than the reward itself.
  3. The dog might actually understand that if they do x they get more treats than if they do y!

This is the most thought I’ve ever given to ‘mini jackpotting’, and I haven’t been very logical in its implementation.  If this system occurred by accident or subconscious desire to jackpot, I am unsure.  However, I have found it to be quite successful and I would be interested to see if anyone has had similar success.

Further reading: Schedules of Reinforcement