E47: 크리시 슈란츠(Chrissi Schranz) - "보상물 구축 및 콜백 훈련"

we're going to put those in the show notes for you guys. Christy shared the YouTube links with me. Do you want to just talk about this a little bit? Yeah. So in general, I think you can train skills later in a dog's life, but you really, really need to put a strong foundation of confidence and relationship on them as early as possible. Because the younger they are, the more moldable they still are and the more open they are to new experiences. So I usually take puppies out into the world, introduce them to people and dogs and places and smells and sounds. It's been really interesting working with Game because she's so different from grit. Grit is very handler focused and game is very environmentally focused. Also extremely confident and very social too. So when I take her out, I try to not let her directly meet people and dogs because she already thinks people and dogs are awesome. So she doesn't really need more of that. And we mainly work on being okay, just sharing a space with people and dogs without always approaching and playing with everyone. And so usually I give her time to acclimate and then I transition into playing with her. Sometimes without any food or any toys, sometimes with food, sometimes with toys. Yeah. I talk about that more in the videos you mentioned. Yeah. I think it was kind of cool to watch some of the stuff and how you kind of handle some of, you know, when she got distracted or what happened. So it's really interesting to kind of see, see all that. So you've mentioned that Game and Grit are pretty different. Do you want to talk a little more about kind of what you mean by that and how it's influenced your training? So Grit is very handler focused. So it was pretty easy to get her to focus on me in any environment. I didn't really have to work on it. She just offered that even as a puppy. Game, on the other hand, is super environmental. She thinks the world is fun, smells are fun, sounds are fun, people are fun. She needs to check it all out. So I haven't had an environmental dog since Snoopy, my dachshund. And he was the most difficult dog I've ever trained. He was so independent. So I'm really glad that I know more now than I did then. And with Game, I was confident that if I just gave her time to check out the environment, there would always come the moment when she would push me to interact with her. In the beginnings, when I took her interesting places, she didn't show a lot of interest in me. And I just accepted that because I don't think it's possible to make yourself more interesting

than the environment anyways. Yeah, we worked on our relationship at home. I could actually see how her interest in playing with me increased every time we went out into the real world. I think in hindsight, it really was the best approach I could have taken for her. She'll now happily engage with me soon when we enter a new space. And it's always her choice and not my request, which I really like. I like it to be that way. But I mean, I'm pretty sure her environmental interests will come back when she hits adolescence. So this will be very interesting. Right. As somebody who has a young dog and is working on foundation stuff, what do you feel is the most important skill or skills, if you want to dive into more than one, to really focus on or teach a new dog? I think it really depends on the owner and their goals for themselves and their dog. For me, I really want a strong relationship. I find that more important than anything else. And in order to get that, I just start with lots of playing and being together, doing things together that the dog enjoys. I want the dog to know that they can trust me and feel safe with me. Also, then I want off-leash reliability because I really love hiking. Everything else is secondary to this foundation. Part of I'm guessing that off-leash reliability is recalls. And since you teach a class on it and have a book coming out on it, do you want to just tell us a little bit about the book, when it'll be out, where it'll be available? Yeah. So the book is in German, unfortunately. So I'm afraid many of you won't be able to read it. But it'll be out this fall. The publisher is Krunos. And it should be available on Amazon. It's a workbook, so it has lots of free space to take notes and tables and checklists that the reader can fill in. I wanted it to be a fun book that you can take places. And it'll give you a clear training plan on the one hand, and it helps you keep track of your progress on the other hand. Okay. So your syllabus, now to kind of shift gears and talk about your class a little bit, mentioned establishing a radius. And you mentioned earlier kind of off-leash reliability. You know, I think that's maybe not something I've thought about before with recall training, kind of the idea of establishing a space. So what do you mean by that? Can you talk us through it a little bit? So when you walk your dog off-leash, you probably don't want him to run more than maybe like 40 feet away from you. So that's the radius you want him to keep. And with radius training, we teach an

awareness of this distance. The dogs learn that fun things happen 40 feet from us and closer to us. So there's various elements to this. One of them is that we play all kinds of games within that radius. Then another one is that we change directions when they step out of the radius. So basically, the way they were just headed sniffing, that ends if they go further away than the radius we want them to have. You also kind of mentioned the idea of auto check-ins. Do you want to just talk a little bit about what those are and how they help with recall training? That's one of those things that I want to happen within the radius. So when I casually walk my dog and she looks at me unprompted, that's an auto check-in. And the more you capture that, for example, with a click, the more often it will happen. It's part of what I call shifting the responsibility to the dog. Because I want the dog to think it's her job to make sure not to lose her off-leash human and not the other way around. It's really more relaxing for the human if the dog makes sure not to lose you than if you constantly have to make sure not to lose your dog. Right. And I think a lot of people probably would love it if they could trust their dog not to lose them. You know, kind of one of the common analogies out there that people talk about when they talk about recall training is kind of this concept of this piggy bank, right? You've got to put a lot of money in before you can make a withdrawal out. I have no idea where that concept, that analogy came from, but I was hoping you could explain a little bit about how that works and kind of what that concept means. I don't know where it comes from either, but I also like the image. So for me, it means that I always try to follow a recall up with good things. If you keep calling your dog and then ending the off-leash fun, she'll learn that she better shouldn't come. So every time I call and then pay her well or let her run off again, I put money in the piggy bank. And every time I call and put her on a leash or end the play date, I'm making a withdrawal. And ideally you want to have as little withdrawals as possible. Part I think of what most people struggle with, right? They can get the recall in the house, they can get the recall maybe in the yard when there's a low level of distraction, and maybe they get it a hundred percent of the time awesome. And so the first time they face something really, you know, hard to recall their dog off of, they're shocked, amazed, terrified, horrified, whatever word you want to choose when the dog doesn't come, right? Kind of the problem there

is that they struggle with generally adding distractions in training and actually thoroughly proofing the behavior. Since recalls are often most important when distractions are their highest, proofing is perhaps even more important with that, like with this particular skill than with most of the things we teach. So I wanted to ask you a little bit about how listeners can kind of do it the right way. Yeah, I think you already touched on the most important part, proofing. Many people just forget about that part when it comes to real life behaviors. They remember to prove sports behaviors and competition behaviors, but somehow just expect the recall to work in real life after training it in the house or in a training building. But then of course it doesn't because it's a very different environment and there are all of a sudden distractions. So ideally you think of it just as you think of any other behavior. You train it in an easy environment first, for example, your house or a training building or your yard. And then you don't just skip a few steps and ask your dog to recall off a deer, but in that easy environment and gradually introduce distractions. For example, you can work with a low value food distraction in your own house and then a slightly higher value food distraction and so on. Kind of building complexity at home before you take it out. Yeah. Is it realistic to believe that every dog can have a strong recall cue or are there some dogs that simply they're just always going to struggle with it? I think some dogs will always struggle. I'm sure some people disagree, but while training is important, it's only part of the picture. There's breed tendencies and individual temperament. And those are also really important factors. For example, a dog who's genetically wired to work independently of humans and a dog who has a strong prey drive, that's a dog that will be much harder to train when it comes to a recall for off-leash hiking, for example. Then a handler-focused dog with a high will to please and no prey drive whatsoever. Right. Yeah. What do you do with those dogs that maybe don't have a lot of built-in interest for reinforcers? How do you handle that? That's a great question. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. And I'm actually developing a class on building reinforcers. So I think we usually assume that a reinforcer is a thing that the dog wants. And that we just need to have the thing and give it to the dog. And we can reward a behavior anywhere and anytime. But very often, it just doesn't work

that way. For example, some dogs only take treats at home, or they're only interested in toys in certain contexts. And for example, you can't reward a recall with something the dog doesn't want when he's on it. It doesn't matter how much he likes that same thing at home, right? Mm-hmm. So I think it's really useful if we try to see reinforcers as behaviors rather than things. So instead of food, we have the act of eating. And instead of a tennis ball, we have the act of playing fetch and so on. So if we think of a reinforcer as a behavior, all of a sudden, it's pretty clear that reinforcers can be trained and generalized just like any other behavior. And it's actually, we actually shouldn't expect them to work anywhere and everywhere without building them and generalizing them and working on them. So since you're working on a class on that concept, any thoughts when we might see it on the schedule or anything else you want to kind of get into about what it's going to cover? I'm not sure, but it'll probably be on the schedule in June. And we'll go into all kinds of reinforcers, including the ones we don't typically think of. For example, there'll be lectures, and games about environmental rewards, like chasing squirrels or chasing birds. And we'll talk about things that are genetically reinforcing, like, for example, herding might be for a border collie. Well, thank you so much, Chrissy, for coming back on the podcast. I really appreciate it. And thank you to all of our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week, this time with Deb Jones to talk about achieving a balance between motivation and control in our dogs through training. If you haven't already subscribed to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzie Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzie for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by bensound.com. The track featured here is called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in, and happy training.