Clean Run Magazine - May 2008 - 12

decreasing speeds, 50% and 20%, to really start to analyze your behavior and how it affects your dog in training or trialing. If you don’t know what you are looking for when you watch the clips, find someone knowledgeable who can help you analyze them. contacts in the face of a distraction, but it can also mean that your dog does not understand when he has access to the reinforcer due to an inconsistency in your behavior. Training Essentials When things go wrong, it often means that your dog is not meeting your performance criteria. If you are disappointed, angry, or frustrated when your dog does something other than what you expected, you have just experienced a failure to communicate. Here are some ideas to help you make your communications with your dog crystal clear. Use an Event Marker basic criteria you should become more selective with criteria (raise the standards slightly). So, for example, he won’t get paid for every sit, but only the faster sits or the straighter ones or the ones where he is better balanced. You get to carefully select the criteria that encourage your dog to give you more. Reinforcement is something that your dog values at that very moment. Petting and praising your dog are not reinforcing enough to build or maintain behaviors. If your dog does not find tugging reinforcing, then you cannot build or maintain behaviors by offering a game of tug. You could work on building value in that activity in separate training sessions, in other words teaching play, but you could not use it to reinforce other behaviors. © MATTALLISONPHOTOGRAPHY.COM Split Criteria Apart, Not Your Head Open A marker (often called a bridge) can be a particular spoken sound such as the word “yes,” or it can be produced by a tool such as a clicker. A marker is a crucial tool. By being very consistent you will teach your dog that he must always hear his marker first, in correlation to some behavior that he is performing, and then second, he will have access to his reinforcer. This in particular helps the dog that mugs the trainer continually for food or toys or rushes from the ring to grab his toy or treat bag. The hardest part is being consistent about giving a marker before starting your behavior of delivering the reinforcer. Hand movement, leaning, or stepping before an auditory marker is given, can all become physical markers for the dog about when the reinforcer is coming. You don’t want your physical movement to become the event marker for the dog. For instance, your dog leaping off a contact to grab the toy or cookie in your hand is not just a contact problem. It can mean the dog does not understand the criteria for 12 “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” —Albert Einstein When working with your dog, know ahead of time exactly what standard will be reinforced and what will not. Splitting behavior into small components will bring greater understanding to your dog. The most common error in dog training is not reinforcing the dog enough when training new behaviors. Rate of reinforcement is directly tied to splitting criteria. Break criteria down into small increments so the dog gets paid a lot in the beginning (always after your marker is sounded). This concept is very foreign to us. Our human payment system (we use a secondary reinforcer, which is money) is based on a person getting paid more as his or her experience increases. The reverse is true for your dog. Reinforce (pay) your dog a lot when learning and building any new behaviors. When your dog demonstrates he understands the © CRAIG LIZOTTE/CL PHOTOGRAPHY Devise an Emergency Plan “Lack of planning on your part, does not justify an emergency on your dog’s part.” —Moe Strenfel Have a default behavior that you will immediately cue when things go wrong or if your dog has lost focus. Ah, yes, this has to be preplanned, doesn’t it? And trained ahead of time! That means your dog looks at you (mental focus) and then moves toward you to a specific position in relationship to your body (physical linkup). The cue can be as uncomplicated as standing still for a moment to initiate a recall to an indicated side. Practice this default behavior away from agility until it becomes second nature to Clean Run | May 08

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Clean Run Magazine - May 2008

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Clean Run Magazine - May 2008