- Location
- Andorra and Spain
I took Shadow into town this morning. I'm taking him "on the road" as far as our settling work is concerned, and this was our first outing to a car park to practice. Most shops are closed here on Sundays, so it was empty - although just as we rocked up, a father and his two young daughters also arrived, one on a bike. Typical.
Anyhow, I digress.
After our settling session, I thought I'd take Shadow for a walk around the back streets. It was pretty quiet, but this is completely novel for him; I can count the number of times he's been in this sort of situation on my fingers - more than likely without even starting my toes. What for most of you would be an everyday occurrence is something way, way out of his comfort zone. Knowing he'd find LLW difficult, I set off, trusty clicker in hand, marking him at a very high rate for walking nicely. But I slowly had a bit of a change of plan. He didn't need "training". I know we often say "the dog doesn't understand when they go to a different place", but that wasn't what was happening here. He understood perfectly what I was after. The issue wasn't with understanding, it was with arousal. This is something I talk about all the time, I know, but you know when sometimes you forget everything you know, and go back to what you used to do? Yeah, that was me this morning. I think we so often jump to "training" mode when that's not what's needed in a particular scenario. I would say that's extremely likely in the case of LAT and similar drills. We fall into a pattern of operant conditioning when the dog doesn't need that. What they need is to regain their focus, and that's about arousal rather than training. Yes, we need to proof the behaviours against different levels of distraction, but what we're really talking about is different levels of arousal. So it seems to me that the most important thing is actually teaching the dog to be calm in all those environments. The key isn't about retraining the behaviours in all the different situations, it's about teaching the dog to be able to think in those environments.
That has to be a shorter process than taking every single behaviour into every single situation and trying to teach it again. If you had, say, ten different behaviours and ten environments, it would mean doing it the traditional way, you'd have to retrain each behaviour a hundred times. Whereas if we can simply teach our dogs to be able to think in those environments, we're just dealing with the ten. And the more we teach the dog to think in arousal, and to lower that arousal, the more that skill will transfer. Not to mention that we'll be dealing with less frustration on both ends of the lead.
I need another puppy.
Anyhow, I digress.
After our settling session, I thought I'd take Shadow for a walk around the back streets. It was pretty quiet, but this is completely novel for him; I can count the number of times he's been in this sort of situation on my fingers - more than likely without even starting my toes. What for most of you would be an everyday occurrence is something way, way out of his comfort zone. Knowing he'd find LLW difficult, I set off, trusty clicker in hand, marking him at a very high rate for walking nicely. But I slowly had a bit of a change of plan. He didn't need "training". I know we often say "the dog doesn't understand when they go to a different place", but that wasn't what was happening here. He understood perfectly what I was after. The issue wasn't with understanding, it was with arousal. This is something I talk about all the time, I know, but you know when sometimes you forget everything you know, and go back to what you used to do? Yeah, that was me this morning. I think we so often jump to "training" mode when that's not what's needed in a particular scenario. I would say that's extremely likely in the case of LAT and similar drills. We fall into a pattern of operant conditioning when the dog doesn't need that. What they need is to regain their focus, and that's about arousal rather than training. Yes, we need to proof the behaviours against different levels of distraction, but what we're really talking about is different levels of arousal. So it seems to me that the most important thing is actually teaching the dog to be calm in all those environments. The key isn't about retraining the behaviours in all the different situations, it's about teaching the dog to be able to think in those environments.
That has to be a shorter process than taking every single behaviour into every single situation and trying to teach it again. If you had, say, ten different behaviours and ten environments, it would mean doing it the traditional way, you'd have to retrain each behaviour a hundred times. Whereas if we can simply teach our dogs to be able to think in those environments, we're just dealing with the ten. And the more we teach the dog to think in arousal, and to lower that arousal, the more that skill will transfer. Not to mention that we'll be dealing with less frustration on both ends of the lead.
I need another puppy.
I find this familiar. We like you don't very often take our dogs into town which is always busy. Before I started Hattie's PAT work I decided to take her our busy local town on a Saturday morning. I armed myself with cheese but I hardly used it, she walked beautifully on a slack lead to heel, ignored people, children and lots of dogs and hussle and bussle. We walked for around an hour, I stood outside shops, sat on benches, we walked round the market where there is a Pet stall with lots of tasty treats, she didn't budge an inch. I was emensley proud of her. But I remember a certain someone on TLF stating this behaviour was the behaviour of dogs that aren't exposed to these environments - rubbish I thought to myself. I haven't tried it with Charlie but I am pretty confident he would behave in the same way apart from the lots of dogs! He behaves beautifully around the lake in town where there are lots of dogs but just too many ducks 
