There is a totally awesome moment when somehow you convey to the dog what you want and then for reasons of his own, the dog decides in his turn that he wants to work for you. Together you manage to acheive something totally new.
I remember the first time I taught a dog anything. It sounds silly now, but I taught Auburn to stand on our mini trampoline. Now Woozle and even Daisy wouldn't need to be taught this; I would just ask and they would just do it. Auburn was a little spooked however. By a dint of coaxing and bribery I managed to get her up there and then for some reason she stopped worrying about it and would do it whenever I asked. I think I was about 10 and I fancied myself some sort of circus trainer.
The next feat of skill came a year or two later. I managed to create a sort of travois for Fawn. To this day I don't remember how I did it, but somehow I got her to both accept it and to drag that thing all over the neighborhood for me. And I used it too. We would drag home all sorts of interesting junk. I also remember my brief foray with an actual cart. I built it with wheels salvaged off of a really old red wagon. It was actually quite sturdy and I used it for various stuff for a long time afterward, but for Fawn it failed miserably. It was either the noise or the shafts themselves, but she wanted nothing to do with it.
By the time Britte came around, I was determined to be a "real" dog trainer. I taught her the basics of sit, down, and stay which was thrilling. Come and heel however totally eluded me. I'd read plenty of books about it, but it wouldn't work for me. I also never got that sense of teamwork I had always been trying to find. So, I mostly gave up for a while. Then one day I decided to go exploring in those forbidden and dangerous paths that all of my books had warned me about...
Actually I think I was probably standing in the kitchen eating something. Britte came over and looked sooo hopeful. So I said, "Sit". She sat and I tossed her a piece. Yeah, I was teaching her that begging gets results, but her response was also FAST and there was a different kind of connection at that moment. For that one moment we both wanted almost the same thing and a form of teamwork was born. It was intoxicating. I discarded most of those doom and gloom prophecies of having a dog that "only works when she's hungry" on the spot. I didn't really care that she was doing it for the food and not merely because "she loved me." Britte was working with me and not against me.
I never managed to successfully reenter the world of obedience with Britte. I was never able to mentally get past one yank and crank indoctrination. I had to be "serious" for training "serious commands." We did discover the trick world, though. It had no such bad associations for either of us, was really fun, and dramatically improved our relationship.
A few nights ago I was walking Woozle on a fenced playground. There is a relatively busy road that runs just on the other side of the fence. Even at about eleven o'clock at night there was a significant amount of traffic. Probably an average of one car would appear every 5 seconds...
Woozle gets very excited by cars. Walking on the normal sidewalk is really way too much for him to handle. If I don't notice the car in time, he will fixate on it and then lunge; of course at that point all I can do is hold him back and save him from himself. Whenever I see one coming in the distance I will try to get him to sit and focus on me. This does often work, but as the car approaches his sit will get really bouncy and he will keep flipping his head around, just straddling that line of control and out-of-control. We didn't visit this playground specifically to deal with the car issue, (mostly just exercise and a quiet, new place to explore where we won't disturb anyone) but I quickly see that it will come up.
He was wearing a 20' long line and a flat collar, so I didn't have much "precision control" and we get too close and he lunged a couple of times. So we regrouped a little and stop about 20 yards from the fence/cars. He was still out at the end of the line watching them, not fixated just yet (I'm also a slow learner if you can't tell...), but alert. Then, for whatever reasons he pointedly turned his back on the cars, trotted back to me, sat squarely in front and looked at me.
"So... This is the drill, right? There are cars. I sit. I watch you... Where are the treats?"
What a good boy!! I was so pleased I could barely contain myself. I've never had a dog actively participate in exerting that kind of self-control before, especially one with impulses as strong as Woozle's.
What do I love about this dog? He may be crazy a lot of the time, but he makes it feel like a partnership.
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Showing posts with label food. Show all posts
Monday, February 27, 2012
Tuesday, February 21, 2012
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?
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?
Thursday, January 26, 2012
Food Chase
I came up with a new game several days ago. Ironically it was for Woozle, who has plenty of toy drive. I just wanted to increase his intensity with food a bit. I have gotten lazy with him and lapsed into just handing the food to him after the mark instead of making him chase it a bit. It has some advantages because he can think clearer, but he was losing the "coiled-spring" look too.
I took him out in the yard with an old heel of bread and just started tossing bread pieces in random directions. I would throw a single piece, wait for him to find it and throw another one in a different direction. It soon became obvious that he sometimes needed help because he didn't always see where it landed. He has done lots of scent pads, so he would find it relatively soon with his nose, but it wasn't really what I wanted. I added pointing at the bread too. But now he's only looking at my hands, so I added the rule that he has to look at my face before I throw the bread. We have success! His drive is up and it's focused on me.
I played around with this for a few days before I even thought of adding Daisy. Sometimes it is really hard to leave one of them in the house, so a lot of times I just fall into the trap of training Woozle while having Daisy near me and doing something relatively simple and uninvolved (like a stay) and occasionally tossing food her way so she doesn't get jealous. But just as I was once again falling into this trap I had an epiphany. "Wait a second... Daisy can do this too! Duh." The beauty of it is it is just like fetch only with food and Daisy doesn't care for toys. It also doesn't have the "bring" or "give" parts so it really would work for almost any dog with a stomach.
So I alternated throwing for each dog so there wasn't any direct competition, but having them both participating seemed to up the energy too. Before long Daisy was dancing around like a doofus. Of course she isn't as fast as him, but she's a whole lot better at following the point. Yay! We found something constructive to burn off the old girl's energy!
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