Rio had another Walk & Train session today. We went to the local park and worked around some distractions. We focused on longline work to start with, building his engagement on me instead of all of the environmental stimuli. Then we worked on his loose lead walking and finished off with some play!
Positive Verbal Markers
The clearer we can make our communication system with our dogs the less confusion and frustration they will have. Positive and negative verbal markers communicate to our dogs when they are doing right or wrong. Here is a short clip showing how to condition your positive verbal markers. I choose to use "yes" and "good".
"Yes" means they are free to access the reward regardless of what command they were in. The dog comes to the reward.
"Good" means continue to do the behavior I have asked for and you will get a reward or the reward is coming soon. This helps us with duration in behaviors for example a sit stay. The reward comes to the dog.
Classical conditioning (associative learning) of these verbal markers only works if you say the word and then follow through with the food reward, as opposed to doing them at the same time, which is what we naturally want to do. It is actually quite difficult to do these separately and takes a bit of practice!
Once you have conditioned these markers you have charged the battery so to speak. The more you say "yes" or "good" without following through with a reward the charge on the battery slowly reduces.
This can be a really fun and quick training session to do with your dog when you feed them. You can choose whichever words or word you want as long as you are consistent with the word and the tone of your voice!
Happy training ✌
Nemo building confidence with the obstacles 😍 He even did them by himself at the end 🤣
Excuse my commentary and laughing - we were having way too much fun!
