In this episode, we discuss the practice of avoiding situations as part (or all) of a training plan. Often avoiding certain situations can be an important strategy, helping to prevent mistakes and reduce stress for both the dog and the handler. But it’s usually not a long-term solution by itself and misconceptions about avoidance can result in teams getting stuck and unable to make progress.
In this episode, we also discuss:
- Definition and role of avoidance in dog training.
- Common client misunderstandings about avoidance.
- Benefits of avoidance: preventing mistakes, reducing stress, and allowing time for skill development.
- Challenges of avoidance: risk of over-reliance and restrictive lifestyle.
- Practical applications – sometimes.
- Long-term strategy: balancing avoidance with skill-building and controlled reintroduction.
Links mentioned:
This podcast is supported by: Zero to CD
Zero to CD is an online group mentorship program designed to provide support, structure, and accountability for people who are new to competition obedience and looking to earn their Novice level title AND to make competition obedience accessible to all dogs and handlers through force-free, positive reinforcement-based methods.
Episode Transcript
Hannah Branigan: [00:00:00] When I have a dog whose behavior makes enjoying hikes hard, to simply hear, “Well, you should just stop hiking with your dog,” that sucks! That’s not very fun! And that’s going to have a negative impact on my relationship with that dog. So it’s worth it to me to put in a lot of effort to get the behavior the way that it needs to be for us to both enjoy hiking together.
[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 [00:01:00] both available from clickertraining.com.
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.
[episode begins]
On this episode, I want to talk a little bit about avoidance and specifically the practice of avoiding a situation as part, or even all of a training plan.
This is definitely something that I’ve recommended pretty frequently when I’m talking through training plan options and I think other folks probably have run into this as well and have probably used it. I think it’s pretty mainstream. I don’t think I’m talking about anything particularly edgy here. But I did want to explore it a little bit.
Alright, so when we’re talking about avoidance, what exactly do we mean? Well, what I’m talking about here is when we don’t encounter an aversive experience because we’ve used our behavior to take measures such that we don’t encounter an opportunity to have that experience, right? So we [00:02:00] avoided the aversive.
It’s a negative reinforcement process, right? That is what is behind avoidance. If you use your behavior and a bad thing doesn’t happen, that behavior is reinforced.
And in this case, the behavior in question is the behavior of the person, right?
So, I think most of the time, if you’re seeking out a training plan, then you have some motivation to do so, because otherwise, why would you make so much work for yourself? I don’t know. And it is presumably because your experience of your dog’s behavior is unpleasant in some way. Either the behavior that your dog is doing is very aversive to you (because it’s loud or embarrassing or dangerous) or the behavior that your dog isn’t doing, the lack of that behavior, is embarrassing or frustrating or otherwise unpleasant.
And so we may start with avoiding the situation where those unpleasant experiences happen [00:03:00] and that tends to reinforce our avoidance.
Now if we look at it from the perspective of the dog’s behavior – if we’re looking at the ABC for the dog, the antecedent, behavior, consequence – we’re deleting the A.
If you take the A out of the equation because you’re not presenting the antecedent (you’re not presenting the cue, the conditions where the behavior broke down or the behavior that you don’t want showed up), then you’re not going to get the B or the C, because it’s all one unit of behavior.
So we take the A away from the dog’s ABC and that kind of functions as a C for our behavior. I don’t know if this is too much, too early in the program right now, but avoiding the dog’s behavior is a consequence for our behavior.
I’m definitely getting a little tangled up; I don’t know if you are. But don’t worry because I’ve got so much more to say about this.
One of the things that I think is really interesting about the avoidance flavor of negative [00:04:00] reinforcement specifically is that it’s really hard to measure something that doesn’t happen, right? You did your behavior, you did the thing, and nothing bad happened and so that was reinforcing… but we don’t know if the bad thing was going to happen or not and it’s impossible to prove to you otherwise. (I mean, not you personally, just organisms.) Anyways, I find that really interesting. It’s something I think about a lot, with both human and dog behavior.
Okay. So the practice of avoiding a situation where the dog’s behavior broke down – this is a really common recommendation in dog training. I definitely hear it a lot in positive reinforcement circles. I’m sure it’s common in a lot of different training circles. This is not groundbreaking stuff. Avoid the situation where the problem behavior is happening or where the behavior that you want to happen is breaking down, depending on what we’re talking about here. Very normal.
It’s the whole idea of, “Doctor, it hurts when I raise my arm like this.” “Well, then stop raising your arm [00:05:00] like that.” Okay, so that’s not bad advice. We know that best training practices is to always teach the dog where they can do the thing and not where they can’t do the thing.
It’s certainly true that the worst time to try to address a problem of behavior is in the heat of the moment when you’re in the middle of it, where the behavior is the most challenging, where you’re maybe not the best trainer that you could be. That’s not going to be the most efficient or effective way to get the outcome that you’re looking for.
So I agree with this, and that’s one of the reasons why I suggest it. Continuing to– I’m trying to think of a less violent metaphor than “beating your head against the wall.” Continuing to try the same thing in the same conditions hoping for a different outcome is not going to be very effective. And it is frequently gonna shunt us right into punishment territory, maybe negative reinforcement, but if you’re introducing an aversive that wasn’t there before, then [00:06:00] something may end up being punished when that aversive is introduced even as some other behavior is negatively reinforced.
Again, I don’t want to go too deep too fast. Well, I’ve already done it. I’ve already done it. I’m sorry. Please don’t leave.
Alright, let’s keep going. We’re gonna plow ahead.
And I also think that– Especially if you’re not really sure what to do– The wheels are coming off and you’re not really sure what to do about it until you know more about what is happening.
The first step to getting out of a hole is to stop digging, right? So let’s stop digging the hole until you can make a better plan. Stop digging the hole until you have a chance to figure stuff out, phone a friend, and can make a better plan.
So this is definitely a good place to start. It’s a really good starting point. We want to stop rehearsing the behavior so we have a chance to figure out what we want to do about it.
I also think it’s important that we want to consider the dog’s experience. This is especially true in the case of a behavior or a dynamic that we have reason to believe is very [00:07:00] stressful for the dog, probably very aversive for the dog. In those situations, I definitely want to have a chance to back up a little bit and let’s see what’s really going on and not continue to put the dog into an aversive experience in the hopes that something else will happen. That’s not fair, in addition to being not very effective.
I also think that there is something pretty powerful in starting any recovery process with rest. So just like you would for a sprained ankle, you’d stop running on it, presumably, and you would rest the ankle, give it a chance to start the healing process, and then you would take your ankle to rehab, right?
And I think that this can be true for dogs as well. There’s a lot of cases where both the conditions where the problem behavior–
Take something like behaviors we would call “reactive,” right? “Reactive” behaviors. [00:08:00] Barking, lunging or behaviors we might think of as being anxious, all these kind of emotional behaviors. They tend to have a little bit of a cycle where the doing of the behavior and the physiological state and just the interoceptive physical sensations that you get, plus the conditions – those all become the cue to do the behavior more.
So you’re barking, your heart rate goes up, your muscles feel tense, that feeling of having a high heart rate and tense muscles cues more barking, and we get kind of trapped in this cycle. That’s an oversimplification. But I think you’ve seen it. It probably feels familiar when you think it through. It certainly works for me in that way when I get kind of amped up about something. And breaking that cycle and bringing everything down by just taking the dog out of that situation can be really helpful to get a clean starting point so that you have something to build off of.
I also want to come back to the human’s experience here. A lot of [00:09:00] times, by the time we’re seeking help with a training plan, or even if it’s just me (just us and the chickens), by the time I’m sitting down to make a training plan to solve a problem behavior, I may have already gotten kind of frustrated, right? Like not necessarily acted on it or done anything regretful, but just, “ugh!” It’s bothered me enough that I’m motivated enough to sit down and make a training plan to solve this problem. And at that point, there may have been a little or a lot of strain on the relationship.
And I think this is really true when pet owners are seeking out a professional for help to train this problem that they’ve been struggling with, because they’ve probably already done some stuff on their own and have felt desperate enough to reach out for help. It’s not an easy thing to do, even these days.
And letting everybody’s feelings come down and everybody have a rest, I [00:10:00] think can be good for the relationship before we dive right back in.
And so I think that’s a really valuable place to start. So I tend to often recommend that “let’s just push pause on this situation for the moment and let’s come over here. We’re gonna do some skills and give everybody a chance to take a break.”
But having said that, I think sometimes that advice can be misheard or misinterpreted or misunderstood.
I’ve heard from some folks that when they hear that they should avoid the situation where the dog is having trouble… and then they didn’t hear anything after that. And their perception of it was, “Oh, that means that we can just never ever go on a hike. We’ll never be able to do agility. My dog can never be around other dogs.” And that’s not usually what I’m saying and it’s probably not what [00:11:00] is being said in general, but I do think that that is the impression that can sometimes be given when folks don’t have the complete picture.
So usually when I’m talking about avoiding a particular situation, I want to try to emphasize that this is just a starting point. We need a clean starting point so that we can start building something new instead of just going down the old path over and over and over again.
Now sometimes avoidance is a reasonable long term solution, right? If the situation is very narrow, the dog really only has this particular behavior problem in this specific context and that context is optional to life, then simply avoiding the context may be enough to solve the problem.
An example that I’ve run into a number of times is when a dog is having a hard time at the dog park, specifically. [00:12:00] It is not uncommon for me to hear a story like, “Oh, we used to take Sadie to the dog park. We’ve taken her all the time since she was a puppy. We want to make sure she’s well socialized and she has lots of friends.” And I think that’s great and we’ll put a pin in the dog park aspect of it later. “We took Sadie to the dog park every day for years and ever since she’s turned 18 months or 2 years old, she’s just been really nasty with the other dogs and we’re afraid she’s becoming aggressive. Every time the other young male Labradors come up and try to get her to play, she gets very angry with them and and she reacts very aggressively and we’re just we’re worried she’s becoming aggressive and we’re not gonna be able to keep her.”
And when I go to ask more questions It turns out that so he’s actually lovely and every other aspect: walks by other dogs, is great at the vet, I mean, I’m making up kind of an imaginary dog at this point. My point being, she just didn’t like the dog park.
And a lot of [00:13:00] folks take their dogs to the dog park because they want to do something good for their dog. It’s coming from the right place! They don’t realize that, well, when their dog was young, they enjoyed hanging out at the park and playing physically in that way. Now that their dog is older, they don’t like hanging out with teenage boys anymore.
And I get that. I think that’s really fair! I mean, I didn’t really enjoy hanging out with teenage boys when I was a teenage girl. So I totally get that. And if the only place that Sadie has this problem is at the dog park, then let’s just find other ways for Sadie to enjoy herself. She can join a book club or something, right? There’s a lot of options here. The dog park is easy to avoid. The problem only occurs at the dog park. Boom, problem solved. No need for any kind of training genius here.
Okay, but that’s a pretty isolated situation. A lot of times, long term avoidance is maybe not the best [00:14:00] option or is limited in its usefulness. A lot of times, the idea of, “Well, just don’t raise your arm like that” is not realistic because we can’t avoid the situation or because the behavior occurs in more than one situation. If we were to trim off all the situations where the problem occurred, then we would be left with not a lot. We’d be left with a really small life.
And also, again, when we’re having conversations with other humans and they say, “Oh, I’m having this problem. It’s really frustrating or it’s really embarrassing.” And what they hear is, “Well, just stop taking your dog to agility class,” I think that that can sometimes be experienced as really dismissive, really invalidating of their experience.
And yes, the humans have the words, but I always try to remind myself that the team is the client, so I want to keep that in mind.
And people get dogs for a reason. One of the things that [00:15:00] I really love doing with my dogs is hiking with them. We go for hikes most– well, when it’s not 100 degrees and 85 percent humidity– We go hiking a lot. It’s one of the things that I enjoy most with my dogs. I like to think that they enjoy it too. I’ve never been a dog, so I can’t ask them, but they give me the impression by my definition of liking that they seem to like going for hikes. This is something that we share together.
And when I have a dog whose behavior makes enjoying hikes hard, to simply hear, “Well, you should just stop hiking with your dog,” that sucks! That’s not very fun! And that’s going to have a negative impact on my relationship with that dog. So it’s worth it to me to put in a lot of effort to get the behavior the way that it needs to be for us to both enjoy hiking together, me and my dog (and be safe for the world around us as well, of course).
And I also think that [00:16:00] when we try to say, “Well, just don’t ever put the dog in that situation again,” it gives some room for legitimate criticism to positive reinforcement training as a whole and individual trainers specifically, as having “an inability to solve real problems.”
I’ve seen a false dichotomy presented that “positive reinforcement trainers just don’t ever take their dogs off leash.” And there’s so many things wrong with this statement.
First of all, some folks may choose to find other ways to live with their dogs and that is okay, because there are many ways to help a dog live a healthy and enriched life. There’s not one way that it has to look.
But it also gives the false impression that you either have to train with aversives or keep your dog in a tiny cage like an abused PetSmart betta fish, which is ridiculous.
Like, the reliable recall problem is [00:17:00] one that we have solved over and over and over again with thousands and thousands of dogs. Like, we have trained to dogs to have very strong recalls under normal circumstances and beyond. I can’t even believe that I keep seeing this coming up. You can probably tell I get a little bit bit sweaty about it. I get a little worked up because it’s just such an easy– There’s so many bigger problems to solve! This is one that we don’t have an issue with.
But anyways, I digress.
No matter how you’re training the behavior, if we really want to change the behavior that occurs in the presence of certain antecedent conditions, we are going to need to come up with a plan that exposes us and our training to those antecedent conditions.
And that’s what I really want to talk about for the rest of this episode.
So for those situations where avoidance of the situation isn’t realistic – [00:18:00] either it’s just not possible to avoid it because the trigger is sunlight or air or something like that, or it’s not possible to avoid it without requiring a significant lifestyle change from the dog and or family, giving up important reinforcers for the dog and or the human, damaging the relationship. Everything has trade offs. If we decide that the reinforcers here, the lifestyle, these things are important enough that it’s worth putting the work in, then it’s not realistic to avoid. We need a training plan. We need a shaping plan.
So to address any behavior, no matter what the behavior is and no matter how we’re training it, using best training practice again, we want to start with finding the situation or creating the conditions where it’s easy for the dog to be right, right?
And really there’s variations no matter how you’re training the behavior, but we want to start with the simple conditions where we can control everything or we can control [00:19:00] enough. I mean, I’d like to control everything, but that’s a personal problem. But we can control enough of the situation that we can influence the behavior, the learning that happens there.
And then we’re going to need a shaping plan to take us from this simple, highly-controlled situation towards the more complex, less-controlled situation, which is typically where we need behaviors to be performed.
Now one of the problems with this general “framework” (I guess, to be generous) is kind of human nature. Probably for most people – definitely for the people that I spend the most of my time with, this pattern applies. And I also think that the language that we use about avoiding the situation where the dog makes a mistake or the behavior falls apart, I think that can set us up– Intentionally or unintentionally, it can make it too easy to fall into a pattern [00:20:00] where you train for six weeks or six months or six years in wherever the perfect conditions are until you have a perfectly rigid behavior, and then you try to immediately go out on the road into the most complex conditions.
Not only is that unlikely to be successful, but it also tends to set up the cycle where it reinforces the human behavior of avoiding and also the despair that they’re ever going to be successful with their dog. “Everything is terrible. You should give up dog training entirely. Maybe you should get a fish.”
Whereas real success is always going to come from applying a rapidly-moving but thorough and systematic graduated transition from simple to complex.
Okay, so our first step is going to be getting clean behavior. So that’s where we do want to set up the tightly [00:21:00] controlled conditions. You can ensure the behavior that you want to see is most likely to occur and the behavior you don’t want is least likely to occur. I know you know this. Everybody knows this. Well, maybe not everybody. People listening to a dog training podcast know this at this point.
So we want the behavior that we do want to see to occur and the behavior we don’t want less likely to occur. And of course, particularly in the case of aggression or a safety behavior, we want to make sure everybody’s safe.
But the trick is that we can’t get stuck there, right?
I know. You love that pattern. You want to find the simple, safe situation to practice your new, very shiny behavior, and then after that period of time has elapsed, you’re going to panic and you want to go immediately and directly into the full speed situation where the behavior broke in the first place.
This is normal, as far as I can tell.
And depending on where you’re on your personal journey, when the behavior inevitably breaks again, you’ll either blame yourself or your dog [00:22:00] or perhaps the training. “See, I told you positive reinforcement doesn’t work.” You might even blame me because I told you that it did work. “Thanks, Obama.”
And we just needed more splits. We just needed more splits in between.
But that’s really the sticky part, right? Because it’s easy to say that. It’s easy to say, “Well, of course, you went from zero to a hundred, zero to sixty, and of course the behavior broke, so of course you need more intermediate splits.” But what are the splits? How do you figure those out? And how can you tell especially when is it time to raise those criteria? That’s a million dollar question right there.
And I will be honest, I do not have all of the answers for every behavior in every situation. But I do have some thoughts that will maybe help us stay on the right path so we don’t get stuck in that avoidance mode and get our clients stuck in that avoidance mode.
So first, let’s talk about the “when.”
So Alex Kurland, who’s a horse clicker [00:23:00] trainer and the person who invented or described loopy training practices. I’ve learned so much from her. She says, “When the loop is clean, not only can you move on, you must move on.”
And that’s very helpful for me, because what that tells us is that as soon as you have the conditions where you are getting a clean loop, it’s time to change it. You gotta change the conditions.
I know that that is scary, because you finally, after a great deal of trial and error– And I want to be super clear here, a large part of our job is trying to figure out what those conditions are going to be, asking the dog a lot of questions, asking ourselves questions, asking the questions to figure out “what are the conditions I need to massage to create a situation where I can get a clean loop?”
That’s not always so easy. Sometimes maybe. Sometimes [00:24:00] it’s enough to just go into the bathroom and close the door and shut the blinds, but not always. Sometimes I need a prop. I need to figure out what time of day and I need to figure out where do I need to stand and how do I need to hold my mouth. There can be quite a lot of experimentation to even land on what’s going to give you that clean loop in the first place. So don’t despair if that’s actually where you’re stuck. I’ve been stuck there many times and had to go phone a friend and ask for help to figure out “What do I need to change? I can’t even get something started, so I have nothing to build on.”
But once you do find that, once you’ve put all that work in, you finally have a clean loop, sweet relief! That feels really good! Negative reinforcement! You don’t want to leave that sense of safety. Who would? You’re not crazy! (I mean, you might be, I can’t say.)
Yeah, that’s normal. And we have to [move on anyway]. We can’t stay there because the behavior is just going to get more rigid. The longer you spend time repeating the same thing under the same conditions, the harder it will be to get different behavior in new [00:25:00] conditions. So we’ve got to move and keep it moving.
The secret is in the micro-shaping, right? It’s the tiny, tiny moves. Anything that’s different counts.
This is the “different but not harder” that we talk about a lot in Zero To CD. Simply moving your treat pouch to the other side of your body, if you’re using a treat pouch, or putting the treats on the counter instead of having them in a treat pouch, or if they’ve been in your hand, put them in a treat pouch. Those small changes count. Like, they really do!
Even if your behavior that you’re working on or the problem that you’re trying to solve is that your dog pulls on leash, or your dog lunges and barks at other dogs, or your dog won’t bring the dumbbell back in the ring. I don’t know. And you feel like, “Well, I finally got a clean repetition, a clean loop of the behavior that I do want, but it’s in my kitchen. That couldn’t be further from where I need to go.” You’re stuck thinking that the path, that your adjustment, your changes of criteria, needs to be linear. And not only [00:26:00] does it not need to be linear, it shouldn’t be linear.
So rather than thinking about “What’s the next logical linear step from going from my kitchen to wherever it is you need the behavior.” What could you do that’s just different in the kitchen? Because it counts. All those little changes count. So the more things you can change that are seemingly a little bit irrelevant, but make it easier, that are easy for you to change and make it easier for you to train your dog, do those.
Every repetition that’s clean, every time you get one or two clean loops, change something on the very next loop. Don’t let the paint dry. Be a shark. (Grow multiple rows of serrated teeth. No, that’s not what I meant. I mean, like, “keep swimming,” right? Like without stopping, because I think sharks have to swim or they can’t breathe. I’m not sure about that, so don’t fact check me on that one.) Let’s keep moving.
Right, so instead of a whole bunch of sessions under rigid conditions trying [00:27:00] to be as perfect as possible and then jumping into the deep end – do one session (or as many sessions as it takes while experimenting to find the right combination of variables that does result in a clean loop) and then as soon as you have that clean loop, which might even be in the same session, change something up.
Shange whatever is the easiest thing to change. You can move a prop or change out a prop or just face a different direction or change your body position. Body position is one that I change early and often because it’s relevant to just about every behavior that I’m training. And make those kinds of changes a whole bunch.
Then start taking your behavior out on the road.
Now. You’re excited. Don’t go straight to Lowe’s or Home Depot or PetSmart or wherever it is that you’re immediately thinking on the road means. It doesn’t mean that. This is where I do want you to be strategic. It still doesn’t need to be linear. I want you to start picking out specific environments that have features that make it easier for [00:28:00] you to do your thing, to do the training, to do the plan that you planned on doing.
Let me try a specific example. Let’s talk about reactivity with your dog. And specifically, your dog barks at other dogs. I’ve never had that problem. Okay, I mostly have that problem. I feel like I’m an expert in that problem. I’ve worked it so many times. The dogs I fill my house with– Anyways.
You might start by avoiding situations where dogs are likely to be encountered. So, maybe you don’t go on walks in your neighborhood, or maybe you only go walks in the middle of the night, or maybe you do the thing that reactive dog owners will recognize where you put your dog in the car and you drive to a strip mall, also in the middle of the night, and take your dog for walks in the parking lot there.
During this time we are making sure the dog’s needs are met. Of course, we’re addressing any more distant factors. We’re getting a solid medical exam, bloodwork, etc, making sure that all that is [00:29:00] in order. We are making sure the dog’s needs are met. They’re getting enough exercise. They’re getting enough enrichment in ways that don’t involve exposure to unfamiliar dogs and rehearsing of that behavior.
And we’re taking this time to teach some new skills. Active management, reinforcement skills, leash skills, maybe crate or station training. There’s always going to be some human skills that need to be learned or taught. Leash handling, u-turns, Control Unleashed style of skills, like Look At That. There’s a lot of options here and you can put a lot of things in that bucket. That’s what you’ll be doing during this time. So, out of context, working on those foundation skills so that you have them in repertoire so that you can pull from them.
Okay, so let’s get to the specific environments. Think in terms of easily defensible positions. So this is probably going to include spaces [00:30:00] that still don’t have a lot of dogs. I’m still going to pick out places that I’m unlikely to run into dogs and if I do, it’s going to be in a much more controlled and predictable way. So I am looking for very predictable traffic patterns. I’m looking for a clear and accessible emergency exit. I want to have a plan for how I am going to evacuate, should anything unexpected happen. The real world is very difficult to control. This is the worst part about the real world. This is why I’m not a fan. My world, where I can control everything, is a much better world, and I would prefer to stay there. But again, it’s not always practical under capitalism. So occasionally you must explore and venture out.
At this stage, I am still going to continue avoiding environments that have lots of reinforcement history. A lot of times, this is going to mean avoiding the streets immediately around the house where the dogs probably already been surprised [00:31:00] by other dogs and barked. And, of course, those where you are highly likely to have very unpredictable encounters or an inability to control the intensity or the exposure, or situations where you might get trapped.
So I’m looking for a line of sight to my car, clearly marked emergency exits…
I remember a particularly disastrous hike when Fig was in like the worst of adolescence, where I happened to be on this sort of lollipop-shaped trail that was pretty narrow and it took longer to get around than I had originally planned.
So we were on the stick part of the lollipop, which was the only way back to the parking lot where our car was, just as the runners and triathletes that got off of work and then drove to the park arrived. So there was a steady stream of runners and dog walkers and we were trapped in the bushes off the side of that lollipop trail with no way to get around. It was also it’s particularly hilly [00:32:00] so like there’s literally physically no way around because of the the creek and the cliffs.
Anyways, we were there for seven or eight weeks, I believe, before there was enough of a clear break in the traffic that we could make our way back to the car.
It was not a good experience. I did cry in the car. I think I called Shade, if I recall correctly, and whined to her about how terrible everything was. You know what? I was just realizing we’ve hiked that trail probably 30 or 40 times since then and it’s been great because, fortunately, training works. Fortunately there’s so much we can do! Yay! Yay training! Yay dog training! Yay clicker training and positive reinforcement! Hooray!
But yeah, that was a little bit of a trauma for me. And I’m going to actively avoid getting stuck in that kind of a situation.
I love to look for situations where the design of the traffic pattern means that people are going to get out of their car and walk in a particular direction [00:33:00] and they’re unlikely to go right or left; it’s going to be a very two dimensional kind of traffic pattern. For example, lollipop trails, but not one where you’re on the lollipop with the people, but where maybe there’s a field to one side where you can get some lateral distance, but you know that folks are going to get out of their cars and they’re going to go to the trailhead and then head off down the greenway. That would be a great opportunity because I can control the distance from where we’re standing to the path of the trail.
I also love parks that have big raised planters that we can step behind or step up onto. People don’t usually follow me up on top of the planter when I have stepped up. (I mean, not trampling plants. I’m talking about like the big brick installations. I hope that that was clear. I don’t advocate for destruction of life or property.)
But yeah, benches, things you can step up on. “Think in terms of three dimensions” is really where I was trying to go with that. Stop digging [00:34:00] the hole.
Compared to that street where there’s usually a row of parked cars and a retaining wall that you can get pinched between and surprised? No, I’m going to avoid that. And that may be on my list of avoiding forever. I may never walk down that particular street. The apartment complex where dogs can appear suddenly out of nowhere and from a lot of different directions at once? No, I’m not going to do that. I’m going to stick with linear, predictable, I can control the space and lots of options for either a clear exit at all times or lots of options to get around or to escape if I need to.
So again, I can control mine and my dog’s space and experience. And it’s difficult to be surprised. I hate surprise parties. Even when they’re good, I don’t like them.
I use my car as a home base a lot, almost all of the time, and I return to it frequently and as-needed. So I love to practice returning to the car. I might start in the car, start with my dog taking treats in the car– I’ve talked about that in [00:35:00] building food drive. And then venture a little bit further out into the park and then right back to the car. And then every time I make that loop a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger and a little bit bigger, always returning the car.
And then of course if anything changes in the environment, like a dog walker pulls up, somebody with a bunch of kids pulls up, bicycles pull up, I can pop right back in the car. “Oh, this is just what we do. We just pop back in the car. Not a big deal.”
I love a Target or Walmart parking lot. Target is especially nice because they have those big red balls in the front. ([laughter] I’m 14. Oh my goodness.) Anyways, those big red balls, I don’t know if all Targets have this, but the ones near me do. And the parking lot tends to be so long and wide that I can be way down away from the main entrance. Maybe I’m working on heeling and I can use those balls as like giant props that come with me. I use planters for the [00:36:00] same thing. Props for heeling is what I mean, as well as visual barriers.
So I’d really like to not just like look at what’s easier, what’s harder, what’s distracting or not distracting. Again, I’m not thinking about so much in terms of like a linear progression of difficulty in that way. I’m more thinking about, what are the specific features of this environment that might make it easier or harder. A single well-placed bench can be very helpful or play structure can make all the difference in how successful or risky an outing might be.
From there, I might increase the number of behaviors or the complexity of behaviors that are available in different environments. Again, love “different every day” kind of stuff. Not harder, just different. Every single time should be a little bit different, but not harder.
Increment the degree of control that I have over the environment, leaving the [00:37:00] hardest locations – and by that I mean the ones that I have the least control. In fact, I even want to delete the word “hardest” there, because a complex environment that is perhaps challenging in terms of the level of stimulation that’s present, but that I have a lot of control over the experience? I would actually put that much earlier in the progression, if that makes sense. And environments where I really have very little control, even if they aren’t that “challenging”… And what I mean by “challenging” is like when everything’s going right, they’re not that big a deal, but then if something goes wrong, it can go wrong quickly and there’s nothing you can do about it.
An example of that kind of environment would be PetSmart, where you might be in PetSmart and there might be like four other people in the store with you, but it is so easy to come around the corner of an aisle and be face-to-face [00:38:00] with another dog that’s at the end of a Flexi lead, right? Like you can be surprised because you can’t see them coming. People and their dogs in that space can be kind of erratic. There’s too many different directions. You can’t monitor it all. And if you do get cornered, there’s nowhere to go.
So I don’t really take my dogs to PetSmart to train anymore. I will train outside of a PetSmart and take advantage of busy people on a mission. That’s a pattern that I love to take advantage of. They’re less likely to go side to side. So I’ll set myself up in front of the cell phone store that’s a couple storefronts down from the PetSmart and take up the opportunity of people who are getting out and bringing their dogs in for grooming or whatever. That’s someone that I use a lot.
So I would say going from most control to less control. And I’m going to go ahead and like draw a line through certain environments that just aren’t worth it.
That’s where like this whole avoidance thing– It’s [00:39:00] not binary, right? It doesn’t have to be always or never. It’s not “Oh, positive reinforcement trainers never let their dogs off leash. They always keep their dogs in a tiny cage.” Well, I often let my dogs off leash, but I do so in specific situations where, for me and my dogs, the risks are less and the benefits are greater.
And we can apply that a lot of different ways. For almost every behavior in question, there’s going to be a way that you can narrow the scope of how much work you need to do.
An example from dog sports, my dog Gambit was mostly– I mean, he was very successful and he was very successful in a lot of environments, but there were a couple of specific trials that just were not for him. He could go to a national tournament and do great. I don’t even know how many – ten, thirteen rings going at the same time, he’s totally fine. Not just fine, but like shine. [00:40:00] Like he was just like sparkly and accurate and super fun to play with and to trial.
And then there were a couple of dog shows, sadly, several of them the ones that are geographically closest to me, but the building that they were in just had features that, for him specifically – very echoey buildings with really heavy fire doors that would slam a lot – were just very startling for him. And they just frayed his nerves. Also blow dryers. He never really– He would do his things, but it was not a great experience. If it was in the same building where a lot of grooming and blow dryers were happening. So heavy fire doors, in big echoey environments with a lot of blow dryers going was just not environment that was very comfortable for him.
And after a few tries, it occurred to me that there are other dog shows [00:41:00] and I could show a lot of different places. We could show outdoors and he would do great. Livestock arena? Not a problem. Obedience tournament? Beautiful, high placing. But just an all-breed show at the convention center? No. Or the gymnasium? Not so good.
So I just started not entering those trials and saving my money. Good heavens. It took way too long for me to learn that.
And then my next dog, Spark, had a different profile of the environments that were more accessible for her and a few environments that were just gonna be more challenging for her. She did great at the all breed shows. In fact, if anything, it was easier for her than at a one ring trial where space was a lot tighter.
So, knowing your dog, paying attention to the specific features of the environment, what variables are affecting the behavior of this dog?
This is one where I’ve gotta put a plug in for “don’t let your expectations interfere with your [00:42:00] observations.” I probably just butchered that. I’m sorry. I’m trying to paraphrase Emelie Johnson-Vegh who said that in one of our podcasts a while back. And I think about that a lot. If I’m coming in to a training plan with the expectation that this environment is “harder” or “more distracting” or that it’s “not hard” or it’s “not distracting,” I might let that cloud my ability to see what my dog’s actually telling me.
So we may always avoid the hardest situations. We may always avoid the situations where we have the least control or where the risks outweigh the benefits.
And I’m still gonna stack things so that I’m always building on success. The other thing I’m always gonna keep in mind is that I always want to have a point of success to return to. If things go sideways, I can go back to that point of success.
So we’re back to best training practices.
Here’s where I really do want to hear from you. I mean, not that I don’t always want to hear from you because I do! I do always want to hear from you. But I’ve not seen that much of the world. [00:43:00] And when you’re thinking in terms of strategically selecting your environments, what are your favorite environments that you like to choose for training purposes? And what are the features you’re selecting them based on? Like I was just talking about, if you were to think beyond just “difficult to hard,” like what do you love about your favorite park that makes you bring your dogs there to train there regularly? What are those elements that you’re looking for that help you be successful? What does that look like? And how do you use them?
I really want to hear what your shaping plans look like when you’re selecting environments in this way or selecting situations if we wanted to go beyond environments.
Anyways, reach out. You can find the post for this episode on social media, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Let me know what your favorites are. I really do want to hear.
[outro]
Thanks for listening. If you liked this episode, well, you have good [00:44:00] taste. And I hope you’ll hit the subscribe button on your podcast app to make sure you don’t miss the next episode; it might be even better than this one. If you are already subscribed, well, thank you. I really appreciate it. And there are still some ways that you could reinforce me, if you were so inclined. You could always leave me a five star review on iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you happen to be listening to this podcast. And you can also check out and support the sponsors because they help make the podcast possible.
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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 that you could always find if you were interested. So until next time, happy training!
