When Pigs Fly_ Training Success With Impossible Dogs - Jane Killion [22]
The Release
You need a very clear way of telling your dog that the training session or behavior you are asking for is over, and he can go do as he likes. If you don’t have a clear cue that your dog is free to do as he likes, he will always be guessing when he can stop doing whatever you are asking for. It is confusing and distressing for a dog not to know if he is on duty or not. He will guess at which hand movements or changes in your voice or stance he can seize upon as a cue. He will often guess wrong, and you will get annoyed at him for “blowing you off ” in the middle of a training session.
If, on the other hand, you consistently require your dog to continue doing whatever it is you are asking for until you give a specific release cue, such as “OK,” “Free,” or “Go Be a Dog,” your dog will relax and just keep working until told to stop.
The Long Road is the Quickest Way There
Why Shaping is the Better Way to Train Everyday Behaviors
Let’s look at a “practical” behavior and see how to teach it. We will use “sit” as an example. Since dogs do sit frequently on their own, you could just wait for them to sit and then click that. If you put the time into playing the free shaping games in the first part of this book, you will see the light bulb above your dog’s head light up, and he will start offering to sit in hope of getting you to click him. Once you would bet $100 that your dog is going to offer a sit, you can start saying “sit” when his butt is hitting the ground. Gradually, you can start saying “sit” earlier and earlier. After a few repetitions, “sit” will become a cue for the behavior.
Many of you may be shaking your heads and thinking, “That is an awful lot of trouble to go to just to teach my dog to sit. I am going to have to play all of those games, learn a bit about training, buy a clicker and learn how to use it, keep an eye on my dog and wait around for him to sit—that’s a lot of time and effort. I could push down on his butt and make him learn to sit in five minutes.” My answer is, yes, of course you could, but think about the dogs in Scott and Fuller’s study. The non-biddable dogs beat the biddable dogs at problem solving and thinking. By compelling a sit, you are taking any thought out of the equation and relying on avoidance. The problem with this is two-fold:
1. Many non-biddable dogs are notoriously impervious to physical discomfort. Terriers in particular have extra tough skin around their head and necks in order to withstand the bites they receive when they dive underground in pursuit of vermin. You can push and pull all you like, but they are programmed not to react much to physical manipulation. A push on the butt will make little impression on them and they are unlikely to find it punishing enough to sit promptly to avoid another push on the butt.
2. If the push on the behind does succeed in getting your dog to sit, it is not going to help you train the next behavior, unless that next behavior is based on a very similar type of avoidance of physical pressure. If, on the other hand, you teach by shaping behaviors, it gets easier and easier to teach new behaviors because the dog gets more and more excited about learning and offers more behaviors and variations/improvements on those behaviors more rapidly. Again, remember that the independently thinking dogs kicked butt when they were allowed to problem solve on their own. Why not choose a training method that will play to your dog’s strengths?
Some of you may still not be convinced that free shaping a behavior is worth the effort. I can just see some of you, cookie in hand, thinking, “OK, OK, so I won’t push down on my dog’s butt to get him to sit, but I ain’t spending an hour free shaping it. Shoot, I’ll just put this cookie over his head, lure his nose up, and his butt will go right down into a sit—bingo! Sit achieved in 3 seconds! Who needs to waste all of that time and effort approximating a behavior through free shaping?” Well, you would definitely get the behavior you desire that way, but you will have missed