Interesting to watch. Do you think Squidge shuffles/slides because she knows the platform is behind her and is waiting to hit it?
I'm not totally sure why Squidge shuffles. I know Willow is more particular partly because of her nature - she is very careful about where she puts her feet, because she is cautious. So, when putting her front feet on a new object, she will "try it out", feeling the balance of it, to see if it moves, and adjust accordingly. She's very, very thoughtful about it. Not worried, just making sure she keeps her balance. Whereas Squidge is a tank, who will throw herself onto anything and deal with the consequences!
I think I can learn from the number of repetitions you do and the speed of treat delivery. I think I try to move on too quickly to getting things on cue.
This has been something I've seen more and more with the trainers I want to emulate. They set up their scenarios so the behaviours are really likely, and have a very high ROR. Since doing this, and sometimes clicking only for a slight muscle movement that is the precursor to an "actual" movement, the understanding seems to come so much more quickly. And the joy that they express is far greater. Chrissy Shranz says "Train for emotional state, not just behaviour", and it works SO well. So I reinforce joyful effort, even if it's not entirely what I'm after. If the dog tries, they get reinforced. If they keep trying and getting "not quite", then I adjust my training plan so they
can get it, with that same joy.
It is
so tempting to try to put things on cue. Now I'm trying to stop myself doing this until I have the finished product of the behaviour I'm after. I want the cue to be unambiguous, and the dog to know exactly what it means, not just some approximation of that.
Fascinating. Though I thought with shaping 'one' would click each movement that led closer to the final point. I see you click, how can I put it, at various times which are not towards the final point. Can you explain as interested, I might be doing it all wrong!
So I am keeping a very high rate of reinforcement, and we're working towards that final point, but it doesn't always get progressively harder. I am trying to listen to the dog and adjust accordingly. When the dog tells me "ooh, that one was hard!", I make it a bit easier. Or sometimes I'm focussing in on a particular movement that I want - for example, "Please think about that right foot", so I click the second that moves.
Think of it a bit like training a sit-stay. If all you do is make the duration you leave the dog longer and longer each time, it can be far harder to achieve than if you "ping pong" your times, so set it up for 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 10 seconds, 1minute, 30 seconds etc. The general "flow" is towards longer and longer, but each rep can be shorter. Moreso, if your dog starts to fidget towards the end of a 1 minute stay, then that's information that they're finding it hard, so chucking in some really short easy reps helps to build the confidence and reinforce the behaviour.
Also, sometimes I screw up and I notice that the dog is doing something I'm not quite after. In those situations, I take it back to the beginning and build up again, with a clean behaviour.
Finally, when I change something to make it harder, I also change my criteria. So, when I move backwards, I will likely throw in a couple of reps where I'm reinforcing a single movement of the foot to set the dog up again in the changed scenario. And when I change where I reinforce, (at head height rather than on the floor), I've made it a bit harder, too, so if the dog shows me it's harder, I set them back up and we work through it again.
Looking at that last video of Shadow, at 0:36, I changed my reinforcement from being on the floor to being at head height. Immediately, his next rep was a tiny bit hesitant; we lost that fluidity of "end of reinforcement leading straight into the start of the next behaviour". I let him try one more rep to see if it clicked, but on that one, he touched the platform with his foot and immediately came forwards for reinforcement, got a bit confused and tried a couple of things. So I lured him back to position with a reset cookie, on the floor to make the back up really likely to happen once he'd finished eating, and then I started clicking again for the earlier stages, to rebuild his confidence.
It's a long way from perfect training, but it's a step up from where I used to be
)