Dog Training 101
There is no special secret when it comes to dog training. No special mantras, philosophies, or ideologies. It is simply the application of behaviorism and learning theory! Through decades of experience and research, animal trainers have found the most effective ways to teach animals new behaviors and modify existing ones. Dog training is an applied science! We take what we know from research, apply it to real life settings, and evaluate our results to determine if we are applying the theories correctly! This is what we do as dog trainers.
Dog training can be as simple as teaching your dog to sit on cue, or as complicated as training an avalanche search and rescue dog. However, for most of us training involves teaching our dogs behaviors that will allow them to live conflict-free in our human world. Training your dog is the key to an enjoyable life with your dog.
REASONS TO TRAIN YOUR DOG
Training is more than just sit and down. Training your dog can involve teaching them to be comfortable with nail trims, staying calm in the car, walking nicely on leash, or having a reliable recall off leash! Training has many benefits on top of making for a well-mannered dog. Some of the top reasons you may want to make training a regular part of your life…
- Mental stimulation: All dogs need activities that require them to think, problem solve, and use their brains! Dogs are incredibly intelligent creatures. Mental stimulation is a requirement towards reaching behavioral wellness, and has the added benefit of satiating your dog and keeping them calmer during the day.
- Increasing confidence: Our dogs rely on us for almost everything. They eat, sleep, walk, and play on our schedule. This lack of control can often lead to uncertainty and anxiety in our dogs, specially with an irregular daily schedule. Through training, our dogs learn that they can control their access to certain reinforcers through their actions! Training allows your dog to feel in control of their environment, when they otherwise might not have.
- Building a strong bond: During training, we are the gateway to reinforcement. When our dogs perform a behavior and we deliver their reinforcement, we add a coin into the “Mommy/Daddy is awesome” piggy bank! Overtime, this builds a long and powerful history of positive and rewarding experiences with us. This allows us to build trust with our dogs, who learn that good things happen when working with us.
- Physical exercise: We don’t need to run our dog 5 miles to exercise them! Your dog can get a great workout with a few basic behaviors such as sit, down, and stand. These behaviors form some of the foundations for canine fitness and conditioning. If you want to up your training game, you can try a dog sport such as agility, flyball, or disc! Training keeps your dogs fit!
TYPES OF TRAINING
Dog training can be organized into two groups; primary and secondary. Primary training is anything done to improve the welfare of the dog and that benefits them directly. For example; training a reliable recall allows a dog to enjoy off leash experiences. Desensitization to a dremel allows for a dogs nails to be trimmed and maintained comfortably. Secondary training is anything beyond the scope of the dogs needs. This often includes dog sports and service dog work.
Primary Training
Foundation/Life skills: This includes any behavior that allows a dog to adapt successfully to life with us. Examples include leash skills, crate training, potty training, etc.
Cooperative Care: Cooperative care is the training of behaviors that allow the dog to consent to any medical care, grooming, etc. It also includes desensitization to care and building to a positive response handling and grooming.
Fitness and Conditioning: Just like humans, dogs benefit from cardiovascular and strength training. Working with a certified fitness trainer, you can teach your dog exercise that will build balance, strength, and endurance.
Behavior Modification: This training can be used to help a dog overcome an emotional or conditioned response that may be inappropriate or upsetting to them or their owner. This may address separation anxiety, reactivity, aggression, etc.
Puppy Socialization and Training: Before 16 weeks of age, puppies are neural hardwired to take in new information. During this time, it is critical that they are positively exposed to a variety or novel stimuli and environments. This helps them grow to be confidence and well-balanced adult dogs.
Secondary Training
Tricks: Whether it’s learning to play dead or to give a high five, tricks are so much fun to teach your dog! You can even participate in trick dog competitions.
Therapy and service dog training: This training involves teaching a dog specific task behaviors and those necessary for public access work.
HOW ANIMALS LEARN
Whether it’s a dog, cat, fish, or human, all animals learn through consequences! Animals are patterning machines! We make connections between the things in our environment, our actions, and the events that follow it. If every time you knocked on my door, I opened it and gave you $100, you would learn to start knocking on my door all the time! Dogs learn the same way. By understanding this natural ability to associate cues with certain consequences, we can manipulate those consequences to train specific behaviors in our animals.
ABCs
The science of consequences can be broken down into three steps. Antecedents, behavior, and consequence.
Antecedents: This refers to the environment and all cues present before the behavior occurs. An antecedent is anything in an animal’s environment that it can perceive. This can be a smell, a sound, a vibration, a sight, etc. Antecedents can be internal (feeling of hunger) or external (hearing a doorbell). Dogs are very good at picking up on even the smallest cue in their environment. We might not notice a small movement in the corner of the yard, but you can be sure your dog will!
Behavior: This is any observable action the dog takes. It can be as small as a ear flick, to as big as barking and lunging! Some behaviors are made up of many smaller behaviors performed at the same time or in sequence (a behavior chain). When my dog hears the cue, “Place” she walks over to her mat, gets all four feet on it, does a circle, and lays down. This chain is built up of many individual behaviors that all happen, in succession, in response to the cue, “Place.”
Consequences: This is the event that follows the behavior, and will effect the dogs future behavior. Consequences come in two forms; reinforcement and punishment. Punishment is anything that causes the behavior it is influencing to decrease in frequency. Reinforcement is anything that increase the frequency of the behavior it is influencing.
POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT
This is the main way that professional animal trainers influence and modify behavior. Positive reinforcement means adding something to the animal’s environment that they enjoy, so that the behavior we want increases in frequency. Basically, it is anything the dog is willing to work for! If your dog loves cheese, and wants more of it, we can use cheese to get them to sit, spin, lay down, or walk on a loose leash!
Value of Reinforcement
The most important thing to remember about reinforcement is that the value of the reinforcer is determined by the learner! Our dogs get to determine what they find reinforcing and just how valuable that reinforcer is. Consider this; my dog loves to swim! She would happily perform a cued behavior and then be rewarded with the chance to swim! My brother’s dog on the other hand? No way! He does not swim and, in fact, being made to swim would likely be punishing for him!
Also, the value of a reinforcer can change based on the environment, the dogs physical or mental state, or based on learning history. Just because your dog will work for cheese today, doesn’t mean they will tomorrow! Your dog may be happy to train for kibble at home, but in a more distracting environment they will likely need a higher value reinforcer! Therefore it is important that we consider the training situation before choosing a reinforcer. Also, it is beneficial to have several options of reinforcement when training our dog, in case the one your are using isn’t reinforcing enough.
Reinforcement Hierarchy
Every animal has a reinforcement hierarchy. This is simply a scale that measures the value of different types of reinforcement. This will be unique to each dog. Remember, the learner determines the value of any given reinforcer! Take sometime to write down some things your dog enjoys and try to rank them from least to most reinforcing. Just think… what does my dog want most?
Types of Reinforcement
In dog training, the two most common types of reinforcement used are food and toys. However, we can use lots of things to reinforce the behavior we like. Remember, reinforcement is anything that the dog enjoys and wants more access to! What is your dog willing to work for? Here are some ideas!
SOCIAL REINFORCEMENT
- Verbal praise
- Physical touch
- Greeting a friend
PLAY REINFORCEMENT
- Playing tug
- Chasing a ball
- Being chased
- Catching a frisbee
- Chasing a flirt pole
- Playing with a herding ball
ENVIRONMENTAL REINFORCEMENT
- Getting to go outside
- Being off leash
- Going for a walk
- Sniffing
- Digging
- Swimming
- Getting up on the couch
- Getting out of the crate
- Chasing a squirrel
A WORD ON DOMINANCE THEORY
“Dogs are pack animals, and you need to be the alpha leader.”
This is something we hear a lot in the field of dog training. Unfortunately, this idea of dogs as pack animals with an alpha leader is based on the misinterpretation of a study on wolves… and it is even wrong about them!
Most of the origins of dominance theory stems back to Swiss animal behaviorist Rudolph Schenkel. In the 1030s-1940s he studied captive wolves in a zoo and concluded that these wolves had a pack, in which they would fight to gain dominance, and the winner became the alpha wolf (1). Other behaviorst followed his lead. In further studies of captive wolves, they found similar findings. Indeed groups of unrelated wolves brought together in artificial captive environments do, indeed, engage in often-violent and bloody social struggles. Unfortunately, others erroneously equated these findings to the natural behaviors for wild wolves as well, and eventually domestic dogs! This is not the case though!
Future behaviorist, looking for answers, studied the natural behavior of wild wolves. Their findings did not match those of Rudolph Schenkel. David Mech, and other scientist, found that wild wolf packs are made up of small families (2). A mated male and female will live together with their offspring from the last few years of breeding. Once the offspring are matured, they will leave to find their own mates and to start their own family pack. Occasionally, a few mated pairs will come together in a larger pack, but the only permanent members of a pack are the breeding male and female. As David Mech says, “science has come to understand that most wolf packs are merely family groups formed exactly the same way as human families are formed. That is, maturing male and female wolves from different packs disperse, travel around until they find each other and an area vacant of other wolves but with adequate prey, court, mate, and produce their own litter of pups” (3).
So is dominance even a thing in the animal world? Well yes, but it isn’t what you think. Dominance is a term we use to describe the interactions between two members of the same species. In this definition, a dyadic conflict will result in a “winner” and a “loser” based on the results of the interaction. We may refer to the animal that consistently wins these encounters “dominant,” and the animal who loses as “submissive” (4). However, dominance is not the description of an individual! It is describing results of an interaction between the individuals. Dominance is also fluid! In a dyadic pair, one individual might be dominant in one encounter, and submissive in the next.
So is your dog being “dominant” when he tries to walk out the door before you. No, because dominance is not a behavioral trait of an animal. Your dog can not “assert dominance” over you because dominance is not a power to be possessed. This kind of thinking can actually be very damaging to your relationship with your dog. Every time you try to be the “alpha dog” and apply punishment or coercion, you damage your bond and train your dog to be fearful of interacting with you. This can lead to serious fallout behaviors that can be dangerous and even lethal. Punishment creates fear, and a fearful animal may feel the need to defend itself with violence.
For more information on the myths surrounding dominance theory check out this resource from The American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior.
SOURCES
(1) Schenkel, R. 1947. Expression Studies on Wolves; Captivity Observations. The Zoological Garden, Basle, and the Zoological Institute of the University of Basle, http://www.davemech.org/schenkel/index.html
(2) Mech, L. David. 1999. Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs. Canadian Journal of Zoology 77:1196-1203. Northern Prairie Publication 1078. Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, Jamestown, ND. See at < http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/2000/alstat/alstat.htm >. May 16, 2000. Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center, 8711 37th Street SE, Jamestown, ND 58401-7317 http://www.mnforsustain.org/wolf_mech_dominance_alpha_status.htm
(3) Mech L.D. 2008. What ever happened to the term alpha wolf? International Wolf. (https://wolf.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/winter2008.pdf).
(4) Carlos Drews. “The Concept and Definition of Dominance in Animal Behaviour.” Behaviour, vol. 125, no. 3/4, 1993, pp. 283–313. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4535117. Accessed 6 Jan. 2020.
FAQ
When should you start training your dog?
Training can start as soon as your bring your dog home! It’s always best to start with simple training that is focused on quality of living such as crate training, cooperative care, and others. Even new puppies can begin training as soon as they come home with you. Remember, one of the goals of training is to build your bond with your dog!
How often should you train?
This really depends on what you are working on and what your schedule is like! However, all dogs can benefit from daily training sessions. No matter what you work on, training together every day will help build your bond, exercise your dog, and put you on the path to a better life with your dog!
How long should a training session be?
Dogs learn best in multiple short training sessions. When starting out, 3-5 minutes per session is plenty! Once you and your dog are more experience, you can start working for longer periods of time. At home, I advise keeping all training sessions under 15 minutes.
What tools do you need to start training?
All you really need is you, your dog, and some kind of reinforcement! That can be food, a toy, or just personal play with you!
Do I have to use treats and rewards forever?
No! Tangible rewards such as treats and food are easy to use and therefore helpful during the learning process. However, once a behavior is fluent and well-understood, you do not have to keep using these rewards.
When should I hire a trainer?
FREE DOWNLOADABLE GUIDES
HOW TO CHOOSE A DOG TRAINER
More Coming Soon…