온 큐 - 에피소드 3: NePoPo® 박스 피딩, 일명 도파민 박스

for nearly everything and yeah I just uh made a little bit on the Whiteboard the measures because everybody's constantly asking how how big is the Box how about how big must the Box be and um it's just 30 by 30 by 30. so nothing special about that yeah so uh Mike do you want to start yeah I mean uh sure so let me pull up working on being organized here all right so box feeding um I'm going off notes Here so we're going to talk about why how what's it used for the magical measurements of the box I think you probably already mentioned that maybe um so aka the dopamine box um and I know there's a joke in other podcasts about how big the box is and obviously you know Dominic has the measurements up there but I think for me this really the size of the Box doesn't matter it could be anything but for those of you who use a lot utilize a clack clack um these measurements are perfect because um you know the clack clack can fit either inside of it or on top of it um you know but really it's inconsequential it could be [Music] it could be I need to put my phone on do not disturb okay it could be that's probably a client listening to me on here saying I'm putting my phone on do not disturb when I turn their call off probably hear about that but anyhow um it could be a a big bowl it could be anything that the dog can just get his head in um to uh really passed his eyes so that he can essentially the Box can help them be environmentally blind or indifferent to you know the environment um and really the box is just an arbitrary command it could be anything the box is just generic it's an exercise outside of anything else that you have to perfect whether that be a position healing a front or you know whatever um but it it helps you to toughen a dog to environmental distractions it helps you to teach your dog to stay on task and I think most of all it builds it helps build it gives the dog a place to focus to on a task so that reward can be paired with pressure so that a dog knows how to respond to pressure and then that anticipation that is cued by the pressure is what triggers dopamine so the anticipation the anticipation of a reward that's cued by pressure uh obviously so um so maybe you just can't explain how you use it or why do you use it with your own dogs or why they use it with a class with a client's dog give us just an example so um yeah I don't I'm I don't really

I don't use it much with client dogs but I use it on my dogs and when they were a little bit younger they're still very young but when they were a little bit younger um I use it a lot more and I need to really get back on it but how I use it is to uh for me it's about teaching a dog like I said just a second ago um and I'll just keep it simple to help the dog learn to stay on uh to stay focused on the command or whatever he's supposed to be doing and to build uh to build anticipation of a reward in response to pressure so for example um and I'll show a video a second I think the best video to start with is probably your video but we'll see in a video that I show um I like to I want the dog to know that there's a reward in putting his head into the box and I like to really initially teach that through free shaping you know no different than teaching um in a scent a scent tube you know a dog to go over and just sniff and then kind of by approximation you know he gets his head in there then I click the dog comes to me then the dog has to try a little bit harder so his head's in there a little bit longer and then I click he comes to me and then so the dog tries again um he knows what he's supposed to do by this time he knows that putting his head in the Box brings a reward so um he goes over he tries again puts his head in the Box I make him wait a little bit longer and then I click he comes to me the dog learns that the longer he waits um rewards coming and then all of a sudden you know the dog's head's in the box and instead of me clicking the dog coming to me boom I dropped food in the box and then so the dog has learned that by keeping his head in the Box uh you know reward comes at first the pressure is simply his head in the box and then his head's in the Box again another lesson he's waiting on the food that he knows is coming I might click for him to come to me or you know to release him from the box or I might drop food in the Box his head's in the Box because he knows he's anticipating food to go in the Box and then from there I um I will my routine now is to put the dog on the pedestal and I put and let me first say this that you always have to stay within the framework um the legal framework of your country so I'm talking about for here where I'm at the United States Stateside so um don't get this wrong if anybody else is commenting or whatever you know I'm speaking for myself and how I do it but you can apply any kind of pressure and we'll see that shortly but how I do it is I'll take and I put the dog on the pedestal and I put the collar on them very very low level probably even not

even perceivable but I'm going to assume that it is because I had on the really lower than the lowest factory setting of the collar that I use which is the chameleon 3B but so I put him on the pedestal put the collar on and then I'm just a few feet away that I know that when I release him he's he's going to the Box because we've done it you know 100 times already so there's food in the Box he's amped up about it and then so I start tapping on the collar applying pressure release him as soon as he gets to the box or in the box boom I release the pressure so now his head's in the box and I add just tap pressure drop food tap pressure drop food tap pressure drop food not too quick together because that can lead to other mistakes but the dog quickly learns that uh pressure means food's coming pressure could be me tapping the box with my foot pressure could be me just reaching over and tapping him on the back a little bit but in this case um with the e-collar it's pressure food pressure food pressure food and so if the dog happens to raise his head out of the box then what do I do right pressure and the pressure makes him anticipate the food and he knows that when his head's in the box when the food comes so and he pulls his head out of the box I add pressure boom he anticipates the food so his head goes in the box when his head goes in the Box I release the pressure and drop food in the box napol right so what this turns into is the dog learns that pressure means put my head in the Box pressure means putting ahead in the box so or stay on command and how this translates to training I'm just going to use the heel command for example so now um uh how I do it again I use a clock board I'm standing next to it my dog already knows the crack the clock board's loaded right so the dog just like the Box um so I had the dog on the clock board you know he's got the e-collar on and he already knows the position so I'm just layering pressure into the position right so I'm on the clap clack board I'm standing next to a clap clapboard so in other words the clap clack board is to my left in the heel position I toss food against the wall in my training room the dog goes after the food as soon as I see he's you know a couple pieces of kibble he picks it up he turns around and when he turns around to come to me he knows I'm standing next to the clap clack board that's his cue to get in the hill position on the clock board just like I would apply pressure going to the box I apply pressure now coming to the clack clack board to get into position so there's pressure he gets on the clock board turns around to the hill position

uh pressure goes off and you know he gets the food again napopo so again you know it's all relative the the Box could be healing the Box could be whatever we start off with the box so that we can kind of perfect it teach pressured build dopamine into into it and also the Box allows us to add environmental pressures once the dog knows so the dog's head's in the Box um a little bit of noise you know the dog's head comes out of the box during the noise what happens add pressure just to cue the dog back into the box eventually the dog stops bringing his head out for that noise you can add another noise or another environmental pressure blah blah blah blah blah what does that mean in the heel position well now you're going down the middle of the igp field the dog's in position um and The Gunshot goes off right instead of your dog knows that pressure precedes I'm kind of getting ahead of myself a little bit so I'll stop we'll I'll let you talk and we'll go through some of the videos and be able to see this kind of in succession uh yeah I think I think it's good if you just if you just show your video that you uh that you made okay so the people understand how you what you mean exactly by using the e-coll of with the pressure going into the box okay so we'll bring up all right let me open it my phone again all right so so we'll start off here he is I just that's the pedestal you can see it's just a box with uh another box but it's got a clap clack board in it so I just put the collar on them what you'll hear is what you're going to see I actually have my uh finger kick paired to two collars the collar that's on him and the collar that's hanging on the stand that's holding the camera that's taking this video so when you hear the beat the beep signifies uh e-collar pressure so you know when I'm applying pressure and when I'm letting off okay so we'll start you'll see how the head in the Box pressure goes off foreign food fresher food fresher food a little bit of leash pressure food and this is Binger pressure all the way to the Box and as soon as the dog drops the headline the Box you stop the pressure and you add food Nate Popo foreign dog is in the box and then you add food and you click the dog out of the box and again pressure to the dog goes in the Box yeah I think that gives a little bit of clarification how you use the box and yeah of course uh you just in the beginning you you shape that so you use indirect reward right um to yeah just shape like every other exercise and yeah well I just I loaded it first you know a cheap I guess kind of just by feeding them out of the box when he's a puppy just letting him see me drop food

in there and then they knew so yeah so that's exactly how I start so to to be honest uh if if I have a puppy I don't use uh that measure of the Box because if it's eight weeks old it's a bit too big and the dog can't fit in really so uh I have a little bit a smaller box I don't know the measures I think 20 by 20 by 20 but it really doesn't matter so just the dog can go inside and yeah I start always with just feeding the box the dog out of the box just throw food in it let the dog go to the Box by himself and that's how I load up like you said the the Box and uh in my opinion it's just in the beginning it teaches the dog always to accept pressure and go through the pressure because the first pressure is the dog can't see anything in the box so he has to go in a dark room with his box and we can't see anything he just has to concentrate on the food that's coming and already that's already inside the Box and the second pressure is when he goes in the Box um his his uh his body is always under pressure from from the box so that's also a little bit pressure and yeah I just do that for a few weeks so the dogs really hyped up for the Box and yeah later um I teach the dog a little bit to accept the pressure inside the box and I really make dopamine on the box so the dog's really hyped up to go to the box and that's exactly what we saw in the video and I can just show it uh here one more time we can just watch it with my older dog that's already a little bit experienced in that he does it a long time or with I think we start with my puppy so where is it there yeah these are really nice examples as you can see the dog's pulling to the box and just block has to go through the pressure to go inside the box and as soon as the dog is inside the Box um the pressure is released and then I add food so this is how I start off with puppies so they learn to accept a little bit pressure and they must fight through the pressure to go inside the Box and later I make the dogs crazy for the Box that looks like this the dog has to fight to get inside the box and as soon as the lock is inside the box and release the pressure and then I add food so I think we have a little bit longer version of the video I think your black and white versions longer the demo one it's down there too oh sorry yeah just have a look sorry [Music] the dogs pulling the Box [Music] [Applause] a little bit more experience you can see I add a little bit leash pressure pull the dog out the dog has to stay in has to stay in Fight to stay in and then I add food again so this kind of um makes the dog accept the pressure from your leash and because I don't use

e-colors because that's not allowed in Germany I always stay in my legal framework I teach him with a flat collar to accept the pressure pull a little bit out of the box and he fights to stay inside the box and that's how I teach him a little bit pressure so that's basically what I do with the box and also later I saw a comment uh that was made here just show it short some dogs need the Box the dopamine box for a a place to relax and that's what I do later I mean it's a little bit let's say dump to first get lots of dopamine for the box and then later calm them down but later I use it uh in the same way as a pedal stool as a place where the dog has to rest so you gotta put his uh head inside the box and just wait till the next command comes and that builds a little bit stability and that's also um the thing between motivation and concentration it's always you gotta find the fine balance between motivation and concentration because when you have too much motivation you don't have concentration if you have too much concentration in the dark looks flat so it's not motivated enough yeah that was a little bit how I use the box but there are many other ways sorry seeing your dogs seeing your dogs pull I think that builds my dopamine that's pretty intense yeah but uh yeah you can use the Box in a lot of different ways you can build confidence you can build dopamine you can make like you said the dog environmentally blind do you if you use it in a in a when you have a dog that's afraid of cars you just put the box right next uh to a street where a lot of cars drive by and just feed them inside the box and the dog doesn't see the cars he just hears them and he has to accept that to stay in the Box to get food so that's what you can do like I do I teach leash pressure there are a lot of people that also use the box as a healing position I personally have never done that but maybe I will try that and also like maybe you remember in Gold school we used the food box for tracking so the tracking food box doesn't have a bottom maybe you want to explain that how we did that in Gold school yeah so um I actually I have one I can grab it real quick just to show it um one thing I want to mention real quick and then I'll show the video and then while that video is playing I'll grab the box um you mentioned that you don't use a box this size for your puppies and and then you mentioned tracking so it's kind of funny it's going to time together but um you don't have to have a the box is good for teaching environmental blindness but to teach your dog to kind of pull toward you know to fight through the pressure to get the reward

um you can use something where even you know a bowl or a box even big enough for the dog to for the puppy you know to see what's in there what's what he's actually pulling towards so yeah Lars lens actually does this in and I'll I'll show this video and then I'll go grab it God wait I just restarted dude a small box and can you teach that and accept a little bit the leash from behind so oh it doesn't always have to be a box with maybe by 30 by 30. people always use the tools different and everything I think has has a reason if you know what you do that's how he uses the Box let's say yeah and we just wait for Mike to come back I just dropped it on my ankle so here's one um here's one it's just a box with kind of an elongated uh hole in the bottom about the size of it so shaped like a footprint for tracking and then but it doesn't have to be like that you know it could just be like this just a box without a bottom so there we go those are dusty it means I haven't been using them like I need to but and so basically what you do with that you you just put it on the ground and what you do yeah so once the dog knows um once the dog knows to keep his head uh in the box a box that has a bottom or between your turn your arm or wherever you're trying to you know um then you take this one without a bottom on it and I I would disturb the ground a little bit just like you would if you were tracking you know just kind of Stomp the grass area a little bit and then put this over the Disturbed ground and then just repeat the process you know um the same thing the dog already knows to do so the difference is now when his head's going into the box or her head's going into the box uh they smell the Broken Ground you know the broken grass vegetation the turn to dirt whatever it is and so did you start to make that Association in the mind uh you know of the Broken Ground means food's coming and then especially when you're adding the least pressure too because now you're really implementing tracking into it you know you have the least pressure the long line the dog's pulling on it um pressure and then drop the food pressure drop the food so um anyhow yeah I mean it's just a way of teaching the dog tracking I mean a thousand ways to teach your dog tracking and yeah I mean if it works it works yeah and the dog already knows that you know his job is to keep the head in the box so if he Associates the smell and the the you know the scent of the Broken Ground with staying on On Target now that translates into when your dog's on the track they know not to take their head off the track not out of the box because there's not a box but don't take

your head off the track and then leash pressure means food's coming so less pressure to the next portion of food you know the next step yeah yeah so I'm a lot better explaining this and I am at doing it that's got to change huh I think so so we have one more video that we want to show you guys and uh yeah this is um do you want to explain the video what's happening uh yeah sure I think uh just watch it and then we will talk about it right okay yeah so you'll in this video you'll see this is Antonio's video um shout out to her for some excellent box work here what you'll see is she's kind of past all the preliminary stages and now her dog knows the job which is to keep his head in the Box in anticipation of a reward coming um and no matter what's happening and you'll see she adds in a tremendous amount of environmental pressure and the dog is just Rock Solid so [Applause] foreign [Music] concentrate Inside the Box these environmentally blind to the noises Jets physical pressure dog stays in holds a little bit on the neck and then she adds food so the dog must go through the pressure [Music] and I'm not sure if that's the dog I was afraid of mistakes yeah she's putting it on yeah a lot of pressure [Music] so another way to translate um last week we talked about uh when we had our oil I guess it wasn't last week our last episode we uh Eric mentioned his dog was on the track and I think you had the video did you put the link to the video in the uh okay so that the cow would be pressure you know a distraction and rather than rather than the distraction or pressure making the dog you know taking drawing attention drawing the dog's attention to to itself or to the cow or to the noise from the actual job or keeping a set in the box or the track it actually signals through classical conditioning it signals that a reward's coming so pressure and noise and distractions is actually a cue to stay on track rather than to pull the dog you know out of behavior so it's pretty ingenious it's napopo all right so we have uh some questions from the group and I'm just gonna summarize what I think Jennifer uh meant and what she basically said is that if you give pressure and if you touch the dog the same time you add food that could lead maybe to Resource guarding on food and that's also something Bart explained in Gold school and in silver school yes that can happen so you got to make sure if that happens um you gotta put the dog away and you and as you maybe know we we always train

with existential food so if the dog shows any sign of resource guarding when you do the box work and you just gotta put the dog away you just gotta make sure that the dog knows okay if a any sign of aggression with my Handler or anything anybody else touches me I'm gonna just get put away and that's uh that's it for today's training and no more food so this is something that can happen yes that's correct uh uh you want to say anything about that maybe you have personal experience with that no hang on sorry ah you're good now we have another question from tune that's uh a friend of mine I know personally and he's a dark psychologist so he always asks very very tricky questions and to be honestly some parts of that I just I I really don't know because I'm not into that so deep into dark it's like psychology like you or maybe but but maybe that's a possibility if we uh if you put you on the show and you can talk a little bit about dockets like dark psychology so but what I can tell you is um the question is does high focus on generating dopamine in the body brain make the dog a junkie or a workaholic so in my opinion yes we make our dogs dopamine junkies but we do that on purpose because we want hyped up dogs we want happy dogs that always perform with heart and soul and if you have a lot of dopamine um the dogs are highly motivated so that's just my opinion what do you think Mike absolutely thanks it's good um yeah just we go over a little bit over the questions I saw in the comments yeah I'm seeing quite a bit so one comment here is um looking I'm just gonna put this up on the yeah I was going to show the same man gotcha looking at the dog's tail he is not happy at all in the video of Antonia dopamine and anxious dogs can strengthen the anxiety um I would say that just because a dog's tail often when a dog's tail is down it um it can be a sign of anxiety but that's not it can also mean a dog's focused super focused so it doesn't always mean um you know that a dog is anxious it could mean that the dog's anticipation and you know in anticipating a reward or a release and so I think that's the case here I don't think that it's strengthening the anxiety here the dog's not really anxious he knows the job so what do you think yeah I think so too and uh I have my puppy right now my female she's barely wagging with her tail so not because she's on she's a poor dog and she's always in a bad mood I think some dogs just don't are like that dopamine waggling tail dogs and also if the dog's very focused you can also see that oftentimes while the dogs are tracking and Eric explained that also that if if a dog is really concentrating really

focused on the track uh the tail is not constantly wagging the tail is it's not um under the belly but it's just a little bit down so that's not always a sign for anxiety or fear or whatever you want to call it so that's my opinion sure I have another question dog shows passion going into the box you know he was happy about going into the box and then came the focus so the dog it wasn't out of anxiety go ahead so I have another question that's a good question actually uh can you guys talk about when you actually start to let the dog out of the box and how you will release them out of it so in fact that we don't want our dogs to put their heads out of the box by themselves that's a good question so what I do when I want to end the session I just click them out of the box like you did in your video so the talk is not used to putting his head out of the box when they enter session by themselves because then you can punish that later if you let the dog do that on his own but therefore you need a charge clicker or you can just click release with food or you just say a command force or ball or whatever you want to do you click and throw a ball just make sure that you end the session and not the dog by himself yeah I think that's pretty but that's pretty clear so in the entire you know a lot of people use click release in in the popo you know it's we primarily use click release so that doesn't that's in any Behavior so even in the box and you want whatever you're teaching in the Box you want that to be able to translate to your other uh your other the dog's other skills so let's just go back to tracking again if if pressure means uh keep your head in the box and pressure means Keep Your Head on the track then my dog's tracking I don't want him coming off on his own but um you know I can click and release the dog off the track so the dog never knows when the click's coming the dog doesn't know if he needs to stay in Behavior how long he needs to stay in Behavior but he he always stays fired up he stays motivated because he knows that if he stays on track whether it's on the track or in the Box The Click could come at any time the reward in the Box could come in at any time or the click release to the reward can come at any time yeah so so like we always say that a lot of different ways to teach a lot of ways to teach pressure a lot of ways to charge your e-collar if you're in a country where it's allowed and there are a lot of ways to um yeah teach tracking whatever you want to call it healing just depends on how you like to train and and if you understand what you do that's always the most important thing that you know what you do because

otherwise you can create problems like that uh comment that mentioned uh um resource guarding with food aggression uh yeah I mean if you if you always train with existential food and then food becomes existential for the dog there's a high possibility that there will be food aggression later so always make sure you know what you do and if you don't know exactly what you do just reach out to a trainer that knows um about what you want to train and go for it yeah and I think a key to that to preventing um resource guarding is your timing as well so you don't want to if your dog is the has an issue with resource guarding then I wouldn't while he's eating in the Box I wouldn't you know touch him um but maybe your timing has to be right in the Box regardless you know if you're if you're uh adding pressures so let's just say pressure is touching the dog on the back you touch the dog drop the food touch the dog drop the food touch the dog drop the food if you do that too quick then it's not going to be easy for the dog to decipher it what's coming first is dropping the food coming before the pressure or is the pressure coming before dropping the food what you don't want is the food uh predicting the pressure because you don't want a reward to mean that something negative is coming um you want the pressure to predict the food so you want the dog to understand that the pressure means that something good is coming so if you have a dog that's resource guarding what you don't want to do is the dog's got his head in the box and he's eating and while he's in the process of eating you're touching him so because you know now it's interfering you want if the dog knows that your touch or your pressure or your voice predicts a reward then your dog's not going to get ticked about the pressure so takes time to develop but you just have to be work on your timing and be careful with your timing be thoughtful don't just go into your training sessions sloppy you know that can happen with people who just start training or and it can also happen with season trainers who are too comfortable with the process and so you just you know you start going through the motions and before you realize it you know you've you've got just the whole sequence of classical conditioning it's just all thrown out of whack and text you know text putting thought into it um yeah one more question and uh yeah I think that we got a I'm gonna end that for today and maybe we we do a second uh second episode yeah yeah it is and if you have any box feeding questions comments little videos or whatever drop them in the comments um you know we can comment them uh it's it's

uh On Cue discussions in modern dog training so this is meant to be a discussion amongst all of us so um chime in the more the Mary we all learn from each other right so one more question all right yeah I think I'll just go with that I'm just going to explain that a little bit in my opinion and uh yeah then we add that with that what is the end goal with the box when do you know that you read something substantial I'm not 100 sure what substantial means but uh oh okay so what's the end goal with the Box um I don't think there's a real end goal where you can say now reach something I can end there that's it's it always depends what you want to train with with the Box let's say you have a dog a fearful dog that is afraid of cars then the end goal would be that you train inside the box that your dog's environmentally blind to cars and the ankle would be that you go can walk on the street and the dogs ignoring the cars or it's not uh it's not scared or aggressive on cars anymore that would be the end goal for that but you always got to decide that what you want to train and then what's the end goal so yeah right for example you take somebody who's an nlr times about up we have about 60 seconds left but you take um somebody who has PTSD from like gunshots let's say war and I'm not diminishing this severity of this but I'm just saying for the or for the sake of argument um a gunshot makes them trip out so now you put them in a room right so let's just say the room is the Box um on a really really low level the sound of a gunshot is probably not going to trigger them but what you could do is counter condition it right they're in the room all by themselves um on a very very small level tape recorder whatever the sound of a very low low gunshot and then boom a reward something that's very significant 100 bucks I don't know I'm just throwing that out there right raise it up a little bit boom 100 bucks the more positive associations that are made with that noise um the dog the person not dog but the person would not only um rather than just being in even environmentally blind to the noise he would actually uh be happy about it so again it just just what he said you know if a dog dog is triggered by a car going by you know box feed with the sound of cars going by and rather than the dog being nervous to the car the dog's going to associate the sound of the car means food's coming so it just all depends on what your the Box can be applied to any Behavior the principles of the box it's it simply teaches a dog that pressure predicts a reward and it builds dopamine in the par and the entire process through uh you know the anticipation of

reward coming so yeah I think that's it so if you have any questions just uh leave it leave it in the comments show us your videos and yeah we can have discussions in the group um thanks see you next time have a good evening and uh we'll see you next time bye