Fun with Dogs!

I joked with someone that my poor little brain is actually leaking information it got so overstuffed at the Susan Garrett seminar but honestly I think there is just too much information up there for me to handle right at this moment.

The one thing that absolutely resonated with me at the seminar was not anything that Susan actually said but the way she said something I already knew:

If you have heavily reinforced a cue (sit, come, down, etc.) repeatedly so that it is a high value behavior meaning your dog is delighted to have the option to perform that behavior it can become a reinforcer in its own right.

I had already heard that piece of information.  I just hadn’t ever thought about the ramifications of using those heavily reinforced behaviors in other situations.

To cope with the Brit/Jellybean issues in the house, I have been interrupting Jellybean’s predatory behavior by asking for a sit or a down, waiting a moment and then reinforcing the sit or down.

Example: Jellybean is in the living room and sees someone or something on the sidewalk and gets overly aroused barking and carrying on.  I’m sitting in the kitchen at my laptop with Brit under the table.  Jellybean roars into the kitchen looking for an outlet for her frustration and jumps Brit.

Initially we had two actual fights under the kitchen table, one resulting in a puncture to poor Brit’s neck after which I switched to tethering Jellybean to a hook I put in the cabinet under the sink allowing me to heavily reinforce only calm behavior.

Gradually I gave Jellybean more untethered time continuing to reinforce calm behavior and when she began to run into the kitchen I would immediately ask for a sit or a down to interrupt the sequence before she got to Brit and hopefully create a pattern of “I am overly aroused and frustrated but if I go into the kitchen and sit, Mom will give me something plus my Wubba is always available to release that energy.”

The way that Susan spoke of using a heavily reinforced cue to reinforce another behavior made me see that what I was doing with Jellybean was actually reinforcing the getting wound up and tearing into the kitchen behavior which is the exact opposite of what I want!

My problem now is what do I do instead??

I believe that Susan would just prevent the getting wound up behavior in the first place by crating/tethering Jellybean which I am certain would work and I am not ruling out but I personally feel guilty doing that as it means Jellybean is not getting the attention and interaction she is accustomed to getting which to me feels punishing.

Thursday, Friday and Saturday I used the collar grab but then last night it occurred to me that Susan specifically said that the collar grab done correctly is BOTH positive reinforcement AND positive punishment and if that is ok then how bad is it to use my management technique of asking for the sit to interrupt the behavior?  Isn’t it the same thing really?  Both a positive reinforcer in giving the dog the option to perform the heavily reinforced behavior AND a positive punisher by stopping her from doing what she would like to do?

The short answer is that I need to buy copies of Shaping Success and Ruff Love ;-) but in the mean time…well, in the meantime I am slightly paralyzed by too much information I think.

I just watched a video on my twitter friend, Debbie Jacobs’ wonderful blog

And despite my incredible respect for Ian Dunbar and Sirius Dog Training, what I saw, with my fancy new Susan Garrett glasses, was that they are making the puppies lazy thinkers in terms of training. Now, that may be the best possible thing for the average pet owner. The trainer I worked for always told people that really they don’t WANT smart dogs because smart dogs are a pain in the ass!

That said, I do hate to see puppies immediately being dumbed down in quite that way.   I am not currently involved in any dog sport which none of the other seminar goers could understand: why would someone NOT involved in a dog sport want to go to a Susan Garrett seminar!  My dogs’ sport is life!

I had the ideal dog, Fancy, and that is all I want for my current dogs: to have a life commensurate with the one Fancy led which, although she participated in both competition agility and disc dog were not at all contingent on those sports.  Fancy had this incredible foundation that meant at any moment we could start up a new sport or create our own.  Anything less than that now is unacceptable to me for my dogs.