Proofing Behaviors: Performing All the Time No Matter What

The hardest thing to do is not getting a dog to perform a behavior, but getting the dog to do the behavior all the time no matter what. It's so easy to teach a dog to sit. No matter a person's experience with dogs, I've found that all but one dog I've trained knows how to sit before we start working. These inexperienced dog owners/handlers can make the dog sit some of the time, but the dog doesn't do it all the time no matter what. This illustrates that training is the easy part, anyone can do that. Proofing is what's hard.

Proofing a behavior is the process of getting a dog to do a behavior all the time no matter what. It is also one of the more important concepts in maintaining a dog's training. Proofing exists in two major categories: 1) desensitization and 2) obedience.

Proofing by way of desensitization means exposing your dog to new things and ensuring a positive and successful experience. Let's consider a dog who is generally dog aggressive. In my house and front yard, this dog will interact very nicely with other dogs. When at the park, this dog will tear into other dogs. What we can assume here is that this dog has the ability to play nice with other dogs. The question then becomes, how do we proof this good play with desensitization? The short of it is that we start from a distance away from other dogs in which he will not react and slowly move forward from there.

The only reason a dog performs a behavior we don't like is because at some point the dog was rewarded for that behavior. In a more traditional style training, we would essentially use aversion therapy and try to replace those positive associations with, in our case dog aggression, with negative associations, using collar corrections, shock collars, spray bottles, etc. That's one way to do it. I do not think it is the most effective, though it is the quickest to produce changes in behavior.

The slower, but more fun way is by treating your dog every time it is not trying to attack another dog and treating every time the dog is behaving how you like. When I say every time, I literally mean 1 treat per as fast as you can treat. What this does is 1) creates a positive association with being around other dogs and 2) teaches your dog what to do when faced with a situation in which the dog would normally be aggressive. Doing this slowly and making sure your dog never goes past the threshold of success should proof the behavior of playing nicely with other dogs.

One of my favorite things to do is obedience. What I love more than obedience, is going out to my favorite stores and doing obedience. My clients will attest that my college graduation level test for dogs is going to Bookmans (local dog friendly used book store) and doing all of our obedience. Sit, down, stay, loose leash, etc.

Now this graduation requires a lot of desensitization as well. The key difference here is that behaviors in desensitization are about what the dog already does, whereas obedience is about what behaviors we've taught the dog.

Honestly, I didn't need this whole length to describe proofing behaviors. It really is a simple concept. It's the precise execution of constantly changing criteria that is hard. When is it appropriate to push your dog? When should I pull back? What am I expecting? Criteria setting is going to be next week's blog. It's the next important concept in proofing because it is the finer detail of it all.

To end, I'll provide a brief list of important reasons why proofing is important. 1) A dog that listens in all situations will be less likely to get injured/injure others. It's safer. 2) A mentally stimulated dog is less likely to cause trouble. 3) It's more reason to get out a do fun things with your dog. 4) It's fun to include dogs in the family.

Let me know what you think! Comment here or shoot me an email at michael@concentricdog.com

Take Care of Yourself First: The Effects of Selflessness

Today’s blog is going to be another one of those blogs in which I take a step back from actual dog training topics. After last time’s light-hearted entry, today’s is going to be heavy. We’re going to be discussing depression, suicide, and mental health in dog communities. Whether they be volunteer, training, or veterinarian communities, we are all under very similar pressure and very similar emotional loads.

Even though this may seem heavy, it’s an important topic that needs an open discussion.

The topic of selflessness came to mind when I read this article and learned that Dr. Sophia Yin had killed herself. I won’t pretend to know what the circumstances were. The only thing I can do is speak towards how her suicide highlights statistics about the deaths of workers in the animal care community. It’s startling how rampant depression and symptoms of depression are: weight gain, anger, and constantly shifting moods to name a few. Working with dogs and other animals wears on our minds and will cause depression. It is honestly not a matter of if, but when depression will strike an animal care worker.

I see it on my Facebook and the Facebook's of friends. The anger and the sadness and the constant ups and downs of everyone. I can see it in my own Facebook activity too. When I’m feeling great I post a lot, when I’m down my posting frequency drops. I don’t necessarily express my anger online, but everyone has their own outlets.

Everything I’m describing is known as Compassion Fatigue. The dog care workers reading this know it well. And from the way I see it, it comes from two sources: implicit and explicit management of expectations.

I want to start with the explicit expectations we face in the pet care community. The explicit ones are given to us or put on us by outside forces. This is not the expectation we feel when we see an injured dog. The explicit is the pressure our groups and peers put on us. And surprisingly this is what seems easiest to manage.

I titled this blog the way I did because the idea of putting oneself first is often foreign in this field. Let’s cover dog trainers first, then we’ll move on to volunteers are other animal care workers. I emphasize to my new trainers and clients that you must take care of yourself before you can take care of anything or anyone else. I emphasize this because the way a person feels is so pervasive throughout everything else they do. Now this isn’t a new concept and I’m not pioneering new ground in psychology, but sometimes it’s good to make the obvious plain as day.

I see a person’s mood affect their training all the time. A client is feeling depressed about their week, so the dog gets away with pulling more often. Or even a client feels angry and all they want to do is yank their dog around. What would happen if the people in these examples decided not to dog train that day or reschedule the appointment and take care of their feelings?

My answer to that would be the person would end up with a dog more well trained than if they tried training angry.

Due to the pressure that I’ve put on my clients to train their dogs and the expectations I have for the client and their dog, my clients feel the need to go forward with a lesson, even when it’s not in anyone’s best interest (except my bank account, but let’s be honest, if money is what a dog trainer wanted, they wouldn’t be a dog trainer). When a session doesn’t go as planned due to these emotions, it makes me wonder why facing the anxiety of cancelling or rescheduling is worse than paying for a session that doesn’t work out well?

Let’s look at the rescue/volunteer world for a moment. The explicit pressure is from friends and other volunteers to constantly adopt, give resources, and advocate. If this community was filled with people who have infinite resources to give, then there wouldn’t be compassion fatigue caused by this. Instead we have people with a very finite amount of resources giving every last thing they have because, while the animals do need the help, they are receiving pressure from other volunteers to constantly do more.

I’m not saying that the expectation to constantly give more is a bad thing. I’m saying the way some people react to this is what can be bad. Becoming angry is such a common response to not being able to manage explicit expectations.

The implicit expectations come here. The voices in a person’s head would ask, “What would happen if I stopped giving all that I can? What would happen if I’m selfish with my resources?” The unfortunate I’ve got from asking this questions to worn out volunteers is always around the lines of “then animals will die.” What a burden these volunteers carry!

These implicit expectations are the ones inside a person’s head. They are made up more often than not because they are expectations of what people expect of them. Notice the degree of separation here. The volunteer is creating expectations based on what they they think is expected of them. If this sounds a bit convoluted, then good, because that’s exactly what compassion fatigue caused by implicit expectations is. It’s all about what the person thinks, not what is actually happening.

In reality, what would happen if I didn’t spend my last $20 on towels to donate as opposed to going out for a nice lunch? To the volunteer, in response to this I will often receive disgusted looks. The idea of spending money on themself instead of the animal is so off putting that it often induces anger.

This seems like the volunteer feeling like their own well-being is worth less than all of the animals at the shelter. The self-worth issues here will only get worse because improperly managing these implicit expectations means the volunteer will never feel satisfied with who they are and how they’re able to help. One victory, one dog saved, even in the face of thousands of what the volunteer perceives to be as failures won’t mean anything. Even though their efforts accomplished their ultimate goal, to save dogs, if they can’t do more than they are capable of, then they will never be happy.

Let’s consider the opposite scenario in which the volunteer goes out to a nice lunch with that $20 instead of buying towels. No amount of a dog trainer telling you that this will make you feel better would convince you that it is. You have to try it. That’s all I can say. Try spending $20 this week on yourself. Then next week spend $20 on the dogs, or something similarly applicable to your life. I promise, after spending some resources on yourself, you’ll feel recharged. You’ll feel like you actually matter.

My hope is that making one selfish instead of selfless decision will recharge the volunteer. It may take an hour away of time from the animals, but the next hour the volunteer will spend with the animals will be so much more productive than that previous hour filled with mismanaged expectations.

In writing this, I hope is that at least one person will decide to take care of themself. Maybe one person will realize that they are important, they are making a difference, and spending time on yourself doesn’t make you a selfish person. It makes that person someone who cares about themself.

Who knows what Dr. Yin was thinking. My thought was that she was facing a similar issue to the one this article is about. Someone with the amount of weight to carry like she did, it could be possible. I’m saying hope a lot because that’s all I can really do about this, but I hope after reading this, someone who needs help gets it. I hope this made talking about feelings and discussing mental health issues ok. I’ve had my fair share of mental health struggles and feeling alone is not helpful.

I’m not pretending like I have the answers and solutions to compassion fatigue and the mental health issues it causes. I’m hoping this starts a discussion, maybe not with me, but groups of volunteers.

If you have any questions or comments, I’d love to hear them here, on my Facebook, or by email at Michael@concentricdog.com.

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.

Pulling Is An Instinctual Behavior and A New Collar Won't Help

Martingales, choke chains, harnesses, and head collars. These are just some of the tools that I’ve seen people use to get their dogs to walk loose leash. I even read on a dog training forum yesterday that someone likes to wrap the leash around their dog. (Note: when I read these things, I won’t be posting the link to where I read. I don’t want to start a witch hunt for the person.) While some of these tools are arguably more inhumane than others (when used incorrectly!) they all have the same thing in common: they don’t teach a dog to walk loose leash.

What they do is put a bandage on a stab wound. Sure you can’t see the problem anymore, but you haven’t actually done anything to fix the problem. The problem will still be there because it’s not a problem to the dog. Pulling on leash is instinctual and letting it happen is a reward.

Try this experiment. When your dog is standing next you to, with one finger, push into your dog’s ribs. Your dog will push back against you with some amount of force. Puppies will do this before they’ve even had a leash and collar attached to them. Because this is an instinctual behavior, every time the dog performs it, it is rewarded and will then continue to do it even more than before.

The special equipment and wraps and anything else will not unteach an instinctual behavior. Proper training and reward is what will replace (NOT get rid of) an instinctual behavior. This is the same reason why it is impossible to say if even the kindest dog won’t bite. You cannot remove instinct from a dog. You can only make other behaviors more desirable to perform.

Using a special collar also does not teach anything if you keep walking forward. The reward for pulling is forward progress. That’s why dogs will choke themselves out on these (most of the time. some of them of course have their place.) useless special training collars. Even though they are choking themselves, it’s more rewarding to move forward than it is punishing to get choked.

It’s a gross misunderstanding of how any animal, including people, learns to put a choke chain or martingale on a dog and expect it to walk loose leash. Not only that, but it always seems to be that the dog’s handler feels a sense of retribution from choking their dog for doing a behavior that the handler doesn’t like. Even though the handler never taught the dog the right thing to do in the first place.

To summarize, special training collars do not replace actual training because they do not teach or unteach anything. And often times indicate, to me at least, laziness in training and frustration in the handler.

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to leave one here, on my Facebook, or shoot me an email at Michael@concentricdog.com

Human Projection of Morals onto Dogs Revisited

I’ve touched upon the idea of dogs doing good and bad before. In that post I was more focused on how people project their own moral system onto their dogs. In this post, I want to focus more on the personification of animals in the media. Most notably, two big examples lately, the bear that pulls a crow out of water and a dog splashing water on a fish.

Here is the first video I want to cover, the one of the bear pulling the crow from the water

Only the first 2 minutes of this video are relevant. The first thing I noticed was in the description of the video. The person who posted it says, “even animals can break away from instincts.” I think this expresses the general sentiment most people have while watching this. They get warm fuzzies from watching wild animals befriend each other. While I’m no expert in bear behavior, and nor am I going to pretend to be, there are certain things we can take from this video that applies to most animals.

The most important thing I noticed was that the bear was eating before the “rescue efforts” started. And the entire habitat the bear was in also had food coating the ground. To me, this indicates the beginning of meal time. With the abundance of food and the eating before and after the rescue, the bear seems hungry and hasn’t finished its meal yet. So far the bear hasn’t strayed away from instinct. If hungry, then eat. It’s a fairly simple recipe.

This raises the question of why the bear is bothering with the crow. Following the same train of thought as the previous paragraph, I think the bear is just hungry. A skim of information about bears online finds many sources agree that bears are not active predators (when they do find food from meat). Seeing a crow flopping around, defenseless, the bear probably sees this as an opportunity to eat something different than what the keepers provide, which is most likely boring to the bear. It’s simply a matter of opportunity.

In the same vein as boredom, another possible explanation is that the bear was playing with the crow. Zoos often run into the problem of entertaining their wildlife. As soon as the bear pulls the crow out, it stops moving and play has ended. It’s no longer rewarding (read: fun) for the bear to keep messing with the crow. That’s why so many species of animals have a ‘play dead’ behavior.

The next video is one in which a dog is splashing water on a fish. With all of the fish around, it seems as though the setting is at a fish market or a dock.

Here is the video:

]

The comments are all related to how much people like dogs more than humans, or how this animal has a heart of gold. But in reality, this dog’s heart is as full as its stomach. The dog could not possibly know that fish die when taken out of water. That’s orders of logic beyond what I dog can do. And if the dog did know that fish die out of water, why would the dog care about it? What reward would the dog get for “saving” the fish, as opposed to eating it? In this instance of an animal “saving” another, just like with the bear, the dog is simply trying to secure food.

(NOTE: There is evidence suggesting that animals can be altruistic. The evolution of altruism is a fascinating subject, but I won’t be discussing it in my blog because I do not feel it has much to offer in explaining dog behavior.)

What we see the dog doing is attempting to bury the fish to eat later. He’s either full at that moment, or understands the scarcity of resources in his current environment. Once again, the animal in question is not going outside of instinctual behaviors. The dog is totally within the confines of the “if hungry, then eat” explanation of behavior.

I realize some of this can be a buzzkill. It’s nice to believe our dogs are capable of showing a human level of compassion, but without a bigger brain, the ability to have complex emotions is not something a dog has (though who knows what future research will show).

It may seem unfortunate that almost every single behavior our dogs do is for food, but when we try to speak their language, instead of getting them to speak ours, it actually encourages a stronger relationship with your dog. Everything I just explained is essentially the premise behind positive reinforcement training. And every time I talk about positive reinforcement training, I always explain that it helps create a bond with your dog. That understanding is how you form a family with your dog involved.

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