DMWYD Archives - Teaching My Old Dog New Tricks

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Clara’s Intermediate Trick Dog Title: Three-Minute & Three-Month Behaviors

Posted on December 10, 2021December 10, 2021 by Eileen Anderson

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.

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.

Clara’s Novice Masters Trick Dog Title: More Tricks, More Lessons Learned

Posted on November 5, 2021November 5, 2021 by Eileen Anderson

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.

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!

That Damn “Roll Out the Carpet” Trick

Posted on October 14, 2021 by Eileen Anderson

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.

Tan dog with a black muzzle and ears is putting her nose under part of a rolled up carpet and receiving a 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.

Tan dog with a black muzzle and ears is lying down on a maroon carpet. The very end of the carpet is turned over, showing the white backing. — **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.

Tan dog with a black tail and muzzle has her foot on a rolled up carpet — **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.

A tan dog with a black face and tail pushes an orange ball filled with food with her nose — **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!

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.