Rainy Day and My Backyard-is-a-Bog Training

Hokey planted herself in front of the heat vent. It was cold!

This will be a short, but sweet post.
Between the weather being horrendously cold last week...
then snowing...
then warming up so dramatically the snow melted in less than a day...
then raining buckets...
so that my backyard has become a virtual bog,
I haven't had much opportunity to do any real training with Hokey.

What to do?

How about shaping a random behavior?
I am using a flashlight as my substitute clicker.

Welcome to Hokey's Place

Another stressful week with little time to write any posts. However, the training goes on despite my lack of time to sit down and write anything about it. Here is a post on a behavior I'm introducing into Hokey's repertoire: "go to your place". This is a very convenient behavior to have if you are busy doing something and want your dog to stay out of the way, especially if you don't happen to have a crate handy.

The most common tool used to teach this is some sort of mat, but a towel, small blanket or even a dog bed, which is what I use for Poppy, works fine. It just should be something reasonably portable and easily recognized by your dog as "their" object. Every dog in the household should have their own designated "place". I bought Hokey a small cheap utility mat with non-slip backing for this purpose.

I am primarily training this through shaping and am currently in the middle of training the full behavior. It started with me laying out the rug in the middle of the living room and hand-flashing (my "clicker" since Hokey is deaf) her for interacting with it, eventually working up to reinforcing her for standing with all 4 feet on the mat. This actually turned out to be a speedy process as she was already used to putting all 4 feet on an object lying in the middle of the floor due to the shaping work we've been doing with the frisbee. From there, I gradually shaped her to sit and maintain good eye contact with me.

 

Next, I taught her to lie down on the mat. This was the only time I did not use pure shaping. This is because down is not a very natural behavior for Hokey to perform while we are interacting and was, in fact, the hardest of the basic obedience commands for me to train her to do. I felt trying to completely shape a down on the mat would take a long time and might try the limits of patience for both of us. Therefore, I did spend some time giving her the hand signal for down and reinforcing the resulting behavior on the mat. 

The end behavior that I'm working toward is for Hokey to respond to a hand signal telling her to "go to your place" by going to the mat and lying down and staying there until I release her. For example, this could mean when I'm ready to sit down at the table to eat dinner, I would be able to signal her to "go to your place" and she would make a bee-line to wherever I've laid her mat down and she would then lie down and remain there until I've finished eating and have given her a release signal. I could also bring the mat on the road with us - say to visit a friend or hang out at an agility trial. I could set the mat on the floor and she would have her own space to hang out. In such situations involving unfamiliar surroundings, having a default behavior such as this while making use of a familiar object (i.e. the mat) offers some security to a dog. 

As of today, my training of this has progressed to the point where Hokey is offering a sit with eye contact on the mat and going "down" on my signal. Eventually, I want her to recognize that when the mat is out and I'm busy doing something, she should be going to it and offering a default behavior. Right now, that default behavior is a sit, but I am working on turning it into a down and today I took steps to begin to shape that. 

I decided to get the mat out and place it on the floor right next to where I was sitting and working on a jigsaw puzzle. I made sure I had LOTS of treats close at hand to reinforce any desired behavior. Since this is new to Hokey, at first I reinforced her a few times for getting on the mat of her own accord and sitting. She was free to move about and I gave her no information about what to do other than to reinforce her when she got on the mat and sat down. 

Next, I gave her a short refresher on going down while on the mat by giving her the down signal a handful of times and rewarding her for responding correctly. 

Then I stopped giving her any information to see what she would do. She spent quite a bit of time standing or sitting on the mat and staring at me waiting for information that just wasn't coming. A couple of times she wandered off the mat, but she kept returning. She wanted to find out how to earn those treats! Then slowly the light bulb started to go off. You can see her working it out in her head in the following video.

Slowly she started to get the idea of what she was supposed to do. 

 

As Hokey gains confidence, her speed should improve. I did want to make sure I don't let her get into the bad habit of constantly getting up to repeat the behavior - i.e. I do not want her getting into a pattern of lying down, getting reinforced with a treat, then getting up and repeating the behavior in order to receive a constant stream of treats. The goal behavior is to have her down/stay on the mat for a period of time, so it is important to build duration in. Normally I build duration into a behavior very gradually, but as she was already showing some signs of falling into the habit of repeating the behavior for extra treats, I decided to mix it up a bit by randomly and generously rewarding her for staying in the down position and, every so often, not reward her immediately upon her going into the down position. This seemed to help her hold the down position. Also, it is important to make sure the delivery of the treat is given in such a way that it does not encourage the dog to rise from the down position. Give it quickly and just below the nose while they are in a down position. If the dog starts to rise in anticipation of getting the treat, make sure they go back down into position before releasing the treat.

Hokey and I will continue to work on this and before long she should be heading to her mat to relax and chill out while the world buzzes around her.

Shaping Up(date) & Bonus Trick

This past week was not my best (to put it mildly). And it was a busy one at that. I have lots of ideas for new blog posts, but the chaotic nature of my life is getting in the way of bringing them to fruition.

Finally taking a break from the chaos of this past week. As always, my dogs are there to lend support.

In the meantime, I thought I'd write a brief update on Hokey's progress with shaping. Last month, I recorded Hokey's first free shaping session and wrote a blog entry about it. In that session, I was shaping her to simply put two front feet inside an upside-down frisbee. Since then, we've progressed to 3, then 4, feet in the frisbee. Here is a demonstration of us working through the process. Again, since she is deaf, I use a hand flash as my "clicker". I have to be fast and try very hard to make sure she sees it. Here, I start by hand flashing for putting her back feet on the frisbee. Next I reinforce for movement of one of her front feet backwards so that eventually there are 3 feet in the frisbee. Finally, the fourth foot moves back - the goal - and she is generously rewarded.

As usual, Hokey catches on to the game quickly and offers the behavior consistently and repeatedly as shown in the following clip.

Soon I will be moving to a smaller frisbee.

In the meantime, I am teaching Hokey a TON of other things, including some tricks. Here she is learning to roll over. I teach this by putting her in a down then using a treat to lure her into the behavior by letting her nose follow the treat I'm holding as I slowly move it over her back. As soon as she completes the behavior, I release the treat.

And yes, I talk to her a lot even though she's deaf. It's part of the bonding process for me and I'm sure she can "hear" me, or at least recognize my intent, in her own special way.

Shaping Up - The First Session

Hokey had her very first shaping session today. I particularly love to incorporate the use of shaping into my overall training for two reasons:

1. The dog learns to think through situations and problem-solve. It is allowed to make choices and subsequently learn, through trial-and-error, which ones result in a reward and which don't. I love watching the wheels turn inside my dogs' heads as they try to figure out and work through what it is I want them to do. And it is especially rewarding when the light bulb goes off and the dog starts consistently repeating the desired behavior - you can see them bursting with pride and pure joy.

2. It's FUN! The dogs and I have a blast together when we do shaping exercises. It's a big game where we both win. My dogs can barely contain their excitement and I get so much enjoyment out of watching them experiment and experience a-ha moments. The process helps to cement our bond and makes us better working partners.

That said, I am not a free-shaping purist. I may have an abundance of patience, but still, not quite enough to use shaping as a method to train every little behavior.  I use positive reinforcement lure training in combination with shaping - especially for basic commands such as sit and down.

What I really like to use shaping for best is to help my dogs develop body awareness, to help them learn to interact with objects (i.e. more independence/less handler focus), and to teach new tricks.

Although I've incorporated some shaping into Hokey's basic training, today was our very first session of true shaping for the sole purpose of shaping's sake. Because of her deafness, she tends to be a little more handler-dependent and handler-focused than the average dog. Looking ahead to potentially training her for agility, I want to begin to shift her focus off of me a bit so she can 1) start to build value for interacting with objects/obstacles and 2) develop some independence. Additionally, I want to start building her body awareness.

Normally, when beginning shaping sessions with a dog, I would start by using a box as the object with which they are to interact, as in 101 Things to Do with a Box. However, since I recently started nosework training with Hokey, which involves the use of cardboard boxes, I decided I should try something else as not to confuse her. Since she is small, I felt a plastic frisbee would do the trick. 

Unfortunately, I did not capture the very first steps of her shaping session on video. These involved her getting rewarded for any interaction with the frisbee: nose touch, paw touch, etc. Any kind of acknowledgment. She is a smart cookie and flew through those steps rather quickly, so I decided she was ready to take the plunge and actually learn a new behavior. I wanted to keep it VERY simple, so the behavior I chose was for her to stand with both front feet on the frisbee. Here is a video of our first attempts:

She caught on right away! I let Hokey think things through and never lured. That is the point of the game. Sometimes if one of my dogs gets really stuck while I'm waiting them out, I might move around the room to help "unstick" them, but never in a way that would result in them being lured into the desired position.

After a short break, we were back at it. At first, I was preferably delivering my rewards while she was still in the desired position. However, once she "got" the game, she showed some reluctance to put much distance between herself and the frisbee between repetitions, so I decided it was time to start throwing the treat away from the frisbee to move her off.

With Ollie and Poppy, I either use a clicker or my substitute clicker word, "Yes!". Obviously, with Hokey's deafness, neither of those is an option. Instead I use a hand flash. I may also give her an "OK" sign AFTER the hand flash and treat reward, to let her know how pleased I am. Of course, I want to try to deliver my hand flash, followed by the reward, the split second she performs the behavior (i.e. as soon as both front feet are on the frisbee). This is where there might be a slight disadvantage with her deafness in that,  if she doesn't happen to be looking at me, I am unable to get the timing correct and, therefore, this may result in a delay between the behavior and the hand flash, as shown in the following clip (slowed down) where she is sniffing the carpet as she performs the behavior before she looks up at me.

But, overall, she caught on to the game and I consider it a successful first session.

BTW - I don't know what that silly little move of her putting her head upside-down between her front legs is all about, but I love all my dogs' funny little quirks.