Michael Ellis' Philosophy of Dog Training

if you've been getting our semi-weekly newsletters you know that I'm in the middle of producing training DVDs with Michael Ellis the first in the building drive and focus series titled the power of training dogs with food will be released in several weeks Michael gives 4245 seminars a year all over the country he's been doing it for over ten years the next four or five streaming newsletters will feature Michael explaining his training system this lecture will teach new and old trainers a thing or two about their relationship with their dogs after you listen to this lecture on dog training you will understand why I feel lucky to be able to work with Michael Ellis on these DVDs when I release a new DVD it'll be announced in the newsletters so to keep me in one place at least while I talk now ah thank you for Edie and everybody and everyone here for having me the way we're going to structure it today is I'll talk again it'll be a lecture on sort of my philosophy on dog training but we're also going to cover pretty intensively the use of markers or what I call the use of verbal markers in our training so you have an idea of kind of where we're coming we have a mixed group of people here some of which train with me very frequently and some of which are totally new to me and what happens with the people that train with me on a regular basis we tend to just get out there and start training so what I'll try to do is I'll try to stop and explain to you guys what we're doing why we're doing it but it's not perfect so like Ed said please follow us around and if I'm doing something that I'm not explaining fully and you have questions about fire away I'm really low-key and casual about the format of it so you're more than welcome to interrupt and ask questions and if there's a topic that I wind up not covering that you want covered please so we can you guys really direct the direction of the seminar so so what I'm going to do is I'll jump straight in I'll give the my basic lecture again if you have questions along the way just put up your hand and when I get a shot to break I'll break and I'll answer your your your questions and then we're going to work the dogs in obedience and then we'll work the dogs in in protection after that I'm going to do my protection lecture tomorrow so I won't stop and talk much before the protection but what I tend to do is stop after each dog and talk a little bit about what went on with that dog and why we're doing what we're doing so the next person up can pause for a second in the protection it's less important in the obedience but in the protection we tend to start going and somebody's off getting their dog and if you want to hear what's said about the dog before just hang around I'll talk and then you can go sometimes people are in a hurry to be prepared and if you want to hear what's being said to each person stick around and listen to that after each dog it's relatively brief but I try to kind of encapsulate what we did with that dog as we went along so what we're doing in terms of I'm going to give our a little basically theory lecture now what we're doing with the dogs in terms of our communication system is not new good competitive obedience trainers have been doing some version of this kind of training for fifteen or twenty years probably it's been really slow to find its way into the protection sports the protection sport people have stuck to what I will call old school ways and it's probably an incorrect term but basically the protection world is still filled with more people that are practicing mostly what we call a scape avoidance training basically pressure-based compulsion based training where the dog is learning to do things but to turn off pressure so the dog is not working to access a reward there weren't looking to turn off pressure and there's still lots of trainers in the protection sport world that sort of approach it this way the competitive obedience world over the last 15 years has changed radically and people have begun to use a lot more operant conditioning type work right and that's ultimately what doing the term that I'll use extensively is markers or the use of verbal markers this is a behaviorally incorrect term so if you've exposed yourself to any of the operant conditioning litter out literature out there and either clicker training stuff you'll hear the same terms but the the behavioral terms Bant Banting around for this and those are you'll hear something called a conditioned reinforcer or a bridge this is the same thing as a marker I use the term marker because I like the fact that it connotes that we're marking a moment in time when the dog is either correct or incorrect and that's ultimately what we're doing our system is based on being able to communicate to the dog when they're right and wrong ultimately verbally so the system is based on being able to communicate any one of three things to the dog at any given time the first of which is when the dog is going to get a reward so we have a word or a sound that proceeds every reward we give our dog I say yes but it doesn't make any difference what you say you can say bang zip Joey whatever you want this is where clicker trainers would use a clicker so the important part here is that it proceeds the reward that I give my dog so this is a concept that I'm going to spend a lot of time talking about it's a really simple concept but it's going to drive people nuts because it's very simple but it's not easy to do what winds up happening is there's a concept and most people have probably been exposed to this during usually high school psychology there's a Russian psychologist Yvan Pavlov he was doing experiments in a lab with dogs on salivary responses and he found that the presence of the researchers in the lab had an effect on the dog and his experiments so we set up automated feeders in the so that so the technicians didn't have to be in the room with the dogs when they were getting fed and so he had a tone or a bell that would go off before the food dropped into the automated feeders for the dog and over a number of repetitions he noticed that when the tone would go off the dogs would start to salivate the dogs would actually have a physical response to what was previously a me stimuli to the dog so the Bell or the tone meant nothing to the dog but by predicting food the dog actually started to have a response a physical response to the sound and he called this classical conditioning and classical conditioning is what we're going to do with our reward sound our reward marker we're going to classically conditioned this the sound to mean a rewards coming the interesting thing that Pavlov noted was that if the foot if he sounded the tone at the same time the food dropped or if he sounded the tone while the dog was eating there was no classical conditioning and it's the same with our reward marker if I'm saying yes and giving my dog the food at the same time or saying yes while my dog's eating the food my dog will not become classically conditioned to that sound so it has to precede this the production of the reward by a split second so I need to go yes reward yes reward yes reward so it needs to follow right after really simple it's a pain in the neck your mouth and your body want to go at the same time so this yes feels natural yes does not feel natural so you're going to have to condition yourself to do that once your dog's condition to this sound it's an incredibly powerful tool right the dog knows that whatever they're doing when they heard that sound is what they're getting rewarded for so at the point that they're conditioned to the sound I no longer have to get the reward to the dog immediately on completion of the action I just have to mark it with my voice so if my dog's across the field and I tell my dog to down and he lays down and I say yes he's going to jump up come tearing across the field I'm gonna reach in my pocket I'm gonna give him a piece of food and now that much reward might have come several seconds after the act of downing but he knows that whatever he was doing when he heard that sound is what he's getting rewarded for which is very powerful now I don't have to be there when I'm training without the use of markers where we try to do is we try to get the reward to the dog as close to the completion of the behavior that we're trying to capture as possible so if I'm trying to teach my dog to sit and I'm not using a marker as soon as his bite hits a ground I'm trying to get them a piece of food and they've done further learning studies and they know that dogs learn best if I'm not using a reward marker or a bridge if they learn best if they get the reward in under a second of the completion of the behavior we're trying to capture I don't care how good you are you are not consistently getting rewards to your dog in under a second it's not going to happen you might do it occasionally but you are not consistent on a consistent basis getting rewards to your dog in under a second so once my dog's condition this sound I simply have to mark the behavior with my voice in under a second so that's incredibly liberating it allows us to pinpoint the the moment the dog was correct and the reward can follow after which is powerful the other powerful part about it is allows us to have the rewards out of sight so one of the trickiest things that we have in dog training is we start out if we're if we're using a reward based training we start out teaching the dog to work to get a reward and the reward is there driving it and then getting the reward out of the picture and still having the dog perform is one of the trickier things we do and we want the dog to know that the dog goes through us to get to a reward that they don't see and the use of markers a reward marker greatly facilitates this this makes us much much easier so you're going to hear me talk over the course of the weekend about what I call the active versus reactive dog in clicker circles you'll hear people call the active dog an operant dog but we're talking about the same thing the active dog is a dog that understands that their behavior has an effect on their environment and I'm an integral piece of that environment meaning their behavior can make things happen for them and we've all seen this you take a puppy home use some food to show your puppy to sit and lay down and speak and come when they're called and a few things you're messing around in the kitchen in the living room you're showing your dog how to do some things so you ask your puppy to sit your puppy sits you don't give it a reward immediately so it downs it sits again hit you with its foot right it backs up it barks at you the puppy's cycling through ever the dog psyching through everything that it knows that's got a reward in the past so that dog has made the connection that its behavior is what makes the reward come out and it's actively trying to figure out what it needs to do to make me give it a reward and we like this because that dog is much easier to teach new things to that dog is trying to figure out what aspect of their behavior made the reward happen so when they make the connection it's a very strong connection in the dog's head the dog says ah I did that by doing this so that makes that behavior that much stronger we've all seen the reactive dog as well and the reactive dog is a dog whose behavior is being driven by the reward their behavior is not driving the production of the reward this sounds like us sounds like I'm splitting hairs but it's a really important concept the reactive dog's behavior is being driven by the reward itself their behaviors not driving the production of the reward so we've all seen this as well somebody comes out on the field with a dog the dogs not paying any attention to them like oh what's over there what's over there they take out a ball wave the dot ball in the dog's face tuck the ball into their arm off they go healing and the dog heals beautifully you're look at the person you go wow that looks really pretty that dogs doing nice healing but the dog's behavior is being driven by the reward he didn't drive the production of the reward and this every single dog starts out as a reactive dog there's no reason for a dog to pay attention to us unless we setup the circumstances that make it productive for the dog that make it rewarding for the dog and a marker simply makes that easier so I bring a puppy home I conditioned my puppy to their reward marker yes vgs feed yes feed yes feed a hundred times until every time i say yes my puppy goes hey where's the food now he's conditioned to the sound and then I put food hi hide food on my body and every time I take the puppy out I go pop up he looks at me I say yes and out comes a piece of food so he didn't see the food but his attention on me made it come out if I do that ten days in a row on the eleventh day I step out I let my puppy out he runs over to me he sits there looked at me goes come on last ten days in a row you've had food on you so you must have it now and he offers a behavior he looks at me and goes come on you got something for me and I say yes I do and I give him the food right now the puppy starts to work me to make something that he doesn't see come out so our reward marker really facilitates that transfer from a reactive to an active dog so we like that the other thing that allows us to do and competitive obedience has become more and more detail-oriented you'll find it's it's really easy to go out go out and grab a world championship level shoots and tapes from 15 years ago and watch the obedience and then watch the obedience at this year's World Championships it's a totally different animal like it's evolved the level of animation and precision and everything changes from year to year so we're talking about really fine details separating the okay dogs from the very good dogs at these competitions and markers really allow us to pinpoint very tiny aspects of a dog's behavior so let's take a dog looking at us focusing on us in heel position and let's say I want to teach my dog in heel position to look at my face and I've taught my dog a cue watch and they look at my face when they're in heel position if I'm not using a marker I'm standing here I asked my dad to look my dog looks up at me I see what I want I'm excited about this so I go to give the dog a reward I do that a couple of times as soon as I start to move to give the dog a reward the dog says ah I'm getting rewarded what does it do it looks away from me to the reward and when it actually gets the reward it got the reward for the exact opposite of looking at me you got the reward for looking away from me so that just that split second difference in timing means I'm rewarding a completely different behavior and over time that dog starts to hold his head lower and lower lower until it's not looking at me any more up at me it's looking out here where it thinks the rewards going to come out so and if I have a marker of course if I'm using a marker my dog's condition - a reward marker the dog looks at me I see it I say yes and then the reward comes out afterwards and the dog knows that whatever it was doing when it heard that sound is what it gets rewarded for so I can pinpoint very very fine aspects of behaves oh we have one word or sound that precedes every reward we give our dog it is inherently a release for our dog so when I use my reward marker the dog can stop doing whatever he was doing and access a reward my dogs over there I say down eight downs I say yes he's going to jump up and come to access a reward I'm healing with my dog I say yes he's gonna spring out a position and go give me my toy right so it's a release we have a second word or sound that means I like what you're doing keep doing it so I say good but again it doesn't make any difference what words you use I use good because we sort of preload this word at home when you live with your dog when I'm petting him I say oh you're a good boy and when I'm feeding him I say good boy and pretty soon he knows good means he did something well it's equivalent of verbal praise it's my way of telling the dog he's right without releasing him from his behavior and we use the second word er sound when we're working on either duration in the behavior or linking multiple behaviors together without releasing the dog from one of the component pieces so once my dog's condition to his you're good boy sound whatever it is he knows that that means you're good we'll talk about the first thing duration what happens when I initially teach a behavior most of our obedience behaviors their actions so if I take sit down stand come to heel look at me these are all physical actions on the dogs part what we want to do when we first teach the dog these behaviors is reward the dog as close as possible to the completion of the action we want to highlight the fact that it was the action that got the dog the reward so if I'm teaching my dog to sit my dog's butt hits the ground I say yes he gets a reward my dog's butt hits the ground yes he gets a reward I'm pinpointing that action of putting your rear end on the ground and that's what's getting a reward as we progress in our training and my dog starts to sit well the dog figures out through that process that the faster he sits the faster he gets rewarded so he starts to sit more quickly everything is smoother he gets a he really understands what his job is as we progress of course I'm gonna hit a spot where I don't want the dog to sit and then jump right back up again to access his drawer I wanted to actually hold the behavior for a second or two duration we're starting to work on duration and this is what our second sound comes in so I say sit my dog sits I say good good they hold it for a couple of seconds yes they're released and rewarded could do the same thing with a focus command I teach my dog watch my dog looks at me yes reward watch my dog looks at me yes reward I do that a hundred times now every time I say watch my dog looks right at me now I want my dog to hold that behavior so I say watch the dog looks at me good good they hold it for a couple of seconds yes they're rewarded or whatever right so the first place we use our second sound is during duration when we're building duration in our behavior we want to give the dog feedback without releasing the dog the second place we use it is when we're linking multiple behaviors together and we want to give the dog feedback on one of the intermediate pieces so a lot of what we do in competitive obedience is break complicated behavior chains down into their component pieces teach those pieces separately and then bring those pieces together for a finished product like competitive heeling is way too complicated behavior to try to teach the whole thing at once so we teach a focal piece where do you want the dog to look when he heals we teach a position piece wears heel position and how do you get there and then we teach the skills of moving in heel position how do you maintain that position as I go forward backwards turn left turn right these are all different physical skills for the dog so we tended the good competitive trainers tend to teach these things separately and then bring them together so I may put my dog's focus on a command watch he looks at me rewarded watch he looks at me a yes reward we do that repeatedly separately I'm teaching my dog to come to heel heel my dog gets here yes reward heel my dog gets here yes reward now I want to put those two pieces together I would say heel my dog gets here good watch my dog looks up at me yes reward so I'm giving the dog feedback but not releasing the dog there's an exercise you'll see this weekend that we teach all of our dogs regardless of the sport we're doing or I do and the people that tend to train with me do and this we call it a change of positions exercise it ultimately was a ring sport exercise where you leave your dog at a distance and you tell your dog to sit down stand down sit stand all in a different order the dog knows each of those commands sit down and stand from each of the other so your dog really has an understanding of the concept of stand my dog can be in a sit nice now understand and they'll stand my dog could be in it down I'll tell understand any stands so very useful skill to help the dog really understand each of the positions that we're going to ask them to do so we teach all of our dogs this I teach pet dogs this if I'm working with them it's just a good way to get the dogs to understand each of those positions when we're initially doing that we're the dogs on what we call continuous reinforcement I mean I reward every single rep sit yes reward down yes reward Stan yes reward etc as the dog becomes fluent with these I'm not going to want to reward every repetition I'm going to want to reward the best repetitions or the ones I'm having difficulty with but I still maybe at an early stage in my training where I want to give the dog feedback for having been correct so I might say sit good stand good down yes or whatever okay the other place that we use our are kind of your right signal keep going signal our good marker is when we're working on stability and exercises so what happens a lot is if I have a very motivated dog gets cranked up those dogs frequently have a heart enact what I call an external dog a dog that fidgets and shakes and jacked up and wants to go those dogs frequently have a hard time holding positions sitting still right so when I see that in a young dog I want to work a lot on what I call stability in the positions so I might not release the dog out of the position when I'm teaching it as much with that kind of dog because if I release the dog out of the position I make them want to move more and so they don't want to sit still so I may struggle with that so I want to work on stability in their positions so that lolis still used by your correct marker but not releasing the dog and I'll take the reward to the dog in place so my dog might be over there and I say sit and I say good and I walk over to the dog and give the dog a piece of food in place I walk back away good I walk back over and reward the dog we're paying stability in that position so we use our our good marker there sometimes the dog gets a reward and sometimes it's just a signal that you were correct keep doing what you're doing and you'll get a reward ok so we have a word or sound that precedes every reward we our dog it's a release I say yes but it doesn't matter what it is we have a word or sound that means I like what you're doing keep doing it we use it working on stability duration or giving the dog feedback when we don't want to release the dog from a given behavior and finally we have a word or a sound that means you were wrong and in the beginning of our training it is a non reinforcement marker meaning it is not a signal for positive punishment correction whatever you want to call it right it is a signal that you were wrong I'm going to withhold something that you want from you and I'm going to ask you to do that behavior over again and the reason that in the early stages of our obedience training we don't punish the dog physically with a correction or social pressure for mistakes comes back to our active versus reactive dog thing if I have a young dog and the dog starting to learn something and they make a mistake and I give them a strong correction for making a mistake they get careful they get reactive they no longer want to try new behaviors because new behaviors are potentially dangerous for them and so the last time I tried something didn't work out so well for me I'm not going to do that again so they just sit there and wait for you to show them what do you know so Corrections in the early stages of our work especially for obedience behaviors not only have the potential of undermining my relationship with my dog making worried about me afraid of me that sort of thing but I also have the potential of turning my active dog into a reactive dog and one of the things that we want to keep intact in our young dogs when we're starting to train is the ability to make a mistake and try again it's huge I want my dog to say oh I know I made a mistake you told me I marked the moment you made the mistake but let me try again let me try again let me try again I'll get it right this time that makes it much easier for us to train complicated behaviors of the dogs willing to keep trying to figure out what he needs to do it if I shut the dog down early I'm in trouble with that so and most of our obedience behaviors are not natural behaviors for the dog anyway right the things that we're asking the dog to do in it out in the world sit down stand heel retrieve all of these various these various behavior are basically neutral to the dog in the real world meaning they don't have they only have meaning because we supply it meaning but I reward my dog for laying down when I ask him to lay down that's the reward that's the part that makes it valuable to the dog right if I'm not supplying a reward for that downing doesn't really mean anything about he lays down when he's tired but it doesn't really mean anything that's not rewarding or not rewarding for the dog so we supply meaning so if I most of our obedience behaviors really lend themselves well to non reinforcement non reinforcement is for mistakes so I ask my dog to lay down instead my dog sits I say nope you don't get this piece of food let's try that again I say down he sits instead I say nope you don't get this piece of food let's try again I say down he downs yes and he gets the piece of food so he figures out oh that's what gets me to the piece of food so non reinforcement works beautifully for that kind of stuff for our medians behaviors and when I say non reinforcement and we're not correcting the dog it means also that we're not using social pressure of a dog means my non reinforcement marker isn't no bad dog right that's the same as a correction to dessert to a certain kind of dog right social pressure is also a correction for our dog I should distinguish a non reinforcement marker from a what we call a conditioned Punisher right so our no marker pinpoints the moment the dog was incorrect the same way that our yes marker our reward marker pinpoints the exact moment the dog was correct and I mentioned earlier that our reward marker is in behavioral circus circles is also called a conditioned reinforcer and a conditioned reinforcer is something that was meant nothing to the dog in our case is sound the word yes for me but whatever it is a sound that had no meaning to the dog but by predicting something that was reinforcing to the dog what we call a primary reinforcer food a toy petting whatever now the sound itself has been conditioned to be reinforcing to the dog so dog hears the sound and he gets happy right because it's been conditioned to be reinforcing at the other end of the spectrum we have what's called the conditioned Punisher so if I bring my dog out and I say no and give him a correction or no and whack him on the head with a newspaper right if I do this 20 times in a row when I say no my dog is going to act as if I corrected them they're going to physically act like I corrected him they're gonna go well when they say no even though now I didn't touch them if I walk up to you and say hey and punching the stomach Hey and punching the stomach and I do that 20 times in a row the next time I say hey you go home whether or not I hit you right your body takes over a conditioned Punisher so what happens is there are certain places in our lives that we would use a conditioned Punisher I don't want my dog to chase cars I don't want him to bite my nephew I don't want him to there's things that I want out of the repertoire like you don't get to do these these are bad things right if you rehearse these behaviors continually it becomes a problem for us so I might correct those behaviors when they first start happening and I might condition a Punisher to do that so I take my dog for a walk he wants to chase the moving car I say no I give him a correction we go do something else I say no I give him a correction pretty soon no means a correction to my dog that's the case if I've used one of those in real life if they've used a condition Punisher in real life use a different sound for your non reinforcement marker so lots of people say no for their condition Punisher and they say or wrong or whatever for your non reinforcement marker but it's really important if you've corrected your dog at home while saying no and you try to use no as your non reinforcement marker on the field you're going to get the same bad effects as if you were correcting the dog right so we should talk a little bit now so in a nutshell that's our communication system for the dog right it allows us to basically pinpoint exactly when the dog is right and wrong when they're going to get a reward when I let that like what they're doing and they keep for them to keep doing it and when they were wrong and they're gonna have to either do it over or they're gonna get punished depending on where we are in the process I should probably talk a little bit here about non reinforcement and where it works and where it doesn't work so what we're talking about here this whole system is what we call a reward based system you'll hear people say motivational training I don't like the term because dog should be motivated fertile by lots of things they can be motivated to get something they want they can be motivated to avoid something unpleasant there both forms of motivational training what we really are doing is reward-based training we're taking something the dog wants and showing them what they have to do to access that reward so reward-based training the constraints on reward-based training the limits of reward based training are your dog's motivation them how motivated is my dog that's what constrains this system and there's a reason that working dog people are out there looking for that nutty dog if somebody told me when I got into dogs thirty years ago that I was going to want some the maniac dogs that I've had in last year I would've been like you're crazy wild dog like that a dog wants to bite everything he wants to chase everything you know I tried to give a piece of food he took the end of my finger off right who wants that kind of dog what you find though is that the more motivated the dog is the better reward based training works the harder that dog will work to get to the reward and the more distractions that dog will tune out to get to it so the more motivated our dog the better non reinforcement works and the better reward based training works so we'll spend a lot of time this weekend talking about building motivation in our dog how do we use food and toys to make more motivation what's a productive way to play with your dog to build motivation and there's a reason that we're constantly trying to make our dogs more motivated because if my dog doesn't want what I have reward based training and non reinforcement doesn't work if I'm training my dog with the ball and he doesn't really want the ball and he makes a mistake and I say no you don't get your ball he goes so what look what's over there he goes off and wanders off so the dog has to be motivated for the objects well it was funny when I first started getting into reward-based training I had trained with a lot of guys that were very much purist escape avoidance trainers the guys I learned from were all compulsion based trained and some of them were very good at it but it was that was sort of the mindset and the first time i got what i would consider now a highly motivated dog the guys i trained with told me oh you're gonna have to get on that dog right now you'll never get him under control unless you start getting on him now as a young dog and i actually found the opposite to be true he was so motivated for everything for a ball to bite to play everything that non reinforcement worked beautifully on him if he made a mistake and i said no you don't get your ball you wanna try that again he was like please please let me try it again right and he would get it right the next time so i used a lot less pressure on that dog then i wound up using on a lot of the dogs that are a little less motivated the tricky dogs for us are what i call the medium motivation dogs so we get a super highly motivated dog great non reinforcement reward based training works beautifully that dog really trying to figure out what he needs to do to get to that stuff we have a dog with no motivation really easy as well you just turn it into a pet you don't train it for any of this stuff because it's a square peg round hall no he lays around the house it's great you let that one off the hook the ones that are difficult are the ones that are in the middle that supply us with some motivation but not enough of motivation to override their interest in certain things in the environment under distraction or maybe they weren't won't work more for more than a few minutes to get a reward before they say i'm tired i don't want to do this anymore those are the dogs that get the brunt of the compulsion in our training because if i don't have something that dog wants more than some aspect of the environment i have no choice but to correct the dog at that point so if my dog's favorite thing in the whole world is chasing squirrels and i go out there try to heal him around and there's a squirrel in the tree that's the favorite thing right there he wants to get the squirrel he doesn't care that i have a ball he doesn't care that i have food he doesn't care about any of that stuff his desire for that will override the desire for this and i cannot make that go away if that's his favorite thing so i have no choice but to correct him and say no you can't have that but you can have this so the dogs in the middle of the ones that we wind up using the most compulsion on the other thing that non reinforcement like i mentioned briefly before non reinforcement works really well for what I call neutral behaviors favours that really have no meaning to the dog unless we supply it o boast of our obedience behaviors sit down stand heel these things aren't intrinsically reinforcing for the dog non reinforcement does not work on what I call self reinforcing behaviors the squirrels right so most of our dogs are hardwired to enjoy chasing things it's a vestige of when they had to hunt to survive and if they weren't genetically programmed to enjoy chasing they wouldn't get to eat the act of chasing has to feel good to them right so your dog may chase squirrels and never catch a squirrel in his life but the act of chasing squirrels feel so good but the more he does it the more into it he gets so they can get bonkers for it and they're like oh this feels good this is what we call a self-reinforcing behavior non reinforcement does not work on self reinforcing behaviors my dog goes to chase the squirrel I can't say nope let him chase the squirrel come back give him a piece of food it'll never go away that way because the behavior itself is reinforcing so with self reinforcing behaviors the only way we're going to make them go out of the repertoire is by punishing them away taking the self reinforcing nature away from it so that's one of the other places that we will use punishment in the beginning if it's necessary and the dog I'll block the dog from being able to perform self reinforcing behaviors so they don't get to continually rehearse those behaviors let's talk about the use of compulsion when I first started doing a reward based training when I transitioned from a very much an old-school style of compulsion to training to a reward based system I met a woman that trained AKC obedience and her dog looked much better than my dog I looked at the dog and I said wow her dog is really fast and really happy and very correct like and I wanted to know what she did so I went out and hung out watch what she did learn some stuff started playing around with reward-based training and like many people when I first hit that spot I was like a religious convert I was like this is the coolest stuff I've ever seen you mean you can train a dog without correcting them I was so excited I was like yes I'm gonna train dogs with no compulsion whatsoever turns out that you can't do that but you can do a lot without compulsion if you're good at reward-based training so what I found is I had a couple of dogs at the same time roughly and I got them up to a certain age and they'd had virtually no Corrections they were almost two years old both of them almost two and they have really no corrections in their life minimal and that hit a spot in my work where I needed to correct the dogs for certain things one of the dogs just folded like a house of cards like I changed the rules on him he was looking at me like what have you done to me like this is not in our agreement to like I work if I make a mistake you make me do it again this correction thing I don't get it he just crumbled really squashed him totally undermined his trust in me and everything the other one wanted to eat me like he came at me with a vengeance he's like huh you don't correct me this is not in my repertoire and both of them the problem was that they hadn't learned as a part of the system how to cope with the stress of being corrected of being made to do something and how to learn to turn that pressure off so I'm very very methodical about how I teach a dog to access a reward had a shape behavior and we'll talk about it this weekend how we lure dogs and move dogs into various positions and how we show them how to access a reward we teach them what the reward markers are we spend a significant amount of time on this I want to be just as thoughtful about how I introduce pressure to my dog and so we'll talk this weekend about what I call a leash pressure work so there's a place that my dog's life where I'm going to teach the dog to turn pressure off away from all my obedience it's simply showing the dog that I have a signal I'm going to put pressure on you you have to turn that pressure off by complying and I do it with what I call leash pressure work we teach the dog to give to the leash to yield to the leash so most of our dogs have a classic opposition reflex to a leash there's a reason you see pet dog people with their dogs dragging them down the street the dog wants to go forward you pull this way the harder you pull this way the harder they want to go that way you're walking your puppy on the leash your puppy sits down the more you try to pull forward to get the puppy to Kalakh the more they hunker down into their it a classic opposition reflex you pull the leash the dog pulls against the leash what we want to do is teach the dog that if you feel leash pressure you go with it you move with it and we teach this separate from all our obedience so I have a young dog they hit a certain spot in our training they're usually oh I want to say five six months to nine ten months old somewhere in that range there we the dog and I have a good relationship we're playing well together everything's good in that front they're usually finished teething and then I'll take them out and I'll put them on a training collar and I'll show them how to move with the leash I'll just pull the leash in a straight line the dog puts on the brakes and I keep the pressure on the dog freaks out like pull and I pull pull pull and finally they go and as soon as they go with it I mark that yes all the pressure comes off the leash good boy etc right so they basically learn after a number of sessions that resisting the leash doesn't work and this is mildly stressful this is escape avoidance training I'm turning pressure on you turn it off by going with it but if I do this right in a number of sessions I get to the point where I can move my dog with two fingers in the leash I grab the leash I go this and the dog moves with the leash so now I've given myself a tool to subtly manipulate my dog's behavior so like when we go to teach heeling it's an important part of my healing program which is to be able to manipulate the dog Verret for very subtly he gets two inches too far in front of me I can use my wrists to make him move backwards right very subtle gradients I can give the dog information with the leash I can move him around the other thing the dog learns is that stress it a little stress isn't going to kill him he learns to turn pressure off and it's not the end of the world so later on if in my work as I progress I need to use the leash to correct my dog he knows what it is he knows how to turn it off and he's not stressed by it but when I taught in this I didn't teach him it giving him any commands I didn't teach him it while teaching him any obedience behaviors so he doesn't associate any of this stress with our obedience work I get it ironed out somewhere else I show the dog the skill and then I bring the tool in to my toolbox and incorporate it into my obedience work okay so now we've built up a system where the dog understands yes good and know basically understands when they're getting a reward I can tell them exactly when they're right and wrong with verbal markers I can manipulate their behavior to access something they want and they know how to turn pressure off and I have a leash pressure skill that I can use to manipulate them around with now these are the tools that I'm primarily going to use to train my dog a couple of pitfalls that we're going to run across that I should mention right now you'll see when we start working dogs that what we do a lot of the same way that I taught the dog leash pressure without any commands we teach the dogs behaviors before we put the behaviors on cue so the first time I go out and teach my dog to sit I do not say sit I show my dog how to sit I take a piece of food I hold in front of my dog's face he follows the food I lift the food up his nose goes up his butt goes down he sits I say yes I reward it I didn't say sit I didn't do anything I simply messed with him until I got him to sit and I repeat this over and over again until every time I lift my hand like this my dog sits now I put that behavior on cue but not until I'm sure that I can get the dog to do the behavior the way I want so I taught the behavior now we put the behavior on cue so I say sit lift my hand yes reward sit lift my hand yes reward sit lift my hand yes reward sit oh look the dog sat before I lifted my hand yay right and we're gonna do this with everything we're gonna do it down we're gonna do a stand we're gonna do it come to heel right we teach the behavior then we put it on verbal cue and the verbal cue predicts what follows immediately after it so I put the verbal cue right in front of whatever physical help I need to get the dog to do the behavior so now I've touched on this a couple of times already one was with the reward marker right the reward marker needs to be predictive needs to happen right before the production of the reward now I'm talking about putting a verbal cue right in front of physical help because this is one of the most important concepts that we have if you do anything physically and verbally at the same time the physical will override the verbal and become the signal for the behavior so if you're there and your dogs in front of you you're saying down down down you can do that over and over again physical verbal together physical overrides verbal becomes the signal for the dog now you try to stand up straight like this and you say down and don't move your dog won't lay down you drop your head bang down your dog goes so the very first obedience class I took I was 12 years old German Shepherd Dog Club use choke chain old-school Keillor method class the instructor told us basically you teach sit by saying sit and pulling up on the collar and pushing down on the dogs but at the same time so we went sit sit sit you can do that a thousand times in a row on the thousand of first time if you stand up like this and say sit your dog won't sit but if you go as soon as you turn towards the dog boom they sit physical verbal together physical overrides verbal so even if I'm doing old school on old school if I'm doing escape avoidance training even if I'm using the leash or correction to get the dog into position the cue has to happen right before it it has to be predictive so I would say sit boom sit boom sit bone sit boom sit oh look he sat before I move we got it right it has to be predictive we see these things all the time I told you before a little bit about that the change of positions exercise when you leave the dog at a distance so you tell him to sit down and stand the time I first saw that exercise I was doing shuttin and I saw a ring sport guy do the exercise and I thought it was super cool like oh that's really cool I'm gonna teach my dog that so I went home and taught my dog out over the course of the next couple of months and he was really good at it I could leave him way over there sit down stand down sits down any order and I thought all this is awesome and I had a friend videotaped me training one day and I was going like this sit down stand with my head right really little movements I lifted my eyebrows dropping my head I got oh I should stop doing that go out the next day stand up straight sit down stand nothing I lift my head like this he sit downs stance right I didn't have to say a word he physical I was making the gesture at the same time I was saying something and it's a huge problem right so this is one of the problems that people see all the time there pulling their shoulder they're popping the dog with the leash at the same time they're giving in command all these things are going to get in your way as you progress right so keep this in mind it's a big part of it I mentioned briefly luring we use luring a lot so I'll touch it lightly here right so when we initially starting to teach behaviors we use a lure extensively to get behavior in the beginning so usually with food so one of the first things we do with our young dogs we charge up our our reward marker so I go out and I say yes feed us feed us feed 100 times until my dog's condition to their sound and then I show my dog how to follow a reward around so I take a piece of food I lure my dog like this as soon as my dog follows that I say yes I let the dog access the food so I'm teaching them to follow my hand around like in turn them in circles move them up down all kinds of stuff to follow a lure around this is what's going to allow us to manipulate the dog into the various positions that we want to teach the dog so we practice blurring and then we start to incorporate it into our obedience behaviors and one of the things that we want to do when we're teaching the dog to lure is we control the dog's body by the dog's head this is a big part of the system that what the dog's nose does their rear end will do the opposite so by controlling the dog's head we control how their body moves and luring is an integral part of that so if I want my dog to sit I simply pull the dog's nose up as it follows the food up its nose goes up its rear end goes down if I want my dog's Rin to come up I simply go under it snows it snows goes down like this and the rear end comes up if I want my dogs we're going to go to my left I simply pull my dog's nose to the right right and this is going to be an integral part of not only our shaping of behavior but also when we get to healing later we'll talk a lot about healing and healing is head position and healing is critical because what the dog's head does dictates what the rest of their body does so in a nutshell that's our system for communicating to the dog we show the dog a reward marker continuation marker and a non reinforcement or a punishment marker depending on where we are in our training and we show the dog how to turn off pressure in a very controlled environment and now we have a leash luring a way to communicate to the dog exactly when they're right and wrong and in the nutshell that's what we're going to use to teach the dog everything and it doesn't make any difference what it is sit down he'll get a beer from the fridge so it's all the same we're taking behaviors we're breaking those behaviors into pieces or showing the dog the pieces we're bringing the pieces together and timely communication and being able to tell the dog in a timely fashion when they're right and wrong that's dog training and as Edie says a lot it's simple but not easy like intellectually you'll get this concept in two listens you're talking you're all that makes perfect sense that's easy good good no problem it sounds perfect the actual execution of course is not so easy right like the separation and the moving is a lot of rehearsal on the physical aspects of doing it but the concepts not difficult at all any questions on that stuff sure and we'll do it we'll show you what dogs as we progress but the biggest thing is that we use the leash and a training collar to teach the dog to move with the leash so we start out with I usually use depends on the sensitivity of the dog right so if I have a very sensitive dog I may just use a slip lead on those little light nylon slip leads if I have a not so sensitive dog I use a little pinch collar now you get one of the small like poodle pinch collars the little tiny ones I put a pinch collar on the dog or whatever active training collar I need and then once it's on the dog I simply take the leash and I pull in straight lines so if the dog is here in front of me facing me I would just take the leash and I'd pull straight forward like this in a straight line the dog puts on the brakes like they normally do they resist and I just keep the steady pressure pulling I don't say anything I just pull put the ball and eventually I go this is uncomfortable so uncomfortable and boom they shoot forward they come with me and as soon as they come with me they give to the leash I mark it yes I turn alt I take all the pressure off the leash I either let go or just let it go slack and then I reward them by petting them or giving a piece of food or whatever right but ultimately they're whole the whole idea is that they turn pressure off now let's say they're beside me and I just go like this and I pull straight along their back even in a straight line as soon as they feel the pressure they resist pressure pressure pressure they finally take a step backwards and as soon as they move backwards off the leash pressure I mark it release the dog yeah good job right and if I do this a few sessions and pretty soon I can literally take two fingers and hold the leash and I pull a little bit the dog just goes with it he doesn't resist it at all and at that point my dog has learned to give to the leash and he suddenly learned to turn off pressure so then I can use it to teach my dog all kinds of things because now once he's learned to go with it it becomes know long it's no longer aversive anymore right it's no longer stressful for the dog it's a signal right it's my way of making him move with the leash so now let's say I put him beside me and I want to teach him to back up on command I simply say back pull back with the leash yes reward back pull back with the leash yes reward back with at least yes reward I do that 20 times and then I say back and look my dog took a step back without me pulling the leash excuse me then I've taught him that behavior I've taught him to turn off pressure and move so now I've accomplished two main things with that one is I've given myself a tool other than luring to manipulate the dog's behavior and I'm going to use leash pressure at that point to teach the dog the finish to come to heel I'm going to use it to teach the dog to back up and heel I'm going to use it to teach the dog to get closer to me or move its rear end I can use the leash now in a lot of different ways to manipulate behavior and then also I've taught the dog to turn off pressure so if now my dog I hit the my dogs older my dog's eighteen months or two years old and I need to start correcting my dog my dog doesn't freak out they know what it is and they know how to turn it off right so for me compulsion one of the most important parts about compulsion is I want my dog to understand what I want from them and I want them to know how to turn the pressure off so meaning I've shown them what I expect them to do I've shown them there's something in it for them I've shown them how to turn pressure off and now I say okay this is your clear path to getting it right but what happens a lot is people start using Corrections before the dog is fluent in the behavior before the dog knows what's expected and they haven't shown the dog out of turn pressure off so now the dog really stresses and the dog stresses in a way that associates it with whatever obedience exercise you were trying to teach and so now that dog starts to hate that exercise or hate obedience or not want to be around you all the bad things we see from pressure training our it's come down to bad communication my dog knows what I want knows how to turn the pressure off and has a good relationship with me I can pressure my dog a lot I can use a lot of Correction and my dog looks good he looks happy he's fine with it he knows what he had to do it was like okay I got it I got I know what I need to do and he does it right boom he gets a reward excellent but if my dog doesn't know what to do doesn't know how to turn pressure off and I tried to use compulsion of my training now that's the dog that looks like the traditionally compulsive we've all seen they say he owned the dog goes it keels lawn next to you like oh I'm so sad right that's just bad compulsion training right it's somebody wasn't clearly communicating with the dog the dog didn't know what it needed to do wasn't sure how to turn it off so you get all this bad stress signs around it but if we're careful about it then we give ourselves the tools to pressure the dog later without all the bad esthetic fallout that we traditionally see poorly executed compulsion based training any other questions on that stuff yeah well they're certain play depends on what the behavior is so there are certain places where like let's say I'm teaching a stay to my dog I'm going to teach my dog a sit-stay I won't use my my reward marker that releases the dog I'll use my intermediate my continuation marker and I may take a reward to the dog when I do that intermittently so I might leave my dog over there and say sit I step away from him he stays in a sit I say good I walked back over I give him a piece of food I step away again good I walk back over I give him a piece of food right so I'm paying him in the position I'm paying him for staying there I'm paying him for duration but I'm not releasing him out of it but I'm giving him feedback that he's right every time I say yes the dog is gonna be released from whatever so if I were gonna use yes there so my dogs over there and I say sit and he sits and I say yes he's gonna jump up and come towards me to go hey where's my reward right you know you gonna throw the ball for me you're gonna feed me what's it going to be right so if I want to work on stability in a behavior or duration then I frequently take rewards to the dog in place step away return give the dog a reward and I use my other marker so we really have two markers that mean you're right right for me there yes and good but it doesn't matter what they are you make up your own but they have to that means your right one that means your right and you're being released into a reward the other means keep going and you're you get a reward or keep going and I'll bring a reward to you in place what not Renault yeah always give a reward now I say that you don't have to it's like anything if I've rewarded the dog every time I say yes and I hit a spot and I didn't reward the dog the dog is gonna be okay but I don't make a habit of not rewarding them because the sound is now but conditioned to mean good things to the dog so it would take I would have to not reward them a lot when I said it for to start to lose its power but if I do too much if I release the dog yes and don't give them a reward too much then you'll start to lose the power of that reward so I would say I almost always give them a reward the other thing is and this is sort of an advanced thing that I do later but the idea is that I build in different ways of rewarding my dog so what I do is I teach my dog little games that we play so I teach my dog to spin right and spin the circle go between my legs I have these little game I teach them to jump up and hit my my hand with his nose and when I teaching these initially each of these things predicts a reward for my dog so I say spin my dog spins in a circle I say yes bang he gets a reward gets a tug we play tug I teach him touch he jumps up in the air and hits my hand with his nose and I say yes and I give him a reward through rehearsal those little actions those little games become reinforcing it onto themselves so I'm at that point he just likes to spin and he likes to jump up and hit my hands because it's been paired so now those things feel good to him so I can release my dog and say touch touch touch spin heel and off we go again and that little interlude was rewarding to the dog right so there are lots of ways I can and some dogs are so socially packed driven or there so they like social contact that I may release the dog and pet them a rough on with them a wrestle with them or whatever it depends on the dog but most of the time the vast majority of the time when I release the dog I'm giving them a primary reinforcer which for us in our training system is usually food or a toy so it's usually they're a piece of food or a game of tug or I'm throwing the ball for you or whatever it is those are those are the ones we use most frequently I mentioned briefly luring we use luring a lot so I'll touch it lightly here right so when we initially starting to teach behaviors we use a lure extensively to get behavior in the beginning so usually with food so one of the first things we do with our young dogs we charge up our reward marker so I go out and I say yes VES feed us feed 100 times until my dog's conditioned to their sound and then I show my dog how to follow a reward around so I take a piece of food I lure my dog like this as soon as my dog follows that I say yes I let the dog access the food so I'm teaching them to follow my hand around like in tournament circles move them up down all kinds of stuff to follow a lure around this is what's going to allow us to manipulate the dog into the various positions that we want to teach the dog so we practice luring and then we start to incorporate it into our obedience behaviors and one of the things that we want to do when we're teaching the dog to lure is we control the dog's body by the dog's head this is a big part of the system that what the dog's nose does their rear end will do the opposite so by controlling the dog's head we control how their body moves and luring is an integral part of that so if I want my dog to sit I simply pull the dog's nose up as it follows the food up its nose goes up its rear end goes down if I want my dog's Rin to come up I simply go under it snows it snows goes down like this and the rear end comes up if I want my dog's rear end to go to my left I simply pull my dog's nose to the right right and this is going to be an integral part of not only our shaping of behavior but also when we get to heeling later we'll talk a lot about healing and healing is head position and healing is critical because what the dog's head does dictates what the rest of their body does so in a nutshell that's our system for communicating to the dog we show the dog a reward marker continuation marker and a non reinforcement or punishment marker depending on where we are in our training and we show the dog how to turn off pressure in a very controlled environment and now we have a leash luring and a way to communicate to the dog exactly when their right and wrong and in the nutshell that's what we're going to use to teach the dog everything and it doesn't make any difference what it is sit down he'll get a beer from the fridge it's all the same we're taking behaviors we're breaking those behaviors into pieces or showing the dog the pieces we're bringing the pieces together and timely communication and being able to tell the dog in a timely fashion when they're right and wrong that's dog training and as Edie says a lot it's simple but not easy like intellectually you'll get this concept and two listens you're talking you're all that makes perfect sense that's easy good good no problem it sounds perfect the actual execution of course is not so easy right like the separation in the movie is a lot of rehearsal on the physical aspects of doing it but the concepts not difficult at all any questions on that stuff sure and we'll do it will show you with dogs as we progress but the biggest thing is that we use the leash and a training collar to teach the dog to move with the leash so we start out with I usually use depends on the sensitivity of the dog right so if I have a very sensitive dog I may just use a slip lead on those little light nylon slip leads if I have a not so sensitive dog I use a little pinch collar I get one of the small like poodle pinch collars the little tiny ones I put a pinch collar on the dog or whatever active training collar I need and then once it's on the dog I simply take the leash and I pull in straight lines so if the dog is here in front of me facing me I would just take the leash in I'd pull straight forward like this in a straight line the dog puts on the brakes like they normally do they resist and I just keep the steady pressure pulling I don't say anything I just pull pull pull and eventually dog oh this is uncomfortable this is uncomfortable and boom they shoot forward they come with me and as soon as they come with me they give to the leash I mark it yes I turn all I take all the pressure off the leash I either let go or just let it go slack and then I reward them by petting them or giving a piece of food or whatever right but ultimately their whole the whole idea is that they turn pressure off now let's say they're beside me and I just go like this and I pull straight along their back even in a straight line as soon as they feel the pressure they resist pressure pressure pressure they finally take a step backwards and as soon as they move backwards off the leash pressure I mark it release the dog yeah good job right and if I do this a few sessions and pretty soon I can literally take two fingers and hold the leash and I pull a little bit the dog just goes with it he doesn't resist it at all and at that point my dog has learned to give to the leash and he suddenly learned to turn off pressure so then I can use it to teach my dog all kinds of things because now once he's learned to go with it it becomes no law it's no longer aversive anymore right it's no longer stressful for the dog it's a signal right it's my way of making him move with the leash so now let's say I put him beside me and I want to teach him to back up on command I simply say back pull back with a leash yes reward back pull back with the leash yes reward back but at least yes reward I do that 20 times and then I say back and look my dogs I can step back without me pulling the leash excuse me then I've taught him that behavior I've taught him to turn off pressure and move so now I've two main things with that one is I've given myself a tool other than luring to manipulate the dog's behavior and I'm going to use leash pressure at that point to teach the dog the finish to come to heel I'm going to use it to teach the dog to back up and heel I'm going to use it to teach the dog to get closer to me or move it through our end I can use the leash now in a lot of different ways to manipulate behavior and then also I've taught the dog to turn off pressure so if now my dog I hit that my dog's older my dog's eighteen months or two years old and I need to start correcting my dog my dog doesn't freak out they know what it is and they know how to turn it off right so for me compulsion one of the most important parts about compulsion is I want my dog to understand what I want from them and I want them to know how to turn the pressure off so meaning I've shown them what I expect them to do I've shown them there's something in it for them I've shown them how to turn pressure off and now I say okay this is your clear path to getting it right but what happens a lot is people start using Corrections before the dog is fluent in the behavior before the dog knows what's expected and they haven't shown the dog out of turn pressure off so now the dog really stresses and the dog stresses in a way that associates it with whatever obedience exercise you were trying to teach and so now that dog starts to hate that exercise or hate obedience or not want to be around you all the bad things we see from pressure training are it's come down to bad communication my dog knows what I want knows how to turn the pressure off and has a good relationship with me I can pressure my dog a lot I can use a lot of Correction my dog looks good he looks happy he's fine with it he knows what he had to do it was like okay I got it I got I know what I need to do and he does it right boom he gets a reward excellent but if my dog doesn't know what to do doesn't know how to turn pressure off and I tried to use compulsion to my training now that's the dog that looks like the traditionally compulsive we've all seen they say he owned the dog goes that Kiehl's lawn next to you like oh I'm so sad right that's just bad compulsion training right it's somebody wasn't clearly communicating with the dog the dog didn't know what it needed to do wasn't sure how to turn it off so you get all this bad stress signs around it but if we're careful about it then we give ourselves the tools to pressure the dog later without all the bad esthetic fallout that we tradition see poorly-executed compulsion based training well there certain play depends on what the behavior is so there are certain places where like let's say I'm teaching a stay to my dog I'm going to teach my dog a sit-stay I won't use my my reward marker that releases the dog I'll use my intermediate my continuation marker and I may take a reward to the dog when I do that intermittently so I might leave my dog over there and say sit I step away from him he stays in a sit I say good I walked back over I get my piece of food I step away again good I walk back over I give him a piece of food right so I'm paying him in the position I'm paying him for staying there I'm paying him for duration but I'm not releasing him out of it but I'm giving him feedback that he's right every time I say yes the dog is gonna be released from whatever so if I were gonna use yes there so my dogs over there and I say sit and he sits and I say yes he's going to jump up and come towards me to go hey where's my reward right you know you're gonna throw the ball for me you're gonna feed me what's it going to be right so if I want to work on stability in a behavior or duration then I frequently take rewards to the dog in place step away return give the dog a reward and I use my other marker so we really have two markers that mean you're right right for me there yes and good but it doesn't matter what they are you make up your own but they have to that means your right one that means your right and you're being released into a reward the other means keep going and you're get a reward or keep going and I'll bring a reward to you in place what not Renault yeah always give a reward now I say that you don't have to it's like anything if I've rewarded the dog every time I say yes and I hit a spot and I didn't reward the dog the dog is going to be ok but I don't make a habit of not rewarding them because the sound is now been conditioned to mean good things to the dog so it would take I would have to not reward them a lot when I said it for to start to lose its power but if I do too much if I release the dog yes and don't give them a reward too much then you'll start to lose the power of that reward so I would say I almost always give them a reward the other thing is and this is sort of an advanced thing that I do later but the idea is that I build in different ways of rewarding my dog so what I do is I teach my dog little games that we play so I teach my dog to spin right and spin lat the circle go between my legs I have these little game I teach me to jump up and hit my my hand with his nose and when I teaching these initially each of these things predicts a reward for my dog so I say spin my dog spins in a circle I say yes bang he gets a reward gets a tug we play tug I cheat him touch he jumps up in the air and hits my hand with his nose and I say yes and I give him a reward through rehearsal those little actions those little games become reinforcing it unto themselves so I'm at that point he just likes to spin and he likes to jump up and hit my hands because it's been paired so now those things feel good to him so I can release my dog and say touch touch touch spin heel and off we go again and that little interlude was rewarding to the dog right so there are lots of ways I can some dogs are so socially packed driven or there so they like social contact that I may release the dog and pet them a rough on with them a wrestle with them or whatever it depends on the dog but most of the time the vast majority of the time when I release the dog I'm giving them a primary reinforcer which for us in our training system is usually food or a toy so it's usually they're a piece of food or a game of tug or I'm throwing the ball for you or whatever it is those are those are the ones we use most frequently yes they both worked it out it was less than ideal so the sensitive one always looked a little bit mushed after that he got through it he survived and he went on and did stuff but he didn't may never really coped with handling pressure well and I just gave you my best shot nothing really happened that didn't work and it drops out of the repertoire so I kind of subtly assert myself over the dog without a big fight the longer I wait five an 18-month old dog or two year old dog I can no longer just let them bite me and not be nonreactive if they bite me it's bad so at that point I have to stop them and I have to be firm about it when they're puppies one of the best things that you could do to early signs of aggression and a young dog is be totally nonreactive to it and continue to do what you were going to do so like if I'm playing with a puppy and the puppy starts to guard something from me I just went in and grabbed it and they bite me and I oh I'm taking it thanks then I give it back to them and walk away right it's like they're like oh well that didn't work right so what and you'll we'll talk about this woman tomorrow especially in protection theory when we get there but one of the strongest tools for making aggression or any kind of behaviors go away is to have it not work for the dog one of the biggest things that helpers do incorrectly in protection work is be non-responsive to the dogs power so if the dog gives you a good fight a good bite shows aggression and the decoy doesn't respond it goes away the dog gets scared gets weak feels like you can't beat this guy and you get a diminishment in the dog but we can use that same kind of non reactivity in our relationship with our dog to sort of subtly assert ourselves over the dog dog goes wow that didn't work at all it would be like if I walked up on the street met somebody and I came up and I gave them I just punched him right off gave my best shot boom and they went hey all right I'm out of here right you're obviously much tougher than I am at that point I just gave you everything I've got made no impact on you whatsoever I go all right you're in charge and that's sort of the same thing we do with puppies so when I like to start a little bit of pressure work when the dogs or in a controlled environment so if they're going to stress about it and do that I can just kind of go sorry we're doing it anyway in the Douglas pool well I guess I can't get out of this and you've got to you have a better relationship with the dog and the dog learned some lessons about turning pressure off I'll repeat all this stuff like a broken record all weekend you'll hear it over and over again and as we go feel free as we start to work over dogs I'll try to like illustrate as we work a dog what we've been talking about here but if there's a question we have the interesting thing is we have people here doing a really wide variety of thing so we have ring sport people we have shot some people we have strictly obedience people with a variety of different people and each of those sports disciplines kind of have their own aesthetic the exercises are a little bit different the focus and energy you put into the training the training principles underlying it all are exactly the same but their teaching is teaching and it's all the same now I'm going to spend more time on the focused healing and my Shipton dog than I am in my ring sport dog I'm going to spend more time on a fast retrieve and my shits and than I am in my AKC dog there's a whole there's things like that where we're going to put energy into different places so if you have a question about why we're doing something a certain way with one dog and different with another please fire away I'll try it as we go along to explain the differences between the different disciplines and why you have one dog doing this and another dog doing this because that can be frequently confusing but so I'll try to I'll try to keep you up but if what if again if I'm not clear about any of those fire away okay all right let's work dogs we're going to end this part of the lecture here if you'd like to watch some of the free streaming videos that I have on my website you can go to this web address now I have a number of free streaming training videos and then a number of product videos also

Channel: Leerburg

Views: 617,775

Rating: 4.8679752 out of 5

Keywords: Michael Ellis, Lecture, Training, Dogs, Dog, Philosophy, Method, Markers, Leerburg, dog training, learnig, clicker, clisker training, dog whisperer, teaching, leerburg, behavioral science, learning theory, dog train

Id: xe0-oqqoXvw

Length: 70min 41sec (4241 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 26 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/Njdevils11]

So I implemented one of the main points in Mr. Ellis' video today and I think it was a rousing success! He really went into depth how to use language to support training. I use verbal markers with my pup, but I really only had two marker "good" and "no" with the occassional "uh uh" thrown in there.

In the video he says you should have 4 distinct cues. The first cue is an opperant cue and precludes a treat (he says this can also be used as a release cue), The other operant cue should preclude a correction. In between those you need positive supporting cue which encourages your dog to keep doing what it's doing and a corrective cue which lets your dog know they're getting off track (does not have an correction associated with it).

Anyway I've been working on more advanced heeling and I felt like the training was choppy because as she progressed with a trick I would say "good" and lose her because she knows she usually gets a treat. Then I would need to say "uh uh" because I distracted her. It went really well today, will definitely be solidifying those intermediate cues!

[u/miagolare]

This video is excellent! I use this "system" with my dogs and it works fantastically!

When working on a new behavior, it really helps to let the dog know "not on the right track" vs "getting close!"