Newsflash. Not all dogs want to be petted. But you wouldn’t know it from watching videos on YouTube.
What you can learn on YouTube is that there are lots of dogs whose owners _think_ they are enjoying petting. But they aren’t. This is another one of those disconnects between dog and people language. People who adore their dogs–and whose dogs love them–post videos of said dogs saying in every polite way they know how that they would like the human to STOP.
Note: there exists research regarding the effects of using multiple smaller treats vs larger bites (aka magnitude reinforcement) when training. But the basic premise that there exists a size of treat that is “too small” for an individual dog also holds true.
How often have you read the following words? “For clicker training you need some tasty treats for your dog. We recommend treats about the size of your pinky fingernail.”
If you Google “clicker training treat pinky nail” you will get page after page of hits with variants of this advice. Except some of them caution that the treats should be no larger than the pinky nail. Some say half the pinky nail. I saw one that said a quarter of the pinky nail.
If you spend any time on the clicker training Yahoo or other discussion groups, you will read conversations about treat size in which people practice one-upmanship regarding how many tiny pieces they can cut out of a single hot dog.
Guess what? This advice negatively impacted my training for years.
Many people have legitimate concerns about their dogs’ weight. Also, I think there is a bit of sensitivity in the clicker training community to criticisms by trainers who use other methods. I think some people want to minimize the whole treat thing.
At your peril.
Here is my story about treats. Summer, my crossover dog, borders on hypervigilance and does not appear to have been selectively bred for an abundance of the “joy with working with humans” genes. She is very environmentally turned on and it is very, very difficult to get her attention outdoors. So naturally, I decided to do agility with her. An offleash sport often pursued outdoors. In fields often bordered by wildlife habitat or in rodeo arenas loaded with animal smells.
For our first year or two, I didn’t have a private teacher, so we just struggled along. I did learn to use high value treats, but I cut them up nice and small as directed. Still, I doled them out fairly generously.
Summer and I got a great agility instructor after about two years. She encouraged the high value treats. I used higher value treats than anyone else in my class, and doled out more of them. Yet after about another year, I was still struggling to get Summer’s attention. My instructor started talking to the class about giving treats generously enough. I listened but I was sure she wasn’t talking to me. As I said, mine were better and I was giving out more.
Then one day in a private lesson, my teacher remarked that the treats I was using were pretty small. I immediately said, “Oh, those are my pocket treats. I have bigger pieces in the food container that I throw at the end of the sequence.” She didn’t say anything else that week. But the next week she took another look and said, “These are just too small. These are ant-sized treats!” I didn’t ask whether she meant they were the size of ants or or appropriate to feed ants. It didn’t matter. Both were embarrassing. I was still a little resistant to her comments since I always passed out several of the small treats. But I did as she suggested and started cutting up much bigger treats.
Around the same time I told her that I knew of something that Summer loved but I hadn’t ever tried. We had been struggling to get her attention for a year or two, remember. It was baby food. She asked me why I hadn’t used it and I said, and this is true, that I was afraid of “treat inflation” and that I needed to leave something at the top to use later. She kindly suggested I drop that concern.
I wrote about what happened next on a list in March, 2010.
But over the weekend, I tried something new. I took two dogs to our agility lesson. My highest value treats were pieces of commercial meatball, thrown in a food tube at the end of the run, and baby food in the jar for contacts. Even my
“pocket” treats were chunks (not little pieces) of chicken skin, hamburger omelette I made for them (just hamburger cooked with eggs), and hot dog. I know, horrifyingly fatty and gross.
And you know what: my dogs performed with the intensity and enthusiasm of my dreams. Like never before. Boy did I feel stupid. And I probably didn’t end up giving them that much more than usual in terms of calories, since one piece went a long way.
I had been like the proverbial frog in the hot tub, who ends up boiled since he doesn’t notice the rising temperature because it is so gradual. I have been settling for lackluster performance without even knowing it. Last week I would have called my dogs enthusiastic. Now I know better.
Dark meat chicken chunks for agility training
In addition to the very high value food treats, we also started reinforcing Summer in agility sequences by letting her play in water sprayed from the garden hose. It turns out she will do almost anything, with speed and excitement, for a chance to play in the hose. And the speed and excitement have “stuck” in her agility performance.
More than two years later, I still tend to use pretty high value stuff for training, but you know what? Summer gets turned on for training whatever I use. Indoors can be pieces of Natural Balance roll, kibble, goldfish crackers, or even bread. Outdoors, and for longer or more difficult behavior sequences anywhere, it is generally meat, fish, or purees thereof in a squeeze tube. And now even outdoors, my high prey drive, curious dog keeps an eye on me all the time to see if we might do something interesting together.
Weaving for white bread
This is still a little difficult for me to admit to. It feels like I “bought” my dog’s attention. But either you’re a positive reinforcement trainer or you’re not. And if you are, part of the process is finding out what is reinforcing to your dog and using it. If you aren’t getting great results, you try something different. If I had had a typical border collie or retriever, I might have gotten equal enthusiasm from the start with something lower value. But I had Summer, and I (OK, my teacher did actually) figured out what turned her on.
While preparing this post, I needed some photographs. I cut up some hot dogs into “ninths,” then tiny pieces as in the pinky photo above. The dogs were excited by the smell of hot dogs, which they don’t often get. After the photo session I had a pile of tiny hot dog pieces, so I tried them on Clara. But when I gave her the treats, even two or three at a time, she acted as though she wasn’t sure she had gotten anything. And this is a dog who will happily work for kibble much of the time. The pieces were just too small.
In some circumstances it seems to be very effective to dole out several treats over a time period instead of one big one. But I think even then, there is a minimum effective treat size. I’ve got two dogs (Summer and Zani) who clearly enjoy a nice big piece of good stuff for a difficult job well done.
I’m sure there are plenty of dogs out there who would be delighted with the hot dog treats I cut up today. I’m not prescribing a treat size. I’m suggesting that we all listen to our dogs about what they want. Most importantly, don’t assume that the common recommendations apply to all dogs.
For two years now whenever I’m on a list and someone starts talking about tiny treats, I have a knee jerk reaction, and write a semi rant in response. Now I can just refer them to this post.
Has anybody else experimented not only with different foods but the size of the treats? Do your dogs like rapid fired smaller pieces or a big chunk?
Addendum, 8/24/12
Two astute readers have mentioned in the comments some things that I should have included. Pawsforpraise pointed out that you need to make sure not to make treats too large because of the danger of choking, especially in rapidfire situations. Good point. Marjorie M. also mentions pancreatitis and the dangers of too much fat in the diet. Also a very real concern. You can read the discussion in the Comments below.
Both of these points reminded me that I didn’t say anything about the need for balancing out the rest of the dog’s diet when they are getting some rich training treats. Summer and Zani, for instance, only get treats like the dark meat chicken above in one, maybe two (active, outdoor) training sessions per week. And I adjust their meals accordingly every time we train. I figured that to be self evident, but I shouldn’t have. My own problem with the tiny treats was caused by taking something too literally, so I sure don’t want to omit some practical concerns here and send anyone flying in the opposite direction!
Up to this point, all of my Missed Cue videos have been set up. After I discover or suspect a hole in my dogs’ training I set them up in a situation in which I’m guessing they will fail, and record it as a teaching exercise. (I discuss why I don’t think this is a mean thing to do in the original post about missed cues: Dogs Notice Everything.)
But this one was not set up. It was during a normal training session. I thought I had the bases covered. And I had the camera running.
The behavior we were working on was Level 2 Go to Mat, Step 3 from the Training Levels books: Dog goes 5 feet to the mat and lies down. Clara has been getting on mats and being reinforced for that since the day she arrived. She can go to a mat on a verbal or hand signal from at least 20 feet away. She can stay on it for extended periods (20-30 minutes). She has a verbal cue, a hand signal, and two environmental cues to go to mat. She can do it when I run in circles around her, when the other dogs are excited, and in many other challenging situations. So I really thought we had this covered. But when we are working on the Levels, we never skip steps. We train every step as if we’ve never done it before. You’d be amazed what we find out by doing that.
I was amazed today. We got to the Comeafter. The Comeafter in this Step is to add a distraction. In the book, Sue talks about taking care in picking our distraction. And I thought I was being careful. I picked putting some food on the floor as our distraction. This is old hat for Clara. She has training sessions with plates of food on the floor, can do recalls past food, etc. She has very close to a default Zen during training. And this was only a 5 foot trip to the mat.
What could possibly go wrong?
(There is a synopsis of the following video at the bottom of this post.)
I managed to do exactly what Sue warns about in the book if you make a poor choice of distraction. I made Clara so crazy she wouldn’t go to the mat.
This problem is different from those shown in all the other Missed Cue videos. They involve generalization issues with behaviors for which the dog knows the cue in some environments/situations but not in others. This one is more like the conflict of two cues, one verbal, the other environmental. Clara certainly appears to understand what I am asking her to do and just can’t figure out how to reconcile it with other strong default instructions.
The more I think about it, the more understandable Clara’s behavior is as she shies away from the food and won’t/can’t go to the mat. We teach Zen by reinforcing the dog for moving away from the treat. That is a definable behavior, as opposed to “not eating the treat.” And when we train it, most of us like to see the dog getting very distant from the treats, and we reinforce accordingly.
So how can I re-train this? Clara needs to know that she can pass close by the treats as long as she doesn’t eat them.
Also, why, in the second go round, does she not take the straight path I have made for her to go to the mat? She wouldn’t have to come within 2 feet of the treats. Anyone care to speculate about that? That part I don’t understand. I do note that in both cases she seemed to feel “safer” from the treats when I was standing near her.
I know we are not the only ones this has happened to. Sue has at least one photograph in the Levels book showing one a dog shrinking away from a treat on the floor. And Sharon Wachsler, a great service dog trainer, came up with a name for the thing that she modestly mentions lots of us have noticed: the Zen field. The Zen field is the invisible area around the treat that only the dog knows the boundaries of. Sharon is the only trainer I know though who deliberately manipulates the field during training: taking treats in and out of the field and extending the field by adding treats within it and changing its shape.
I am hereby asking for suggestions on how to retrain Clara to get closer to the treats, and not freak when she is asked to walk close by them. In other words, we need to shrink the Zen field but retain its potency. Seriously, we need some suggestions. I have only one idea and it is very mundane. I bet some of you can come up with some clever ideas. I’ll choose whichever suggested method seems to fit Clara’s and my skill level the best and video the progress and results.
Scene 1: We see Clara having a training session with Eileen. Clara is practicing dropping a piece of knotted rope into a bowl, and there is a plate of treats close by on the floor.
Scent 2: We see Eileen calling Clara, who runs full speed past a plate of treats to Eileen.
Scene 3: We see Clara running to her mat with Eileen, but plopping down and staying without a verbal cue as Eileen continues running by and going out the back door.
Scene 4: We see Clara going to her mat and lying down on verbal cue from two different directions.
Scene 5: We see Eileen put some treats on the floor next to a mat, then verbally cue Clara to go to the mat. Clara looks at the treats and scoots a bit sideways away from the mat. She looks away, then looks back at the treats several times. Eileen changes her own position closer to the treats and cues mat again, and Clara slowly goes around and get on the mat, sniffing it as she does so.
Scene 6: A silly repeat of Clara shying away from the treats with animated flames coming from the treats and the music from the shower scene in Psycho.
Scene 7: Eileen again places treats on the floor near the mat, but this time on the other side, leaving Clara a clear path to the mat. When Eileen cues mat, Clara again slips off to the side and puffs with her mouth and circles around. Eileen encourages her to come to the other side (actually closer to the treats). Clara eagerly comes that way, then stops very short when she gets close to the treats. Finally Eileen puts her foot over the treats and Clara goes by and gets on the mat. Eileen is chatting reassuringly to Clara throughout this.
This is a fun little body language study. The consensus of the viewers is that Clara is a brat!
Here is some background about Clara and Zani and their play habits. It’s pertinent to the interaction in the video. I’m rewriting this in 2021 after Zani passed away in late 2020.
Clara and Zani played together since Clara was tiny and Zani was 3 years old until Zani was about 10. They played only with complete supervision, especially after Clara got a lot bigger than Zani. Also there was Clara’s assertiveness, although Zani was no slouch in that department either. I interrupted them frequently and they learned to self interrupt.
They played frequently when Clara was a puppy and adolescent. They played chase, bitey face, wrestling, and steal the toy. Once Clara got bigger she learned to self-handicap in almost all the games. Clara would never catch Zani when they played chase, even though she was faster. She let Zani catch her, and then Zani would hurl herself on Clara. When they wrestled, Clara lay down and Zani chewed on her legs. Of the two, Zani used her mouth a lot more during play. Zani often snatched a toy away by stealth and when she did, Clara didn’t aggress about it. But Zani generally deferred if they were both going for a toy at the same time (as in the video).
Clara used to stare at Zani with a very erect posture (as in this video) often as a precursor to play. It was usually followed by her running and chasing Zani.
When playing alone, Clara frequently drops her ball and observes it. She has done this her whole life. She will drop it on a hill and let it roll, chase it down, then carry it up to the top and drop it again. She plays a similar game on a slanted board, pushing the ball up and watching it roll down again. She drops the ball in holes and pushes the ball under objects and reaches in to pull it out. This even morphed into a game where she would drop the ball, then Zani would pick it up and bring it to me, and I would toss it back to Clara.
My Interpretation of the Encounter
I tend to agree with the commenters that Clara made a bratty plan and I caught it on video. I haven’t seen another dog do what Clara is doing here, but it does seem that Clara is trying to get Zani to make a play for the ball, then making sure she doesn’t get it. I have seen dogs do things like that with a little less apparent planning: prancing around with a toy trying to get another dog to try for it, then darting away. It is also possible that Clara’s dropping the ball was initially a “nice” play invitation, or at least an experiment (as described above). “What will happen if I drop the ball?” But after she dropped it she could have changed her mind and taken steps to keep it in her possession. This would go along with behavior I have witnessed from her before. She will bring me a ball to throw, then can’t quite give it to me.
Regarding Clara’s stare and possible aggression concerns expressed by some commenters: my teacher always says, “Watch the other dog.” I do not see fearful behavior on Zani’s part. I see interest and yes, caution. To me, the thought bubble over Zani’s head is, “Is she about to be a jerk, or is this going to be fun?” Zani lip licks when Clara approaches her head, and turns away as Clara pushes into her space, both stress signals. But right after that when Clara nudges the ball Zani makes a play for it. She turns sharply away as Clara grabs the ball, but walks casually after that.
Jean Donaldson describes something she calls a “consent test” that you can do when you can’t tell whether two dogs are both enjoying play. You restrain the suspected bully and see if the other dog attempts to continue to play. Often Zani continues to want to play when my observation is that Clara is being awfully rough or bratty. Zani and I have a deal though, that I will help her leave play with Clara anytime she wants, and she makes it very obvious when she is fed up and wants out.
On the evening I filmed this, the two dogs played on and off for 1–2 hours. After the filmed episode, Clara approached Zani with the ball several more times and dropped the ball on Zani’s back. (Didn’t get that recorded!) Zani got the ball on the rebound a few times. Zani did leave the area several times but would return after taking a break. At the time I originally wrote this, they were separated by an ex-pen and Zani was lying on her back, reaching her nose through the wires at Clara, who was gently batting at her with her paws.
Before completing it, I showed the movie featured in this post to two different training buddies and both responded with questions. Is it really resource guarding if the dogs don’t escalate to violence or obvious threats? How come the “winner” in the interaction is throwing stress signals right along with the other dog? I thought we were talking about aggression; how do we know this particular interaction is resource guarding? Isn’t Clara just giving play invitations sometimes? I don’t know the answers. I think these are great questions and also inevitable when we are trying to discuss dog communication and body language in real life.
What the interactions in the movie have in common is that they all show two dogs who appear to want the same thing. The dogs communicate rapidly with body language, and one dog keeps control of the thing. There is usually a definite assertion of ownership by the guarding dog, but both dogs may also exhibit other types of body language.
Defining Resource Guarding
Jean Donaldson defines resource guarding in her excellent book, “Mine!”, as
Dogs behaving aggressively when in possession of (and sometimes to gain possession of) food, toys, bones, their owners, their resting spots and crates.
She goes on to describe ritualized aggression, where an animal behaves in truncated versions of more serious or violent behaviors. The truncated versions allow animals including humans to indicate intent but avoid bloodshed. Some of the behaviors that Donaldson categorizes under that include:
…hard stares, growling, snarling, snapping and biting without maiming force…
She describes these ritualized aggressive behaviors as:
…the “legal” conflict resolution behaviors in dog society.
Donaldson’s book is a how-to manual on dealing with dogs who resource guard items from humans. She uses protocols of desensitization and counter conditioning to change the dog’s emotional response to a human approaching when the dog has a valued item. She makes the point that guarding is a natural behavior tied to survival, and common among dogs in a group.
Also, I highly recommend the FaceBook Group: Observation skills for training dogs. This group is great for anyone who wants to hone their observation skills. Members post videos, their own or others found online, and the behaviors in the videos are described and discussed. The group has a very smart guideline: the participants are asked to practice using descriptive words to describe observed behaviors and THEN (emphasis mine) attempt to interpret the behaviors they see. We humans tend to skip right to what we think the motivations of the behavior are, rather than first observing and describing what is happening. This is a great place to learn about both. I got some nice comments and encouragement there for an early draft of my movie.
Guarding against Humans
I am fortunate that none of my dogs currently resource guards items from me. This is a combination of luck with Summer and Zani, and deliberate training with Clara. Because of her feral history, Clara has abundant, strong survival behaviors. (Translation: she is very pushy.) So I made a special effort to head off potential resource guarding against me when she was a baby. This is a good idea with any puppy or new dog.
Notice I said my dogs don’t currently resource guard against me. Here’s a photo from many years ago of Cricket with a rawhide chewy. Enough said.
Cricket is ready to defend her rawhide chewy
Is it Resource Guarding or a “Discussion”?
My movie shows my dogs having “discussions” about objects and places they want to have control of. The resource guarding behaviors are mostly on the very low end of ritualized aggression, which to me is a very good thing. They are working things out without coming very close to harming each other.
In addition to the hard stares, growling, and snapping that Donaldson mentions, my dogs perform several other more subtle behaviors that I would also classify as resource guarding and these are shown in the movie. They include moving forward into the other dog’s space, standing with a stiff, straight stance, muzzle feint (my name for a mouth closed muzzle punch without contact), and even intrusive sniffing and licking.
I agree with my friends that there is a lot of different stuff going on in the movie. Clara rarely looks very stressed. At times her guarding behaviors resemble (and could be) invitations to play. In Summer’s “successful” guarding of her toy in the last interaction, she darts a furtive glance and a lip lick towards Clara, who seems to be considering stealing her toy. This does not seem to be very assertive behavior. Perhaps Summer lucked out that time, but still, the outcome of the interaction was that she got to keep her toy.
What else do you see?
Final Note
I am fortunate at the low level of aggression my dogs show. I don’t mean to minimize the real dangers that resource guarding behaviors can pose, and of course I don’t encourage them. These clips were taken over several years. I take habitual precautions: supervising heavily when valued toys are available, intervening when someone (ahem Clara) is being a jerk, and separating all four of my dogs completely when I am not home.
Resource guarding can be a very serious problem. I hope if any of you have a dog who has started guarding things from you, you can get access to an experienced trainer or behaviorist.
This is from Level 2 Focus, Step 4 in the New Levels. After the dog has built up eye contact duration to a solid 10 seconds, Sue suggests several ways to change the scene and generalize the behavior. I liked her suggestion of teaching eye contact through a car window, but we are currently in the middle of the hottest summer in years, maybe ever.
I have French doors going from my front room to my kitchen, and not only that, they have a handy gap underneath that I can shoot treats through.
Here is a short video of Zani and me practicing eye contact through the French doors. It turns out the the panes in the French doors are a perfect way to get Zani to realize that it is her job to find my face and look into my eyes.
As usual, we started from scratch under the new conditions and it turned out to be completely necessary. This was a big change from what Zani already knew how to do.
If others want to try this, you don’t have to have a gap under the door. Just leave it propped open enough so that you can toss the treats through on the side.
Thanks Sue. It never would have occurred to me otherwise to do it through glass!
The very first thing I do every morning when I wake up is turn over and take a careful look at my very old dog Cricket. She has a special place on the bed surrounded by pillows on three sides and me on the fourth. Here is what I often see.
Cricket sacked out in her fortress on the bed
First, frankly, is she breathing? Then, what is her alertness level? Is she still sacked out or is she looking at me? Big “oh-oh” if she is sitting up or trying to get off the bed. I have to make an important decision right away. Who gets to go to the bathroom first? Me, Cricket, or Clara the puppy?
Cricket needs to go
These days it’s usually Cricket, although once in a while she sleeps in enough that I can get a head start. The other dogs virtually always have to wait since it is not safe for me to leave her out of my sight on the bed.
Cricket has neurological weakness in her back legs and a bit of arthritis. She needs some help in the morning. And as soon as she stirs, I don’t have very long to get her outside. She is 16 years old, and when she needs to go, it’s right now. In that case I put on my glasses, throw on a robe, step into some shoes, and grab my phone. I lift her up a little and stand her on her four feet on the bed so she can get her bearings and practice standing. Then I pick her all the way up. I usually have a treat in my pocket and I offer it to her (I have taught her to associate being picked up with good things). Amazingly, even bleary-eyed and dry-mouthed, she usually wants the treat. Her teeth are in good shape.
I tuck her under my arm and she chews on the treat as I carry her down the hall. I unlock the door, go down the steps and take her into the front yard. Without fail, as soon as I step out the door she takes a deep sniff, then snorts a little. Then I make the daily search for a moderately level place on which to set her. Every degree of slope counts against us in the morning.
After I choose the place, I put her down very gently but don’t let go. I keep my hands under her abdomen and help her stand up. I try to get her pointing downhill (there is nowhere completely flat). If she needs to pee first, I let her go and she manages. If she needs to poop, she often needs a little more help. I keep ahold of her, switching my grip to keep her from falling over backwards.
Cricket waiting to go to work with me
Things improve after that first trip outside. Like a lot of human people, Cricket is stiff in the morning and a little slow to get going mentally. But even though she has dementia, she definitely perks up as the day progresses.
By the time I leave for work, she is generally crowding me at the door to make sure that I don’t forget to take her along.
And later in the day, she is downright frisky.
Here she is getting her supper:
But back to the title of the post. The other day I went through our morning routine. I took a look at her and the answer to the daily question was clearly: Cricket needs to go. As I was carrying her down the hall, I offered her a treat but she seemed distracted. This happens sometimes. I took her outside and she peed, but that was all. Now that is very unusual. We stayed out for quite a while, but no go. I got bored and reached into my robe pocket for my phone.
Not yet.
I pulled out my iPhone.
Now.
Perched on the top edge of my phone case was a small, neat piece of brand new poop. I stared at it for quite a while in disbelief, willing it to be something else. It remained poop. I transferred the phone to my other hand and very carefully peeked into the suddenly very interesting pocket. Nothing else. I very carefully removed the phone poop with a leaf curled in my fingers and stuck it under a rock or something. I actually don’t remember that part, even though an embarrassing amount of my brain power is normally spent keeping track of the location of poop. Amazingly it had not smeared around on my phone case or in my pocket. It had just perched there politely. But even a moderate poop cleanup is not something you can do later. But neither could I run frantically into the house to clean things up because I still had a 16 year old dog toddling around in my front yard. Also, there was a very important question: where was the rest of the poop?
So holding the phone a bit outstretched (wouldn’t you?) in my left hand, I picked up Cricket with my right and tucked her above my hip in her usual place, noting the positioning of her butt and my robe pocket for future reference. Watching my step, I trekked back to the house for cleanup and a change of clothes.
Once inside, I saw the rest of the poop in the hallway where she had dropped it while I was carrying her down the hall. I have never been so glad before to see poop on the floor!
Thanks for reading!
Those of you with old doggies, do you have stories to tell?
