When Pigs Fly_ Training Success With Impossible Dogs - Jane Killion [46]
When you are first teaching a behavior, you could even break down the sessions into a matter of seconds. Teaching loose leash walking? Reward the dog for anywhere from one step to 10 seconds of walking politely on leash 20 times a day and he will learn more quickly than if you trained heeling for a solid hour daily. This is especially true of Pigs Fly dogs. Biddable dogs can do long sessions of heeling or any other kind of training, because they were bred to spend long days in the field, taking direction from their handlers. Is a long session the best way to teach any dog, Pigs Fly or not? Probably not, but because the majority of performance dogs are biddable breeds and can endure long sessions, training has traditionally taken place in larger chunks and included a lot more per session than a Pigs Fly dog can take.
Short training sessions also make it easier for the trainer to be very precise and accurate. Most people cannot pay full attention to training their dog for an hour. The result is that some rewardable behaviors will go unreinforced, and many timing mistakes will be made, thereby reinforcing the wrong behavior. This will pollute the properly reinforced behaviors and stretch out the time it will take to teach them. If, on the other hand, you set out with a clear picture in your mind of what you want to reinforce and only have to hold that picture for a matter of minutes or seconds, you are much more likely to be accurate in shaping the behavior you want. It is part of the agreement you make with your dog every time you train him—give me the behavior that I am looking for and I promise to reinforce it 100% of the time. The closer you come to that 100%, the faster your dog will learn, and the stronger the behaviors will be in the face of distractions.
Piggy Pointer
When I say that you need to reinforce a behavior 100% of the time, that does not mean that you have to reinforce, for instance, every single step of heeling or loose leash walking. Based on where you and your dog are in your training, you will have decided in advance how many repetitions of the behavior the dog needs to give you before reinforcing—one step, five steps, or twenty steps. You might just be looking for a particularly well executed behavior—a really fast sit or down, for instance. The point is that, in a short session, you will be able to maintain a clear picture in your mind of what you are looking for and you will be focused enough to remember to reinforce when you get that picture from your dog.
Energize your dog’s behavior with hot reinforcers. Once you have the behavior and it is on cue, and your dog is performing correctly almost every single time at home in a neutral environment, you mix in hot reinforcers to create excitement about the behavior. Remember the slot machine and make yourself as unpredictable as possible. Here are some example of hot reinforcers and how I use them for specific dogs:
1. The Bull Terrier likes balls. It’s very easy to dispense this reinforcer because you can carry a ball with you in your pocket or bait pouch.
2. The Rhodesian Ridgeback likes lure coursing. Although you can’t carry a lure course in your pocket, you could carry some kind of lure on a string and run away like mad, dragging it behind you. Or maybe you are lucky and rich and you do have a lure course set up in your back yard with an assistant ready to start pulling the lure—you could release him to go chase it.
3. The Norwich Terrier likes to hunt down vermin. Even if you could carry a chipmunk in your pocket and present it to your terrier as a reinforcer, it would not be a very nice thing to do. You could get a furry toy on a string and drag it along the ground quickly in a convincing imitation of some small prey animal. By all means do not shove the toy in the dog’s face— pull it and shake it along the