November 11th, 2014

sit... Sit!... SIT!!!

How many times have you been frustrated by a dog who won't listen even though he KNOWS what you want?  If your dog doesn’t seem willing to go into a particular position, don’t despair or resort to force-based techniques.  There are various ways to get your dog to do something.  Start by making sure your dog actually knows what your words mean.  My next post will be about what to do after that, but for now check out these tips for how positive trainers help dogs learn.

Luring means leading your dog into position by having him follow a treat or something else he wants badly.  This is our primary method in class but it won’t work if the dog is anxious or distracted.  It certainly doesn’t mean your dog is untrainable or stupid if he won't follow a lure.  It just means you have to try something else!

Catching a behavior means praising and subsequently rewarding your dog each time he happens to do it on his own. For example, if you praise and treat each time your dog voluntarily makes eye contact, you will soon have a dog who is staring at you! In this sort of training, we do not add the verbal cue (for example, “Watch Me”) until after the dog is performing the behavior correctly. Once he’s “got it” and is freely offering the behavior, we simply add the cue just as the dog starts doing the behavior, thus creating an association in his mind- essentially teaching English as a second language! That allows us to then elicit the behavior by giving the verbal cue.

Shaping means rewarding progressive bits of a behavior over several practice sessions until you’ve taught the entire behavior.  It works well with dogs that are interested in a lure but lose focus or give up easily.  Shaping is also useful when you can’t manage to catch an entire behavior but you can capture parts of it.  For example, to get your dog to lie down from a sit, you might praise and treat at first for a slight dip of the head, then for the head lowered further, then for head lowered further combined with one paw reaching forward, and so on until your dog was fully lying down. Luring and shaping are often combined.

Placing means you physically put your dog into the position you’re trying to teach, for instance, you scoop a dog’s hind end to teach him sit and pull out his front legs to teach him down.  Placing used to be a popular technique, before the advent of lure/reward training and catching and shaping.  However, dogs trained this way often learn simply to allow people to place them into various positions and while that's useful, they never learn to actually perform the behavior on command!

There are other ways for people to train dogs but these involve the use of fear or force.  These techniques all have this general formula in common:

- the dog is unaware of what he's supposed to do.

-the trainer does something painful or scary.

-the dog reacts.

-if the reaction was what the trainer wanted, the painful or scary stimulus stops and maybe the dog gets a reward

-if the reaction was not what the trainer wanted, the painful or scary stimulus continues

This is a horrible way to train even when it's effective- and let me tell you, this training method can RUIN a dog.  So stay positive!  If you are struggling to train a new behavior using only positive techniques, know that you can do it!  I am here to help.