My agility club has been teaching a tricks class over the summer, to raise funds so that we can buy more wing jumps. This week it was my turn to teach them a trick, and we worked on backing up on cue.
Dogs will gravitate towards the location where they have received their rewards. When you are training a back-up cue, this means that they need to be reinforced away from the handler, at the location where they have backed up to (or even slightly behind it). Rewarding the dog from your hand makes it hard to get more than a couple of steps of backing up, as the dog will want to come forward again to your hand to get its cookie.
Feeding from the hand is a deeply entrenched habit, and I had to remind them all multiple times to toss the cookies back to their dog after he had moved backwards. Once they had got the mechanics right, the dogs were much happier to leave their handlers and back up for their supper.
Old Lady with Labrador Syndrome
Every beginners agility class at my old club in Wellington seemed to contain an older woman with a food-obsessed Labrador. This dog learned the obstacles fairly quickly, but then really struggled to put them together in a sequence. It had an uncanny knack for tripping up its handler, which was scary as we trained in an indoor venue with unforgiving concrete pillars for people to crash into.
I dubbed this Old Lady with Labrador Syndrome (OLLS for short). I eventually figured out the cause of it when I had one in my class. It all comes down to the placement and timing of rewards – as do many of the problems that I face in my own training.
The old lady in question was Jan, and her dog Sally was a lovely black Lab. In the first couple of classes, Jan and Sally had attempted one jump or tunnel at a time. Like many inexperienced trainers, Jan was heavily reliant on lures, and would have a treat in her hand before she started each repetition. She would deliver it close to the exit side of each obstacle – a great placement because this is exactly where she wanted Sally to go.
Jan had quite bad arthritis in her fingers, something which I suspect contributes to many cases of OLLS. She took a long time to get a treat out of her container and deliver it to Sally. Once we moved on to sequences, she would finish all of the obstacles, move to one side to get out of the way, and then take up to a minute to actually deliver Sally her cookies.
Sally would wait as patiently as a slobbery Labrador can, right in front of Jan, until her reward was ready. When you think about it, it’s completely sensible that Sally would pop up in front of Jan after each obstacle, just in case this was the end of the course and it was time for her treat.
We put Sally’s cookie jar at the end of the sequence. Sally discovered that cookies happened at the cookie jar, although only when she had done her agility first. On the last night Sally ran her graduation sequence of six obstacles without getting under Jan’s feet once.
Correct Reward Placement in Agility
The correct placement depends on whether you want the dog to come towards you, or to focus on something away from you.
When working on most individual obstacles, your reward should be delivered just past the end of the obstacle. Stopped contacts are slightly different, and should be reinforced close to the bottom of the plank, where the dog’s front paws would be if he was looking straight ahead. This will discourage your dog from doing a sideways 2-on 2-off when you are behind him.
When working on handling that requires your dog to come towards you, it sometimes makes sense to reward from your hand, or to throw the the reward onto the ground in front of your feet. I actually did this last night as club when I was working on threadles, to reinforce my dog for coming Wthrough the gap towards me.
When working on distance work, it’s really vital that you reinforce your dog away from you. This applies even for behaviours like landing-side approaches, where you want the dog to leave you and then curve back towards you. You will get a more fluent send if most of your early reinforcement happens near the jump, not near you.
Next time you’re training your agility dog, think carefully about what reinforcements he is getting, and where you are delivering them. Are you sabotaging yourself with poor reward placement?