FE280 Cutting Out the Cookies (or Toys!) - Reducing Reinforcement for R+ Trainers

Concept 1: Opportunity

• Timing
• Movement as Reinforcement

Concept 2: Effort

• Effort for specific behaviors
• Sequencing

Concept 3: Duration

• Trial Run through
• Should I trial?
• Put the easy reps in
• Timed trick sessions
• Dog's expectations

Concept 4: Environmental Confidence

• Trial like locations equal fun
• Ready to Work
• Reset Behavior-information

Concept 5: All the training things

• Trial Skills
• Make hard behaviors easy
• Transitions between exercises
• People Proximity
• Object Proximity
• Start and End rituals

Concept 6: Conditioning

• Physical
• Mental

Concept 7: Variable Reinforcement

• Variable reinforcement

Finished behaviors that you want to work on. By "finished", I mean off a food lure. Food in pockets or in other hand is fine, but still needing to lure the dog into a down or heel with food in front of the nose isn't a finished behavior.

Goal for trialing

Established training language with your dog

Should I trial?

Concept/Goal:

Handler looks at information gleaned from trial run through and thinks about the point deductions, how close they are to trialing, etc....

Run through Assessment:

The first thing to ask yourself is

• Should you trial?
• Can you work on all the things you need to work on and get them done before trialing?
• Look at disqualification reasons. Can your dog do the big stuff? In AKC you are not allowed 2 cues in many of the exercises, so for instance if your dog is inattentive when you recall them, and doesn’t come on the first recall cue, you will fail. Know your rules!

Other thoughts:

Big point deductions? Little point deductions? What should you care about and what should you let go? If concentrating on one little thing results in a big thing going bad, figure that out.

In Talic’s case, yes, I’m pretty confident. He knows all the major skills and concepts, nothing is DQ worthy, everything is little points and I am being picky. He’s got the big stuff! There are no surprises, outside of surprises always happen in trial, but basically he should definitely be able to pass and bonus, get a pretty good score.

(Now his IGP 1 protection is another matter all together!)

I chose to talk about obedience stuff with Talic, because that is more familiar to my students.

But take a look at this protection run through:

IGP 1 protection

• Get on Field-dog is on leash, but needs to be in control, walk the entire football sized field length along the midline, before stopping and removing the leash and setting up for
• Send to blind, dog barks at helper for 40 seconds
• Judge motions me in, I walk behind dog
• Call dog back to heel
• Escape bite with some heeling thrown in, helper stops, dog has to out.
• I pick up dog from helper (no touching, ask to heel) Heel down field
• Turn around, send dog to bite again, 2 outs, pick up dog again
• Escort helper in side transport to judge, heel dog away to attach leash to collar.

Talic’s answers:

As is always in protection, the dog has to both pay attention to the helper and to the handler. He has to bark with extreme focus on the helper, yet sit quickly when I approach and ask him to. The dogs always have challenges here, and leading up to trial, it’s a delicate dance of too much focus on one thing or another.

• Talic is leaky and vocalizing on his walk up the field. Little points, but may be big points if he is overaroused and can’t hear me on potential disqualification things.
• Hold and bark-excellent
• Call back, he comes back immediately, but leaves me and goes to bark again. Depending on judge, this could be a disqualification. (out of control) That over arousal I was talking about!
• Comes back on second cue, heels nicely when asked, bites and outs when asked.
• We avoid the picking up the dog out of guarding, because we know this is fragile and still in teaching stage.
• Heel down field is fine, distraction stay is fine, bites and outs nicely, guards with duration, but again, we avoid picking up out of guarding.
• Side transport is not attentive, he doesn’t sit when he’s supposed to, but basically under control for the rest of it.

So…..

Got some potential DQ big items there, including me picking him up out of guarding. Should I trial? It is a very shaky yes, and I need to be prepared to pull if he is not ready.

Homework:

Write out your thoughts about the information gleaned from your dog's run through