Funwalks Dog Training

Funwalks Dog Training basic manners training, walking, tricks I will send a video how I prefer to meet. Hands off dog at all times until praising and petting.

I will not tolerate forcing into sit, down, or pinching ears or mouths. Your dog is not stubborn, they are confused. like anything else, humans might not know we are inconsistent. I can help you be more clear. A high rate of success predicts more success. Let's reinforce good behavior to make it happen more often.

Read all of this from Whispering Horse
11/29/2024

Read all of this from Whispering Horse

Certain horse trainers promote the idea that it's great if their horse walks away in a training session. This is not ok. There's even a saying that I really dislike, something like "you get more yes, if you allow the no". That's just not how I approach my positive reinforcement (R+) training, I'm always training for an enthusiastic "yes!!".

It's really not great (for the horse), and you are potentially in Negative Reinforcement territory and worse, if you're shrugging your shoulders and saying that’s ok or that it's a good thing to "allow them to say "no"". It doesn’t encourage us to train better and find answers so they don't want to leave.

I needed a good example video and I've been seeing a lot of videos lately of other trainers doing this thing that I want to talk about, but obviously I can't use their video. But then I came across one of my own videos that is close to what I want to use as an example of what I'm talking about.

To set the scene, I've seen many trainers lately doing this exact thing, from a tiger trainer who kept giving the cue while the tiger snarled in her face and when the tiger finally did the behaviour, she then asked for an even more challenging behaviour. To a trainer whose horse gave a calming signal after the cue and they cued the behaviour again and the horse walked away. To a very big name horse trainer, who is very new to R+ training, whose horse repeatedly walks away during sessions and that trainer, much like the tiger trainer, cues more challenging behaviours, instead of easier behaviours, which makes the horse more likely to walk away in the future.

For me personally, walking away is not ok or what I want to see in my training sessions as a R+ trainer, it means I made a mistake. Accepting it’s ok doesn’t motivate me to train better and make it a better experience for the learner. It’s strange that a culture can be developed for the wrong reasons. If a professional coach trains so poorly that their horse leaves or finds the grass on the edge of the arena or path more interesting and reinforcing than what they are offering, look for a better trainer/coach. We want to train to make things better for our animals and accepting our training as so unpleasant that we cause our learner to leave, is not something we should celebrate or aspire to doing.

To quote Eileen Anderson:

"Building escape behavior into a protocol can provide a disincentive to the human to make the process as pleasant for the dog as possible. Rather than working harder to create a situation where the dog doesn’t want to leave, the trainer can focus on saying that the dog is “empowered” by the ability to leave. On the contrary, some trainers, including myself, consider a dog repeatedly leaving as evidence that we have not worked hard enough at making the experience pleasant. It’s a failure, not a goal. It means we didn’t set up our antecedents and graduated exposures well enough."

You can read my previous post about this subject here:

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BtWacdwek/

Therefore I thought it might be interesting to do a post to try to address this issue. In particular, what people are doing or not doing, when a horse doesn’t want to engage or respond to a cue and is either walking away in a training session, or seeming disinterested or disengaged or frustrated or doing some other behaviour or just grazing.

There are quite a few causes and strategies, it’s not straightforward or black and white, but I thought perhaps addressing one of the main antidotes to these problems might be helpful.

The thing I’d like to focus on specifically, is what to do when your horse doesn’t respond to a cue for a known behaviour, trained with Positive Reinforcement and/or appears disinterested in the training or walks away.

I’d like to preface this discussion by saying that I understand there is a lot of old mindset to undo and a lot of old muscle memory to unlearn. This takes work and it takes determined focus and self awareness and I would go so far as to say that these two attributes are some of the most important ones to develop, to be a good R+ trainer. What that means is that in our old ways of doing things, when we gave an (aversive) cue, we expected compliance and if we didn’t get it, we asked again and again and started to insist and to escalate. So it can be challenging to give a R+ trained cue once and if it’s not responded to straight away and with alacrity, instead of asking again and again, we need to pause and question why a horse would not want to do an appetitively trained cue. We want to avoid continuing to ask and worse, ignore any body language that shouts that they are really not comfortable with the situation (which is what I’ve been observing in videos I’ve watched).

In practical terms, this means that we may think we have trained a behaviour well and think we’ve put it on a solid cue and proofed it, but what the horse is telling us is that we haven’t. OR that there is something else happening for that horse, that overrides the appetitive cue we are giving and that most likely will be something they are finding aversive and is interfering with their ability to do the R+ trained behaviour. It could also be that something else is more reinforcing to the horse and has a stronger R+ history, like the bits of grass around the edge of the arena.

Lack of generosity with the food reinforcer, low Rate of Reinforcement (RoR), not reinforcing small enough approximations or asking for a lot of behaviour or even a chain of behaviours for little positive reinforcement, without building up enough of a R+ history on all the behaviours first, can all contribute.

You are always working within a number of different laws in relation to learning, Matching Law in particular can often trip you up, if your RoR is too low.

We need to be able to think on our feet. It’s all a learning process and we need to be kind to ourselves and accept when we’ve made a mistake and try doubly hard next time. This is also what I love about R+ training, because we develop so many amazing skills and really, they become super powers. Self awareness is key!

Ok, what to do when our horse doesn’t do a cued behaviour that was trained with R+ or seems disinterested or walks away or ignores us?

There’s a couple of options in the moment:

- Cue an easier well liked behaviour (with a strong R+ history) as soon as you realise

- Give free food anyway and then cue an easier well liked behaviour

- Give free food and give the horse an end of session signal, end of session food and give them a break

- Use a Least Reinforcing Scenario (LRS)

- Give the cue again and if nothing happens, go back to the top of this list

What not to do:

- Give the cue repeatedly

- Cue another behaviour of similar difficulty or challenge

- Withhold food for non-response

- Stop training or give the horse a break without giving the end of session signal and food

- Use any kind of sound or movement that suggests the horse was wrong such as "no", or "ah ah"

- Use Punishment (“correction”) as a Consequence.

This list is not exhaustive, but gives you some clues as to the way you want to head.

I’ll also add this excellent and comprehensive blog about training behaviours, putting them on cue, Stimulus Control and more. All these things should be trained and in place before we give a cue and expect the behaviour to be performed. Sometimes people think that for example hoof lifting is just about telling the horse to lift their hoof and then you put it on a cue and they’re done. All behaviours need much more than that to be well trained and also safe, and in doing so you build that R+ history which makes the behaviour well liked, fluent and more likely to be performed, more than walking away.

You can read the blog here:-

https://www.clickertraining.com/node/2279

What I’d like to focus on is the LRS, as there is lots of great information out there about it and it’s an extremely useful tool for your R+ force free tool box. Good trainers with an errorless mindset often use it instinctively, I know I do and it’s very useful to keep the horse engaged and feeling successful.

For a great explanation and discussion of the LRS, I’ll put a link to Jose at Train Me Please’s video, that explains what it is. It’s also a very interesting video about how training has evolved over time and the reason for the LRS. There is some focus on the use of the LRS to address problematic or unwanted behaviour, but my main focus and the way I learnt to use it from Ken Ramirez, was as a technique for trainers, when a cue was missed for whatever reason. There’s also some problem solving covered in the video as well.

You can watch it here:-

https://youtu.be/QcYcgIFVgeM

I want to highlight that the amount of time for your LRS can vary depending on the species and the individual learner. Ken Ramirez talks about a micro pause and if you watch him train, sometimes the pause is so small as to be nearly imperceptible. This is because he trains so fast and his animals respond fast, therefore a 3-4 second pause would be way too long. Similarly with horses, a pause that long for many horses is just too long and borders on withholding food. We also want to avoid them inserting any other behaviour in the pause, apart from what should be their default Calm Attentive Behaviour (CAB) or what I like to call ‘standing still and doing nothing’. Obviously this needs to be an established behaviour first, with a strong R+ history already, so that it becomes the horse’s default behaviour, when in doubt and we instigate the LRS.

I’ll add some further links about the LRS that I really enjoyed listening to and got a lot out of, if you want to dive a little deeper into the LRS.

The one mentioned in Jose’s video I found super fascinating. That was the podcast by Zoo Logic, featuring Grey Stafford, who chats with Chuck Tompkins and Ted Turner, who were some of the early R+ trainers who helped develop the LRS. Again, some interesting insights into the early days of R+ and how women and their softer science based R+ approach influenced the industry a great deal in the early days.

You can find that here:-

https://zoologic.libsyn.com/the-least-reinforcing-scenario

The other super interesting discussion about the LRS was from Ken Ramirez, Susan Friedman and Steve Martin at Live From The Ranch. The LRS discussion starts at 20 minutes and resumes at 1 hour and 16 minutes, or like me, I found the whole thing fascinating and listened to it all!!

You can hear that here:-

https://theranch.clickertraining.com/live-episode-38/

Finally, I’ll show you a video where an LRS would be a good option to use, to give you a good visual. It’s not essential to use an LRS, but it can be a helpful tool. Being generous, understanding how to raise your RoR and lower your criteria when you don’t get the behaviour you expected, are important to remember as well.

Knowing your learner is really important too. In this video, I have a very good idea why Seymour didn’t lift his back hooves, it had to do with what we had just been doing prior and then I unexpectedly tried to film voluntary hoof lifts after I’d just been teaching him to keep eating while I did something with his legs and hooves. But it’s a good example where I could have used an LRS to return to the voluntary hoof lifting behaviour easier and smoother and made it clearer for Seymour.

You can watch that here:-

https://youtu.be/tLkdfscZimo


4 million people lost their vote. Felons like Trump.
10/15/2024

4 million people lost their vote. Felons like Trump.

Although a majority of Americans impacted by felony disenfranchisement laws live in their communities, they won't get a say in how policy will impact their lives.

Everyone deserves a voice in a democracy! https://bit.ly/4dFxlZY

🇵🇸 >🇮🇱. 🇱🇧>🇮🇱. 💩>🇮🇱
10/07/2024

🇵🇸 >🇮🇱. 🇱🇧>🇮🇱. 💩>🇮🇱

Found on Google from commondreams.org

09/24/2024

DNA evidence not available at the time of trial proves his innocence but has not been considered in court. Act today.

09/19/2024

Possible update on Joe Couch, lunatic shooter in London Kentucky, a body was found near a vehicle near exit 49. Clothing looked unusual. ID to be determined soon. Also, in Lebanon, Hezbollah is not Hamas. This is more evidence of Israeli terrorism.

09/19/2024

I miss him. And his grandma. Great doggo. His mom is very funny and clever. Did it on purpose.

09/18/2024

A real trainer teaching recall instead of chasing. No e collar needed

09/17/2024
09/15/2024

Public Letter to Ivan Balabanov

Dear Mr. Balabanov,

I am writing on behalf of many in the modern dog training community to address serious concerns regarding your participation and professional conduct in the study titled “Comparison of the Efficacy and Welfare of Different Training Methods in Stopping Chasing Behavior in Dogs.”

The study revealed that 100% of the dogs in the shock collar group yelped in pain when shocked. The study notes, “We did not observe negative welfare impacts in the dogs trained with e-collars beyond presumably pain-induced yelps in immediate response to the electric shocks.” This confirms immediate distress caused by the shocks with 8 dogs in your custody.

Even more troubling is that 25% of the dogs in the shock collar group were removed because they exceeded the 20 shocks allowed, yet those attempts still failed to suppress their chasing behavior.

The details of the study indicate not only the infliction of pain but also ineffectiveness in a significant number of cases - even under controlled conditions led by “experts” like yourself. And somehow it was the two dogs who were shocked more than 20x in a session who were disqualified, and not the trainers who continued to shock the dogs until they reached the 20x threshold.

Your involvement in both shock collar training and the so-called “positive reinforcement” training groups in the study further raises concerns especially since the methods presented for positive reinforcement were not representative of established, humane training practices.

A modern approach involves marking a desirable behavior and reinforcing it consistently across different contexts, not merely “calling” a dog back with food.

The study's design misleads the public into believing positive reinforcement is ineffective by setting it up to fail without proper proofing and controlled settings. As a figure in the aversive training community, your participation in this study and its promotion raise ethical questions, especially given your awareness of the broader scientific consensus against aversive methods.

It is concerning that your involvement could mislead the public and dog guardians into believing shock collars are an appropriate and humane training tool.

The modern dog training community requests that you cease all public education efforts that promote pain, fear, and intimidation-based methods which are holding our industry back and which put the public at risk. Our understanding is that you have scheduled a workshop overseas, where based on your history you are likely to advocate for these outdated techniques. These methods contradict the ethical standards for dog welfare, especially in countries like the United Kingdom.

As a practitioner of dog training, we urge you to reconsider your approach and align your practices with scientifically supported, humane training methods, consistent with the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists and their international counterparts.

The modern dog training community stands ready to escalate public discourse and scrutiny if these unethical practices persist in the interest of public health and safety.

Zak George

We also acknowledge the involvement of Dr. Clive Wynne from Arizona State University as a co-author of this study. While Dr. Wynne’s academic standing is now under scrutiny due to his endorsement of research methods that caused 100% of the shock collar group dogs to yelp in pain, we remain focused on addressing the immediate welfare concerns this study raises.

The study in question: Johnson, A.C., & Wynne, C.D.L. (2024). “Comparison of the Efficacy and Welfare of Different Training Methods in Stopping Chasing Behavior in Dogs.” Animals, 14(18), 2632. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani14182632

09/06/2024
08/31/2024

All the steps I took to get my 10 month old dog to be comfortable in the canoe. How did your training go? Comment below if you have any other personal tips a...

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