Operant Conditioning

I can't remember if I've mentioned before that I have been a fan of BF Skinner concerning dog training for quite a long time. It's thanks to his research that we have such things as clicker training and positive training in the world of animals now instead of the classic way of force and control.

My only problem with this is that I often have difficulty coming up with ways to utilize positive training in unique situations. The one I've had the most difficulty with is getting the dog to stop bothering the cats. She likes to run up to them and shove her nose into their side making them jump and run, giving her something to chase. She will also curl her lip at them if they are lying near her and she's very jealous of the possibility of any food if they are around. 

About two months ago, I had a light-bulb moment and realized that instead of rewarding the dog for not bothering the cats,

I would instead reward the cats for being bothered by the dog. 

I set out to begin my training this morning with her most valued treat, cat treats. It was funny to watch her reaction the first time she shoved her nose into the cat and I gave the cat a treat! After a moment's contemplation, she tried a second time, shoving her nose into the cat's side. Again, I gave the cat a treat. The look on her face was priceless. You could almost see her working out the problem in her head. "Nose in cat, cat gets treat. That can't be right. Nose in cat...cat gets treat?!?" A third time, she shoved her nose into the cat and again, the cat got rewarded while she got nothing, not even a word from me.

She sat back on her haunches for a moment to contemplate the situation. She tried this behavior a couple more times and finally gave up bothering the cat, laying down on the floor. I wanted to reinforce the laying nicely behavior, so I finally gave the dog a treat. In my mind I was rewarding the most recent behavior, which was NOT bothering the cats.

 I was incredibly impressed that the dog had just run the equivalent of a science experiment to understand what was happening and I declared myself a dog training genius!

I was still patting myself on the back the next day when I took my coffee to the same chair and the cat jumped up onto the same ottoman. Charlotte walked up, looked at the cat and then looked at me and proceeded to shove her nose into the cat's side. I wasn't completely surprised. I mean, Rome wasn't built in a day. So, according to plan, I gave the cat a treat.

Without missing a beat, she shoved her nose into the cat again, waited for the cat to get a treat, and did it a third time. As I was handing the cat her third treat, the dog laid down and looked at me expectantly. 

I'm happy to say the light bulb went on immediately. I looked at her said "Oh-no-no-no! We are not creating a chain of behaviors!That is not how this works! No treat!" She cocked her head to the side and looked at me as if to say "Why not?"

All in all, I have to give it to her. It was pretty clever of her to think that she had somehow managed to get both herself and the cat a treat in addition to having her fun. I was not happy to see I'd been outsmarted by my dog. Border collies - too smart for their own good! 

Needless to say, I still haven't figured out how to get her to stop bothering the cats completely, though we now have a foster dog, and having an animal of the same species to bother has brought a small amount of peace to the cats lives.

Thoughts on My Dog Training Classes

I signed up for an online dog training class in February. It was a lot of money and I often suffer buyers remorse. Part of the problem was that it was a really bad time to do start something with this kind of time commitment. I was still in classes until May so my time was limited. But I felt compelled to sign up because this course if only offered every couple of years. It's for Dog Agility.

My mistake was thinking that I'd be getting more of the basics with it, but really, that was the course I signed up for last summer and dropped because I was concerned about the amount of money it cost and I had to pay for car repairs in addition to school and I was quickly running out of money. I'm mad at myself for not dropping this class and getting the refund while I could but rather trying to convince myself that this would all work out.

I am still trying to make it work. That is if I can find the drive to. I have the time now, but I still can't seem to bring myself to practice regularly. I think it's because there are basic obedience problems that I thought would be covered in this course that aren't and it's very frustrating to me. That and I can't seem to get my dog excited about some of the games. Maybe because I'm not acting excited enough about them. Hmmm. Food for thought.

I'm using this blog as a therapy session. Can you tell?

While re-watching some videos this morning I had a couple of ideas that I'm going to work on that will hopefully help.

1) I don't think I working in a big enough space.

2) The videos contain beginning, middle and advanced difficulty.I need to break them down and stop trying to work through the whole video at once.

3) Watching the videos without immediately following up with training isn't doing me much good at all.

4) Despite what I just said in "3", I need to look in every single link as there is information that I haven't stumbled upon yet that might help me. ie. Ruff Love

 5) I need to stop being lazy and making excuses.

The program advises doing record keeping so you can mark how far your dog has come. I've decided to try using this blog for that purpose. Obviously I haven't been actually blogging, so why not.

Plans for tonight:

Work on "Drive to the Hand"

Review games in Ruff Love

Where's my Shoe?

In my constant quest to become ever lazier while keep the dog more entertained, I decided to teach her to bring me my shoes when we go for a walk. I thought if I just taught her "shoe" connected with one pair of shoes, it would be fine. Well, as you can see in the video below, this wasn't really the case.

The biggest challenge in this entire thing is the fact that simply asking her where my shoe is sends her into a frenzy of racing about the house, bopping the cats with her nose, getting them riled up and pissed off which in turn gets her even more frenzied.  But if I can get her to focus long enough to actually search for my shoe, it usually works. And she gets rewarded with a walk. Yes, I realize the reward is probably why she gets all frenzied in the first place.

The Dog is smart, it's the human that needs work.

The small bells on a string hang on our back door so that whenever Charlotte needs to go outside she can ring them.

 This morning I heard her get up and walk to the back door, but no sound came. A moment later she turned around, came into the living room, and looked at me expectantly. I asked her what she wanted and she turned around and walked back to the kitchen door. Again, no sound came from the kitchen. She came back and tried to get up in my lap the way she does when she's insistent about going outside. 

I said "that is not how we ask to go outside. What do you need to do? Do you need to ring the bells?" 

She went back in the kitchen, but again no sound came. This went on a couple of times with me asking, her leaving and then returning with never any bells ringing. She was getting fustrated and I was slightly annoyed. 

 Finally I got up to go and see what she was doing and why she wasn't ringing the bells. I thought maybe the behavior was beginning to extinguish and I needed to point them out to her again. When I got to the door however, there were no bells. They were completely missing from the door not just caught in the door jamb like they sometimes are. I felt really bad and apologized to the dog, giving her a hug as I attached the lead to her collar and then let her out as she so desperately wanted to do.

It took some doing but I found the bells, in pieces, on my husbands desk. The string must have broken and he must have forgotten to tell me that it needed to be repaired. 

This just goes to show that she knew what behavior she was supposed to offer.

1) Walk to the door. 

2) Put your nose on this spot.

3) Push the object at this spot with your nose. 

Before finally getting up, I had watched her appear to complete 1 and 2 and in fact she actually had completed 1 and 2. She had followed all the instructions she was capable of completing. She was unable to follow through to the last step however because of something the humans had done. 

I have to wonder, how often this is the case in our training sessions with our pets? We think that they are refusing to follow through on a behavior or a trick, when in fact they are offering us as many steps as they are capable of and either we left out an important step, or we weren't clear in how we taught it to begin with. Just goes to show, the dog is smart, it's the human that needs work.

Selfie Tuesday

Selfie Sunday

Okay, so it's technically Monday. I suck at this. What else can I say. lol

Selfie Sunday

We missed selfie Saturday, so it's Sunday instead. Last week we were in New Orleans so I couldn't do it then. It was the first time I left the Wimby with someone other than my MIL or my aunt. It all went fine, but I worried. I finally understand what parents go through when they leave their children with sitters. It's not the children you worry about, it's the sitter. What if the child does something to the sitter. What if they try to run away, or they make a horrible mess or they're just generally obnoxious? I'm happy to say that I got no such reports. The Wimby survived and New Orleans was wonderful! I'll worry less next time. If he agrees to sit for us again...