When Failure Helps Your Dog learn

Hello, dog peeps. Jack here. Just a quick one before we get into this episode. You may or may not be aware that when I'm not talking dog stuff with Max, I in fact interview people who are incarcerated in prisons across the United States on a show called One Minute Remaining: Stories from the Inmates. And that show has been nominated for an award in America. And I would love your support if you've got 60 seconds to click the link in the show notes of this episode and just vote for my show. That would be amazing if you could. Thank you very much indeed. Oh, and don't forget to verify your email address. Otherwise, the vote does not count. Thank you.

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It's the Dog People Podcast with your host Jack Lawrence. You know, Malinois seem to be like the dog at the moment. Like, I think people see them on Instagram doing these incredible things. Yeah. Go, oh my God, that's awesome. And then they get one like, oh my God, what the fuck have I done? And Max O'Neill.

If you want to ask me how often I walk my own dog a week, it's only twice a week.

It's the Dog People Podcast, the podcast hopefully giving you a no-nonsense approach to dog training so you never have to shout, it's okay, he's friendly. Jack Lawrence here. Max O'Neill, the Down Under Dog Trainer. Max, I'm coming at this episode today because as someone who watches a hell of a lot of dog training stuff online, and there's something that I think I know the answer to, but I'm not sure. It's a little bit confusing. So I thought I'd bring it to you and we can explain it to everyone else. So when I've watched a lot of dog training videos, you see a lot of people talking about, hey, we don't want our dogs to fail.

Yeah.

We want our dogs to succeed. We always want our dogs to win. But then on the same token, we also talk about Essentially setting our dogs up to fail because we talk about, especially, you know, like with you and I have done training with Kira because she's occasionally sort of snuck out of the house. I'll now purposely leave a gate open and sort of disappear around the corner to see if I can catch her out and sort of say, ah, ah, and teach her that, no, that's not the right thing to do. It feels contradictory because on one hand we're saying we don't want our dogs to fail. On the other hand, we're saying, well, we need to set up these scenarios. So what's the difference? And Why do we do these things?

Yeah, absolutely.

So there's definitely a notion out there like, you know, we want our dogs to succeed, our dogs learn through, you know, their success, not their failures. And, and there's definitely truth to all that, but I think we, we've got to zoom out and look at— we want our dogs to succeed, not fail, on like a macro scale, like in the scheme of things, absolutely. But if we zoom in and look at, you know, session to session, week to week, there's got to be some level of failure in there where they— whether they fail your rep or fail a session, because that's when we know we are challenging our dogs and we're pushing them, um, at the right rate. I see a lot of people who are really obsessed with, you know, doing a training session. We're like, oh, my dog's awesome, like, if I do this work at home, he'll be perfect. But I'm like, if you throw the same session at your dog day in, day out— 10 reps of this, 10 reps of this, 10 reps of that— and they're 10 from 10 from 10, you're never going to get anywhere. That's just the same. It just ends up so autopilot, so within their comfort zone. And whether that's trying to teach them something new or train them or train something out. I see lots of people who go, we do our 10 reps of recall in the yard every day and he's flawless. Doesn't happen at the beach. And vice versa, we might have people who go, who are trying to train something out, like, I don't know, escaping from the door. They go, yeah, every day we do our 2 steps back from the door. He gets 10 from 10 and we go back inside. And then again, if a 10 from 10 success rate, if you get it, awesome. But the moment you're getting 10 from 10, you need to evolve that training session closer towards your goal. If that's your goal met and you go, well, there's nothing else, the behavior is complete, that's cool. You can, you know, find something else to work on. But on that training journey, it's really important that in that cluster of reps in that session, there is some level of failed reps because that's when your dog's being challenged and that's where the growth happens. So my kind of success rate I aim for is around about the 70 to 80%. Okay. There was a study we can post it if I can find it again, saying that mammals optimal learning rate is at 85% success rate. If they fail 15% of the time, that's just challenging enough that it forces them to upskill and evolve. And that's kind of where we want it, 70, 80. You can start to split hairs with percentages, but that's where it gets a bit sort of too nuanced for me. And you're kind of like, like, what's the point? 70 and 80%. The easy way to think of it is do 10 reps of everything and going, if my dog succeeded where I was able to yes mark and reward 7 or 8 times out of 10, You're nailing it. If it's any less than that and you go, okay, well, they only kind of passed half the amount of reps I gave them, well, then you probably made things too challenging. And if you go, well, my dog was 10 from 10, you're not making this challenging enough. So let's use an example where Jack and Kira are talking about the gate, because again, our dogs learn through success. We want them practicing success and building habits around that, but we also want some level of failure in there for a few reps. So let's break it down. Let's say Jack's doing a session where he goes out, he goes, I'm going to leave the gate 10 times. And come back ten times, and let's see how she does. If he does the whole thing where again she nails every rep, that's that's kind of pointless. He's clearly not challenged her. So we want to try and find that sweet spot where we go. We went ten times, and a few of those didn't go so well. We intentionally pushed. We went a little bit longer. We walked a bit further from the house, or maybe there's some high distraction around that.

Through a tennis ball past the door.

Through a tennis ball past the door. And like we said, we're not setting ourselves our dogs necessarily up for failure failure. But we want to challenge them and go like, if they fail that rep, that's cool. Like, this will be a learning moment. Our dogs learn just as much through their failure as they do through their success. If Kira gets a rep right, she's able to hone in and go, okay, Dad liked that repetition. There's something about that that he really likes. I'll try and repeat it. If Kira gets a rep wrong and she goes, oh, I missed out on the reward, or I got punishment, whatever. Okay, there was something about that rep that he didn't like. I need to try and remove that from my behavior set. So our dogs learn equally from both, but overall, in terms of what we call like behaviour rehearsal, we want our dogs rehearsing the right behaviour more. Because put it this way, right, if we do 10 reps of, you know, in a session and our dog gets 5 of them right and 5 of them wrong, well, what's going to happen is although each rep has been educational— hey, that was shit, that was great— if you look at the habit being practised, our dog's still rehearsing the unwanted behaviour just as much. I'll give you an example. I can— when I play, I'm learning a song on guitar, I could straight away try and learn that at full speed, and half the time I might play it through perfectly, half the time it might play through shit. Okay, and even though in the moment when I'm playing it shit and I'm missing notes and it's being— it sounds all kind of like awkward, even though in my head I'm getting that immediate feedback of punishment of, oh, that sounds shit, that's not reinforcing to hear, my fingers are still practicing the incorrect movement just as much they are practicing the right movements. That's a shit ineffective way to practice.

Does that make Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because you're kind of— yeah, you're hitting the wrong notes, but your muscle memory is kicking in and you're remembering the bad notes as you keep playing.

And that's it. Essentially, if we practice— if I practice all the time like that and go, all right, like most of the time I'm getting it wrong, or at least half the time I'm getting it wrong, all that really happens is your body's not necessarily improving, your mind's not necessarily improving, your body's just getting more efficient at performing the incorrect action.

Therapy's biggest impact doesn't show up in some dramatic breakthrough. It shows up in the smallest moments. You bite your tongue instead of escalating. You put your phone down instead of firing off that text. You say what you actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average $21 with insurance, and some pay as little as $0 depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality licensed therapists across the US, offering both virtual and in-person sessions nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability, and you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as 2 days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as $0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com/startnow. That's growtherapy.com/startnow. growtherapy.com/startnow. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan.

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So same with your dogs. If you practice, that was shit, that was shit, and half that session was shit, You need to make it a bit easier because although you gave them the feedback of that was shit, their body's still going, cool, like we will make this movement or this way of doing things more efficient. It just means it takes less energy and effort and less thinking to make it happen, but it's still going to happen.

Very much like the human world. We, we learn more from our mistakes than we do from our successes.

Yeah, that's it. Yeah, it's all— you get educated from both, but we want to practice, practice the, um, the right behavior more often than not. So 70, 80% of the time Like I said, count everything in tens. It's the easiest way to do it. 10 reps of this, 10 reps of that. It's honestly the best way just to figure it out roughly where you're at.

It's funny, I was literally watching a video last night. Shout out to the Yorkshire Canine Academy guys because they were talking about the same thing about, you know, you can do 200 reps in your backyard. It's like going to the gym and lifting the same weight every single time you go in and you're just going, oh God, I'm really good at this now. And you just keep going and you keep going, but you just never get any better.

Yeah.

Unless you stress yourself or put, you know, more pressure on yourself by increasing the weight, make it harder. Yeah. Yeah. And you improve That way.

That's it. That progressive overload's got to happen with that, um, our dog training too. So if you're running out of ideas and go, well, if I do do 10 reps of recall in the yard, my dog's going to nail it, but where do I go from here? That's where we really start to look at what we call like our 3 Ds of dog training. So one way you can start to challenge your dog is looking at our 3 Ds: our distance, distraction, duration. How can I get my dog doing this further from me? So if you're doing a recall, cool, get a longer line or let them go further off lead Before you call them, practice a new distance, practice around greater distractions. Um, or if you're doing something like a loose lead walk, try and get a longer duration, try and get 5 minutes with no food but still engagement or something like that. It's just challenging those areas. Or you can look at making a behaviour evolve. So for example, with Nelson's recall, one of the things we worked on earlier, we're like, all right, well, proofing— he comes back for everything now. How can we make this even more hard for him? Is We stopped paying the reps where his chin wasn't touching my belly. So if he came back and sat, but his chin was missing me. Yeah. Nice one, dickhead. That's not it. And then we do it again. And then he started to hone in on the 10 reps. He called me a few of them. I was lazy and didn't put my chin there. Didn't get paid. The ones I got my chin there, I got paid. Now whacks me in the gut every time.

See, this is— now this is where I struggle with Kira because I feel when I— so for instance, I've been practicing at the moment with the sit-down stand.

Yep.

And trying to— and she can do sit-down stand. That's great. But she started creeping Yeah. When it came to the stand.

Yep.

Obviously I've got the shaping box now, which helps that. But out of that, she's still doing the creeping and I go, ah, ah, ah, ah. And then she seems to get confused, like, oh, and then so when she's in the down and I say stand, she now gets to the point, well, well, I won't stand up because he told me that was wrong. Yeah.

So that, so that, that brings up a couple of things, right? So yeah, position box is definitely really good. It's going to take a bit of time for that to become muscle memory.

Yeah.

So same, Nelson took tons and tons and tons and tons of time in the box before Even absent of the box, he started to do the thing. But what you want to distinguish there between Kira on like a little tangent is we want to have a clear distinction between a no positive punishment marker, like hey, I don't want you doing that ever. So say for example, if Nelson were to happen to put his paws up on the counter, no physical leash correction. Get off the counter. I don't want to see that again. Yeah. And then what we call like a no reward marker or an error marker, and Nelson says nope. Which means I'm not paying you for that, but you're not in trouble. Like, I don't want to kill his drive where he goes, oh shit, like there's some serious tripwires here. We want that to come later in the training when the dog's really sure, because if that sort of ah ah ah and that social pressure comes in earlier, dog can start to go, fuck, I thought I knew what to do here, but I really don't, and it's kind of risky.

I don't want to get in trouble, so I'm just not going to do anything at all.

Yeah, so just have a nope, which just means you reset the rep. You just, you stop everything for a sec. There's no reward for that, and you just kind of go Well, that was shit. Then let's try again. And they'll kind of go, oh, okay, like something about that rep wasn't right. So she might do that again. The moment she creeps forward, nut. And same thing, uh, just as our reward marker timing is so key, so too is that nut marker. The second she moves like that. And then what I want you to do is like actually like break out of position. If we keep progressing and just get her to do another thing, we kind of just smooth over it and we keep going. We want to say like, no, like There's no progression here. No, stop everything we're doing. All right, let's reset, then let's go again. And almost like a halt goes to it, if that makes sense.

Okay, fair enough. That way.

Yeah, no, right.

That makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. I took us on a tangent there. So, okay, there we go. Fantastic. So it's okay for your dogs to fail because that's the best way for them to learn sometimes.

Exactly. They need a little bit to hone in on and get that contrast effect. This is what's right and this is what's wrong. And But if you have those both sides of the coin, the picture that they're aiming for becomes clearer. But overall, if we're doing a session, we want them practicing success more than failure because they're going to build a habit of what they practice. We want them practicing success more often than not, 70 to 80% of the time.

Okay. Any questions on that? The Dog People Podcast on Facebook, get involved, and we'll see you next time. The podcast is a Mashed Pumpkin production hosted by Jack Lawrence and Max O'Neill. Edited, produced, and audio production by Jack Lawrence. There's only one Ozempic.

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