FE130 Toys - Developing Cooperation and Play

2 toy game:

Trade

chase

prompted return

marker cue

eye contact

offered return

offered drop

add behaviors

listen to your dog's feedback

Tug

joy in tugging

pulling

pushing

bringing tug back

physical hand signals

adding another toy

adding chase and drop

adding behaviors

listen to your dog's feedback

Toys, balls, and variety of tugs, treats. Depending on your dog's preferences, you may start with soft fuzzy type toys to build drive and then end up with really hard type toys to encourage dropping and letting go. Flirt poles and toys on ropes can also be great in the beginning stages.

2 toy chase Step 10: Listening to your dog

Listening to your dog: dropping, outing and returning with the toy-the "reset"

Also known as dog's "tell".

I'd like trainers to look at things a bit differently when we are teaching our dogs and see if they can develop a training "language" that considers the dog's opinion during the training session. In the toy game, when you have 2 toys, the piece I want you to look at is the "reset", that part of the behavior loop after the dog has collected the toy into their mouth, and is on their way back to you. What does that look like at it's ideal, and where in that behavior of returning does your dog deviate when you add too many or too hard of behavior skills.

To summarize:

Reset/loop: the piece of behavior from the time the dog strikes the toy on the chase to the time the dog drops the toy at the correct distance and orientates to the handler (eye contact for our purposes here). With food training, this is the piece of behavior from the time the dog swallows the food and orientates back to the handler. With toys, it is Unique and Harder because the dog has to give something up, where as with food, the dog has swallowed and there is nothing to have or return.

Ideal behavior (dog dependent, for instance Ones takes a couple chomps to drop the toy, where another dog might drop cleanly.)

• straight return

• stops at handler

• drops toy at feet cleanly

• looks at handler quickly

Where it starts to go wrong:

• arcs on return

• drops toy early

• smashes into handler

• circles around behind handler

• chompity, chomp, chomp on the toy

Really far gone:

• runs to far corner of arena

• never drops toy

• takes toy to ground and proceeds to tear it up

• endless circling

• etc....

Look and sound familiar? These are likely the same issues/behaviors that you trained through when you were teaching the game skills in the first place. Dogs may show only one of the examples, or many.

Basically: you give reinforcement (chases) until the reset is clean, whatever your baseline is. Then, you ask for a behavior, look at the rep immediately after and if it is clean, baseline, then ask for another behavior. If it is not clean, then reinforce until it is.

Here is Ones and I working on a very difficult retrieve skill. In this video, this is one of the first times I have combined hold with moving into front. I am not rewarding him enough and he tells me that. Here's part of that training session, warts and all! Look at my mistakes! But also look at the quality of his drops when I finally got a clue that what I was doing wasn't working.

If I were to ask him to heel (something we are good at and he finds relatively easy) he would drop the ball right away. I listened to him and the next couple sessions when we worked on the hold, I gave him about 3 ball throws in between each holding attempt. It worked! Here he is about a week later doing a new skill, generalizing different objects.

For the purposes of this lecture (and my current thinking!), we're talking about a 2 toy game, where you always have the other toy in your possession. One toy games complicate it further! And tugging on the toys includes some different "tells" from the dog.

Homework:

Evaluate your dog’s performance and game skills when it comes time to add in some behaviors. Does their game skills stay the same, with no hestation? Do certain behaviors deteriorate, where?

Remember to play and reinforce until the game skills are "clean" again before asking for another behavior skill. Start thinking of play reinforcement as "chunks" of play, rather than one behavior equals one throw.