Rusty is always teaching me lessons about training, and tonight was no different. I was reminded again just how important it is to have precision in shaping. Making a shaping exercise precise as well as understandable and motivating can be a bit of a challenge. I had to sit back and think, try again, and cheer my dog on to keep him trying as well.
It's been a while since I first trained the "say no" command, and it was my goal to have my dog shake his head in an emphatic no. Our practice petered out when his emphatic no turned out to be a snake dance with a lot of whining. We decided to try again, and tonight I was able to start applying some recently learned lessons.
The first question I should have asked was "what do I want out of training this trick, and what do I want the end result to look like?" After trying unsuccessfully to fix the problem, I finally came back to that question and actually answered it! What a thought... Here's what I came up with.
I want my dog to gain confidence and enthusiasm, and I want him to shake his head no. (No snake charming here)
The next logical question of how I was going to get there, and well, that took a little bit of thought. I needed a way to cause the large shakes of the head to happen a very high percent of the time. Rusty needed to know exactly what I wanted, and an easy way to do that behavior.
I'm training this the very same way as I did last time - using two chairs with targets at nose height. The dog touches one target, then the other, and receives a treat on the opposite target. Easy right? Well in theory yes, but when you are precision challenged when it comes to using the clicker at the right Milli-second, and providing the treat at just the right angle, it can get very interesting. I am challenged in both those areas. I know how to use a clicker, but when a half a second delay can ruin what you're doing, it's hard to get it right.
In order to give Rusty confidence about what he was suppose to do, I found that I had to click for direct hits to the targets, instead of rewarding the attempts that were slightly shy of hitting them. The more I rewarded the attempts, the more he became confused and lazy about swinging his head far enough to hit the target. My biggest challenge was not clicking a moment too soon before he really touched the target. I was anticipating his moves, and he began to anticipate the treats at the other target. I started listening for the hits, which really helps. His whiskers made noise going across the targets and sometimes he hit the chairs hard enough to make noise! Those hits were highly rewarded...there's the enthusiasm I was looking for.
Now it's just a matter of making sure he knows that those hard swings to hit the contacts is what I want, and then we'll start fading the targets...again.
The lessons I learned tonight were many, but here are the main ones.
1. ask the "what do I want out of this" and "what do I want the final product to look like" questions before you start working! Just saying that it should look like he's saying "no" and that you want him to do it on command isn't enough! The dog doesn't understand what "no" looks like. And your goals need to be more about your dog and your relationship with your dog than anything else.
2. If the behavior starts to look fuzzy ( not sure if it's quite "on") then it's probably not what you want. Take a step back and understand what you need to tell your dog in order for him to understand it. Think from his point of view, or have someone pretend they're the dog - are the clicks clear enough and precise enough?
3. Fade targets and change it slowly! Make sure the dog knows the last step before moving on. If you go to the next step and it starts to look "fuzzy" then your last step wasn't clear enough. Was your dog 80% + successful? Do you even know how successful he was? You can go through the steps quickly if your dog truly understands each step. Otherwise, you both need some practice with marking behaviors.
4. If you go too far, and the behavior isn't quite right it's "Yay! Good dog, you're still trying even though my signals are not clear enough!" More than likely, you're the one signalling this other behavior. Go back to the last step to give your dog confidence, using jack pots to tell your dog how amazing they are. Then take a break and write out that next step.
In all honesty, it's hard to remember these things. That's part of the reason I'm writing them down. Just like I said to write out that next step in your shaping exercise, sometimes it's helpful to write down exactly how you should train. Drill these things into your mind, because it certainly isn't the dog's problem that we forget the fundamental basics. It's hard to do these things when you're frustrated, because we often revert to the way we were first taught to train, whether by other people or by natural consequences.
I'm always telling my students, I'm not there to pick on them about being positive and using markers correctly, or anything else. I'm simply there to encourage them and remind them. I tell them the theories of how to train positively. But it's more than hearing it. It's learning how to do it moment by moment. I'm afraid I still need others to do this for me, and I need to make the effort to seek out those who will. We're all learning, and all growing in our training skills! The eyes watching are certainly better than the eyes doing.
Well, that's all for tonight. I hope that anyone who comes across this will be reminded what training is about, and encouraged. Remember, it's not "me or the dog" it's "love the dog, forget the trainer".
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