Here’s a excerpt from an opinion piece on Newsroom by Cat MacLennon, who as a barrister would be more familiar with the legal system than many. This isn’t a refugee from a brutal military regime overseas, just a well-off and well-educated New Zealander who is anxious at the mere idea of getting into trouble:
I made the trip to collect the greens from my friends yesterday, but was anxious throughout the drive there and back because I knew that if I was stopped by the police I would be facing the exercise of discretion. One police officer could think it was perfectly reasonable that I would be travelling out of my suburb to obtain greens for my animals. But another officer could regard this as totally unacceptable.
This is how a dog that doesn’t clearly understand its contact criteria feels in the ring. Sometimes he gets to run on to the next obstacle, sometimes he gets told off by his handler, and he doesn’t know what he should do to get the outcome he wants.
2) Slow Reinforcement Schedules Suck
The long incubation period of the coronavirus meant that we had to stay locked down for several weeks before there was a noticeable change in the number of new cases. It would have been very easy for people to be discouraged by this, especially when we saw our highest daily statistics in early April, nearly two weeks after the lockdown started.
Our Prime Minister and the Director-General of Health did an excellent job of people-training during this period, delivering regular positive reinforcement in the daily press conferences to keep people’s spirits up.
Be like Dr Bloomfield and give your dog lots of encouragement when training. If they are struggling with something that’s too hard and have failed a few times, make it easier or ask them to do something else (maybe a favourite trick) so that you can reinforce them for something.
3) Not all behaviour is Intentional
I had no idea how much I touched my face until suddenly I wasn’t supposed to, particularly when loose strands of hair get onto my face. It’s almost an automatic reaction to rearrange my hair when I feel something tickling my nose, and I have only had limited success at not doing that when I’m out and about. I’ll manage to stop myself doing it for a few minutes, and then I’ll get distracted by something and then suddenly my hands migrate up to face “all by themselves”.
I’m not the only one. Here’s a health official in the US displaying another unconscious behaviour during a press conference:
Your dog probably has some behaviours that it isn’t aware of doing. I choose not to punish my dogs for barking while they run because I don’t think it’s something that they are deliberately choosing to do. I’ve had two noisy dogs and two silent dogs, and that’s just how those dogs were – every dog has its own individual ways of expressing how excited it is to be doing agility.
4) Regression happens
Last week I went to the supermarket. I washed my hands for 30 seconds before I left the house. I waited in line for my turn, being careful to stay two metres from the person in front of me. I used the hand sanitiser at the door on my way into the shop …
… and then I walked into the trolley of a man coming out the door because I had completely forgotten about the social distancing thing. He apparently hadn’t, since he decided to fend me off with his trolley when I popped his bubble.
“Old habits die hard” is a cliche because it’s true.
It was easy to get social distancing right on my first visits to the supermarket after lockdown. There were a lot of changes in the environment – the requirement to queue at the door, the marks every 2 metres on the floor, the fellow customers wearing masks – and these handy reminders jogged my memory every time I started falling back on old ways.
Four weeks on, these things were no longer so new. My brain is used to seeing tape on supermarket floors and shoppers with masks. It has had years and years of practice of the old behaviour, where I give people half a metre of personal space. As soon as my attention wanders, I go straight back to performing this familiar behaviour.
It takes time to build and consistency to build new habits. The longer you or your dog have been doing the “wrong” behaviour, the more successful repetitions you need to get of the “new” behaviour to make it stick. Even then, you may see the odd relapse when the dog’s mind wanders.
Thanks Kate. Very good comparisons. Well done.