Sunday, January 13, 2013

More on Being Reactive....

I have been working on this for a while, mostly letting my mind wander while driving long distances, I hope it make sense...

My family gave me satellite radio for Christmas. It was an awesome gift as I am going to be traveling (i.e. driving) for a very big part of 2013. Some unavoidable last minute changes in my work schedule forced me to drive home after Christmas from Vermont to Mississippi. During the long drive I had a chance to test it out and quickly found myself flipping between various talk radio stations. They seem to occupy my mind better than music (although the E Street Channel, Bruce Springsteen 24/7 is hard to beat). After spending several hours listening to people call in regarding various personal, financial or health problems my mind wandered to the similarities to dog training. What a surprise right? And it made me think how often people are reactive vs proactive in all aspects of our life.

People think because I have working dogs or because I am a dog trainer that my dogs should be perfect. However I am like everyone else – I have priorities in what I train and a finite amount of time to dedicate to training. I am much more concerned with functional skills that my dogs perform (detection, tracking, obedience) than things that could be defined
as “manners”. For example, I am not concerned with their behavior greeting people at the door (hardly anyone comes to my door). Or how they greet people (they never meet anyone but dog people). This is not to say they have particularly bad manners, just that I do not have a need to put the time into training those specific behaviors.  So if they were not good at one of the above examples it wouldn’t be fair for me to be complaining about it.  Nor would it be fair to correct them. But I also would not force their bad manners onto other people. For example  - Steel who has muscles on top of his muscles and love people can get over excited greeting, especially when he is let out of his car (a cue I shaped to tell him that something exciting is going to happen). If his excited greeting is going to be too much for someone then I just don't allow him to greet. Could I train a calmer behavior? Yes. Do I want to? No. There is no natural genetic basis for the dog to understand how to greet a human being politely (and we usually make matters worse in how we handle it). The dog is usually behaving normally – it is up to us to create the behavior we want.

When I am working with someone who needs help with a training issue it is helpful to talk the owner through their options for the current behavior:

1. Ignore it and let it continue
2. Prevent it from happening by managing the environment
3. fix the problem/develop a new behavior


If someone has gone so far as to seek help then Option #1 is usually not ideal. However I quite often see quite a few people whose only problem with a behavior is shame because someone else is judging them based on what is considered "proper behavior". I get this apologetic vibe from dog owners quite a bit because they assume that since my dogs are perfect (not) then I am judging their dogs accordingly (again, not). If you are happy and your dog is happy (and healthy and safe) then who cares what I or the rest of the world thinks? For example, I am training a young dog, likely destined for a working home. When I release him from his kennel he comes out and greets me by standing on his hind legs and throwing his paws around, as if to give me a hug of youthful joy and happiness.  I am sure lots of people would have all kinds of advice on how to teach him to “greet properly”. My response to his behavior is to give him a big hug, kiss him on the head and tell him how happy I am to see him too!! I want him to wait to be released from his kennel (developing self control) but am totally okay with the other behavior.

Typically however I am working with people who want to resolve the issue, so Option #1 is not ideal. They usually make some attempts at Option #3 but circumstances often make this unsuccessful. The owner lacks the knowledge or the timing to resolve the issue. Various family members offer conflicting opinions or solutions. Life gets in the way and the training lacks the consistency needed. Or people fail to remove the reinforcement for the behavior. Option #2 is quite often a useful solution and one that is usually overlooked. People don't realize how to do it. Or they feel like they are giving up or being lazy by not resolving the problem completely. The irony is that as a result they usually end up back at Option #1 – living with a behavior that they would like to get rid of. Option #2 can be a stand alone solution,depending on the behavior. It is also a necessity PRIOR to Option #3. The first thing we need to do is stop allowing the unwanted behavior to occur. Then we develop an alternative behavior.

Here is a simple example - I am working with a young dog teaching him basic competition obedience skills and a few tricks. He is very food driven and also very agile and tenacious. As a result, if I am holding a high value item like food or a toy he tends to bounce off of me trying to get it. In his head this makes sense. In my head, while I like his enthusiasm and I don’t have a problem with jumping - I find that it is hard to teach him something new while he is airborne.  The solution? First I taught him to back up on cue. I held a treat in my hand, ignored the bouncing and walked into him. He automatically took a step back and I quickly gave him the treat. I was careful to reward him in the position that I wanted him in – all four feet on the ground. Then I added a hand motion that was his cue for backing up and I used (and rewarded) that prior to moments when I knew he was thinking about launchng. In this example I was implementing option #2. It was hard to bounce on me if he was walking backward. It got his paws on the ground long enough for me to proceed to Step #3 which in this case was to train obedience behaviors.

The biggest problem that I see in dog training (and in the problems presented by most of the people calling talk radio hosts for help with their personal problems) is that we continuously REACT to behaviors that we are almost 100% certain are going to continue to occur. I was about 85% certain that this young dog was going to pounce on me to get what he wanted. So why would I let it continue to repeat itself? And worse would be if I got mad about it. Or hurt. Or embarrassed. This does not apply to just behavior modification either – I see it frequently in sports and even working venues as well. People continue to ask for behaviors that have
been proven to have a low likelihood of occurring (start line stay, recall from a decoy
etc). Then they react when the behavior fails (which was almost 100% predictable). It is the “hope for correct planet alignment” training strategy! A far more effective response would be to find better way to train it in a proactive way; rather than reactive.

And of course it applies to other aspects of our life because what part of dog training does not? With my satellite radio, so many times as I drove along listening to people’s problems on the radio, I was thinking “Seriously? What did you think was going to happen?” And I did not do this in a totally judgmental way (a little bit though, some people were pretty stupid). I can see plenty of places in my own life where I do the same thing. If you are pretty certain that a behavior is going to occur (based on previous history) then why do we just think it is magically going to go away? And why do we continue to react to it? When we are 99% certain something (if it is negative) is going to happen why do we continue to set ourselves up to be effected by it? In dog training (and in life?) being proactive is more effective and lot more fun, than being reactive.

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