When Pigs Fly_ Training Success With Impossible Dogs - Jane Killion [49]
Keep your hand low and feed from at or below the dog’s nose level in order to help keep her seated.
Energize your dog’s behavior with hot rein-forcers. When adding your hot reinforcers, be sure that you have clicked the sit before you produce the hot reinforcer. Click, wait a beat, and dispense your hot reinforcer. The reason you have to do this is that you may inadvertently click as your dog is jumping up to play with you. What do you think the problem with that is? Well, keep in mind that you will get whatever you click. If you click as your dog is jumping up in the air to get a toy, then the behavior you have built is “sit, then jump up in the air.” It is common to see dogs who pop up right after a sit, and this is usually why.
Take it on the road gradually. Follow all the rules of slowly building your dog’s ability to sit anywhere. Just like you did at home, give him pop quizzes randomly when you are out and about. Sit is one of the most important foundation behaviors you can build—it is hard for your dog to get into trouble if he is sitting, so we want him to be able to do it any time, any where, without fail.
It takes a lot of practice to get your dog to the point where he will sit anywhere, anytime, no matter what distractions are around him.
Yield on your requirements when you change something. Remember that just because your dog sits in front of you in your kitchen, does not mean he will sit next to you at the pet store. You may almost have to re-teach the sit when you change the context, but it usually will not take long to do this. The “sit” behavior is in there and you just have to bring it out again.
Down
Shape. You can free shape a down by clicking just a slight head dip, and then a bigger head dip, then shoulders leaning down, and so forth, until you have a down. As always, this is my preferred method to teach the behavior, but I have to admit that it takes some skill to shape a down for many Pigs Fly dogs. This is one of those places where it is good training economy to introduce a lure. Get down on the floor (your exact position will depend on how limber you are) and make a little bridge by bending one of your knees. Lure your dog under your leg and, as he ducks his head down, click that. You can approximate the down just the same way as if you were free shaping it, but you are getting the dog started by luring him into a position where he is likely to start offering the behavior. If your dog is huge and you are small or if you are not too flexible, sit in a chair or on a low stool and prop your leg up on a milk crate.
When using a lure to teach the down, you might be tempted to click only when your dog actually lies down, rather than clicking each approximation. Your dog would certainly learn to lie down that way, but, as we discussed earlier in this chapter, the behavior will be stronger and more durable if you click and treat each approximation.
If you click for a lowered head, the elbows will almost certainly begin to bend soon after. As you can see in the third picture, there is the tiniest bit of bend in the elbow— reinforce that heavily. Once the elbows hit the ground, the rear end will plop down soon after.
Add a cue. The cue you use will depend on how you taught the down. If you free shaped it, you add a verbal cue—I use “down.” If you lured the down, it is easy to use a similar hand motion to the lure to cue the down. You can start fading the food by hiding it in the palm of your hand as you lure the down. Once your dog is responding to the hand motion reliably without actually seeing the food, try it without the food hidden in the palm of your hand. You should be able to fool him once