Here’s an “Almost Wordless Wednesday” for you. Just a short movie showing Clara and Zani playing.
Even wholesome dog playing can be scary to people who aren’t familiar with it. Dogs growl, snarl, and mouth each other so fast and hard that you are sure they are doing damage. But many dogs, sometimes the most unlikely pairs, work out ways to play that are pretty safe and fun for both parties concerned.
In this clip you will see hackles raised (Clara), lots of snarling and screaming (Zani), and lots of so-called displacement behaviors from both dogs (look-aways, lip licks, ground sniffing). Yet what I see in the main is wholesome and fun play. I show some of the things I like about it in the movie: Clara’s self-handicapping, how they take breaks and vary their play, and how they negotiate the end of play and bleed off any built up tension. (Try to see when one of them first decides it’s time to quit. I’ll give my opinion in the comments if anyone wants to discuss.)
Throughout the clip, my third dog, Summer, is sitting quietly in front of me. I have trained her to do that instead of being the Fun Police, and intervening aggressively in the other dogs’ play. She got a treat right after the clip ended.
The whole post in three words: Don’t do it. Start at the beginning.
I’ve mentioned before that I use Sue Ailsby’s Training Levels as a guide for training my dogs. The Levels comprise an organized method for teaching your dog. The behaviors are designed to build on each other and generalize as part of the process. They are carefully laid out, and the books suggest specific ways to teach each behavior without being doctrinaire about it. The method is great for new trainers, because the trainer builds skills through the process as well.
I am not the best example of a Levels trainer because I frequently dash off-course and train something else, but with each new dog I do use the Levels for my foundation, and they are always going on in the background. Right now all three of my dogs are working some Level 3 behaviors and we are still cleaning up some in Level 2.
I’ve been on the Training Levels Yahoo group since 2008. Just before discovering the Levels, I had been putting together my own prioritized list of behaviors to teach (with competitive agility as a big focus but also plenty of polite pet behaviors). I had been patching together some Susan Garrett and Leslie McDevitt and things from other sources. So when I discovered the Levels, I was in a quandary. I am a dedicated do-it-yourselfer and am constitutionally hesitant to take “someone else’s” structure and follow it. And I wanted something focused specifically on agility. But I also had enough sense to vaguely realize that Sue Ailsby might know a tiny bit more about how to put together a dog training curriculum than I did. (That’s sarcasm. Sue’s credentials are awesome.)
Adopting the Levels
So, after some generous guidance from Lynn Shrove, with whom I struck up an email relationship and who was very generous with her time, I decided to use the Levels for my training structure.
In an email conversation I described to Lynn how I was going through the lists of behaviors in the Levels to see where I should start with my dog, since she already knew a lot of them.
Anyone who is a dedicated Levels trainer is smirking right now.
Here’s how the conversation went.
Eileen: I’ve made a check-off sheet and am going through and testing Summer through the early behaviors in the Levels so I know what Level she is already at and where to start.
Lynn: (politely) You should think about starting at the beginning.
Eileen: But Summer knows that stuff already! She has titles in obedience and agility! She can do a two-minute sit/stay with distractions. She’s good at heeling. She got her Novice obedience title in three straight trials.
Lynn: (politely) Still, I really suggest you start at the beginning. The Levels are about learning how to teach your dog and they all fit together.
Eileen: But I’ve already been training her for two years! I don’t need to backtrack.
Lynn: (patiently) What would it hurt, though, to retrain according to Sue’s methods? You will probably pick up some stuff that you didn’t know was missing.
Eileen: (grudgingly and several days later) OK, I am starting from the beginning.
Lynn: Great! Let me know if you want to share training videos.
Eileen: (a few weeks later) Oh now I know why you told me to start at the beginning. Thank you!
Perhaps I wasn’t that gracious at the end, and perhaps it was more like months, but I’m pretty sure I did tell Lynn that she was right. Because she was.
Zani Demos a Level 1 Sit
Why to Start at the Beginning
Most humans hate to backtrack, or do anything that even feels like backtracking. Also, we are usually proud to have taught our dogs anything. Finally, we are impatient. We want to get to the new, fun stuff. So it’s perfectly natural that we should see a list of behaviors, think, “Oh great, my dog already knows some of those,” and decide to start somewhere in the middle, determining what she already knows by a quick test.
Here are some of the reasons why that is a really bad idea with the Training Levels.
The Levels emphasize generalization. In many obedience schools, and just by natural inclination, we teach our dogs to do a behavior in one environment and do it the same each time. If my dog can sit in the kitchen when I am holding her food bowl in my hand (facing north), I may figure she “knows sit.” Or if she can sit in a line of dogs for one minute in an obedience ring (admittedly a challenge), I figure she can “do a sit stay.” Notice that in the conversation above I defended my dog’s knowledge of behaviors by citing her titles. This is very common when coming from that training background, but in truth, being able to perform a series of behaviors in an obedience ring has little or nothing to do with being able to do them in “real life.” Different skills entirely. My dog didn’t really “know” a sit-stay. All one has to do to test this claim is to put the dog or oneself in an odd or different position or with new distractions and ask for the same thing. I did this later. I have a series of movies about this in the blog post: Dogs Notice Everything. Check it out. When you start the Levels from the beginning, generalizing becomes second nature, and that’s a good thing.
If you are new to clicker or marker training, you need to practice on the easier stuff more than your dog does! And Sue gives explicit instructions about this.
Behaviors taught with aversives, even mild ones like pushing the dog’s butt down into a sit, are **not the same** as those same behaviors taught with positive reinforcement. They carry with them a burden of pressure and even fear. The Levels are taught with joy. And yes, behaviors taught that way can become reliable (the Levels are great at that too). If you have used aversives, or trained the behaviors “for praise,” or “without treats,” you especially need to start over. You may even need to change your cue words, since they probably have baggage from the “old way.” I changed the phrase I used for “leave it” because I originally taught it by saying “leave it” and pulling (honestly, jerking) my dog away from a treat on the floor, without any clue ahead of time what I wanted her to do. And here’s a whole post about a cue I changed much later in my dog’s life when I finally came to see the baggage it carried: “Replacing a Poisoned Cue.”
Sue knows more than you do. In short, the problem is that you don’t know what it is that you don’t know. I can’t tell you what that is. But I can practically guarantee that unless you are a professional trainer yourself, there is something in those early instructions that will be a revelation to you. Probably a lot of “somethings.”
Real Life Example of Levels Generalization
Here is a movie I made back in 2010 of my then new dog Zani sitting on cue in the 15 different situations that Sue suggested in the “old” Training Levels, Level 1. There are plenty of warts in this training including consistently late clicks, but the cool thing is that even so, Zani could and did learn to sit on cue!
And remember, that was just Level 1 out of 7 in the old Levels.
Now take a look at the list for Level 1 Sit from the New Levels. The list is a little shorter now, but actually more challenging.
Dog sits with the leash off.
Dog sits in a different part of training room, facing a different way, with the leash off.
Dog sits with a hand signal only.
Dog sits with a hand signal in a different room.
Dog sits with the leash on.
Dog sits with the leash on with you sitting down, if you originally taught it standing up, or vice versa. If you’ve done it both ways already, you can kneel or hang off the edge of your bed.
The dog sits by an open door (an inside door).
The dog sits: during a TV commercial, when you open the oven door, when the doorbell rings, when you’re on the phone, when you’re putting on your coat, when you’re brushing your teeth, while you’re peeling carrots, while you’re putting on her leash and collar.
That’s part of what you miss if you skip Level 1 because your dog “knows sit.”
Oh, and one more thing about “testing.” If you go around testing your dog’s sit in lots of different situations in one morning, that doesn’t give you an accurate picture. Dogs will tend to repeat the last thing they got reinforced for when they are unsure. If you go to 40 different places in your house in sequence and ask for sits, well, you’ll probably get sits. That’s why when testing behaviors, Sue specifies to do it “out of the blue.” Meaning outside the context of a training session and without having recently worked on or asked for the behavior.
So there’s another reason. If you start in the middle, you may not even know how to properly test the behaviors. Take it from this inveterate skipper-arounder. Start at the beginning.
The Academy has yearly awards that are mostly in-house, but this year they decided to include a category for work done outside the Academy.
I was awarded the first “The Academy Applauds” award for my work here on eileenanddogs.com.
I am so honored. Thank you, thank you, and thank you again!
Below is the letter from the Academy. I have also put a permanent graphic in the sidebar of the blog. And I’ll include a photo of my “statue” when I get it!
Back Atcha
Thank you to the following:
Jean Donaldson and the students of the Academy (not just for this award, but for the work you do and what you stand for)
All blog readers
All blog commenters
Everyone who has shared a post
Everyone who has subscribed to the blog or Liked the Facebook page
Everyone who has provided a graphic or photo
Everyone who has made a video for me
Everyone who has pointed out little errors
Everyone who has pointed out big errors, privately or publicly
Everyone who has helped me with drafts of blogs and movies
The serious learning theory mavens–at all levels–who help me tackle the hard questions
Folks who have given me an idea for a blog, whether they knew it or not
Folks who have said, “Attagirl!”
Folks who have disagreed constructively
People who translated a post into another language or subtitled a movie
Pet owners who have decided to venture forth and take those first few steps with a clicker and treats
Pet owners who have realized they needed in-person help and hired a positive reinforcement based trainer or vet behaviorist
My training “other half,” who seems to think everything I think
All you pro trainers out there on the front lines
People who provide and manage quality, free Internet resources and keep their eyes on the prize: helping dogs and their owners over all else
The Pet Professional Guild
My friends and family
And of course…..my dogs!
This recognition is some of the best R+ ever. I’ll prove it by writing more!
Have you ever had an epiphany? Wherein all of a sudden some information you had been turning over and over in your mind fell into place and created an entire new picture? It has happened to me a handful of times in my life, and in each case the result was that I changed some basic beliefs.
Trainers who have switched to positive-reinforcement based training from more aversive-inclusive methods often refer to that process as “crossing over.” I have written about crossing over in many bits and pieces over the years, plus in a couple of longer articles (I’ve linked some at the bottom of this post).
[In operant learning], extinction means withholding the consequences that reinforce a behavior. –Paul Chance, Learning and Behavior, Fifth Edition, 2003
In that post I discussed the common error of arguing that withholding a treat from a dog in a training session (or other time) comprises punishment. On the contrary, when nothing is contingently added or taken away but behavior decreases, the process at work is extinction, not punishment.
But that is not to say that extinction is automatically better. In Dr. Susan Friedman’s Humane Hierarchy for behavioral intervention (see graphic below), extinction by itself is at the same level as negative punishment and negative reinforcement. They are roughly at the same level of (un)desirability, and the level of unpleasantness of any particular technique would depend on the circumstance and individual animal. Dr. Friedman makes a point to say that these three are not ranked in any particular order of overall undesirability.
Extinction is often overlooked when considering or analyzing methods. People often mix it up with negative punishment. It’s a bit of an oddball learning process since it applies to both operant learning and respondent conditioning. In operant learning it is sometimes jokingly called the “fifth quadrant.” The important thing to me is that its unpleasant effects can vary wildly, from practically nil to complete misery.
Dr. Susan Friedman’s Humane Hierarchy
Extinction can be very, very frustrating. Here you are with these behaviors that you have been performing for such a long time that they are habitual, and all of a sudden they don’t work anymore! But there are ways to use extinction in combination with other processes to make it much less hard on the learner. And in fact, if we look at the Humane Hierarchy a little more closely we will see that extinction is actually lurking in another of the levels, partnering with something much nicer.
Let’s explore this by way of a thought experiment.
Extinction Scenario #1. You get your car out of the shop after a tune-up. You buy a pint of your very favorite ice cream, or other perishable treat. You realize you need one more thing from the store, so you lock the car and go back in. When you come back out, you try to unlock your car with a remote. It doesn’t work! You press the remote again and again. You press it harder. You aim it differently. No go. Then you try unlocking the door with the key. That doesn’t work either! You jiggle and jiggle the key, and try the different doors. Nothing works. You bang on the car doors. You can’t get into the car using the methods that you have always used. You are starting to cuss now. Your ice cream is melting. You finally yell at the car and it opens!
You drive back to the repair shop and ask the guy what the heck he did to your car. He said your car doors now work by voice control. Apparently he thought that sending you off to find that out on your own would be the best way to teach you.
Two questions. 1) Was that learning process fun? 2) What are your feelings towards the mechanic?
That is a description of the process of extinction. A behavior that has previously been reinforced is no longer reinforced. In this case it was actually two behaviors: opening the car with the remote and opening it with the key. Both used to be reinforced by your gaining entry to the car. Both stopped working with no warning. Stinky!
Three characteristics of extinction are the extinction burst, an increased variability of behavior, and aggression. We got all three. When your normal methods for opening the car door didn’t work, there was a big burst of behavior from you as you tried stuff. You unconsciously started adding variety in how you performed the behaviors. And you started doing everything a little harder and banging on stuff. None of that was fun for you.
Now let’s try a different version of the scenario.
Scenario #2 When you first go to the mechanic, he tells you about a new option to have your car respond to voice commands, including that if you opt for the upgrade, in some cases the old methods will not work. You decide that it sounds good.* Your mechanic takes 10 minutes to go over the voice commands that you will use with your car, including that you practice unlocking it with your voice.
When you stop off to go to the store and return to your car, if you are like 99% of the human race, that huge reinforcement history for using your remote or keys during your whole driving career kicks in and you initially try to use one of these to open your car. But the practice of the new behavior is fresh in your mind, so as soon as the remote doesn’t work, you remember to give the voice command. Your car unlocks!
But old habits die hard. You will probably be hitting that remote or trying your keys for quite some time, each time you approach your car. The old behaviors will diminish slowly as their reinforcement histories fade into the past and the practice of the new successful behavior overshadows them. However, there will be comparatively little frustration. You are never in the dark about what behavior will actually work. You’ll probably perform the old behavior once, go “oops!” and immediately use your voice without wasting much time.
Not so bad!
What About Dog Training?
Here are the dog training corollaries to Scenario #1 and #2 above.
Let’s say you want to address the following behavior problem: When you get out your dog’s leash, your dog gets excited and runs around getting all aroused, barking and jumping on things.
Scenario #1 You have never trained your dog to do anything, but you’ve had enough of the overexcitement. So you decide you aren’t going out that door until your dog sits calmly for you to put the leash on. So you take your dog into the front room and pick up the leash. Dog runs around. You just stand there. Dog jumps on you and on the furniture. Runs around and barks. This goes on for about 5, maybe 10 minutes. Finally your dog wears out and sits down and looks at you. You take one step towards him, holding the leash out to attach it. He gets all worked up again and you have to wait out another few minutes of excited activity. This happens over and over.
From your dog’s point of view, the rules have changed. All that previous barking and running around have been reinforced by getting to go outside. Many people frankly don’t have the stamina to outwait a dog in this situation, and will finally break down and take the dog out anyway, which worsens the problem (by finally reinforcing the behavior they’ve made it more persistent). If you do succeed and the dog calms down in 20 minutes on that first day, it may take a bit less the next day. But since this is completely new to your dog and you are asking so much of him when he is already wildly excited, it will take a while, and be a frustrating process for him
Scenario #2 You have trained your dog to sit in all sorts of situations and for all sorts of reinforcers. He sits for his supper. He sits to go outside. He sits to greet people. He sits at the agility start line. He can hold a sit stay while you run around and play tug with another dog. So when you decide to teach him to sit calmly to put the leash on, you first practice some sits for treats in a random room of your house. Then you do the same in the room where you keep the leash. Then you pick up the dog’s leash and look at him expectantly. If he starts running around you wait. When he makes contact again you give him the expectant look. He will likely sit pretty soon. Treat!! He may jump up again when you approach him, but he is already learning.
This fits a pattern he is familiar with: sit and something good happens. You can use treats to reinforce those sits in this new situation so he doesn’t have to wait so long for the ultimate reinforcement, going out. You practice in small steps until you can put the dog’s leash on while he sits calmly. Depending on the dog and what you have trained, you may be able to take him straight out the door calmly that first day, or you may practice a few more days just putting the leash on and off before you go out the door.
Defining the Difference
Take a look at Dr. Friedman’s diagram again. See the area just below “Extinction, Negative Reinforcement, and Negative Punishment”? It is called “Differential reinforcement of alternative behaviors.” Guess what? That one corresponds exactly with both of the Scenarios #2 above. Dr. Friedman’s definition is, “Differential reinforcement is any procedure that combines extinction and reinforcement to change the frequency of a target behavior.”
Instead of being gobsmacked by the normal behavior not working anymore, the learners, dog and human, are given a big fat clue about what is going to work to get what they want. That clue is the positive reinforcement of an alternative behavior.
Extinction is part of all differential reinforcement training methods. Those methods are on a more humane rung of the hierarchy because the animal is given immediate opportunities for positive reinforcement. This can be done either by reinforcing successive approximations (shaping), or by separate practice of the desired behavior before it is evoked in the situation where the undesired behavior is likely.
So when someone says to you, “Neener neener neener, you use punishment when you withhold a treat,” say, “No, that’s extinction.” Then if they say, “Neener neener neener, you use extinction and that’s mean,” say “I use it in combination with differential positive reinforcement.” And make sure you do!
Be the mechanic who shows his client ahead of time what is going to work, instead of the one who sends him off with no clue.
* The car thing is a deliberately ridiculous scenario. Obviously, to cause a car’s keys and remote not to work would be horribly dangerous, and hardly anyone would consent to that even if it allowed one access to a new feature like voice commands.
A food tube (aka squeeze tube) is a vehicle for delivering soft, tasty food straight into your dog’s mouth. Food tubes are great for general dog training when high value treats are needed. They are also invaluable for doing desensitization/counterconditioning for dogs with fear issues.
There is a trick for using food tubes successfully, and just as with the non-crumbly treat recipe, I’m going to tell you right up front. I wish someone had told me, because the first time I ever tried a food tube, it didn’t work for us and I didn’t try it again for more than a year.
The secret to good use of a food tube is to get the filling just the right consistency. If it is too solid or dry, like ground up roasted white meat chicken without much moisture, it won’t extrude correctly. Likewise if it’s lumpy. If it’s too liquid-y, like chicken baby food or plain yogurt, it drips out when you are not trying to feed your dog and makes a mess.
So what you do is either buy something that is already the right consistency, or mix and match different filling types to achieve that in a do-it-yourself way.
The rest of the post covers what you can buy and what you can make, and has a few other tips for successful use.
The Easiest Way
Here is the very easiest way to use a food tube for successful high value treat delivery:
Buy a couple of Coghlan’s squeeze tubes from REI or Amazon.
Go to a pet food or grocery store and buy a can of pureed style dog or cat food. Or for raw feeders, get finely ground meat.
Put the lid on the tube, turn the tube upside down, and spoon the food in. If there is separate juice in the canned food, save it for something else.
Squeeze the air out, fold over the bottom, and close with the included clamp.
Take off the lid and offer a squirt to your dog when he does something right. You will become a god in his eyes. (And he’ll soon learn how to get the goodness efficiently into his mouth!)
Mixing It Yourself
Zani loves the white meat chicken & baby food mixture
Again, it’s all about the consistency. In the series of pictures above: the “too thick” one was 8 oz of baked white meat chicken, chopped fine in a food processor. The “too thin” one was 2.5 oz of Gerber chicken baby food straight out of the jar. The Goldilocks version was simply those two things combined in that proportion.
So that gives you the idea. In most cases, if you use 3–4 parts of something thick cut with 1 part of something thinner, you’ll probably hit the sweet spot. Here are some suggestions to choose from. Be mindful of the fat content whenever you give your dog rich stuff. Some of these adapt very well to low fat though.
Canned tripe (but every once in a while there is a piece of…something…that doesn’t want to go through the hole). That stuff is crack for dogs, though.
Canned pumpkin
Small curd cottage cheese
Thickeners
(These are things you can add to something that is too drippy. See Micha’s filling method below.)
Oat or rice flour
Guar gum
Tapioca flour
Tips
Test the mixture at the temperature at which you will be using it. Most will be softer at room temperature, more solid when refrigerated.
Test the consistency by taking off the lid and pointing the end down. If filling drips out without squeezing, it’s too thin.
Avoid canned foods that say “chunky,” “stew,” “homestyle,” or “flakes.”
If canned food is too moist, let it drain in a strainer–Randi Rossman.
Fillings
(Thank you to members of the Facebook Fearful Dogs Group for fillings suggestions and others throughout this post!)
Canned dog or cat food: pureed or mousse style. Examples: Wellness 95% canned food; Newman’s Own Organic Dog Food (Debbie Jacobs of Fearfuldogs.com says this one cuts nicely with canned pumpkin); Friskies pâté style canned cat food.
Cheez Whiz (the U.S. stuff in a jar) mixed half and half with canned pumpkin. This makes a passable substitute for spray cheese, which can be hard to find.
Honest Kitchen dehydrated dog food (rehydrated of course!).
Heather’s dogs are crazy about this liverwurst!
Heather Edgar of Caninesteins says: “The hands-down favourite of all of my dogs is liverwurst. If you wanted to dilute it down because it’s both high calorie and a bit thick, it could be pureed with a baby food veg or cooked pureed vegetables–the easiest is probably using jarred baby food sweet potato.”
Alex Bliss starts with pureed baby food and adds chicken breast, a tin of sardines, or tuna. She says that low fat soft cheese is also very popular with her dogs as a base for other flavors.
You can use pure peanut butter at room temperature, but oh, the calories! You’d better have a big dog or a very special occasion!
Ground raw meat for the raw feeders!
Deb Manheim CPDT-KA, CDBC of Happy Tails Family Dog Training purees the special diet of one of her dogs: baked North Atlantic cod and rice congee with vegetables. If you home cook for your dog already, this could be a very straightforward solution.
Micha Michlewicz starts with a protein or fruit, perhaps some veggies, and then oat or rice flour as a binder. She too mentions that you can blend up your dog’s meals and make a paste for the tube.
Dr. Jenny LeMoine suggests boiled chicken breasts, thinned down with the broth, and some yogurt mixed in as an optional treat.
The tube on the left in the large photo at the top of the post has: 4 oz Neufchatel cheese, 1/2 oz peanut butter, and 1 oz skim milk. The one on the right has commercial cat food!
Tripe: crack for dogs.
Other Tubes: Commercial or Do It Yourself
I really like the tubes like Coghlan’s with a screw top and clamp because they are so resistant to leaks and mess. I have used the same two tubes in agility for years and used them hard. I throw them ahead of my dogs and have never once had a leak or explosion. That being said, here are some alternatives. Readers, if you know of other tubes, let me know and I’ll add them.
Used mustard or other condiment squeeze container. Denise Donnelly Zomisky has experimented with this: she says you need to play around with the texture of the filling.
A sandwich bag, sealed, with a lower corner cut off –suggested by a Fearful Dogs member
Organic baby food in a pouch–a couple of people suggested this!
Here’s another food that’s already in a tube: Carly Loveless points out that in Norway you can buy flavored cream cheese in a tube, including bacon flavored. How cool is that? And bacon sounds like a nice flavor for a homemade version as well.
