Frankie is a Min-Pin/Chihuahua mix about 1 1/2 years old.
Less than a year ago, she completed the DogDude™️ Jump Start Puppy Program along with her humans.
I wanted to feature Frankie and her guardians because it’s a wonderful example of the strength of the bond that one can create with their dog through effective communication that the dog can understand and by showing benevolent, trustworthy, and fair nonverbal body language behaviors that show effective canine leadership skills to the dog.
The purpose of the Jump Start Puppy Program is to do just that: create a very strong and solid foundation and bond with your dog. When your relationship with your dog is in the proper balance, and when your communication with your dog is clear and effective, your dog will see you as a leader that she wants to follow. And she’ll do whatever you ask, as long as she knows what it is. Through the training, Frankie and her guardians learned how to lead Frankie in all the fundamental behaviors necessary for a well-mannered pup.
They learned:
sit
down
stay
come
leave it
drop it
don’t doordash
don’t jump
give eye contact
settle
heeling
don’t be reactive toward other dogs, humans, or anything else in the environment
and many more.
Frankie learned all these skills and how and when to do them because her guardians practiced them in various situations and contexts. Repetition is the mother of success when it comes to a dog learning how to do something. Intentionally seeking out novel situations in which to practice the learned skills is how you “condition” the learning to your dog's behaviors and develop “bomb proof” obedience.
It’s all fine and dandy when you’re practicing inside the house, where it’s easy for your dog to focus on the task at hand.
But what about when you leave the house? When you walk out the front door with your dog, you compete for your dog’s focus and attention with everything else in the natural environment. Birds, squirrels, rabbits, other dogs, strange humans, skateboards… The list goes on and on.
If your relationship with your dog is not in the right balance, your dog will not be able to do what you ask of her. Her focus and attention will be held captive by whatever holds the most reinforcement value in her proximity.
And Frankie lives in the real world. Her guardians are snowbirds that spend the hot months in Michigan. How beautiful!
But guess what? Instead of a tiny rock and cactus walled in the backyard, like they have in Arizona, their backyard in Michigan is a wide open grassy field with a large pond that houses hundreds of geese.
Talk about temptation and reinforcement in the natural environment! It doesn’t get any more reinforcing for a dog than to chase a slow-moving bird.
When they first arrived in Michigan, Frankie would dash out the back door and run with wild abandon away from the house and toward the pond to chase the geese. All the while, the guardians were trying to recall her and get her to “leave it” and willingly turn away from the geese to come back to them.
That is a very tall order for a dog with a strong prey drive (by the way, almost all dogs have a strong prey drive). It wasn’t that Frankie was trying to be disobedient or ignore her humans. Frankie’s behavior was quite simply the product of the highest value of reinforcement to her. Chasing the geese had a higher reinforcement value to her than leaving or avoiding the geese and staying with or returning to her humans for the reinforcement they offered.
Frankie’s mama continues to stay in touch with me, and we discuss how to teach and practice the best behavior out of Frankie in many situations.
We discussed this issue. This particular situation represents a sort of “Super Bowl” circumstance. When fully prepared for a game of this magnitude and intensity, one can perform all the given plays in their playbook. But when not properly prepared by building a strong foundation over time, this “Super Bowl” situation will result in complete failure. It would be similar to inserting a Pop Warner football player into the starting lineup of a Super Bowl team and saying, “Go get ‘em, kid. You’re going to do great!” No. The child will not do great. He won’t know what to do and will be crushed by the situation's intensity. The same thing happens when we ask a dog to perform unknown behaviors in a high-stress environment.
We devised a plan to desensitize and counter-condition Frankie to the reinforcement value of choosing to chase geese despite what her guardians wanted her to do. We did that by using a long line to restrict Frankie’s ability to run away from the house and toward the geese. At the same time, we discussed using obedience games such as “fetch with rules” to raise the reinforcement value of focusing on the human and the activity and finishing the activity by letting her chew on a bone or snuffle up food rewards that were scattered in the grass, close to the house and humans.
With the use of the long line, Frankie was restricted from practicing the unwanted behavior. She was instead requested to perform other behaviors that were naturally pleasing to her (like chasing and retrieving a ball) and highly reinforced by her humans with food, praise, play, and affection.
By preventing her ability to chase the geese with the long line, Frankie could not complete the behavior and earn the reinforcement that comes at the end of the behavior. At the same time, they were practicing and reinforcing the behaviors they wanted.
Over time, if a dog cannot practice and earn reinforcement for any given behavior, that behavior will become extinct. That’s been proven by science. Meanwhile, the dog continues the repetitions and earns reinforcement for the desired behavior, and it grows in strength and intensity.
At some point, assuming consistent practice and exposure, the desired behavior will overtake the undesired behavior and become the dog's first choice of action. This is called a “conditioned response”.
You can see that Frankie’s desired behaviors aren’t fully conditioned - yet. But they will be as long as they continue to practice in that environment. It’s only a matter of time.
I couldn’t be more proud of Frankie and her guardians. For my method, training isn’t focused on teaching your dog obedience tricks. My method focuses on effective communication that your dog can really understand and presenting yourself as an effective canine leader to your dog. My method focuses on creating a healthy, balanced relationship with your dog so your dog sees you as a leader that she wants to follow.
Frankie and her humans have developed that kind of communication and relationship through my training program. Frankie is willing to learn and practice the behavior her humans want because Frankie knows her humans are effective leaders for her and that they will reinforce (or reward) her when she chooses the behavior that her humans want.
That’s what happens when the training focuses on effective communication and leadership behaviors. When your relationship with your dog is in the right balance, you can lead your dog through any given situation, given repeated intentional practice.
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