by Grayson Schaffer | on March 9th, 2010 | in Features, Video Clips
Danger contributes some nice camerawork to our ski outing on Friday.
Danger tries his hardest to frame the shot
by Grayson Schaffer | on March 2nd, 2010 | in Features, Training, Video Clips
Last week, Danger and I got to hang out with the Telluride ski patrol and learn a few tricks. One that didn’t go as well as planned was Danger’s attempt to ride the chair lift. . .
Eric and Wylie
by Grayson Schaffer | on February 18th, 2010 | in Features, The Wildrose Way, Training
Here, I’ll use Cooper to demonstrate the stepping stones to a remote sit. Stopping a dog on the whistle is as important for skiing as it is for retrieving. Stopping your dog is the first step toward handling him—sending him left, right, and back like a football receiver.
by Grayson Schaffer | on February 10th, 2010 | in Features, Training
All dogs have the ability to swim underwater, but not all will. Here, we get Danger used to putting his head under in a controlled environment. All you need is a bucket and some jerky.
by Grayson Schaffer | on February 9th, 2010 | in Features, Training
This one is borrowed from horse trainers. Making right-angle inside turns forces your dog to watch your legs and make sure he’s in position to avoid getting stepped on. It’s kind of like a dance step. Practice often and your pup is bound to become a good partner.
Heeling with an inside turn
by Grayson Schaffer | on January 26th, 2010 | in Features, The Wildrose Way, Training
Every dog’s got to know his name. That’s how your pup is going to know when it’s really his turn to heel, retrieve, or get on the couch.
by Grayson Schaffer | on January 5th, 2010 | in Features, Training, Video Clips
We’re going to keep harping on this point all winter. Dogs that get close to skis receive gaping lacerations. It’s just that simple. Here are three tips to help ease your mind and your dog’s pain. Nothing keeps me awake at night like the thought of skis cutting doggy tendons. You can see, even in this video clip that Danger and Cooper aren’t perfect. In the heeling part at the end, Danger crosses over my right ski and was very lucky not to have gotten cut.
Next time, we’ll work on positioning—teaching your pup when he should be at your side, when he should be a ski-pole’s length away, and when he should be behind.
Cooper, Grayson, and Danger at Ski Santa Fe
by Grayson Schaffer | on December 21st, 2009 | in Features, Video Clips
Danger gets ready to spin the bottle
by Grayson Schaffer | on December 14th, 2009 | in Features, Training
This is another fun one to teach with the clicker. First teach him to drop a glass bottle in the glass bin, just like we did with the cans. Do this only after teaching the can trick—broken glass and dog paws don’t mix. Then have him start by picking up the glass bottle from the can bin and dropping it in the glass bin. Gradually add cans to the mix and only click/treat him when he chooses the bottle.
Danger hits his mark
by Grayson Schaffer | on December 7th, 2009 | in Features, Training
Here’s a classic trick that never gets old: Play dead. Use a clicker to shape this behavior. The click should come right at the moment when the dog has completed the task. Early on, you might click just for him lying down and then for flopping over onto his side a bit. With a dog that’s had some clicker training before and knows that he’s got to offer a behavior to get the click, this should go quickly. You can teach a roll-over the same way.
by Grayson Schaffer | on November 30th, 2009 | in Features, Training, Video Clips
What’s not to love about Ski Santa Fe? The same slopes we were hunting September we’re skiing in November. Cooper was too young to hunt this year, but he’s just the right age to get started on snow. We’re going to spend a lot of time talking about how to ski with your dog this winter. Everyone loves to do it, but few people do it safely. Of the Outside dogs that accompany us on morning hike-up laps, none have escaped a laceration either from a ski edge or a snowmobile. The reason it happens is simple: The owner has no control over the dog when new and exciting distractions are introduced. A few people have told me that I’m no fun for making my dogs heel. But that’s not quite right. The point is: Make sure your dog can heel and will come when called (even when skiers or snowmobiles are zipping by). Then when you release your dog to run and play, you can do so with the confidence that he’s not a danger to himself.
- Cooper gets his intro to snow
by Grayson Schaffer | on November 11th, 2009 | in Features, The Wildrose Way
Hmmm, notes of kerosene with a distinct diesel finish
Mike passed along news from Tennessee-based handler Jim Bowers about Cooper’s half-brother Boone’s recent certification in arson detection. Boone is trained to detect some 18 different accelerants, which are often present in arson-caused fires. The dog pinpoints the location of the fuel in the debris, a sample is taken back to the lab and, voila, This was no accident!
Boone was started in scent detection at Wildrose shortly after birth and made the team at only 12 months, which is very young to pass the Canine Accelerant Detection Association’s rigorous test. Currently there are about 200 arson-detection dogs working in the country. Nice job, Boone!
by Grayson Schaffer | on October 28th, 2009 | in Features, The Wildrose Way, Training
Three fingers under the chest; pinkie out; thumb out
Puppies are great. Loads of fun. But they squirm a lot and, unlike cats, do not always land on their feet. Here, Mike demonstrates proper technique with my mom’s pup, Gibbs.
How to Hold Your Puppy from Walker Parks on Vimeo.
by Grayson Schaffer | on October 22nd, 2009 | in Features, Training, Video Clips
Safety Note: If you're going to try this with a bottle, make sure your dog's hold is bulletproof.
Some folks were asking whether Danger can do that beer trick from last week’s short movie, “In the Face of Danger,” in one take. Yes, and chances are your dog can too. Training a dog to connect tricks or behaviors end to end is called chaining. Typically, these types of linked behaviors are taught back to front, or what’s called back-chaining. Basically, you start with the last part of the task, train that to proficiency, and then add the next-to-last part. Withhold your reward until the dog completes both of these well-polished tasks end to end. It won’t take him long to figure out that the criteria have been raised and he now has to do two tasks before the reward. Then add a third link in the chain and so on. When you see dogs performing complex, apparently human-like tasks on TV, this is generally how they’re taught.
OK, here’s the video.
How To Teach Your Dog To Fetch A Beer from Walker Parks on Vimeo.
by Walker Parks | on October 19th, 2009 | in Features, The Wildrose Way, Training, Video Clips
by Grayson Schaffer | on October 12th, 2009 | in Features, Training
Nice pick, Cooper!
You never know what your dog will be afraid of. After we’d wrapped up our opening day of duck season, I brought Cooper out of the truck to make a couple of retrieves through the decoys. Just before tossing a duck out into the spread, I gave a few honks on a duck call (ya know, for realism) and Cooper jumped backward. He’s fine around everything else, from guns going off to vacuum cleaners to hair dryers, but for some reason this really set him off. He made some nice retrieves (and one not-so-nice, where he got to shore before I could cut him off) but I learned a valuable lesson. Introduce your dog to all new things slowly. When we got home, I quickly conditioned him to the duck call by blowing it very softly and then giving him food and gradually ratcheted up the volume while continuing to feed him with every quack. I got lucky that this mishap was easy enough to fix, but let this be a lesson for all of your dog’s early athletic endeavors. Make introductions carefully and build up exposures slowly. Once a dog is affraid of bikers or skiers or horses or bearded men or women in fur coats, you’re going to have a hard time breaking that fear. Best not to let it start in the first place.
by Grayson Schaffer | on October 7th, 2009 | in Features, The Wildrose Way, Training, Video Clips
That old trope about old dogs not learning new tricks just isn’t true. It may be difficult to break old dogs of long-held habits, but teaching new tricks isn’t so hard at all. Here’s a clip from when Mike was here, in Santa Fe. Features editor Elizabeth Hightower was having problems getting her ten-year-old black Lab, Angus, to drop his ball. Mike showed her his pressure-point technique to fix the problem. Now watch him spit it out and wait for a retrieve before dissapearing into the bushes. . .
Angus finally spits out his ball
by Grayson Schaffer | on October 5th, 2009 | in Features, Training
Many common dog bowls can be used upside down to prevent wolfing
Wolf–verb (used with object)
| 9. | to devour voraciously (often fol. by down): He wolfed his food. |
What your dog eats is important, yes, but so is the way he eats. Scarfing down a day’s worth of food in 30 seconds can lead to digestive problems, bloat, or even a deadly condition called gastric torsion. Here are some tips on how to feed your dog, regardless of what you feed.
- Feed your dog twice a day. I’d often heard that since dogs are carnivores and thus evolutionarily adapted to go for long stretches between meals, you can feed them once a day. Then Sue reminded me that dogs aren’t carnivores, they’re scavengers—and in the case of Danger, panivores. One larger meal a day will work, but two will lead to better digestion, less bloat, and less hunger-related anxiety around the house. Remember to subtract the calories of any treats or scraps you give your dog from his food bowl.
- Get a bowl that forces your dog to slow down. You can buy bowls that have posts in them, or if you have a bowl with a hollow rim (pictured) just turn it over and feed from the edge.
- Give your dog a quiet area to eat. If Cooper approaches while Danger is eating, Danger aggressively inhales his food as a defense.
- Have your dog offer a behavior, like a sit, before you set the food down. If you can manage, also require him to sit still until you release him to eat. (A dog that knows to release by name will learn other name-related tasks easier, too.)
by Grayson Schaffer | on September 30th, 2009 | in Features, The Wildrose Way, Training, Video Clips
Whiskey and Deke honor Cooper's retrieve
We’ve harped a lot over what’s hard and what’s easy in dog training. Honoring is hard. It’s when one dog waits patiently while it’s another dog’s turn to work. It falls generally in the category of self-control. If your dog sees another dog run by, will he chase? Or will he sit there calmly and, if you’re lucky, check in with you to see what you want him to do. Here’s a quick video, where Mike has Whiskey and Deke honor while Cooper retrieves. (Mike was in Santa Fe a couple of weeks ago and gave Outside’s staff a demonstration. Great fun. Thanks, Mike!)
by Grayson Schaffer | on September 18th, 2009 | in Features, Training
Dave, Dave, and Hank after a successful training run
And now for something completely different. In August I joined the Los Alamos–based Mountain Canine Corps to start training Danger for search & rescue work. The group is made up of volunteer trainers and a dozen or so dogs of various breeds and mixes. When someone goes missing in the woods, the New Mexico state police give them a ring and dogs and handlers get dispatched to the scene for a search.
The team trains dogs in three disciplines: tracking, air scent, and cadaver work. Tracking dogs need to follow an aged scent—sometimes days old and overlaid with other odors—for long distances. Air scent dogs pick up scent on the breeze and then home in on the source. And cadaver dogs, well, look for dead people and more importantly, bits and pieces of dead people.
Danger is just getting started on tracking, which he loves. The process of following a scent track is a simple chain of behaviors, just like retrieving. I say this now as a sort of personal reminder. Retriever training is often made unnecessarily complicated with complex drills and equipment. So to avoid that, we’ll take a positive-reinforcement approach to tracking, learn to understand Danger’s body language, and attempt to fix one problem at a time, while raising our criteria slowly so that he’s always successful. The same requirement of 80% proficiency before moving on to the next step that we’ve been following with Assistance Dogs of the West applies here, too.
Retrieving: Acquire a line, run a certain distance, stop and hunt for an object by scent, pick up the object and return, deliver the object to the handler. Tracking: Acquire a scent, follow a scent, find a subject, return to the handler, alert the handler, return to the subject with the handler.
To get some perspective on how to get started, I called Steve White. White, who’s based near Seattle, is well-known for training police and search dogs using positive reinforcement methods. As with hunting dogs, police dogs still tend to be trained using force-breaking methods. In that regard White, like our gun- and adventure-dog guru Mike Stewart, is ahead of the curve. He’s also spent enough time around other trainers to know what we’re all up against: “The only thing two dog trainers will ever agree on,” says White, “is what the third trainer is doing wrong.” So true.
White recommends starting search dogs on tracking, rather than air scent. “In my experience, we generally don’t have a dog do any air scenting until his tracking is good.” I’d been told this before, but White’s explanation really hit home for me because it deals with a dog’s natural hunting ability. “Dogs are hardwired to be efficient, effective hunters,” says White. “Wolves, foxes, and domestic dogs, tend to combine tracking, trailing, and air scenting, but the vast majority are of their hunts are successful with air scent and maybe a little tracking at the end.” I’ve seen this dozens of times, now, hunting in the upland with Danger: He’s quartering methodically, then his nose goes up and catches something on the wind; he quarters more aggressively, then his nose goes to the ground, and a few seconds later the birds flush.
A lost hiker, though, could be miles away, and the scent could be faint. A dog on the hunt would probably do better to ignore such a faint scent and keep looking for something fresher. I saw this first-hand yesterday, when Danger was tracking nicely until his trail intersected with one that another handler had just walked down. Danger switched off the aged track and went frantically off on the much fresher track. Clearly, we had him working above his ability level and needed to lower our criteria to ensure success. For starters, White recommends simplifying the terrain and removing every odor that’s not the one you want tracked. “Start on a hard surface like asphalt,” he says “then move to concrete, gravel, and finally grass.” Each of these surfaces holds progressively more scent. White recommended a beginner’s drill:
Have a subject lay treats a few feet apart on an uncontaminated stretch of asphalt. (The subject is also laying down scent while doing this.) The track should be straight and then end without a subject for the dog to find. The idea here is to make the faint (we’re on asphalt, remember) scent of this one human predictive of food. We want to reinforce the dog for the act of tracking. Then, gradually lengthen the distance between treats so that the dog has to follow the scent bridges from one treat to the next. Gradually, we’ll lengthen the track, add turns, and increase the space between treats. It’s a good idea to start your dog on lead, but if you’re having to give the cord anything more than the occasional nudge, you need to reduce the difficulty level for the dog.
OK, so that’s our plan for Sunday’s practice. But not so fast. What about that refind? The conventional wisdom on teaching a dog a behavior chain is to work back to front, called backchaining. We’ll go more into chaining in the weeks to come, but the basic theory here is that the dog learns the proper way to cross the finish line and then starts further and further from it. White says it’s critical to have your refind in place by the time you start running tracks with live subjects at the end. If you teach the dog to track and then offer a big reward without a refind, and then change thee the rules to require that refind, “The dog thinks this is a buzz kill,” says White. “And in actual neurochemical terms, that’s exactly what it is. The dog isn’t searching to find a person, its seraching to satisfy its neurochemical urge. He wants that good endorphine buzz, and you’ve just taken it away from him.” Bummer.
The good news, though, is that training a refind is much easier than reinforcing and refining a dog’s tracking ability. The refind is simple mechancics and repetition. To train the refind, we’ll use what’s called a runaway, a short track to an easy find where the dog has seen the subject leave. The steps are:
- Dog finds the subject. Subject marks the behavior and rewards it.
- Handler calls the dog back and requires a sit (the alert), marks the behavior and rewards it.
- Handler gives the cue “show me,” and the subject calls the dog back.
- When handler and dog are back at the subject, the handler delivers a jackpot-sized reward.
OK, so that’s the order of business: Get Danger’s refind up to 100 percent and reinforce him for slowing down and focusing on the track at hand.
Information about Steve White’s videos and courses can be found on his Web site, i2i K9
by Mike Stewart | on September 16th, 2009 | in Features, The Wildrose Way, Training, Video Clips
In order to train any dog, you’ve got to know what your dog is willing to work for. Every dog is a bit different, even within breeds, so finding your dog’s favorite things is up to you. In this clip, Mike explains five basics that should be combined in different proportions depending on what you want in your finished dog. If you pay attention, you’ll also hear Mike mention something called a primary motivator or reinforcer. Here’s a quick primer on the difference between primary and secondary reinforcers.
Primary Reinforcers: These are the things a dog naturally views as rewards. You don’t have to teach a dog that a liver treat is worth working for. Almost all dogs will view a treat as a primary reinforcer. Most retrieving breeds (with a strong prey drive) will view a retrieve or even getting to hold a favorite object as a primary reinforcer.
The Gray Area: These are motivators that some dogs may see as primary and others may have to learn as secondary reinforcers. In this category are verbal praise, affection, and just being with you. Some highly-social Labs go crazy over a high-pitched baby voice. Meanwhile, independent sled-dog and pointer breeds often don’t care whether you’re around or not.
Secondary Reinforcers: These are also called conditioned reinforcers because the dog learns that they’re valuable based on their pairing with primary reinforcers. That sound that the food makes when it hits the bottom of your dog’s bowl is a good example. Most dogs will sprint toward that sound becaus they’ve learned that it’s predictive of food. If your dog will come to that sound, you should be able to train him, through repetition, to come to any sound.
Finally, there’s the bridge, which Mike Mentions. The main purpose of the bridge is to mark a specific behavior and to let the dog know that the reward is coming. But over the course of training, the sound of the bridge—a click or a one-syllable word—will become a conditioned reinforcer in its own right. The bridge word is the lynchpin in positive field dog training. It allows you to mark behaviors at a great distance and then deliver your reward once the dog has returned to you. It’s only through building up the power of these secondary reinforcers that we can get the dog to perform consistently at a distance without resorting to force methods.
Mike explains the five motivators
by Grayson Schaffer | on September 3rd, 2009 | in Training
The chair creates at least five more ways for Danger to get himself into trouble
Last week, Sue had me and Danger meet her at a local shopping mall to have a go a working from a wheelchair. Needless to say, this makes everything more difficult and meant Danger had to stay close and avoid pulling, lest we end up on a Nantucket sleigh ride through the mall. Going through doorways, up and down ramps, and through peopled areas were all twice as complicated as they normally are. The takeaway: A good service dog has to be calm, precise, and utterly unflappable. Danger was quick to learn how to press the handicapped access button on the door and equally quick to hump the leg of the indiscriminant petter who smothered him just afterward. I’ve since recovered.
by Grayson Schaffer | on September 1st, 2009 | in Features, The Wildrose Way, Training, Video Clips
We’ll teach heeling to a bike just like we’ve taught all of our other skills so far: slowly and in increments. Once you’ve got a good loose-leash walk or off-lead heel, you can start this. (If your dog won’t heel ordinarily, it’s unlikely he’ll heel when you add such a big, mechanical distraction.) When you’ve got this down, it’s a great trick for riding around town with your pup as well as having him join you on some mellow spins through the woods. Remember, don’t run your dog flat-out behind a bike until he’s at least a year old. And even then, keep the distances short. Puppy joints aren’t tough enough to take prolonged pounding.
- Walk with your dog at heel on his normal side while you push the bike on the other.
- Once you’ve mastered that, move the dog to the bike side and walk with the bike between you and the dog.
- Finally, mount up and ride out. If you’ve built up each of the steps slowly—over days, not minutes—you should have a dog willing to heel beside you as you ride.
by Grayson Schaffer | on August 27th, 2009 | in Features, The Wildrose Way, Training, Video Clips
Here’s an uncut clip of Cooper’s first water retrieves. He makes three beautiful deliveries when we cut off his return to the bank. On the last one, I’m not quick enough and we quickly discover why it’s so important to be in the water with your dog.
Cooper, the 25-pound torpedo
