Читать книгу Tricks in the City - Sassafras Lowrey - Страница 11

Are you sold? Let’s get started training tricks! To get started, you need to figure out how your dog wants to be paid. Yes, you have to pay the dog! Put your wallet away—money might be motivating to you, but it won’t likely be very motivating for your dog (not to mention that coins are a choking hazard). For teaching tricks, you’ll be paying your dog in currency that is valuable to dogs: food and toys.

What You Need

Treats—when you work, you want to get paid. So does your dog! Treat training is really important. I sometimes hear people say that they don’t want to train with treats because they want their dog to work for the sure joy of working with them…do you work just because you get satisfaction from working? Probably not. Your dog is the same way—they want to get paid for their work and they deserve to be paid. Yes, our dogs love us, but we need to keep building that relationship and “paying” or rewarding our dogs for a job well done.

As you start getting ready to begin trick training, your first task will be to find out what different levels of reward look like to your dog. For many dogs, the smellier, softer treats are going to have the highest value. Either commercially manufactured treats or things like hot dogs and string cheese are the favorites of most of my dogs, but each dog is different. My youngest dog is most excited by dry biscuits (why, no one knows!). What matters most is that your dog thinks what you are offering is high-value, so try out different treats and note what gets your dog the most excited.

Sometimes finding your dog’s currency requires a little bit of trial and error. It also might require you to do some carrying of treats—what is high-value today might be less high-value tomorrow, so you’ll have to pull out something else. I like to rotate the treats I’m giving when training among different high-value ones. Find your dog’s currency—even if it isn’t high-value to you, it might be to them! Different dogs will find different things valuable. Try different treats and play to see what motivates your dog most and use that. As you are finding your dog’s currency, also experiment with play and toys. You’ll still need to have high-value treats for some training, but for some tricks, if your dog is toy-motivated, start to incorporate different toys. A lot of working dogs, like search and rescue, police, and military dogs, work for play and toys (retrieve, and especially tug), so if your dog is most excited about toys, they are in good company.

Even if toys are the highest-value reward to your dog, you will want to have a variety of treats available when you’re training—you can even incorporate your dog’s kibble into your training! Just reserve kibble or other lower-value treats for practicing trick skills that your dog is already confident and having fun with, and pull out the higher-value treats when you are teaching something new, or practicing in a new or more distracting location.

Safety First

If you are training outside and not in a fenced yard, it’s important to always have your dog on leash. The best thing to have is a plain six-foot nylon or leather leash. Avoid retractable leashes, because they can cause a lot of injury to you and/or your dog and don’t give you a lot of control over where your dog is. Following leash laws is a simple but important part of being a good canine citizen. Dogs aren’t robots; even if you think your dog has a good recall, they likely don’t—if another animal ran past and you called your dog, would he immediately turn and return to you? If yes, that’s fantastic, but still keep the leash on, for the comfort and safety of other dogs and members of the community. Following leash laws, scooping poop, and keeping your dog(s) close to you and under your control helps to make the general public more accepting of us having our dogs with us in (dog-friendly) places, and keeps places dog-friendly and welcoming to all of our dogs. You’ll also want to have your dog on a collar, head halter, or chest harness. Safe options include flat collars (nylon or leather), limited-slip martingales (which tighten down to a point that keeps a dog from backing out of a collar, but don’t constrict the dog’s breathing), head halters (like the halters horses wear), and back or front clip harnesses are all safe options for your dog if you are walking or trick training in public spaces. Be sure to avoid prong collars, choke chains, and shock collars/ e-collars—pain conditioning should have no place in dog training.

Teaching Your Dog about Learning

Dogs are not born knowing how to communicate with us—or rather, they aren’t born knowing what our words mean. Over time, your dog learns about how to interact with you; they learn what our likes and dislikes are, what our words and gestures and body language mean. Our dogs are always learning from us, every moment of every day. Our dogs learn good things that we want, like to go potty outside, but our dogs are also learning not-so-good things, like that they don’t have to come until you say “come,” “coooooooooommmmmeeeeeee,” “plleeeeaaaaasssseee coooommmmmeeeee,” ten times and jump up and down. When we don’t set our dogs up for success, when we aren’t clear about our expectations for them and don’t create circumstances where they are going to be successful, we often end up training our dogs in things we don’t mean to (for example, that “come” isn’t a verbal cue in and of itself, and that when we want our dogs to come, we will do that whole literal dance and say “come” a bunch of times). This doesn’t mean that you need to “teach your dog who is boss” or otherwise force them. Quite the opposite, our goal with training should be to make working with us the most fun option, eliminating the opportunity for our dogs to make mistakes—so, for example, only taking your dog into your yard or to the park on leash with lots of high-value treats, so you can support and reward the “come” recall to the point when the behavior is solidly understood by your dog and they think it’s a lot of fun to come racing back because it doesn’t mean the end to play, it means yummy treats and more playing. We want to make engaging with us the most rewarding option available to our dogs.

Next to treats, patience is the most important thing to have when you are starting to teach your dog tricks. We talk to our dogs all day long, but a lot of what we say doesn’t make sense to them. Dogs don’t come pre-programmed to understand what different words mean. Training your dog is about building a relationship and developing a shared language. Your dog has to learn what those random noises coming out of your mouth mean, and the only way that can happen is with positive training, patience, and fun repetition. Our dogs are going to get confused or make mistakes, but nothing they are doing is really a mistake. If our dog fails to do a trick in the way we want them to, it means that they aren’t ready for the level of difficulty. It’s a moment for us to step back and help our dogs to be successful.

No Punishment

There is no place for punishment in tricks. If you find yourself getting overwhelmed and frustrated, it’s time to give your dog a treat and take a break. There are a lot of reasons not to punish your dog in general—causing your dog pain or fear or discomfort while learning is contradictory to the learning you want your dog to do, and doesn’t help them to retain information. Ideas like your dog needing to be dominated or shown who is “alpha” have been discredited by canine behavior and training researchers. Dogs are not “mini wolves”; they are not looking at us as “pack leaders.” Essentially, you want training with your dog to come from a place of mutual respect and fun. All training, especially trick training, should be enjoyable for both of you, not something that makes your dog overwhelmed or shut down.

Positive Reinforcement

I define positive-reinforcement-based training as methods that come from a place of mutual respect, without use of fear, pain, or intimidation. Basically, this means training that centers the relationship between the person and the animal, and doesn’t use tools like shock collars/e-collars and prong collars that cause pain to communicate what the human wants.

Clicker Training

One method of positive reinforcement training that is useful for all animals, from puppies to goldfish, is clicker training. Clicker training is based on marking a desired behavior and then providing a reward for it. The reason that a clicker (those little box-shaped devices that are sold for about a dollar on the counter of most pet shops, that have a button and make a metallic “click” noise when pressed) works is because trainers are able to deliver the click more clearly, quickly, and more precisely than a verbal marker or food reward alone. The approach grew out of trainers working with marine mammals, and has taken the dog training industry by storm because of its ease and effectiveness. Basically, clicker training lets us communicate more clearly with all animals, from cats and horses and rats to wildlife like dolphins and zebras! Yes, really—the same methods people use to teach an elephant, you can use to teach your dog! Pretty cool, right?

Clicker training is successful because it allows trainers to clearly “mark” (a.k.a. communicate to the dog) that they have performed a specific behavior that is desirable, and then come in and reward with a treat. Essentially, it allows us to improve our communication with our dogs as we are training, because the clicker is such a clear signal to our dogs (once they’re properly introduced to it) that we can use it to mark very small behavior cues, enabling us to train very impressive and specific tricks, like dunking a ball in a basketball hoop.

If you want to give clicker training a go, get a clicker (again you can find them inexpensively at most pet stores) and a bowl of very small pieces of very high-value treat. When you first introduce clicker training to your dog, your only goal is for your dog to associate the click with something great (the treat). So, you will click, and treat, click and treat, several times in a row. At this stage, we aren’t asking for any kind of behaviors from the dog—we just want them to start making the connection that the click means good things (treats) are coming.

After a couple of short training sessions like that, ask your dog to do something they already know how to do, like “sit,” and, right as they get into the appropriate position, click, praise, and treat. Repeat a few times. The goal is for our dogs to understand that the click is our way of telling them that what they are doing in that moment is what we want when we give them a specific cue.

Keep your training sessions short when introducing the clicker and all the other training we are going to be doing. A few short (five minutes or less) training sessions spread through the day is much more effective (and fun) for your dog than one long training session. My goal with training is to always end a session with my dog having been successful and having had fun—essentially, you want to end with your dog wanting to do more, not bored and frustrated.

Sirius and I had a wonderful time at Clicker Expo 2019.

If you are interested in learning more about clicker training, check out the work of Karen Pryor, Karen Pryor Academy, and her Clicker Expo annual conference. Learn more at karenpryoracademy.com. If you are interested in animal behavior and training and have the opportunity to attend Clicker Expo, I can’t recommend it highly enough. They also have a variety of online learning opportunities, and a growing number of positive-reinforcement-based trainers across the country and around the world are incorporating clicker training into their classes.

Patience

Dog training can be exhausting and overwhelming. We’re communicating with a completely different species, and sometimes asking them to do very unnatural things, like putting a little ball into a little basketball hoop! It’s important to make sure that you train when you are in a good mood and in a good place to keep your training sessions fun and positive. Different dogs learn at different speeds. Don’t compare your dog with someone else’s dog, or, if you share your life with multiple dogs, don’t compare one dog to another. Different dogs learn differently, and even learn different kinds of tricks at different speeds. For example, my dog Charlotte learns anything with small details very quickly, but is much slower to learn tricks that require her to position her body in certain ways, a skill set that my youngest dog, Sirius, excels at.

Our dogs are individuals; there are some tricks that your dog will enjoy more than others. Our dogs learn through repetition; again, you want to train more frequently in short, fun training sessions with lots of toys and treats. Dogs do learn through repetition, but you can do too much of a good thing. No one likes a drill sergeant (even a fun one), so, if you find your dog seeming to be a little less enthusiastic in your training sessions, you might have just worked a certain behavior a little too much for the moment. It’s important to keep your training sessions varied and short. Work on teaching a new trick alongside practicing a trick your dog has successfully mastered, and always be sure to end each training session on a positive note—create an opportunity for your dog to be successful, even if that means having to lower the criteria of what you are asking for. Keep your training sessions short and sweet. A few short (under-five-minute) training sessions a few times a day will be more effective than one forty-five-minute training session.

HINT: If your dog isn’t consistently successful in your training sessions, it’s probably because you are asking for too much too soon. Slow down, make the criteria easier, and then slowly build up to the full behavior that you are trying to achieve.

Ways of Training

There are a variety of techniques we will be utilizing to support your dog in understanding the tricks we want to teach them. When our dogs are first learning a trick or skill, this is how we will show them what we want them to do, or communicate to them what we want them to do.

Luring

This is pretty much what it sounds like: we will be using treats to lure or maneuver our dog into the desired position. Luring is a fast and easy way to teach a lot of tricks, because we are able to use treats to lead them to a behavior or position that we want. So, for example, your dog’s nose follows the treat, the body follows, and your dog ends up in the position you want—say “sit,” for example. You click and/or praise and give your dog the treat. As your dog gets more comfortable with the behavior, you are able to phase out the physical lure.

Shaping

With shaping, your dog is actually getting to put together the pieces of the trick without your prompting or leading. Shaping easily goes hand in hand with clicker training (though you can also use a verbal marker). With shaping, you are clicking or marking very small incremental behavioral changes while engaging with an object. The exciting thing about shaping as a training methodology is that your dog is actively thinking and puzzling out the behavior, which can be very rewarding, empowering, and confidence-building for them, creating a training conversation between you and your dog. An example of what this would look like is: if you wanted to teach your dog to push a ball with their nose, you might take out a beach ball and have a clicker (or be ready with a verbal marker your dog is familiar with, like “yes”) and a lot of treats. To start, you will click and treat for any movement toward the ball, then click and treat for sniffing at the ball. If your dog paws at the ball, you would just ignore that, and then when the dog sniffs the ball hard enough to push it, you would click, praise, and jackpot, giving lots of treats. Your dog is essentially puzzling out what kind of engagement with the ball gets the reward, and will offer more of the behaviors that are getting rewarded, thus creating the finished trick, to which you can then add a verbal cue.

Capturing

This isn’t always the fastest way to teach a trick, but it is a really fun process, and can be extremely effective for teaching tricks that are physically subtle (like head tilts, shaking, licking, leg lifting, etc.). To teach a trick via capturing, you will be clicking and/or verbally marking something your dog does, each time you see them do it. So, for example, if you want to teach your dog to shake on cue, each time you see them shake off after waking up or coming in from the rain, you will click, praise, and treat, and begin adding in a verbal marker, like “shake.” With time and repetition, your dog will begin to figure out that they are being rewarded for shaking their body and that the verbal marker you have attached to it—“shake” in this example—will become your cue to ask your dog to perform the behavior at any time.

Signals

As we get into the trick training, we will be using both verbal and physical cues or signals to our dogs to indicate what trick we want them to be doing. These signals are the way our dogs know what tricks we want them to do. Here’s an overview of how we will be communicating with our dogs as we teach them tricks.

1.Just like it sounds, a verbal signal is a word that we have taught our dogs to associate with a specific trick or physical behavior we want them to do.

2.With physical signals, which are often, though not always, hand signals, your dog associates the physical cue with the trick you want them to do. Dogs are extremely attuned to our body language, and so are very responsive to physical cues, alone or paired with verbal signals. Dogs are consistently watching our bodies, so they often take very quickly to physical cues. For tricks taught via luring, the physical cue can often be a less exaggerated form of the way you initially lured the behavior, something your dog will already be familiar with at that point.

Building Duration

With some tricks, we want our dog to perform the behavior and keep moving by, say, weaving between our legs while we walk—we don’t want them to stop because we would then probably trip over them and fall! Not fun! With other tricks, like “sit,” you might want your dog to stay in position until you tell them to do something else or release them. It’s very easy to build duration in your tricks by continuing to reward behavior in position (by treating while they stay), and then, when your dog is familiar with the behavior, upping the criteria before you reward. This means increasing the amount of time between your dog getting into position and your click/reward, and then adding in a release word.

A release word or cue is something that communicates to your dog that a stationary behavior has finished and they can move. An example of this would be a verbal cue to release your dog from a sit or a down they have been holding. You can use this release word in trick training and in everyday life (trick training is of course part of our daily life with our dogs), so if you have asked your dog to stay, you want to clearly communicate to them when they can move. By building duration skills into our dogs’ training vocabulary, we can also communicate to them our expectation that, when performing a stationary trick (like sit, down, bow, or beg), they should hold that trick until released.

To build duration, you will need to pick a word you want to use for release. I like to pick something that isn’t a part of my general vocabulary, so that I don’t inadvertently cue my dog to move when they are in a stay, or at another time when I don’t mean to. “Okay” and “Break” are common release words. I like to do a little extra and tend to have a flair for being a bit more eccentric in my dog training, so I use words/phrases with my own dogs that are a bit unusual. I also like to have a different release word for each of my dogs, so that I can release each one individually while the other dogs hold position. This is handy when I have the dogs all doing tricks at the same time, and in real life with three dogs, when for example I want to release one dog at a time from a stay to get meals, or from their crates. I like to find words that fit my dog’s personalities or somehow connect to their names. Mercury’s release word is “Blast-Off,” Charlotte’s is “Mosey,” and Sirius’s is “Apparate” (yes, the Harry Potter spell). Come up with a release word that you like and then, to get your dog familiar with it, start when they are lying down on their own—take out a treat, and toss it. As your dog gets up to follow the treat, say your release word in a happy voice, praise, and let your dog get the treat. Repeat a few times. The goal is for your dog to understand that the release word is a cue to move. After a few practice sessions with throwing the treat, get your dog’s attention and say the release word. When your dog gets up, toss several treats, give lots of praise, have a little party!

Treats

Treats are one of the most important parts of the trick training we are going to do. To support the learning process, and to reward the work your dog is doing, you want to have an abundance of treats that are motivating to them.

When starting to train, a lot of people want to know when they can stop giving their dogs treats as part of trick training. My simple answer is NEVER! Do you want to work for free? But that isn’t actually true. You will, as your dog gains confidence and familiarity with tricks, be able to start to phase out the need to, for example, lure your dog into the trick. You will begin asking your dog to execute a particular trick perhaps even without food in your hand. Your treats might be sitting next to you, or in a treat pouch attached to your waistband. I know, I know, not the sexiest look, but hey, I’ve been seeing fanny packs making a comeback in NYC and gracing fashion runways. This is great news for hip dog people like yourself. Don’t be afraid to keep dog treats on you at all times. You like to get paid for a job well done; so does your dog!

Try not to be in a rush to remove treats from your training plan. A lot of people want to cut treats out as fast as possible in order to prove (mostly to themselves) that the dog really understands. Don’t rush! You want to really make sure that your dog understands what is expected of them before you increase the criteria or make the game significantly harder, such as by taking away treats. I promise you won’t always have to lure your dog into sitting with a piece of hotdog, but if you try to remove treats too quickly or ask too much of your dog before they really understand the game you’re playing together, your end trick is going to be inconsistent and sloppy. It also will add stress and tension to your relationship with your dog. Dogs want to play with us, they want to work with us. Dogs don’t want to irritate or frustrate us. Part of being an ethical play partner for our dogs is to communicate as clearly as we possibly can to them.