고집 센 반려견 때문에 답답하신가요? #51

A lot of times this kind of dialogue happens when somebody you respect is watching your training, but not necessarily. You need to remind yourself to train the dog that's in front of you. Because the dog that's in front of you doesn't know this. Because if he did, he would be showing you that he doesn't know this. So, let me skip back to a session I had with my 15 month or 15 week old puppy, just this week. And let me set the stage for you. It was nine o'clock at night. And I'm going to preface this by saying, I normally am getting ready for bed at nine o'clock. I go to bed around 930. But I decided I was just going to do, I was really excited to try this one behavior. It was a brand new behavior and it's a complex behavior. And it's actually an accumulation of a number of different behaviors put together. Now you're saying, Susan, why on earth would you try a complex behavior, an accumulation of a bunch of other behaviors that you've never tried at nine o'clock at night? I know, I'm asking myself that same question. But I learned a very valuable lesson proving after 30 years in dog training, I too, continued to be shaped by dog. Let me get to that. So, the behavior was sidestep. Now, to sidestep the dog keeps their body straight. And I guide them to reach out with same side legs and step to the side, whatever direction I cue them to do so. That's what I wanted to train or teach my 15-week-old puppy. She knew all the little bits. We had put all those little behaviors done in isolation. I was just going to put them all together at nine o'clock at night. The first time through, it actually wasn't so bad. The second time through, she got confused and put her back feet up on the board that only her front feet should have been on. So, she didn't get a reward for the second time. She did for the first. The third time through, she did the same as the second. Again, didn't get a reward. At which point she left the training and just went and sniffed something. And so, what I did next was I said, okay, it's nine o'clock at night. We're ending this. I turned off the video camera. I tossed her a toy. Now Swagger was in the room with her. I tossed her a toy. And then I left the bedroom. I just stood outside the bedroom door for about five seconds saying, well, that was silly Susan to try and do this at nine o'clock at night. Probably the things you said at the beginning of this podcast. And then I came back in and she was waiting. She wasn't sniffing the floor where she was. She was waiting right by the door, looking up at the door.

Where'd you go, mom? What were you doing out there? I came in, had a little play session, took her outside, final piece, got ready for bed. And I went to bed. I woke up at five o'clock the next morning before I even looked at my journal notes or my video, I knew what I had to do. Now, two really important things I just said there. Before I looked at my video of my training session, which I always video my training, or before I reviewed my notes, which if you're not journaling your notes, how are you going to improve? It's super important. Before I did that, I knew what I had to do. It hurt me in my heart that I walked away from that puppy. It hurt me at five o'clock in the morning. I can't believe how upset I was. It was such a benign thing. I stepped outside the bedroom door for five seconds. But what in fact I was doing as I was walking away from her, giving her a little timeout. Now in my brain, I wasn't saying I'm giving you a timeout. I just needed to pause. And mentally, I don't think it was too taxing for her, but it wasn't the right thing to do. It was unfair to that puppy. And so, I'm going to share with you now my five-step evaluation of what I should have done and what I encourage you to do when things don't go as you plan in your training. So, step number one is I get a failure and I just repeat what I just did and evaluate. Was it just a one-off or did, was there really some confusion? Really important that before you repeat, any time you evaluate your dog's temp, T-E-M-P. Now that is all in episode number four here on Shaped by Dog. Is the dog engaged in what you're doing? If not, then there's no need to repeat a third time. That would take us to step number two. And this is the mistake that I made. And this is the new step that I have added. You need to consider and have this in the front of your mind before you start training. What stage of training is my dog at in this behavior? So, this goes back to episode number 44, where I talk about arranging coincidences and the chart that I presented with the stage of training and how early in the training, which let's face it, this is a 15-week-old puppy bringing together a brand new behavior. You don't get any earlier in the training. You need to make the correct choice incredibly obvious. I don't believe I did that. I did two more sessions after that and they were brilliant. I will show you the outcome of how my puppy now proudly and happily knows how to do that. So, I'll show you the next step. So, I'll show you the next step. I'll show you the next step

step number one. You have a failure and after every failure you evaluate temp. Step number two, and these could be reversed. Remind yourself where this dog is in the training progression chart. So, if I was doing this with my five-year-old dog, I would have no problem with her failing two or three times. I know that she wouldn't leave training. Why? Because the reinforcement for working with me has been built up through a history of fun and engaging training. So, she would be okay failing. A 15-week-old puppy, we're getting there, but we're nowhere near where we are with my five-year-old. Evaluate temp, ask yourself where you are in the training progress. And number three, what I should have done is take a break. Do something easy, put the dog away, and now that's number four. Take a break, do something easy, number four, put the dog away. Number five, we're going to evaluate what just happened. That would be looking at your video and you're looking for these three elements. And these are the reasons why dogs fail in my opinion. It's an acronym PEP. We need PEP in our training. So, number P, the number P. So, the first P is there could be a psychological reason why your dog failed, or your puppy failed, or your puppy left training. And quite often it's stress. Is it that you've gone too long between reinforcements? Is it that your training session has gone on way too long for the stage and the age of that dog in training? Is it that your training is too boring? That it's is mundane. You need to put some games and some life into your training. Could it be, as I mentioned before, the stage that you're at and that you haven't made the correct choice, obvious and easy. The stress could be there because of you as a trainer. Maybe it was your mechanics. Maybe your criteria was very inconsistent to the dog. So, you caused confusion. So, there was some stress from the dog or the puppy based on the confusion of what it is that you want from me because I don't really get it. Possibly you were using a lure, a food lure before, and you took the food lure away and you expected the same outcome. And the dog's like, well, I don't get this. Or your mechanics, you altered your mechanics. So, these are just a few examples of why there might be stress that the dog's psychology is having them wanting to get away from the pressure, to leave the training. It also could be a fear. Does the dog sense that you're getting irritated and they're getting a little bit worried? Or is there somebody new watching? You've said,

hey, to your friend, hey, watch what my puppy can do. Or maybe there's another dog in the room. Or it could be another psychological stressor. It could be the dog's too excited. The dog's overexcited. So, they're not going to repeat what they just did. Environment. You've got to look at what are the distractions in the environment and what is the value of reinforcement that you're using in that environment. If I'm just working at home, I might not use, and I'm doing something the puppy already knows, I'll use a lower value rewards, boring, more boring rewards. As the, if it's a new behavior or it's a new environment with more distractions, the distractions could be smells on the ground, or there's other dogs around, or maybe the footing's different. We've never worked on this footing, or there's people around, it's crowded. You've got to take that into consideration. And people will say, oh, well, you know, my dog should just work for me because it's his job. I'll give you an example. Let's say you went into a bar with a friend and it's crowded. There's hardly any tables left, but they find one table and they sit at this table and your surfer comes and you order a drink and it takes a while, but you get your drink. If you then go all spider monkey on that server and say, well, holy crap, I would, you know, I could have gone and got my own drink. I could have, this has taken, it's been here 10 minutes and you just now bring me my drink. I bet you that beer is warm. It's her job. Yeah. She's supposed to bring you drinks. And when your drink is done, she's supposed to check on you to see if you need more. It's a crowded bar. How likely is it that you're going to get the top A service? As opposed to you waited 10 minutes, the server comes in and she brings you your drink and you say, wow, it's crowded in here tonight. And I bet you there's a lot of people that are giving you a hard time. Here's a 20 for our drinks and here's a 20 just for you. If the bar is crowded people, you tip with 20s. And if the distractions are high, you use high value rewards to make sure it's worthwhile for your dog to work through those distractions. So, we have psychological reasons. We have environmental reasons. It could have been that you had props before up that to help your dog get the behavior and then you took them away. It could be that the dog is just overwhelmed with everything that's going on around them in this environment. You know, you might say, well, my last dog did all this. Train the dog that's in front of

you. Your last dog may not have been as soft as this dog. And that's okay. The third P is physical. I can't tell you how many times, uh, Linda Orton-Hill who works here at Dogs That, she is like, we call her the poop queen. She sees a puppy training and maybe not getting things right. And she says, I think that puppy needs a poop break. She's almost always right. So, physical. Does the dog, has a dog been out to pee or poop recently? If it's a puppy, maybe they've got an upset stomach. Maybe they're hungry. Have you ever been hangry? I know I don't do my best work when I'm hangry. Maybe the, the, it could be something physical, like they got, uh, you know, something on their pads. So often with agility dogs, they might be missing weave pull entries or popping out of weave pulls because they've got a rib out. They need an adjustment or they just, their body is sore somewhere. They could be thirsty. They could be tired. There's a number of reasons, physical reasons, why the dog isn't doing it. And you have to dig deep to figure it out. So, P-E-P. When you have a failure, you need to evaluate. And that's exactly what I did. I evaluated how I failed my puppy at that 9 PM training session. I then had a list of ways that I could do things better. And more often than not, it's unrealistic expectations. If it isn't a physical reason, and if it's not an environmental reason, and it's not a reward or, it's more often our expectations. We set criteria that that dog or puppy just wasn't able to get to. We leaped too far ahead. We made the task too difficult. Even if the environment was a simple one for the dog to succeed in, you need to consider if the dog knew what you wanted, they would do it every time. So, when you find yourself saying, but I know he knows that, train the dog that's in front of you. The dog that's in front of you does not know that. So, what are you going to do? Are you going to get more irritated or are you going to evaluate the dog's temp, evaluate where you are in your training session, take a break, play, do something easy, take a break from the training, put the dog away, and then evaluate PEP. Psychological environment and physical reasons why you may not have got the outcome you were expecting. That's it for me on Shaped by Dog. And hey, thank you so much for all the love you guys have been showing us on my last podcast on YouTube. I got tons of great comments and I love the like button. So, thank you so much. If you are watching this on YouTube, I hope you took notes and I hope you wrote down the statement,

train the dog that's in front of you. And if you are listening to this podcast and you're in your car, look for a tattoo parlor, jump in there and tattoo somewhere where you can see it. Train the dog that's in front of me. That's all for today. I'll see you next time on Shaped by Dog.