Over the last few weeks I’ve been taking Able along to my club’s agility training on Wednesday nights. I train my older dog Rik in the 7:30 class, but I try to arrive before 7 so that I can get Able out and do some things with him before then. It’s important to train a youngster in lots of different environments, so I try to get him out and do something with him wherever I go.
Earlier in the spring we were training on the margins of the main agility field, as we needed to be under lights. This was a great opportunity for Able to practise his basic skills – sit stays, retrieves, agility handling on the flat, jumping lanes – in a more stimulating environment, with other dogs running a course ten metres away. There was a noticeable deterioration at first, but by the third week he had his little halo on and didn’t put a paw wrong all night.
And then daylight savings started and I moved to a different space behind the clubrooms, where we had more room to get moving and chuck some toys around. I decided this was the ideal time to start on Able’s more formal handling education, and I started coming to club each week with an agenda of sexy stuff I was going to work on.
Things Go A Bit Pear-Shaped
This week’s training session with Able was very, very frustrating. I had to set him up two or three times for each exercise because his sits were a bit slow and he wasn’t lining himself up with my leg. He took a detour on his way back with the toy a few times. We were wasting time after each repetition because he it took me several goes to get the tug toy out of his mouth.
Then there was a rare and embarrassing recall failure. I was just about to start an exercise with him when I noticed a couple of people walking through our clubgrounds. I decided to hold onto Able until they were out of sight because he had already run off to visit my friend’s husband earlier in our session, which was bad enough. I sat down on the ground with him, we had a little cuddle while the people walked past and then ….
My large and exuberant young dog ran off down the walking track and around the corner to go and mug the walkers.
When Good Training Sessions Go Bad
One of the most common reasons for frustrating training sessions is a low rate of reinforcement. The dog isn’t getting enough of the good stuff, so his attitude starts to deteriorate. It’s tempting to think of this as spoiled bratty behaviour – your dog isn’t getting what he wants so he decides not do what you want. This isn’t the full picture though.
Reinforcement is also communication to your dog that he is on the right track. If we assume that he wants to please you, he is going to try some other stuff to try and figure out what you want. And if that doesn’t work, at some point he’s going to decide that he can’t do it and get frustrated. Some dogs will take a quick stress-relieving break to wander off and sniff a bush. Others might get frantic and start doing All The Things At Once. Able was still trying really hard to figure out what I wanted, but he was also procrastinating before and after each repetition because he didn’t know what he was supposed to do. Just like I procrastinate over vaguely-defined tasks at work.
The ideal success rate is about 80%. That means that after about 80% of the repetitions, your dog “wins the game” and gets his reinforcers. With experience dogs can become more resilient and work through a reasonable amount of failure without losing their focus. This develops from a solid history of succeeding after overcoming struggles though, and my ten-month-old puppy isn’t there yet.
Next Wednesday’s Agenda
The root cause of our frustrating session was the agenda.
I’ve been coming to come with a list of 4 or 5 things I want to work on, where several of them are new exercises or things that Able hasn’t mastered at home yet. That is too apparently too much hard stuff at once for the young fella. It’s also quite a lot of things to get through in one 15-20 minute session. Instead of stopping to take a break when he starts going off the boil, I tend to charge on ahead to the next thing.
So next week’s agenda is that we will work on sit stays and tugging and recalls away from friends – all things that he was doing quite well a few weeks ago – and get back on the same page there. And when I set my agenda for the following week, I will find a better balance between the new, potentially challenging stuff, and the fun things he already knows pretty well. There’s no rule that says you can’t do leg weaves in the middle of a Big Serious Agility Handling Training Session, after all.