In this episode we discuss:
- Speed vs. Latency:
- Speed is how fast a behavior is completed from the time it starts.
- Latency is the response time, or the time elapsed between when the cue is perceived and when the behavior starts.
- Motivation:
- While motivation is essential, it is just one piece of the puzzle.
- Overemphasizing motivation can lead to frustration, which might not always yield the desired outcomes.
- Natural Behavior Efficiency:
- Given a stable training environment, behaviors naturally trend towards faster, more efficient performance over time.
- Training Environment:
- The importance of considering training conditions (e.g., environment, timing, footing) to ensure optimal speed without inducing frustration.
- Pay attention to when, where, and under what conditions your dog already moves faster
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Episode Transcript
Hannah Branigan: [00:00:00] When we are kind of hung up on motivation as the only way, the only thing that we can influence to get faster behaviors, we can sometimes like slip-and-slide from thinking in terms of positive reinforcement motivation to maybe a negative reinforcement kind of motivation. We might call it something like desperation.
[intro]
Hey there, fellow training nerds! You’re listening to Drinking From The Toilet. If you like to geek out about combining the science of behavior with positive reinforcement philosophy in real life, you’ve come to the right place. And I’m your host, Hannah Branigan: teacher, trainer, podcaster, and author of the book Awesome Obedience and its companion, Awesome Obedience: The Field Guide, which are both available from clickertraining.com. [00:01:00] I’m also the founder of Zero To CD, which is the only totally integrated program to get you competition-ready using positive reinforcement methods.
Along those same lines, I am going to be running a 21 day heeling challenge with exercises to make your heeling awesomer, improve your position, make it tighter, sharper, improve your focus. This is going to be similar (but not identical) to the challenge that I did last year around this time. I’m still working on putting the details together. I’m planning on starting it in September. If that is something that catches your attention, if you’re interested in playing (or playing again, because we had a lot of fun last time), then keep your ears on this spot and keep your eyes out on social media and in your inbox. I will send out emails once we have all of the details nailed down. If you’re not on the email list, you can go to my website and get yourself on it.
[episode begins]
This week we are talking [00:02:00] about getting faster behaviors in training without leveraging frustration.
I’m specifically looking at all of the ways that we can increase speed that are totally separate from anything that we might put in a category of – I’m going to do some air quotes – “drive.” So if you have a dog that you’re worried is “low drive” and you’d like to optimize some behaviors for speed without increasing your or your dog’s suffering, this episode is for you.
So I want to start the conversation by addressing terms first, right? We have two main terms that come up in this area: speed and latency. I’m holding up my two fingers now.
There’s some understandable confusion in which one is which and how we talk about it. Really, speed and latency have a lot of overlap. In general, when we see one is big, the other one tends to also be big– [backtracking to correct self] Or when we do training things that improve one, the other one tends to also [00:03:00] improve. So this is part of the problem, right?
Speed and latency combined are how long an action takes to be completed from when you give the cue, right? So if we’re looking at it from the trainer’s perspective, speed and latency together, the measure of that is going to give you like the total elapsed time from when you gave the cue as the trainer to when your dog completes the behavior.
But they do have slightly different pieces to it. And again, the language gets a little trippy because speed, you probably know what that means. That one is what it sounds like. I don’t feel like that one is as easy to get tangled up in. Speed is how fast the behavior is completed from the time the behavior starts.
How long does it take you to move your clothes to the dryer after you open the lid to the washing machine? Like from the time your hand is on the washing machine and you’re in the process of [00:04:00] moving that first sock over. This is probably something you can measure in seconds, right? Probably.
Latency, however, is the response time.
When speed is high, that means the behavior is really, really fast. High speed means a small number of seconds.
Latency is the response time. High latency is is a larger number of seconds. And that’s just confusing. When we talk about reducing latency, we are talking about reducing the response time, getting a quicker response – fewer seconds elapsed between when the cue is perceived and when the behavior starts. That’s decreasing latency or low latency.
How long does it take you to start opening the lid and moving the laundry to the dryer after you hear the washing machine beep that it’s done? This is something that may be measured in business days.
So we have speed plus [00:05:00] latency. It’s useful to be able to talk about them separately. It’s important to recognize when we’re increasing speed and decreasing latency, both of those things result in a faster outcome. When we’re decreasing speed and increasing latency, that’s going to give you a longer, slower outcome.
Alright. When we’re talking about faster behaviors, the first place people tend to go (and not just dog trainers, but I think people generally; I think it’s very human) is that we tend to look at everything in terms of motivation. But really, motivation is just one variable. It’s a big one. It doesn’t not matter. Reinforcement drives behavior and motivation is part of that, right? So motivation is relevant here, but it is really only one piece. And a lot of times when we are kind of hung up on motivation as the only way, like the only thing that we [00:06:00] can influence to get faster behaviors, we can sometimes trip like a slip-and-slide from thinking in terms of positive reinforcement motivation to maybe a negative reinforcement kind of motivation. We might like call it something like desperation, right? And there’s a lot of factors that can influence that. And some can feel kind of medium and some can feel really-not-good-at-all, but they definitely affect how quickly you do a behavior. The conditions and the contingencies, of course, influence how the behavior is performed.
For example, let’s say you are in a situation where you realize that you have a lesson that is starting very soon and every single pair of pants that you own has been sitting in your washing machine damp since Friday. We won’t discuss what you may have been doing without any pants since Friday, because that’s not important. That’s not relevant to this conversation.
The important part is that you have a desperation [00:07:00] situation here. You’re very motivated and you will very likely respond quite promptly to the signal (after you’ve rerun that load of laundry). As soon as that washing machine goes off, you’re going to be flinging those pants into the dryer at like Mach 9, which I think is a speed measurement.
So really, really fast. Quick response. Fast behavior.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing you can do (such as by sweating and jumping up and down in front of the dryer) that will cause the dryer to dry your pants any faster and you will probably be driving to that appointment in damp pants. (And I’m sorry, because that’s really uncomfortable. I’ve heard.) But they will at least be a little bit dry, right? And not smell like mildew.
We’ve all had this experience as humans. We’ve all had the experience as children or bigger children like we are now (if we don’t really identify as adults, or even if you do identify as adult). I think it’s a very common [00:08:00] thing to address human behavior from this same perspective: getting a faster response through a motivational effort.
And as I was thinking about examples, I think the most common way that I see this or have experienced this is when teachers, parents or other adults will layer on some kind of negative reinforcement contingency in the form of threats to develop some sense of urgency so you can get a faster response.
And I get that, actually, because I have a child and trying to get out of the house– I swear, I don’t understand how long it can take to put shoes on. I have felt that pressure. It’s a negative reinforcement. I’m in an escape/avoidance contingency to get her shoes [00:09:00] on so that we can leave. And yeah, that can kind of spill out.
In fact, she’s given me feedback to that effect recently and told me that “my stress was not her problem,” and she was not wrong, so that’s something for me to sit with.
But we also tend to go directly to motivation to get faster behaviors in a dog training context as well. When our dog isn’t responding quickly enough or the times aren’t what we’d hope for, the first thing we tend to start grasping for is, “how can I increase this dog’s motivation? Could I just find the right reinforcer? Or somehow make my dog desperate enough to get the reinforcer that I have?”
Ultimately, you can also just buy a dog that’s born that way, right? Like when you’re not really getting the results you’d hope for, so maybe you should go get a puppy that comes out of the box already easier to motivate. And you know I’m never going to tell you not to get the puppy (because life is short and you should totally get the puppy). You may just be trading one set of problems for a different set of problems and then you’ll be right back here asking how to handle a different [00:10:00] set of training challenges. But you know what? Let’s stick with your older dog first and we can talk about your new high-drive puppy in a different episode. Of course, principles are still the same, right?
Alright, so we’re talking about building motivation. This is where a lot of suggestions for drive building tend to come into play. And you can check back to previous episodes for discussions on building specific reinforcers like toy play or food drive, because I have a lot to say about those specific topics.
And you’ll probably also want to check out the episode that I did (or I may have done a series of episodes) on conditioned motivating operations.
Or you don’t have to take my word for it. Go to Google and YouTube and learn for yourself about conditioned motivating operations, because that’s one of the ways that we can influence motivation and influence the value of a reinforcer.
And, spoiler: we can do those things without deprivation.
Simply not feeding the dog for [00:11:00] a while or a long time is not the only thing that we can do to increase the response that we get for food or increase “food drive” if we want to use that language. There’s a lot of things we can do.
Okay, but that’s not what this episode is about.
This episode is about how to all of the things that we can do separately – totally separately – from the reinforcer, the drive for the reinforcer itself. I’ve got quite the list. I may even end up breaking this into two parts because I have a lot of bullet points in front of me and I sometimes can get a little bit on a roll or ramble. You can look at it any way you want.
And in fact, for a couple of reasons, one of which being that the majority of the dogs that I work with and the teams that I work with are just normal dogs owned by normal people. Which, I mean, “normal” is nothing but a setting on the washing machine, but so what do I mean by that?
They’re the dogs that you [00:12:00] have in your home. That’s always my approach, right? Like the dogs that I have in my house, I love them. They’re my babies. They’re my pets first. And then I like to do stuff with them. And so my angle is always “What can I do with my training to optimize the performance and optimize the experience that I have with these dogs?” Because they’re not going anywhere. So what can I do with those? And that’s mostly who I tend to work with.
We also, you know, have experiences with the cracked out malinois, etc. But again, that’s for another episode, right? We’re talking about normal dogs, ordinary dogs and what can we do?
Because these things, of course, apply to all dogs, right? Like a lot of things, good training is good training. The principles are the same. So these techniques will help you get faster responses with your hound mix, and they will still help you get faster responses with your sport-bred herding dog or whatever.
These are the places that I [00:13:00] go first.
And the reason that I look at these strategies first before I really look at drive building or changing something about the motivation for the reinforcer is because these are the lowest risk options and strategies in terms of avoiding unnecessary or undesired side effects like barking.
So when we’re approaching trying to build motivation through all things that we do in the name of drive building, we are often dancing on the edge of (or diving headfirst into) frustration and extinction as a way to try to get more of that desperate “give me the thing, give me the thing, let me bite it, let me tear it out, let me shred it” headspace. And so when we’re doing that, we’re also going to tend to scoop up all of the other stuff that comes in that frustration bucket. And a lot of [00:14:00] that we maybe don’t want.
And it may also just not be the flavor of emotional experience that you want attached to your training and your relationship with your dog. Which is how I feel and where I’m coming from here. So I want to get more out of it.
And the other reason is because, for a lot of dogs, increased frustration doesn’t actually increase their motivation for the reinforcer. It can kind of go either way.
And I do think there’s a genetic component there, right? I’m thinking of my Belgians compared to, say, Rugby or my hound. If it seems hard, those things that I would do that could light up a Belgian, other dogs are just like, “Oh God, it’s too hard. Forget it.” So frustration can be expressed through like lots of loud flailing and high energy stuff. And frustration can also be expressed through [00:15:00] shutting down, sniffing, looking away, leaving.
Rugby gives me good feedback regularly that, if I’m not clear with my training, then he can more effectively find reinforcement elsewhere in the environment and in fact does not need me. So yeah, I have to do my work.
So:
- Totally separate from the reinforcer itself
- Lower risk
- None of these things are gonna hurt
- They’re not gonna damage your relationship
- They’re not gonna make your dog not like training
- They’re least likely to result in a lot of garbage behavior that you don’t want and will be a real pain in the butt to clean out of your training sessions later
The next thing down that people tend to consider when trying to increase speed or decrease latency is something along the lines of Differential Reinforcement. We don’t really need to depend on that here either. That’s gonna put us right back into [00:16:00] frustration mode, potentially.
Differential criteria in this case looks like only reinforcing behaviors that meet a time-based criterion, right? So you set a threshold, and if the behavior is slower than that threshold, it doesn’t get reinforced, and if the behavior meets that or is faster, then it does get reinforced.
And in application, this is hard to do. I can see where it’s coming from. In theory, it sounds really great. And in real life application with real dogs and real people, it’s honestly just really hard to do. In general, most of the behaviors that we’re training our dogs to do are really fast. Like the behaviors, even done slowly, don’t take very much time. The behavior itself is pretty short. So if you’re looking at a stopwatch to try to be specific about what you’re [00:17:00] reinforcing, measuring how long the dog is taking to perform the behavior, you’re gonna miss the moment to click.
And I can guarantee you that one thing that does not improve speed or latency is poor timing and shitty mechanics on the part of the trainer.
And also, if the behavior is occurring under conditions that are resulting in a particular window of time, like the behavior is kind of happening slowly under these conditions, then simply chopping off half of the responses and dropping your rate of reinforcement significantly so the ROR just falls off a cliff – that also does not do anything to make the dog more motivated to continue participating in the session.
I’ve seen a lot of sessions where this strategy was attempted in good faith, making a good effort. And the response from the dog got slower and fainter because the rate of reinforcement just got too low.[00:18:00] So again, we’re going into extinction. We don’t need to do that.
My recommendation is actually to go ahead and reinforce even slow attempts. If you’re getting the behavior that you want, if it’s happening even at all, then reinforcing even the slower attempts but making changes elsewhere is probably going to get you to your goal a lot faster. And low rates of reinforcement are not going to help. They’re not going to get you any closer.
Now I want to give you some good news here. I feel like it’s good news. I feel like I’ve trained enough dogs who know enough behaviors. As an impatient person, speed and low latency are always high on my list of desirable characteristics for basically every behavior.
I’ve made a lot of observations. Here’s one of them:
The easiest strategy to take is to really do nothing. Like actually to do nothing. If you’ve got reasonably [00:19:00] strong behaviors that are just building in fluency, then all things being equal, if you do nothing else, the system will tend to trend towards faster, more efficient performance.
This is sort of like “natural selection” at play, like in a very short time frame. We talk about natural selection as a part of evolution of species, which is a long duration – that’s a long timeline. But one of the cool things about thinking about behavior as “natural” science is that we get to see the natural selection of behavior in very short time frames, sometimes in one training session.
I think that is so cool! I get very excited about it! I love that!
And if the reinforcer (the function of the behavior) is there, if the reinforcer is even reasonable in general, then we’re going to find the most efficient way to access [00:20:00] that reinforcer.
A visual that always comes to my mind when I’m thinking about this phenomenon or effect is one that I saw both in NC State, where I went to undergraduate, and also at UNC Chapel Hill, which is where I did graduate school. And I’m gonna guess that this phenomenon occurs in lots of facilities, lots of schools and probably lots of other places, too.
In both of these cases, the buildings where I had classes, there were buildings that were arranged in a square and there was a big grassy courtyard area. And the designers of the campus had set out these nice graceful paths with plantings. And the paths did not necessarily reflect the most direct path from the door from one building to the most commonly followed [00:21:00] path to the next commonly followed doors.
And so the students on both campuses made their own little deer trails through the grass where grass never grew because of hundreds and hundreds of feet walking the straight line from exiting this building to getting to the cafeteria or whatever. And you could see those little deer trails. I always thought that was so fun.
And you might think “Oh, well they should stay off the grass and stick to the the paved paths,” but behavior doesn’t work that way. Behavior does not stick to the paved path. Behavior is going to work. And when it isn’t, if it doesn’t seem to be getting faster by itself, they usually means there’s some other contingency at play. It could be as simple as a temporary or maybe not-so-temporary or chronic contingency that’s [00:22:00] overlapping the one that you’re focused on.
I’m trying to think of an example here. Let’s say I overdid it yesterday. (I never overdo it and then have regrets, of course.) But let’s say I wake up in the morning and my bladder is full. And in the morning, my bladder is not necessarily more or less full depending on what I did yesterday, aside from the obvious. The discomfort and the desire to get to the bathroom does not change. (Now, this is a negative reinforcement contingency, but it was the first example that came to my mind and I already have regrets.)
So that discomfort doesn’t change, but if I’m having sore muscles this morning, it may take me a lot longer to work from the bed to the bathroom than on a morning when I wasn’t in quite as rough shape. (I can’t think of a morning when I’ve woken up without some kind of pain, but definitely there are some mornings which are worse than others.) I’m going to be a little slower making my way over there.
I’m [00:23:00] still going to go the direct path, right? Well, the direct path pending whatever laundry piles may be on the floor in between me and the bathroom. It’s still gonna be the most direct path (and because I am pretty much always on top of laundry, there’s not usually any laundry piles on the bedroom floor, so it’s going to truly be the most direct path).
Again, all things being equal, I’m going to get there efficiently and effectively and that’s going to make it a fast process (except when it’s not, right?).
So I wanted to put a pin in that.
Let’s talk about some of the things that we can do in training to get those faster responses without drive-building, without influencing your dog’s drive at all. You may also be doing that separately. You may be working on drive-building as a totally separate thing and I think that’s a fantastic idea. You can see those previous episodes on building motivation without deprivation. [00:24:00]
Let’s talk about faster responses.
So we’re looking at primarily like capital C Conditions here. Right? So we want to start with what are the Conditions– starting at like the atmospheric level of your antecedent conditions like where you’re doing the training and what of those arrangements can you manipulate (I’m using the word manipulate in a good way here, because there are good ways to use it and I just made one, right?) So starting up at the top.
A lot of this is stuff you already know, right? You’re probably already even doing it: things like keeping your sessions very short. Or maybe you know that you should be doing it, but then you get like into the session and all of that old psychological baggage… Maybe including things like, “Oh, I need to stop on a good note,” but like there aren’t any good notes so you’re desperately training for like longer and longer in the hopes of like getting something good that you could end on but you [00:25:00] really just want to end and everyone wants to end but you can’t seem to escape… or other things like that.
So maybe you know that you should be keeping your sessions short and maybe you even have had like an out of body experience of watching yourself training for a lot longer than you should have and there’s a little voice telling you that you should end the session, that it’s not going to get better and you’re going too long, end the session, “no, not just one more,” but you keep going because at that point you’re no longer in control of your body…
But keeping your session shorter is generally going to be one of those conditions that will make it easier to get faster responses.
Reinforcement still drives behavior. So we want to get faster responses so that we can reinforce a lot of faster responses, because that’s going to tend to give us faster responses later. But that’s pretty obvious and you didn’t need me to ramble like that for you to know that. You know that. [00:26:00] You’re already doing it. I know that you are.
What other aspects of that capital C Conditions can you influence, do you have control over, or have some choice in? What could we use and pull from to work towards faster responses?
I want to think about things like: when and where does my dog move faster in general? Like when in time and where in space and then like what else is happening adjacent to that?
So for example, if the goal of my training session or the biggest thing I’m interested in with this particular behavior is that I want the behavior to be faster, then this is not the training project to work on when it’s really hot or when the footing is poor, right?
I’m not directly affecting the footing, the surface that we’re walking on. But if it’s [00:27:00] slippery or unstable or loud or weird, well, slippery surfaces tend to make all of us careful, and careful behaviors tend to be slower. I don’t want my dog to be slow. So I don’t want my dog to be careful. So I’m going to deliberately choose environments where the footing is more secure or my dog is more likely to feel secure on that footing. I’m not going to be working on this on a tile floor or linoleum, whether or not the specific dog is nervous about linoleum. There are dogs for whom slippery floors linoleum, tile, etc, are are a big deal, but even for like an ordinary dog– I need to work on that language a little bit. But a dog for whom slipping on linoleum doesn’t seem to be aversive, I still don’t want to work on speed behaviors on that tile floor or on a polished concrete floor.
So [00:28:00] these are not training projects that I am going to be taking to Home Depot or PetSmart, where I know the floor is going to be on the slippery side. Well, there’s other reasons I might not want to work my dogs on a slippery floor, but this is a good one, especially if slowness is a problem and I want faster responses. I want good traction! And thinking about the when–
Again, this feels obvious. And also: I am personally guilty of ignoring the obvious! Like what’s the saying? “Stepping over dollars to pick up dimes” or something like that? I am very guilty of ignoring the obvious and coming up with stories about it. So maybe one or two of you will also find the suggestion to be helpful.
Looking at the when: when in the day is your dog a little spunkier, a little quicker? Are they doing other things also fast, right? So if they’re doing one behavior fast, then all things being equal, [00:29:00] another behavior under the same conditions is probably also likely to be a little bit on the faster side. We can work with that.
Something that I’ve noticed with my personal dogs is that they tend to be quicker in the evenings, around (but also after) dinner time. From the time that ‘m done with our other things to when we go to bed, I tend to see faster responses from my dogs.
And it’s probably not a coincidence. We probably got a couple of things going on.
Some of it is probably that there’s a biological component, right? The natural history of the organism. What it is to be a dog. They tend to be crepuscular, right? I don’t want to get too nitpicky here. They tend to have their active periods in the morning and in the evening, and then they tend to sleep in the middle of the day and at night. It makes a lot of sense that they would tend to be more active in the evening. They are probably also more active in the morning, but I’m doing other things in the [00:30:00] mornings.
I am not faster in the evenings. I start like falling off a cliff around two o’clock in the afternoon, but that’s not important part. We’re looking at this from the dog’s perspective. But that’s actually where the disconnect tends to come from, right? Like I want to train my dogs when I feel the sharpest, but that may be when they’re not so sharp because they normally are napping, and that’s when I tend to ignore the obvious.
But if I were really being as virtuous as possible, I would be looking at where in time are my dogs more active and faster with the things that they do, just moving around faster, moving around more, et cetera. Evenings tend to be that time frame.
There’s probably also a fair amount of conditioning involved there, right? First, I’ve been training my dogs in the evenings after work for generations of dogs at this point. Previously it was because I was at work. Now I work [00:31:00] from home being a dog trainer, but I didn’t always. And, of course, my dogs were always trained last. “Even when I was a dog trainer.” Well, I’ve been a dog trainer for a very long time. Isn’t that a weird thing to say? When I would get home, then my dogs would get trained.
That’s also around dinner time and I tend to train with food. So everything about their system is probably primed for food and all of that stuff. There’s a lot of reasons that my dogs might be moving around faster in the evenings. I should take advantage of that!
And of course, as a tie-in with our previous episode when we’re talking about the necessity of having a shaping plan that takes us from where the dogs currently can do the behavior to where we need the dog to be able to perform the behavior, that applies here too. I mean this that’s what shaping is, right?
So you’re thinking, “Well, it’s all very well and good that my dog is faster in the evenings, but my sport [00:32:00] is performed in the mornings,” because there is some weird thing about dog sports that is that they all have to start at the crack of dawn, which I think is ridiculous and I would like to start a movement for the majority of dog sports (unless there’s a really good reason, and I can’t think of one so far) to start at like something civilized like 10 o’clock in the morning. And I think maybe we could get that going. But we also need to wrap up by two, because as previously discussed. I’m not really good for much of anything in the afternoons and evenings. There’s always a lot more day than there is Hannah and it’s a problem.
So your dog is faster in the evenings around dinnertime. Great, we can start there! That is a starting point. So we’re identifying the conditions where they’re already faster.
But then one of the things that we would need to do is work out a shaping plan that’s going to bring them from doing the behavior in question, our target behavior, at seven [00:33:00] o’clock in the evening until they can also do it at that same speed and with all those same qualities at 8:30 in the morning or 1:00 in the afternoon, whatever. We need to work on generalizing it so that there are other cues that have taken over and we see the behavior just as fast whether it’s at 7:00 in the evening or any other time of the day or night.
And that’s not something that’s going to be solved by trying to train your hot dog during nap time, right? We’re starting it where they can and we increment with successive approximations. I know that I say that a lot. I know that I get kind of loud and excited when I am saying that. But it’s for my own benefit because I need to hear it.
I know the temptation is that I want my dog to be fast at 1:00 in the afternoon when it’s hot outside on crappy obedience mats, [00:34:00] so that means– Like instinctively, I think we want to go to crappy obedience mats in the middle of the day under the burning hot sun and then try to do a whole lot of other crap to get faster responses, which we then fail, and we create this like self-fulfilling prophecy of both making the dog hate doing training with us and making us despair that we’re ever going to be able to achieve our goals. Some of you might have a pattern with that. I don’t know.
So let’s find the conditions where your dog already does things a lot faster. We will find more dots that we can connect to get us to the less-advantageous conditions. That’s going to be the training plan.
Alright, so “when during the day,” but also like “when in your routine.” What things might be happening.
I’ve talked so many times about kind of rolling training and dinnertime into like the same container. It’s helpful for a lot of reasons in getting faster behaviors.
From the flip [00:35:00] side, looking at it from the horse perspective – where my talent, my skill at taking any animal and turning it into a malinois is a problem, right? Because mostly I am looking to have my horses be calmer in training and I have made them fast in training and I don’t really want that. So trying to train my horses around dinner time (even though I continue to do it because of all the same reasons that I tend to train my dogs around dinner time, end of the day) is not…
I’m not going to train anybody right now because I’m recording a podcast, but I wouldn’t train horses because they’re outside and it’s a million degrees and 700% humidity and we would all die. So I’m going to be stuck trying to train them around dinner time due to that. And when I do that, I’m going to tend to get a lot more faster responses, but I’m likely to also get other stuff that I don’t really want, so that’s something for me to work on. I can make adjustments to [00:36:00] other variables if that’s one that I can’t control and then I would need to work my way backwards, right?
However, on the flip side, if I want faster responses from my dogs, I am going to tend to start training them around dinner time. What other conditions may come into play when you see your dog doing things faster, bigger movements, more behavior and more faster behavior? Is it when you first come home and you’ve been away for a little bit? Yeah, there’s a little bit of a deprivation in there, but hopefully that’s just in the course of your normal “going to the grocery store,” “going to work,” that kind of thing. Your dog may be more excited. Mine is. Figgy goes crazy. Actually Figgy goes crazy when I check the mail if I don’t bring him with me (and since my mailbox is across street from my house, I usually don’t, because it’s not safe).
And yes, there are going to be some conditions that we might, if we were looking at it from another perspective, label with something like arousal. Some of those conditions may [00:37:00] come with behaviors that we don’t want in the training session, so there is a bit of a judgment call to what extent can we select from those variables, those aspects that we can use here. What trade-offs are we willing to accept?
There are a lot of dogs that I’ve worked with where I’m totally willing to risk a bark or being jumped on or body slammed, because it’s totally worth it to get faster responses. I’m unlikely to get physically harmed, so I’m okay with that. Safety first always, but also the likelihood of that extra barking or body slamming or jumping around sticking around for a very long time for those particular dogs is pretty low. And that’s where it’s going to be very individual decision.
Even for dogs in my house– Like when I was showing Gambit, the biggest challenge that I would tend to have with him was him getting too flat and I had to put a lot of training, a lot of work, thought, effort, like all kinds of [00:38:00] trial-and-error-y things on my part, to try to figure out how to get sharper, faster responses, especially under pressure. The likelihood that he would be barking in the ring during a performance was pretty low, because he was tending toward flatness.
On the other hand, other dogs that I have in my house like Figment the border collie, or Clay the toller? They vocalize very easily, very loudly. It’s a very cheap behavior for them. And so when I am trying to get faster responses, the challenge is “can I get them faster and keep the bark out of it?” So if I’m working with a stereotypical german shepherd, corgi, sheltie? No, I’m not going to risk the barking. But for a lot of other dogs, that’s not such a bad thing.
So I may or may not be willing to take a chance on conditions where I get fast responses but also some barking happens. Can I harness that, [00:39:00] could I somehow siphon a little bit of that off, even if a little bark comes with it? Because I know I’ll be able to clean it up later.
And of course, like so many things in dog training, this is one of those “simple but not easy” kind of things. On the surface, looking for where dogs are already excited, they’re already moving fast, you’re already seeing a lot of action happening and then just doing your training under those conditions? That seems really straightforward. And it is on the surface. But in application, not always.
One of the challenges that we frequently have as trainers, or one of the reasons we don’t be brought in, is because a dog is too excited, too aroused to respond to the handler, right? They’re so excited that they can’t take food.
Now of course, if they’re so excited you can’t even get on the same planet as them, then that’s not going to be in the “can do” conditions, right? Those aren’t conditions where I can do the thing.
Now, you may be able to borrow a little bit of that. You may be able to piggyback off [00:40:00] of the LaCroix version of that excitement and get faster behavior. But with a dog that’s just out of their mind, we’re not training there. It’s not a universal rule.
Also, you may run into an obstacle where you are trying to introduce a new reinforcer into a situation where that reinforcer is not expected. That’s its own training task. It may be worth it! And that’s why one of the first things that we’ll often do is work on, for example, taking food under the conditions where I might want to do some training.
I’m thinking like on my training plan outline, like your bullet points and your sub bullet points. That can on some days feel like a really fun thought exercise and other days make you just want to like scream and run through the wall like the Kool-Aid man. But there may be sub bullet points where you need to split the [00:41:00] exciting condition where there’s a lot of behavior happening and you can’t connect with the dog in any way. That would not be a good scenario to train in. So you may need to split some of that and you may also need to do some training to layer in this condition where you’ve never seen food before, you’ve never taken food before, but there’s a lot about it that I really wish we could use in our training.
My first step is going to be teaching food eating as a behavior. In that scenario, we’re very close to it. Don’t despair or like just throw this whole podcast in the trash if you tried doing some training when like you first came home from work or doing some training while your dog was going bananas in some other situation. It’s not that it doesn’t work or that I’m just full of crap and I’m just throwing out these [00:42:00] these garbage recommendations. There’s probably a shaping task to be done there.
But we’re approaching this from the perspective that we have this dog, we have this goal of faster responses, faster behaviors. We’ve got a box of behaviors we’d like to see go faster. What are some things we could do?
And you know what? (This is when the podcast is in the trash.) You’ll probably have to do training. There probably isn’t just like One Secret Trick To Do that would just magically work in all conditions. You are going to have to do some training. I know you can probably find a podcast that doesn’t say that which would probably be a lot more heartening if you could “just buy this collar or this leash.”
(I mean, again, of course you should buy more collars and leashes. Part of being a good dog trainer is having enough wardrobe for your dog to wear! But it is probably [00:43:00] not going to solve all your training problems. And this is a bummer.)
The next big category that I want us to look at is the How. We’ve talked about the When and the Where, so now let’s talk about the How of the behavior.
In fact, this may be part of your training plan that happens separately and maybe even not under those conditions that you’ve identified as “where the faster behaviors are already happening,” right? This may actually be something that you’re doing in parallel. You may be working on teaching your dog to take food, food eating behavior under those conditions, like when you first come home from work. And then at the same time but separately, work on technique in general.
When you’re working on structuring your progression, you want to focus on technique first and speed second. This can be something that is very hard for us to accept, especially if seeing your dog doing fast [00:44:00] behaviors and getting sharp responses is very reinforcing for you. The idea of focusing on technique in a way where your dog is doing things more slowly? You may need to do some inner work for that. I know that that’s not easy. I’ve absolutely felt that. Fortunately I’ve seen it play out enough times that I can see the path and I’m able to connect that.
Two big reasons for why I want us to focus on technique first and then speed first. Generally speaking, technique needs to come before speed in a learning progression because practicing the wrong behavior really quickly is unlikely to get you to more accurate response. You’re not going to improve jumping by just throwing a lot of bars on the ground to get speed happening first. [00:45:00] Again, circling back to one of my earlier points, if you get good technique and you do nothing else, all things being equal, it will get faster by itself. The same cannot be said for focusing on speed first and disregarding technique. Practicing poorly really fast, you’ll not get better. Accuracy doesn’t work that way because the shortest path to reinforcement does not support improved accuracy if lots of fast flinging around of your body gets you there.
So technique first, but the other reason – and this is the one that I would focus on here or the one I think is the most relevant for us here – is that there’s more than one way to peel an orange, right? Like there’s a lot of different ways you can peel an orange and you might end up with a peeled orange, but some techniques for orange-peeling are just going to get you a peeled orange a lot faster than others. The point is not to get [00:46:00] really splitty on the on the metaphor. The point is that when teaching a dog to do a behavior, you can end up with the same outcome and some mechanics are going to result in a faster behavior path, like they’re just going to get there faster.
One that I work with a lot is fold back down. A dog can go from standing to lying down. If they are folding back into the down so that their weight shifts backwards, their feet more or less stay in place And they go directly from standing to flexing all their limbs so that they go into the down and hit on the ground that way. That’s faster than going into the down by sitting and then walking their front feet out and kind of slouching into the down. It’s just going to take less time for the dog to hit the dirt if they’re going directly from the stand to the down by shifting their weight backwards and flexing their limbs. [00:47:00] Sitting in the down is just going to take more time.
One of the things that I learned from my friend, Julie Jenkins’s flyball school– I don’t even know the beginning of– I have bare tip-of-the-iceberg understanding of everything that goes into training a high-quality flyball dog and flyball team and flyball handler. There’s a lot to it. But anyways, certain turns are faster and getting the dog to put their feet down at the right point in the turn and pushing out and jumping a certain way. It’s a science and getting that technique correct results in a faster turn, which results in a faster flyball run. So how you do the thing affects how long it takes to do the thing, which can also affect how easy or hard it is to do the thing.
So this is stuff that I’m thinking about when I’m designing my shaping plan. Something that I’ve run into sometimes with my own dogs, and often with client dogs, [00:48:00] is that the dog has gotten into a little bit of a training cul de sac in that the way that they have learned to perform an action is just not very efficient. So trying to put more enthusiasm or more motivation on top of an inefficient solution isn’t really getting us a better outcome, because you just can’t lay down any faster than that if you always have to sit first. So what do we want to do to make this happen? Let’s get practical.
A couple of things that I keep in mind here with technique with an eye toward faster performance:
First, I’m going to make it physically easier. If you’ve seen like the pull up machines that they have at the gym (or you might look it up on YouTube, if you like watching people do pull ups on YouTube, there’s a lot of content there. Probably TikTok too). But they might use elastic bands, things that just make it easier to do the [00:49:00] action by taking weight off of their hands, like using counterweights or those elastic bands so that they get a mechanical advantage.
I will often do this with dogs by using an incline or elevating part of the dog on a platform or a cushion, putting gravity on my side so that gravity is helping the dog do the correct behavior in the way that the elastic bands are helping the person do a pull up.
Are there any other ways that I can make doing the task physically easier? If they’re picking something up off the ground, could I raise it so they don’t have to lean down quite as far? I would like someone to do that for me. If it’s a compound movement or a complex behavior, look for the weakest link. Where is your dog most likely to hesitate or where do you see the slowing down happen? And is there a way that you could make that weakest part easier physically? [00:50:00] It might be something as simple as starting your dog in a stand instead of a sit, if you want a faster recall. What about letting your dog run down a little bit of a hill instead of up a hill? Little things really matter, even just starting them on an incline like the base of your driveway can make a difference for a lot of behaviors. It doesn’t take a huge slope. You don’t need a massive specialized piece of equipment to make this happen. (Although, again, I’m never going to stop you from buying dog equipment.)
And if you aren’t really sure where to start with it, one of the things that I always do, that I’ve done this for a long time–
Well, first, you could ask for help. That’s not really something that I’m very good at. That’s an area of personal growth for me. But one of the things that I’ve done a lot in the past and continue to do is that I will look at videos of dogs doing the thing that I would like to train. I go on YouTube and I will look up videos of dogs that are doing the thing that I want and they’re doing it faster. And then I use the [00:51:00] little playback speed tool on YouTube and slow it down so that I can see how that dog is moving their body, and then, if possible, compare it to a video of my own dog and see what the differences are (if I’ve even trained that behavior in the first place).
This episode is talking about increasing speed. So if I train the behavior and I’ll record some video of my dog doing the thing, and then I’ll look: are there places where this other dog (and more than one data point is helpful, so maybe look at three or four or five dogs that are doing it and that are doing it fast the way you would like your dog to do it). What do you observe, if you can put your observation glasses on and not your interpretation glasses? What can you actually see? Like does that dog lower their center of gravity as they’re coming in for the dumbbell? And then if you compare it, does your dog stay upright and tippy toes and then overshoot the dumbbell [00:52:00] and have to circle back around? Okay, so that’s information. So you could improve the technique and get a faster dumbbell retrieve by teaching your dog the skills that they need, the physical skills to lower their center of gravity even more as they approach the dumbbell. Well, that’s doable. That’s a very shape-y shaping plan that we could put together. Again, “simple but not easy.” And there’s a lot of different ways you might approach that.
But that’s an example of a place where changing how your dog does the thing is absolutely going to have a big impact on how quickly they do it and what it looks like and probably how successful both of you are.
And that is where I’m going to leave you for Part One. I still have one, two, three – I have a lot more bullet points to cover. So stay tuned for Part Two where we’ll talk more about timing and the specifics of mechanics. Not just like, “Oh, you should [00:53:00] have good mechanics,” but how to approach that and what elements of mechanics will help you. We’ll be talking about handler mechanics, your trainer mechanics, to help you build faster behaviors. I’ve got a couple more examples that we can talk about. Some that are specific for latency, a couple of tips and tricks for the building aspect once you have the kernel of fast behavior, and then how you might introduce some new elements to keep the behavior fast and/or build speed and low latency.
So stay tuned for Part Two. I’ll see you back here!
[outro]
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And while you’re there, you could also pick up a free PDF training template to help you plan your training sessions. There’s also some other articles and previous podcasts and that sort of thing, which you could always find if you’re interested.
So until next time, happy training!
