Treats and Tricks

Your homework this week (actually three weeks!) is

Please read my Comments section below; and
Teach your dog a new trick. You may use luring if you like, though if you can shape it without a lure, you’ll be ahead of the game because you won’t have to get rid of the lure. I recommend using operant conditioning (“clicker” training, with or without the clicker) to do this.

Ideas for a new trick:

Spin left and spin right; this is a good one, since we’ll be using this “trick” to teach your dog another cross. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJza51DsXIM.
She uses luring to get behavior but quite simple to train it this way. Once you’ve got the behavior, it’s simple enough to get the treat out of your hand and produce it afterward (train next to a table with food on it). Oh – it’s obvious the dog already knows the behavior, so it will probably take you a little longer to get your dog to do it. You might need to work a little more on just getting him to turn his head away. Always break down new behaviors into bits and reward those bits individually. No lumping (see below).
Back up. Good to know; also a good body conditioning “trick.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLVCkzaBDqM.
Good example of starting with a lure and getting rid of it. Love the use of a target for the dog to learn the behavior.
“Sit pretty.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQUerO0woqw
Good for body awareness and conditioning. Note her cautions about dog’s position and supporting your dog.
Other trick of your choice. Any may be started using a lure, but please wean the dog off the lure as soon as you can.

Remember to reward your dog! Removing a lure does not mean not rewarding behaviors!

COMMENTS

This week’s homework is born out of my observations last evening. You and your dogs did really well with the exercises, most of which consisted of running around the room, with the dogs going through hoops and tunnels. All of you (humans and dogs alike) did very well. The one stand-out that needs work is the fact that many of you were using food to reward the dogs. Well, that’s not the issue. The issue is that you were carrying the food, mostly in your hands, and it was getting in the way of the dogs’ performance.

Now, I’m a huge proponent of using food to train. It’s a “primary reinforcer,” which means that most critters will respond favorably to receiving it:

The reinforcers which are biologically important are called Primary Reinforcers. It is also referred as unconditional reinforcement.
These reinforcers occur naturally without having to make any effort and do not require any form of learning. For example: food, sleep,
water, air and sex.
https://www.psychestudy.com/behavioral/learning-memory/operant-conditioning/reinforcement-punishment/primary-reinforcer

Of those primary reinforcers, food is the easiest for us to use in our day-to-day training of our dogs. But there are good ways to use it and not-so-good ways to use it. The most important issue, if using food to induce the dog to perform the behavior, is to use it only to achieve that goal and then to wean it away. Yes, it can always be used as a reward, but it should ideally not be on your body when working with the dog. Remember what incredible noses our dogs have. They know. Anyway, ideally not on your body but definitely not in your hand when working. And the sooner you get the food out of your hand while in the process of training, the better.

In all fairness, what we are doing in this class is called “lumping” – combining multiple behaviors before the individual behaviors are trained. The goal behavior is for the dog to run alongside or ahead of us and run through a hoop – and continue to the next hoop (or tunnel) alongside us. Your dogs have done this quite well, considering the fact that they have not been rewarded sufficiently for these behaviors to have become fluent.

What are these behaviors?

Leaving us to go to a hoop
Going through the hoop
Running with us
Running ahead of us
And doing all this while in a strange place with other dogs and humans around.

Each of these behaviors can be broken down into tiny bits as well, but most of our dogs will run with us already.

Since we’ve begun in this lumpy way, we shall continue. They (and you) are all learning and improving. But let’s make a contract to break things down as we go. I’ll remember that myself.

Here are some articles on luring and how to “fade” the food lure:

“A simple principle: a dog who depends on the treat being in your hand will not do the behavior if the treat is not in your hand. To solve this, you need to teach your dog that the treat is contingent on doing a behavior and not upon the treat being present in the hand. This is one of the most important lessons your dog can learn if you are going to use luring to teach behaviors.”
https://dogmantics.com/fading-a-lure/