Thoughts on Training Bridges

I've been thinking about the use of intermediate objects/motions or "bridges" used in training lately. Please be kind to me, you experienced trainers out there. I am for most intents and purposes very much a newbie.

I can remember the first time (probably well over a decade ago) I saw mention of a bridge behavior. It puzzled me. A lady somewhere on this wonderful worldwide internet mentioned that she taught her dog "Paws Up" (dog puts both front paws up on an object, from a sitting position). I don't remember exactly, but I think her end goal was "Say Your Prayers." Now it seems kind of obvious to me, but at the time I couldn't conceive why you would want to train and name a behavior that wasn't either inherently interesting or useful (okay well, maybe if she had named it something cute it would have seemed more interesting to me). Of course the answer is it is nice to have a set behavior you can always fall back on for either training one behavior chain, or even more importantly for branching out and creating multiple behavior chains.

I was also flummoxed with the use of bridge objects (probably not long after the former time), when I first saw them. The first one I remember was teaching your dog to touch an object with his nose as a precursor to teaching the Send Away. The theory goes that if you use something disposable like a piece of paper or a butter tub lid you can progressively cut it down until the dog can barely see it, so he has to take your direction on the faith that it is out there somewhere. I was puzzled because at that time I hadn't wrapped my head around how useful targeting could be in many different situations. It seemed like you were again putting an awful lot of effort into something that wasn't inherently interesting. Maybe if the article I read had used targeting with feet instead of the nose, it would have made more sense.

I have been attempting to teach Woozle to pivot on his front feet and eventually probably on his back feet as well. My end goal is to teach a nice neat finish to heel this way. Yeah, I could just lure him into position, and I have done that, but it really looks kind of sloppy. Dogs don't pivot a whole lot naturally. Without teaching him first to put his front feet on a target, this move would be pretty difficult for me to teach. It also teaches him a lot of coordination at the same time. It has really cemented the value of bridges for me. Marker training is a wonderful thing, but it isn't very good at teaching strange movements. Yes, you can refine and polish the behaviors the dog gives you quite a bit, but if the dog simply never offers the behavior, you can't mark it. They do complement each other fantastically though.

Doing bridge work probably doesn't seem very interesting to family, neighbors or even yourself. It is harder to see the value in it than approaching the problem in a more head-on fashion and harder to keep at it. This experimenting I've been doing makes me very curious what the real potential of using bridge objects really is... Is it just limited by the trainer's creativity?
 
Bridge behaviors, to me, seem to be mostly limited to being an exhaustive list of simple behavior that a dog can do. These behaviors can then be recombined into longer strings of more complex behaviors. I recently heard one man's interesting opinion. He liked to put on cue every single behavior his dogs did; later he could either enhance or extinguish it. I've tried to come up with such an exhaustive list and at the moment it's maxing out at around 40, though it really depends on how much of a purist you are at defining them. It certainly isn't set in stone, but yet considering all of the things we can teach dogs to do, it really is a surprisingly low number. Relatively short strings of behaviors might also be considered bridges to longer strings of behaviors (like the "Paws Up" example above: sit and target with the front feet), but there is no obvious limit to these, so I won't think about them too hard at the moment.

Using bridge objects seems to be mostly limited to targeting. I guess theoretically you could teach a dog to target with almost any part of its body. But realistically it is usually confined to the nose tip and different variations on the feet (all feet, one specific foot, front feet, back feet, etc.).  "Shake hands" of course is no more than a simple variation on targeting with a single foot. I suppose teaching to target with the top of the nose could also be useful, especially if you are trying to teach a pushing type of behavior, like rolling a ball. You also might consider teaching dogs to grab or carry things a form of targeting with the mouth. I guess any form of interacting with the world outside of the dog's own body could conceivably be targeting. Could teaching a dog to target with other parts of it's body create very useful results?