E469: 니콜 비부시(Nicole Wiebusch) - 가만히 있는 상태에서 스테이(Stay)로 발전시키기

i started working on that one and so that was tucker and he got his rae which was the highest title they had at the time and then every dog since then i've continued to do rally stuff um and obedience to i've got several uds um a few udxs and then two yeah two rally championships and then agility stuff too fair enough so um i wanted to have you on today to talk a little bit about stays so i know well i think kind of when a lot of people think about teaching a stay they kind of assume they know how to do it right they think you know how hard could it be until they maybe go to teach it to a dog who doesn't understand naturally that value of stillness they're just but you know come across the dog who just doesn't get it um and then both the dog and the handler end up super frustrated so what makes teaching a truly reliable stay more complex than you know maybe it first appears so this is a really good question because like you said on the surface it seems so simple and i think if you're a trainer that has pretty good timing and a good sense of when to adjust your criteria training a dog to stay in position isn't necessarily that difficult especially at the beginning stages um but what i find that a lot of dogs are missing and what i'm starting to insert into my training well before i think about stays is that understanding of the concept of stillness um the concept of doing nothing and not receiving any feedback from the handler and not freaking out right and not getting fidgety and nervous and offering other things so those dogs that don't understand stillness they want to do something they don't just want to do nothing it's really hard for them especially many of our sports dogs they're bred to be doers right they're bred to to do things to offer things we often train in a way that that encourages the dog to offer behaviors so those dogs really struggle with doing nothing and especially when we're quiet about it they're like oh my gosh i don't know what's going on so i'm going to offer all the things um and then i think too we spend a whole lot more time rewarding offered behaviors than we do rewarding rewarding the absence of the behavior so that also makes it more difficult for the dogs um another piece that i think about is the emotional um emotional state of the dog right a lot of our sports dogs have a little bit naturally higher arousal which can make stillness hard um i always say when you have a quiet brain you have a quiet body and it kind of it goes both ways right a quiet body

helps with the quiet brain as well um vice and vice versa so um the dog that has a super high level of arousal is going to struggle a little bit more um and in that case you know knowing how to start your stillness or your stays that session can be really helpful by maybe we start with some scatters and then maybe we go to a chin rest or you know something along those lines um and then i think too about impulse control so in my experience i've had dogs that have natural impulse control it's kind of built in which is super nice and then i have dogs that i have to teach a lot of impulse control and those dogs will struggle less with the stays when they kind of understand that impulse control that internal control uh if the dog's naturally inclined to be still they're more likely to stay in a static position um i usually tell my clients or students that impulse control is the dog controlling themselves whereas like queuing a stay is me putting control on the dog external control on the dog and that internal control that the dog brings to the table whether it's trained or not whether it's trained or natural um will make those stays just become a lot easier to teach that makes a lot of sense it makes sense that you know the dog being able to do it themselves make it makes it easier for when you ask them to that they then you know have an easier time of actually doing it yeah um if somebody's maybe been working on stays for a little while and they're not quite making the progress they want you know what are some of the signs that maybe the dog is just getting frustrated and working on this stuff i do think um you know like the obvious things is the dog just isn't progressing right they're they're repeatedly getting up they're making a lot of mistakes um mistakes are information that's all they are it's just information to us that the dog is struggling so it's up to us as a good trainer and a good partner for a dog to make modifications to figure out how to help the dog uh be successful so um mistakes getting up offering other behaviors is a huge one um a lot of dogs are they're like oh i'm i'm sitting and i'm not really getting any feedback so now i'm going to throw in a down or maybe a stand or a spin or speak or maybe all of them at the same time i would do um fidgeting is a little more subtle but if you watch your dog especially their face you can see if they're starting to fidget a little bit or to get frustrated or you know maybe um their face changes you just see like just the smallest amount of stress

um that sort of thing vocalizing is a huge one and i do think that there's dogs there are dogs where vocalizing is just like in their dna but i also think frustration um makes that threshold a lot less where we'll be more likely to vocalize um and then just stuff like disconnecting you know sniffing scratching shaking all of those types of signs are showing us that the dog is maybe getting frustrated doesn't understand the criteria isn't able to do the job with the information that they have how do you maybe help dogs who are thinking you know nothing's happening i should try something else you're talking about dogs who like like to offer things or offer all of the things so how do you you know kind of get across to them that what we actually want is the lack of behavior and then help them you know become comfortable just waiting for that information instead of you know seeking it i think the most important thing is showing the dog that stillness is valuable and the way we do that is we reinforce it so we have to actually sit down and come up with a plan for this is how we're going to teach the dog the concept of stillness um that that piece there's there's just not a lot of getting around that like we show them that movement is valuable we have to show them that the lack of movement can be valuable as well i typically start at the the very beginning um by using a game like rapid treats where all i'm doing is rapidly feeding the dog treats and if they get up i stop feeding the treats or if they change position or whatever and if they freeze again i'm going to resume feeding the treats and while i'm going through this in the beginning stages like i don't even care about position if the dog is sitting and i'm feeding treats and then they stand up i'm going to stop the treat for a minute to kind of show the dog that yep the way you get your treat is to stay in position but i'm not going to make them sit again right if they stand and then they're still then i probably will start those treats again later on as i'm actually starting to work on stays that's going to change a little bit i'm going to get more picky about the position but in the beginning i'm i'm focusing on stillness um the the key to this is that i'm rewarding the dog pretty quickly so there's no time for frustration to build up it's just there's just not time for it um so once they are pretty good at rapid treats and they understand and they're not like attacking my hand for the treats and that sort of thing then i'm going to move to like the slow treats or the zen hand different trainers call it different things

but it's where you teach the dog you stay in position the treat will come all the way to your mouth and i think this is probably the most important game in teaching dog stillness and the concept of stillness um the concept of impulse control too don't move towards the treat um i see that with a lot of students their dogs don't understand if there's a treat here that they just can't go help themselves and it's really hard to teach stillness if the dog's trying to mug your hand so that slow treats um game can teach them stay put until i get the treat to your mouth other things that i think about as i'm working through these games is right from day one i'm going to be as quiet as possible um i'm not going to be doing a lot of chatter with the dog i'm not going to constantly be saying good dog good dog you know you're doing great um i want to teach him right away that if i'm quiet it means you're doing great and just keep on doing what you're doing and don't get nervous or frustrated and try to offer a bunch of things um a couple other things i think about i typically will use low value treats um i don't want the dogs getting overly excited about food so i'm not going to use filet mignon uh or anything like that um with my golden's low value is pretty much air cookies or pocket lint that usually works yeah well for getting up into the high to medium value or medium to high value um it doesn't take much for for rise at all so you know and maybe at the most i'm using kibble like that's about all i i use for him when it comes to teaching the stillness staff um i purposely keep my session short and by purposely i mean i set a timer or i set out a certain number of cookies or i in some way make myself keep the session short because i can't tell you how many times i recorded a session and i swear it's 30 seconds and i go back i watch it and it's like three and a half minutes and i'm like i was pretty sure that was 30 seconds so when we're working with our dogs and we're feeding them and we're excited because they're doing well or we're frustrated because they're not we don't keep track of time that's just it's really hard for us to do so i like to time my sessions um and then i kind of mentioned this earlier but i start by reinforcing the concept of stillness and not necessarily position so um you know i think teaching a stay i think it's natural kind of as we're talking about the word stillness and the word stay for for people to understand that teaching a stay requires you know the dog understanding that stillness pays but

you know when we're using those two words how are you thinking about a stay versus stillness how are you thinking about you know are they the same can you use them interchangeably do they just overlap can you talk a little about that yeah of course i definitely think they overlap i do not think they are the same now obviously you have stillness when you have a stay but you don't necessarily have a stay when you have stillness um stillness is a concept right it's not holding a position it's about a mindset not a simple cued behavior so um stillness has nothing to do with position you know my default for my dogs is i want you to stand preferably um generally they do and i want you to make eye contact so they're giving me stillness but they're certainly not doing a stay they're not doing a sit or down stay or anything like that um stillness is not cued necessarily it's it's not if i'm doing a stand stay i'm going to say stay if i'm doing something like i'm just um say i'm building up off or uh eye contact i'm not going to say anything to them i'm not going to give them any cue um i think stillness comes more from quietness within and from that natural or trained impulse control and when a dog has a good understanding of stillness it makes teaching this way easier i should understand that are there foundations that you start with that make it easier for dogs to learn stillness oh my goodness foundations everything's about foundations right fair enough everything's about foundations um you know there are there are a lot of foundations that i do but i will tell you that one of the the biggest things that i realized with rise and he showed me this like very clearly i remember having this epiphany with him when i was he's not a still dog naturally okay but when i was working on things like say a chin rest with him adding duration was so easy and i'm like okay why was it so easy with him where i've struggled with other dogs and what i realized was because when rise was a puppy i focused on a lot of foundation i focus on a lot of how to learn stuff i also focus a lot on reinforcement cues or reward markers i use those two terms pretty interchangeably um and because i did that he has a really good understanding of reinforcement cues and i think that made a huge difference so for him when i did the chin rest what i do is i say yes which is stop the behavior come to my hand get the treat and he knew that so like he learned right away as a puppy he's like oh i just wait for the yes and it was just so matter of fact

like he just figured that one out and i'm like oh because he had such a great understanding of the reinforcement cues it was easy for me to add duration so that is i think one of the number one things is that you understand the reinforcement cues so i use um other ones too obviously i have good is i'll put the treat in your mouth uh so they don't necessarily break position for that and then i also use ground or floor um i say ground because i learned it from shade and that's what shade uses um i've never had problems but some of my students say it sounds too much like down so they've gone to using floor which i think is a great one too they both make a lot of sense and that just means i'm going to put put a cookie on the ground or on the floor right in front of you works really really well for downs and building duration and downs um because the dog's not coming up towards the treat so those are the the main ones that i use and then i use yes to end um like for chin rest for holds you know stuff like that um i think default eye contact can be can be really helpful as a foundation um having a really good understanding of the rapid treats and slow treats game um i will say when i'm doing rapid treats personally i do not use any reward markers um and even when i'm starting slow treats i don't use reward markers as my dog understands the game of slow treats and i know they're not going to come forward to get the treat then i will i'll like i'll bring the treat in and then the last minute i'll just say i'll pause i'll say good and then i'll feed the dog in their mouth um but i don't use them early on in the game and then i think the other the other piece that is missing with a lot of people is the dog has to understand their release they have to understand the concept of starting and the concept of stopping so that's something that i work on training really early even if it's just um i do a lot of station work with my puppies which teaches them all the stuff it's great i love station work meaning they just go like up on a cot a raised cot you can use a bed too but i find they do better when they have like the parameters of a cot something raised off the ground um so i teach that's how i teach my release cues is the dogs on the on the station and then i said for for most of my dogs is break i say break and then they come off um so having that clear end like okay now i'm done because if it's vague and you just walk away the dog's like i don't understand what we're doing and then they never understand there's a clear end and they can't keep and you can't keep stillness if

they don't know when to stop keeping stillness so those are a few of the foundations that i was able to think of as i'm as i'm thinking through this question i'm there's definitely more but um i think that's a good list to start with yeah so you mentioned kind of in there that you know building duration can be difficult what are you know how do you approach building duration without that uncertainty and do your frustration kind of sneaking in very slowly um i i'm um adding duration and tiny increments um i'm trying really hard to reward before mistakes especially in the beginning of the training the early the early days of of stillness and um safe training um later on i'm going to go to a variable reinforcement but not in the beginning that's going to happen like way later when they understand kind of what i'm trying to teach them um i try to go in there with a plan but that plan can always change and i'm always going to react to what the dog's giving me in the moment and maybe my plan was to do a five second moment of stillness or stay whatever and the dog's plan was not then i go with the dog's plan and i try to you know change things switch things up so that i can help the dog get closer to my plan maybe we don't meet you know where i want to meet but i try to meet the dog in the middle so we're both making compromises um i don't push it and this is a hard lesson to learn because we're always like oh let's just go a couple more seconds oh let's just wait and see what happens and that never ends well so i just learned from the beginning i'd rather get you know 20 perfect days that are only two or three four seconds than getting two good ones that are longer mixed in with a bunch of mistakes so i don't push it i focus on the confidence if i'm seeing a lot of questioning uncertainty fidgeting anything like that then i'm gonna keep things really short really easy for the ducks i want to build that confidence um and then just again we mentioned this i mentioned this earlier just those short sessions and not falling into that just one more trap um sometimes i find myself thinking let's just do one more repetition things are going so well and then everything falls apart that's pretty murphy's law and dog training i think funny so those are some of the the things that i'm thinking about um as i'm building duration so you mentioned in there that you know one of the mistakes people make is they maybe you know try for a little more a little too soon but you know what are some of the other common mistakes that handlers make when they're working on a stay so i think about

when i'm teaching stays i'm kind of thinking about the three d's that most of us are familiar with you've got your duration which is the length of your stay you get your distance which um i look at distance a couple of ways it can either be how far you are from the dog or it could be the distance between the dog and distractions and then distractions of course is our third d so i'm always thinking about as the dog learns i always do duration first right because the dog has to have duration to do anything else um and and then i'm careful to just raise them one at a time so i think a lot of people don't necessarily understand that they're raising two d's at a time um you know maybe they're working on distance but they're doing it in an environment where there's a bunch of other dogs running around yeah and they don't really understand necessarily that hey that's a big distraction so now you think you're working on on just distance but you're working duration because you got to have duration to work distance and you're working on distractions they don't necessarily understand or realize that so really thinking through how can i raise criteria without going too fast um another mistake i see a lot is just giving that constant feedback to the dog good dog you're doing great stay stay stay you know the hand signal like all the time as they're backing away from the dog um i try really hard like i do once i start to introduce the stay cue i say stay and that's it and i don't i don't continue to repeat it i don't say you're doing awesome good dog blah blah blah most of my generic praise is actually done in between reps so i'll be like stay break oh you are so smart what a great dog and then we'll start over um unclear release cues kind of mentioned that so that not teaching a really clear release before you start doing a lot of stay work that can be really hard um releasing or rewarding excuse me rewarding the release not the stay that is such a huge mistake that i see with newer trainers is they're like stay and then they're like break here's your cookie good dog and they don't understand necessarily that they're they're rewarding the release um and not this day so i talk about with with students especially new to this that you know putting value into the stay piece is important and the way you put value into that is rewarding during this day um and then i think sometimes a lot of um handlers get into where they're they just get in this rhythm of practicing failures where the dog is struggling

and so i talk about my two mistake rule one mistake i don't change a thing let's say i'm doing a 10 second stay my dog breaks at eight seconds i just calmly reset no big deal we do it again i go to 10 seconds if the dog makes it great if they don't that's their second mistake so i'm going to change something i'm going to do a six second stay or i'm going to change something about the environment to make that easier for the dog so um those are kind of some of the more common mistakes that i see when the handlers are first teaching those days when a dog you know you're working on stays and the dog does kind of break position what information does that give you like what do you kind of think about from there so it comes back to one of my favorite sayings which is mistakes aren't failures they're just information right so the dog is telling me through their actions that the understanding of what i'm asking for isn't there yet it's not as complete as i thought it was i'm not going to ask a dog to do something that they can't do right that would that would just be silly that would that wouldn't be a good training decision so if i asked it out to do something and they do make a mistake they're giving me feedback that hey this is too much it's too difficult i don't understand what you're asking so what i'm going to do is go back and lower criteria i'm going to maybe revisit foundations i'm going to look at the environment and see if there's something else going on um i'm just going to try to pick apart like what happened what was the dog confused about was there a weird distraction in the environment that caused that mistake um and then how do i build the dog back from there how do i re how do i strengthen i can use this this is a great opportunity i can use it as a way to strengthen the understanding and the foundation so i think about how can i do that and sometimes you don't like i try to i try to like change my plan on the fly and be really quick to respond to my dog but sometimes i can't sometimes it's my dog did that and i have no idea why and i just need a minute and i think it's completely okay to recognize i just need a minute and to put the dog in a kennel or or you know whatever on a station i love stations um a lot of times i'll put them on a station because my dogs are taught that very very early um so i'll put them on station i'll kind of think through okay what happened um but if you need to take a minute it's not that you're ending on a bad note it's that you're taking a moment to help your dog and to come up with a better

plan and there's nothing wrong with that everybody's like always end on the success and that is awesome if you can do that it's a great thing in theory but sometimes it's not possible and it's okay it's okay just to put your dog up and say okay you know we're going to come back to this once i've had a moment to um think about it or a day to think about it you know whatever um so i think that you know that kind of it gives me a lot of information when the dog breaks position so i just figure out what to do with it and where to go from there how important would you say you know reinforcement and timing and uh strategy for you know reinforcement strategy and um kind of those pieces of things are when we're trying to build reliable stillness oh it's everything i think it's extremely important um if if our timing is off and we end up you know marking at the wrong time maybe we mark when the dog gets up and that you know now now look at what we just did we gave our dog fake information we're like haha just kidding and dogs don't understand that very well i mean some of our dogs and i've had dogs like this and um rises a little bit like this like if you accidentally reward something once you're kind of in trouble um that's how chickens are by the way for those of you that have trained chickens you all know what i'm talking about like if you teach your chicken to you know to let's say your timing is off your click is late and that the dog goes to or the chicken the chicken goes to peck the target and your timing's late and you taught them to um you know come away from the target well you might as well grab that chicken and put it back in the barn i train my own chickens not chickens you can't chickens but literally put the chicken back in the barn and just grab a new one because that's going to be easier now dogs are more forgiving thank goodness than chickens are but if you ever think your dog is not forgiving go train a chicken and then let me know how that goes so that reinforcement that timing the placement how you reinforce that's all really important in building the stay behavior um so you know when you mark how you you decide to reinforce something sometimes you're going to want to say yes and get them out of the stay or out of the stillness um sometimes you're going to want to reinforce in the stay or the stillness to put more value on than that so kind of knowing what situations are better for each each um different way that you can reinforce but just like with everything in dog training timing is critical it's very important

is there a difference in your mind between the work that we do to kind of teach a stay and then i guess the maintenance that's involved and like keeping that behavior fluent and strong and reliable kind of in the long term you know how do you ensure that the dog that you spend a bunch of time teaching this excellence day to doesn't just lose that skill once we've kind of checked it off decided it's done and begun to you know maybe introduce the behavior to more exciting environments things like a trial situation um or maybe we just kind of start working on it a little bit less because it's going well you know that kind of thing yeah it's easy to do that with stays because a lot of people think they're kind of boring right they're not the most fun thing in the world to teach um so it's really easy to kind of okay i got it i'm putting it on the back burner um one thing that i try to think about or one way i try to think about this is until i have a competition early ready stay in my brain it's not taught right um adding those distractions the generalization of different environments and locations scenarios um all that to me is teaching so if i think about it that way it just helps me keep going along that track of training versus like oh look i got a 30 second stay in my training building i'm good to go the other thing i think about too is is um the the concept of stillness these dogs that struggle with that the dogs that find it hard they need regular practice and what i find is i can build that into any training session it doesn't mean i'm training stays it just means i'm doing a three second default eye contact wait for the next cue um you know i'm building in pauses in between my position changes you know different things like that like i can put stillness practice in everything on the start line when i'm on and on the agility start line i turn around and i make contact you know i connect with my dog and i wait two to three seconds before i release them every single time um so i'm constantly thinking about how can i build this wellness into this and before you go outside you can do it with life skills you know before you go outside i want you to make eye contact with me for two seconds and then i'm going to open the door and release you outside um so that can be really helpful too and will also help maintain that stay behavior even though you're not practicing stays so it definitely is not something that with it you can just be like all right got it and move on it's something that you do need to continue coming back to um and then the last thing that i think

about too and i i mentioned this earlier is confidence right so if we don't practice something if we don't fall back on it if we don't continue to reward it um if we practice all this movement stuff and sometimes the dog will get a little bit unconfident like well am i supposed to stay still or am i supposed to move uh so that's another reason i keep building these ended regular training sessions is i want to protect that confidence i want the dog to be like i'm still my mom or dad is quiet and i've got this and that's kind of the attitude i'm looking for so uh we're talking about this because you're offering your six-week class on stays better still stays without frustration in the august term so do you want to talk a little more about the class in particular kind of you know who might want to take it what you cover maybe what phase in the training process they should be at when they sign up some of that kind of stuff sure yeah so this class um if you haven't figured out yet i'm big on the concept of stillness so that's the underlying um foundation of this class is the concept of stillness and then how that plays into teaching reliable stays um the class has got a lot of material uh it covers a lot of ground we talk about the very beginning stages of stillness all the way up sit stays down stays stand stays and relax stays um whether that's on the station or whether that's a relax down stay so we cover a lot of stuff in this class but that means it's ideal for several different um phases right you can come in and like my favorite student my favorite not student i shouldn't say that my favorite type of person to get in this class is the one with the puppy right because puppies are super easy they just soak up everything so if you can teach your puppy stillness you're gonna have a much easier life with your puppy um so puppies are awesome but that doesn't mean that these older dogs eight ten year old dogs even can't learn how to be still even if they you know have been kind of moving everywhere their whole lives so it's ideal for dogs that need a stay need some stillness but especially those dogs that find movement reinforcing or tend to offer a lot of behaviors and you know a lot of us have dogs like that there's a lot of dogs out there that aren't necessarily that way too but especially those dogs that are just they're always trying to you know get you to react to them by throwing out every behavior they know my dog toby i used to call him i didn't know any of this stuff back when i had toby

and i used to call him a deranged circus animal because if i just looked at him he would like oh my gosh he looked like he was trying to turn himself inside out he would just throw out everything all in like two seconds he'd get like 30 behaviors i don't know how he did it but he would like do flip flops and so that kind of dog this is a great thing for yeah um it also was good this class would be good for dogs that get fidgety or uncomfortable with the lack of information and we're also teaching another concept in this class which is silence means you're right and this concept carries over to everything healing rally courses you know it's got a huge um carry over to obedience rally and agility too um and other dog sports as well so if your dog kind of gets you know a little bit uncomfortable like i i don't know that you're you're quiet i'm getting nervous this is a great class um so for those handlers that want their dog to understand that silence means their dog is right and just keep doing what you're doing um so i think that kind of covers like it can really help a lot of different types of dogs awesome all right well with that we'll wrap things up thank you so much for coming on the podcast nicole thank you so much for having me melissa this was really fun it was awesome and i think it's a really important topic for people to think about maybe a little bit you know heading into the tower so and thank you to all of our listeners and our viewers for tuning in we'll be back next week this time with patra ford to talk about teaching engagement for competition if you haven't already subscribe to our podcast either on itunes the podcast app of your choice or over on youtube to make sure you never miss an episode today's show is brought to you by the fenzy dog sports academy special thanks to denise fenzy for supporting this podcast music provided royalty free free by bensound.com the track featured here is called buddy audio and video editing friday christline thanks again for tuning in happy training