When Pigs Fly_ Training Success With Impossible Dogs - Jane Killion [7]
5. Reinforcers
Figure out what gets your dog really excited. Get control of those things or activities. Dole them out in exchange for the things you want. Through that association, you will transfer the passion your dog feels for activities like sniffing, digging, or running away from you, to the behaviors you want, like walking on a loose leash, sitting, or coming when called.
6. Attention
Before you can do anything, your dog has to be paying attention to you. Once you go through the first steps, your dog will have pretty good attention, but we want to expand that to attention everywhere, even with monumental distractions.
7. Playing
Play is a great relationship builder. If your dog loves to play with you, he will generally be more interested in you and what you are doing. Furthermore, you want your dog to love to play with you so you can use it as a reward in exchange for things that you want. In this part of the Pigs Fly training system, you will learn lots of games and how to get even the most reluctant dog to play with you.
8. Behaviors
Here it is! This is the section on teaching your dog the actual behaviors, like sit, down, stay, and come, as well as how to change “problem” behaviors.
9. Living With Your Dog
Finally, we will discuss how to incorporate training into your life with the minimum of inconvenience to you.
Consequences, Schmonsequences
Tools We Use to Train in This System
Every training method uses the same fundamental technique—the dog does a behavior, and there is a consequence for it. If the consequence is something the dog likes, the dog will tend to do the behavior again. If the consequence is not something the dog likes, the dog will tend to not do that behavior again. The only fundamental difference between training methods is what kind of consequences the trainer chooses to use. There are four possible consequences for any action:
1. Something is added that the dog likes. For example, the dog sits and receives a cookie. This is called positive reinforcement.
2. Something the dog likes is taken away. For example, the dog jumps on you and you turn around and ignore him—attention is taken away. This is called negative punishment.
3. Something the dog does not like is added. For example, the dog gets ahead of the handler and receives a jerk on the leash. This is called positive punishment.
4. Something the dog does not like is taken away. For example, the dog’s ear is pinched until he picks up the dumbbell—picking up the dumbbell makes the pain of the ear pinch go away. This is called negative reinforcement.
How, when, and if you use these four kinds of consequences will determine your ultimate success in training your dog, so it is worth your while to take a little time to think about them and understand what they mean in practical terms.
As used in behavioral science, “positive” and “negative” do not mean “good” and “bad.” Positive simply means adding something, and negative means taking away something. Likewise, “reinforcement” and “punishment” have very specific meanings in this context. Reinforcement means anything that will tend to increase behavior, and punishment means anything that will tend to decrease behavior. Here are two examples that help illustrate these definitions. For most dogs, adding cookies when they sit will tend to get them to sit more often. Thus it is positive because you added cookies, and reinforcement because it increased the behavior of sitting—positive reinforcement. If, instead of giving a cookie when the dog sits, you smacked him with a newspaper, the dog will think twice about sitting again with you around. The newspaper is added, therefore it is positive, and the behavior of sitting is decreased, therefore it is punishment—positive punishment.
“Reinforcement” and “Punishment” are tricky concepts. What you have to remember is that reinforcement