Miso’s first offered down to sit! Pretty stoked, from limited predictable lured reps, she cottoned on to what I was after and offered a pretty snazzy version of the behaviour!
Did anyone notice the cheeky little rename? 🐶💕 rebranding to come…
Handler Activation
I thought I’d upload this video for two reasons: 1) look how cute Miso is, and 2) do you notice how attentive and how resolute she is in her quest to get my attention before I’ve even started training?
The second point is something that I’ve begun to take for granted because it happens so effortlessly. It is something I will spend time rewarding now I’ve had the reminder.
What I love is that Miso has offered this attentiveness all because my body language and my intent is that we’re about to do something together. When you’re purposeful and consistent, your body language will become the biggest cue for your dog for what’s coming next.
So, how can you get this with your dog? Spend time rewarding them when they interact with you (without you cuing the attention/interaction) in every day life - this teaches them that they can start the conversation, or it teaches them that they can make you reward them with the simple act of giving you attention, this is what we call handler activation!
Another thing you can do, is get up and move with the intention that you’re going to go play or train your dog, if they come and give you attention, reward your dog! Have a party! Have fun! Your dog will then start to pay attention to your intention and use that as a cue!
Supplementary point - do you see how in my video, the first things I reward when I start the training session is attention? Your competition behaviours are only as good as your foundation allows them to be! Never neglect those foundation skills!!!
Girl, you walk like a bitch 💅🏻💅🏻💅🏻
Reward based training
I haven’t posted on here in a while and I figured I would share something that I’m now able to articulate. I’m not reinventing the wheel or necessarily sharing something new here.
I want to talk about one element of training your dog. We all utilise rewards, in my opinion this is how rewards work and here are some points to consider so that you can maximise the yield of your training!
The dogs execution of the behaviour is the sum of their reinforcement history.
The aforementioned statement goes beyond click treat; it includes the dogs inherent feelings natural or manipulated by you, environmental factors and experiences while performing the behaviour, presence of intrinsic drives etc.
At its most basic level positive reinforcement training relies on the transfer of the value of the reward to the behaviour. This means after consistently rewarding your dog for doing the behaviour, they will begin to associate the behaviour with the reward. The caveat here is consistently reward - the dog will not form the association between reward and behaviour if there is not significant reward history.
Now if we know the dog associates the reward with the behaviour we have to look at how the dog feels about the reward. What I mean by this is how bad do they want the reward, what energy and mental state the presence of the reward triggers. Because what they give you in the presence of the reward, what they will do to get the reward (chase/lunge/leap around etc) is the maximum energy and the mindset that will transfer into the behaviour after consistent reward.
The next point isn’t groundbreaking or anything new, we all do it, but perhaps with varying degrees of intention and purpose. Before you go about training behaviours you have to know how your dogs feel about rewards. What I want to talk about is we have the power to influence performance based on our dogs feelings/energy/mindset that rewards can trigger.
Therefore to get the most out of rewards in trainin
