When Pigs Fly_ Training Success With Impossible Dogs - Jane Killion [54]
To train this, begin in your kitchen again, and go back to standing right in front of your dog—relax on the distance requirement. Get a friend or family member to act as a distractor. Have them walk 10, 20 or even 30 feet away from your dog. Start the distractor as far away as necessary for your dog to remain in position and keep his eyes on you. As soon as the distractor comes into your dog’s field of vision, immediately click and treat for maintaining eye contact. Even if your dog can hold his stay for ten seconds, click immediately. You are relaxing the duration requirement while you work on distraction. Your dog may swivel his head to look, but click him anyway if he looks back at you right away.
Gradually work your way up to someone walking right in front of your dog, right behind your dog, even stepping over your dog. Here is a sample progression of how you would train your dog to stay with distractions:
1. Have someone put their hand out as if to touch your dog.
2. Have someone touch your dog’s head.
3. Have someone pat your dog.
4. Have someone crumple paper near your dog.
5. Have someone move his arms in front of and around your dog.
6. Have someone do jumping jacks.
Or whatever other crazy thing you can think of, and click and treat your dog every time for remaining in position and maintaining eye contact.
Soon your dog will get really happy and excited when the “distracter” comes around, because he will know that means he is about to get an opportunity to earn cookies. The important concept that your dog learns is that he has a behavior to fall back on when his environment gets crazy or stressful. The crazy stuff that might otherwise make him react in a wild fashion instead becomes a cue to calmly look at his handler. That is something any dog can understand and it is a pleasure to live with a dog that has been trained this way.
You set up distractions this way in a controlled environment so you can make sure your dog is set up for successes. Once your dog learns the general concept, this lesson will (with practice) carry over when you take your dog out on the road and ask him to stay in a crowded park. He will eventually view all the hub-bub as a cue to keep his eyes on you and his butt in place.
Duration. Once your dog has the basic idea of the stay behavior, you can gradually start building up to having your dog stay for longer and longer periods of time. The best way to do this is to ask your dog for an average number of seconds of stay and gradually increase that average. For instance, you might start with asking for an average of three seconds of stay, which means you would ask for one, then four, then five, then two seconds of stay. Three is about the average you are asking for. Then you can increase to an average of, say, five seconds. You might reinforce five, then four, then one second then ten seconds—the average is about five seconds. You can build up a long and very reliable stay by using this method of reinforcement. The important thing is that you build up your average (mean) duration by “bouncing” around it. That way your dog never figures out that it is getting harder and harder the way he would if you just did two seconds today, three seconds tomorrow, four seconds the next day, etc. The randomness of the reinforcement also maintains excitement because your dog never knows when he might be in for a treat.
Morgan Spector has graciously allowed me to reprint the reinforcement schedules from his book, Clicker Training For Obedience. They can be found in the Resouces section at the end of the book. Use them as a guideline for teaching stays or any other behavior that requires duration or repetitions of behaviors.
Let’s say that your dog will stay for a minute (duration), will stay if you walk twenty feet away (distance), and will stay if someone is hitting him in the head with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (distraction),