The lockdown is a welcome break for me from one of my biggest challenges with Able – his ridiculously exuberant greeting behaviour. We have made good progress on this, but it’s very time-consuming to work on. I have to take him out to where the people are – the Saturday morning market, the supermarket car park, outside the bottle shop on a Friday night. And since we live in a small town, even then there is a lot of Waiting For People to Appear.
As a result I’ve not been spending as much time as I’d like on all the exciting stuff I could be training – but now’s my chance. While we do usually keep a 2m distance from our unwitting training partners anyway, it’s not really appropriate to go out and look for people to hang out near during a Level 4 lockdown.
Teaching the Stand
This week’s focus has been on teaching Able to stand on cue. I’ve taught all my dogs this, mostly so I have a useful third position cue to work on cue discriminations – my dog’s ability to listen to the actual word that comes out of my mouth, instead of just guessing what I want based on past patterns. Cue discrimination is a very easy game with two cues, but once you add a third one into the mix it becomes a lot more challenging!
I taught Able to stand using a method I learned from Susan Garrett’s blog, which I hadn’t used before. I found that I had to get the rewards in very quickly at first, as Able already has an automatic sit at my side and he was very good at popping up and then sinking back into a sit as soon as he landed. I like the results I got from this method – my puppy lands with his feet well behind him in a more balanced stand than my old method.
That old method was to put the dog into a sit, give his back-up cue, and then reward him as soon as he stood up – before he actually began to move backwards. Then you can add the new cue in front of the old cue (e.g. “Stand – Back”) and keep reinforcing the stand until the dog starts to offer it before you say “Back”. You may need to revisit your back-up behaviour a couple of weeks later and give your dog a pile of reinforcement for actually moving backwards.
Let the Games Begin
Now that Able knows three different position cues – Sit, Down and Stand – we have been playing a couple of different games to work on my puppy’s listening skills.
Note: If you are planning to compete in obedience as well, you’ll want a higher degree of precision in your dog’s position changes (i.e. no front paw movement). Your time might be better spent working on that first. If you aren’t planning on competing in obedience, remember that you can always retrain your position changes with a new cue if you do want more precision later.
Position Changes: This first “game” is fairly simple – just work on a set of position changes with your dog standing right in front of you, feeding after each one. Dog training legend Ian Dunbar came up with a sequence which covers all of the possible transitions without any double-ups: Sit -> Down -> Sit -> Stand -> Down -> Stand. Start with this sequence and keep going until it’s smooth, then gradually reduce the frequency of the treats until your dog will do the whole lot for one (larger than usual) treat at the end. Able surprised me by mastering all the changes in two days, and now I am making up new random sequences of positions as we train.
Distance Training: For a bonus challenge, you can work on doing these position changes at a distance from your dog, without him moving forward. This is a requirement for the highest level of competition obedience, and it looks really impressive without requiring as much effort as most of the other exercises at that level. Distance skills are a really important part of agility too, and this is a nice simple calm game that lets you work on that indoors. There are three keys to successful distance training:
- Give your dog some sort of target – in this case, a station for the entire dog to stay on (e.g. a large flat dog bed or a low plank, or start your dog at the top of a step where they can’t move forward). Build up your distance with this station first, and then drop down to a very short distance and work up again once you remove it (things will go quicker the second time).
- Reinforce where you want your dog to be – on the station. If you get your dog to come forward and take their reward from you, your dog is going to want to come forward.
- Take it slowly at first, growing the distance by no more than half a metre. The first two metres will probably take 80% of your training time. This helps to keep the success rate high so that your dog really loves playing this game on their station. If you want to go further, you can progress in bigger increment of 1 to 2 metres. See if you can get to 10 metres!
Chaos Monkey: This is my name for Susan Garrett’s “Can You Do It In a Box?“, and there are many variations from other trainers as well. The Chaos Monkey is a bot that runs on Netflix’s servers and triggers random server outages – its purpose is to encourage the Netflix engineers to make their systems as resilient as possible so that they can deal with whatever the Chaos Monkey throws at them. There are so many weird and wonderful things you can do to “proof” your behaviours – test your dog’s ability to respond to your cues despite distractions. A few basic ideas include:
- With your back to the dog
- Lying down on your back next to the door (credit to Ian Dunbar for this one)
- With the dog in the back seat of the car
- While you do star jumps or other aerobics moves
- While you squeak your dog’s favourite toy
Remember to be patient with your dog when they miss a cue. They aren’t being deliberately stupid or naughty – it’s just often quite hard for dogs to generalise their skills to a new context. Make the other elements of the exercise easier (e.g. reduce your distance, add back the station, reinforce after one or two position changes) so that your dog can be successful often enough to keep the game fun.
Able and I will continue to work at this for the next few months – it’s such a nice easy thing to train when I don’t have a lot of energy, and although it seems quite repetitive I’ve found that all of my dogs actually quite enjoy these games.