You don’t have to watch the whole thing (10 mins of training sped up to 5 mins is still pretty boring) to get the gist, but the gist is that you don’t always have to set aside special time for training. Making breakfast was a good opportunity to teach Finn to stay outside of the tiny kitchen we have for the month (the entire space is pretty much what you see here). For reinforcers, I used what he was coming into the kitchen for in the first place—the chance to catch a scrap of tortilla here and there.
I could also have asked him to do something like go lie down on a mat, but he was already standing, and all I had to do was catch it where it was already happening. I'm going to be talking about this, among other things, in my presentation on choosing alternative behaviors to replace unwanted behaviors at Karen Pryor Clicker Training's ClickerExpo Live in January. Registration is at: https://clickerexpo.clickertraining.com/clicker-expo-virtual/
Most of the time I want dogs walking slightly in front of me (so I can notice shifts in their body language if something changes in the environment) and meandering within a leash’s length to smell what’s interesting (because that’s what the walk is for). But sometimes we need them to walk close to us at our pace, and that’s the skill I’m working on with Mabel here. (At the start, you’ll also spot another useful skill, to follow a hand gesture to move to my other side.) The second video is a situation in which close attentive walking is needed.
I will be giving teaching a lecture/lab combo on loose leash walking at ClickerExpo in Portland in April where you can sign up to participate with your dog! Link to register in comments.
I was petting Maggie outside when she took a leaf in her mouth and then growled and snapped when I reached toward it. So here’s what I did:
* Stopped reaching for it!
* Started making the phrase “can I have it” predict a treat (or several) that wasn’t contingent on her doing anything—say it, treat, repeat. Treats were delivered away from the leaf--I didn't try to stick them in her mouth or get her to drop the item for them.
* When she did drop the leaf, which wasn't harmful for her to have, I didn’t take it right away—I just let her go right back to it.
* When she was quickly committing to eating the treats, I did take the leaf, but then repeatedly gave it back.
* Marked and reinforced with a treat for taking it, which prompted a drop.
* Moved, with the leaf, to a new location (mostly to get video where you could actually see what I was doing) and played the game some more, until she was essentially throwing the leaf at me or dropping it in anticipation of the mark/treat.
Alice used to run and hide when anyone came over, but at each of our sessions, she has gotten braver about staying out. At first, she mostly stuck to a mat where she learned she will get treats tossed to her and I won’t approach her. She then started to approach me, and I still tossed treats away. In the meantime I had her people teach her this hand signal predicting “safe” touching. This has increased her affectionate interactions with them, and over the past two meetings, I have been able to use it to determine if she is OK with me touching her. If she’s not, she will step back when I make the hand signal. This week she began to put her head down near me faster when I started responding by asking if she wanted petting.
The hand target, reinforced by a treat, is to reset her and see how fast she puts her head back down. Treats are not contingent on tolerating petting; if she moves away or goes to her mat, she can still get a treat. She is also free to go hide, but she only chose the mat once on this visit and didn’t hide at all.
The other day I posted a video where I made forward movement contingent on the dog checking in with me. To do this, you first have to have a dog that wants to check in with you! Here’s one exercise I do to teach the behavior of checking in after a distraction. The treat here doubles as both the distraction to come back from and the reinforcer for the previous check in.
Capturing orientation toward you while standing still is a prerequisite to what’s on the video. When the dog is orienting to you after each treat while you are standing still, you can move on to this.
Start with a treat tossed to “12” on the clock. While the dog is eating, turn your body so that your treat-side hip is facing the dog. When the dog looks back from eating the treat, click, then toss a treat to the next number on the clock; repeat.
When your dog is turning back after eating each treat, you’re ready to try turning your circle into a straight line. (Video of that forthcoming.)
This is a nice example of what I think is often a missing skill in loose leash walking. We could call it “find me when you’re finished.” I am delighted at how natural it looks here—that it can be reinforced by a cue to move on—but this took a fair bit of work to build and was taught with food. When this is missing, the dog who is already away from the handler sniffing tends to shoot forward from wherever she is, and runs out of leash quickly.
Mabel’s mom has made fantastic progress with her husbandry training so I’ve edited together a little “victory video.” In the nail filing clip, I love how she shows Mabel the file, then tells her which nail she’s going to touch with it. For tooth brushing, I added a helpful hint that—just like for many humans—a wetted toothbrush is gentler than a dry one. We also introduced some work on gentle restraint and handling the back leg for blood draws, and I, a second person, was able to wipe Mabel’s ears with some solution on a cotton ball. Throughout, we try to apply some great advice from Laura Monaco Torelli - Animal Behavior Training Concepts about not marking as the procedure is happening, but rather after it is completed, so that the touch doesn’t start to immediately predict, and prompt anticipatory head lifting for, the treat.
Mabel’s mom has made fantastic progress with her husbandry training so I’ve edited together a little “victory video.” In the nail filing clip, I love how she shows Mabel the file, then tells her which nail she’s going to touch with it. For tooth brushing, I added a helpful hint that—just like for many humans—a wetted toothbrush is gentler than a dry one. We also introduced some work on gentle restraint and handling the back leg for blood draws, and I, a second person, was able to wipe Mabel’s ears with some solution on a cotton ball. Throughout, we try to apply some great advice from Laura Monaco Torelli - Animal Behavior Training Concepts about not marking as the procedure is happening, but rather after it is completed, so that the touch doesn’t start to immediately predict, and prompt anticipatory head lifting for, the treat.
Here’s Ruca a few steps off the riverwalk, working on what to do when she sees other dogs. I thought I’d outline the important pieces of what we are doing. That said, there are lots of nuances to all of these pieces, and this might not be the right approach for every dog (which is not to say that you need to be harsher, let me be clear). If you are struggling, hire a professional.
1: First job is to find your working distance. Your dog should be able to look at you, look at stuff without moving towards it, and eat. That distance will change as your dog gains skills; many dogs initially need to be across the street or more.
2: Make sure the leash is short enough that if your dog did lunge, they wouldn’t reach anything—but from your hand to the collar or harness, the leash is slack. Even if the leash is 1 foot long, it’s slack. If it’s tight, lower your hand toward the ground to keep the length the same but take tension off. This might be Step 1 if you need to change direction quickly—gather the leash, dip it, put a treat on the dog’s nose and move to your working distance. But in this case we knew dogs would be coming so we set up here to wait for some.
3: Mark for looking at or otherwise acknowledging the trigger—this could be an ear flick, a glance, etc. After you’re sure the dog has noticed the trigger, mark for looking at it again, looking at you, or looking at it and back at you. This might also be Step 1—you might mark for noticing a surprise, then use your treat placement to move the dog to working distance if you’re going to do further reps. You don’t have to do further reps—you could also do one rep and go away. I’m doing multiple reps with Ruca because her barking and lunging doesn’t appear to be fearful.
4: After marking, move your treat hand. I almost always deliver treats to the ground because it takes longer between reps of looking, it looks to other dogs like your dog is sniffing, because dogs who are on the fence
Snow after two 80-degree days meant Finn and I got our favorite meadow all to ourselves today, so I felt confident letting him drag his long line for a brief training session. (Shortly after this beautiful video, you should know, he rolled gleefully in feces of unspecified origin.)
Here's what we are working on
(1) A game where I drop a treat, then move away, and reinforce Finn for following me. You will see in earlier videos that this began as just marking and reinforcing for lifting the head after eating the treat, then was shaped into orienting, then following. The reinforcer comes on the ground to give him back the environment as well as the treat and to set up the next opportunity to find me.
(2) His "go" cue (which means do what thou wilt) and his "with me" cue (walk by me for a bit).
(3) His official recall, the cue for which is "bacon."
(4) His "wait" cue, which is being taught by stimulus pairing: say wait, get a treat out and put it by my right side regardless of what he is doing. Or mark and put it there if he's not already looking, so he knows to start looking for a treat.
In a previous video with Mabel (I’ll put the link in the comments), I showed how I was pairing my leash gathering swoop with a treat, and how I wanted to be able to mark looking at me when a person approached by gathering the leash. This was because Mabel was jumping on passers-by, so at that time I was delivering treats low on the ground, hoping that leash gathering would start to cue her to orient downward, but she paid more attention to me getting the treats out. So now the leash gathering is starting to cue her to move to my right side, by the pouch, which is equally practical. In this session, I was working on marking her for checking in with me from various directions, and then a person walked by, giving us an opportunity to use the new skills on the fly.
A while back I posted several videos from the training I did with Finn in his former home around his reactions to fire and fire-related stimuli. You may have seen these in my ClickerExpo Live presentation in January, or you can see a playlist here: https://www.facebook.com/watch/296821597004242/631277337814599
Last night his other mom asked if I had been able to light candles around him in his new home. I hadn't tried, so I set up my phone to record and checked if our training had generalized:
Reorienting after a distraction
Working on a close-walking behavior with Finn. Treats are tossed out to the side to simulate distractions he might find in the grass so he can practice reorienting after investigation--which for me is a key component skill for loose leash walking.
Ruca, a 2-year-old lab, pulled hard on walks and jumped on passersby when we started a day-training package at the beginning of this month. Her first few sessions were inside, with no leash! When we initially moved her skills outside I reinforced every step or two. Some extra good stuff to note in this clip—at the beginning, she grabbed my glove but let go on the verbal “drop” cue, another priority in her program! And though there aren’t a ton of people or other dogs on this stretch of sidewalk, we do go past another big distraction: the door to a Kriser's Natural Pet store that she recently visited for the first time!
Teenager Mabel will lunge and jump, in a friendly but startling way, at passers-by. This is how we are working on it.
What I do here is a routine that we also practice without any distractions: I gather the leash, short but slack, then treat on the ground.
If the leash is short, I'll then have a way to prevent her from jumping if I've misgauged a setup.
My next goal is that when I gather the leash, she starts to anticipate good things will be coming from my pouch to the ground, and her body will prepare for downward orientation. My second goal is to do this after she spots the person, and not before—so the leash gathering starts the reinforcement process for just glancing at the person and the person (by predicting the leash gathering, which predicts the treat) becomes a cue to orient to me and get ready for treats down low.
In one rep here, I do the thing before she spots the person, though, because otherwise the person probably would have startled her and she probably would have jumped. I am also reinforcing her for just looking after she eats the initial treat scatter.
I’ve been working with Max on walking at a relaxed pace on a loose leash (see previous posts, which I’ll put the links for in the comments) in preparation for teaching him to walk that way with a stroller. I thought this was a great first session with the wheels (and the cruddy weather helped me remember to keep it short and sweet). Note: Max is walked by a variety of people, so we are trying to “protect” the consistency of this training by using the Balance Harness that Max is wearing here only for these sessions. Folks who are not prepared for whatever reason to reinforce the desired behavior use his old Freedom Harness.
Look at this pretty cooperative ear cleaning work by Mabel and her mom Sue! The towel on the floor is to differentiate cooperative care sessions from play and other training on the floor. The enthusiasm in the lay out behavior is delightful—look at that tail—and tells me that Sue has kept criteria doable for Mabel while practicing between lessons. This was the first time Sue used a cotton ball that had some ear cleaner on it. Here she lets Mabel smell it, and if Mabel maintains the lay out, then she goes ahead and does something with her ear. Short sessions, with lots of breaks well before Mabel initiates them, and today we also added in doing other favorite cued behaviors during those breaks (tip o’ the hat to Laura Monaco Torelli - Animal Behavior Training Concepts).
Finn has previously barked at oven beeps and the "whoosh" of the oven igniting. We worked on this earlier in the year at his home, and what really helped was his strong history with mat training: Once on the mat, he could pause long enough after a beep for me to deliver a treat contingent on the sound without catching any barking in between.
Finn is staying at our house this week and his first night here was a real test of the generality of our training. While Doug was making risotto, which involved running the oven to roast asparagus as well as lots of timer beeps while he stirred water into the rice, Finn went to this mat voluntarily—I didn’t cue it, and he had the option to come upstairs with me instead or go anywhere else in the house. There is a tiny bit of whale eye and tongue flicking, and startles briefly here when the gas oven flares to raise the temp, but otherwise he does really well, and he settled happily immediately after this to share some of our risotto.
He went to the mat on his own again for breakfast prep this morning, and showed no discomfort around the timer beeps, so it may just have been first-night jitters. We’ll see how it goes at dinner!
If you follow me on Instagram, where I post a lot more than here these days, you may have watched the evolution of Mabel’s walking (note: she looks much shaggier in earlier videos). This was from about a month ago, and I shot it to show that once you have built strong behaviors with the necessary duration, you can show the dog that they can use these behaviors to reach reinforcers that the larger environment will provide, rather than treats.
There isn’t anything wrong with treats—I used so many in training this and still use some here!—but hopefully walks are full of lots of other reinforcers for our dogs. And using a slightly longer leash, as I have advocated many times before, will also facilitate the incorporation of naturally occurring reinforcers.
Naturally occurring reinforcers are actually often responsible for behavior people tend to call "habitual," "self-reinforcing," or that we say the dog just "prefers" or "likes." So it is important to pay attention to them.
How many naturally occurring reinforcers can you identify here?
