E449: 줄리 플래너리(Julie Flanery) - "비상 정지 가르치기"

them into um you know an unsafe situation and you know we i don't think that we consider a lot of these sometimes extremely dangerous situations um that an emergency stop can help to prevent that emergency so a dog that understands a freeze cue freeze is the verbal cue i use freeze um meaning to immediately halt all forward movement even out of a fast run whether they're moving to you or away from you or next to you um it's going to give your dog a lot more freedom than a dog that doesn't have that so it's like having a strong recall a dog with a really strong recall is going to be much safer than a dog without a strong recall and so i like to think of the emergency stop is like an opposite recall it gives the handler another way to ensure that the dog is going to be safe out in the real world i mean if you think about it there are a lot of times when you're out with your dog they're off leash you enjoy off leash with your dogs and they're see something they run quickly away from you or they're way far ahead of you and want to run back to you um and it just gives you another tool to be able to feel safe when you and your dog are out and about in the world why is the ability to kind of stop immediately or that freeze skill a valuable skill especially when we're talking about you know sports dogs or working dogs so so this can be transferred from the dog running to us which is one of the first steps that that we do to teach this to a dog running away from us moving alongside of us i said or even add different positions like a down so initially we want to teach the dog how to abruptly collect themselves and stop on a dime so to speak right so that's not an easy skill at all it's not something that's easy for a dog to do physically like you could try it you could try it yourself you could run as fast as you can and without slowing stop at a specific point and don't allow your momentum to carry you forward past that and you'll feel how difficult physically that is to actually do the tendency is always to kind of slow a little bit to buffer that stop by slowing your momentum but there are a lot of sports where we ask the dog to do just that to run fast towards us or away from us and stop quickly and abruptly and control their momentum drop on recall comes to mind a moving stand even though there's less forward momentum in the moving stand the stop has to be immediate we have go outs in herding or tri-ball we need the dog to abruptly stop or change direction abruptly which is also physically difficult when the dog has a lot of momentum carrying them through

that motion and even if we don't need the full stop so like in agility there are a lot often abrupt shifts in motion where the dog needs to collect fully in order to change direction um it rally even though there may not be a lot of speed in rally there are several signs where the dog needs to learn the skill of collection and stopping out of motion uh and of course it it makes a really cool wow behavior in freestyle to have a dog running full speed at you and slam on the brakes as if he's about to hit a wall uh i'm sure there are more it makes it's just anytime we're going to ask the dog to move and abruptly stop or change direction that's a skill that we want to teach separately from the actual behavior that the stop is included in right so like with the drop on recall often handlers teach the stop and the drop as a single behavior right and if if we teach the dog first how to use their own body to stop the forward momentum the drop will be much cleaner and it eliminates a lot of that creeping at a stop and a backup before adding the drop and that drop piece becomes almost easy to the dog right because they learn how to stop themselves and then the drop can happen much more easily they're not the dog you know because the dog is controlling their body it allows them to not need to creep forward in order to do the drop does that make sense yeah do you find that that teaching these skills can um you know relate to a dog's understanding of impulse control more broadly are there any you know kind of less obvious benefits or carryover you know um i personally i don't think that it helps with impulse control per se so to me impulse control should be thoughtful the dog considers their options and they choose the best option given the opportunity for reward okay so it's it's like the marshmallow test you know the marshmallow test where they have kids in a room and they have a marshmallow there and they tell the kids now don't eat this till we get back and when we get back you can have two marshmallows you know and so the kids are sitting there with this thing they really really want and they're having to control their impulses to eat that marshmallow in order to gain bigger reward later so to me that's what i think of when i think of impulse control and how a dog learns impulse control the the emergency stop should be an automatic response it's not something the dog thinks about it's a reflex to a cue and and matter of fact we teach it as a reflex and then we put that reflex on cue so the dog is going to have a full amount of energy um they're going to be

running aroused they're going to be up and we don't want a lot of thought process coming in there which is what we really want with impulse control i think i want thoughtfulness and impulse control i want the dog to make that choice here i want it to be an automatic reflex to the cue i don't want it to be a thoughtful process does that make sense yeah i think that's kind of an interesting um i think that's an interesting differentiator right like thinking about impulse control as that piece versus yeah this being something that we kind of want to happen before the thought right i mean it looks like to someone looking at an emergency stop i guess it might look like impulse control control yourself for moving forward but there there really is once we teach it there there isn't going to be any kind of thought process involved the cue is going to happen and it's going to happen immediately and reinforcement happens immediately on this when we start training it so it's not there's no delayed reinforcement which often there is in impulse control um for this when we train it that reinforcement comes immediately so talk to me a little bit about how you actually approach training this what's kind of that first step in teaching the dog to stop on a dime either physically or conceptually or maybe both right so conceptually the dog is learning that something they want is coming to them and moving forward will not benefit them okay so so in essence we're training it like we would anything else the dog is learning what is in my best interest to earn reinforcement okay so we kind of start it there a little bit there's some pre-training that has to be done physically in order to get what they want they have to stop abruptly right and then reinforcement for that stop is immediately so basically it it all is going to start with a game of catch don't worry if they can't catch when i first started teaching my dogs as fee especially was horrible fee i would toss a treat i would it would be big it would be fluffy it would be light and it would just land on her head and then drop to the ground and then she would eat it and she knew she could eventually get it if she just stood there and didn't i thought for sure she was never ever ever going to learn how to catch and there are some really fun ways that we can actually help a dog that doesn't seem to get the concept of catching something in their mouth so that's that's the first step and then we start to add motion and speed and distance actually before we um add the speed we actually i should say we do add

the motion and the speed pretty quickly and that's where once we have the motion and the speed then we start to add the cube and then we can start to add more distance and then we can start to add more distractions and difficulty and things like that interesting all right so we're talking about like being able to rely on these emergency stops kind of in some pretty interesting situations right so how does the how do things like arousal level impact a dog's ability to kind of execute this reliably right and how do you kind of build the skills that it holds up to you know you mentioned the the not running in front of a car situation like how do we build it so it'll hold up even in like a high distraction or high arousal or high pressure situation yeah yeah so that's kind of a multi-faceted question but um because we are utilizing a reflex the stop is faster when the dog is aroused okay because they are um because it's not a thoughtful process the arousal level can often benefit the immediacy of the stop and i know that sounds weird um but once you see how we train it you'll you'll see how that can actually work so we actually want the dog running and that usually includes a level of arousal um when when we get into the meat of teaching it that's that's where we're going to teach it so they're learning the the stop in a state not quite as high of a state but but we're adding that state of arousal into the process of teaching it so that when we need it they're already used to that feeling of being in arousal does that make sense so we do want the dog responsive to the cue and that does take the brain as well as the body but we teach the skill with the brain and the body kind of working together so that movement and arousal is the context in which the cue will be given in which they're actually learning the cue and that's kind of different from other things you know normally we we're in kind of a calm state um we're in a quiet area when we add cues the dog we want the dog thoughtful and thinking about the cue but in this because we're adding a cue to a behavior that the dog is already doing in an aroused state um when it arousal isn't something we add later because it's happening all throughout the training process in terms of like building skill with distractions we do that just as we would with any other skill so we would methodically add layers of difficulty of distraction pressure all the things that we do with other behaviors um we would do with this we would obviously adjust for any errors

we would keep the rate of reward really high for more difficult scenarios um but most importantly on those skills that are the most important to us we need to keep the dog practiced at it and if we don't then it will degrade so we want to make sure that we're maintaining it and keeping a high rate of reinforcement for it if it's something that we're going to actually need and want to use in real life can you talk a little bit about kind of the role of timing and handler position when what we're doing is essentially you know kind of trying to build this reliable emergency stop behavior yeah um so a couple of things yes timing is super important for the handler uh when you think about the times when we need this for an emergency we are also in a state of arousal often and that means our movement is likely to be quick and so one of the things that happens at the start of training this is the handler's movement will be quick there is a progression of steps for the handler that can be a little difficult um and the dog is first taking physical cues from the handler before learning the verbal cue so there's definitely some skills for the handler that you wouldn't expect when just playing a game of catch the speed at which the handler gives the initial cue to stop is important and that's a skill that that will work with handlers on in in the class that i have coming up actually i have a class coming up on this so that's one of the things that we work on um is the handler skill the handler skill actually is more important in teaching a dog to catch than the dog skill so we'll be working on that as well so speaking of the the class um we're talking about this because you're offering a three-week class on this stuff in the march term do you want to share a little bit more about the class and maybe who might want to sign up yeah um it's going to be a really fun class uh we will start as if you're you and your dog know nothing your dog doesn't know how to start your dog doesn't know how to catch you don't know any of the mechanics on tossing so you'll learn the first week how to actually build the foundation skill for the actual emergency stop and we'll move into refining your skill your dog skill will add uh movement and speed and distance and all of those things that can make this a really difficult skill to teach teaching an emergency stop you know it's funny because to be honest when i first started teaching my dog the emergency stop i wasn't i mean i knew it'd be useful but i have to tell you to see a dog suddenly freeze out of motion the first

time you see it is like one of the coolest things that you'll ever see it's like whoa boom they're running through you and all of a sudden they're frozen i i put that right up there with like the first time that i ever taught my dog to do mimicry and the first time she mimics something i did i had that same feeling the first time i saw my dog like just freeze out of motion it was such a cool thing to see um and to be honest i think the dogs kind of get to like it it is a really fun game um who should sign up if you are someone that tends to be out and about with your dogs a lot if your recall is important to you and you use your recall you should have the opposite recall you should have an emergency stop where you want to interrupt your recall maybe or you want to uh stop a dog from coming to you both the recall and the emergency stop are two sides of the same coin you know really we we want both to have the most control uh of our dog's movement and safety i think those of you in sports uh teaching a dog to control their bodies and stop first before asking for the down gives the dog another tool to use in their learning of things like the drop on recall or the standout of motion or any of those things where we're asking the dog to literally stop all forward momentum all forward momentum and as i said if you if you think that's easy for a dog try it yourself you know run full blast and try stopping and physically it is very difficult mentally it is very difficult and yet in all of the sports that we participate in there is some measure of us asking our dogs to do that very physically difficult maneuver so really it's i mean anybody who this class is for whether you're in sports whether you enjoy just being out in public with your dog hiking with your dog it's just another really fun cool skill to have any uh final thoughts or maybe key points that you want to leave listeners with i think a couple of things if you want this to be useful like your recall it needs to be practiced and again if you feel like a recall is an important skill for your dog to have the emergency stop is also an important skill for your dog to have you may need one you may need the other you may need both but like they always say it's you can't train a behavior at the time that you need it best to maybe take these steps now so that when you need it you have it excellent all right well thank you so much for coming on the podcast julie thank you for having me it is always fun to chat with you back at you and thanks to all our listeners for tuning in we'll be back next week this time

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