Private Lesson

Our lesson didn't turn out quite as expected, since Ursula got distracted by late arriving guests and forgot to bring her dogs.  So, she gave me a free lesson on the "wait for the cue" issue we've been struggling with.  Remember, this is the third stage of learning - the one referred to as true obedience.  Ursula sees it very much as a listening skill, one that very smart and very confident dogs often have difficulty with.

We first discussed what the consequences should be for a wrong response.  I knew I didnt' want to give a no-reward-marker because of the overall behavior suppressing affect of NRMs.  Still I wasn't clear on what to do that wouldn't be an NRM.  Ursula said to just calmly walk away until Gimme gives up the behavior and joins me, then turn back and give her a new chance to be right by repeating the cue.

Something Gimme had been doing and I'd been rewarding was - I'd say "sit", she'd give me a down (her new favorite behavior) and I'd wait, then she'd ponder and say, "hmmmm that's not getting a treat, now what did she say, oh yeah it was 'sit', I'll do that".  By rewarding that, she is still getting rewarded for a) not listening, b) not giving me what I asked for and c) poor latency.  So from now on I'll do the turn and walk away until she joins me - which will make it clearer and won't reward stuff I don't want.

Ursula suggested that I sometimes play a listening game with Gimme -- in particular when she is not in training mode.  I can give her a cue for a behavior she knows well without any other prompting (i.e. not saying her name to get her attention first) and then if she does it, say "good" and give her a treat, petting or some other reward.  I won't use a clicker since that gets her in training mode and I can't have the treats on or near me.  So, if I want to reward with a treat, I can repeat "good" on the way to where there are some treats.  BTW we are using "good" specifically because it is not our click-word (ours is "yes"), so if my timing is bad, I'm under no obligation to pay up.  For instance, I told her sit and when I said "good" she had started to lay down.  I didn't want to reward that so she got nothing and it wasn't a case of breaking the click=reward bargain.  (obviously you won't muddy the water with this approach for a dog that was a clicker novice)

Then the second thing we worked on was to get Gimme to give me a behavior only when I cue for it.  Ursula suggested that I might get better results if I tried the extinction approach, with a bit of the mixed sets.  I had worried about using extinction, since I didn't want to risk weakening the behavior.  In reality, using extinction won't weaken the behavior.  The moment she stops offering the behavior, then I'll cue it and she'll get rewarded for it.  At that time, its essentially on a variable schedule of reward, which makes the strongest behaviors of all.  Well duh...

We tried this with her orange behavior (get on a box and sit) and it worked well.  We were starting to get some good results.  We tried it with peach (head under a chair) and it didn't work as well.  Although Gimme clearly knows peach, she doesn't seem to be that fond of it.  I think that's because its not a particularly active behavior, which is Gimme's preference.  So before we work on that again, I'm going to train the behavior and raise its value by using Gimme's favorite reward.  You know the one - peanut butter. 

So that's some work cut out for us in the next few weeks.  Ursula agreed with me that Gimme has difficulty with this because its not on her agenda.  Gimme's agenda is "its all about Gimme-me-me-me".  We talked a bit about this, because Urs wanted to be clear that we aren't talking about dominance stuff - which she and I both agree has nothing to do with dogs. 

Rather, its about giving up control, which has to do with all species.  A dog that wasn't clicker trained or lacked confidence won't have as much of an issue because they've never really had any control, so there isn't much to give up.  THAT certainly doesn't describe Gimme.