Why worry about training now?

Part of plan­ning and prepar­ing for a major life change is help­ing to pre­pare the oth­ers who will be affect­ed by the change.  Since I don’t have kids or a spouse I have to pre­pare my pets for the dras­tic change that mov­ing on to a boat the size of a clos­et will be for them. Many of the post will be live aboard spe­cif­ic, but not all. For instance we will work with some of the behav­iors from Con­trol Unleashed. These behav­iors will help if you are mov­ing on a boat, or just going to have your pets out in pub­lic a lot. So if you will be mov­ing to a city, a small island or even a move to the coun­try where your dog may need to work in the pres­ence of strange and unusu­al ani­mals.  (I mean seri­ous­ly have you seen cows. Talk about strange.)

What do I need to know?

The first thing you need to do is under­stand the sci­ence behind train­ing. Learn­ing The­o­ry has been stud­ied for years and uti­lized in both lab­o­ra­to­ry and real world set­tings. You will find that a lot of sites and train­ing books use the sci­en­tif­ic def­i­n­i­tions so I’ll giv­en them to you in a nutshell.

Rein­force­ment: Rein­force­ment makes a behav­ior more like­ly to occur. In sci­ence Pos­i­tive means you have added some­thing and Neg­a­tive means that you have removed some­thing. So when using Pos­i­tive Rein­force­ment you add some­thing to the sit­u­a­tion that makes the behav­ior more like­ly to occur in the future. When using Neg­a­tive Rein­force­ment you are tak­ing some­thing away that makes a behav­ior more like­ly to occur.

Exam­ples:  Giv­ing your dog a treat when­ev­er she sits is pos­i­tive rein­force­ment. You are adding food and the behav­ior is more like­ly to occur in the future. An exam­ple of neg­a­tive rein­force­ment is if you start dri­ving and don’t close the car door all the way. The annoy­ing ding­ing makes it more like­ly you will close the car door. Since clos­ing the car door takes the noise away it is neg­a­tive reinforcement.

Pun­ish­ment: Pun­ish­ment makes a behav­ior less like­ly to hap­pen in the future.  Remem­ber that pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive have no moral or eth­i­cal mean­ings in this ter­mi­nol­o­gy, it sim­ply means adding or subtracting.

Exam­ples: Spank­ing a child for throw­ing a tantrum is an exam­ple of pos­i­tive pun­ish­ment since you are adding pain to make a behav­ior less like­ly to hap­pen in the future. End­ing a pos­i­tive rein­force­ment train­ing ses­sion with your dog when the dog starts bark­ing would be neg­a­tive pun­ish­ment since it leads to less bark­ing and you are tak­ing away the oppor­tu­ni­ty to earn treat.

An Impor­tant Note: These def­i­n­i­tions are result based. If you spank a child or a dog and it does­n’t lessen the occur­rences of the behav­ior then it is not pun­ish­ment. Just like if you pet or feed a dog for com­ing when called, but the behav­ior does­n’t become more com­mon it isn’t pos­i­tive rein­force­ment.  How­ev­er remem­ber to take baby steps when train­ing a new behav­ior. Don’t treat a dog once for doing some­thing and expect her to do it constantly.

 

Getting Started

I’ve used all four quad­rants in my train­ing, but tend to get the best results with a com­bo of R+ (Pos­i­tive Rein­force­ment) and P- (Neg­a­tive Pun­ish­ment) than with oth­er meth­ods. Though horse train­ing relies heav­i­ly on R- (Neg­a­tive Rein­force­ment) and can be very effec­tive as long as the behav­iors are bro­ken down in to tiny (tiny) incre­ments. The first behav­ior that I would rec­om­mend start­ing with is tar­get­ing. Tar­get­ing is teach­ing the dog to touch some­thing with her nose. (Actu­al­ly it can be any body part, but seri­ous­ly I am not going in to all the pos­si­bil­i­ties here. )

For this exam­ple we will pre­tend that you want the dog to touch a post it with her nose.  Pick a mark­er sig­nal, it can be a click­er, a whis­tle or just a word you don’t tend to use in nor­mal every­day con­ver­sa­tion.  Hold the tar­get up and if the dog touch­es it mark and treat. If the dog does­n’t touch the post it then mark and treat for look­ing at the tar­get even if it is just a glance.

That is all it takes to start train­ing. I find dog train­ing to be a fun and fas­ci­nat­ing past time. Most of the train­ing posts in the fea­ture will include video since I find it much less awk­ward to speak and demon­strate train­ing than write about. (And thank God­dess. Writ­ing this has been a nightmare.)

Additional Resources

There are some great inter­net resources that will give you more infor­ma­tion about train­ing your pets.

Fen­zi Acad­e­my: These class­es are geared toward com­pe­ti­tion, but there are sev­er­al class­es that are great for pet peo­ple such as the shap­ing class (teach­ing behav­iors in tiny steps, is great men­tal work for a dog stuck on a boat in bad weath­er or on a pas­sage.) The Nose­work class­es (also great brain work) as well as class­es in Basic Learn­ing The­o­ry and for reac­tive and fear­ful dogs.  You can check out the Sam­ple Class to get an idea for how an inter­net dog train­ing class works. (I have tak­en sev­er­al bronze lev­el class­es and love it!)

Click­er Solu­tions: This site has a wide vari­ety of train­ing arti­cles writ­ten by a num­ber of expe­ri­enced train­ers. Some of my favorites are Gen­er­al­iza­tion, Train­ing Myths, Reli­a­bil­i­ty, though I am a train­ing geek. Here is an arti­cle on the dif­fer­ent ways you can use tar­get­ing to get behaviors.

ClickerTraining.com: The home for click­er train­ing. This site has some great arti­cles as well as a store with click­ers, treats toys and more.

Train­ing Lev­els: This site has a paid book, but also the free orig­i­nal train­ing lev­els which are a great place to start.

For book geeks here are some great options.

Con­trol Unleashed: Cre­at­ing a Focused and Con­fi­dent Dog by Leslie McDe­vitt: If you only buy one dog train­ing book get this one. Leslie cre­at­ed a great pro­gram and I haven’t met a dog that would­n’t ben­e­fit from it in some way. There is also the Con­trol Unleashed: The Pup­py Pro­gram. Basi­cal­ly all the same exer­cis­es as the orig­i­nal book, but described in terms of pup­pies instead of reac­tive dogs. (You dog does­n’t have to be reac­tive for Con­trol Unleashed.  Dogs that are dri­vey, ener­getic, lack focus or are like­ly to be exposed to new things that they have nev­er seen before will all ben­e­fit from this program.

Karen Pry­or, Get­ting Start­ed: Click­er Train­ing for Dogs Kit: A great starter kit with basic train­ing info, a click­er and some treats. If you just want to dip your toes in the water this is a good place to start.

Cul­ture Clash by Jean Don­ald­son: This book is start­ing to get a lit­tle bit of age on it, but remains a favorite of mine. This book tries to take the Dis­ney out of our rela­tion­ship with our dogs. (In techini­cal terms it strips our ten­den­cies to anthro­po­mor­phize our dogs. I love my pets, this isn’t a bad thing.)

The Oth­er End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs by Patri­cia McConnell: This is an incred­i­ble book on how humans inter­act with dogs. With infor­ma­tion on dog­gy body lan­guage and human body lan­guage this book will make you very aware of how you and oth­er inter­act with your dogs.

I could keep going on and on and may make an ama­zon store to list all the dogs books that I want to share. Maybe some cruis­ing books too.