Oh Behave!

The other day I told the kids in my humane education class that they’re not just training shelter dogs, they’re saving lives. At first blush, that may sound like an outlandish claim. On closer examination, it really is true.

One of the primary reasons dogs are relinquished to shelters is due to behavioral issues that could easily have been prevented or curbed with positive training. Behaviors like jumping up that were seen as cute when the dog was a puppy become an annoyance when the dog becomes a bigger stronger adult. Problem behaviors are often punished making them worse, or overlooked until they become extreme and harder to modify.

Many guardians with a poorly-behaved untrained dog throw their hands in the air out of frustration. Many give up on their dogs altogether and surrender them to shelters. Once in a shelter, a dog’s future prospects are far from rosy. Given the severe pet overpopulation problem, current economic realities, and the common mentality that shelter dogs are “defective,” shelter dogs have a slim chance of adoption and a high chance of being euthanized.

However, dogs that are well-trained in polite manners have a much greater chance of staying in their homes. The same is true for dogs whose undesirable behaviors have been modified with positive reward-based training.

The best strategy for dogs and their guardians is a positive proactive one. If you have a newly adopted puppy or adult dog, start him off on the right paw by training him to behave in ways that you like. Dogs are creatures of habit. It’s far easier to teach a dog to behave politely from the outset of your lives together than to correct bad habits in full bloom. Even if your dog hasn’t had much or any training it’s never too late to start.

If you suspect your dog has or may be developing problem behavior, address it as soon as you can through positive training. Fearful or aggressive behaviors most often arise from underlying fear and/or stress and/or anxiety. If left unchecked or if punished, the dog’s fears/stress/anxiety worsen and so does the resultant behavior. This poses a danger for humans interacting with the dog, and ultimately the dog himself who may well find himself in a shelter or at the wrong end of a needle.

By training shelter dogs, the kids in my humane education class are doing so much more than training. They’re giving the dogs a leg up on adoption, improving their chances of staying in their eventual new homes, and giving the dogs a real second chance at a happy life, one click at a time.

Being proactive about your dog’s training and behavior may feel like a pain in our overly-busy lives. But a proactive approach is an investment that yields fabulous long-term results. A few minutes of positive training every day improves your dog’s quality of life, his happiness and your own, and may make all the difference between a future without your dog and forever future for you and him, together. When you think of it that way, training’s more than worth the effort.

We recently returned to Willowside Ranch for Vinnie’s first herding lesson. He started panting and pacing in the car as soon as we turned off of Highway 1 to Pescadero. The closer we got to the ranch, the more excited he got. By the time we parked the car, he was emitting short quiet whines and scratching at the window. I was certain he knew exactly where we were – the glorious place where he gets to herd sheep.

My husband gamely agreed to be the handler – the human who goes into the pen with dog, sheep and herding trainer. I watched, curious about how you train a herding dog to do his thing under human direction.

The first instruction from Marian Pott, the herding trainer, was that Vinnie had to sit before he got to herd. No way, I thought. He was too worked up. The sheep were too enticing. As we’d waited our turn to herd, Vin had been rearing up on his leash, barking, whining in a warble, and unable to focus on us or keep still. I’d never seen him in such a state.

Now that he was in the pen with the sheep, he was even more amped. The sheep were so close. Vinnie couldn’t take his eyes off them. My husband asked Vin, then kept stepping in front of him to block him from the sheep. It took a few minutes, but the unbelievable happened. Vinnie sat! The immediate reward? He got to herd!

My husband kept repeating the exercise and each time he requested a sit, it took VInnie a little less time to do so. Minutes later, not only did Vinnie sit, he stayed while my husband backed away from him and moved towards the sheep.

Ahh, the power of Premack, I thought. For non-dog geeks, Premack’s Principle, a powerful training strategy, states that more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors. In plain language, a behavior your dog really enjoys doing can be used to reinforce a behavior he’s less inclined to do. In Vinnie’s case, herding — an activity he adores — was used to reward and reinforce the sits and stays in the sheep pen. Once he was rewarded with herding time for sitting in the pen — something he was very uninclined to do — it was easier for him sit again, and even easier the next time, and so on.

Premack applies to humans too. People use it all the time without realizing it. Parents tell kids they must eat their veggies (something the kids are less inclined to do) before they get to eat dessert (something the kids are happy to do). It’s Premack at work when kids have to clean their rooms before they can watch TV. People motivate themselves to do things they’d rather not do using the same approach, like exercising 4 times a week for the reward of eating ice cream on the weekend.

There are abundant daily opportunities to use the veggies-before-dessert approach with your dog. Ask your dog to sit before you offer a toy to play tug, or to lie down before you toss a Frisbee, or before you take her for a walk. Every day presents plenty of these potential training moments. Take advantage of them — start Premacking ‘em! It’s great practice for doggy manners, and helps train and maintain doggy impulse control.
Not only that, more and more your dog will offer desirable behaviors when she wants something – the canine equivalent of saying please.

With a wee bit of time and effort on your part, “Premacking it” yields lovely behavioral results. And surely that’s preferable to jumping up, nipping, barking or whining for attention, play and other good stuff!

Several times a week, I drive from San Francisco to Oakland to teach dog training in an exciting pilot program called Teaching Love and Compassion (TLC). My human students are fourteen Grade 8 students, and their students are seven shelter dogs from the East Bay SPCA in Oakland. The first of its kind in Northern California, TLC is a humane education program designed to teach kids love and compassion through a combination of classroom material and hands-on positive reinforcement dog training. The idea is that the children learn and practice empathy, compassion, non-violence, love and respect through their relationships with the dogs.

The drive is usually a nerve-wracking slog over the Bay Bridge and through rush hour traffic, and I’m often frazzled by the time I get there. But at the end of each training class I’m in another mood entirely. I hardly notice the drive or traffic on the way home. I can’t stop thinking about the successes of the day, the smiles on the children’s faces, and the kids’ terrific patience and kindness towards their dogs.

Sometimes it’s not clear who’s teaching whom. We’re now halfway through the program and already, these kids have impressed and reminded me of valuable lessons for dog training. . . and life.

Peluchin sits for his TLC Trainer

Some of the TLC dogs had a hard time adjusting to the change in routine, and relaxing around all the new people and dogs in class. I explained to the kids that helping dogs feel comfortable, while perhaps not as “sexy” as teaching one to roll over, is part of dog training too. Inside, I worried endlessly that certain dogs wouldn’t relax enough to train, and that the kids they were assigned to would walk away from the program feeling like failures, and/or that positive training was bunk.

I switched to yummier treats, put down comfy mats, set up visual barriers, and asked the kids to work on easy exercises. Happily, one week into the program all the dogs grew comfortable enough to train. My training interventions aside, the kids deserve enormous credit. Unlike many adults, none of my TLC students got upset with the dogs. No one called his/her dog stupid, stubborn or a dud. No one wanted to quit. The kids worked patiently with their dogs, talking to them softly, and gamely trying all my suggestions. These kids who are brand new to dog training have already moved leaps and bounds beyond many adult-dog guardians.

The kids notice and delight in the smallest signs of progress in their dogs; they aren’t stingy with rewards; and they’re infinitely patient with their dogs. We’ve talked a lot about how important it is to have patience when training dogs. But like so many things in life, it’s one thing to discuss patience and another thing to practice it.

Patience is a necessary virtue when it comes to dog training whether you’re teaching a dog to come when called, working to help a dog overcome a fear, or trying to quiet the bark fest that ensues when the doorbell rings. Depending on the dog’s training history (or lack thereof); history of reinforcement for a “problem” behavior; and how easy or hard it is to motivate the dog, carrying a training plan through from start to finish sometimes takes a L-O-N-G time. How long is always difficult to say. That depends a great deal on the patience, diligence and consistency of the human trainers.

Impatience arises in large part from unrealistic expectations about dogs and the learning process. People expect dogs to nail new skills immediately and to execute those skills perfectly under any and all circumstances. Unlike many adults, the TLC kids are still immersed in learning new things. I’d bet that’s why they understand and appreciate that mastering a new skill takes lots of time and practice, and approach dog training with that in mind. If you’ve ever taken salsa dancing lessons, learned to speak another language, or to play a musical instrument, you know what I mean.You don’t learn all at once, you learn in stages – how to do easy steps, then increasingly harder ones, how to put them together into whole dance routines, and how to perform them fluidly and gracefully.

We should approach dog training the same way – patiently and in small manageable steps. First train the dog to do a behavior reliably in environments with few to no distractions before asking (and expecting) the dog to do the behavior in increasingly challenging contexts. If your dog comes when called from anywhere inside the house, that’s a wonderful thing. She’ll still need lots and lots of practice and incremental training to come when you call her outside where other dogs, pigeons and squirrels are cavorting.

It’s often necessary to break a behavior into pieces that the dog can master before putting the whole behavior together. Training a dog to lie down is one example. If you can’t lure the dog all the way into a down position, break it into baby steps. Reward the dog for putting his nose on the floor. When he’s getting that right at least 80% of the time, reward him for putting his nose on the floor and bending the front elbows, then for moving his chest closer the floor, and so on, until he’s lying all the way down.

Training in this manner sets dogs up for success at every step of the way, boosts their confidence, and avoids frustration – for dogs and their humans. If you’re getting frustrated with training, do what my students do. Take a break and have some doggy play or cuddle time. Go back to training later when you’re both refreshed and re-energized. You’ll both have a lot more fun that way, and after all, dog training should be loads of fun.

We could all learn a thing or two from my TLC students. I’ll share more in upcoming posts.