One of the least emphasized, but most important, aspects of training is management of your training environment and the motivators within it. To keep it simple, until the dog is correctly performing a task on autopilot, under the required conditions, and to the required standard, you must be able to control the dog or control their access to the competing motivators in the environment. Before going further, let’s define some terms:
Environment: everything in the training area besides you and the dog
Competing Motivators: things in the environment that compete for the dog’s attention and desire, drawing them away from the desired task
Control: Absolute custody and ability to manipulate… not a wish or a hope
Desired Behavior: The thing we want/tell the dog to do right now
Undesired Behavior: Everything the dog does that is not the desired behavior
Training Environments
Controlled Environments
Early in the process of training a skill it is helpful to remove all competing motivators from your training environment. Essentially, we are training the dog in a “Skinner Box” or aquarium. For most people, this means working in their basement, garage, or backyard where there are not many things competing for the dog’s attention. In this sort of environment the trainer has the ability to add or subtract motivational content as needed. Usually this means we start with an empty space, a dog on a leash, and one thing the dog is trying to work for (food, toy, bird, etc.). The dog performs the desired behavior, usually because I prompt it with the leash to start, and then earns a reward for doing so. We make sure the dog knows the behavior creates a rewarding consequence, and that performing unrequested behaviors does not yield reward. We repeat this until the dog is doing the behavior without any help from me through the use of training equipment or denial of access to reward.
It’s important to note that we want the dog to be able to try things, and have them fail at producing the dog’s desired outcome, here before moving into new environments. We want them moving into more natural or uncontrolled environments already having a relatively well established understanding of things that yield reward and things that don’t. We want them to be fairly certain, through repetition, that going rogue leads to failure. In training terminology this is called, “attrition.”
Accidental reinforcement of undesirable behaviors is the most common cause of failure in training, and no amount of correction or punishment will fix that. At best you will have a dog that learns they can push through your roadblocks. At worst you have a dog that can’t make heads or tails of what they are supposed to do.
It is prior to this phase in training behaviors that we should have already created desire for the motivators that we can offer our dog in training. If we want the dog to do what we ask, we have to be able to show them why they should care about performing the task when there is no obvious value. Then, if I know my dog values what I have to offer them as a reward in early phases of training and they are still checking out regularly, I probably need to provide more reinforcement, or provide it more frequently. Pay the dog a lot for a little bit of effort at first. Then over time, they get paid less for more and more work.
Transitional Environments
Next we move into more natural training environments but maintain the ability to control the dog and/or the competing motivators. In field work, for example, I might have ability to control when a bird flies (using launchers) or have a check cord on the dog to disable their ability to chase if they bump the bird, or (usually) both. When I am certain that the dog understands the rules of the game in this environment are the same as in the aquarium, then we begin to remove controls. In this phase I will still always have control of the dog or control of the competing motivators in the environment.
Natural Environments
For most people natural environments still allow for the use of training equipment. But for those participating in tests or trials, these places usually require your dog to run without equipment on. We need to have proofed the dog against all possible competing motivators prior to having an expectation that the dog will perform well under such circumstances. Training for these instances require carefully planning out your training area and control of motivators because you are no longer able to control the dog. Some behaviors cannot be “proofed” against and will always require some amount of management. This is especially true of elicited behaviors that support the dog for the task for which it has been selectively bred. This tendency is called “instinctive drift” and has been in the scientific literature on applied behavior analysis for a long time.
Control of Motivators
The front 70% of training work is done in controlled and transitional training environments. If done properly, the back 30% mostly takes care of itself. I am certain that most of the people reading this have seen, or experienced themselves, a dog that did not have the requisite preparation to be performing a certain task in a certain environment. The best examples I can think of:
The dog that was not trained on stop to flush and stop to shot as isolated exercises prior to attempting them in the field on liberated birds. No check cord on the dog, no launcher for the bird… This is a recipe for teaching your pointer to be a flusher. And I have seen plenty of dogs run right through the highest levels on a remote collar. Once a dog knows that discomfort does not imply injury, you would be surprised what a driven dog is willing to endure to get what they want.
The dog being told to enter the water for a blind or duck search, or a resend on duck search, that has never been taught that they must enter the water (through the use of pressure). No leash on the dog, no e-collar on the dog (or no practice with its use for a send away), and no waders on the handler… All you are doing is teaching your dog they are allowed to refuse.
On a dragged game track my dog stops tracking, lifts their head up and goes into a field search. They find the dragged game despite not tracking. So in the future, they see no need to track, since they can search and get the same result.
Curt (handled by Zach) starting a track on a slip lead at the VJP test. Curt got a very good tracking score, and very good search score because he’d never been allowed to succeed by doing the wrong type of seeking behavior in a given context. The consistent use of equipment, body language cues, and the command used inform the dog of what they are supposed to do. Curt was never allowed to succeed by doing anything but tracking when told to track, so when told to track, he does what has always worked for him in the past.
Prior to starting any training session you should first think of all the ways that it could go wrong and then figure out what you can do to mitigate that problem. So instead of going home frustrated, using those above examples again we can see how training is used to explain to the dog what they are supposed to do and why they get (or don’t get) the outcome they want:
If I practiced with the dog that a flush is a cue to stop, and a shot is a cue to stop, and then I go into the field and can control when a flush happens, as well as reinforce the need to stop either with a remote collar or a check cord, then I am able to set up a training scenario where the dog experiences loss of access to reward when they mishandle a bird. Now I can show the dog the relevance in those trained behaviors because they now have intrinsic value to the dog since they lead to possession of a bird. I have control of the dog and the reward.
If I practiced force to pile and water force with my dog, then I can compel them into the water and I get to stay dry. Early on, I can reward them very quickly for entering the water by throwing a duck so it lands in front of them after taking just a few steps into the water. I have control of the dog and the reward.
If I practiced the dragged game track with a lead on the dog, I can tuck it under one front leg so that the angle of leash pressure encourages the head to go down to the ground. If I know the exact track and pay attention to the wind, I can have a very good understanding of whether my dog is on the track or not, and restrict their ability to advance in the exercise if they are off track or try to switch to searching instead. Later, if I have a helper who laid the track for me, I can radio to them, if my off leash dog starts searching instead of tracking, to pick up the game used to create the track so the dog cannot succeed on that attempt. I have control of the dog, or the reward.
Pay close attention to your training environments and the competing motivators in them. Besides the understanding of core skills, the key to successful training is effective motivation for desirable behavior. We want the dog to engage in trial and error, but we don’t want to engage in trial and error. Any time your dog creates an outcome to a training setup that you don’t want, it means you failed to think through and adequately address all possibilities for failure.
In dog training your job is to stay unf*cked!
-Bart Bellon
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