Sarah Owen Dog Training and Behavior Consultations

02/01/2025

Little Deelie doesn't know it yet, but she is learning (errorlessly!) to wrap jumps and to follow my foot cues :)

We'll gradually add more/different equipment to our training sessions, and we'll move it to other locations, but the process will happen fast, as long as I'm thoughtful about how I introduce each change.

You can see how I used this same errorless approach to teach my other dogs to take jumps and tunnels, as well as how to retrieve dumbbells and to walk with me in very distracting environments, in a webinar I recorded last Spring: https://sarahowendogtraining.com/workshopsandwebinars/

CEUs are available for the webinar.

30/12/2024

How can we teach a dog to lie down and take a nap in the car, without having to rely on punishment, extinction, or environmental management, such as confining them with a seatbelt or in a crate? By using a constructional approach.

Rather than trying to punish or extinguish our animal's behavior, we can use a constructional approach to teach them how to do it "right."

17/12/2024

Another super busy semester in grad school has come to an end, which means I had time to write a new blog post!

Thoughts from a recent scent work trial. If you've got a dog who acts differently in the ring than they do when you're practicing at home, this one's for you ;-)

Will it hurt your dog's work ethic, if you give treats before you run at trials? How should you spend your time, before your run?

07/09/2024

When we use a constructional approach to shaping behavior, the focus isn't on reducing or eliminating behavior. Instead, it's on teaching our learner everything they need to know in order to access reinforcement.

It can be tempting to think that, if a puppy is behaving "impulsively," by jumping up on me or snatching things from my hand, that I need to address those behaviors.

But, if I instead teach a reinforcement system centered around the reinforcer the puppy is trying to access, the "impulsive" behavior disappears on its own.

When our learner knows all of the steps that lead to a reinforcer, they are calm and focused.

24/08/2024

Have I mentioned how much I love having a puppy in the house?? So much teaching and learning going on, all the time!

Help yourself to some ramblings about stimulus control, behavior chains, and how I differentiate between loose-leash walking and heeling!

I take my dogs for two types of walks: sniffy walks and business walks. And, the way I expect my dogs to behave on these walks is very different.

17/08/2024

I've been working with a young puppy on expanding her reinforcers and teaching her some foundation skills. Imagine what might happen when I combine these two things! 🤯

One of the advantages of teaching a reinforcement system before you begin any other training is that it speeds up behavior acquisition.

11/07/2024

"I never thought I’d be writing a blog post about dogs hu***ng, yet here we are.

To clarify, this is not a blog about sexual reproduction or attempts to sexually reproduce.

This blog is about that mystifying behavior we’ve all seen – a dog (often a puppy or a young dog) hu***ng another dog, a person, or an inanimate object."

https://sarahowendogtraining.com/blog/the-humpies/

19/05/2024

Life has been super busy!

But, I finally had a chance to pick back up the research I've been doing on transferring stimulus control. And, I had time to write a blog update on it as well!

How do we "transfer a cue"? In other words, how do we transfer control of a behavior from one stimulus to another?

17/05/2024

It's wild to think how much has changed in animal training in such a relatively short period of time!

It makes me excited to think about how much more room for growth we surely must have, and how fast it can happen 🥹

This 1992 clicker is a blast from the past!

It seems strange to think about a time before the term “clicker training” existed.

However, this “before time” wasn’t really that long ago.

For example, in Karen Pryor’s original edition of “Don’t Shoot the Dog,” published in 1984, she does not use the word “clicker” or “clicker training.”

When talking about selecting conditioned reinforcers, Karen describes “a cricket, the dime-store party toy that goes ‘click-click’ when you press it.”

Animal training was evolving rapidly in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

One momentous event for both animal trainers and behavior analysts was
the 1992 Association for Behavior Analysis annual convention in San Francisco.

ABA president, Dr. Edward K. Morris, invited Karen Pryor to give the President's Invited Scholar's Address.

In addition, the convention included two symposia by prominent animal trainers, which featured Karen Pryor, Gary Priest, Gary Wilkes, and Ingrid Shallenberger.

These presentations featured demos of the shaping game, videos showing how positive reinforcement training could be used to teach foot care to elephants, and discussions about how to best apply the science of behavior to animal training.

The 1992 convention led to new collaborations between behavior analysts and animal trainers and may have even contributed to the birth of the term “clicker training.”

This year, at the end of May, ABAI will hold their 50th annual convention.

As part of the program, Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz will be giving a short talk about the 1992 convention and its impact on both behavior analysts and animal trainers.

If you’ll be at the convention, you can find it as part of Symposium #485.

Hope to see you there!

11/04/2024

Recently, I competed with one of my dogs in a local agility trial. I had taken him to agility trials and fun runs in the past, and had tested to see if he was ready to compete in that environment. How had I tested it? I offered him his regular reinforcers – kibble and his Frisbee. When he wasn't interested in those things, I knew it meant I had more training to do.

So, we worked more on training and, when we went back to the agility trial ... he was fine. He ran exactly the way he runs in our backyard. He was more than happy to eat kibble at the trial, and to play with toys.

The problem was never that my treats weren't high-value enough or that he was "distracted." The problem was that he didn't have the skills to be successful in that environment. Using high-value treats to try to bribe him to work likely would have set us farther back.

How can we train our dogs to navigate challenging environments, without relying on increasingly higher-value treats to bribe them?

16/03/2024

I recently presented a webinar on errorless learning for the folks at Braver Dogs Sweden. I had a lot of fun chatting with them about how we can design our training sessions to promote rapid skill acquisition, and how we can then transfer those behaviors to other environments.

I've made the webinar available for purchase on my website, if you'd like to see it yourself. You can find it here: https://sarahowendogtraining.com/workshopsandwebinars/

And, I've also put together a little preview of the webinar, which you can watch below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qntA71rQFfM&t=3s

You can purchase the webinar here: https://sarahowendogtraining.com/workshopsandwebinars/?et_fb=1&PageSpeed=off

26/01/2024

Have you ever suspected an animal of learning something just by watching another animal do it? I think this happens all the time!

We call this "observational learning." The term refers to a process in which one animal detects another animal’s behavior – as well as the consequences for that behavior – and uses that information to determine whether or not to imitate the behavior.

Learning through observation can be a fast way to add fairly complex or unlikely behaviors to an animal’s repertoire!

Take a look at a few examples from my own dogs :)

Animals can acquire new skills quickly, if they're able to observe another animal perform the behavior and see how it pays off!

20/12/2023

One of the projects I've been working on with my own dogs is about what trainers call "cue transfer" and what behavior analysts call a "delayed-cue" procedure – getting them to perform a known behavior with a brand new cue. The lore goes: if you present a new cue, followed by the old/existing cue for the behavior, your dog will start to anticipate the old cue and will perform the behavior when you give the new cue.

But ... it doesn't always work. Or sometimes, it works, but it takes a really long time to get the new cue reliable.

So, I've been trying to tease it apart, and see what's actually going on there. Here's a little clip of Cheaters and Rosie working on it with me.

Rosie's new cue is a hand signal for down ("stop" hand, raised above my shoulder). This was her second session with the new cue.

And, Cheaters' new cue is the word "go," which means he should run straight ahead of me. Again, this was his second session with the new cue.

I think there's probably a lot going on here – and not just one "rule" about how to transfer a cue. I'm excited to keep playing with it and see where this goes!