Wednesday, April 3, 2013

More of Drive States

Once again blogging has fallen by the wayside to way too much actual teaching. We just spent the last two months teaching Detection Trainer's Schools to two groups of DC area police K9 trainers. What an awesome experience, the dogs did great and the students worked hard and were a lot of fun. Not much more we could have asked for except maybe some warmer weather. Then I made a brief stop in Roanoke Virginia to teach some tracking and am now back in Mississippi for a brief stay before hitting the road yet again.

In spite of the lack of blogging I have been very busy teaching and thinking about training. Once again I am juggling teaching, training and talking about a variety of dog training venues.  As I commented in my last blog post however, the common theme seems to be maintaining the dog's drive state. This topic is hard to teach because it is more of an art than a science and requires the trainer to develop the skill of being able to read the dog.

If we think of drive in terms of percentages we want the dog at about 90-95% drive state. Any higher than that and the dog is too crazy to think through their drive. As it drops lower than that level then the dog becomes distracted and starts to notice the environment and other distractions. As people have heard me repeat over and over again - you don't have a distraction problem, you have a drive problem. One of the arts of dog training is learning how to tweak the dog's drive in order to keep him at the correct level. For the high drive, over the top dog we need to let him go close to that too high drive place and then let him diminish to just the point where he can think through his drive. We keep the task challenging but something he can handle and then be patient while he works through that level of drive to get what he wants. We neither correct him through it nor help him (i.e. in the form of solving the puzzle for him). Too often people try to physically bring this type of dog down, through training tools and techniques. Whether these tools and techniques are positive or negative, they often just attempt to suppress the dogs natural drive and the opposite occurs. It is like pushing on a spring - the harder you push the stronger the resistant pressure.

On the other hand, an even bigger challenge is getting handlers to see when drive state is too low. In this case we want to step in and not correct or direct the dog (which will have the opposite effect) but we need to do something to push up the drive. We can't insert drive into a dog that doesnt have it. However we can manipulate him so that he develops a habit of bringing the most of whatever drive he  does have to the work. Like with the over the top driven dog, we manipulate his environment and handling to develop a habit in him of working at a certain state of drive. Obviously there are some inherent problems with working from the low end and trying to push it up. This is why when the work is critical my preference is to start with a too high dog - it is much much easier to dial that dog down just a bit. Usually all that is necessary is to be very clear to the dog what he must do to satisfy his drive.

I think this concept is a difficult thing for handlers of all dog types (high drive or low drive) to understand. I once heard a quote that "dogs are efficiency experts". They are geniuses at taking the shortest path to what they want. Not because they a clever or manipulative but because they don't have the complication of all the thoughts in their head of doing something in any other way. Yet another life lesson that we can probably take from them.....