This week I’ve been trying to teach Rik to sit straight in front for obedience or rally-o competitions. It’s proving quite challenging – she has a long history of being reinforced at my side, so she keeps gravitating into heel position.
As a first step, I’m getting her to come in between my legs while I’m sitting on the couch, so that she doesn’t have that option. To build more value for being in that position, I need to reward her while she is sitting there. This provides a new challenge, though – how do I get her to leave the position so that we can do another repetition, without having to stand up and rearrange myself each time?
Enter … The Reset Cookie
After Rik has had her treat for sitting straight between my legs, I throw a second treat behind her, over her head. Rik gets up and wanders off to eat it, and then I can call her back to me for another attempt. I can even vary the angle of approach by throwing the treat off to the side rather than directly behind her. This is often called a “reset cookie” and it useful in lots of dog training situations.
Now I have a new problem. Rik sits, eats her treat, and then immediately pops her bum up and starts looking for her reset cookie. I have been too boring and predictable with how I use my treats, and she knows that after I feed her from my hand, I’m going to throw a treat away for her to find.
The solution to this is to feed her a variable number of treats while she’s in her position, and then toss the reset cookie. By feeding her multiple cookies in place, I am building lots of value for the sit-and-stay-still-in-front behaviour, and only a little for her pop-up-and-hunt-for-cookies behaviour which only ever earns one bikkie.
Putting It on Cue
Last year I taught Rik a “search” cue, which tells her to sniff around on the ground until she finds a treat. I have dark carpets and Rik doesn’t have the best sense of smell, so sometimes I need this to actually tell her that there is food on the ground that she can have. Yes, she is a disgrace to all dogkind.
This was fairly simple to teach as an extension of the It’s Yer Choice game. I put food on the ground while she was watching me, guarded it from sneak raids, and then gave her new cue “search”, followed by her normal release cue “OK”. Once she was moving as soon as I said “search”, I started tossing the treats onto the ground, first to fairly obvious locations and then just chucking them all over the room. This is a great active game to play while you feed your dog her dinner on a cold winter’s night.
You don’t need to have a special release cue to use reset cookies. I like it because it’s a cue for a more specific behaviour (use your nose to locate a cookie that’s on the ground) rather than a more general-purpose release cue which means “do whatever you want”.
Used properly, I think it might also have reduced my problem with Rik popping up as soon as she’d sat. I should have given her the “search” cue while she was still sitting, which would have reinforced the sit (how? a subject for another day!) and then thrown the cookie after she got up to look for it.
Applications to Agility Training
- Training a back-up – Toss multiple treats back to the dog at the end location. You want to build value for staying there (or going back even further), or you’ll finish up with a dog that keeps creeping forward. Then call the dog back to you for another attempt. Often you can get away with a fairly boring reward, like a quick pat, rather than an actual cookie.
- Interacting with objects (e.g. targets and wobble boards) – Feed a few times on the target, then toss a cookie off to the side. If you throw it a long way, you’ll have a couple of seconds to reposition the object as needed.
- Early 2o2o training on stairs or short plank – Feed several times in position, and then toss a reset cookie back to the start end of the obstacle, so that your dog finishes up in the right place for a fresh attempt. As you progress the reset “cookie” may become a reset tug as you both move from the end of the down ramp back to the start position.