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.