What does learning how to learn look like? Let’s consider this situation. You are opening the bag of treats and your dog immediately sits. Your dog is offering a sit in exchange for a treat. He has learned what gets him the treat. The next time you go to give your dog a treat, just hold it and wait to see what he does. What I most often see is the dog will scoot and sit closer to you. He’ll whine or growl. Maybe he’ll jump or offer a paw to shake. This is what it looks like for your dog to learn how to learn.
Other than watching your dog do a little dance of frustration to get a treat, teaching your dog like this is useful for adding new behaviors, like tricks. What we’re doing is waiting for the dog to offer a behavior and then rewarding it. Waiting for the behavior requires patience and attention to detail. It’s not just patience from the human, it’s patience from your dog as well. which is not only making your dog smarter, we’re giving him better manners too.
I mentioned using this to teach tricks. Let’s say you want to teach your dog how to sit in a chair. We get to use your dog’s frustration to our advantage. Hold a treat above a chair. What is the first thing your dog does? I do a lot of jumping type things with Shimmer, so her first instinct would be to jump up on the chair with her front two legs. That jumping behavior is in her repertoire of behaviors to get treats, which means she has learned to offer those behaviors first. She has learned the best way to process the information given to her. Is there a treat above my head? Then I must jump to get it.
Let’s examine this quick video of getting Shimmer to jump up on a chair. It went about exactly as I suspected it would. What you’ll notice are three distinct phases in the process. 1) Figuring out what is being asked of her 2) Frustration and offering behaviors to unlock the next treat and 3) Figuring out what I’ve asked of her.
What is slightly unfair about this example is that I’ve been working with Shimmer since I got her three years ago. What about if you dog is brand new to this sort of training? Then I don’t think it would be reasonable to teach him to sit in a chair right off the bat.
Here are some easy, non-standard things to teach your dog to learn how to learn. I won’t go over the exact procedure for each of them, so I will try to provide a link with more information. There’s no sense in covering a topic that someone else has covered so thoroughly already.
2) Shake. This can be transitioned into Wave (Just a Shake without you grabbing the dog’s hand)
3) Crawl: This is great for getting your dog to learn hind leg awareness. There are also many different factors, such as keep their body low to the ground, how fast they should crawl, distance, etc.
What these tricks have in common is that you are not forcing your dog to do anything. In the books, they’d call this sort of training shaping/capturing. What it does is forces the dog to think independently and create strategies for solving problems. It gets your dog to recognize patterns and apply previously acquired knowledge.
My favorite thing about this style of training is that it instills more confidence in your dog, both your confidence in him and his confidence in himself. I need and use this a lot because Shimmer is an anxious, not-so-self-confident dog. She’s always at her best whenever she’s learning new things.
My final note about this style of training is that when you mentally stimulate your dog, he’ll be less likely to destroy your house/property. I own so few things of value as it is (computer and guitar really) that I want to protect those things as much as possible.
Feel like I got it all wrong? Don’t know how to apply this directly to your dog? Leave me a comment here, on Facebook, or shoot me an email at Michael@concentricdog.com
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