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Mogens Eliasen: "BrainWork for Smart Dogs"
Part I: A dog's Mind is a terrible thing to waste…
ORGANIZING BRAINWORK
Table of contents / Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3A / Part 3B / Part 3C / Part 3DPart 2:
"What All Smart Dogs Want Their Owners to Know...."
Dogs are not natural leaders. They much prefer having someone else take all the responsibilities of leadership. They prefer to follow the leader - and they feel great satisfaction from knowing that they are members of a pack with a strong and powerful and smart leader that can make the decisions that need to be made, and organize the cooperation of the pack during hunt and social activities.
One of the most important leadership duties is taking care of education. It is the pack leader's responsibility that all puppies in the pack learn what they need to learn in order to fit into the pack's social hierarchy so they can contribute value to the teamwork.
Dogs are genetically programmed to learn for life - all their lives. In the wild, a dog that cannot learn is soon a dead dog...
Unfortunately, dog training is traditionally carried out in a way that does just about the opposite to the dog of what we need to provide with our training: mental activation and brainwork.
This Part explain how you can become an effective dog teacher - and truly deserve your rank as pack leader. It is an outline of the principles of dog training and the reasons behind them. Principles that are founded in the dog's nature and its quest for learning.
You will be surprised to see how simple they actually are - and how effective they are when applied in a natural way.
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1
Mogens Eliasen: "BrainWork for Smart Dogs"
Part 2: "What All Smart Dogs Want their Owners to Know...."
COMPOSING A TRAINING METHOD
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Chapter 5:
COMPOSING A TRAINING METHOD
Contents of this chapter:
The fundamental "recipe" for all training
How much training is enough?
How often is this necessary?
Balance between mental and physical activation
Understanding the nature of rewards
When punishment is needed...
Training a dog is not difficult - when you know how to do it! Many professional trainers, however, make it appear as a science, but it really isn't. It can be boiled down to some very simple principles that are very easy to use when you understand them. The bad news is that understanding them takes that you accept that communication with your dog has to take place on the dog's terms, not yours. You have to speak Dog Language. It is not the dog having to learn to understand your language…
But the good news is that the principle is the very same for every single exercise you possibly can imagine. So, once you get the concept, you can use it over and over and over again….
The fundamental "recipe" of all training
Regardless of what you train your dog to do, you will need to use a signal (command word or sign) to initiate the dog's behavior. Since all brainwork exercises are based on the dog solving a problem of some kind, the behavior must be related to the goal that you give the dog. This goal is specified by the command. The command must generate a picture in the dog's brain of the goal. With the command, you communicate to the dog what it can achieve in this particular situation.
So, first of all, you must connect your chosen command word with the goal you want the dog to achieve. This is very simple: You say the word - and you give the dog the reward that later will become the goal. When you repeat this a dozen times, and do it effectively so the dog truly understands the connection, you have accomplished the first and often most difficult step.
Graphically (as a short comic strip), it looks like this:
You simply combine two events in sequence, just as you read a comic strip, one event at a time in each picture frame. The important thing is to make sure that you have no disturbing sense impressions or distractions entering this sequence between the command and the reward.
Please note that you don't ask the dog to do anything - except listen and enjoy!
In order to avoid confusion, you should choose a command that is completely unique for the exercise you plan to train. No common words from the language you use to communicate with your family and friends! The best way of understanding it is to see the command as a "secret code for a military operation" only you and your dog know about! You don't want to confuse your dog by inadvertently using the command in a conversation with a person - it is not fair to your dog, and you will have severe penalties deducted immediately from your leadership rating if you do.
A simple example is the search exercise used by a Search & Rescue dog to find people in distress. It basically involves having the dog to find a hidden person. You are a skilled dog trainer, so you do not pick any simple English words for this you could possibly use in conversation with other people, but you also want it to be simple and easy for yourself to remember. You can pick "UNVEAL", as an example.
The beginning of that exercises can be trained this way: You give the dog the command, and the dog gets the reward from the other person. No searching! When you think about how this must look, you will realize that you, the dog, and the person must all be closely together. And, in order for the reward to be given in such a way that you can continue this, also in later stages of the exercises, you can see that it is not you, but the other person that must reward the dog!
But, when you start the training this way, it is extremely easy to develop the entire search exercise from this very simply beginning, as the dog, totally on its own, will find out what it takes to get its reward: it will go look for the person that has it!
You can add a hand signal to the command, if you want. It will make the search easier for the dog later - which, in principle, is a disadvantage in terms of brainwork, but this search exercise has so much potential for becoming challenging without any limits that you don't need to worry about that. Instead, you can just as well take advantage of teaching the dog to follow your hand signal for direction - it can become very useful in many other situations.
Nice and simple, eh?
Unfortunately, in real life, it is not always practically possible to make it this simple for start. When this is the case, you have to reduce this first stage to merely a check on the value of the reward, and then go directly to the next stage, trying to make it as simple as you can.
An example: Let's assume you want to teach the dog to find treats in the lawn. The reward obviously is the treat. Again, you need a command you can use to communicate to the dog that it is now allowed to go and get its treat. Let’s say you use “YOOLIE”.
What you should be doing, in accordance with the outlined principle of combining the command with the reward would be to give the command and then let the dog have the reward. But this is not practically possible, unless you are a magician that can make the treat fly into the dog’s mouth!
Now, you could, of course, get the idea that you could first show the dog the treat, then give the command and let it go for the treat. But that is cheating on the principle (just a nice way for me of saying that you actually completely violated it by doing this….)
Read again what the sequence of events were when you did it this way: First, you showed the dog the treat, then you gave the command, and finally, the dog got the treat as you allowed it to get it. The important thing here is that you did not start the training sequence with your command word, but with showing the dog the treat….
Now, these training principles are so powerful that they don’t care what you use as your “initiator” for the exercises. If you choose to let this “initiator” be the smell of a treat, so be it! The learning principles will then develop the entire understanding of this exercises in the dog’s brain to mean that the smell of a treat be the command for this exercise!
You might still use your verbal command word – but the dog will learn to ignore it – because you already gave the real command: the smell of the treat! The result will be that you will later only be able to start this exercise by exposing the dog to the smell of the treat….
Seriously, the smell of a treat is not a particularly useful command. This feature, when misused like this, is actually what makes many dog trainers curse the use of treats for training. They call it “bribing” – and they do not like that the result is that the dog will only work when it knows there is a treat in the game.
Unfortunately, this is an incorrect judgment of what happens. The undesirable result is not coming from using treats as rewards. It comes from using treats as commands!
When you understand this, it is also easy to understand how you avoid it. You simply do not let the dog be exposed to the smell of the treat until after the command. But this now takes that you create a link between the command and the treat. After your command, you must get the dog to do just a little bit of what the exercise is all about, so it can actually find out where the treat is.
Of course, you make it as simple as you can. And you accept to help the dog also. What matters is that you try to come as close as you can to the goal: make the simplest possible connection between the command and the reward.
For this, you need an incitement. An incitement is nothing more and nothing less than what it takes for you to do in order to make the dog perform the action you want. This action, of course, is having the dog move forward towards the treat, so it will discover it is there – and eat it.
All you do then at the first stage of your training is this: You hide a teat in the grass, without the dog noticing it. You bring the dog to the scene, on leash, and hold the dog in its leash. You wait for the dog to pay attention to you ("to ask permission") - you want at least a short flash of an eye contact. That's the time when you say "YOOLIE" (still remember your choice of command?)
The art of the training is now to make the dog find this treat it has no clue where is – without understanding that you actually talk about a treat! The dog does not understand what “YOOLIE” means, and it won’t make any difference if you instead used an English word – all you would get out of that would be confusing yourself, because you understand what the English words means, and it is very difficult for any human to fully comprehend that others do not understand the things we understand ourselves…
So, what could you suggest as incitement to help the dog quickly get the reward in the very moment you have spoken your command?
Yes, of course: just show the dog with a fast hand signal! If you indeed do have the dog’s attention when you say “YOOLIE”, then the dog will follow your hand signal, simply to check out what is going on here. A fast moving object will stimulate your hunter to pay attention to the action. You fast hand movement will signal a hunting action that the dog instinctively wants to be part of. And it will! Because you generously pass on the prey to it!
In this context, you can view the incitement as “Dog Language translation of what you want your command to mean”.
With the "comic strip" representation, you have four events now in sequence:
You will notice that the amount of brainwork you ask at this stage is as little as you possible can make it! The simpler you can make it, the more effective your training will be….
Next step is to get the dog to actually do the biggest portion of the work.
When you have chose an effective incitement and can get the whole sequence of all four training elements performed with no interruption and no repetition of any of the element, the dog will make the mental connection between your command and the reward – and that was exactly what you were aiming at! When you understand that the success of the training hinges on this mental connection being made, you also understand why it is so darn important that you really make it so simple that it might appear ridiculous – but don’t worry about that! If you won’t to be in control of what the dog learns, and you want to use your own training time effectively, you have no choice! I have seen thousands of times how people, who try to make the exercise “look like something” already from the beginning of the training, utterly fail at ever getting the dog to understand what the exercise really is about – even after years of training! The good news is, that training this way gives you results in just a few days!
From this, you simply increase the distance between the dog and the treat, in our “YOOLIE” example. You still use your incitement, but you now gradually reduce it to be merely a supplement to the command, showing the dog which direction to search in. If the dog truly has made the mental connection between your command and the reward, it will search for the treat now, trusting that it is indeed there, as you told!
Returning to the "comic strip" representation, you now have all four events in sequence, at full value:
The brainwork behavior is still very simple, and that’s OK. The point now is that the dog actually does some work on its own, after you applied the incitement.
You notice that, till now, in our “YOOLIE” example, you had the treat in a location that is not precisely known to the dog, but the dog had a pretty good idea of the approximate location.
You might, once in a while, experience that the dog will fail to find the reward. Whenever that happens, you simply use the incitement again, this time so effectively that the dog will instantly get to the reward. You must keep in mind at all times that maintaining the connection between the command and the reward is the very foundation of the dog’s performance. If you lose that, you lose everything. So, for this reason, progress in the performance is less important than maintaining the connection between the command and the reward!
Unfortunately, this is where impatient trainers get their dog’s performance completely screwed up….
The essence of this stage of the training is that your command creates a picture in the dog's brain of the reward - but the dog has no other way of knowing that the reward is actually there. You want it to learn to trust your command - so you prove that you are right, by helping the dog to succeed by using the incitement.
When the dog shows to you that it understands your command (it will do so by "jumping the gun", starting the desired behavior before you can give your incitement, or perform a substantial amount of work after the incitement), then you move on to make the exercise more challenging. You do this by gradually increasing the difficulties the dog has to overcome between your command and the reward.
As always, you will not lose anything by progressing a bit slower than what the dog might be able to handle. But you destroy everything by trying to progress to fast…. For this reason, you must immediately correct your own errors when they occur. You do this by never letting the dog down. If it has trouble with the exercise because you made it too challenging, you help it finish the exercise successfully – and then you conclude your training session with a much simpler version that can be performed perfectly by the dog!
Please note that there is no such thing as “correcting the dog’s errors”! Errors are yours, not the dog’s…. If the dog fails to do what you want it to do, it is your fault. You were the one that pushed the limits or did not plan the training well enough.