As Able nears six months of age, I’ve begun doing a longer formal training session with him for his dinner. He eats a colossal amount (more than twice what my adult dog does) and this means I have a big bowl of reinforcements I can use. I tend to use handfuls of kibble rather than individual pieces because his puppy kibble comes in really small pieces. Even so, he usually eats the last third or so of his dinner out of his bowl, because we run out of things to do before we run out of food.
I don’t time our sessions (although I probably should) but I think they are about 10 or 15 minutes long. If I have a new skill or something that’s difficult for us to work on, I do that first. Then we take a couple of the things that Able’s already pretty good at, increase the difficulty level, and do a few repetitions. I like to structure my sessions like this so that we always finish on something that the pup finds fun and has a good success rate at.
When Things Go Horribly Wrong
If things are going wrong with our first exercise, I will sometimes abandon it without making much progress and go on to the fun stuff. It’s very tempting to stick at something until you see the light bulb go off, but sometimes this leads to a spiral of doom. Many dogs get a bit stressed if they aren’t having a lot of success, and in my older dog Rik this leads to a flurry of limbs as she attempts to do All The Tricks at the same time.
Some dogs increase their activity level when they are stressed, and others decrease it. In the dogs that “stress up, you might notice barking or whining, and a lot of different behaviours being performed at random. Sometimes they develop a weird habit (biting grass is a common one) as a way of releasing their stress or avoiding the situation. Dogs that “stress down” may move very slowly, sniff a lot, pee, or leave the training area altogether.
You don’t want to let things get this far. If you keep an eye out for the more subtle signs of stress, you can interrupt before things go further down the spiral. Some of these include:
- Lip licking. A hungry puppy that wants his food does “big” licks, where his tongue runs right along his lips (and you’ll probably also notice him drooling). A stressed puppy does “little” licks near the nose, where the tongue just darts out briefly.
- Panting. A tired, sweaty puppy pants with his mouth open, but his facial muscles are relaxed and his lips are straight right up to the point where they meet. A stressed puppy pants with his mouth open, but the lips and facial muscles are wrinkled near the point where his upper and lower lip meet (the “commissure”). There’s some good photo comparisons here.
- Eye contact. A happy puppy will look directly at your face or your hand and has his head up with an eager expression. A stressed puppy will carry his head lower, and avoid direct eye. You may notice that you can see the whites of your dog’s eye (“whale eye”) because he has his head turned slightly away from you but is glancing at you from the corner of his eye.
- Tail carriage. A happy puppy has a relaxed tail that floats along behind his body as he moves, although the individual tail carriage varies a lot by individual. A stressed puppy has a tail that’s held further down than usual (or tucked between the legs) and doesn’t move much.
- Changes in eating behaviour. This is the first sign I notice in Able when training is getting a bit too much for him. A very stressed dog won’t eat at all, but before you get to that point, you’ll notice that there is a change in eating behaviour. Able takes treats off my hand more slowly and chews them for longer, rather than his usual “grab and gulp” approach.
If you start to see any of these signs in your dog, you need to stop doing what you’re doing right now. That might mean stopping to take a tuggy break, or moving on to another exercise, or giving your dog a cuddle for a few minutes. It might mean that you just end the training and give your pup the rest of his meal.
Why is it a bad idea to work through the stress? Firstly, I don’t think I ever made any actual training progress when I used to do this. Instead things would go from bad to worse to utterly terrible. Once we were both exhausted I might managed to get a response that was just moderately bad, and then I’d pretend to myself that this was “finishing on a high note” so I could end the session.
But more importantly, we need to remember that classical conditioning (that thing that Pavlov discovered) is always at play when we work with our dogs. If a training session turns toxic, your dog’s brain will link feeling yucky with everything around it – you, training sessions in general, the location you’re training in, the equipment you’re using, the specific behaviour that you’re working on. Next time you train your puppy, he’ll be a bit anxious before you even start.
Agility dogs need to be confident in order to excel. Training your puppy while he’s stressed is the ultimate snake – something that will only hurt your progress towards your agility goals.
Quitting while your dog is stressed is a miss a turn square. You don’t make any progress, but you minimise the damage. Pay close attention to your puppy, stop early when things are getting stressy, and then reconsider your training plan – what can you do to make it easier for your puppy to succeed next time?
Maximising Your Training Time
This week I’ve enjoyed some really fun training sessions. I’ve been able to pack lots of useful progress into my training sessions, far more than I’ve ever done with my previous dogs, and yesterday I realised why:
My puppy is easy to catch.
I played the Collar Grab game with him when he was a wee pup. Now I have a puppy who eagerly comes back to me, and a puppy who just magically appears underneath my hand whenever I reach out to grab him.
It took me two years longer than I’d hoped to get my puppy, and during one of those years we had a covid pandemic. I have a tendency to analyse things to death, and I had lots of free time. I spent way too much time on a puppy training plan that would produce the best eighteen-month-old agility dog that ever debuted in an agility ring, while minimising the amount of time spent on high-impact things (like practising the actual obstacles).
The final plan was over 240 pages long … oh, and it only went up to 8 months because that’s when lockdown ended. I was fairly sure this was a ridiculous endeavour and my plan would not survive first contact with an actual puppy. To my surprise we actually got to about eleven weeks before the plan got thrown out the window.
But this plan has paid off. I spent hours thinking about what should be the very first thing I did with my puppy, and literally planning out every training session for the first two weeks he was at home. And most of the skills that I worked on in those early weeks were ladders – things that help me to get more progress out of my training time than I’ve had with my previous dogs.
These ladders include:
- Collar Grabs. I literally just stand where I want my puppy to be and put my hand down – he does the rest.
- Retrieve. When I throw a toy it comes straight back. When I drop a tug toy it gets pressed into my hand. And when I say “Give” the other end falls out of my puppy’s mouth. I have never before had a dog who brought things straight back without even mouthing them the teensiest bit. It’s awesome and it saves a lot of time.
- Hand Targets. Similar to a Collar Grab – gives you better control over the puppy’s direction, but less over his exact location. I just hold my hand out and suddenly my puppy is perfectly positioned to start our training.
- Search and It’s Your Choice. This is something that is still a work in progress with Able, but I did a good job of teaching it to Rik and it’s so useful. When I say “Search”, she will drop her head and hunt for bikkies on the ground. If she sees a bikkie drop and I don’t say “Search”, she stays in place and looks at it for half a second – and then she goes back to whatever she was doing. This is very handy because I am a bit klutzy and I drop a lot of bikkies.
- Simple shaping practice. I did a lot of this in the first few weeks, although I have let it slide a bit lately. With my previous dogs I’ve only ever shaped something that I “needed”. Able has spent some time learning random things, like crawling under the legs of a bar stool, climbing onto a crumpled cardboard box that used to hold a fridge, walking around my office chair … I’m still not a brilliant trainer and sometimes it takes us a while to get something right, but every few weeks he blows my mind by offering the right behaviour on the first or second try.
I’m so glad I spent the time on building these skills. I make sure to reinforce him a couple of times each training session for being so cooperative, and hopefully that will help to maintain them for years to come.