Successful Training through the Three Cs
by Sarah Burgess, Obedience Chair
This year, I was able to go home for Christmas for the first time since beginning my graduate career. I had a special project that week: To help train Ruby, my mother’s 10-week-old golden retriever puppy.
To be honest, I was a bit nervous; it had been a while since I had last trained a young puppy. After a deep breath (and some successful training sessions) I mused on how silly I had been. After all, the central tenets of operant conditioning are the same regardless of age and species – that’s the beauty of behaviorism. Everything from people to poodles to planaria responds to the principles of positive and negative reward and punishment. Variation in response is usually the result of a misunderstood or miscommunicated command or stimulus.
I’ve found that many of the frustrated pet owners I’ve worked with feel that dog training simply involves too many variables for them to manage. While trying to train, their minds ran away with them much as my own had when meeting Ruby for the first time. When this concern is expressed, they always seem relieved when I tell them that there are really only three things that a wise trainer needs to be mindful of: clarity, consistency, and creativity.
Clarity. When telling a dog what you expect of him, a successful trainer is always clear.
In the world of behavioral psychology, clarity is related to a phenomenon called cue salience. This is really a fancy way of saying that your command (or “cue”) must be clearly sensed and understood (or “salient”) by whatever it is you are trying to teach. Say, for example, you wanted to tell your Beardie to Sit. If you give this command in an empty, quiet room in your home with your Beardie looking directly at you, we would say that your Sit command has high salience; it is easily perceived by the organism you are trying to teach. On the other hand, if you were standing on the far end of a football field, separated from your Beardie by a parade full of clowns, obnoxious children, and cats on unicycles, your spoken command would have very low salience.
Let’s troubleshoot for a moment. Where do you teach your Beardie new behaviors? Obedience classes are fantastic, but do keep in mind that, in the end, the classes are really in place to teach the human what to do rather than the dog. A command given during an obedience class in a room full of excitable, social dogs may have very low salience for a happy-go-lucky Beardie who really wants to play. The best thing to do in this situation would be to listen to your trainer and then go back to your relaxed home environment to work your Beardie’s new command. Learning in a familiar and quiet environment increases cue salience.
How are you delivering your commands? I’ve worked with some dog owners who naturally have very soft, gentle voices. I’ve also worked with people who aren’t all that confident while training; instead of giving commands, they tend to offer suggestions (“Hey… Sit. Sit… Sit?”). Quiet voices and faltering faith can rob a command of its salience – after all, what bright, distractible Beardie could hear whispered words over the din of his own brilliance? What confidence would he have in a trainer that isn’t sure of himself? Think of yourself as that shepherd that I described in my first article. His voice needed to instill courage in his Beardie across a field full of sheep. Could yours?
Before your next training session, take a moment to monitor your vocal depth and verbal tics. If you are soft-spoken, try to imagine yourself as that horrible math teacher that you hated so much in grade school. Remember how grating and scary that voice was? Don’t worry – when you’re naturally soft-spoken, you’ll more than likely never be that intimidating. Do, however, bring some of that strength and firmness to your vocalizations when giving commands to your Beardie. You’ll feel strange at first – and your Beardie might take some notice and need to get used to the new clarity – but you’ll soon fit into a comfortable pattern.
There are some little slips of human vocalizations that can give the impression (or, as is often the case, clearly communicates) a lack of confidence. Stop for a moment and ask yourself a question out loud. Did you hear how you ended with a higher tone than the one you started with? Trainers who aren’t all that sure of themselves (or their dogs) will sometimes end a command as they would a question. A smart Beardie will pick up on this along with your timid body language and decide that, as a shepherd, you don’t really know what you are doing. Are you repeating your command without first providing feedback on your Beardie’s behavior? A trainer that does this is essentially teaching the dog that he doesn’t need to mind the command the first (or second, or third…) time it is given! Instead of repeating a word until your Beardie decides to do what you want him to, offer his command once and then let him know how he did. Did he Sit? Excellent! Praise him! Did he ignore it? If you’re sure that your command was clear, give him his corrective or “No” command (I prefer “Eh-Eh, Try it again!” followed with a 360-degree turn myself) and attempt the command again.
In short – an audible, firm command is a salient and clear command!
Consistency. Once you are sure that your Beardie is aware of the command he is given, it is important to issue and follow up that command the same way every time. A successful trainer values uniformity while training.
When doing positive, reward-based training, a handler is essentially guiding a dog’s behavior through something called shaping. What this means is that a trainer watches the dog’s behavior and rewards only what he wants the dog to do. Eventually, the trainer assigns a command to this behavior, and the dog will eventually perform this behavior when given this verbal cue. While simple in concept, it can be a very delicate procedure depending on the behavior a trainer is attempting to teach.
I was taught a fantastic game during a Women in Science summer camp back when I was just a wee trainer. Aside from outing myself as a life-long nerd, I mention this game because it is a fantastic way to really drive this idea of consistency home. Imagine the following scenario:
After being coached to not to talk to anyone until told otherwise, you enter a room and find two people standing there. They are both holding baggies full of cookie chips – chocolate, peanut butter, and white chocolate. It’s the middle of the afternoon and you’d really like a sugary pick-me-up. How are you going to communicate this to these people without speaking?
You try pointing to the bags – nothing. You look at them imploringly but get no response. You sit down in a chair to think. Suddenly, one of them steps forward and gives you a chocolate chip! Hooray! Sitting down worked well, so you try it again. Another chocolate chip! The third time gets you a peanut butter chip from the second person. Awesome! Over the next few rewards the people with the chips say, “One” right before giving you your treat. “Odd”, you think, but continue doing standing up and sitting down in your chair in order to get more chips. At one point you don’t get a reward for immediately standing up and sitting down again. You do it again – no response. While trying to figure out what gives, you stand up. One of the people looks at you, holds up a peanut butter chip, and says, “One”. Well, the last time you heard that word you were about to get a treat, so you wait for the chip he is holding. Nothing. He repeats: “One”. What else were you doing at the time? Well, you were sitting down… so you decide to sit in the chair. That did it! You got your peanut butter chip.
Sound familiar? This game was actually called “Animal Trainer”, and we were supposed to pretend that the people with the treats were trainers and the people without the treats were animals of our choosing. Our goal was to teach three behaviors of our choosing. Since animals can’t talk (and beating our fellow students into submission was openly frowned upon), we could only communicate through reward. In addition to giving us the fantastic inside perspective of what it was like to be trained, it taught us some of the little nuances of the art that some may neglect to mention. For example: have you ever thought about how your Beardie likes to be rewarded? My “trainers” did when it was my turn to be the “animal”. I personally feel that trying to pass off white chocolate as something edible is an abomination – so I did not take that particular chip from my “trainer” when offered and would stop responding if that was the only chip I was getting. I taught my trainers that I did not like that reward; fortunately, they were sensitive folks and caught on quickly to my signals.
Now imagine this scenario:
You’ve walked into the same room with the same instructions and the same situation. This is your first time in here, and you are exploring just like the person in the first example did. For ease, let’s say that you sat down in the chair as well.
You are rewarded! Excellent! You want another chip, so you stand up and sit down again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. You get up, walk to the door, walk back to the chair, and sit down. Hooray! Another chip! You do it again. This time, no reaction. You stand up and sit down. You get another chip – but you’re starting to get confused. What is the pattern? Over the course of the next few minutes you are rewarded sporadically, but you can never seem to get the right behavior so that you are given chip reliably. Finally you can’t think of anything else to try and simply give up, tired of making the effort.
Or, worse:
You’ve been training with the same people for about five minutes now. You’ve learned that “One” means to sit in the chair and “Two” means to knock on the wall. One of the trainers says “One”, so you sit down. Reward! The same trainer says “Two”, so you knock on the wall. This time, you don’t get a chip. What gives? The other trainer says “Two”, so you try knocking again. Success! Now the first trainer says “Two” and you reluctantly knock. Hooray, treat! Slightly confused, you sit down when the second trainer says “One” and get no treat. Then the same trainer says “One” again, so you stand up and sit down… and get a chip. Another minute of this leaves you frustrated and grumpy, so you decide that you’re done with the whole thing and leave the room.
Do you see what happened in these two examples? The training sessions were riddled with inconsistencies. In the first example the behavior itself was not uniformly rewarded; the second example involved inconsistent command-behavior-reward pairings. The common thread here is that the “animal” couldn’t figure out what was expected and didn’t feel like playing anymore after a while.
Your Beardie will do the same thing if he is not communicated with in a consistent manner. Your smart pup will quickly realize that his efforts are not effective and, rather than try to achieve something that his talented brain has already analyzed, he will more than likely try to engage you in play or, if sufficiently disrespected, lope off to find something far more entertaining to do.
I’ll be the first to admit that maintaining consistency – especially in public places - is not an easy task. It’s hard to shake the thought that you look like a neurotic, perfection-crazed trainer when you take five minutes in an aisle in Petsmart to make your dog sit. Our social rules dictate that we try to blend in with the people we are around; you can’t do that as a trainer in a store full of dogs straining on leads, pulling their oblivious people along.
Let’s face it – we are caretakers of a very special and magical breed. Most people will never know the joy (or frustration!) involved in training such intelligent and clever dogs. Beardies are smart and will take advantage of a trainer that does not mean what she says. Remember that shepherd in his field – if he decided to let a command slide, his Beardie would (rightfully) question his competence and instead rely on instinct. In the field, this may mean driving the sheep into the hills; in the pet store, this may mean loud playtime on lead! Consistency is not merely good form; it is a necessity when handling an independent thinker.
Creativity. While helpful when training any dog, this point is particularly important for Beardie lovers. Theoretically speaking, creativity is really found at the intersection of clarity and consistency; it’s sort of an added concern when teaching anything more advanced than a unicellular organism. While I don’t have any fancy lingo to elucidate this idea, the point remains the same: a successful trainer is a flexible and inventive problem-solver.
Being a dog trainer and all-around dog lover, I tend to attract all of the pet-related email forwards that my friends and family find. There is one in particular that I get a few times a year: it asks the reader how many dogs it would take to change a light bulb and then follows up with a list of popular breeds and their responses to that question (a border collie, for example, would apparently reply, “Just one. Then I’ll change all of the light bulbs in the house and make sure that all of the wiring is up to code.” An old English sheepdog, on the other hand, would say, “What light bulb? I can’t see a thing!”). Always one to educate, I write the forwarder back with the following response:
“Bearded Collie: ‘Light bulb? *yawn* What’s my motivation again?’”
How often have we read that Beardies are behaviorally and mentally similar to human toddlers? Anyone that has spent a respectable amount of time with a human two-year-old will tell you the trials and tribulations they’ve been through while keeping said child amused, engaged, and content. Games are invented, novelties are explored, and tantrums are weathered gracefully (well, usually). We rely on feedback from the toddler to let us know whether our efforts are successful and, if they are not, we adjust our approach. Training a Beardie involves much the same process. This is not a breed that will Sit perfectly for a trainer every single time – at least, not without the appropriate mental stimulation. My very first Beardie mentor very succinctly summed this up for me by stating that training a Beardie is an exercise in convincing the dog that what you want to do is exactly what he wants to do. Doing this most certainly requires creativity on the part of the trainer!
If your Beardie is not responding to commands even when they are clear and consistent, look around in his environment and try to identify what may be affecting his performance. Think outside of your training! Sometimes it is something simple. Did your dog just finish a huge meal? He might not feel like working for treats at that moment. Try a toy or lots of physical praise instead. Sometimes it is something beyond your control. Storm, my little rescue Beardie, responded somewhat poorly before I figured out all of his food allergies. He simply didn’t feel good enough to participate. Once I took care of all of that, he started responding beautifully and rocked the Obedience and Rally rings. As my response to my family’s forward indicates, sometimes your clever Beardie simply isn’t motivated. How can you inspire him? What always gets him excited? My favorite shaggy example, Storm, will sometimes get bored if he feels he knows a command perfectly. When this happens, I make him finish the command I’ve given him, then switch him up to a complicated string of old commands to put his mind to something else and freshen his outlook a bit. After a few minutes of this, I make him do the command we were working on once more and, once it is completed, I end our training session and begin our Intense Cuddle Session. All of these examples go a bit beyond basic behavioral techniques, but the ability to be attuned to your dog’s individual needs and desires is a very important part of successful training!
To sum, successful Beardie trainers clearly communicate their desires, consistently cue and reward their Beardies, and creatively consider what may be lurking behind a refused command. By keeping these three points in mind, a successful trainer will usually be able to guide his Beardie through nearly any training!
Sarah Burgess earned her BS in psychology from the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point. Her educational background is in both human cognition and animal behavior/ethology; she is currently studying cognition as a graduate student at California State University – San Bernardino and doing dog training and behavioral consultation for the sheer fun of it.
Storm (When The Levee Breaks CD RA) is a 2.5 year old Beardie rescue. His favorite jobs are obedience training, herding, and accompanying His Person to campus to make sure that she stays on task in the lab. When not working, he enjoys squeaky toys and cuddling.
