Flashback Friday: My First Dog Business

This week’s blog is not really going to be about training. And after a long streak of serious blog posts, it’s time to liven things up. Today's is a bit silly.

At about 11 pm the other night my phone went off and it was my mom. Here is what she sent me?

Aren't I adorable?

The picture is a little blurry but the business card says “Good Dog Dog Walking: Fun

Enjoyable Dog Exercise for your Furry Friend.” I was in 6th grade at the time I think. I totally forgot until this jogged my memory.

One of the neighbor ladies helped me do this. Her dog’s name was Crash and I got the job when I started playing with her dog in the grassy field that the picture was taken.

Not only was this my first dog related business, it was also the first and only time I’ve been fired from a job.

Another woman in the apartment complex needed her poodle walked at night while she was away. For three weeks I walked her poodle three times a week, until one day she left a note on her door addressed to me. It said something along the lines of “I am not longer in need of your services.” The note was most likely less cold than I remember, but it was tragic for me nonetheless. I stopped the business at that point.

I guess this means that my dog training experience goes further back than 11 years. Though it doesn’t count for much.

It looks like I was destined to dog training, regardless of what else I tried to be. It’s funny how these things tend to just work themselves out.

Time Under Pressure: Can Dog Training Become the Next Modernist Movement?

During one of my appointments I was talking to my client about timing how long her dog was pulling on the leash. We would then compare the amount of time the dog was pulling to the amount of time our appointment took.

To teach loose leash properly, I think you need to treat when the dog makes the choice to make the leash loose i.e. stepping into a non-tense position. The dog should also be treated for not pulling i.e. every time the leash is loose. There is a fine distinction between the two and it revolves mostly around how much credit you give your dog to solve problems.

Taking the idea of timing how long her dog had a tight leash, we can see what percentage of the time her dog was unsuccessful. Ideally, in the perfect world, that percent error would be 0%. I haven’t tried that technique yet, but I imagine we’d end up with about 25% of our time the dog would not be performing successfully.

The percent error is something I’m going to refer to as “Time Under Pressure”(TUP). The most basic definition I can come up with is that it is the time under which the dog is not successfully performing and the handler is not causing successful performance. Let’s expand this definition a little bit.

On the human side I’ve said “the handler is not causing successful performance.” On the most basic level, this means that the handler is failing to train the dog how it the handler wants to train it. This doesn’t apply strictly to loose leash because not every dog needs to be leash trained or leash trained the same way. Think sled dogs or scent dogs, their leash work is way different than a house pet or a guide dog.

For the human to eliminate the human side of time under pressure, the handler (human) needs to be educated on what techniques they want to use and how to use them. When TUP is caused by a human error, it almost counts as doubly unproductive because the human is not performing successfully and that will  absolutely cause the dog not to perform as well.

From there, emotions begin to run high and patience runs thin and nothing gets done. I’m going to begin to compile statistics during my training sessions, but I feel as though for human TUP, it most likely won’t be able to exceed 15% for brand new handlers and 5% for experienced handlers. I think those percentages would be the threshold under which a successful human experience would happen.

A dog’s perspective on TUP would be that of confusion and frustration. “What is being asked of me?” is probably what they would ask. If a dog is not being directed properly, then very little learning could possibly occur. We know this already from the previous explanation of human TUP. This begs the question, what happens if the dog is not learning and the human is instructing as effectively as possible?

The percent TUP for a dog will be much greater than it will for the human. It will be greater because the dog has much more to learn and much more to adapt to than the human does. Makes greater than one leap in logic to reach a conclusion is not really possible to teach in a dog. What we have to do is teach the pieces of a behavior before combining them. We can teach human’s this way, but it is also possible for humans to understand conceptual and abstract ideas to learn. We cannot put this style of learning on our dogs.

For TUP to count for a dog, the dog must be unsuccessful in training. This idea of unsuccessful is much more strict in the mind of a person than the mind of a dog. How many of you, when you tell your dog to sit, your dog will sit not at your side, but will sit facing you? You’ve asked your dog to sit and he has sat. That is successful. We cannot count that as TUP. Now imagine if we’re trying to teach your dog to sit by your side. Then every time your dog sides facing you, that would count as TUP.

Notice again, we are making fine distinctions between two ideas. Specificity is what makes the dog successful and able to learn. In order for the dog to know what to do, you have to know exactly what you’re asking the dog to do.

Conceptually, I don’t think this idea does much more than put words to what dog trainers already know. What I’m most interested in with TUP is discovering a more exact relationship between how our failures relate to our dog’s failures. Now this might sound like an overwhelming negative concept, but it only sounds negative if we consider our failures and shortcomings a bad thing.

In my previous blog about Willy the Pit Mix, I received a lot of feedback regarding breaking down dog training into percentages. A 1 second increase in a 4 second stay is a 25% increase in success. My clients who are just getting their first dogs or aren’t super comfortable around dogs really enjoyed that we could call a seemingly small improvement a huge success.

So that is the point of TUP. I am trying to figure out more ways to quantify how well a dog’s training is going. In modern dog training we try framing everything as positive and only put the dog in situations in which he will be successful. It only makes sense to further modernize dog training and use statistics, instead of just relying on intuition and feel.

To take a step back from dog training for a moment, it seems as though, since about 2010ish, there have been modernist movements in even more fields that used to be stuck in classical and archaic ways and techniques. Cooking for example, has seen chefs pushing a person’s relationship to their food. Writing has also seen changes in the way the human experience is described.

The question I’m forced to ask myself now is, how can dog training reflect on what it means to be a person? We seem to be on our way with everyone trying many different things, but what seems to be missing is reflection and introspection on how the dogs affect our humanity.

Feel free to leave me a comment here, on my Facebook, or shoot me an email at Michael@concentricdog.com. I’d love to know what you all think.

Client Spotlight: Willy the Pit Mix

Today I want to start an on-going series (again) high lighting some of the successful (and sometimes not-so-successful) techniques we’ve been using lately with clients. This is my chance to speak about individual learning styles of each dog I work with.

This week’s dog is Willy the pit mix. You can tell by his ears that he has some sort of terrier in him.

Here is Willy, right before I got him too excited and he jumped at me. You can see him contemplating.

Willy’s mom came to me with the goal of “having him listen to me.” A respectable goal considering that I too wouldn’t want anything living in my house that didn’t play by my rules. During the rest of our consultation I saw he likes to pull on leash, eat things off the ground, and mouths when playing or being handled. All of which sounds worse than it is. I only saw behaviors that have a million different ways to teach. But when you’ve been living with a dog who doesn’t listen, I can imagine feeling a bit more stressed than I was.

The first thing we discussed training was loose leash. We talked about how this would meet her goal of teaching Willy to listen. Then we talked about the goal I wanted to set for him. For Willy, I saw our “graduation” as walking a lap through a store, loose leash the whole way. In order to do this, he would have to listen, as his mom wants, but he also has to perform many different obedience commands and show a certain amount of desensitization to distractions. The goal, when we get to that point, will demonstrate that obedience training is crucial to solving most behavioral problems.

The problem I run into in the first two or so sessions with a new client is that they will feel discouraged with their dog’s performance. In a culture of immediate satisfaction, not receiving that when working with a pet makes my job a bit harder. While we worked on loose leash in our first session, every time Willy would sit, the sit would last for a few seconds before his mom had to hand place him back at her left side. The issue is that Willy is about 50 pounds of muscle and his mom is not tall enough to get the best leverage against the leash. I could see and feel the frustration. It seemed like he wasn’t learning and in those moments, it’s crucial to maintain positivity.

It’s hard convincing a client that a lot of progress has been made. For Shimmer, a dog I’ve been training for three years, progress looks a lot different than for Willy, who has not been living with his mom all of his life and has been training for less time than that. For Willy, progress is sitting for 5 seconds instead of 4 seconds. To me, that’s a 25% improvement! But 1 second is never as satisfying as it should be. This is what we worked on for almost the whole session. We hardly walked at all because he wasn’t there yet.

On 9/4/14, our third and most recent session, we had a breakthrough. Not only did we learn that a clicker works better than a mark word, we were able to turn that revelation into walking loose leash for over 50 feet! Granted, there were a lot of stop and goes, but that’s fine. Willy was able to walk 50 feet loose leash. As opposed to three weeks ago when we were just working on positioning him at his mom’s side.

To get him from the first week to the third week we had to change a lot of how we approach working with Willy. The first thing we tried to do is change our positivity towards him. After a while of frustration, this was, and still is not, easy to manage. I tell my client to use her “12-year-old voice. I know you know how to use it.” Tone of voice became important towards managing Willy’s willingness to work with us.

We also learned that Willy does not work the best with us in the first and last 20 minutes of the session. To compensate for that, we do the easy stuff first. We work on Willy just sitting in a “heel” type position. This requires very little problem solving skills from him and he still gets tons of treats. Then in our middle 20 minutes, we work on the hard stuff, which is actually moving while loose leash.

If we only get 20 real minutes of loose leash training, and we’ve only worked three times, that means we’ve got Willy to a very basic loose leash walk in 60 minutes. That’s 1 hour, out of the total 168 hours in a week, dedicated to making Willy easier to live with. A very minimal time commitment.

The big progress is what seemed to make everybody the happiest, but it’s also important to recognize the little victories when they happen. I’m sure Willy’s mom can attest to me making a big deal out of what seems to be nothing. But any victory, regardless of size, is a victory in my book.

I’ll leave with this final note. I heard it when I was 14, just starting dog training, from a woman who seemingly didn’t like me at the time. She said “in order to be a good dog trainer, you have to be willing to make an ass of yourself.” Not just Willy’s mom, but all of my clients, can speak to how silly I can get. This is the attitude I try to impart on everyone I work with and when they finally feel comfortable to look and feel foolish, their dog will grow, just like Willy.

If you have any questions or comments feel free to leave them below, on my Facebook, or email me at Michael@concentricdog.com

I wrote this blog with Willy’s mom’s consent. The last thing I would want to do is invade someone’s privacy or misrepresent them in some way.