BKLN Manners. Kate Naito
using management to ensure that the bad habit doesn’t continue when you’re not home. Even when you are home, management stops the unwanted behavior from occurring; during that time, you can train your dog to behave differently in the presence of his triggers, whether it’s food on the counter or a squirrel crossing your path during walks.
For a dog who is accustomed to his crate, the crate can be a helpful management tool.
Sequence for Training
When it comes to communication between you and your dog, it’s a little different from the kinds of communication we’re used to. (However, the positive training techniques we use to train our dogs can also be used to train spouses or kids! Karen Pryor explains how to use positive reinforcement with animals and humans alike in her classic book Don’t Shoot the Dog.) When teaching your dog to lie down, for instance, what you do after the dog lies down is far more important than what you did before he lay down. What that means is that your cue to lie down doesn’t teach him much; it’s by “marking” and “rewarding” the correct Down position that you are actually teaching him. This is the typical sequence for teaching a dog a brand-new behavior:
Cue Princess to lie down. At first, you may need to lure her into position with a treat so she can follow the scent downward. Princess lies down.
Mark it. The moment Princess is fully lying down, say “Yes!” Why? “Yes” is a word that we generally don’t use around our dogs otherwise, so the dog will make a clear connection that the word “yes” means “good job; a reward is coming.” You may also click with a clicker (see page 24) or use a different verbal marker, such as “Good dog!” (If you want to get technical, trainers tend to avoid “Good dog/boy/girl” because we also tend to use it when Princess is simply being cute or funny, but we rarely say “Yes” to a dog in other situations.) The word itself is not so important, as long as you use the same word every time and say it at the exact moment the dog does the desired behavior. Marking the desired behavior is the way Princess learns what we want her to do.
Reward it. In the early stages of learning, rewards serve to encourage the dog to try the behavior again. It was so rewarding the first time, why not lie down next time, too?
Marking and rewarding go hand in hand. Marking identifies the behavior we want, and rewarding encourages the dog to do it again. If you mark too slowly—for instance, after Princess has popped back up from the Down—there is the chance that you’re marking the wrong behavior, and she will learn that “Down” means “lie down and stand up quickly” rather than “lie down and stay down.” Rewards should come pretty quickly after the verbal marker, within a second or two of marking, especially when you’re teaching a new behavior. Always reward Princess while she’s still doing the desired behavior. In this case, reward her while she’s lying down so she learns how awesome it is to lie down.
If Princess starts to lie down but then pops up into a stand, we mark that moment, too. We use a no-reward marker (NRM) like “Oops” or “Uh-uh” to identify the moment the dog did the wrong thing. When that happens, just say your NRM and start over. There’s no need for an angry tone, and, please, no physical corrections. When the dog makes a mistake, it is just that: a mistake. Imagine if your teacher punished you every time you made a mistake; you probably wouldn’t want to learn from this person anymore, and rightly so!
The last handy word is a release word, telling Princess that she can stop lying down now. I use “OK.” Without this word, she won’t know for how long to lie there, and she will eventually get up on her own. It’s better for you so release with “OK” before that happens.
There are several strategies to replace counter-surfing with acceptable behavior.
Cues
When I was growing up, dogs went to “obedience school” and obeyed “commands.” The attitude toward the dog was, “Do it. And if you don’t, expect unpleasant consequences.” As times have changed and training has evolved, so has the lingo. Obedience and commands are out, and manners and cues are in. This shows the current direction of dog training, which is more about the dog being polite than being obedient, and we recognize that the dog certainly has a choice whether to obey our cues or not. The goal of positive dog training is to make the polite behavior—such as sitting, rather than jumping, to be petted by a stranger—the better choice in the dog’s mind. Sure, he can choose to be rude, but only being polite gets him what he wants, so it’s in his best interest to listen to your cue.
Cues reveal a great deal about the differences between humans and dogs. We humans talk a lot, and it’s quite a challenge to get us to stop. In BKLN Manners™ and other group classes I teach, I always remind participants to say the cue only once. And almost every participant breaks this rule again and again, not because they are bad at following instructions but because they are normal human beings who tend to repeat the same thing, louder and louder, until they are acknowledged. (For an enlightening comparison of human and dog behavior, I recommend Patricia McConnell’s The Other End of the Leash.) If you think about dogs, though, they generally don’t vocalize, excluding arousing or alarming events like a doorbell ringing or rowdy off-leash play. In general, their world is pretty quiet, and for us to train them effectively, we need to put our human tendencies aside and follow suit.
So, from now on, unless told otherwise, give the cue only once. Once! (There I go, repeating myself like a human.) Imagine if you say, “Sadie, sit. Sit. SIT!” Finally, she does, but what has the cue become? It’s become two cues that Sadie can ignore, and only the third time does she have to listen. Instead, say the cue once and then ensure that the dog is in a situation in which she will definitely sit. This will be outlined in the steps of later chapters.
If, while training something new, you say the cue (e.g, “Sit) and the dog doesn’t immediately respond, count to ten in your head. Dogs, especially puppies, take a little extra time to process what you’ve said. Give your dog the chance to respond to your first cue; most dogs do if you just give them sufficient time. If you completely lose his attention, or more than ten seconds has passed, then reevaluate what may have gone wrong and start over. The next time you ask for a Sit, create a situation in which you know he will sit, possibly by moving to a quieter area or using a tastier treat, so he can be successful with just one cue.
Four-for-Four
Let’s go back to the metaphor of taking a language class. Either as a child or an adult, you have probably learned a foreign language to some extent. In my case, I have been taking Japanese language classes for more than a decade so I can communicate better with my Japanese in-laws. One program I took was divided into twelve levels, but there was no exam at the end of each level to determine if the students really understood the material enough to move on to the next level. All of the students moved up to more difficult levels at the end of each semester, regardless of proficiency. Without an assessment to gauge each student’s comprehension, what happened was, by Level 5 or so, students started getting in over their heads, lost their motivation, and many ultimately dropped out. Having a background in education, I already knew that when the material got overwhelming, I would need to repeat a level. And I did, at Level 6 and then again at Level 10. Despite criticism from my classmates (“Why are you wasting your money to repeat old material?” “If you want to feel like the best student in the class, maybe you should retake Level 1, ha ha!”), it was repeating those levels that allowed me to really absorb the information I’d learned and smoothly progress to Level 12—while my snarky classmates gave up and dropped out, one by one.
The same concept holds true for dogs. When teaching a new behavior, we want to make sure that the dog fully understands the criteria for Level 1 before we move on to Level 2. I recommend practicing “four-for-four,” which involves working on a new behavior at Level 1 until you