I can’t believe that Clara, my puppy, is 10 years old.
Clara in 2011, the night she came into my house
But here we are.
When she was a baby, everything was triage. Tons of classical conditioning and graduated exposures for this puppy who at 10 weeks old knew nothing of humans except to be scared of them.
Joining a household of three other dogs created its own triage, too. She needed to learn things that let the household run smoothly. Things like “switch from this crate to this mat on a hand signal,” or “be able to be called away from harassing another dog” were priorities.
Later, when I saw the variety of things people taught their puppies, I was envious. We were way past her sensitive period by then. Silvia Trkman’s puppy videos made me drool. Why hadn’t I had time to train all those cool, fun things! I always wanted Clara, any dog of mine, really, to have a wide palette of behaviors to choose from. And I wanted to be able to train those. But left to my own devices, I tend to fall into ruts or train one thing for an inordinate amount of time.
Clara needs more stuff to do. I want to hone my training chops. So we are going to learn every trick I can get my hands on, even the ones that are out of my comfort zone. The only exceptions will be those that may be unsafe at her age or with her physique, those I can’t make fun for her, and those that require special equipment.
I won’t be putting everything on verbal or hand signal cue, but I’ll be making a concerted effort to do more of that.
She’s far from an untrained dog. She and I have learned lots of things together. So she’s not being introduced to training as an old dog, although I’ve done that, too, with my rat terrier Cricket.
Since Zani died, Clara’s life has been just a little bit more boring, a little less stimulating. I’ve worked hard to keep her life enriching. But doing some ad hoc training lately made me realize that training is probably the thing she enjoys most of our enrichment activities.
So here we go. I’m making the website for accountability and to share. And I’ll share it all. The successes and the blooper reels. Not just for laughs, but because there’s always something to learn (and the laughs are fun, too).
Hurray for Clara: we got her Intermediate Trick title from Do More With Your Dog this week. It got me thinking (surprise!). We had the beginnings of a lot of the tricks already from previous work. Am I achieving my goal of widening her palette of behaviors?
Foundations
Even if you are a sloppy trainer like me, if you’ve done a lot of training over the years and built some foundations, you can often sit down and train something new quickly. Sue Ailsby calls this training “three-minute behaviors.” And truly, a couple of the new tricks still took only a few minutes.
Jumping a baton was one of those. Clara knows a hand target, and she knows a 3/4-inch diameter PVC pipe means jump. (If I had used a piece of dowel, she would have bitten it instead!) The hand target is allowed, so I sat down and targeted her over the bar and gave my “jump” verbal. I mentioned in a previous post that she, alone among my dogs, responds to the verbal. My agility dogs never needed to learn it. She probably didn’t need it either, in this situation. But I included it because I’m a word-oriented human.
Anyway, I could have fancied up the trick. I could have taught Clara to jump the bar back and forth without a hand target, as a chain, or with repeated verbals. But that would have taken a long time for very little gain. Plus, she’s 10 years old and doesn’t need to do a lot of repetitive activity.
I’ll come back to the “How solid do I want to get the trick?” question in the ethics section below. I’ll just say here that getting behavior is by far the easiest part of training for me.
This isn’t from the clip I submitted, but she is so cute holding the orange donut!
The hardest trick in this batch was the hold of an object. Luckily, I struggled through teaching a hold first with Summer. God knows how long it took, since teaching the hold was new to me, and it’s difficult. Hint: if you’ve never done this, the hard part is teaching them not to drop it when you reach your hands toward it. Oh no, wait, it’s getting that first duration hold out of a grab. Or maybe getting them not to chew it. And, and.
Clara and I progressed faster, but we still took some months. That was years ago, and I have kept the hold alive as a foundation for other behaviors. So that was easy to perform and record even though it’s a hard behavior.
“Directional casting” was another three-minute behavior with months of invisible work behind it. The trick instructions are:
Dog will be sent by handler to one of 2 or more platforms or low marks. Handler should show dog being sent to at least two platforms in a row. Platforms should be spaced 3–4 feet (~1–1.2m) apart. This trick is about showing the dog understanding and responding to directional cues and not as focused on the platforms.
Practicing a directed retrieve
This is probably easy to train with only two platforms. I say “probably” because I didn’t have to train it. I have worked on a directed retrieve with Clara on and off for years and more seriously this year. She started to “get it” in the spring and I have been generalizing and proofing.
The directed retrieve generalized beautifully to the directed “go to place.”
Finally, Clara had never done jump wraps before, but that was a three-minute behavior too. A benefit of growing up in an agility household.
Matching Law
You expected this section, right?
I don’t like how we performed one of the tricks, but I let it go. It’s the figure 8s around my legs. I don’t like our rendition because I must cue with both my hands and my legs. I feel like a squirming mess to get her to do the behavior. But the person on the demo video for the trick uses both, so I figured my excessive body English would be OK.
We used to have the figure 8s with leg cues only. I messed around with that trick years ago. But leg movement now means something else for Clara: peekaboo. These days, if I move my legs apart, she will get between them and stay. Matching law! I have a verbal cue for peekaboo but not for the figure 8s. So I added the hand cues to the figure 8s for clarity. But I find it inelegant. I love seeing the freestyle dogs do that behavior with no repeated physical cues (that I can see) from the handler.
In another life, maybe. I sat on my trick submission video for about two weeks because I didn’t like how that behavior looked. But I can’t get it clean until I get peekaboo completely on verbal cue. Right now she still cues off my legs for that, with the verbal cue at the probable level of “lady says something when I’m behind her and she’s holding her legs in a certain way.” So squirmy figure 8s it is!
So here is our trick title video. The behaviors are peekaboo (while walking), directional casting, shake hands, fetch-to-hand, figure 8s around the legs, barrel racing (“fly”), baton jumping, target mark (run to a flat target and lie down on it), hold an object five seconds, stay out of sight 20 seconds, jump wraps, and close the door (drawer).
Ethics
My goals with the trick training are 1) enrichment for Clara; 2) get out of a rut and train some new behaviors; and 3) improve my skills.
I noticed that even though I made a goal to train new stuff, I chose mostly behaviors related to things we already knew. It is so easy to focus on numbers: do enough tricks to get the title! But I’ve pushed back. I’ve also picked new things: rolling out the carpet, biscuit on the nose, and peekaboo in its different versions. Also, opening a drawer, although it didn’t make it into the video because of an execution detail.
With a video submission, if all you want is the title, you can take shortcuts. Do as many takes as you want and use the one out of 20 or more that meets criteria. People do that in public competitions as well, of course. In my agility days, I remember seeing trainers whose dogs were not solidly trained, but they had advanced to the excellent level because the people had the means to go to trial after trial until they had lucked into enough qualifying runs. They were competing above their level.
Closing a drawer was easy because of the targeting exercises we did in the Training Levels
I had this in the back of my mind as I chose, worked on, and recorded tricks. The rules state only that the dog has to do the trick and meet criteria, not that it has to be proofed or even put cue solidly. This is not a public activity; videoing tricks allows you to curate what you show of your training and your results. I wanted to be fair. But many of these tricks were not things I needed to put on cue and get solid.
I submitted clips that were a little above our actual skill level for only a couple of tricks. One was target stick, believe it or not, but only because I used a stick she wanted to bite. A fit of perfectionism on my part that didn’t work out. So even though I turned in a fairly lucky clip of this novice trick where she bopped the end of the stick correctly several times and didn’t bite the ball at the end, I felt the clip fairly represented her ability to touch a target stick. She has been targeting all her life. I picked a hard target stick, then decided the discrimination (don’t bite the enticing ball instead) wasn’t worth the time. I could have switched to an easier stick and gotten a billion targets, but I went with a recording in which she was just learning not to bite the tricky stick.
Another trick I kind of rushed through was “shaking hands.” She had this behavior from husbandry tasks, but I had never alternated feet. I trained enough that she could do this, recorded it, and will probably never ask her to do that again. She changes feet fluently enough when we do nail trims and that’s enough for me.
On the other hand, we worked methodically on the peekaboo/walking trick because it’s important to me. I want to train her to get in that position out in the world when we encounter something challenging for her. And I’ve only started to get three puppy pushups, though the time when that trick would count has passed. We still work on them!
I’ve let my conscience be my guide. I’ve taken the challenges that interest me and only pushed through “for the camera” a couple times, with reasons I hope are decent enough.
Next Time
I’ve realized it’s more interesting for people if I show my method and our progress, warts and all, rather than presenting a finished video and discussing it. So I think that’s what I will do next.
And regarding “warts and all,” here’s a video of two bloopers. The tricks are to run around a tree (our cue for counterclockwise is “away”), and go lie on a flat target. I’ve sent Clara around things forever, but I had never done it from that angle with the tree, and I didn’t have her complete attention. The lying on the flat target problem is self-evident and cute. Clara is delightful.
It’s an oxymoron, as my friend Carol pointed out, but Clara and I earned her Novice Masters Trick Dog title recently. I haven’t had time to post about it until now.
Things We Learned
As usual, the balance between stuff she already knew (get in a crate), tricks we could adapt quickly from stuff she already knew (get in a cardboard box), and completely new stuff (roll out the carpet) was…interesting.
Practicing the cookie balancing trick by starting with kibble on the top of Clara’s head
Here are some highlights.
Stand: We finally have a nice stand on cue after our long running debacle. Her stance is a bit crouchy (no idea where that came from), but it’s fixable. What I’ve got is a moderately calm dog with four on the floor and I’m happy! I’m using a hand signal and have no plans for a verbal one. No, no, no way!
Find hidden treats: This should have gone quickly because of all the food searching games we play, but we got haunted with a bit of previous reinforcement history. Clara is so experienced with searching for food that she can find a few pieces of kibble in a very large backyard. For the trick, all she had to do was find three hides of stinky lamb lung in a small area in my bedroom. However, in that room she is patterned to head for the bed and her snuffle mat area where she eats breakfast and often searches. She spent some time over there, off-camera, rather than finding all the easy hides I set.
Rolling out the carpet: I was proud that we finally won our wrestling match with the matching law. In the video, you can see her pause, then flip over the last little corner of the rug. To me, that was better than rolling the whole thing out in one swoop. I could tell she was getting the criteria. It made me very happy.
Platform jump: The directions for this trick say it must be clear that the dog is jumping from platform to platform, not just stepping. We nailed that one!
Tricks We Re-Recorded
There were several tricks I had to tweak and record again when I saw we might not have met some nuance of the requirements. They included the muffin tin game (what could we do wrong with that?), the bang game (whack a board), and eye contact, the last because I had the wrong camera angle.
Finally, we had to re-record the cookie on the nose game. This is one we put some work into, although she already had a good foundation with lots of different Zen/leave-it practice. I taught her to hold still twice as long as the description required, but after we had recorded it, I re-read the rules. It said that the dog would hold the cookie on her nose until the handler reached and took it (or the dog could flip the cookie and eat it for an intermediate trick). We were doing neither. When the time was up, I reached toward her and she dumped it off her head! So I taught her to keep her head still even as I reached for the cookie, and we re-recorded in case the former version was a fail.
I’m pretty proud of that trick, though. My goal was that it would be fun for her. I’ve seen so many miserable-looking dogs with treats piled on their bodies. I was curious, so I finally searched to see how the force-based trainers do this trick, since it is a very common “show-off” trick. The trainer I found, not even one of the worst, held the dog’s chin and scolded whenever they tried to move their head, so the dog learned through physical molding and threats to keep still.
Eye contact
By the way, all that re-reading of the instructions I did? It’s partly because I have considerable ego involvement in this. I don’t plan on screwing up a trick because I misread the directions. But also, re-checking is a habit from my grant writing days. Check the directions, and check them again, and again, and then once more before you turn the damn thing in. Old habits can pay off!
Sloppy Training
Maybe you’ve noticed that I’m not one of those precision trainers (understatement). I am sloppy. I work to get my mechanics decent enough that I am not doing too much of a disservice to my dog, but I hardly ever go that final 20%. But man—watching these videos is an incentive to clean up my act.
Any regular viewer now knows that I keep my treats in my left pocket, because that’s where Clara looks or heads after any behavior. I mention below that I fixed that for our Peekaboo behavior (not shown), so I do know how.
I made the treat orientation worse when working on these tricks because I was often using some kibble from Clara’s breakfast. I was too lazy to take the different kibble out of my pocket so I could pocket her breakfast kibble. So for several tricks I have kibble already in my hand, which I’m waving around in front of her. If you want to see her hand and pocket orientation at its finest, check out the stand behavior about one minute into the video and the hand signals near the end. One of our best tricks is “Look at Eileen’s left hand.” There are so many ways to fix that; I really should!
In the front behavior, I do the classic novice move of taking a step backward and luring her toward me with my two hands together. I made sure this was allowed. I taught Summer a pretty front without that move, since it is disallowed in some levels of obedience. But I’ve never needed formal obedience moves with Clara. The move is included in the official demo video, so I took that shortcut. That’s a lure even without food in the hand, but upon a closer look, I was holding food in that take! I was unintentionally luring her with food.
Many of you have noticed by now that Clara has a superstitious foot lift when she sits. She’s had it forever. A paw lift can be a stress-prompted behavior, but Clara wasn’t a stressy puppy when at home with the other dogs and me, and I suspect that this longstanding addition to her sits is just something I accidentally clicked too much when she was very young. You can see it (barely because of the angle, but I remark on it) in the very first behavior in the video, getting in a box. She holds her paw up for at least three seconds, and I cleverly treat her in that position. Brava, Eileen!
These things I have accidentally trained are annoying for me to look at. It’s my job to remember that they are there because I reinforced them. If I want them to go away, I need to load more reinforcement onto the version I want, not punish or frustrate my dog. There’s a strong human tendency to use punishment to solve problems, but in this case and so many others, it’s completely unfair and uncalled for.
Our Title Video
Things We’re Still Working On
We’ve started our intermediate tricks, but I am keeping my eyes on the prize here, which is to do some great training, not only earn pieces of paper. So we are still working on some of the novice tricks.
Puppy pushups, how about that most basic trick that “everybody” does in obedience schools and many other venues? Hanging my head in shame. We are up to sit, down, sit, down on one treat, but we need to get up to six behaviors rather than four. (She can also do down, sit, down, sit.) I truly do ask my dogs for more than one behavior for a reinforcer at times. But the stand behavior still haunts us, the one that I practiced with her in an aroused state approximately one billion times. And as I extend the number of behaviors on one reinforcer, it usually pops up. “Wait, did you mean this?”
I worked on having her target the long target stick with the enticing ball on the end enough that I was getting a higher percentage of touches than bites, but I haven’t worked the bites down to an acceptable percentage. We still work on it. She’s fine with most anything else I ask her to target.
Our peekaboo during the “whip the head around” phase
One of the novice tricks we both enjoyed was peekaboo, where the dog comes up from behind as you are standing and puts their head between your legs. I didn’t include it for the title, because it required three seconds of duration and we didn’t have that. We kept practicing, though, because I wanted to teach her this behavior for when we are out and about (prompted by the Denise Fenzi “squish” behavior). We got our duration, then I noticed she was poking her head through and immediately whipping it toward my treat hand. I started switching hands, so then I got a dog who poked her head through, then immediately whipped her head back and forth, looking for the treat. C’mon, Eileen, think! I could have predicted that if I’d thought about it for half a second. So I thought about it.
I didn’t want to spit treats like I learned to do in competitive obedience. Clara doesn’t like to catch them, and the only dog treats I’m willing to put in my mouth are pieces of mozzarella cheese. Then I remembered Marge Rogers’ method for treating for a straight front behavior. Before treating the dog, she would bring both hands up to her chin, then bring a hand straight down with the treat. So the treat was not only presented in the center position, it was in the center position for a noticeable amount of time before it came to the dog. That did the trick nicely, and now Clara is getting into position, staying there, and looking forward or straight up at my face. Progress!
I picked the “Roll out the carpet” trick from the novice trick list from Do More with Your Dog because it looked fun and more trick-like than a lot of the other behaviors. We had been doing things like sits and downs and walking on leash and targeting. This was more like a real trick. It would be new, but still looked like a fairly straightforward one because Clara knows how to push things with her nose.
The definition of the trick is:
Dog will use his nose to unroll a rolled-up carpet. Carpet can be a yoga mat, rug or towel and should be roughly 5 feet/~2 meters in length.
DMWYD Novice Trick List
I have rolled food up in towels for Clara before as enrichment, so that seemed like an obvious way to practice. So I took a 5-foot rubber-backed rug and rolled it up with treats inside, and she promptly unrolled it to get the food. I had Clara do this for a couple of days. Easy Peasy.
But that was for practice. Luring is allowed, but I’m not sure about luring-and-eating-as-you-go-along. Even if it’s allowed—the rules for Novice tricks are pretty loose—to me, it’s not in the spirit of the trick. So the next time we practiced, I rolled up the carpet with no treats. Guess what happened? See the photo above?
Clara gave the rolled-up carpet a good sniffing all over, then sat on the little strip that wasn’t rolled up and looked at me. There was obviously no food in there, so why should she bother? Maybe starting with a loaded-up carpet wasn’t the best idea after all!
I had thought the original discriminative stimulus (cue) to get her to unroll the carpet was the rolled-up carpet. But it was the rolled-up carpet with treats in it. I had annihilated a giant lure (perhaps 20 treats) in one blow. Why should she bother with an empty carpet?
Back to Square 1. I realized I was going to have to actually teach the trick instead of coasting in on previous behaviors.
First Teaching Attempt: Get Clara’s Nose in the Right Spot without Treats
I started rolling up an empty carpet and shaped a nose touch in the correct area to push the carpet. This wasn’t hard. She would sniff when she approached the rolled carpet, anyway. So I turned that sniff into a little nudge. And I was thoughtful about my treat delivery, aiming for the little crack under the roll of the mat so I would direct her nose right back to the correct area when she went for the treat.
Crappy photo of my glorious treat placement. She always scrunched herself up to stand on the mat, because guess why?
However, I had two problems. One was that she has an enormous reinforcement history (there’s that problem again!) for lying down on mats or anything matlike. Possibly the most reinforced behavior in her life. So even though I kept my rate of reinforcement high for the nose touches, whenever there was even a momentary lull, her first choice was to lie down on the mat.
This is what we do on mats: lie down.
The second problem was yet another behavior that was stronger than the nose push: a foot target. She would sometimes hit the unrolled part of the carpet with her foot or stand on it.
Or else we put our foot on this part that looks like a target.
Standing on it was incompatible with unrolling it for sure! And once she would start these other two highly reinforced behaviors, it was not likely she would find her way back to the nose touch. So I didn’t just leave her to figure it out. That would have been too frustrating. I would interrupt, ask for a nose touch to my hand or simply toss a treat, then start us over again.
I did succeed in shaping the gentle sniff under the rolled part of the rug into a nudge, then a push. Sometimes she would give a big push and the whole thing would unroll! I reinforced well for that, but again, I didn’t feel like it was in the spirit of the trick. It happened frequently when I used a yoga mat instead of the rubber-backed carpet runner, so we stuck with the latter.
I was getting the nudge, but I had a problem. I needed to thin my reinforcement schedule and get enough pushes from Clara to unroll the carpet completely before I reinforced. But I had these two other behaviors lurking, ready to pop out the minute Clara didn’t get reinforced for a nose touch. I knew if I tried to thin my schedule now, the first time I didn’t reinforce a nose push (because I wanted a second one), she would try one of the other behaviors instead.
Extinction and Thinning the Ratio Schedule
I’ve made it no secret that I generally pay my dogs for every behavior. You can see my article on it here and another by Dr. Eduardo Fernandez here. You can also look up Nevin’s work outlining the arguments for rich reinforcement schedules creating behaviors that are resistant to extinction (Nevin, Mandell, & Atak, 1983).
I do have a few exceptions to using a 1:1 ratio schedule with my dogs. For loose leash walking, I have extended the number of steps between reinforcers. I probably reinforce on a VR15 (steps) or so. I have also trained stationary duration behaviors where the reinforcers get fairly spaced out. For instance, there can be time periods between reinforcers measured in minutes when I am reinforcing Clara for staying on a mat while I work in the kitchen. I have at least one behavior chain (retrieve) where I generally only reinforce the terminal behavior. Finally, just living with my dogs, sometimes I randomly don’t reinforce for everyday behaviors. But I probably reinforce daily behaviors far more than most people. For instance, I still reinforce 10-year-old Clara with food virtually every time she pees or poops in the yard.
What I haven’t asked for from Clara, since back when I was working on the Training Levels, is multiple iterations of the same behavior for one reinforcer. What Sue Ailsby calls “twofers.” I found this out the hard way early in our trick training endeavor. Clara could not do puppy pushups unless I reinforced every behavior, or at least every other one. Doing six iterations, as is required for the trick (sit, down, sit, down, sit, down), was not possible for us. On the third cue or so, if I failed to reinforce for a sit or a down, she “assumed” she was wrong and started hopping around and throwing behaviors, usually a stand or a hop. I got an extinction burst. How humbling. I hadn’t worked hard enough on cue recognition.
We had an even worse situation with unrolling the carpet, because my goal was to cue her to unroll the carpet, which meant nudging it up to five or six times before it was all the way unrolled, then reinforce. Multiple nudges for one terminal reinforcer! I knew the nudging was still weak enough that I needed to reinforce every single one for a while. Because as soon as I would space out the reinforcement, in would pop into the foot targets and lying down. And I don’t want to put her through extinction without a really clear idea of what she can do for reinforcement.
Then I realized what I should do.
Backchain It!
I don’t think I’ve ever written about backchaining here. I don’t teach many chains. Backchaining means you start with the last behavior of a behavior chain first and work backward. There are several benefits. One is that you load a lot of reinforcement onto the final behavior (stay tuned to see the result in the video below). Another is that because of this, the dog is working toward the more familiar part of the chain that has gotten more reinforcement.
I can think of three behaviors I backchained. First, I backchained a retrieve with Summer and Clara. I also backchained Clara to drop a ball into a bowl using this video as a model. That’s a good video that shows how backchaining can work, if you are curious. It can be almost magical. I also backchained stopped contacts in agility.
Here is how I I used backchaining to get out of the rug trap.
I folded over only the very end of the rug. Clara had enough practice with pushing at the rug that she happily unrolled the little end I had folded over. I didn’t load it with treats, but she had enough experience by then that she would do it without seeing the money on the front end. We did many reinforced repetitions of opening one fold. Many. Then I folded it over twice. Oops, too soon! Got a down and a foot target. Went back to the beginning with just one fold, worked up again to two, and voilà! She pushed it hard enough (or pushed twice) to unroll both folds! Lots of reps of that, too. So we continued, working backward, with me rolling the rug more and more. I sometimes gave interim treats. She was giving multiple pushes rather than one constant one, which was fine with me. I didn’t want her to go from feast to famine, but I wanted her to gradually learn I would pay well if she performed the nose push multiple times to get to the end criterion: unfolded rug. That was backchaining.
While working on the trick, I also remembered she knows how to get food out of a rolling food toy, so I got out the Tricky Treat Ball and fed her some of her breakfast in there. It seemed like a good idea to build some more repetitions of nose pushes however I could get them.
As we got close to success with the backchaining, I added a cue, “Push,” and started using a conditioned reinforcer, “Good girl,” instead of the intermittent treats to let her know she was on the right track. As for that verbal cue: I was cheating a little. It didn’t matter what I said. Clara didn’t instantly learn the specific meaning of “Push.” If I were to say “Push” to her when she was lounging on the couch, for example, she wouldn’t start hunting for a rolled-up rug to nudge. It’s contextual. “Lady says something in a certain tone while I’m standing on the rug, so I will do the thing I just did.” But hey, it worked.
I always think of the Tricky Treat Ball as “Summer’s food toy,” but Clara gained some fluency at it after she aged out of trying to eat the toy itself.
Progress Video
The video shows the steps we took and our victory a couple of days ago. For such a simple-seeming trick, this feels like quite an accomplishment. But I know exactly why it was a challenge for us, and I’m pretty pleased I could thread my way through all those heavily reinforced but “wrong” behaviors to tease out the right one.https://www.youtube.com/embed/HST5O2Km2pU?version=3&rel=1&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&fs=1&hl=en-US&autohide=2&wmode=transparent
I love the last iteration of the trick on the video. She pushes the rug several times and ends up with a small flap of it still folded over at the end. She looks at me, she looks at the rug. I am holding my breath, waiting for the reinforcement history to burst into the picture. But the folded over flap, because of the backchaining, became a pretty good discriminative stimulus for “push with your nose to unfold that.” She pushed both sides of it to open the rug flat all the way!
She never did one constant nose push, but it doesn’t appear to be a requirement, so I don’t think we’ll bother. We have already learned a lot by working on this trick!
Speaking of learning a lot, shout out to Marge Rogers for not saying, “I told you so!” She’s been trying to get me to train more tricks for years!
Copyright 2021 Eileen Anderson
This post was also published on my main Eileenanddogs blog.
References
Nevin, J. A., Mandell, C., & Atak, J. R. (1983). The analysis of behavioral momentum. Journal of the Experimental analysis of behavior, 39(1), 49-59.
Yes, this is part of the trick training series! Stand is one of the tricks we are working on. We just happened to touch on this long-standing can of worms created by my training!
I considered titling this post “Eileen’s Stand Disaster,” but I thought that might be too confusing. Clara was the one standing, but the disaster part was definitely on me.
The method is to have the dog in heel position in a sit, and to use a hand target above the dog’s head to get them to leap into the air, hit the target with their nose, then land on four feet. It’s a fun, flashy behavior. But the activity got Clara over-aroused, and I didn’t know how to handle that.
When I casually mentioned on social media that Clara and I had bombed using Susan’ Garrett’s method, a group of angry fans came for me. But wait! I am a Susan Garrett fan, too! I took part in the very first Recaller’s Class, and that was probably the time I saw all three of my dogs at their happiest. I respect her work and have used lots of her methods, both in and out of agility settings.
My failure with that stand method was just that: my failure. Between Clara’s temperament and my weaknesses as a trainer, we had a wreck that kept on wrecking. Not every method works for every trainer’s skill level with every dog.
What Did the Disaster Look Like?
I messed around with the method for a couple of years, alternating between trying to make it work and trying to reteach stand another way. Here’s a video from that time. It’s pretty embarrassing, but things had been even worse earlier. You can see (and hear from my yelps) that Clara’s arousal level was a tremendous problem. I know better now how I helped ramp her up. I literally fed into it by feeding too rapidly and never adding duration. Shark creation.
And no, I don’t know why the half-squat position with her back legs crept into her stand!?
I do kind of wish I had that “leapfrog” behavior at 0:05 on cue, but I know better than to work on it! Another thing to notice is at 0:50 when, after trying unsuccessfully multiple times to get her to stand with a forward hand target, I give up and say “OK.” That, unfortunately, became the verbal cue for the behavior. What to me was a release cue, to her meant “stand.” You’ll see it in subsequent videos.
Clara is not always ramped up. She can melt into a mat and relax, and has successfully relaxed through every session of Dr. Karen Overall’s Relaxation Protocol in several locations. But jumpiness became part of the stand sessions.
Susan says in her video: “Even a six-year-old can do it.” Sigh. But I couldn’t, not with this dog.
Teaching Stand Successfully with Previous Dogs
I taught standing on cue to two other dogs with no problems. I taught Summer while training for competitive obedience and rally. I believe I used targeting but forward, not high in the air as in Susan’s method. Later, I taught Zani an adorable kickback stand using Sue Ailsby’s clever luring method: you lure them backward so they don’t step forward. Stand was the first and maybe only behavior I taught Zani by luring with food. I had to persuade her to follow the lure, since we had done so much leave-it practice.
This video of Zani is from 2018, after her spinal cord concussion. She couldn’t do a tight sit because of the effects of the spinal cord injury on her right rear leg, but she could still do the kickback.
Thanks for indulging me. Yeah, I posted this video partly to calm my ego, but also, damn, Zani was so cute!
What Were the Problems with Teaching Clara to Stand?
Clara gets aroused when she moves. A common problem, but I had not experienced it with any dogs before Clara. For instance, when we practice loose leash walking—ouch! She gets excited and super chompy when she gets treats while in motion. So when I taught her to leap from a sit or down and touch my hand in the air, then jammed food in her face when she hit the ground, I got her all worked up.
I was trying to capture the stand before she moved, so I shoved the treat into her mouth reallyreallyfast. And, predictably, got shark behavior in return.
Also, when Clara got confused about what we were doing, she would land in a sit or a down and stay there. I responded by giving my release cue to get her to move. She would stand, and I would reinforce. So the release cue (“OK”) became the cue for stand. By the time I added a real cue (“Brace”), I had already accidentally but firmly taught her to listen for “OK.” And it was unhandy that Clara popped into a stand whenever I tried to release her from anything.
I kept starting over with the process, so I got no duration.
I had an over-aroused, grabby dog who would bounce around nervously whenever I tried to train stand. Whatever I did with my reinforcement mechanics left her manically continuing to try other behaviors.
How I Solved the Problems
Clara already knows how to stand, of course, as does any dog with typical mobility. She stands dozens of times every day, meaning she performs both the motion of standing up from a sit or down, and the duration behavior of standing around. Standing in everyday life doesn’t arouse her; I created the arousal in our training.
A few months ago, I started over one more time. I took a page from my previous training and looked up my video on capturing stands. I thought I had made the video with Zani, but there was Clara, in 2015, with a nice little start on a fairly calm kickback stand! LOL, that’s what can happen when you write lots of blog posts and make lots of videos over the years! I think I had done that before I got her all overwrought with the jumping and targeting method! In the video, you’ll see her roach her back a couple of times, but her rear legs are in a much better position than the ultra-squatty stuff reinforced during the Bad Times.
So this year, I copied the steps from my own video.
First, I captured quiet stands for a while (not the behavior of standing up, just standing). I changed the picture from the method that didn’t work for us and stopped using the heel position setup. After sessions of capturing, I set her up facing me and waited. She offered movement into a stand quickly (but not nervously!). I was careful not to feed too fast, and I added duration as soon as I could. (One of my tragic flaws as a trainer is neglecting duration.) And I used a new cue—a flicking hand signal. No more “Brace” or “OK.”
This video from April 2021 through today shows our progress. She was still crouching somewhat with her hind legs in April, but that is mostly gone now.
Reinforcement History: Ghosts of Behaviors Past
But my “sort-of “victory isn’t the point of this post. I did some decent problem-solving. I was very patient. I got back a pretty nice stand behavior that we can continue to work on. You’ll see it in our next trick training video as well. But the nervous behaviors I reinforced during the stand practice still pop up frequently in training sessions of all sorts.
Behaviors rarely diminish all the way to zero. Clara unfortunately has a big reinforcement history for the debacle-stand. Here are a few examples of the attendant behaviors reappearing. And at the end, she does a perfect stand from a down (in response to my release cue) while I turn my back to go turn off the camera!
The concept of reinforcement history comes straight from Thorndike’s Law of Effect.
Of several responses made to the same situation, those which are accompanied or closely followed by satisfaction to the animal will, other things being equal, be more firmly connected with the situation, so that, when it recurs, they will be more likely to recur; those which are accompanied or closely followed by discomfort to the animal will, other things being equal, have their connections with that situation weakened, so that, when it recurs, they will be less likely to occur. The greater the satisfaction or discomfort, the greater the strengthening or weakening of the bond.
Thorndike, 1911, p. 244
The matching law quantifies the Law of Effect. The percentage of the time a behavior is reinforced will be reflected in how often the animal performs the behavior. So it’s a numbers game. If I stop reinforcing Clara for popping into a stand after I give the release cue (the last behavior in the above video), the stand will gradually decrease in that context. But the leapfrogging around in training sessions will be hard to eliminate because it got a ton of reinforcement in the past and gets chained into other behaviors I reinforce. You can see me reinforcing these chains throughout the video. The chain problem is not impossible to fix, but I need to sit down and think about whether I (with my own limitations) can carry out a plan without frustrating Clara, whether it’s worth it to try.
In the meantime, I’m pleased I am getting a semi-normal stand.
Copyright 2021 Eileen Anderson
Reference
Thorndike, Edward L (1911) Animal intelligence: Experimental Studies. Macmillan.
Clara thinks “front” is a great game. Stay tuned for more tricks!
P.S. Although I didn’t categorize it that way, this post was born of the trick training we are working on. We aren’t through with tricks by a long shot!
Clara and I are learning so much! Here is a quick trick update with a couple of videos.
Treat on the Nose Trick
We are taking the treat on the nose exercise nice and slow. I can now put a piece of flat kibble on the top of Clara’s head for a second or two. I’ll work up to an actual dog biscuit.
There are lots of aspects to the trick.
There’s the Zen aspect: the dog can’t grab for the treat as you are putting it on her face. I’m stating the obvious, but most treats coming to a dog’s face are heading for their mouth, and trained dogs have a huge history of that.
There’s the “something is on my face!” aspect.
There’s the balance aspect, which means holding the head still. Clara knows various stays, but this has never been a criterion.
There’s the duration aspect.
We are still working on #1 and #2. There’s not really balance involved with the kibble on the forehead. She just needs to stay moderately still, which is a good first step.
The kibble does often fall off when I release her, but that’s fine for now. I usually give it to her, so she’s getting bits of mozzarella cheese from my right hand and a kibble now and then from my left. No wonder she thinks this is a great game.
This nice flat kibble works for practicing this trick
Our leave it cue is “Pas.” (So when I say that, I’m not referring to her foot.) I love how she snaps into forward focus when I say that cue as I put the kibble on her head.
The most interesting thing to me is that she had a very hard time leaving the treat alone when I tried to put it on her head with my right hand. She could do it when I used my left. You can see both in the movie. There is something in her reinforcement history or the current environment that is causing that, but I’m not sure what. I thought at first that I use my right hand more commonly for a hand target and she was trying to target it. I know I have a “target hand” and a “Zen hand.” Bad Eileen. But I looked at last week’s video and I was using my left hand for targeting. So that probably wasn’t it.
Two training concepts I’m passionate about are reinforcement history and the matching law. Whatever your dog does reflects their reinforcement history. Sometimes it’s easy to figure out where a behavior or difficulty is coming from. I have a splendid example for the next post. But this right-hand business is still a mystery. One thing I know for sure: she’s not “being stubborn” or “blowing me off.” We all can see how into the game she is. When I use my right hand, it paints a different picture for her from when I use the left.
Treat on the nose is such a common trick, but I’ve never noticed how people teach it. I was never interested before. I’m interested in the trick now, and I’ve decided not to check into how other positive reinforcement-based trainers do it. I want to see what I come up with first. I think I can do this successfully in my own way and keep it fun. Mozzarella cheese is guaranteeing that Clara thinks it’s great. Watch her tail wag!
Roll out the Carpet Trick
This has gotten almost too easy. I switched to using the yoga mat because that length is required, but it often rolls out completely in one or two pushes. It’s easy money for Clara. We’re still practicing with the bathmat because even though it’s half the length, it’s more work to unroll. I’m not bothering with a video here. I just remembered that I have a couple of long bathmats and I’ll use one of those when we record the trick. Hopefully, it will take her more than one push to roll it out.
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Paws in a Box Trick
The joys of mat training! If you teach your dog to get on a mat, it becomes a target. Then you can put the mat anywhere to tell your dog that you want them to get there, even if it’s inside or on top of something else. Clara is one of those dogs who is so magnetized to her mat that I have to throw treats to distract her so she doesn’t try to get on it before it hits the ground!
I couldn’t find a cardboard box that was the right size, so we started with a shallow plastic box. We did two reps of just the mat, then a few reps with the mat inside the box. Then I slipped the mat out, and voilà, she got right into the box. Stationing at its best! What we recorded today would probably qualify for the trick, but I still plan to get her into a real cardboard box. How can she be an R+ dog if she’s never been in a box?
This series of posts is about teaching an old dog new tricks. But Clara doesn’t respond like an old dog. Even so, part of the challenge with teaching completely new things to an older dog is the matching law. Older dogs trained with positive reinforcement carry with them huge reinforcement histories for common behaviors over the years. Clara is mentally as sharp as ever, and she is fast. But getting out of ruts (that I put her in) can be a challenge. My next post will show some of the behaviors that keep popping up because of past training we have done together.
For Clara’s Novice Masters Trick Dog title through Do More With Your Dog, we need 15 more tricks to add to the 15 we’ve already done. I’ve picked an assortment. Some she already knows fluently, some we can resurrect from old training, and some are completely new. Likewise, my criteria will vary a bit. She can already do paws up on a wall; we’ll get it once and that’ll be enough. It’s something I’ll fade out as she gets older. But Peekaboo/center position, where she stands under me and pokes her head out between my legs, is something I want to get fluent and strong.
Trick Selection
Here’s the list of what we are going to work on, with commentary.
Balance beam (walk on an elevated plank). This should be straightforward. I have a sturdy agility teeter that she has actually walked while it moves. Walking a steady plank should be easy.
Balance cookie on nose. I’m thinking of this as a fun challenge. I hate the “leave-it” videos where dogs have treats all over them and look miserable. I realize this is just one treat on the nose, but it’s a new thing for Clara. I broke out the boiled chicken today. She may have only a dog biscuit on her face, but she’ll get chicken for her efforts. And we’ll break it off if I can’t make it enjoyable for her. Update: We’ve done one session of this. I used some flat, large kibble to start with instead of a dog biscuit. I aimed to start by putting the kibble on top of her head, but she thought that was too weird when I reached up there with food. Instead, I started by putting it on her front legs, using our “leave-it” cue. She got that right away. I paid with mozzarella cheese, which she seemed to think was a more than fair deal. Sometimes she got the kibble, too, if it fell off, which was OK with me. Toward the end, I switched to putting the kibble on the top of her head and she did fine with about five reps of that.
Crawl. We have worked on this before, but I find it a challenging behavior, so it might take us a while to meet criteria. (This image is from 3 1/2 years ago.)
Disc rollers. New behavior. I’ll need to get some rollable disks. The only ones I have are soft rubber and not suitable.
Doggy pushups (sit/down). This was an earlier failure. We are practicing. We’ve got this easily if I reinforce each position. But I want to build some confidence and extend the behavior to all six iterations on one treat if we can. I rarely ask for multiples, and I’d like to get her more used to the idea.
Focus. This is eye contact for six seconds. When we used to do the Training Levels, she got up to 20. Shouldn’t be too hard.
Front (go from heel position to sitting in front of me). This will be new for her, but with my rally and obedience background, I’m pretty clear on how to teach it. It looks like they allow the backward step, as in rally novice (AKC).
Memory game (indicate where a treat was placed under one of three containers). Should be fun.
Muffin tin game. Also fun. Hardly any criteria—remove items to get to the goodies.
Paws in a box. We’ve never done this, but she can do a tucked sit on a small elevated platform, so this shouldn’t be too hard.
Peekaboo/center position. I am excited about this one. I want her to get it very solid so I can cue her to do it on walks. So I will go slowly and work to keep my training clean. Like mat training, I want to reinforce strongly both getting into position and staying in position.
Platform jump (jump between two platforms of equal height). This is easy for her; I just need to get my two platforms the same height. I think I can take the height of the Klimb down to get it close to the Kato board.
We had one trial with the yoga mat. Video next time!
Roll out the carpet. We started this. It’s completely new for her, even though it’s such a baby trick. First, I put treats in a bath mat and let her at it. She was initially a little tentative and looking for instruction from me. But got the idea pretty soon that when she pushed with her nose, a treat appeared, whether it was one that was already in there or one I tossed. The challenge will be to get her to use her nose exclusively since she likes to use her feet.
Stand. We’ve been working on this on and off for years. I have to remember what I started using as my verbal and hand signal!
Target disk (nose touch to a disk). This will be simple if I hold it in my hand, more challenging if it’s on the floor (the rules give you a choice). I have taught her a paw touch to a disk on the floor and it’s actually on stimulus control. I don’t want to risk messing that up. In this case, I am going to take the easier route and hold the disk for the nose touch and let that be part of the cue. I rarely work on stimulus control and I don’t want to lose what we have with the paw touch. (To clarify: it’s perfectly possible to get both things, but I am running up against my own limitations. Plenty of these tricks will challenge us, so I don’t mind taking the easier way on this one.)
Target stick. We are working on the new stick. This is an easy and fluent behavior for her; I just need to get it transferred to the longer stick with the ball on the end.
One-year-old Clara checking out a stink bug
Wall stand (paws up on the wall). We’ve done this before. We’ll do a one-and-done.
Weenie bobbing. This is new for her, but she loves water and puts her head under naturally, so I don’t foresee a problem.
Which hand holds the treat? This will be new for us. Since closed hand is an old signal for “leave it,” this might get interesting.
You may notice that there are more than 15 here. I need a little insurance in case some don’t work out!
Head Cock: Already a Mega-Blooper
I’m also planning for some of the hard ones on the list (we aren’t stopping at 30 when there are 61 tricks on the list!). One of the novice tricks seems like it will be very difficult for Clara: cocking her head. Zani was the queen of this charming behavior, but I have never seen Clara do it in her whole life. I will try shaping it, but it will be tough.
I’m trying to do the planning and problem-solving myself in this project, but on this trick, I might need to bring in some reinforcements. Hmm, which trainer friend shall I hit up?
We had a practice session where I tested the waters about capturing/shaping head movement. I marked and treated for any kind of movement of the head in any direction. This seemed a safe enough thing to do for one session. Unbeknownst to non-observant me, something was going on with another part of her body. This movie first zooms in on her head, where you can see that I was doing a halfway decent job of marking head movement. Then it zooms out and you can see the other movement I was capturing. Oops.
We also had some amusing developments when I started using the yoga mat for the carpet roll, as you can see from the featured photo at the top. I’ll post some yoga mat footage next time since it’s cute.
Clara is enjoying this so much and that makes me very happy.
To keep us both on our toes, I am starting to teach 10-year-old Clara every trick I can get my hands on that is safe for her and that she enjoys. Going to grab some online titles on the way (these are judged via video). Titles are reinforcing to me and often the requirements jolt me out of my training ruts.
These posts will be both here and on my Eileenanddogs blog. For now, my plans are that it will be the same material. If you don’t want to have to search for the tricks posts among all the different topics on Eileenanddogs, use this one because the tricks posts will be the only ones here. There’s also a little intro that also gives a little more background about why I embarked on this project. I’ll get a subscribe option up soon.
We started with our novice trick title for Do More With Your Dog. For this first go-round, I picked things Clara already knew and could do fluently. Hey, I wanted a little immediate reinforcement! But also, I was honest about it. When it turned out I was wrong about the fluency and she struggled with puppy pushups and a new target stick, we saved those for later. I could have gotten the behaviors well enough to pass the criteria for the test, but passing at all costs is not my goal. I want to do some good training. I don’t have to have everything on verbal cue (thank goodness) or stimulus control, but I want a modicum of understanding of the behavior. And the failures (see below) are so instructive about the flaws in my training.
I do aim to get better cue recognition along the way. I’ll be working on duration (with myself—Clara does whatever I ask of her!) as well.
A large part of my motivation is that Clara needs more enrichment in her life. Throughout these 10 years, I’ve learned that playing training games is one of her very favorite things. So here we go with every trick I can get my hands on.
Here’s the first batch.
Clara is virtually always this happy when training. This video earned Clara her Novice Trick Dog title with Do More With Your Dog. Thank you to Kit Azevedo for judging our video.
Training Errors
So far, the behaviors are mostly kindergarten behaviors—it feels like a stretch to refer to them as tricks. But a couple of them took some skill. The things I thought we could do that we couldn’t are far more interesting! Here’s a list of the things you can see on the following “Informative Failures” video. I’ll discuss them below after the video.
1. I make her break her stay on a cot by saying her name in a way that resembles our recall cue.
2. I forget to release her from her cot, she stays 60 seconds, and I don’t notice or reinforce.
3. We fail puppy push-ups.
4. We fall apart when I use a new target stick
5. (Not on video.) I cue her to jump, she takes me literally, and jumps into the jump instead of over it.
The following video is not quite funny enough to qualify as a blooper video, although I found some things amusing. But then, I always laugh a lot when we work together.
Reasons for Errors
The reasons for the “errors” that Clara made (I’m using scare quotes because they are not really her errors) are so clear to me. They are due to matching law effects and reinforcement history, both schedules of reinforcement and patterning on my part.
1. Breaking her stay when I say her name. People warn against using a dog’s name as a recall cue, and this is the reason. But it’s not usually a problem for us. I use a special tone and inflection for her recall cue (you hear it later in the video). It’s different from my normal way of speaking to her, but when she was staying on her cot, I inflected her name just enough to make her come to me. My bad.
2. Staying on her cot because I forget to release her. This isn’t a mistake at all, it’s a lovely success, except it would have been nice of me to reinforce her after that great stay while I was walking all around and setting things up. But no, I jumped right into cueing the next behavior.
3. Puppy push-ups. Here’s where it starts to get interesting. The puppy pushups chain consists of repeating the behaviors of sit, down, sit, down, sit, down, on cue. What half-way trained dog can’t do this? Answer: a dog whose trainer has been emphasizing stand on and off for the past two years and tends to ask her for a pattern of sit, down, sit, stand. My pattern overruled her recognition of the verbal cues. Not to mention that I usually reinforce 1:1 and I was asking for six without working up to it. Doh!
We could have pushed through this on the spot and gotten the requisite number of correct repetitions, but I’m choosing to go back and do some remedial work. I worked hard for that stand, but I don’t want it to overrule another behavior I ask for! And getting the verbal cues for sit, down, and stand distinct seems like a great idea!
One of these things is not like the others
4. The new target stick and “three-fers.” Clara has a strong nose-targeting behavior. She can target my hand, my foot, a target stick, a piece of tape on a wall, a cabinet or door. So what happened here? The first problem was reinforcement history. We have been practicing a directed retrieve for months now, so putting her mouth on something is right at the top of her “behaviors to offer” list. The second problem was that the target stick was much longer than the two others I usually use, so the visuals were wrong. The end was much farther from my hand. You can see her repeatedly targeting the place on the long stick that corresponds to the length of the sticks she is used to. Also, the end of the target stick was a round object that must look delectable to a dog who loves balls. But that doesn’t account for most of the errors. If those had been the only problems, we would have gotten 70–90% correct touches within a few minutes.
My biggest mistake was to start asking for three-fers. I’m stealing Sue Ailsby’s term of “two-fers,” that is, to ask for two reps of a behavior before marking and reinforcing. We’ve done plenty of that along with higher numbers of reps as well. The trick requirements for the video asked for three nose targets in different positions, so I absentmindedly started asking for them as a chain. <Insert record scratch sound effect.> Clara’s success rate because of the other problems was already too low. When I started asking for three touches for one reinforcer, i.e., not marking and reinforcing the first two, I put the targeting behavior on extinction. It wasn’t paying off, so she started trying a bunch of other stuff. This is a classic side effect of extinction: getting more variety in the behavior. It’s a side effect we sometimes gently and carefully use in shaping. But here it must have been frustrating. She couldn’t figure out the game we were playing because I changed too many variables. She’s such a good sport.
You can see in the video that there are three clean touches in a row at least once. But that was not representative of our performance, which had a low percentage of right responses for this simple behavior. So I’m going back to the drawing board on this one, just like puppy pushups.
5. Bar jump. This is not on the video, because some mistakes are too awful even for me to show. Even though Summer and Zani were titled agility dogs, the cue “jump” to them was background chatter. To them, the cue was being pointed toward an actual jump combined with my body language. But Clara learned the verbal cue “jump” back when we were working on the Training Levels. I use it occasionally, cueing her to jump over a narrow flower bed in front of the house when on leash.
So I forgot which dog I had. I lined Clara up before the bar jump, cued “Jump” and she jumped right where she was, doing exactly as I asked, and landed on the jump. This was especially bad because it’s a homemade jump with bars that don’t come off. She could have broken a leg by catching it between the two horizontal bars. She didn’t do that, and she didn’t injure herself in any way. But that horrifying scare was punishing for me. I don’t think I’ll get mixed up about that again.
It’s ironic that I am weak at teaching verbal cues, but I somehow taught a good one for “jump.”
Final Words
One of the reasons I’m writing up these details is that there are still people, many many people, who blame errors on the dog. That is like a different world to me now. How can I unlearn what I have learned about reinforcement history and the matching law? When I see Clara’s “mistakes,” I am looking at a map of my own training habits and flaws. Look at Clara in the videos. She wants to perform behaviors for food and fun. Her attention is riveted on me. She is eager. There is no reason on earth she would deliberately make a mistake, as some people claim their dogs are doing when being “disobedient.”
She is obedient to the laws of learning, as we all are. And the most important thing is that she loves these games, even with my warty training. As I improve my skills, she’ll enjoy this activity even more.
