Thursday, May 23, 2013

Still more on the importance of Reward Placement

Since I teach so much tracking I get a lot of questions about teaching articles. In fact I will be teaching an entire on line class on that topic later this year. However my actual answer about how I teach articles is pretty simple - I reward on the article. Initially the article has food on it but that is faded as quickly as necessary for a given dog (the ability to avoid fireants also plays a factor). The dog will usually hesitate for a second on the article (a clicker helps with this sometimes) and that's all I need. I race up to the article, stand in front of the dog to impede further progress and feed. From my hand but on top of the article. Not two inches above the article but right on top of it. I feed treats in sequence, pulling my hand away in between and watching for the dog to nose touch or sniff the article (they usually will, looking for crumbs) and I give the next piece of food. I do not cue the dog. I don't even wait to see if it will happen (at least not for quite a while). If I do wait and see if it will happen once and it doesn't then I go back to the above process for a while - I have not built the value of the articles high enough.

The point of the post is not really to teach articles but to remind all of us to take into consideration reward placement. If I only pay the dog in the place where I want him to be, and if he really wants the reward, why would he go anywhere else. I am creating an expectation that he will be rewarded for the articles or position.

Below is a video clip of an 8 month old malinois pup I am working with. He has never been cued or prompted to down on the articles, I just rewarded him in the manner I described above.




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