Your dog has been enrolled in a training program, great! There’s lots of questions that come with entering the world of training with your dog. Commonly, we are asked, “when can I stop training?” Simply put, never. Training can be viewed as a system to create and reinforce desired behaviors to where they become habits. As with any habits, you need to be reinforcing them or they start to fade away. While those reinforcements may not look the same as when you started your first session they will still need to exist, even as they evolve over time.
In training we have a term called reward history. Meaning that when your dog hears a certain word they understand that there exist a history of there being a positive outcome for doing an action to associated with the command. This is most often done with a positive reinforcement methodology, a dog does something desirable they receive a food/toy reward. Increasing the likely hood of the behavior happening again. Positive reinforcement isn’t always a food/toy reward. Dogs will create their own reward history in different situations even if you don’t intend for them to learn that specific behavior. Repeating your dog’s name numerous times to unsuccessfully get their attention from sniffing the grass will build a reward history of your dog understanding that ignoring you gains them a better reward than giving you attention will. The inverse of that is saying your dog’s name and they receive a high value treat every time you say it. Leading to when they are out sniffing the grass, they’ll turn to you since they have a history of receiving a higher value reward than sniffing the grass will provide them.
Many trainers have programs built around usability in everyday life. It can be cool to have a dog who knows how to give you a high five, or to roll over, but use of these commands won’t help you at the pet store. Leash manners, basic commands such as sit, etc. are taught with the understanding that there is a practical need when it comes to involving your dog in your life. Often as trainers we hear, “oh I didn’t have time to train my dog this week”, when asking a client if they did their homework. Too often we think of training our dog as a set time frame, carved out into our day where we only focus on our dog. This isn’t necessarily true, understanding how to blend using your dog’s training into your day-to-day life helps not only keep the training fresh in their mind, but involves your dog in activities that they previously may have been left out in.
Take past client Mike for example. Mike owned a sweet female German Shepherd who was struggling with bonding with Mike after his son who had been the main caretaker of her, went to college. In the consultation Mike brought up that he was constantly busy, and worried that he would not be capable of doing the homework private sessions required. We encourage him to do the private sessions, if he could commit to trying to find moments where he could involve his dog in his daily activities.
Involve her he did! Working out was one of his regular activities. This is where he started involving his dog. He would put her in certain commands, such as down, do one set of reps, go back to reward her for staying. During his work out if she was wandering around the room, he would practice calling her to him, just as we had trained in our sessions together. Ultimately through his dedication of involving his German Shepherd in his life, she started going to work with him as if she had been doing it her whole life! Her training was constantly being reinforced in real life scenarios, even when food or toy reinforcers were not present.
Using the training, ensuring that you don’t allow your dogs to get continuously sloppy, means that your dog won’t forget how to properly listen to commands. For example, if you have been taught a place command (a dog stays on a directed object for extended periods of time), you can tell your dog to “place” when you are cooking dinner. Not only does this mean that you are aware that your dog isn’t getting into mischief, but that your dog is getting reinforced on what “place” means since you have previously taken the time to create reward history with the command. Taking Mike’s situation with his German Shepherd into consideration. If he hadn’t built strong reward histories with his obedience commands in random situations, his dog wouldn’t have been equipped to join him at work as seamlessly as she had.
Benefits of training includes a way of clearly communicating expectations from your dog. If you allow those expectations to be altered over time you find that your communication will be weakened due to a new alternate reward history. Say you haven’t practiced calling your dog to you in six months. Sure, there may have been times where you called, they started to come back but got distracted along the way more often than them making it all the way back to you. You may have even laughed and called them stubborn as they went to go sniff a spot on the ground. One day it happens, they somehow made it out of the yard while you were mowing the lawn. As they are running down the road you call out your obedience command to tell them to come back, just as your trainer showed you. Six months of reinforcement comes into play, your dog keeps running away from you.
Reward history changing during play can also be a problem that you’ll need to keep an eye on. If you give the command “sit”, your dog has been given the history that sit means putting their butt on the ground until you give the release cue. Play time doesn’t commence until the dog has successfully completed this command. During your play time the dog may be filled with anticipation of you throwing the ball again. When this happens if you give the command “sit”, the dog does not perform the behavior, and the ball gets thrown anyway, you have reinforced that “sit” may be optional. Failure to properly reinforce by not withholding the ball until your dog sits can lead to your dog testing out what situations they can decide to not follow the command. Perhaps they will associate when they are excited, they don’t need to sit, since they learned that picture during play and was rewarded for it. Non consistently reinforcing the desired behavior and instead allowing an alternate behavior to be born will lead to your dog’s original command to be diminished.
Dogs are creatures of habit. There’s a popular phrase amongst the dog training community, “it’s a marathon not a sprint”. It takes time to create good habits, to defeat prior reward histories. So, take a deep breath, relax, and enjoy the journey with your dog as you focus on creating a new communicative future with your dog. Remember to reward yourself along that way as well! You’re creating new habits for yourself too!
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