When Pigs Fly_ Training Success With Impossible Dogs - Jane Killion [59]
3. After he will happily follow you for one step, adding two, three, five, and ten steps is a piece of cake. Follow the reinforcement schedules in the appendix and you will have a dog that walks along with you in no time.
Lots of playing at home is helpful, too. Anything that puts an association between following you and a good time in your dog’s mind is going to increase your value to him and make him more likely to want to walk with you.
Add a cue. The only cue for a casual walk is the fact that your dog is connected to you by a leash and you are walking. If your dog is on a leash and you are walking and you have not told him otherwise, your dog will come to know he is free to do what he wants, so long as the leash stays loose.
Frequent but short sessions. Although your goal is to be able to take a nice long walk with your dog, start with very short walks. Put him on a leash and take him out to the mailbox with you, or around the corner, or into your front yard, or over to your neighbor’s house to return the wrench you borrowed. It is easier for both you and your dog to “get it right” on these short jaunts and they will serve as a foundation for long walks.
Energize your dog’s behavior with hot reinforcers. Just as you did with attention walking, add hot reinforcers from time to time to keep things interesting.
Take it on the road very gradually. The usual protocol of gradually practicing the behavior in more and more stimulating environments applies to casual walking. In addition, be aware that “planter” dogs may be reluctant to walk because they are actually fearful of walking in public. You can inoculate your scared dog against his fears by introducing walking in public in tiny, easily digestible pieces. In this way you can desensitize him to his fears of the world. If you pull him along to a place where he is scared and make him walk, you run the risk of sensitizing him to the thing he is scared of and actually making it worse.
There is nothing fundamentally different about the way you train a fearful dog to walk versus a non-fearful dog. You do, however, have to monitor your dog’s fear level and be very careful to stay within his envelope of comfort. Study up with the book or DVD On Talking Terms With Dogs: Calming Signals by Turid Rugaas (see Resources). Learn to read your dog and know when your dog is the tiniest bit scared or stressed so you can back off. Only move on to walking in more “scary” places in teeny, tiny, steps. Your dog should never be reluctant to walk with you. Shape your dog to beg to be walked, not to tolerate being walked.
Yield on your requirements when you change something. When you are walking somewhere new or somewhere really interesting like a hiking trail, you may have to use a much higher rate of reinforcement to get your dog to walk with you. By now you know the drill—go back to the behaviors that your dog can do, and build your way back up to walking nicely along with you.
Nosy Parker
Touch/Target
These are great behaviors to teach and come in handy more often than you might imagine. Touch (as in touch your outstretched hand) is a fabulous way to control your dog’s body position and field of vision at any time. For “mouthy” dogs it is a perfect way for them to interact with you without using their teeth. Target (as in touch his nose or paw to a specific target) is an excellent way of teaching your dog to work at a distance from you.
If your dog will voluntarily put his head wherever you put your hand, his body will automatically follow, so a touch command has endless practical applications. Anytime you want to reposition your dog or turn him away from something distracting, simply ask him to touch your hand. For distractible or easily over-stimulated types, this is a great way to center them and get their attention back on you. Most dogs seem to like the nose touch and appear almost relieved when you ask for it in the midst of a very chaotic or distracting environment. For some reason, it is easy for dogs to ignore a plea for general attention, but very difficult