Michael Ellis' Philosophy of Dog Training

If you've been getting our semi-weekly newsletters, you know that I'm in the middle of producing training DVDs with Michael Ellis. The first in the Building Drive and Focus series, titled The Power of Training Dogs with Food, will be released in several weeks. Michael gives 40 to 45 seminars a year all over the country. He's been doing it for over 10 years. The next 4 or 5 streaming newsletters will feature Michael explaining his training system. This lecture will teach new and old trainers a thing or two about their relationship with their dogs. After you listen to this lecture on dog training, you will understand why I feel lucky to be able to work with Michael Ellis on these DVDs. When I release a new DVD, it'll be announced in the newsletter.

So this is to keep me in one place at least while I talk now. Thank you for— Ed and Cindy and everyone here for having me. The way we're gonna structure it today is I'll talk— again, it'll be a lecture on sort of my philosophy on dog training, but we're also gonna cover pretty intensively the use of markers, or what I call the use of verbal markers in our training, so you have an idea of kind of where we're coming. We have a mixed group of people here, some of which train with me very frequently and some of which are totally new to me. And what happens with the people that train with me on a regular basis, we tend to just get out there and start training. So what I'll try to do is I'll try to stop and explain to you guys what we're doing, why we're doing it, but it's not perfect. So like Ed said, please follow us around, and if I'm doing something that I'm not explaining fully and you have questions about, fire away. I'm really low-key and casual about the format of it, so you're more than welcome to interrupt and ask questions. And if there's a topic that I wind up not covering that you want covered, please, we can— you guys really direct the direction of the seminar. Um, so what I'm going to do is I'll jump straight in. I'll give my basic lecture. Again, if you have questions along the way, just put up your hand and when I get a shot to break, I'll break and I'll answer your questions. Uh, and then we're going to work the dogs in obedience, and then we'll work the dogs in protection after that. I'm going to do my protection lecture tomorrow, so I won't stop and talk much before the protection. But what I tend to do is stop after each dog and talk a little bit about what went on with that dog and why we're doing what we're doing. Uh, so the next person up can pause for a second in the protection. It's less important in the obedience, but in the protection we tend to start going and somebody's off getting their dog. And if you want to hear what's said about the dog before, just hang around, I'll talk, and then you can go. Sometimes people are in a hurry to be prepared. And if you want to hear what's being said to each person, stick around and listen to that after each dog. Uh, it's relatively brief, but I try to kind of encapsulate what we did with that dog as we went along. So, um, what we're doing in terms of— I'm going to give our little, basically, theory lecture now. Um, what we're doing, uh, with the dogs in terms of our communication system is not new. Good competitive obedience trainers have been doing some version of this kind of training for 15 or 20 years, probably. It's been really slow to find its way into the protection sports. The protection sport people have stuck to what I will call, um, old school ways, and it's probably an incorrect term, but basically, uh, the protection world is still filled with more people that are practicing mostly, uh, what we call escape avoidance training. Basically pressure-based, compulsion-based training, where the dog is learning to do things, but to turn off pressure. So the dog is not working to access a reward, they're working to turn off pressure. And there's still lots of trainers in the protection sport world that sort of approach it this way. The competitive obedience world over the last 15 years has changed radically, and people have begun to use a lot more operant conditioning type work, right? And that's ultimately what we're doing. The term that I'll use extensively is markers, or the use of verbal markers. This is a behaviorally incorrect term. So if you've exposed yourself to any of the operant conditioning literature out there, any of the clicker training stuff, you'll hear the same terms, the behavioral terms bantied around for this, and those are— you'll hear something called a conditioned reinforcer or a bridge. This is the same thing as a marker. I use the term marker because I like the fact that it connotes that we're marking a moment in time when the dog is either correct or incorrect, and that's ultimately what we're doing. Our system is based on being able to communicate to the dog when they're right and wrong, ultimately verbally. So the system is based on being able to communicate any one of three things to the dog at any given time. The first of which is when the dog is going to get a reward. So we have a word or a sound that precedes every reward we give our dog. I say "yes," but it doesn't make any difference what you say. You can say "bang," "zip," "zowie," "pop," whatever you want. This is where clicker trainers would use a clicker. So the important part here is that it precedes the reward that I give my dog. So this is a concept that I'm gonna spend a lot of time talking about. It's a really simple concept, but it's gonna drive people nuts because it's very simple, but it's not easy to do. What winds up happening is there's a concept, and most people have probably been exposed to this during, uh, usually high school psychology. There's a Russian psychologist, Ivan Pavlov. Uh, he was doing experiments in a lab with dogs on salivary responses. And he found that the presence of the researchers in the lab had an effect on the dog in his experiments. So he set up automated feeders in the— so the technicians didn't have to be in the room with the dogs when they were getting fed. And so he had a tone or a bell that would go off before the food dropped into the automated feeders for the dog. And over a number of repetitions, he noticed that when the tone would go off, the dogs would start to salivate. The dogs would actually have a physical response to what was previously a meaningless stimuli to the dog. So the bell or the tone meant nothing to the dog, but by predicting food, the dog actually started to have a response, a physical response to the sound. And he called this classical conditioning. And classical conditioning is what we're gonna do with our reward sound, our reward marker. We're gonna classically condition this, this sound to mean a reward's coming. The interesting thing that Pavlov noted was that If he sounded the tone at the same time the food dropped, or if he sounded the tone while the dog was eating, there was no classical conditioning. And it's the same with our reward marker. If I'm saying "yes" and giving my dog the food at the same time, or saying "yes" while my dog's eating the food, my dog will not become classically conditioned to that sound. So it has to precede the production of the reward by a split second. So I need to go, "Yes, reward. Yes, reward. Yes, reward." So it needs to follow right after. Really simple, it's a pain in the neck. Your mouth and your body wanna go at the same time. So this, "Yes," feels natural. "Yes," does not feel natural. So you're gonna have to condition yourself to do that. Once your dog's conditioned to this sound, it's an incredibly powerful tool, right? The dog knows that whatever they're doing when they heard that sound is what they're getting rewarded for. So at the point that they're conditioned to the sound, I no longer have to get the reward to the dog immediately on completion of the action. I just have to mark it with my voice. So if my dog's across the field and I tell my dog to down and he lays down and I say yes, he's gonna jump up, come tearing across the field, I'm gonna reach in my pocket, I'm gonna give him a piece of food. Now that reward might have come several seconds after the act of downing. But he knows that whatever he was doing when he heard that sound is what he's getting rewarded for, which is very powerful. Now I don't have to be there. When I'm training without the use of markers, what we try to do is we try to get the reward to the dog as close to the completion of the behavior that we're trying to capture as possible. So if I'm trying to teach my dog to sit and I'm not using a marker, as soon as his butt hits the ground, I'm trying to get him a piece of food. And they've done further learning studies and they know that that dogs learn best, if I'm not using a reward marker, uh, or a bridge, if they learn best if they get the reward in under a second of the completion of the behavior we're trying to capture. I don't care how good you are, you are not consistently getting rewards to your dog in under a second. It's not gonna happen. You might do it occasionally, but you are not consistent, on a consistent basis, getting rewards to your dog in under a second. So once my dog's conditioned to the sound, I simply have to mark the behavior with my voice in under a second. So that's incredibly liberating. It allows us to pinpoint the moment the dog was correct and the reward can follow after, which is powerful. The other powerful part about it is it allows us to have the rewards out of sight. So one of the trickiest things that we have in dog training is we start out, if we're using reward-based training, we start out teaching the dog to work to get a reward, and the reward is there driving it, and then getting the reward out of the picture and still having the dog perform is one of the trickier things we do. And we want the dog to know that the dog goes through us to get to a reward that they don't see. And the use of markers, a reward marker, greatly facilitates this. This makes this much, much easier. So you're gonna hear me talk over the course of the weekend about what I call the active versus reactive dog. In clicker circles, you'll hear people call the active dog an operant dog, but we're talking about the same thing. The active dog is a dog that understands that their behavior has an effect on their environment, and I'm an integral piece of that environment, meaning their behavior can make things happen for them. And we've all seen this. You take a puppy home, you use some food to show your puppy to sit and lay down and speak and come when they're called, and a few things— you're messing around in the kitchen, in the living room, you're showing your dog how to do some things. So you ask your puppy to sit, your puppy sits, you don't give it a reward immediately, so it downs. It sits again, hits you with its foot, right? It backs up, it barks at you. The puppy's cycling through ever— the dog's cycling through everything that it knows that's got it a reward in the past. So that dog has made the connection that its behavior is what makes the reward come out, and it's actively trying to figure out what it needs to do to make me give it a reward. And we like this because that dog is much easier to teach new things to. That dog is trying to figure out what aspect of their behavior made the reward happen. So when they make the connection, it's a very strong connection in the dog's head. The dog says, "Ah, I did that by doing this." So that makes that behavior that much stronger. We've all seen the reactive dog as well. And the reactive dog is a dog whose behavior is being driven by the reward. Their behavior is not driving the production of the reward. This sounds like I'm splitting hairs, but it's a really important concept. The reactive dog's behavior is being driven by the reward itself. Their behavior is not driving the production of the reward. So we've all seen this as well. Somebody comes out on the field with a dog. The dog's not paying any attention to them, like, "Oh, what's over there? What's over there?" They take out a ball, wave the ball in the dog's face, tuck the ball into their arm, off they go heeling, and the dog heels beautifully. You look at the person, you go, "Wow, that looks really pretty. That dog's doing nice heeling." But the dog's behavior is being driven by the reward. He didn't drive the production of the reward. And there's— every single dog starts out as a reactive dog. There's no reason for a dog to pay attention to us unless we set up the circumstances that make it productive for the dog, that make it rewarding for the dog. And a marker simply makes that easier. So I bring a puppy home, I condition my puppy to the reward marker. Yes, feed. Yes, feed. Yes, feed. Yes, feed. 100 times until every time I say yes, my puppy goes, hey, where's the food? Now he's conditioned to the sound. And then I put food, I hide food on my body. And every time I take the puppy out, I go, pup pup. He looks at me, I say yes, and out comes a piece of food. So he didn't see the food, but his attention on me made it come out. If I do that 10 days in a row, on the 11th day I step out, I let my puppy out, he runs over to me and he sits there, looks at me, goes, "Come on, last 10 days in a row you've had food on you, so you must have it now." And he offers a behavior. He looks at me and goes, "Come on, you got something for me?" And I say, "Yes, I do," and I give him the food, right? Now the puppy starts to work me to make something that he doesn't see come out. So our reward marker really facilitates that transfer from a reactive to an active dog. So we like that. The other thing it allows us to do, and competitive obedience has become more and more detail-oriented, you'll find it's, it's really easy. You can go out, go out and grab a world championship level Schutzhund tapes from 15 years ago and watch the obedience, and then watch the obedience at this year's world championships. It's a totally different animal. Like, it's evolved. The level of animation and precision and everything changes from year to year. So we're talking about really fine details separating the okay dogs from the very good dogs at these competitions. And markers really allow us to pinpoint very tiny aspects of a dog's behavior. So let's take a dog looking at us. Focusing on us in heel position. And let's say I want to teach my dog in heel position to look at my face, and I've taught my dog a cue, "Watch," and they look at my face when they're in heel position. If I'm not using a marker, I'm standing here, I ask my dog to look, my dog looks up at me, I see what I want, I'm excited about this, so I go to give the dog a reward. If I do that a couple of times, as soon as I start to move to give the dog a reward, the dog says, "Ah, I'm I'm getting rewarded. What does it do? It looks away from me to the reward, and when it actually gets the reward, it got the reward for the exact opposite of looking at me. It got the reward for looking away from me. So that just that split-second difference in timing means I'm rewarding a completely different behavior. And over time, that dog starts to hold its head lower and lower and lower until it's not looking at me anymore, up at me. It's looking out here where it thinks the reward's gonna come out. So And if I have a marker, of course, if I'm using a marker, my dog's conditioned to a reward marker. The dog looks at me, I see it, I say, "Yes!" And then the reward comes out afterwards. And the dog knows that whatever it was doing when it heard that sound is what it gets rewarded for, so I can pinpoint very, very fine aspects of behavior. So, we have one word or sound that precedes every reward we give our dog. It is inherently a release for our dog. So when I use my reward marker, the dog can stop doing whatever he was doing and access a reward. My dog's over there, I say "down," he downs, I say "yes," he's gonna jump up and come to access a reward. I'm heeling with my dog, I say "yes," he's gonna spring out of position and go, "Give me my toy!" Right? So, it's a release. We have a second word or sound that means, "I like what you're doing, keep doing it." So I say "good," but again, it doesn't make any difference what word you use. I use "good" because we sort of preload this word at home. When you live with your dog, when I'm petting him, I say, "Oh, you're a good boy," and when I'm feeding him, I say, "Good boy," and pretty soon he knows "good" means he did something well. It's the equivalent of verbal praise. It's my way of telling the dog he's right without releasing him from his behavior. And we use the second word or sound when we're working on either duration in a behavior or linking multiple behaviors together without releasing the dog from one of the component pieces. So, once my dog's conditioned to his "you're a good boy" sound, whatever it is, he knows that that means you're good. We'll talk about the first thing: duration. What happens when I initially teach a behavior, most of our obedience behaviors, they're actions. So if I take sit, down, stand, come to heel, look at me, these are all physical actions on the dog's part. What we want to do when we first teach the dog these behaviors is reward the dog as close as possible to the completion of the action. We want to highlight the fact that it was the action that got the dog the reward. So if I'm teaching my dog to sit, my dog's butt hits the ground, I say yes, he gets a reward. My dog's butt hits the ground, yes, he gets a reward. I'm pinpointing the action of putting your rear end on the ground, and that's what's getting you a reward. As we progress in our training and my dog starts to sit well, the dog figures out through that process that the faster he sits, the faster he gets rewarded, so he starts to sit more quickly. Everything is smoother. He gets a— he really understands what his job is. As we progress, of course, I'm going to hit a spot where I don't want the dog to sit and then jump right back up again to access his reward. I want him to actually hold the behavior for a second or two. Duration. We're starting to work on duration, and this is where our second sound comes in. So I say sit, My dog sits. I say, "Good! Good!" They hold it for a couple of seconds. Yes! They're released and rewarded. I can do the same thing with a focus command. I teach my dog "watch." My dog looks at me. Yes! Reward.

Watch.

My dog looks at me. Yes! Reward. I do that 100 times. Now every time I say "watch," my dog looks right at me. Now I want my dog to hold that behavior, so I say, "Watch." The dog looks at me. "Good! Good!" They hold it for a couple of seconds. Yes, they're rewarded, or whatever, right? So, the first place we use our second sound is during duration. When we're building duration in our behavior, we wanna give the dog feedback without releasing the dog. The second place we use it is when we're linking multiple behaviors together, and we wanna give the dog feedback on one of the intermediate pieces. So a lot of what we do in competitive obedience is break complicated behavior chains down into their component pieces, teach those pieces separately, and then bring those pieces together for a finished product. Like, competitive heeling is way too complicated behavior to try to teach the whole thing at once. So we teach a focal piece: where do you want the dog to look when he heels? We teach a position piece: where's heel position and how do you get there? And then we teach the skills of moving in heel position: how do you maintain that position as I go forward, backwards, turn left, turn right? These are all different physical skills for the dog. So we tend to— the good competitive trainers tend to teach these things separately and then bring them together. So I may put my dog's focus on a command. Watch, he looks at me, rewarded. Watch, he looks at me, yes, reward. And we do that repeatedly. Separately, I'm teaching my dog to come to heel. Heel, my dog gets here, yes, reward. Heel, my dog gets here, yes, reward. Now I want to put those two pieces together. I would say heel, my dog gets here, good. Watch, my dog looks up at me, yes, reward. So I'm giving the dog feedback, but not releasing the dog. There's an exercise you'll see this weekend that we teach all of our dogs, regardless of the sport we're doing, or I do, and the people that tend to train with me do. And it's, we call it a change of positions exercise. It ultimately was a ring sport exercise, where you leave your dog at a distance, and you tell your dog to sit, down, stand, down, sit, stand, all in a different order. The dog knows each of those commands, sit, down, and stand, from each of the other positions. So your dog really has an understanding of the concept of stand. My dog can be in a sit and I tell him to stand and he'll stand. My dog could be in a down, I'll tell him to stand and he stands. So very useful skill to help the dog really understand each of the positions that we're gonna ask them to do. So we teach all of our dogs this. I teach pet dogs this if I'm working with them. It's just a good way to get the dogs to understand each of those positions. When we're initially doing that, we're— the dog's on what we call continuous reinforcement. Meaning I reward every single rep.

Sit.

Yes, reward. Down. Yes, reward. Stand. Yes, reward, etc. As the dog becomes fluent with these, I'm not gonna want to reward every repetition. I'm gonna want to reward the best repetitions or the ones I'm having difficulty with. But I still may be at an early stage in my training where I want to give the dog feedback for having been correct. So I might say, "Sit. Good. Stand. Good." Down. Yes. Or whatever. Okay. The other place that we use our, our kind of, "You're right" signal, "Keep going" signal, our good marker, is when we're working on stability in exercises. So what happens a lot is, if I have a very motivated dog, gets cranked up, those dogs frequently have a hard— what I call an external dog. A dog that fidgets and shakes and is jacked up and wants to go. Those dogs frequently have a hard time holding positions, sitting still, right? So when I see that in a young dog, I want to work a lot on what I call stability in the positions. So I might not release the dog out of the position when I'm teaching it as much with that kind of dog, because if I release the dog out of the position, I make them want to move more, and so they don't want to sit still. So I may struggle with that. So I want to work on stability in their positions. So that— I'll still use my 'you were correct' marker, but not releasing the dog, and I'll take the reward to the dog in place. So my dog might be over there, and I say, 'sit,' and I say, 'good,' and I walk over to the dog and give the dog a piece of food in place. I walk back away.

Good.

I walk back over and reward the dog. We're paying stability in that position. So we use our, the, our good marker there. Sometimes the dog gets a reward, and sometimes it's just a signal that you were correct. Keep doing what you're doing, and you'll get a reward. Okay, so we have a word or sound that precedes every reward we give our dog. It's a release. I say yes, but it doesn't matter what it is. We have a word or sound that means I like what you're doing, keep doing it. We use it when we're working on stability, duration, or giving the dog feedback when we don't want to release the dog from a given behavior. And finally, we have a word or a sound that means you were wrong. And in the beginning of our training, it is a non-reinforcement marker. Meaning it is not a signal for positive punishment, correction, whatever you want to call it, right? It is a signal that you were wrong, I'm gonna withhold something that you want from you, and I'm gonna ask you to do that behavior over again. And the reason that in the early stages of our obedience training we don't punish the dog physically with a correction or social pressure for mistakes comes back to our active versus reactive dog thing. If I have a young dog and the dog's starting to learn something and they make a mistake and I give them a strong correction for making a mistake, they get careful. They get reactive. They no longer want to try new behaviors because new behaviors are potentially dangerous for them. They said, "The last time I tried something, didn't work out so well for me. I'm not going to do that again." So they just sit there and wait for you to show them what to do. So corrections in the early stages of our work especially for obedience behaviors, not only have the potential of undermining my relationship with my dog, making him worried about me, afraid of me, that sort of thing, but I also have the potential of turning my active dog into a reactive dog. And one of the things that we want to keep intact in our young dogs when we're starting to train is the ability to make a mistake and try again. It's huge. I want my dog to say, "Oh, I know I made a mistake, you told me." I marked the moment you made the mistake, but let me try again, let me try again, let me try again, I'll get it right this time. That makes it much easier for us to train complicated behaviors if the dog's willing to keep trying to figure out what he needs to do. And if I shut the dog down early, I'm in trouble with that. So, and most of our obedience behaviors are not natural behaviors for the dog anyway, right? The things that we're asking the dog to do in, out in the world, sit, down, stand, heel, retrieve, uh, all these various behaviors are basically neutral to the dog in the real world. Meaning they only have meaning because we supply it meaning. I reward my dog for laying down when I ask him to lay down. That's the reward. That's the part that makes it valuable to the dog, right? If I'm not supplying a reward for that, downing doesn't really mean anything to the dog. He lays down when he's tired, but it doesn't really mean anything. It's not rewarding or not rewarding for the dog. So we supply meaning to those. So if I— most of our obedience behaviors really lend themselves well to non-reinforcement. Non-reinforcement is for mistakes. So I ask my dog to lay down, instead my dog sits. I say, "Nope, you don't get this piece of food. Let's try that again." I say, "Down." He sits instead. I say, "Nope, you don't get this piece of food. Let's try again." I say, "Down." He downs. "Yes," and he gets the piece of food. So he figures out, "Oh, that's what gets me to the piece of food." So non-reinforcement works beautifully for that kind of stuff, for obedience behaviors. And when I say non-reinforcement and we're not correcting the dog, it means also that we're not using social pressure on the dog. Means my non-reinforcement marker isn't, "No!

Bad dog!" Right?

That's the same as a correction to a certain kind of dog. Social pressure is also a correction for our dog. I should distinguish a non-reinforcement marker from a, what we call, a conditioned punisher. So our no marker pinpoints the moment the dog was incorrect, the same way that our yes marker, our reward marker, pinpoints the exact moment the dog was correct. And I mentioned earlier that our reward marker is, in behavioral circles, is also called a conditioned reinforcer. And a conditioned reinforcer is something that meant nothing to the dog, in our case a sound, the word "yes" for me, but whatever it is, a sound that had no meaning to the dog, but by predicting something that was reinforcing to the dog, what we call a primary reinforcer, food, a toy, petting, whatever, now the sound itself has been conditioned to be reinforcing to the dog. The dog hears the sound and he gets happy, right? Because it's been conditioned to be reinforcing. At the other end of the spectrum, we have what's called a conditioned punisher. So if I bring my dog out and I say "no" and give him a correction, or "no" and whack him on the head with a newspaper, if I do this 20 times in a row, when I say "no," my dog is going to act as if I corrected them. They're going to physically act like I corrected them. They're going to go, "Whoa!" When I say no, even though now I didn't touch them. If I walk up to you and say, "Hey!" and punch you in the stomach, "Hey!" and punch you in the stomach, and I do that 20 times in a row, the next time I say, "Hey!" you go, "Oof!" whether or not I hit you, right? Your body takes over. A conditioned punisher. So what happens is there are certain places in our lives that we will use a conditioned punisher. I don't want my dog to chase cars. I don't want him to bite my nephew. I don't want him to— there's things that I want out of the repertoire. Like, you don't get to do these, these are bad things, right? If you rehearse these behaviors continually, it becomes a problem for us. So I might correct those behaviors when they first start happening, and I might condition a punisher to do that. So I take my dog for a walk, he wants to chase the moving car, I say no, I give him a correction, we go do something else. I say no, I give him a correction. Pretty soon, no means a correction to my dog. If that's the case, if I've used one of those in real life, if I've used a conditioned punisher in real life, use a different sound for your non-reinforcement marker. So lots of people say "no" for their conditioned punisher and they say "uh-uh" or "wrong" or whatever for your non-reinforcement marker. But it's really important. If you've corrected your dog at home while saying "no" and you try to use "no" as your non-reinforcement marker on the field, you're going to get the same bad effects as if you were correcting the dog. So we should talk a little bit now. So in a nutshell, that's our communication system for the dog, right? It allows us to basically pinpoint exactly when the dog is right and wrong, when they're gonna get a reward, when I like what they're doing and I keep— for them to keep doing it, and when they were wrong and they're gonna have to either do it over or they're gonna get punished depending on where we are in the process. I should probably talk a little bit here about non-reinforcement and where it works and where it doesn't work. So what we're talking about here, this whole system, is what we call a reward-based system. You'll hear people say motivational training. I don't like the term because dogs can be motivated for— by lots of things. They can be motivated to get something they want. They can be motivated to avoid something unpleasant. They're both forms of motivational training. What we really are doing is reward-based training. We're taking something the dog wants and showing them what they have to do to access that reward. So, reward-based training. The constraints on reward-based training, the limits of reward-based training, are your dog's motivation. Um, how motivated is my dog? That's what constrains this system, and there's a reason that working dog people are out there looking for that nutty dog. If somebody had told me when I got into dogs 30 years ago that I was going to want some of the maniac dogs that I've had in the last years, I would have been like, you're crazy, why would I want a dog like that? A dog wants to bite everything, he wants to chase everything, you know. I tried to give him a piece of food, he took the end of my finger off, right? Who wants that kind of dog? What you find though is that the more motivated the dog is, the better reward-based training works. The harder that dog will work to get to the reward, and the more distractions that dog will tune out to get to it. So the more motivated our dog, the better non-reinforcement works and the better reward-based training works. So we'll spend a lot of time this weekend talking about building motivation in our dog. How do we use food and toys to make more motivation? What's a productive way to play with your dog to build motivation? And there's a reason that we're constantly trying to make our dogs more motivated. Because if my dog doesn't want what I have, reward-based training and non-reinforcement doesn't work. If I'm training my dog with a ball and he doesn't really want the ball, and he makes a mistake and I say, "No, you don't get your ball," he goes, "So what? What's over there?" He goes off and wanders off. So the dog has to be motivated for the objects. It was funny when I first started getting into reward-based training, I had trained with a lot of guys that were very much purist escape avoidance trainers. The guys I learned from were all compulsion-based trainers, and some of them were very good at it, but it was— that was sort of the mindset. And the first time I got what I would consider now a highly motivated dog, the guys I trained with told me, oh, you're gonna have to get on that dog right now. You'll never get him under control unless you start getting on him now as a young dog. And I actually found the opposite to be true. He was so motivated for everything, for a ball, to bite, to play, everything, that non-reinforcement worked beautifully on him. If he made a mistake and I said, "No, you don't get your ball. You wanna try that again?" He was like, "Please, please let me try it again," right? And he would get it right the next time. So I used a lot less pressure on that dog than I wound up using on a lot of the dogs that are a little less motivated. The tricky dogs for us are what I call the medium motivation dogs. So we get a super highly motivated dog, great. Non-reinforcement, reward-based training works beautifully. That dog really trying to figure out what he needs to do to get to that stuff. We have a dog with no motivation, really easy as well. You just turn it into a pet. You don't train it for any of this stuff because it's square peg, round hole. No, he lays around the house. It's great. You let that one off the hook. The ones that are difficult are the ones that are in the middle that supply us with some motivation, but not enough motivation to override their interest in certain things in the environment. Under distraction, or maybe they won't work for more than a few minutes to get a reward before they say, "I'm tired. I don't want to do this anymore." Those are the dogs that get the brunt of the compulsion in our training. Because if I don't have something the dog wants more than some aspect of the environment, I have no choice but to correct the dog at that point. So if my dog's favorite thing in the whole world is chasing squirrels, and I go out there and try to heel him around, and there's a squirrel in the tree, that's his favorite thing right there. He wants to get the squirrel. He doesn't care that I have a ball, he doesn't care that I have food, he doesn't care about any of that stuff. His desire for that will override the desire for this, and I cannot make that go away if that's his favorite thing. So I have no choice but to correct him and say, "No, you can't have that, but you can have this." So the dogs in the middle are the ones that we wind up using the most compulsion on. The other thing that non-reinforcement Like I mentioned briefly before, non-reinforcement works really well for what I call neutral behaviors. Behaviors that really have no meaning to the dog unless we supply it. Oh, most of our obedience behaviors: sit, down, stand, heel. These things aren't intrinsically reinforcing for the dog. Non-reinforcement does not work on what I call self-reinforcing behaviors. The squirrels. Right? So most of our dogs are hardwired to enjoy chasing things. It's a vestige of when they had to hunt to survive, and if they weren't genetically programmed to enjoy chasing, they wouldn't get to eat. The act of chasing has to feel good to them, right? So your dog may chase squirrels and never catch a squirrel in his life, but the act of chasing squirrels feels so good that the more he does it, the more into it he gets. So they can get bonkers for it. And they're like, this feels good. This is what we call a self-reinforcing behavior. Non-reinforcement does not work on self-reinforcing behaviors. My dog goes to chase a squirrel, I can't say no, let him chase the squirrel, come back, give him a piece of food. It'll never go away that way because the behavior itself is reinforcing. So with self-reinforcing behaviors, the only way we're going to make them go out of the repertoire is by punishing them away. Taking the self-reinforcing nature away from it. So that's one of the other places that we will use punishment in the beginning. If it's necessary, then the dog— I'll block the dog from being able to perform self-reinforcing behaviors so they don't get to continually rehearse those behaviors. Let's talk about the use of compulsion. When I first started doing reward-based training, when I transitioned from a very much an old-school style of compulsion training to a reward-based system, I met a woman that trained AKC obedience, and her dog looked much better than my dog. I looked at the dog and I said, "Wow, her dog is really fast and really happy and very correct." And I wanted to know what she did. So I went out and hung out, watched what she did, learned some stuff, started playing around with reward-based training. And like many people, when I first hit that spot, I was like a religious convert. I was like, "This is the coolest stuff I've ever seen. You mean you can train a dog without correcting them?" I was so excited. I was like, "Yes! I'm gonna train dogs with no compulsion whatsoever." Turns out you can't really do that, but you can do a lot without compulsion if you're good at reward-based training. So what I found is I had a couple of dogs at the same time, roughly, and I got them up to a certain age and they had virtually no corrections. They were almost 2 years old, both of them, almost 2, and they'd have really no corrections in their life.

Minimal.

And I hit a spot in my work where I needed to correct the dogs for certain things. One of the dogs just folded like a house of cards. Like I changed the rules on him. He was looking at me like, what have you done to me? Like, this is not in our agreement. See, like, I work. If I make a mistake, you make me do it again. This correction thing, I don't get it. And he just crumbled, really squashed him, totally undermined his trust in me and everything. The other one wanted to eat me. Like, he came at me with a vengeance. He's like, "Uh-uh, you don't correct me. This is not in my repertoire." And both of them, the problem was that they hadn't learned as a part of the system how to cope with the stress of being corrected, of being made to do something, and how to learn to turn that pressure off. So I'm very, very methodical about how I teach a dog to access a reward, how to shape behavior, and we'll talk about it this weekend. How we lure dogs and move dogs into various positions, and how we show them how to access a reward. We teach them what their reward markers are. We spend a significant amount of time on this. I want to be just as thoughtful about how I introduce pressure to my dog. And so we'll talk this weekend about what I call, uh, leash pressure work. So there's a place in my dog's life where I'm going to teach the dog to turn pressure off away from all my obedience. It's simply showing the dog that I have a signal, I'm going to put pressure on you, you have to turn that pressure off by complying. And I do it with what I call leash pressure work. We teach the dog to give to the leash, to yield to the leash. So most of our dogs have a classic opposition reflex to leash. There's a reason you see pet dog people with their dogs dragging them down the street. The dog wants to go forward, you pull this way, the harder you pull this way, the harder they want to go that way. You're walking your puppy on a leash, your puppy sits down, the more you try to pull forward to get the puppy to come on, the more they hunker down into their sit. A classic opposition reflex. You pull the leash, the dog pulls against the leash. What we want to do is teach the dog that if you feel leash pressure, you go with it. You move with it. And we teach this separate from all our obedience. So I have a young dog, they hit a certain spot in our training, they're usually, I wanna say, 5, 6 months to 9, 10 months old, somewhere in that range. The dog and I have a good relationship, we're playing well together, everything's good in that front, they're usually finished teething, and then I'll take them out and I'll put them on a training collar and I'll show them how to move with the leash. I'll just pull the leash in a straight line, the dog puts on the brakes, and I keep the pressure on. The dog freaks out, like, "Pull!" And I pull, pull, pull, pull, and finally they go. And as soon as they go with it, I mark that, "Yes!" All the pressure comes off the leash. "Good boy!" Etc., right? So they basically learn, after a number of sessions, that resisting the leash doesn't work. And this is mildly stressful. This is escape avoidance training. I'm turning pressure on, you turn it off by going with it. But if I do this right, in a number of sessions, I get to the point where I can move my dog with 2 fingers in the leash. I grab the leash, I go this, and the dog moves with the leash. So now I've given myself a tool to subtly manipulate my dog's behavior. So like when we go to teach healing, it's an important part of my healing program, which is to be able to manipulate the dog very subtly. He gets 2 inches too far in front of me, I can use my wrist to make him move backwards, right? Very subtle gradients. I can give the dog information with the leash. I can move him around. The other thing the dog learns is that stress— a little stress isn't going to kill him. He learns to turn pressure off and it's not the end of the world. So later on, if in my work as I progress I need to use the leash to correct my dog, he knows what it is, he knows how to turn it off, and he's not stressed by it. But when I taught him this, I didn't teach him it giving him any commands. I didn't teach him it while teaching him any obedience behaviors, so he doesn't associate any of this stress with our obedience work. I get it ironed out somewhere else, I show the dog the skill, and then I bring the tool into my toolbox and incorporate it into my obedience work. Okay, so now we've built up a system where the dog understands yes, good, and no. Basically understands when they're getting a reward. I can tell them exactly when they're right and wrong with verbal markers. I can manipulate their behavior to access something they want, and they know how to turn pressure off, and I have a leash pressure skill that I can use to manipulate them around with. Now these are the tools that I'm primarily going to use to train my dog. A couple of pitfalls that we're going to run across that I should mention right now. You'll see when we start working dogs that what we do a lot of, the same way that I taught the dog leash pressure without any commands, we teach the dogs behaviors before we put the behaviors on cue. So the The first time I go out and teach my dog to sit, I do not say "sit." I show my dog how to sit. I take a piece of food, I hold it in front of my dog's face, he follows the food, I lift the food up, his nose goes up, his butt goes down, he sits, I say "yes," I reward him. I didn't say "sit," I didn't do anything. I simply messed with him until I got him to sit. And I repeat this over and over again until every time I lift my hand like this, my dog sits. Now, I put that behavior on cue, but not until I'm sure that I can get the dog to do the behavior the way I want. So I taught the behavior. Now we put the behavior on cue. So I say sit, lift my hand. Yes. Reward.

Sit.

Lift my hand. Yes. Reward. Sit.

Lift my hand.

Yes. Reward. Sit. Oh, look, the dog sat before I lifted my hand. Yay. Right? And we're gonna do this with everything. We're gonna do it down. We're gonna do a stand. We're gonna do it with come to heel, right? We teach the behavior, then we put it on verbal cue. And the verbal cue predicts what follows immediately after it. So I put the verbal cue right in front of whatever physical help I need to get the dog to do the behavior. So, now I've touched on this a couple of times already. One was with the reward marker, right? The reward marker needs to be predictive. Needs to happen right before the production of the reward. Now I'm talking about putting a verbal cue right in front of physical help. Because this is one of the most important concepts that we have. If you do anything physically and verbally at the same time, the physical will override the verbal and become the signal for the behavior. So if you're there and your dog's in front of you and you're saying, "Down!

Down!

Down!" You can do that over and over again. Physical, verbal together. Physical overrides verbal, becomes the signal for the dog. Now you try to stand up straight like this and you say, "Down!" and don't move, your dog won't lay down. You drop your head, bang, down your dog goes. So the very first obedience class I took, I was 12 years old, German Shepherd Dog Club, used choke chain, old school Keeler method class. The instructor told us basically you teach sit by saying sit and pulling up on the collar and pushing down on the dog's butt at the same time. So we went, sit, sit, sit. You can do that 1,000 times in a row. On the thousand and first time, if you stand up like this and say sit, your dog won't sit. But if you go, as soon as you turn towards the dog, boom, they sit. Physical, verbal together, physical overrides verbal. So even if I'm doing old school— what old school? If I'm doing escape avoidance training, even if I'm using the leash or correction to get the dog into position, the cue has to happen right before it. It has to be predictive. So I would say Sit, boom. Sit, boom. Sit, boom. Sit, boom.

Sit.

Oh, look, he sat before I moved. We got it, right? It has to be predictive. We see these things all the time. I told you before a little bit about that change of positions exercise, when you leave the dog at a distance and you tell them to sit, down, and stand. The time I first saw that exercise, I was doing Schutzhund, and I saw a ring sport guy do the exercise, and I thought it was super cool. I'm like, oh, that's really cool, I'm gonna teach my dog that. So I went home and taught my dog that over the course of the next couple of months, and he was really good at it. I could leave him way over there. Sit, down, stand, down, sit, stand, any order. And I thought, oh, this is awesome. And I had a friend videotape me training one day, and I was going like this. Sit, down, stand with my head, right? Really little movements. I lifted my eyebrows, dropped my head like that. Ooh, I should stop doing that. Go out the next day, stand up straight.

Sit.

Down. Stand. Nothing. I lift my head like this, he sits, downs, stands, right? I didn't have to say a word. He physically— because I was making the gesture at the same time I was saying something. And it's a huge problem, right? So this is one of the problems that people see all the time. They're pulling their shoulder, they're popping the dog with the leash at the same time they're giving a command. All these things are going to get in your way as you grass, right? So keep this in mind. It's a big part of it. I mentioned briefly luring. We use luring a lot, so I'll touch it lightly here, right? So when we're initially starting to teach behaviors, we use a lure extensively to get behavior in the beginning. So usually with food. So one of the first things we do with our young dogs, we charge up our, our reward marker. So I go out and I say, yes, feed, yes, feed, yes, feed, 100 times until my dog's conditioned to their sound. And then I show my dog how to follow a reward around. So I take a piece of food, I lure my dog like this. As soon as my dog follows that, I say yes, I let the dog access the food. So I'm teaching them to follow my hand around so I can turn them in circles, move them up, down, all kinds of stuff. They'll follow a lure around. This is what's going to allow us to manipulate the dog into the various positions that we want to teach the dog. So we practice luring, and then we start to incorporate it into our obedience behaviors. And one of the things that we want to do when we're teaching the dog to lure is we control the dog's body by the dog's head. This is a big part of the system, that what the dog's nose does, their rear end will do the opposite. So by controlling the dog's head, we control how their body moves, and luring is an integral part of that. So if I want my dog to sit, I simply pull the dog's nose up. As it follows the food up, its nose goes up, its rear end goes down. If I want my dog's rear end to come up, I simply go under its nose. Its nose goes down like this, and the rear end comes up. If I want my dog's rear end to go to my left, I simply pull my dog's nose to the right. Right? And this is gonna be an integral part of not only our shaping of behavior, but also when we get to heeling later. We'll talk a lot about heeling, and heeling is— head position in heeling is critical. Because what the dog's head does dictates what the rest of their body does. So in a nutshell, that's our system for communicating to the dog. We show the dog a reward marker, a continuation marker, and a non-reinforcement or punishment marker depending on where we are in our training. And we show the dog how to turn off pressure in a very controlled environment. And now we have a leash, luring, and a way to communicate to the dog exactly when they're right and wrong. And in a nutshell, that's what we're we're gonna use to teach the dog everything. And it doesn't make any difference what it is. Sit, down, heel, get a beer from the fridge, it's all the same. We're taking behaviors, we're breaking those behaviors into pieces, we're showing the dog the pieces, we're bringing the pieces together, and timely communication and being able to tell the dog in a timely fashion when they're right and wrong, that's dog training. And as Ed says a lot, it's simple but not easy. Like intellectually, you'll get this concept in 2 listens. We're talking, you're all, oh yeah, it makes perfect sense. So yep, yep, that's easy, good, good, no problem, it sounds perfect. The actual execution of course is not so easy, right? Like the separation and the moving is a lot of rehearsal on the physical aspects of doing it, but the concepts, not difficult at all. Any questions on that stuff?

Sure.

And we'll do it. We'll show you with dogs as we progress. But the biggest thing is that we use the leash and a training collar to teach the dog to move with the leash. So we start out with, um, I usually use, depends on the sensitivity of the dog, right? So if I have a very sensitive dog, I may just use a slip lead, one of those little light nylon slip leads. If I have a not so sensitive dog, I use a little pinch collar. I get one of the small, like, poodle pinch collars, the little tiny ones. I put a pinch collar on the dog, or whatever active training collar I need, and then once it's on the dog, I simply take the leash and I pull in straight lines. So if the dog is here in front of me, facing me, I would just take the leash and I'd pull straight forward like this, in a straight line. The dog puts on the brakes, like they normally do, they resist, and I just keep the steady pressure pulling. I don't say anything, I just pull, pull, pull, pull, and eventually the dog goes, "Ah, this is uncomfortable, this is uncomfortable," and boom! They shoot forward, they come with me. And as soon as they come with me, they give to the leash, I mark it, yes, I turn all— I take all the pressure off the leash. I either let go or just let it go slack, and then I reward them by petting them or giving a piece of food or whatever, right? But ultimately, their whole— the whole idea is that they turn pressure off. Now let's say they're beside me and I just go like this and I pull straight along their back, even in a straight line. As soon as they feel the pressure, they resist. Pressure, pressure, pressure. They finally take a step backwards, and as soon as they move backwards off the leash pressure, I mark it, release the dog. Yay, good job, right? And if I do this a few sessions, and pretty soon I can literally take two fingers and hold the leash, and I pull a little bit, the dog just goes with it. He doesn't resist it at all. And at that point, my dog has learned to give to the leash, and he subtly learned to turn off pressure. So then I can use it to teach my dog all kinds of things, because now once he's learned to go with it, it becomes no longer— it's no longer aversive anymore, right? It's no longer stressful for the dog. It's a signal, right? It's my way of making him move with the leash. So now let's say I put him beside me and I want to teach him to back up on command. I simply say, "Back," pull back with a leash, yes, reward. "Back," pull back with the leash, yes, reward. "Back," pull back with the leash, yes, reward. I do that 20 times and then I say, "Back," and look, my dog took a step back without me pulling the leash. Excuse me. Then I've taught him that behavior. I've taught him to turn off pressure and move. So now I've accomplished two main things with that. One is I've given myself a tool other than luring to manipulate the dog's behavior, and I'm gonna use leash pressure at that point to teach the dog the finish, to come to heel. I'm gonna use it to teach the dog to back up and heel. I'm gonna use it to teach the dog to get closer to me or move its rear end. I can use the leash now in a lot of different ways to manipulate behavior. And then also I've taught the dog to turn off pressure pressure. So if now my dog, I hit the, my dog's older, my dog's 18 months or 2 years old, and I need to start correcting my dog, my dog doesn't freak out. They know what it is and they know how to turn it off, right? So for me, compulsion, one of the most important parts about compulsion is I want my dog to understand what I want from them, and I want them to know how to turn the pressure off. So meaning I've shown them what I expect them to do, I've shown them there's something in it for them, I've shown them how to turn pressure off, and now I say, "Okay, this is your clear path to getting it right." But what happens a lot is people start using corrections before the dog is fluent in the behavior, before the dog knows what's expected, and they haven't shown the dog how to turn pressure off. So now the dog really stresses, and the dog stresses in a way that associates it with whatever obedience exercise you were trying to teach. And so now that dog starts to hate that exercise. Or hate obedience, or not want to be around you. All the bad things we see from pressure training come down to bad communication. If my dog knows what I want, knows how to turn the pressure off, and has a good relationship with me, I can pressure my dog a lot. I can use a lot of correction and my dog looks good. He looks happy. He's fine with it. He knows what he had to do. It was like, "Okay, I got it, I got it. I know what I need to do." And he does it right, boom, he gets a reward. Excellent.

For it.

But if my dog doesn't know what to do, doesn't know how to turn pressure off, and I try to use compulsion in my training, now that's the dog that looks like the traditionally compulsive dog we've all seen. They say "heel" and the dog goes, like, "heels along next to you," like, "oh, I'm so sad," right? That's just bad compulsion training, right? It's somebody wasn't clearly communicating with the dog. The dog didn't know what it needed to do, wasn't sure how to turn it off, So you get all this bad stress signs around it. But if we're careful about it, then we give ourselves the tools to pressure the dog later without all the bad aesthetic fallout that we traditionally see with poorly executed compulsion-based training. Any other questions on that stuff?

Yeah.

Something else you use, um, every time you said you use your marker, you reward, you don't use any intermittent, uh, rewarding? Um, well, I— there are certain places, it depends on what the behavior is. So there are certain places where, like, let's say I'm teaching a stay to my dog. I'm gonna teach my dog a sit-stay. I won't use my reward marker that releases the dog. I'll use my intermediate, my continuation marker. And I may take a reward to the dog when I do that intermittently. So I might leave my dog over there and say, sit. I step away from him. He stays in a sit. I say, good. I walk back over, I give him a piece of food. I step away again. Good. I walk back over, I give him a piece of food. Food, right? So I'm paying him in the position, I'm paying him for staying there, I'm paying him for duration, but I'm not releasing him out of it. But I'm giving him feedback that he's right. Every time I say yes, the dog's going to be released from whatever. So if I were going to use yes there, so my dog's over there and I say sit, and he sits, and I say yes, he's going to jump up and come towards me to go, hey, where's my reward, right? You know, you're going to throw the ball for me, you're going to feed me, what's it going to be, right? So if I want to work on ability in a behavior or duration, then I frequently take rewards to the dog in place. Step away, return, give the dog a reward, and I use my other marker. So we really have two markers that mean you're right, right? For me, they're yes and good, but it doesn't matter what they are. You make up your own. But they have two that means you're right. One that means you're right and you're being released into a reward. The other means keep going and you're either get a reward or keep going and I'll bring a reward to you in place. But you'll never release them with a "yes" and not give them a reward? No. Yeah. Always give a reward. Now, I say that, um, you don't have to. It's like anything. If I rewarded the dog every time I say "yes" and I hit a spot and I didn't reward the dog, the dog's gonna be okay. But I don't make a habit of not rewarding them. Because the sound has now been conditioned to mean good things to the dog. So, it would take— I would have to not reward them a lot when I said it for it to start to lose its power. But if I do it too much, if I release the dog, "Yes," and don't give them a reward too much, then you'll start to lose the power of that reward. So I would say I almost always give them a reward. The other thing is, and this is sort of an advanced thing that I do later, but the idea is that I build in different ways of rewarding my dog. So what I do is I teach my dog little games that we play. So I teach my dog to spin right and spin left in a circle, go between my legs. I have these little games. I teach them to jump up and hit my my hand with his nose. And when I'm teaching these initially, each of these things predicts a reward for my dog. So I say spin, my dog spins in a circle, I say yes, bang, he gets a reward, gets a tug, we play tug. I teach him touch, he jumps up in the air and hits my hand with his nose, and I say yes and I give him a reward. Through rehearsal, those little actions, those little games become reinforcing unto themselves. So I'm at that point, he just likes to spin and he likes to jump up and hit my hands because it's been paired. So now those things feel good to him. So I can release my dog and say, touch, touch, touch, spin, heel, and off we go again. And that little interlude was rewarding to the dog, right? So there are lots of ways I can— some dogs are so socially, uh, pack-driven, or they're so— they like social contact that I may release the dog and pet them or ruffle with them and wrestle with them or whatever. It depends on the dog. But most of the time, the vast majority of the time, when I release the dog, I'm giving them a primary reinforcer, which for us in our training system is usually food or a toy. So it's usually either a piece of food or a game of tug, or I'm throwing the ball for you, or whatever it is. Those are, those are the ones we use most frequently. I mentioned briefly luring. We use luring a lot, so I'll touch it lightly here, right? So when we're initially starting to teach behaviors, we use a lure extensively to get behavior in the beginning. So usually with food. So one of the first things we do with our young dogs, we charge up our, our reward marker. So I go out and I say, yes, feed. Yes, feed. Yes, feed. 100 times until my dog's conditioned to their sound. And then I show my dog how to follow a reward around. So I take a piece of food, I lure my dog like this. As soon as my dog follows that, I say yes, I let the dog access the food. So I'm teaching them to follow my hand around so I can turn them in circles, move them up, down, all kinds of stuff. They'll follow a lure around. This is what's gonna allow us to manipulate the dog into the various positions that we wanna teach the dog. So we practice luring, and then we start to incorporate it into our obedience behaviors. And one of the things that we wanna do when we're, we're teaching the dog to lure is we control the dog's body by the dog's head. This is a big part of the system, that what the dog's nose does, their rear end will do the opposite. So by controlling the dog's head, we control how their body moves, and luring is an integral part of that. So if I want my dog to sit, I simply pull the dog's nose up. As it follows the food up, its nose goes up, its rear end goes down. If I want my dog's rear end to come up, I simply go under its nose. Its nose goes down like this, and the rear end comes up. If I want my dog's rear end to go to my left, I simply pull my dog's nose to the right.

Right?

And this is gonna be an integral part of not only our shaping of behavior, but also when we get to heeling later. We'll talk a lot about heeling, and heeling is— head position in heeling is critical. Because what the dog's head does dictates what the rest of their body does. So, in a nutshell, that's our system for communicating to the dog. We show the dog a reward marker, a continuation marker, and a non-reinforcement. Or punishment marker depending on where we are in our training. And we show the dog how to turn off pressure in a very controlled environment. And now we have a leash, luring, and a way to communicate to the dog exactly when they're right and wrong. And in a nutshell, that's what we're gonna use to teach the dog everything. And it doesn't make any difference what it is. Sit, down, heel, get a beer from the fridge. It's all, it's all the same. We're taking behaviors, we're breaking those behaviors into pieces. We're showing the dog the pieces. We're bringing the pieces together and timely communication and being able to tell the dog in a timely fashion when they're right and wrong. That's dog training. And as Ed says a lot, it's simple but not easy. Like intellectually, you'll get this concept in 2 listens. You're talking, you're all, oh yeah, it makes perfect sense. So yeah, yeah, that's easy. Good, good. No problem. It sounds perfect. The actual execution, of course, is not so easy, right?

Right?

Like the separation and the moving is a lot of rehearsal on the physical aspects of doing it, but the concepts, not difficult at all. Any questions on that stuff? Go over the leash thing one more time, please. Sure, and we'll do it. We'll show you with dogs as we progress, but the biggest thing is that we use the leash and a training collar to teach the dog to move with the leash. So we start out with, um, I usually use It depends on the sensitivity of the dog, right? So if I have a very sensitive dog, I may just use a slip lead, one of those little light nylon slip leads. If I have a not so sensitive dog, I use a little pinch collar. I get one of the small, like, poodle pinch collars, the little tiny ones. I put a pinch collar on the dog or whatever active training collar I need, and then once it's on the dog, I simply take the leash and I pull in straight lines. So if the dog is here in front of me facing me, I would just take the leash and I'd pull straightforward like this, in a straight line. The dog puts on the brakes, like they normally do. They resist, and I just keep the steady pressure pulling. I don't say anything. I just pull, pull, pull, pull, and eventually the dog goes, "Ah, this is uncomfortable. This is uncomfortable," and boom! They shoot forward. They come with me, and as soon as they come with me, they give to the leash. I mark it, "Yes!" I turn all— I take all the pressure off the leash. I either let go, or just let it go slack, and then I reward them by petting them, or giving a piece of food, or whatever, right? But ultimately, their whole— the whole idea is that they turn pressure off. Now let's say they're beside me and I just go like this and I pull straight along their back, even in a straight line. As soon as they feel the pressure, they resist. Pressure, pressure, pressure. They finally take a step backwards, and as soon as they move backwards off the leash pressure, I mark it, release the dog. Yay, good job, right? And if I do this a few sessions, and pretty soon I can literally take two fingers and hold the leash, and I pull a little bit, the dog just goes with it. He doesn't resist it at all. And at that point My dog has learned to give to the leash, and he's subtly learned to turn off pressure. So then I can use it to teach my dog all kinds of things, because now once he's learned to go with it, it becomes no longer— it's no longer aversive anymore, right? It's no longer, uh, stressful for the dog. It's a signal, right? It's my way of making him move with the leash. So now let's say I put him beside me and I want to teach him to back up on command. I simply say back. Pull back with the leash. Yes, reward. Back, pull back with the leash. Yes, reward. Back, pull back with the leash. Yes, reward. I do that 20 times, and then I say, "Back," and look, my dog took a step back without me pulling the leash. Excuse me. Then I've taught him that behavior. I've taught him to turn off pressure and move. So now I've accomplished two main things with that. One is, I've given myself a tool other than luring to manipulate the dog's behavior. And I'm gonna use leash pressure at that point to teach the dog the finish to come to heel. I'm gonna use it to teach the dog to back up and heel. I'm gonna use it to teach the dog to get closer to me or move its rear end. I can use the leash now in a lot of different ways to manipulate behavior. And then also I've taught the dog to turn off pressure. So if now my dog, I hit the, my dog's older, my dog's 18 months or 2 years old, and I need to start correcting my dog, my dog doesn't freak out. They know what it is and they know how to turn it off, right? So for me, compulsion, one of the most important parts about compulsion is I want my dog to understand what I want from them, and I want them to know how to turn the pressure off. So, meaning I've shown them what I expect them to do, I've shown them there's something in it for them, I've shown them how to turn pressure off, and now I say, okay, this is your clear path to getting it right. But what happens a lot is people start using corrections before the dog is fluent in the behavior, before the dog knows what's expected, and they haven't shown the dog how to turn pressure off. So now the dog really stresses, and the dog stresses in a way that associates it with whatever obedience exercise you were trying to teach. And so now that dog starts to hate that exercise, or hate obedience, or not want to be around you. All the bad things we see from pressure training are— it's, uh, come down to bad communication. If my dog knows what I want, knows how to turn the pressure off, and has a good relationship with me, I can pressure my dog a lot. I can use a lot of correction, and my dog looks good. He looks happy. He's fine with it. He knows what he had to do. It was like, okay, I got it, I got it, I know what I need to do. And he does it right, boom, he gets a reward. Excellent. But if my dog doesn't know what to do, doesn't know how to turn pressure off, and I start to use compulsion in my training, now that's the dog that looks like the traditionally compulsive dog we've all seen. They say heel and the dog goes, Heels along next to you like, "Oh, I'm so sad," right? That's just bad compulsion training, right? It's somebody wasn't clearly communicating with the dog. The dog didn't know what it needed to do, wasn't sure how to turn it off, so you get all this bad stress signs around it. But if we're careful about it, then we give ourselves the tools to pressure the dog later without all the bad aesthetic fallout that we traditionally see with poorly executed compulsion-based training. Well, there are certain places— it depends on what the behavior is. So there are certain places where, like, let's say I'm teaching a stay to my dog. I'm gonna teach my dog a sit-stay. I won't use my reward marker that releases the dog. I'll use my intermediate, my continuation marker. And I may take a reward to the dog when I do that intermittently. So I might leave my dog over there and say, "Sit." I step away from him. He stays in a sit. I say, "Good." I walk back over, I give him a piece of food. I step away again. "Good." I walk back over, I give him a piece of food, right? So I'm paying him in the position I'm paying him for staying there, I'm paying him for duration, but I'm not releasing him out of it, but I'm giving him feedback that he's right. Every time you say your yes, you give him food. Every time I say my yes, the dog's gonna be released from whatever. So if I were gonna use yes there, so if my dog's over there and I say sit, and he sits, and I say yes, he's gonna jump up and come towards me and go, hey, where's my reward, right? You gonna throw the ball for me, you gonna feed me, what's it gonna be, right? So if I wanna work on stability in a behavior or duration, Then I frequently take rewards to the dog in place. Step away, return, give the dog a reward, and I use my other marker. So we really have two markers that mean you're right. For me, they're yes and good, but it doesn't matter what they are. You make up your own. But they have two that means you're right. One that means you're right and you're being released into a reward. The other means keep going and you either get a reward or keep going and I'll bring a reward to you in place. —No. Yeah. Always give a reward. Now, I say that, you don't have to. It's like anything. If I rewarded the dog every time I say yes, and I hit a spot, and I didn't reward the dog, the dog's gonna be okay. But I don't make a habit of not rewarding them. Because the sound has now been conditioned to mean good things to the dog. So, it would take— I would have to not reward them a lot when I said it for it to start to lose its power. But if I do it too much, if I release the dog, yes, and don't give them a reward too much, then you'll start to lose the power of that reward. So I would say I almost always give them a reward. The other thing is, and this is sort of an advanced thing that I do later, but the idea is that I build in different ways of rewarding my dog. So what I do is I teach my dog little games that we play. So I teach my dog to spin right and spin left in a circle, go between my legs. I have these little games. I teach him to jump up and hit my, my hand with his nose. And when I'm teaching these initially, each of these things predicts a reward for my dog. So I say spin, my dog spins in a circle, I say yes, bang, he gets a reward, gets a tug, and we play tug. I teach him touch, he jumps up in the air and hits my hand with his nose, and I say yes and I give him a reward. Through rehearsal, those little actions, those little games become reinforcing unto themselves. So I'm at that point, he just likes to spin and he likes to jump up and hit my hands because it's been paired. So now those things feel good to him, so I can release my dog and say, "Touch, touch, touch, spin, heel," and off we go again. And that little interlude was rewarding to the dog. So there are lots of ways I can— some dogs are so socially pack-driven, or they're so— they like social contact, that I may release the dog and pet them or ruffle with them or wrestle with them or whatever. It depends on the dog. But most of the time, the vast majority of the time, when I release the dog, I'm giving them a primary reinforcer. Which for us in our training system is usually food or a toy. So it's usually either a piece of food or a game of tug, or I'm throwing the ball for you, or whatever it is. Those are, those are the ones we use most frequently. Josh, you mentioned that we're about 2 and a half months old, so they don't know how to handle pressure. Yes. What happened with those PRs? They both worked it out. It was less than ideal. So the sensitive one uh, always looked a little bit mushed after that. He got through it, he survived, and he went on and did stuff, but he didn't— he never really coped with handling pressure well. And I just gave you my best shot, nothing really happened, that didn't work, and it drops out of the repertoire. So I kind of subtly assert myself over the dog without a big fight. The longer I wait— if I have an 18-month-old dog or 2-year-old dog, I can no longer just let them bite me and not be non-reactive. If they bite me, it's bad. So at that point, I have to stop them and I have to be firm about it. When they're puppies, one of the best things that you can do to early signs of aggression in a young dog is be totally non-reactive to it and continue to do what you were going to do. So like, if I'm playing with a puppy and the puppy starts to guard something from me, I just wade in and grab it and they bite me and I go, I'm taking it, thanks. Then I give it back to them and walk away, right? It's like, they're like, oh, well, that didn't work, right? So what— and you'll— we'll talk about this tomorrow, especially in protection theory when we get there, but one of the strongest tools for making aggression or any kind of behaviors go away is to have it not work for the dog. One of the biggest things that helpers do incorrectly in protection work is be non-responsive to the dog's power. So if the dog gives you a good fight, a good bite, shows aggression, and the decoy doesn't respond, it goes away. The dog gets scared, gets weak, feels like he can't beat this guy, and you get a diminishment in the dog. But we can use that same kind of non-reactivity in our relationship with our dog to sort of subtly assert ourselves over the dog. The dog goes, "Wow, that didn't work at all." It'd be like if I walked up on the street, met somebody, and I came up and I gave my best— I just punched him right off, gave him my best shot. Boom! And they went, hey, all right, I'm out of here, right? You're obviously much tougher than I am at that point. I just gave you everything I've got, made no impact on you whatsoever. I go, all right, you're in charge. And that's sort of the same thing we do with puppies. So when I— I like to start a little bit of pressure work when the dogs are young in a controlled environment. So if they're going to stress about it and and do that, I can just kind of go, "Sorry, we're doing it anyway." And the dog goes, "Hoo, well, I guess I can't get out of this." And you get a— you have a better relationship with the dog, and the dog learns some lessons about turning pressure off. I'll repeat all this stuff like a broken record all weekend. You'll hear it over and over again. And as we go, feel free, as we start to work over dogs, I'll try to illustrate, as we work a dog, what we've been talking about here. But if there's a question, we have— the interesting thing is we have people here doing a really wide variety of things. So we have ring sport people, we have schützen people, we have strictly obedience people. We have a variety of different people, and each of those sports and disciplines kind of have their own aesthetic. The exercises are a little bit different, the focus and energy you put into the training. The training principles underlying it all are exactly the same. Teaching is teaching, and it's all the same. Now, I'm gonna spend more time on the focused heeling in my Schutzhund dog than I am in my ring sport dog. I'm gonna spend more time on a fast retrieve in my Schutzhund than I am in my AKC dog. And there's a whole— there's things like that where we're gonna put energy into different places. So if you have a question about why we're doing something a certain way with one dog and different with another, please fire away. I'll try as we go along long to explain the differences between the different disciplines and why you have one dog doing this and another dog doing this, because that can be frequently confusing. But so I'll try to— I'll try to keep you up. But if one— if again, if I'm not clear about any of those, fire away. Okay. All right, let's work dogs.

We're going to end this part of the lecture here. If you'd like to watch some of the free streaming videos that I have on my website, you can go to this web address now. I have a number of, uh, free streaming training videos and then a number of product videos also.