by Mike Stewart | on October 26th, 2009 | in Features, Your Questions
Do I look worried?
Q. I have a 7 month British Lab. Outstanding pup, very good with obedience and retrieving—in the backyard. However, she is very skittish in new surroundings: school yard, fields, park, etc. She won’t retrieve or listen to me anywhere except the backyard, but she does heel very well for more than twenty minutes around our neighborhood. I have tried MANY new locations, recently walking her on a 6′ lead in the same field seems to help a little. Will she outgrow this shyness or is there other methods to assist? Thanks.
A. To arrive at a solution for your dog’s problem, you have to attempt to analyze the possible causes. Situational shyness, as you describe, could come from three specific areas:
1. genetics – the parents portrayed these traits/the dog’s personality
2. improper early puppy pre-conditioning, socialization and backgrounding (the lack thereof)
3. inadequate training methods
Assuming that we have no genetic traits that could be the cause of this problem, then we have to focus on the other two. Even if you have genetic issues that are causing the shyness, progress can be made by slowly introducing variables in the dog’s life for desensitization. Item 2 can be equally difficult. Early socialization of a pup is imperative to build a great foundation for future learning and the ability to deal with new situations. Opportunities lost cannot be regained. Similarly to the genetic issue, this will be a slow process of progressive introductions. One success at a time.
Training: One thing that is interesting is the dog does fine in your backyard but is not easily transferring these skills to other locations and/or situations. There are four levels of training… yard work (teaching the basic skills in a familiar area which you have done), field work (teaching the pattern drills, exercises and skill necessary for hunting, adventure, service, etc.), transitional training (moving the basic skills taught in training to realistic field activities/experiences/situations). Transitional training is where a lot of people break down with their dogs. A few exercises in the back yard, then it’s off to an abandoned lot and we thing we’re ready for a hunt. The result: the wheels run off. It’s called generalization. Dogs don’t easily move/transfer skills learned in one location to another in a rational manner. It has to be experiential. Each skill has to be practiced 5 times in 5 different locations.
Now, in your pup’s case, he’s confident in the back yard, but this confidence is lost when moved to a new area. In gundog training I call this sensory overload or to use popular terms today, the stimulus package. When we are asking skills of our dogs and the stimulation, diversions, and distractions are too high or extreme, we have two choices… simplify the task while maintaining the stimulus or keep the task and reduce the level of the stimulus.
Plan of action: Perfect one or two skills of your choice in your back yard. Then, move one of these skills to a new area but with no activity, just new ground. Perfect the single skill there. Then move the same skill to a new area with a bit more activity. Focus only on one or two skills and gradually vary the locations only after the skill is perfected in each, then increase the stimulus slowly. Here’s the Wildrose rule: Each of our skills must be practiced 5 times in 5 different locations before we can assume the skill is an entrenched habit. Be careful that you do not subconsciously reinforce the fear factor. When you move to a new area, do it with a great deal of confidence which should be displayed in your body posture, tone, gait and attitude. Don’t be thinking your dog is going to fail. Also, don’t coddle the fear. Walk briskly and aggressively as the pack leader letting your dog know there is nothing to fear.
The last of the four levels of training is an actual field activity, hunt, adventure, competition, the public area, etc. Your first experience in any field situation is not about your participation in the activity. Your focus is on training your dog. Example: Your first hunt is not a hunt at all; it’s a training opportunity. Keep in mind Wildrose law #5 as you deal with the fear factor: “Make haste slowly.”
Best of luck,
—Mike
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 June 1st, 2009 | in Features, Training
What bike?
During the first weeks and months of a dog’s life, it’s critical to introduce him to as many potentially scary or overwhelming experiences as possible: boats, bikes, men, women, people in uniform, the vet. . . anything and everything. The rules are simple. Make the introductions gradual, and make them fun. With Danger, I plopped him down beside my bike at three-months, clipped in, and took off. Then I wondered why he wouldn’t heel nicely beside me. With Cooper, I’m taking the long view.
- Just walk him up to a bike that’s leaned up against a tree. No freak-out? Move to step 2.
- Put him on a chair by the bike and spin the wheels until he loses interest in them
- Walk with him on one side of me while pushing the bike on the other
- Walk with the bike between me and him
- Finally, get on and pedal slowly. Don’t go to this step until you have a reliable heel both on and off leash.
- Your dog should keep pace with you rather than the reverse. If you find yourself speeding up to get your dog to heel–i.e. racing away from him–you need to go back.
by Grayson Schaffer | on April 27th, 2009 | in Features, Training
Cooper, right, and his littermates
Cooper is 50 days old today and his training is well underway. This time around, I know how many different skills he needs to learn before getting to the fun stuff like retrieving. With a young cute dog, it’s so tempting to see what they can do, to throw bumpers and rolled up socks and to see if they’ll follow scent trails. Don’t get caught in that trap; don’t invest your ego in the athletic abilities of your dog. There’s a long list of important skills that need training right from the start. You’ve got your work cut out for you.
- Recall: At this age, your dog will almost certainly view you as the most interesting thing in the yard. Start your recall drills now and do them consistently for the next several months. Ultimately, you want the sound of the whistle to bypass the pup’s brain entirely and go right to his feet. I’ve been using tiny pinches of soft liver for treats and scraping them off into Cooper’s mouth on his upper incisor teeth. This helps keep him from nipping at my fingers. I let him explore the yard a little and then whistle him in and treat/praise/pet. You want to know, when is it OK to give your dog inordinate amounts of affection? Answer: When you’re doing recall drills. If you’ve got another person around, practice recalling him back and forth between you.
- Condition Your Bridge: The bridge or marker is the linchpin of your training. It’s an unemotional sound—a click, a one-syllable word like “good,” quickly spoken—you make at the exact moment of the desired behavior, and it’s followed immediately by a reward. The bridge is so important because it allows the dog to know what he did to earn the reward—not generally what he did, exactly what he did. But that’s only once he learns what the bridge means. The word “good” or a click is meaningless to a dog until he realizes that 1) the sound is always followed by a reward and 2) he can control when the sound is made by offering behaviors. At six weeks, there are most likely only two things your dog will view as a reward: food and physical affection. These are unconditioned rewards; your dog doesn’t need any training to know he likes them. Later, as food and pets are paired with verbal praise, the praise will gradually become a powerful reward of it’s own. This is the goal and it’s going to take time. Praise, you can throw a hundred yards into the field. Treats and pets, not so much.
- Socialization: I never understood what this meant for a dog because it broadly encompasses half a dozen things that generally add up to your dog not acting like a nuisance. Here are five things you need to train specifically, starting now. We’ll break them out specifically over the next few days.
- Housebreaking: The good news is that all dogs arrive from their mothers pre-housebroken, at least when it comes to their own dens. You just need to expand that sense of cleanliness from den (crate) to the rest of your home.
- Crate Training: If you’re properly housebreaking, you’re also crate training.
- Place Training: Dog’s gotta know his place, not just in the grand scheme of things but where he’s going to sit quietly in your house.
- Calmness and Patience: These two are probably the biggest, hardest, most abstract skills of all. Raising a calm, patient dog is the sum of many factors, that are mostly undermined by the inexperienced handler’s need to see how far a young dog can retrieve and how early he can learn field handling skills like casting. We’ll go over this more, later, but quickly, before you get yourself into trouble: Never allow your pup to call you to him by crying unless he’s confined in his crate and needs to pee. Teach him that carrying on works—it can take fewer than a handful of mistakes on your part—and you could be trying to untrain it for the rest of his life. With Cooper, I wait for him to stop yipping before approaching his puppy pen. Ditto putting his food down. I’m happy to let him manipulate me with good behavior.
- Tying Out Quietly: This is a big part of calmness and patience, but it’s more specific.
The trainers at Assistance Dogs of the West assure me that their K9 students who don’t make the cut can do all of the service dog tasks like hitting light switches and opening doors. They only wash out because they can’t be calm under demanding circumstances. Good dogs at Wildrose are judged by much the same standard: Control and temperment are king.