When Pigs Fly_ Training Success With Impossible Dogs - Jane Killion [61]
The hand touch is especially easy to incorporate into your daily life. When ever you want your dog near you, throw down your hand and ask him to touch—it’s a fun game.
Energize your dog’s behavior with hot reinforcers. Mix in your hot reinforcers for targets and touches. You may soon find that a hand touch has become a reinforcer, itself.
Take it on the road very gradually. As we discussed earlier, the hand touch is a valuable tool when you are out on the road. Your hand touch will be a “re-centering” activity with which you can get your dog’s attention and control his position. It is such an easy activity that you can usually get your dog to do it even when he is too distracted to do any other behavior. If you are out on the road and you can’t even get your dog to touch your hand, your dog is probably in over his head and need to go back to a less stimulating environment.
Simple Math
Recall
Getting a Pigs Fly dog to come when called, especially with distractions, is one of the most challenging things you will ever do. When you call a Sheltie, he will generally snap to attention and zoom into you as fast as his cute little legs will carry him. When you call your dog, what happens? He runs a complex risk-benefit analysis which involves taking an extensive inventory of all the known interesting things multiplied by the promising possibilities he can explore if he remains at liberty, versus the fact that you would be very happy, or at least not too angry, if he came to you. Hmm. Wonder how that equation is going to work out?
Successfully training a Pigs Fly dog to come when called is a real achievement!
A lot of people want to know why their dog won’t come when called. To me it is much more mystifying why some breeds of dogs generally DO come when called. On one side of the balance sheet is the lure of everything interesting, fun, and good in the world, and on the other side is “You”. What does You mean to your dog? Biddable dogs seem to be born with an abnormally high opinion of You. It is just not natural to want to give up liberty and all the fun that goes with it at the drop of a hat, simply for the chance to be near a human. There has to have been some very strong genetic selection for this trait. Your Pigs Fly dog is not equipped with the “come when called” gene. Until we isolate that gene and learn how to splice it onto the “Come? Whaddayoucrazy?” gene, we will have to rely on training and conditioning to build up the value of You to your dog.
Piggy Pointer
It is dismaying to many dog owners that their dog prefers to do almost anything rather than come when called. They think their dog “should” come when called because they, the handler, say so, without any further incentive. Our cultural ideal is of a dog loyal and devoted, adoring eyes shining as he gazes lovingly at his master. Forget it! Yes, there are some breeds of dog that are closer to that cultural ideal than others, but Pigs Fly breeds do not usually personify this type. Let go of the emotional baggage of “should,” “ought to,” and “because I say so,” and get back to training behaviors. It is the only way you will ever succeed.
So, let’s say that All The Interesting Stuff In The World is on one side of the scale, and You are on the other. All The Interesting Stuff weighs about 100 pounds, and You weigh, oh, let’s see…about 3 ounces. Really. If you call your dog to you and give him one piece of food one time, you just added approximately one ounce to your side. If you gave him a super-hot reinforcer, you might add nine ounces to Your side. If you doled out 100 tiny pieces of food in rapid succession when he came to you, that might be worth about twelve ounces. If you did all of those things, it would add up to an extra pound or two on your side and you would have made some good progress towards a reliable recall.
Now, if you call your dog to you and yell at him because he was digging your flower bed, you just put another pound on the scale on the All The Interesting