Thursday, January 5, 2012

The advantages of letting the dog teach himself

My being involved in a wide variety of dog training venues - obedience agility police dog training SAR dog training tracking etc etc gives me the opportunity to watch a wide variety of trainers demonstrate and explain techniques. Sometimes I learn something new however most of the time I just learn ways to tweak what I am already doing to make it more effective. A lot of the time however I see stuff that makes me roll my eyes. Most of the time it is because people seem to think that dogs are stupid they are grossly underestimate how little the dog needs their help while learning. This is true for people who utilize negative training methods but, and this is always a surprise to me, it seems to be even more common with positive training methods.  In order for the dog to learn the task needs to be broken down into progressive steps for the dog to learn. However we also have to have patience and shut up and give the dog a chance to figure things out on their own.

One reason for this is that things that the dog self teaches appear to be more "hard wired". I can give a cue and hand guide the dog through an exercise many many times and they will learn. However if I manipulate the environment in some manner so that the dog offers the behavior and I reward it, my training time is much much less. The light bulb just seems to go on faster. The dog also learns to perform independently of me right from the beginning without some body language cue or encouragement or prompting also being necessary in addition to the command. The dog ignores me and just offers the behavior because I have never been a source of help. Or at least not that he would notice - one of my most repeated mantras is "if you are going to help the dog don't get caught helping". In most of my training I don't want the dog to know I have the answer to the problem. If I have made the exercise too hard then I need to make it simpler in a way he does not notice. I do NOT step in a show him or help him, especially while he is still working and trying to solve the puzzle.

This brings up my most important reason for letting the dog self teach:

Because it is more fun for the dog!!

Dogs love puzzles. Not only are they capable of solving complex problems on their own, many of them like to and are pleased with themselves when they do. Of course, just as with people, this varies between individuals but a lot of dogs are never given the chance. With our egos, we think that all the information needs to come from us and don't realize how much problem solving and self teaching the dogs can do in the right environment and with the right motivation.

I took these clips of Steel just prior to moving. I regret that I didn't make more of an effort to get better quality and more detailed video of him doing this - rather than sitting there giggling at him. There was no training involved in this, just me at first leaving his beloved planet earth ball on top of his kennel. Then of course I started putting it there just to watch the show.  The interesting part was not the accomplishment, it was watching him experiment with behaviors and then watch what happened. He quickly learned to push it to the right rather than to the left! Then later on he determined just how far to the right it had to go before he could reach it from the outside.

During the learning process....



"I got this all figured out...."






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