OK, so tonight I did a one on one and two classes. One of the themes I have been focusing on a lot, especially over the last couple of weeks as the issue has come up time and time again, is the importance of acknowledging and rewarding a naturally occurring positive behaviour from a dog each and every time the dog presents it. By doing so, any interruptions to negative or undesirable behaviour will be that much clearer and the positive behaviour has a greater likelihood of reoccurring when you ask for it. What do I mean when I say this???
Look, we as humans are really great at focusing on the negative, much to our dogs’ chagrin. I had a student in class tonight say “My dog jumps on me, I push him off, bring him to his bed and make him lay down…but he just is not getting it…what am I doing wrong?”
The first thing I asked her is…”What do you do after pushing him off?”
She replied “Bring him to the bed”.
Me: “What do you do then”
Her: “I tell him to stay, but he just gets up after a while and does it again”
Do you see the problem?
There is so much focus on the negative and almost none on positively reinforcing the desired behaviour. The dog has no reason to stop jumping, the dog has no reason to stay on the bed because the owner is not rewarding the cessation of the jumping nor the laying on the bed.
So I explained to the class, this is a common mistake most people make. Her dog learned somewhere along the line that jumping up on people will get him attention. If he is having fun, whether the attention is positive or negative is immaterial. He is still getting attention. So the goal of her training would be to turn this around. I explained it would be much better to teach an alternative behaviour resulting in him getting the attention that is counterproductive to the jumping. When company came, ask the dog to sit, when the dog sat, he got attention, if the dog broke the sit, the attention stopped, the second the dog sat, the attention started again. As long as the dog is sitting, he is going to find it hard to jump AND if you are doing it right, he will be very reluctant to break the sit because the attention would stop.
In her case, where eventually she wanted the dog to lay on his bed and leave the company alone, we discussed how she could get the dog to remain on the bed. We discussed working through sit and down stays that were rewarded as soon as they are started and than intermittently throughout the process. By using intermittent reinforcement when you get to that stage, the dog will understand that his mom wants him to stay on the bed and by doing so he is the best dog EVER!!!
Practice this all of the time. Do not wait until company comes and than try to teach it….if you do, the situation of too distracting. Start teaching the process when there is only you and your dog in the house. Increase the level of distraction gradually, continually reinforcing the success at each step. Reward this behaviour when it occurs naturally. Your dog lays down 101 times a day naturally. If each time you acknowledge your dog laying down as a good thing, the likelihood of him repeating the behaviour when asked to do it increases exponentially. By doing this, you are setting your dog up for success as opposed to reacting to failure.
Do yourself and your dog a favour, focus on the positive, praise it up every single time. If a dog acts positively in a situation nine times out of ten and you recognize and reward those nine times, when you have to interrupt the tenth time, the dog will quickly relate back to the other nine times and figure out what he did wrong and alter the behaviour accordingly. If you do not do this, it is not that your dog is not “getting it”, it is that you are not communicating it properly. The weak link in the chain is you, not your dog.
Here is a link to a video of a sit which Dr. Ian Dunbar discusses something similar. It relates quite nicely to this discussion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTkYvn1HjrI&list=PLC02FB5F8045F8438