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.

Back Up That Booty!

Developing a sense of body awareness is an important skill in the foundation of an agility dog. I play a lot of free shaping clicker games which involve touching targets with different parts of the body or placing themselves in various positions (e.g. 101 Things To Do With A Box). I begin this early in my dogs' training so that by the time they start working obstacles, their proprioception is pretty well-developed. One of my favorite exercises for building rear-end awareness is to teach them to blindly seek out and climb objects behind them using their rear legs. The following videos, starring Ollie and Poppy, show the steps in this process. Just keep in mind that this is done in incremental steps - don't rush it. Dogs learn best when the training session is kept short (in this case, ~5 minutes) and repeated often before moving on to each new step.

First, I teach my dogs to back up so that both their hind feet are touching something flat on the ground. Since it will not see what it is backing onto, the dog will need to be able to feel a distinct difference between a correct position and one that is missing the mark. Therefore, it is important that there be a marked contrast in texture between the target where they will be placing their hind feet and the surrounding area.  Since I'm training on carpet, I use a flat piece of cardboard as my "target". If I were training on a wood, linoleum, or some other smooth surface, I would probably use some kind of non-slip mat as my target. With my use of the cardboard here, ideally I would affix one side with a non-slip surface in order to stabilize it on the carpet so it wouldn't slide around too much. I haven't done so here and you can see it sliding around - especially with Poppy as it goes shooting away from her at the end.

Here is Ollie repeatedly backing onto the cardboard: 

My dogs are already used to playing games where they need to move and place different legs in certain positions, so they know to reach around behind them to find things without me giving them any kind of verbal or visual cues. However, if your dog is not already used to playing body awareness shaping games, you may need to lure them into the correct position the first few times. To do that, have the dog stand directly in front of you with the target lying on the ground just behind the dog. Step toward your dog so that it moves backwards. As soon as BOTH back feet are on the target, click and reward. Repeat this several times. Once your dog seems to "get it" stop stepping toward them and see if they will step back on their own. Click and reward all successes. Once you have had several successful sessions, you can start to build distance so that they need to eventually take 3 or 4 steps back before their hind feet hit the target. Build this distance gradually over a few sessions.

Here is Poppy backing onto the cardboard. Generally, her preferred method of succeeding in this game is to cheat by approaching the target head on and then doing what I call a "swimmers turn maneuver" - kind of a pivoting hand stand where she kicks up her hind legs and swings her rear end around into the correct position. Here, while the target is flat, she is not quite so dramatic, but she does approach the cardboard once head on and then turns around into the correct position. I do not reward her for that.

Once your dog is consistently backing onto the flat target, you can start to add some height. Here I use a low box turned upside-down. Here is Ollie:

And here is Poppy. Notice, once again, that she tries the head-on approach a couple of times and doesn't get rewarded for it.

I did not feel the need to add several videos of the next steps, which basically involve increasing the height of the target. I use gradually increasingly sized boxes. Whatever you use, just make sure it's relatively stable so that it won't move around or be knocked over while your dog pokes his back feet around and hoists himself up.

Eventually you can add a verbal cue or hand signal to tell your dog back. Trick taught. Now go crazy entertaining your friends by having your dog walk backwards up a variety of objects. My dogs will walk their hind legs up just about anything - including people. Here they both are using my standard go to obstacle for this - the sofa:

Have fun & happy training!

Deaf Dogs Do Bark - Part 2

In Part 1 of my discussion of the latest edition to my pack, Hocus Pocus a deaf Jack Russell Terrier, focused on her just being a normal dog. She is. But when training a deaf dog, there are special considerations to be taken into account, which I will go a little here informed by my short experience working with Hokey.

To reiterate from part 1, deaf dogs are absolutely capable of understanding and learning just like any other dog. I can't emphasize that enough. I had posted this link of my working on training her in my first blog entry, but feel I should share it again here as proof:
 Hokey Training
Most of what she is demonstrating in the video was taught to her within the short time frame of 1 - 2 weeks.  I use hand signals - many of which I just made up. I like to keep things simple and mostly confined to one hand so that my other hand is free. It doesn't matter what you use. Deaf dogs don't inherently know ASL. Like any dog, they just need consistency in communication. And, yes, I am using "clicker training". I'm just substituting a hand flash - fingers spread - for an actual clicker.  In addition to training basic commands, I'm currently laying the foundation for eventual agility training and have also started her in nosework.

In my short personal experience, I've found there are two opposing challenges to working with a deaf dog: getting their attention and hyper-focus. Getting Hokey's attention is rarely a problem for me. Like Poppy, she follows me EVERYWHERE. Everywhere I go, instead of one, there are now TWO white dogs shadowing me and watching my every move.

And, as a side note, let me interject that the most common form of congenital deafness in dogs is linked to white coloration. There are plenty of resources to be found online that provide in-depth discussion on the link between coloration and deafness. Perhaps the question I should be asking is not why Hokey is deaf, but why Poppy is not. Both she and Hokey are white to the point of almost being "pink". Both dogs have a patch of coloration on the left side of their heads. Poppy's is larger and bi-colored, but still doesn't quite extend up to the ear any further than Hokey's does. But I'm pretty positive, due to the motion of the ear reacting to a noise, that Poppy can even hear out of her ear on the non-colored side of her head.

But back to the training discussion - inattention vs. hyperfocus in deaf dogs. Unlike some deaf dogs, I don't have to hang a bell around Hokey's neck or go looking for her. She never wanders off to go sleep somewhere else in the house. Unless she is confined to her crate, wherever I am, she is there too. She even follows me into the bathroom while I take a shower and waits for me on the bathmat. From what I understand, this is not outside the realm normal behavior for some deaf dogs. What is a little unusual, I gather, is that I rarely need to take action to wake Hokey up. It is common for deaf dogs to sleep deeply and for their owners to find ways to gently wake them as to not elicit a startled response. Not so with Hokey. If she's out of her crate and asleep on the bed, sofa, etc. and I get up, she senses it and is instantly awake and ready to follow me. On the rare occasions I've seen her curled up asleep in her crate when I walk into the room (she is almost always awake and alert when I enter), she senses my presence pretty quickly and wakes up on her own. It is never a gradual process; one second she's asleep, the next she is wide awake and ready to go! Only rarely do I need to give her crate a couple of light taps to wake  her and only once or twice, early on, did I find it necessary to open her crate and actually touch her in order to wake her.

Although occasionally when we train, something catches Hokey's eye or nose requiring me to refocus her attention back to me, in general, she is highly attentive.

Two focused dogs - Ollie & Hokey during one of our early introduction sessions after Hokey joined the household

Which brings me to the hyper-focus side of things. She is definitely more handler-focused than my other two dogs. She watches me intently when we work together. This is not a bad thing. It would probably be a more than welcomed behavior in a pet home. However, if I decide I want to train her to do agility, being hyper-focused on me as her handler does present some additional training challenges. She will need to learn to take her eyes off of me to focus on her path and the obstacles in front of her and to be able to work at a distance from me. This will be new territory for me as a trainer. Already I find myself thinking of ways to build value for distance and obstacles. I'm hoping that the nosework we've recently begun will help her learn to work independently. Our first session was rough; she spent most of it standing and staring at me looking for information. However, after a few more sessions, she now "gets" the game and doesn't need to look to me at all. Progress. The other day we had a break-through in targeting. Before, she would only nose-target my hand or something I was holding in my hand. She wanted nothing to do with a stationary target. She just didn't understand the purpose of interacting with such a thing as her expectation is to have all interaction and information come from her handler. After using a ball-on-stick target in hand (as seen on the video), I placed the stick into its wooden base. It took a couple of minutes, but after a couple of successful touches and rewards, the light bulb went off  and she started nose touching the ball over and over again. I was able to take a few steps back and she went to it to touch it. More progress! And just this morning I was able to send her running through my practice tunnel after her tug toy or ball rather than her coming instantly to me after running through to receive a food reward. Another triumph on the path to distance and independence. Soon I plan to start doing some shaping with her interacting with objects to help her learn to think things through for herself rather than constantly looking to me for information.

We are on a roll...
Look out world, here comes Hokey!