When Pigs Fly_ Training Success With Impossible Dogs - Jane Killion [9]
Here is an example to illustrate what operant means. When I was a kid, my friend had a little mixed breed dog named Stuart. Whenever you ate dinner at their house, Stuart would be right next to you, sitting there and begging for scraps. If you did not feed him, he would sit up on his hind legs. If you still did not give him anything, he would start waving his little paws in the air. That was generally when people gave in. Stuart was operant. Without anyone asking him, he would offer behaviors (first sitting, then sitting up, then waving his paws) until he hit on the one that “paid.”
Is your dog operant? Take him out in a safely fenced-in area and let him loose. Just stand still, look at your dog, don’t say anything, and wait. What will he do? Depending on the dog, he may just stand there, sniff around, lift his leg on something, zoom in circles—whatever he finds interesting. Chances are, he is not going to solicit your attention by offering behaviors. He is not operant. Now, if you take my dog, Ruby, and let her loose in a yard without telling her what to do, she is going to run out and start working the yard. She will sit, lie down, run over to a lawn chair, hit it with her paw, jump over a bench, and lie down. After each behavior, she will look at me to see if she is going to get a reward for it. She will keep offering any behavior she can think of until I reward her. Ruby has learned the important and abstract concept that her actions will work on her environment to produce a really great reward, and she is going to keep trying until she gets that reward. She loves this game and will bunny hop around the yard while trying to figure out what the “winning” behavior is.
It is important to note that Ruby learned to be operant, and your dog can, too. Ruby was so reluctant and slow as a young dog that she could barely be persuaded to break out of a walk, and she had no desire whatsoever to play with me. I conditioned her to become operant and to love playing this game with me more than anything else, and you can condition your dog to be operant, too.
Don’t worry if, as you are reading this, you have no idea how in a million years you would ever be able to get your dog to pay attention to you and offer behaviors. That will be covered in detail later. All you need to understand from this chapter is the concept of an operant dog, and why it is central to this training system. The operant dog is like the eager Golden Retriever—waiting expectantly for your next move. You really can train your Pigs Fly dog to be that way.
Ruby has offered to take this jump without any prompting from me. She seems to be asking, “Is this the behavior that will pay off?”
You are going to train your dog to keep trying and be actively thinking. The operant dog has gotten off his duff and is on his toes, wanting to play the game. At least this gives you something to work with. I want you to walk on the edge and push the envelope. You are going to get lots of behaviors from the dog, and then hone them down to the finished behaviors you want. The process can appear to be messy and chaotic when viewed in tiny segments, but the ultimate behaviors are continually being shaped, and the result is a dog that not only does the required behaviors, but does them eagerly, with his ears up and his tail wagging. Once your