Oh Behave!

In honor of National Train Your Dog Month, I’ll be posting as many fun and easy training tips as I can throughout January. Welcome to the inaugural post.

“Sammy pays attention to me when we’re inside, but as soon as we go outside, he’s all over the place. He acts like I don’t even exist.”

Although this may sound like a lover’s complaint, it isn’t. It’s something many dog guardians say as they lament the fact that outdoors, it’s difficult to get their dogs’ attention.

This makes perfect sense from Sammy’s point of view. Dogs by nature are extremely impulsive creatures. Many dogs are very inquisitive. Puppies, adolescents and young adult dogs love to explore and investigate and are notoriously easy to distract. Home is a familiar place filled with sights, smells, sounds and people the dogs encounter every day and know well. As environments go, home isn’t very distracting to dogs — that’s why training at home is the best and easiest place to begin teaching dogs new behaviors. Confined to a familiar location with few to no distractions, most dogs pay great attention to their people.

Step outdoors and it’s a different story. Just think of all the wonderful stuff there is out there to grab a dog’s attention! Bushes and hydrants, trees and sidewalks, trails and beaches are all filled with exciting things and scents to sniff out, mark, roll in or dig at. Birds, squirrels, gophers and other wild creatures beg to be chased. Humans roam around exclaiming over Sammy’s cuteness and wanting (naturally!) to pet and coo over him. Other humans carry delectable edibles about or have the nerve to eat full meals in sidewalk cafes right in front of Sammy. Dogs galore pass by or frolic off leash inviting Sammy to join in the fun.

All of that spells distraction with a capital D. The world outside your front door is crammed with one amazing distraction after another as far as Sammy’s concerned. Whenever you’re outside, you’re competing with everything else that’s going on for your dog’s attention. As much as our dogs love us, when they’re out in the world they’re bombarded with enticing things that cry out for investigation. Given that dogs are so impulsive, those things often claim dogs’ attention immediately.

Fortunately you can easily click your way to getting better attention from your dog outdoors and in other distracting places. By rewarding your dog for paying attention to you outside and around distractions, you teach him that focusing on you is fabulous for him no matter where you are. The more you reward him for attending to you outdoors, the more he will repeat the behavior.

Like training any other behavior, you need to train better attention and focus gradually and incrementally, making sure to reward your dog at every step of the way. When training outdoors, use treats your dog loves, instead of treats he just likes. Why? Sniffing and digging and investigating and playing outside are activities that are highly rewarding to your dog. If you want him to come away from butterflies, pinecones and other dogs to check in with you, make it worth his while to do so. As rewards go, kibble, a hard dog biscuit and/or praise don’t even come close to a dog’s delight when playing with other dogs or sniffing a gopher hole. However, rewarding your dog with spectacular yummies for paying attention to you around distractions makes that behavior highly rewarding to him and means he’s much more likely to repeat that behavior.

I especially like using the clicker for this training because it enables you to mark precise behavior the moment your dog does it, and because dogs can usually hear the clicker in noisy places and at a distance.

If your dog is clicker trained, try this easy exercise. Take him outside on leash to a familiar spot that’s more distracting than your home. Your yard or the sidewalk/street in front of your home are good places to start. Take your clicker and some really yummy treats your dog loves. Doing this training when your dog is hungry will make him more motivated to play the training game.

Stay in one spot the first time you try this and observe your dog closely. The moment he turns his head in your direction, click and then treat. Keep clicking and treating every time he turns his head towards you. Once he figures out that the head turn is earning the reward, he’ll do it more often.

With consistent training, head turns will become deliberate looks at you and later, your dog will most likely begin approaching you to claim the reward for his hard work. That’s progress! Click and treat those behaviors when they occur. They show that your dog is focusing on you more intently.

When distractions like cyclists, other dogs or people pass by, reward the heck out of head turns, looks at you or approaches towards you. Give him lots of treats and praise for focusing on you around distractions. That’s hard work for a dog! You can prompt him to look at you as distractions approach by saying his name in a happy upbeat voice, making kissy noises or doing lots of jolly talk.

Keep training sessions short — about 3-5 minutes at a time — and train in different outdoor locations. Gradually increase the distraction levels so your dog doesn’t get frustrated and doesn’t give up on training. When you first try the exercise off-leash, practice in a familiar spot at an off-peak low activity time.

A wonderful recipe for teaching your dog to respond to you outdoors is a combination of the above exercises, training a strong recall and “leave it” behavior. When your dog is an expert at paying attention and responding to you outdoors, remember to reward him randomly for doing so. Random rewards will maintain a learned behavior and ensure that it doesn’t disappear.

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.