Clean Run - October 2012 - 19

Solutions and Answers – A Sticky Situation
By Leslie McDevitt MLA, CPDT, CDBC

My eight-month-old Border Collie has always stared at certain things—toys, leaves, moving dogs—and it’s gotten worse with age, not better as I had hoped. Now that we are doing more agility he has started staring at the weave poles with that same expression. When he gets like that, he does not listen. I have tried to be more exciting than whatever he is staring at, but it usually doesn’t work. How can I break this habit?
This is more than a habit! This is what many herding people call “sticky” behavior. A sticky dog has a lot of “eye.” Let’s look at the motor pattern for predation that all dogs (and wolves) share. It goes like this: orient-eye-stalk-chase-grab-bite-kill. Different breeds have been refined through the years to highlight certain parts of this motor pattern to serve the purpose of the breed. Border Collies, for example, have had eye/stalk highlighted because these characteristics help them do their job on stock; whereas terriers have had bite/kill highlighted, and retrievers have had grab highlighted. Many agility Border Collies—and plenty of other breeds since all dogs have these motor patterns and your dog doesn’t have to be a Border Collie or a purebred to have a strong eye behavior—literally get “stuck” because their training can bring out their prey drive, which puts them into eye or eye/ stalk (these two often go together) mode. It’s not that they are choosing not to listen to you when they’re in this mode; they really can’t hear you. They are operating from a different part of their brain, the primal part not the operant “if I sit I will get a cookie” part. It is very hard for the dog to learn to switch out of eye/stalk mode. Since we like to encourage prey drive in training—with tugging as a reward, for example—it’s important that we understand how to work with stickiness so that it does not become a problem, either in agility or in the rest of life. I have seen so many dogs become slow on their contacts and at the weave pole entry, creeping toward the contact zone or the first pole with a strong eye because they got emotionally conditioned to associate these things with play that turns on predation. Most dogs get faster when you use play as a reward, but very sticky dogs can start “stalking” the obstacles. People often misinterpret this behavior and end up doing counterproductive things. I had a student who, on her teacher’s advice, had corrected, her Border Collie for “refusing” to lie down on the pause table. She had not realized the problem was that the dog, associating the table with her ball, had started getting locked in eye/stalk on the table. The dog would start to lie down but then get stuck in a low crouch and freeze. After the correction, the dog stopped jumping onto the table to avoid another correction. I taught her handler to break her eye/ stalk behavior from her ball on the flat. Then we added the table back in, and the dog was able to lie down on it again. It is never too early to start teaching the foundation that will help dogs learn to “turn it off ” so that they can hear you better. I teach the popular Doggie Zen game to puppies as the introduction to their leave-it training, which I describe in my book Control Unleashed: The Puppy Program. I also wrote about my two favorite tools for working through the stickiness problem: the Premack Principle and shaping.
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Clean Run - October 2012

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