Our ability to train our dogs, to me, qualifies as a bona fide miracle. Here we are, two completely different species with different sensory apparatus, different motivations, and different biology, somehow finding a way to work out enough of a common “language” to allow us to collaborate. I find it no less astonishing than if we discovered that chimpanzees had trained ferrets to gather fruit for them. But dog training has been going on for centuries so we really don’t pay much attention to the wonder of it.
Whether it was an accident of synergy that brought us together to our mutual benefit or the efforts of either species to take advantage of the other for survival’s sake, humans and dogs have found a way to happily coexist. We’ve come a long way from the days where we used the innate abilities of dogs to assist us in hunting, protecting home and property, or finding things for us with their noses. If we had taught them just “Sit” and “Stay” and “Down”, that would be accomplishment enough but we have done so much more together.
How did we get here?
In order to teach a dog a behaviour, you need get them to actually do the behaviour; or at least something that looks like it. A trip to the local book store or a few minutes spent on Google will get you detailed, often step-by-step instructions on how to teach a dog any number of useful behaviours. The variety in methods and approaches is incredible. Everyone has their favorite “recipes” for training dogs and they seem to be effective enough to continue to be taught and used. There is more than one way to teach dogs and our dogs do seem to learn.
Dogs are motivated to cooperate with us, that much is certain. Once we bring them into our homes, their very survival depends on learning to cooperate with our wishes. We provide all the basics; food, water, exercise, affection, etc. But their ability to learn from us might not be just a behavioural response to their environment. We have been selectively breeding dogs for thousands of years. It’s a fair bet that we picked the ones that learned most quickly and most easily in hopes they would pass those valuable traits on to the next generations.
All of those various methods try to solve the basic puzzle of getting the dog to do the behaviour. The particular methods each of us choose will be based on several things; how effective we think it is, how easy it is to do, understanding it well enough to do, or even just that we prefer it for our own reasons. We’re going to use what with think will work and what we think we can do best with the least effort.
A process of elimination
The earliest form of dog training that I was taught can best be summed up as the “No, not that” method. I’m sure everyone is familiar with a version of this kind of training. I was taught to put a leash and collar on my dog and to give a gentle but firm tug if my dog wasn’t doing what I wanted. For example if we were stopped and I wanted my dog to sit, I would just give a tug on the leash and say “Sit!” If he didn’t sit, I would repeat the process, possibly with a bit more force in the tug until he eventually put his butt on the ground.
Eventually, my dog would work out which behaviour he could do that would NOT result in being tugged. It was very much a process of elimination. As my dog matured and we played the “No, not that” game more and more, he would become more skilled at guessing what I was looking for. And, after a fashion, we get where we needed to go in teaching him behaviours. It was effective, but not terribly efficient. But it was simple to understand and didn’t involve me acquiring a lot of skills in order to do it.
Eventually, I looked into alternative dog training approaches. I didn’t have to look far to discover that there are many different ways to teach a dog to “Sit!” All of them were advertised to be effective and no doubt they were (or else why would anyone write them down?). They were different methods developed by different people working with different dogs. Remarkably, each method is offered up as a way for ANY person to teach ANY dog. I soon found out that wasn’t EXACTLY true.
There are many approaches to solving that puzzle of getting the dog to DO the behaviour we want. “No, not that” is just one method. We can entice them with food or other rewards. We can intimidate them in various scenarios. We can manipulate the environment to make it so that it’s almost inevitable that they do what we want them to do. And in the end, it becomes a simple decision to punish incorrect responses or reward correct ones. Some even suggest that you have to do both along the way.
The allure of the lure
Another very popular method of training uses a food or toy to lure the dog to do the behaviour you want. A simple example would be holding a piece of food in front of my dog and then lifting it back over her head. She will try to keep her eyes (and nose) on it because it’s food and the action of craning her neck upward will cause her to drop into a sit position. I can then give her the food or the toy as a reward.
Lure training works almost by fooling the dog. They don’t know why they are doing the behaviour at first. We’re just using their natural behavioural responses to get them to do something like what we want them to do. The process of rewarding them for the behaviour and gradually making the lure less obvious helps them understand that it is the behaviour they are doing, and not just following the lure that is getting the reward.
It can be a low stress, mostly positive way to train. Many very skilled lure trainers have taken their dogs to the top levels of competition using this method. There are many advanced lure & reward techniques and whole books have been written on how to train dogs this way.
One of the features of Mark & Reward training is that there is neither a threat nor a reward present while we are getting the initial behaviour. No leash attached to a collar that could be used to yank, no obvious food or toy to follow. There are two basic ways that I can teach behaviour with a marker – simply capture the behaviour you want as your dog does it naturally during their normal daily behaviour or find a way to prompt the dog to do the behaviour you want by introducing something into the environment (NOTE: Technically, a LURE can be considered a form of prompt).
The downside of the “Capture” method is that it can be time consuming. I have to wait for my dog to sit or down or whatever behaviour I was looking for before I could mark and reward it. The “Prompt” method is not without it’s problems but it has the distinct advantage of being much more controlled. I can choose when to prompt and be ready to mark and reward. The challenge is to choose my prompts carefully.
The challenge of “Prompting” is that my dog might start to associate the prompt as a part of what I’m looking for. This can be a good thing if I want my prompt to eventually become a visual cue. For example, when I teach my dogs to sit, I lift my hand up in front of me to draw they eyes upward. This generally prompts a sit behaviour that I mark and reward. As I fade out the hand motion to become smaller and smaller, my dog learns that it is the sit that gets the reward and the hand signal becomes a cue (NOTE: technically a cue is a prompt and vice versa).
It’s a very exciting time in animal training. Science is opening up all kinds of new windows on our dog’s behaviour and motivation. Much of that new knowledge is being used to make our training more effective and easier to do. It uses our dog’s natural behavioural tendencies in ways that help us to help them learn faster. This article just scratches the surface of where we have been.
In the second part of this series, I’m going to talk about some of the newer techniques being explored. Lessons we are learning from behaviour and psychology labs as well as from studies of canine behaviour and perception are giving us new approaches and new ideas to use in training dogs. Stay tuned, there is more exciting stuff coming!
Until next time, have fun with your dogs!
The NEW Canine Nation ebook is now available –
“Relationships: Life with Dogs”
Photo credits –