Summer targets the plate so hard that her muzzle slips upwards. And look, her mouth stays closed!
I have learned a lot in the last three months. Yes, that’s how long it has taken for me to get Summer’s target behavior where I really wanted it.
Back in September I published a post about the many ways I had messed up Summer’s target behavior. I had lived with it a long time, but it really became a problem when I tried to use a target for distance behaviors because Summer kept biting it and trying to bring it to me.
One of the first things I learned was that Summer was not the only one making correct and incorrect behaviors. I was sometimes marking the incorrect response! So I added two columns, one for my number of correct reps, and the other to express that as a percent. That made me clean up my act in a hurry, and pretty soon I was no longer marking incorrect behavior except once in a blue moon.
I also added a column for a moving average, to smooth out some of the noise in the graph and show the trends better. And just because I’m a nerd and I like that sort of thing.
Recall that one of the worst (out of six) problems we had was Summer’s biting the target, because of our retrieve work before we got target on cue.
I had picked a new hand position so as to change the picture completely for Summer, but my choice, which made it appear that I was holding a treat in my fingers, elicited even more teeth and biting from Summer at the beginning. (So ironic, since Summer is not at all a mouthy dog.)
After the first few sessions I came close to changing my hand position again because of all the teeth. But I decided to take the challenge and keep it. I really liked the touches I was getting from her.
Really, this was the hardest part and took the most time. It took a little more than a month of practicing only with my hand to get rid of the teeth. But I’m really glad I stuck with the new hand position because started getting much, much firmer and nicer touches from Summer than I ever had before.
After we got the hand touch, I tried transitioning to a target stick and that was disastrous. Bite city. The stick was a cue for the retrieve work we used to do. So I thought of an object that I could hold that she couldn’t bite. How about the back of a plastic plate?
Putting the spoon against the plate made it less tempting to bite
So we did many reps with a plastic plate with a piece of blue painter’s tape on it. A good Internet friend points out that blue tape is nicely visible to dogs. After about a month of that, I brought my target stick back out (it also has tape on it), and held it flat on the back of the plate. By making an interim step (splitting), I was able to transition her to the stick without having teeth. This was a huge step, and a good one towards my practical goal of being able to send Summer to a freestanding target stick to touch.
Where We Are Now
Over the weekend I tested Summer on hand, plate, and target stick touches and we got 100% correct! Not only that, but her touches have still nice and firm and she is eager to do it. No more drive bys for sure.
You can see from the graph that I lifted from my tracking document that there are several dips in performance; those correspond to places where I raised criteria. But even counting those dips, her overall average was 86%. Keep in mind that my goal for percentage correct before proceeding each time was 95%, not the 80% that trainers typically shoot for before moving forward. You can see in the graph that we stayed on each step longer than we would have had to if that were our goal. It worked for Summer and me because neither of us minds repetition.
This graph covers 1,012 correct repetitions. Yes, you read that right. About 1,000 reps. Let that be a lesson. Try to train it right the first time!
Final Notes on Criteria and Method
I ended up changing one criterion from my original training plan. I had specified that I wanted Summer’s mouth to be closed. But I got visually confused when I saw her approach with an open mouth, then close it just before the touch. I decided that was her business whether she wanted to leave her mouth open, as long as she touched my hand or the object with her nose/muzzle and not her teeth. This worked out for us.
I wrote in my previous post that I wanted to avoid negative punishment if possible. I did end up doing it a few times. Sometimes we would get in this loop where she would do an unacceptable touch and when she tried again, one of the undesirable behaviors would pop immediately back in. So a few times when I got a bite or felt teeth, I not only didn’t give her the treat, I pulled my hand back and paused, with a little break in the action. This was always followed by a correct response from Summer. The penalty did seem to communicate very well that I wanted touches and not bites. I probably did it fewer than 10 times in our 1,000 reps.
At the time it seemed more kind than letting her try over and over again without getting reinforced (extinction). A more skilled trainer probably wouldn’t have had to do either (and certainly wouldn’t have taken 1,000 reps!)
Notes about Future Steps
What’s left, following the Training Levels, is a foot touch (her nose to my foot), then touching a Post-it or piece of tape on the wall, with the final goal of pushing a cabinet door closed.
I don’t anticipate a problem with the foot touch, but the wall thing will be a challenge because we have done lots of wall touches with her paw. But I know how to be patient, and so does Summer.
Some final tasks will be a duration touch, mixing up Zen and target cues, and finally distinguishing target and retrieve cues. And of course I’ll need to generalize every one of these things and take them on the road.
Thanks for reading! I would love to hear more retraining stories. I’m not the only one, am I?
By the way, now that it’s done, here is the whole series in one place:
What happens when you don’t have retrieve on stimulus control?
This post was updated and republished on January 31, 2019.
I’ve mentioned before that I’m not very good at stimulus control. I’ve included in this post a great video from when Clara was younger that demonstrates that really, really well.
Stimulus control in training is all about response to cues, and goes like this:
The behavior occurs immediately when the cue is given.
The behavior never occurs in the absence of the cue.
The behavior never occurs in response to some other cue.
No other behavior occurs in response to this cue.
Pride, the Rhodesian Ridgeback, sitting pretty on cue
This means, for example, if I have trained the behavior, “Sit pretty,”:
When I say, “Sit pretty,” the dog immediately sits up with his front feet in the air.
He doesn’t ever do that unless I cue it.
He doesn’t do it if I cue something else like down or stand.
He doesn’t down or stand when I say, “Sit pretty.”
Most everybody’s first question is about #2. If this were a natural dog behavior like lying down, he would still do it at other times, right? Sure. And although I’ve seen some discussions about that, I don’t know in what situations it would be a “violation” of stimulus control for the dog to lie down without a cue from a human. The common answer is to append “in a training session” to the above rules. But how do we expect a dog to draw a line between “training session” and “not a training session”? And aren’t we training for real life? Do we say that behaviors like sit and down are never on true stimulus control? Probably.
You may choose not to reinforce downs that you don’t cue, but they are reinforcing to a dog who wants to rest and relax. We can’t help that.
For most trainers, there is a period where we are teaching cue recognition and stimulus control where we do not reinforce uncued behaviors. After that is taught, though, we may change the rules a bit in real life.
There are behaviors for which one needs strict stimulus control. I have a friend with a service dog. “Gigi” has a special setup so she can do the equivalent of calling 911 if my friend falls down. Falling is actually the cue. My friend needs absolute stimulus control on this behavior because it is completely not cool if Gigi “offers” hitting the call box at any other time.
My dogs are not like Gigi. Or more to the point, I am not as skilled a trainer as my friend.
Lack of Stimulus Control
Even a gate doesn’t stop them from offering eye contact
If you put aside Rule #2 and reinforce your dogs for uncued behaviors, you get dogs who offer behaviors frequently.
One of the stereotypes of clicker trained dogs is that they offer behaviors all the time. Dogs trained with positive reinforcement tend to do stuff. And they’ll go wild with offering stuff if their people reinforce it. But it doesn’t have to be that way all the time. You can have a dog who is a virtuoso shaper and completely unafraid to offer behaviors, but who has also learned when that pays off and when it doesn’t.
We can set up some environmental cues and change our own behavior to let a dog know when we don’t want a bunch of offered behavior.
I do have those crazy behavior-offering dogs. If my dogs come running up to me in the yard for no reason to check in—I like that! They’ll usually get something from me. If I walk through a room and someone is lying nicely on a mat, they’ll get a treat.
I also reinforce offered eye contact. It usually comes along for the ride with other behaviors. Reinforcing this in real life means I have dogs who sit and stare at me.
I am OK with the results of this, but some people wouldn’t be. If you are regularly going to reinforce uncued behaviors, then you’d best be willing to do so even when it’s inconvenient. Because it’s just not fair to change the rules on your dog without warning. If you do that, you can put behaviors into extinction. This is unpleasant for the dog and doesn’t serve our overall training goals well.
My dogs are good at chilling since one of the offered behaviors I reinforce is lying down with relaxed muscles. This is nicely incompatible with trying a bunch of stuff to get my attention. I don’t mind tossing a treat around every 10 minutes while I’m working at the computer. But if we are really out of sync and they are tuning up to bug me to death, I just use management. I get behind a gate.
One of these days I may set up a cue for “The Bar is Closed.” There are a couple of situations in which I never reinforce my dogs and they have learned that perfectly.
In the following movie, the bar was definitely open. I was reinforcing Clara’s offered retrieves, and you can see the amusing outcome.
I’ve reinforced Clara for “trading” since she was tiny. But she started it. She always had a tendency to bring me things. I liked that, so I reinforced it. Still do. It means when she has something dangerous, I can immediately get it from her with no stress. This is a good thing since everything goes in her mouth. She was an outrageous chewer when younger, so I managed very tightly about this then.
When Cricket was alive, Clara was limited to only half the house most of the time. Clara was just under 2 years old when Cricket died in May 2013, and it seemed appropriate to open things up a bit after that. It went very well. About the worst thing that happened was that Clara snitched napkins off the table to chew up. I was careful where I put food, so she didn’t develop a counter-surfing habit. She did have certain items of my clothing—a hat in particular—that she kept a constant eye out for. But almost everything she picked up other than napkins she brought straight to me. She still does this, “busting” herself for picking up contraband.
There are good reasons to do the opposite, by the way. Some people teach a default “Leave It.” What if there is someone in your household who is prone to dropping pills or leaving sharp tools around? Then reinforcing a dog for picking random things up in her mouth and bringing them to you is not a good idea. But it has been a good choice for us, I think. You can see the rusty nail Clara brought me above. If she hadn’t, she would have been chewing on it in the yard.
By the way, the movie shows pretty impressive distance behavior. Clara was bringing items to me clear from the back of the house!
Does your dog have any behaviors on good stimulus control? Or any behaviors with an embarrassing lack of stimulus control, as mine do?
Eric Brad posted a really great question this last summer on his FaceBook page, Canine Nation. Yes, it’s December now. It takes me this long to mull things over sometimes.
Have any of you ever used a technique for teaching/encouraging recalls called “Runaways”? It involves running away from your dog, hiding from your dog, or even getting in the car without them when they choose not to come when called.
Can you explain the premise on which this technique is based and why it can be effective in getting the dog to come back more reliably?
I looked around and there are several variants of this. Most people recommend the human running away and hiding as a consequence for a dog not coming when called. Ian Dunbar recommends it (as a one-time exercise) without the recall. Just leave the puppy when he is preoccupied and hide from him. Yet other people use running away from a puppy and even playing hide and seek as a game and a motivator. And Trish King of Canine Behavior Associates has a protocol called Abandonment Training that has some similarities but also important differences.
Let’s look in depth to see how this “runaway” thing can work.
First, here is how people seem to think the first version is supposed to work.
Version 1: Negative Punishment
Just to be clear: the following is not a good behavioral analysis.
Antecedent: Human calls dog
Behavior: Dog fails to come (Note: NOT a good behavioral description)
Consequence: Human runs away and hides
Prediction: Failing to come when called decreases (probably untrue)
I believe that people think they are using negative punishment in this scenario. Negative punishment is the process where something is removed after a behavior, which results in the behavior happening less often. The human removes him or herself from the dog’s environment. But Houston, we’ve got a problem.
In behavior analysis, we need to specify a behavior, in this case, whatever is thought to be punished. And we didn’t. “Failing to come” when called is not a behavioral description. People try to make it into one when they say the dog is “blowing them off” or “giving them the paw.” The fact those also are not realistic descriptions either should give us pause.
So let’s think about what the dog might be doing instead of coming when called.
Sniffing
Chasing a squirrel
Digging a hole
Staring at something in the distance
Rolling
Barking at a stag beetle
Et cetera! The possibilities are infinite.
Problem #1. If we think we are punishing a behavior, what is it? We can’t be punishing an individual behavior if the dog is doing something different every time he doesn’t come when called and we left, and he probably is. However, it gets worse.
Problem #2. Timing. Let’s say Fido is sniffing the ground. You call him. He keeps sniffing. You disappear. Sometime later, he notices you are gone. The problem is that your leaving and his sniffing are not connected. We can’t really expect Fido to review the last two minutes and think, “Oh let’s see, she called me. What was I doing then? Oh yeah, I was sniffing. Now she has disappeared. I’d better not sniff anymore.”
So this may feel like punishment from the human’s standpoint. “I’ll show him! I’ll go get in the car if he doesn’t come!” Just like some beleaguered parents end up threatening to do with their kids. But the analysis doesn’t work out that way. (See below under Abandonment Training for a protocol that removes these problems.)
In truth, we are not looking to punish something as much as we are trying to get behavior. We are trying to increase the behaviors of the dog staying connected and coming when called. So let’s re-analyze it as a reinforcement scenario. We will have to move our behavioral lens over one notch and start with the human leaving. So now we get the Dunbar version.
Version 2: Negative Reinforcement
Antecedent: Human hides, leaving puppy alone
Behavior: Pup looks for and finds human
Consequence: State of being alone ends
Prediction: Pup looking for human increases
The behavioral mathematics work out better here, although it’s a tricky scenario. I’ll be discussing it in more depth in a later post**. The aversive is being alone, which is very scary for many animals, especially young ones. The puppy can learn to escape being ditched or shorten the time by looking for the human more often, and noticing sooner when the human disappears. The pup can learn to avoid it entirely by looking for (or paying attention to the whereabouts of) the human all the time.
Let’s think about what the dog learns and how, though. Here is a true story from a friend, in her words:
Years ago I had my little sensitive Sheltie down at the oval. She was off leash and running around sniffing the ground, hot on the trail of something or other. Not having much experience at the time I called her to come however, she was that intent on sniffing that she was oblivious to my recall. A Trainer told me to go and hide berhind a car so that she could not see me. I did as I was asked and after hiding for a few minutes Elsa finally realised that I was gone. I will never forget the terrified look on her little face as she ran up to everyone checking them out to see if any of them were me. Broke my heart. I would never put my dog through that again. She obviously was not well trained at the time and should not even have been off leash in that environment. I had set my dear little friend up to fail.
This method to me seems quite extreme, especially since teaching a dog to check in frequently and come when called is not rocket science. If you have built a great foundation and relationship with the dog, you would have a very hard time even doing this test. I personally don’t want to teach, “Stay with me or else.” It’s using coercion as an unpleasant topping on a really nice cake.
Version #3: Running Away
Now the cool thing, and I think the point Eric Brad was getting to, is that you can also use running away as part of a positive reinforcement protocol. My original title for this piece was about the continuum, and how the same actions, running away and hiding, can range from extremely rewarding to completely aversive. Here is the other end of the spectrum from what I described above. Take a look at these puppies practicing running after and with their people.
This is a much happier scenario:
Antecedent: Human runs ahead of puppy (optionally calling to them)
Behavior: Puppy chases and catches up
Consequence: Treat and/or play is added
Prediction: Pup running after human increases
And you can see it increase in the movie, can’t you? By the end of their turn, many of the puppies can hardly be left behind anymore and are happily running with their humans.
Cricket (14 years old in this photo) liked playing chase games
So what’s different? First, the humans didn’t hide. They just ran a few feet away from the puppy in wide open spaces. They didn’t lump straight to disappearing. Second, the puppies got a fun treat when they caught up. Third, they got to chase something, a favored activity for many dogs!
Now let’s compare the three different behavioral analyses. In Version #1, the human running away and hiding is the consequence, not the antecedent. It is performed as a result of something the dog did (or didn’t do). It is not an antecedent, or cue for a behavior.
In Version #2 it is an aversive antecedent. The human hides without warning from a young, dependent animal. The puppy is prompted to relieve the stress of being left alone by finding the human.
But in Version #3, the running away scenario, it is a non-stressful or very low stress antecedent. There might be a couple of moments early on where the puppy is going “Huh? where did he go?” But the humans stay close and out in plain sight and the pup learns the game. The difference was that they started out with baby steps. And at that point in the game they called the pups after they were coming to help teach them the cue.
And that leads us to…
Version #4 Hide and Seek
So if hiding is aversive, as described in Version #2, how come some people play it as a game?
The hiding as described in Versions 1 and 2, if used as a training technique, is lumping. In some cases deliberate lumping. The pup has not learned a fun game based on trying to find mom or dad. Suddenly disappearing on a puppy is quite different from doing a careful buildup. The people who do play hide and seek as part of a recall game take it in steps, just like with any other good training. They start off like the people in the puppy video I linked to above. They take care not to push too far and lose the pup’s trust.
Here’s a a short post and video by Mary Hunter, playing hide and seek with her parents’ dog Ginger. Ginger clearly thinks this is fun. Notice that Mary barely even goes out of sight before she calls Ginger. She is demonstrating a great way to start. Building very carefully on this foundation will probably result in a dog who associates looking for and finding her human with some of the best fun ever.
I will mention that I failed to make hide and seek fun for two of my three dogs when I tried it. It’s easy to go too fast, or fail to notice signs of stress. Clara, the formerly feral dog, and Zani, the sensitive one, both got a little stressed out when I tried this game. Summer was fine and had quite the drive for it. My failure with the others may be solely a result of lumping on my part, or could be connected with their temperaments. But I shudder to think of the effect on them if I suddenly disappeared on them in real life as some kind of test.
Version #5: Abandonment Training
I want to mention that there is a formal training protocol for reactive/aggressive dogs that fits into the “runaway” category. It is Trish King of Canine Behavior Associates’ Abandonment Training for Aggression. And although it is not something I would choose to do because of where it lands on the Humane Hierarchy (negative punishment and arguably positive punishment), it addresses the problems I noted in Version #1 above.
It is a protocol for when the dog performs aggressive behavior. It consists of the handler throwing the leash at the dog as a tactile cue and leaving. (There is also a long line on the dog.) But there are some preparations set for the exercise.
Trish King knows her learning theory, so this method is superior to the “just up and leave” method in terms of coherence to the dog. First, the dog is taught a cue that means the handler is leaving, and is positively reinforced for coming along. (That cue includes the tactile experience of having a leash dropped on its back.) So the dog develops some fluency, in neutral situations, of turning and leaving with its handler on cue. Second, a specific behavior (or set of behaviors) is the target for the punishment. In this case, it is barking and other aggressive behaviors, not a “non-behavior” such as not coming when called). Third, the cue for leaving is delivered exactly when the dog is performing the undesired behavior, so the relationship between the two is clear.
Good Methods for Teaching Attention and Recall
Zani comes when called
Except for the puppy recall video, it appears that most of the above is about what not to do. So here are some more resources for kindly and fun methods for training recalls, and a couple of inspirational vids as well.
Photo credit: All photos are mine except the first one of the white dog. That one is from Joegoauk Goa on Flickr under this license. I cropped the photo.
**In Version #2, there could be some positive reinforcement as well: adding the human back into the environment could cause joy as well as relief. Whether the aversive is present depends on the internal responses of the animal, but that’s not uncommon. We can’t “see” if a shock collar causes pain, but we can tell whether it can be used to drive behavior or not. And in both cases we can study the visible behavioral responses and body language of the dog. A third party, present when the puppy was left, could tell pretty easily in most cases whether the puppy was panicked or having a great time searching.
I rewrote this post significantly and republished it in August 2022. Here’s a link. I’m leaving this version up because of the comments.
Priiiiiiingggggg!
I use WordPress.com to host this blog. It has a smartphone app. The app is most useful to me for checking statistics and getting notifications.
The app has a pleasant little sound effect. You can assign it to sound as a notification when different things happen on the blog. I didn’t understand the nuances when I first got it. I just went with the default, and soon learned that it played the sound when I got comments, likes, or follows.
Would you like to see how to teach a dog to back up without walking into them? Today I’m featuring a video I made about that in 2011 that is quite popular on YouTube, but that I have never shown here.
Rat terrier Kaci says, “Train me!”
The video features the “channel” technique to teach backing up. You build a little channel out of furniture or household items, get your dog to go to the front of it by throwing a treat up there, then capture (click/treat) their backing up when they back out. This is only a good technique if your dog doesn’t mind small spaces. (Wait until you see my little demo dog! Kaci the rat terrier is fearless and very “in the game.”)
