When Pigs Fly_ Training Success With Impossible Dogs - Jane Killion [28]
Piggy Pointer
Don’t be discouraged if you are all thumbs at first! You will get the hang of handling the leash, the treats, the door, the clicker, and the wildly lunging dog in no time. Don’t be frustrated if you can’t quite get it all together at first. Keep trying and you will become better able to manage multiple things while handling your dog.
Step Six
Gradually up the ante and take your dog to increasingly more and more stimulating environments. Start with an empty park, progress to a park with people in it, but start 100 yards away from where the people are. Gradually move closer, until you are working right in among the people. Once he is giving you attention with distractions, take him to the pet supply store, take him to the hardware store, obedience class, dog shows, agility trials, or anywhere else he is welcome.
Step Seven
Every minute you are with your dog, he is learning. If you want full attention from your dog, you have to give him full attention. There is no “down time” when you take your young or green dog to class or out on the road. Every second he is with you, you should be clicking and treating for attention. If you grow tired of this, put your dog away in a crate until you are prepared to once again give him your full attention. Whatever you do, don’t ignore him while he is on leash with all that interesting stuff going on around him. He will definitely take the opportunity to self-reinforce, and you will not be happy with the results.
After reading the seven steps to attention, you may be thinking that all this attention stuff seems like a lot of work. Is it worth the effort? Why not give a command to a dog that is not paying attention to you? Might you not be able to convince him to pay attention to you by yelling the command louder? Let me tell you about a very interesting scientific study. Little electrodes were placed in a cat’s ears to measure his hearing response. After taking a control sampling of the cat’s hearing, a mouse in a cage was placed in front of the cat. Guess what? The cat could not hear when the mouse was present. The presence of the mouse was so stimulating that the cat’s auditory centers literally shut down.
I know of no scientific study that proves it, but it is a safe assumption that dogs react to stimulation in the same way. When your dog gets to a new place and you call him and he fails to acknowledge you, he is not ignoring you, he is effectively deaf. Once again, the owner of the biddable dog has a head start on you. The basic functions that biddable dogs were bred for, like herding or retrieving, are inher ently very stimulating activities. What makes a good working dog is a tremendous excitement and drive to carry out his work, but with the ability to stop on a dime and listen to his master’s command, even from a great distance away. From my observation, it appears that many biddable dogs were bred to have an ability to keep listening, even when unbelievably aroused. It will come as no surprise to you that your Pigs Fly dog has no such pedigree.
Even in an exciting public place, Ruby automatically watches me and waits to be released each step of the way. Ruby was not born this way, but we built this lovely behavior over the years by rewarding her for each step again and again.
6
If You Can’t Beat ‘Em, Join ‘Em
Using Your Dog’s Natural Behaviors to Train Him
If you have started with the exercises in the previous chapters, you have a dog who is operant, and that is a very good start. He should be pretty enthusiastic about learning at this point. At least in your living room with no distractions, he appears to be more interested in training than anything else. Here’s the problem. Your Pigs Fly dog still has a lot of passion in life to do things that are at odds with what you want him to do. Your dog is the dog who is obsessed by sniffing, who is oblivious to anything but running off to play with other dogs, or whose mind just checks out when he sees a flock of birds go up in the air. You could train a lot to overcome these distractions and eventually