Oops, guess who's late with the weekly blog again? I'm doing this to mostly keep myself on track and I can already see where I've gone way, way off. I'm all for flexible training plans, but I want to use a weekly blog to recap, analyse and plan ahead for the following week.
I think I'm going to relegate the vital 'settle' until our foster dog has gone home. This is the behaviour that I think will make the most positive impact. He gets himself stressed at class when he's not being used to demo things, so it'll useful for him to be able to learn to chill out. Until then, I'm just going to use management. If I have to bring him with me, I'll set up a crate in the car for when he's not being used. It's already become a bit of a habit, so I need to break that where possible and not bring him to class again until he has a history of being able to settle in less distracting environments.
The reason I want to do it when Bonita has found her forever home is because I will be able to do it more in other parts of the house. She's quite a greedy pup, and I think knowing he had potential competition for treats would make it harder for him to relax. I'm going to do it after a walk, keeping his lead on (putting it on just for the settle will excite him and make it harder) and working on it while I'm watching tv or reading a book. I intend to do a plan for that and work on it every day at least once, maybe more. He's very good at relaxing (he's snoring right now) but what he's not good at is chilling out in the presence of potential rewards. I'm putting the foundations in now, when he's snoozing on the bed with me while I work, I'll pop a tasty treat between his paws when he's relaxed and not expecting it. I keep a packet of Bob & Lush venison livers on the laptop (the things I do for my dog!) so we can practice this very easily during the day.
The good news for his training, is that his new food arrived. Bob & Lush duck kibble is something he'll actually work for, hurrah! That's going to make recall training much easier. Stage one will be putting his daily food in my treat bag at the beginning of the day, and then randomly blowing the whistle and giving him a handful. This is going to eventually end up with a consequence for ignoring the whistle (he'll lose some of his food) but for that to be fair he needs a solid understanding of what's expected of him.
I often think people are unfair when they teach a recall with positive reinforcement. It's not enough to just teach the dog the idea 'come here and get a reward', because sometimes the dog will think 'oh I've got a reward thanks, I'll be there in a bit'. The dog isn't being disobedient, any more so than I am when I say 'no thanks, I've just had a cup of tea', they haven't been taught the rules properly. You either need to practice relentlessly so it's an automatic response. The dog's hurtling back towards you before he's even thought about what's happening! You can also add in recall from distractions, where you manage the distraction so once the dog has been called it becomes unavailable, or you can teach the dog that you might just have something wonderful, and if he doesn't come right now he'll lose it forever. It just isn't fair to introduce consequences without the underpinning foundation of 'I have something yummy, the quicker you get here the better it's going to be'. Once the dog knows that, then you can start adding 'oh and by the way, that means every time instantly'.
The other thing I want to work on, hence the title of the blog, is his stimulus control. Pig is a dog who, for 8 years understood all cues (sit, down, paw, beg) to mean the same thing: guess what I want, and there's a treat in it for you if you work it out. Actually teaching him 'no you don't have to work it out, just listen to the word I use' is quite tricky. He just figured those weird human noises are largely irrelevant.
Fellow humans, if you find yourself repeating cues, you need to question what your dog understands. If you say sit and your dog lies down, or you say sit and your dog stands staring at you for a few seconds before sitting, then your dog is guessing. Sometimes he'll get it right, sometimes he won't. It's our job to teach them what we want them to do, not their job to figure it out like a murder mystery novel.
So, that's the plan for next week: foundations for a solid recall, and stimulus control on sit, down and paws up.
No comments:
Post a Comment