Zani and I succeeded quickly with the “cross your paws” trick
I decided a while back to teach my dogs to cross their paws as a trick. I followed the instructions on one of Emily Larlham’s excellent videos: Dog Tricks Tutorial: Cross Your Paws. But I didn’t end up making the neat, quick progression shown in the movie when I tried it with my dog Summer.
I think that besides my rather clumsy training, it is just not a very natural behavior for her. I used a target, and when I finally got the behavior (sometimes), it took a long time before she would repeat it consistently. That’s very unlike most other training experiences I’ve had with her. That created a vicious circle, since one of my weaknesses as a trainer is that I am slow to raise criteria. So between the two of us we stayed at interim behaviors way too long.
One of our problems was that she kept creeping forward. Emily’s dogs stay tidily in their down position and daintily move only their paws. (And actually, so did my Zani, to whom I taught this behavior much more quickly). But Summer was perennially creeping forward or hurling herself after her moving paw and heaving sideways.
Another favorite of hers was to correctly cross her paw over, then instantly remove the bottom paw and scoot one body width to the side. I reinforced that one way too much as well. My reasoning: Well, she is crossing her paw!
I’ve said before that I had an epiphany about my dogs’ behaviors being a “map of reinforcement.” These outtakes show that in a microcosm. All these behaviors that Summer covers–and she is really good at variety–have gotten reinforced somewhere and somehow. You will see her target various parts of my body: my hand, foot, and leg. That’s because at some point I decided that if she was using the correct paw and reaching over the other one, it was OK if she targeted me a couple of times instead of the little coaster I was using. BIG mistake on my part. You’ll also see her enthusiastically whack with the wrong foot (that was not recently reinforced, but certainly has been before), and do a lot of general foot movement. You’ll even see her “give up” and put her head down on her paws. But as despondent as that looks, that’s actually an offered behavior as well.
All the outtakes make for an amusing video (except that being targeted with extended nails hurts) but there’s a lesson here. If you don’t raise criteria fast enough and instead reinforce all these approximation behaviors too often, this is the kind of thing you get. I’m working on a post about the Matching Law, but suffice it to say at this point that dwelling on intermediate steps and reinforcing approximate behaviors a lot means those behaviors are going to stick around. It will take that much longer to clean them out of the final behavior.
No Reinforcement?
This video doesn’t show me reinforcing Summer. That’s because I edited together a bunch of “mistakes” that I had finally stopped reinforcing. But don’t worry. My rate of reinforcement was generally very high. And when you think about it, that makes sense. It was high, and directed inappropriately a lot of the time. She wouldn’t be trying all this stuff otherwise.
I have tons of footage of her doing it right and getting food reinforcers. But it made for a more entertaining video when I included only the bloopers.
Training Hint
If you use a target for this behavior, it may be hard to fade. The dog is concentrating on hitting the target; the tactile sensation of crossing the paws (which is really what we want) is overshadowed. My friend Yvette Van Veen of Awesome Dogs suggests using a lightweight target (like a piece of paper) and actually putting it on the dog’s paw (the one that will end up on the bottom). Clever!
What about the rest of you who trained this trick? What method did you use? How did the progression go?
Addendum, 2/9/13. Please be aware that there are some historical inaccuracies in this post, mostly related to the origin of the method and term Errorless Learning. The mistakes affect some of my conclusions as well. Please read Errorless Learning II if you read this post, or instead of reading this post. –Eileen
You will never hear me say, or see me write, “It’s only semantics.” I grew up in a family full of passionate readers, English and education majors, and teachers. Not to mention musicians, who are often quite obsessed with passionate about language as well.
Semantics is very important to me because it deals with whether or not we understand each other. Here is part of the definition from Wikipedia: “It [semantics] is often used in ordinary language for denoting a problem of understanding that comes down to word selection or connotation.” In other words (ha ha), if I use a word or phrase and it means one thing to me and to you it means something very different, we instantly have a communication problem, and we may not even know it.
That is the context in which I offer this post. Don’t worry, I’m going to make it to dog training, and there are actually some dog training hints in here.
Zani beginning the shell game
There is a newish catch phrase going around the science-based dog training community: “errorless learning.” I am seeing more and more usage of the term, and reading pieces that equate it with the ultimate humane training. I think a lot of folks have picked up the phrase and are using it to mean setting your dog up for success in a general way. I’m aware of some others who associate it with training with positive reinforcement only. Some use it to indicate that they do not use No Reward Markers. (If an error happens in the forest and no one says anything, did it really happen? Sorry.)
But actually the phrase is not new at all. It refers to a specific teaching methodology that has been well investigated by research. I am going to describe the original research on so-called errorless learning, some subsequent research, and explain why I think the term is currently being misused and perhaps wrongly proposed as a goal in our companion animal training.
Initial Research about Error Free Learning
Skinner box
Herbert Terrace published, “Discrimination learning with and without ‘errors’,” in 1963. The experiments were performed on pigeons in Skinner boxes. The discrimination behavior taught to the pigeons was to peck on an illuminated key for a food reward when the key was lit internally with a red bulb and not peck when the key was illuminated with a green bulb.
At the beginning of the experiment, the key (in the darkened enclosure) was lit bright red. Apparently it is easy to get birds to peck on a colored, illuminated key, and importantly, they generally will not peck a dark key. The pigeons got reinforced for pecking on the brightly lit red key. The key went dark between trials and no reinforcement was available.
The birds were divided into four groups. After the birds had a period during which the key glowed red and during which they got food rewards for pecking it, the color and brightness of the key were changed according to four different protocols. For the pigeons who learned the discrimination the fastest, called the “early progressive” group, the procedure was as follows: early in the experiment, after a “dark” period, the key was illuminated at an extremely low level with the green bulb, and no reinforcement was available when the birds pecked at it. (But mostly they didn’t.) This was alternated with periods where the key was illuminated bright red, and the pigeons were reinforced for pecking it. The duration and intensity of the green light were very gradually increased from a dark key of 5 seconds duration to a bright green key of 3 minutes duration. In short: the key morphed from completely dark to bright green so gradually that to the pigeons it remained “unattractive” to peck.
For the three other groups of pigeons, there were variations in how early the green key was introduced, and whether it was introduced gradually or at full intensity at the very beginning.
The pigeons in the “early progressive” group had an amazingly low error rate. They pecked at the green key well under 1% of the time.
This technique is the ancestor of what we often do nowadays in teaching a discrimination. If I want my dog to touch her paw to a cup with food under it and ignore another cup, I will first have only the desired cup present. I’ll reinforce some iterations of touching that cup. Then when I first introduce the second cup (which is empty) I may put it in an inconvenient place for the dog to touch it and only gradually bring it physically closer. In other words I will make it easy for the dog to be right, sneak in the “wrong” cup so that at first it is just part of the background, and raise the challenge very gradually.
But before we adopt Terrace’s term of errorless learning to apply to such techniques, let’s look at some differences between what he did and what we do–and are even willing to do–with our pets. Here are some of the primary differences between his training situation and ours with our pet or performance dogs:
The pigeons were food deprived. They were kept at 80% of their normal body weight for a period starting two weeks before the start of the experiment to the end of the experiment. This is very common in such experiments.
The pigeons were isolated in a Skinner box during the experiments.
White noise was played to block external sound.
The light intensity and duration on the keys were controlled with great precision by an electrical unit.
The birds had not been taught anything before.
Although it is not stated in the paper, it is fair to assume that the birds had no particular relationship with humans other than being handled; they were not pets.
The birds were being taught only one behavior (this is a crucial point).
There was no proofing. The birds were not challenged to perform the behavior under any other conditions. It’s fair to assume the behavior wasn’t generalized.
Again, the error rate of the highly controlled birds (only in the early progressive group) was less than 1%.
From the above points, it appears that impressively low error rate was possible at least in part because of the technology available to the experimentors and the extreme control over experimental conditions that was possible for them. We don’t generally have rheostats to gradually change the intensity of lights, or little trucks to drag in the “wrong” object in increments of exactly half an inch.
You Can’t Do This At Home, But…
The conditions under which the pigeons were trained cannot be emulated by the average trainer, for technological reasons, reasons related to environmental control, and also humane reasons.
But I wanted to show how that method is relevant to some teaching strategies we use with our dogs. I made a video of the descendant of Terrace’s method as applied to scent discrimination: the Shell Game. In the video I am teaching Clara to tap only a jar lid that has a treat under it. My goal was to demonstrate the method of sneaking the “incorrect” lid in from the side while the dog is happily bopping the food filled one.
As usual, I got more than I bargained for. For starters, I utterly failed at sneakiness. You’ll see. We survived that. But in addition, I got some interesting footage of Clara making an “error” pretty early on (tapping the wrong lid), which was probably because of my clumsiness and bringing it in too fast. However, although different dogs react differently, making this error appeared to help teach her more about the game. See what you think.
Mine is not a tutorial video. If you want to teach your dog the Shell game, here’s a really nice tutorial by Donna Hill. She uses a different method of helping her dog succeed, and does a beautiful job as usual. By the way, in my video Clara was standing in for Zani and it was her first time ever playing the game. All the paw flailing she did (including belting and grabbing me a few times) was because we’ve been spending quite a bit of time shaping a trick with a lot of paw movement. It took her a while to get that out of her system and figure out the new game. That’s another difference between training in the lab and at home. Whatever else has been reinforced recently or richly will likely creep into the new thing you are working on.
What you see in my video, however clumsily done, and what many people seem to mean by “errorless learning, ” is helping the animal to be right. Terrace’s work went far beyond making it easy for the pigeons to be right, however. Because of his use of technology and the controls available in a laboratory, he made it very, very difficult for the birds to be wrong. Is this a good thing?
Would You Even Want To? The Big Drawback of that Huge Success Rate
OK, so what if we could achieve that kind of low error rate while still being kind to our animals, and let’s further assume that we were able to teach it to fluency in a real life environment. Are there any other problems?
Yes. Back to the pigeons: what if later we needed them to peck the key when it was green instead? Biiiiig problem.
Discrimination Reversal Following Learning without “Errors” by Marsh and Johnson in 1968 demonstrated that pigeons taught to peck a red key and ignore a green one, using Terrace’s method, could not, even after five days, be induced to learn a new behavior of pecking the green key.
For most things we want to teach our dogs, that would be a huge problem.
Granted that there are some behaviors and tasks in the dog world that are standalone, in the sense that you would not be likely to teach a conflicting behavior. Diabetic alert dogs come to mind. As I understand it, they learn to react to one and only one odor for their working lives. (Correct me if I’m wrong, folks.) Cadaver search dogs. Perhaps some other types of search dogs, but not all.
But in the service dog, pet and performance dog worlds, it seems to me that these kinds of needs are rare. Most people teach their dogs both sit and down. Agility and herding dogs aren’t taught left turns only. They learn left and right. Service dogs typically learn to both push and pull, use left and right. They have to be ready to pick some stuff up and not even touch other stuff.
Anyone who has trained a dog, for example, to raise her right paw, got that fluent, then taught her to raise her left paw, is familiar with the period of frustration the dog goes through when the familiar behavior no longer pays off. I have a post related to that about the mini extinction bursts that our dogs undergo in shaping exercises. The research tells us that if we had trained the right paw raise errorlessly (a difficult challenge), the dog’s frustration when trying to learn the left paw raise would greatly increase.
The pigeons learned only to do one thing, and the exercise did not teach them problem solving skills or how to play other training games with humans. And it blew their little minds when they were asked to do something else.
This is the biggest reason I do not have errorless learning as a goal for my dogs, nor do I use the term for the teaching strategies I use and admire. Taking a long view, training them to do one thing using something close to Terrace’s method could set them up for tons of stress and frustration later.
Learning What’s Wrong to Learn What’s Right
It’s a little bit out of style to emphasize the importance of your dog knowing what the wrong behavior is. It smacks of corrections and punishment based training. But as clicker trainers say, the lack of a click is information. In my video, because I lumped a bit and moved the second lid into the picture so fast, Clara made an error fairly early on. Her error consisted of tapping the empty lid. She tapped it a couple of times, got no treat, sniffed and licked it, then proceeded to the correct lid and tapped it. She then ignored the “wrong” lid from then on in that session. I think she learned something really important. There are lids with nothing under them! She is going to have to use her nose to figure it out. It seems to me that learning that at this point was not at all harmful for this dog.
Let’s Add to the Terminology Confusion: Applications to Human Learning
Errorless learning is used very successfully in operant conditioning programs for autistic children. But the process is quite different, since we primates mimic so easily and often we can understand and follow verbal instructions. From this website comes a good definition:
[Errorless learning]: The use of instruction designed to prevent errors or incorrect responses. Typically prompts (artificial cues that provide assistance to the learner about the correct response) are presented so that an individual engages in a behavior that is being targeted. Once the individual is engaging in the behavior appropriately, then these prompts are faded or removed slowly and systematically so that the correct behavior is made with few or no errors.
Here is a lovely little video that shows that technique.
But think about whether we could apply that method to dog training. The child is learning to perform the initial task through either the verbal instruction, mimicking the hand movement of the teacher, or both. Neither of those are available to us with dogs. If the behavior is new, they don’t already know the verbal cue. And although there seems to be some small evidence of dogs learning by mimicry (of other dogs), you can’t take your average dog, put your hand on an object, then expect them to put their paw on it just like you did.
Aggression
Back to the birds. Terrace later claimed as a by-product of some later experiments that pigeons trained using a trial and error method rather than his “errorless” approach showed aggressive behavior when pecking the wrong key produced no reinforcement. The article is “Behavioral contrast and the peak shift: effect of extended discrimination training” and is available in full online. In that work and in a later study he claimed that these behaviors were not present with his “errorless” cohort.
I have heard this used as an argument for “errorless” learning for dogs. Our dogs might get enraged and aggressive if they make too many mistakes, so we need to absolutely minimize by any means possible the number of mistakes they make. But again, there are big differences in the training environment between the lab and training our dogs at home. Our training is relationship based. And a big part of the job of the human trainer is to monitor the emotional state of the dog as evidenced by its behavior and adjust the task accordingly.
Also, later research did not replicate Terrace’s results; i.e. the aggressive responses were also found in subjects who learned via the “errorless” methods. See Rilling: Extinction Induced Aggression. To me, for the dog to undergo some momentary frustration in small doses seems better than to get a big dose later.
Conclusion
In short: I think the methods used in the original “errorless” learning would be inappropriate, and in some cases inhumane to use on our pets, and the method by which the pigeons learned a discrimination behavior appeared to impede further learning.
I understand why people use the term. They want to clarify that they are doing their best to make the training experience fun and successful for their dog, and to emphasize that their approach is humane. Maybe there is a better way to say that!
Dr. Susan Friedman uses the term, “Reduced error learning.” To me it is more accurate, and doesn’t carry the baggage of Terrace’s term.
As trainers who use learning theory, we know the value and sometimes the difficulty of getting terminology right. And we understand that discussion is a lot more straightforward when everybody has general agreement on terminology. So from what I have learned here, I am encouraging folks to not morph a term that has a scientific, historical meaning into something a bit different, and especially not to attach a glamour to it because it sounds so nice.
I’m all for making it easy for our animals to be right in order to initially learn the behavior, then very gradually raise the difficulty. Of course! That is a basic tenet of effective, humane training. But it seems to me that striving to get an extremely low error rate can have a very high price.
Anybody have any examples of standalone behaviors that would profit from strict errorless methods? I’d love to know. Also, please note that I did not do a complete literature survey on errorless learning. It’s a large topic. Maybe I missed something important. If I did, please tell me!
Thanks for reading!
Coming up soon:
Don’t forget the contest! Deadline for entries on January 31.
Definition of a Superstitious Behavior: The behavior that results from accidental reinforcement of an action so that the organism continues to repeat it. For example, a rat that turned in a circle before accidentally hitting a bar and obtaining food might continue turning in a circle before each bar press. — from the American Psychological Association Dictionary
My little black cat Arabella never brought me bad luck
I wrote when I started this blog that I was going to share my mistakes in the hopes of helping others learn. Here are some nice big embarrassing ones regarding superstitious behaviors, but at least they date mostly from my earlier training days. Hopefully you, or any beginning trainer, can benefit from the lessons I learned the hard way.
The Terminology
B.F. Skinner first described superstitious behaviors in experiments with pigeons in 1948. He set a feeding mechanism to trip at variable intervals that had nothing to do with the actions of the pigeons. The pigeons nonetheless started repeating behaviors that had been “accidentally” marked and reinforced by the feeder.
The term “superstitious behavior” now refers to any behavior that is accidentally reinforced. A couple of the behaviors in this post stretch the definition. But even if they aren’t technically superstitious, they are nonetheless accidental or at least poorly trained on my part.
Summer’s Nod
When one of my agility buddies encouraged me in 2008 to start using a clicker, I didn’t know that I should practice timing. I didn’t know that there were mechanical and observational skills involved. A clicker seemed like a fun thing and I had heard that dogs got motivated and enjoyed it. So I also didn’t know that it would be wise to start with a behavior that involved only gross motor movements.
Uh oh.
The very first behavior I actually got with a clicker was a head nod, even though I was trying to click for eye contact. I realized this after working on this a few weeks with Summer. Summer would move her head to look at me and I would click. I clicked the eye contact but apparently also clicked the nod. Strangely, the nod drifted to the period after the click and before treat delivery. The sequence went: eye contact, click, head nod, treat. The nod, immediately preceding the food, accordingly got a ton of reinforcement. Even though she did learn (despite me) that I was trying to teach eye contact, the head nod remained.
Four years later, I still get little nods from Summer. Interestingly, she doesn’t offer it in shaping sessions. When it comes back, it returns in its old place between the marker and the treat when I have just clicked her for something else. This is an example of a superstitious behavior. And it turns out that I am really good at creating those!
It has faded some over the years, but I found a couple of examples. Want to see?
Zani’s Weave Poles
The following is a behavior that would have been very difficult to teach, had I intended to do so.
In the course of teaching Zani agility weaves using the two by two method, I would tend to mark with a “yes” the moment she made the turn between the last poles. This was the moment I was absolutely sure she was going to complete the behavior correctly. That’s a natural time to mark. But early on in our training, she did a few little jumps through the last pair of poles. I marked, and you can see what happened.
But what is most fascinating is that she does it only when I am on her right side. When I am on her left, she doesn’t do her “jump thing” between the last poles. I speculate that since she is very spatially sensitive, she is less likely to hurl herself out of the weaves when I am close to where she will emerge. Or perhaps I just didn’t mark the exit as much when we practiced on that side.
Clara’s Circles
Those first two behaviors are pretty cute. This behavior of Clara’s that I accidentally reinforced is rather unfortunate.
Clara has always been pushy. When she was about three months old I started a training project of reinforcing her for walking a few feet away when I was interacting with another dog. I started off with the other dogs in crates and was very systematic about it. I drew lines on the floor for my own benefit so as to keep consistent criteria about Clara’s distance from the other dogs. We did lots and lots of sessions where she would walk away a few steps and reorient at some distance.
It would have been better if I had taught a default down or Go to Mat, or at least thrown the treat away from our immediate area. I ended up unintentionally reinforcing a circling behavior. She would walk a few steps away, turn and reorient at the desired distance. I marked the turn way too often, when what I wanted for her was just to back off. But the “backing off” was not a well-defined behavior, even with my lines on the floor. So I ended up clicking an observable behavior, and that was when she turned back to me. Dang.
What is so unfortunate about this is that the circling either morphed into a stress behavior or it was one already. Because I have seen a lot more of it ever since those sessions. Clara tends to do it when I don’t mark a behavior that she expects to be marked. She will immediately whirl around, usually counterclockwise, then often retreat to a mat.
It is impossible to tease apart how much of this is due to all that early reinforcement, and how much of it is a natural stress behavior for her. I do wish I hadn’t trained so many 180 and 270 degree turns when she was young. When I set out to teach her spinning as a trick, it was dead easy, but I gave that a second thought and decided not to use that trick.
Cricket, Too
I even taught superstitious behaviors with Cricket. I tried to train a paw lift as a “wave” trick, but then it started occurring in her “sit” position as a superstitious behavior. Once it started, I kept accidentally reinforcing it. She almost never put her left foot down when she sat for me again. I didn’t know enough at the time to fix the problem I had created.
The way I first taught the behavior was not great either. A friend had suggested holding a treat in my hand and clicking Cricket for pawing at it, then fading the hand and treat. Such a bad idea in so many ways. Reinforcing an enthusiastic digging terrier for pawing at my hand? Ouch.
How To Avoid Training Superstitious Behaviors
I wish I could give some succinct, pithy advice that could keep other newish trainers from doing this. When choosing what behaviors to teach and how to teach them, it takes experience to learn to predict the ramifications.
Here are the best suggestions I have.
Answer a few questions. Is there a persistent extra behavior that is happening when I train this behavior? What’s going to happen if that extra behavior sticks around? How can I get rid of it? If I’m training a trick—might this extra behavior or the trick itself turn up where I don’t want it? Might it interfere with behaviors that are actually more important to train?
Video yourself. If you don’t have a teacher, you can learn a lot by recording your training sessions, and if you are brave, showing those recordings to online friends if you don’t have a teacher or local training buddy. People can give much better counsel if they actually see what you and the animal have been doing. Most of us humans could use a lot of work on our observation and description skills. Cameras do a lot better job for a lot of us.
Get expert advice. I didn’t have a teacher to ask when I taught most of the behaviors I’ve described here. A professional would have seen most of my mishaps in an instant and showed me how to head them off.
A Success!
One thing that I got right: I started training that “backing up the stairs or wall” trick that was going around a while back. Zani just loved it and started getting good at it. It was great for hind end awareness.
But then one day when we were practicing our two on, two off agility contacts, she overran them and happily backed up into position. That would be a fault in many agility venues. I immediately stopped training the trick. A more experienced or patient trainer could certainly have both behaviors, but sometimes I realize my limitations. The risk wasn’t worth it to me.
Here is one more superstitious behavior Clara and I collaborated on. This is an example of something that is cute when a puppy does it, but can get pretty tiresome in a grown dog. Of course it’s still cute, but who wants their fingers licked Every. Single. Time. They go to open a crate door?
OK folks, please tell me I’m not the only one who trains silly behaviors by accident. Does anybody want to say what they have done? Or are you all perfect?
So maybe you are new to clicker training and you keep hearing people talking about lumping and how bad it is. Be a splitter, not a lumper, they say. You have a vague idea about it but maybe aren’t exactly sure what they mean except that lumping is bad.
Or maybe you are a teacher and you would like a really clear example of lumping vs splitting to show your students.
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 actually the human missing the cue. The dogs are understanding the cues beautifully, but these are cues I’m consciously trying not to give!
Around the time I made the Missed Cue videos, I got very interested in cue discrimination in general and worked on teaching Summer and Zani the difference between the verbal cues for Crate and Go to Mat. Since it is so easy to teach these with hand and body cues, my dogs didn’t really know the verbals, although I used them regularly. So I took a stab at teaching the discrimination and made a video of our progress. The methods in the movie are not bad, but my test of the results leaves quite a bit to desired.
In the spirit of the blog, I present the embarrassing part of the video, where I attempt to test Zani’s knowledge of the verbal cues. The whole point is to refrain from giving any physical indication of which item I want them to go, and I fail utterly at this.
To make it even more obvious I’ve turned off the sound for this short clip. Even a human can tell which behavior I am cuing by my body language every time. I not only fix my gaze on the object, but I turn my body slightly in that direction. And dogs are probably 10 times better at noticing those things than we are.
It wouldn’t have been so bad if it hadn’t been the whole focus and point of the training!
In case you want to test whether your dogs know a verbal cue, here’s Donna Hill of Vancouver Island Assistance Dogs showing how to do it correctly.
I’m making a goal for myself to teach some cues well enough to pass this test. The first step by itself, teaching the dog to respond while I am out of sight, could be a challenge. This skill has to be taught gradually as well. Since my dogs can respond to some cues at a distance I’m hoping we have a good start on this.
Anybody else aware of cuing their dog without knowing it? It’s so easy to do. Want to share?
The following movie of training bloopers is meant to set the tone of this blog. I am not a professional trainer. I am a passionate, committed amateur with four great dogs.
I practice scientifically informed humane training and use Dr. Susan Friedman’s Humane Hierarchy as a guide. I have watched my dogs blossom as I have studied behavior science and dog body language and sought to apply what I have learned. And I’ve actually trained my dogs, though it’s generally easier to cruise the Yahoo groups for the evening. Like others though, I have found that I learn more by training for 10 minutes than I usually do in an hour or two reading arguments about dog training. Who’d have thought it?
I want to share what I have learned and help others take the plunge.
What can I, an amateur who has trained fewer than ten dogs, offer the Internet world? For the past six years I have read voraciously, discussed fiercely, and immersed myself in all things dog training. But even though I’m pretty well informed, there is a big disconnect in what I think I know and what I find out I can do. I sometimes choose techniques that look great on paper, then wonder why my dogs aren’t acting like the paper ones. A mistake I make frequently is not to think through the ramifications of a single behavior or problem solving technique I may attempt. Or I choose the newest popular technique when I actually could have done something more obvious and a lot easier.
The mistakes I make may be so specific to my situation that rather than helping anyone, they may just provide a good laugh. That’s OK. But perhaps we can analyze the type of mistake and the larger picture, and I can help save some other dogs and their people some grief. I’m willing to show you what worked and what didn’t, the results of my sometimes bad timing, and discuss why I made the choices I did.
It’s not all about my mistakes, of course. I love the moments when the dog and I suddenly understand each other, or when a dog turns a corner emotionally about something. They are such marvelous creatures and I hope to share the glimpses of their lovely little minds and souls as they share them with me.
My wonderful dogs. RIP Cricket, who passed 5/31/13.
My day-to-day training focuses on polite pet behaviors, agility, socializing my feral puppy, and surviving in a multi-dog household with the additional challenge of some extremely incompatible dogs. My particular interests within training are how dogs discriminate and generalize, the uses of classical conditioning for pet dogs, and reading dog body language. Believe me, I have plenty of footage to share along those lines. I practice Sue Ailsby’s Training Levels and will be sharing videos and commentary about our progress through them as well.
Most of all I hope you will write me back. Have you ever learned from someone else’s mistakes? Do you think it is possible? Let’s find out.
