In dog training jargon, “recall” means coming when called. And a reliable recall means that the dog comes every time he’s called.

Start teaching the recall as soon as you get your puppy. Young puppies are great followers — they naturally want to be with their pack leader. Let them be off leash in safe areas as often as possible, and use this natural pack drive to help develop a great recall. When the pup is off leash, he learns to choose to  stay with you rather than you depending on the leash to keep him with you.

The Name Game

First steps for puppies and older dogs

This may seem silly, but it really is the foundation to a good recall. We’re going to teach your dog his name. Sure, he already knows his name, but now we’re going to associate wonderful things with his name, and condition him to respond happily and quickly when he hears his name. Through hundreds of repetitions, we are going to “classically condition” your dog to turn and come to you when he hears his name. When a behaviour is classically conditioned, the animal responds automatically, without thought. Our goal is to have the dog hear his name and respond before he even realizes that “wait, I wanted to go see that dog over there!”

Start in an area where there aren’t any distractions. Beginning this training in the barn is difficult because it’s a new place, there are lots of great smells and other dogs around. So your dog won’t really learn the Name Game tonight, but you will learn how to play at home.

Start with a hungry dog and use yummy treats, something that will be just as good after ten repetitions.

Start on leash right in front of the dog — you can drop the leash so your hands are free  and just step on it if your dog decides to find something else to do. We want him to choose to stay with you on his own, because you’re exciting and because it’s rewarding to interact with you.

Ideally use a clicker — the clicker is a stronger mark than a verbal marker, especially in the early teaching stage. But if you don’t have a clicker handy, don’t let it stop you — use a verbal marker such as YES.

METHOD:

• Say you dog’s name — then click (or verbal mark) and treat. Don’t wait for him to look at you, or come to you. All we’re doing at this first stage is pairing the name with a pleasant consequence.
• Repeat five or six times. Even if he’s looking at you, say his name, mark and treat. In fact, once he knows you have treats, he probably won’t look away!
• Release and play. Use a release word such as OKAY or GO PLAY (I use ALL DONE) and show him your empty hands. (Get in the habit of using a release word so your dog doesn’t have to guess whether you’re done or not.) Let your dog go away from you and find something else to do for a bit…
• Then, while he’s looking away, say his name and mark (click or verbal YES) the moment his head turns towards you. Don’t wait for him to come to you to mark  — he knows, or will soon learn, that the click (or verbal marker) means he’s going to get paid. Mark the moment he responds, then let him come to you for the reward.
• Don’t wave the treat around when you say his name; keep it tucked against your body where it’s not so visible.  (We’ll soon move the treat completely out of sight.)
• Say his name, mark when he looks at you, then give the treat. Try to separate the click or YES from the physical presentation of the treat.
• Vary how you present the reward… back up and let him chase you for the treat or throw it up in the air for him to catch. If you’re unpredictable, your dog will be more engaged.

If you have a dog that is far more interested in the environment than in responding to you, you may need to do all of your initial training at meal times while hand feeding him his dinner. No more freebies! He will have to work for his dinner. Feed a handful of food at a time while saying your dog’s name each time as you give him the food. He will soon learn to love his name.

As your dog progresses, gradually introduce distractions. Move from the kitchen out into the back yard. Move to the front yard, then introduce the game on walks or in the dog park.

• Continue to practice the Name Game until your dog will not look away from you. At this point you have your dog’s complete attention.
• Randomly, throughout the day, you can click and treat your dog for looking at you. Reward attention!

Attention

Now we’re going to “up the ante” by waiting for eye-contact before marking and rewarding.

• Say your dog’s name, wait for eye contact and click when he looks at you.
• Wait until he is distracted by something and looking away: say his name and click when he looks at you.
• Now go out into the back yard and do the same thing. Start relatively close to your dog, but move progressively further and further away. Wait for him to become distracted, say his name, and click the moment he turns and makes eye contact. Don’t go to him to give the treat, wait for him to come to you. By now he understands that the click always leads to a reward,  so he will be eager to come to you. If he gets distracted and doesn’t come, that’s okay — it’s his choice to not pick up the reward he earned.
• Do this on walks and everywhere else you take your dog. We want him to come regardless of where he is or how many distractions there are, so work on name response in as many different places as you can.
• If you frequent the dog park, or walk in other areas off leash, use the Name Game to get him to come to you, then release him to go play again. Thus the chance to go play becomes a second reward for coming. Do this frequently, so he doesn’t believe that coming when called is what ends the freedom and fun in the dog park.
• Continue pairing his name with a food treat once or twice a day for several more weeks and for maintenance, occasionally throughout the rest of his life.

Three important rules

1. Never call your dog to you and then punish him, no matter what he did and how much you think he “knows” he was wrong. He will associate the last thing he did before being punished with the punishment — and the last thing he did was come when called. Now you’ve just taught him NOT to come when you call him. RESULT: he becomes fearful of coming any time. The recall should always be positive. If he has somehow misbehaved, walk him down to catch him… then use a positive, happy RECALL to forgive him.
2. Along these same lines, don’t call him to you and then consistently do something unpleasant, such as putting him in his crate or kennel, clipping the leash on and ending the play, putting him in the car when he’s not ready to leave the park, etc. Get in the habit of calling him to you randomly during a play outing, and rewarding him by giving a treat, touching his collar, and then letting him go back to playing. Use the return to play as a reward. When you call him the final time because you’re ready to leave and you need to put him in the car or kennel, touch his collar, clip the leash on, and give a handful of treats for coming when called.
3. Never say COME when you think your dog may not do it. Reserve COME for those times you know he’ll comply. If he’s distracted and sniffing, walk over and get him by the collar. Don’t chase after him — dogs love chase games, and he’ll quickly learn that he’s better than you at keep-away. If there are times when you need to catch your dog and you’re not sure you can, he should start wearing a long line every time he goes outside.

Once again, we discussed briefly HOW AND WHEN TO REWARD (also see Class Notes: Oct 26).  Highlights:

A sheepdog is hardwired to work sheep, just like a spaniel is hardwired to flush birds. It would be crazy to offer a treat to a border collie “here, if you go get those sheep, I’ll give you a cookie”. If a behaviour is in the genes, doing that action is all the reward the dog ever needs.

Agility is not natural. Sure, dogs run through trees and over logs. But an agility course is highly stylized, and there’s nothing “natural” about how we ask the dog to perform. It helps to think of agility as a string of tricks. And in order to convince the dog to do those tricks quickly and happily, we need to reward the dog.

Dogs do what works best for themselves. When they know what the payoff  will be (treats, play) they will work hard to get it.

Rewards: anything the dog wants and will work eagerly to get.

Treats should be small, about the size of your little fingernail. Use soft, yummy treats like hot dogs or string cheese. Dog biscuits aren’t nearly as tasty, and take time to chew up. They also leave dropped crumbs behind.

Timing is everything in dog training. We need to get the reward to the dog the moment he performs the desired action. But logistically, it can be very difficult to toss a treat to the dog at the exact right moment.

Fortunately, we can teach the dog a word or sound that means “yes, that was right!” The word or sound precisely marks the moment that the dog performs an action correctly, telling the dog that what he was doing the moment he heard the sound is the thing being rewarded.

Initially the word or sound means nothing to the dog. The sound must be paired with a reward, teaching the dog that every time he hears that sound, a reward is coming. Using a reward marker effectively communicates to the dog what action is being rewarded. Once he understands that he can make the reward marker happen — that is, it’s his actions that cause the reward — the dog becomes an inspired and engaged participant in the learning process.

Pairing: often called “charging the clicker”. We will begin by pairing the sound with a reward. Simply say YES and give the treat. Don’t ask the dog to do anything for the treat. He doesn’t have to sit, give attention, or anything else. Just say YES and treat. YES and treat. HINT: say YES and then give the treat. Pause briefly between the word and the motion to give the dog the treat. This isolates the word from the motion. If you say YES and move at the same time, the dog will only see the motion and won’t hear the word. RULE: physical always overrides verbal.

We’re looking for the dog to recognise that YES means treat. When you say YES and the dog looks for the treat, we’re ready to go on.

Shaping: takes an unskilled dog — a blank slate — and teaches a complex behaviour by progressively and selectively rewarding any action that takes the dog closer to the desired final action.

Contact behaviour

The dog walk, teeter and A-frame are called contact obstacles. The bottom portion of contact obstacles is a safety zone called the contact zone. Usually it is painted yellow or marked with tape. Dogs must run through the safety zone (at least a toenail must touch) or they cannot qualify in that round. If not taught some behaviour that takes them through the safety zone, most dogs, excited and running fast, would jump from the top of the obstacle, landing 20′ out and that much closer to the next obstacle. Exciting, but an injury waiting to happen.

There are two basic contact behaviours: running contacts and stopped contacts. In running contacts, the dog runs down and through the contact zone without stopping. The dog is progressively taught to run and never jump. Running contacts are obviously faster, but realistically you need a dog that doesn’t have a long stride or a tendency to leap over tall objects.

With stopped contacts, the dog is taught to run over the obstacle and slam on the brakes at the bottom, waiting for a release word from the handler.

There are pros and cons to each method. Any contact method needs maintenance training throughout the competition life of the dog. We will teach all the dogs a stopped contact behaviour initially. Over the next few weeks we will be watching the dogs to determine which may be candidates for running contacts. Dogs with big strides like my malinois need to learn to stop at the bottom: their natural running stride will take them over the safety zone even if they don’t try jumping it. Jeannie will be teaching running contacts; I will teach some form of stopped contacts.

Shaping the plank: beginning stopped contact behaviour. We will use shaping to teach the dog to eagerly run to and get on a plank. Depending on the dog, we may reward sitting at the end of the plank, a down in the dirt just past the end, back feet on the plank and front feet in the dirt, or one back foot on the plank. Whatever behaviour is decided on will later be transferred to the dog walk.

Possible steps:

• look at
• move towards
• step over
• step on with front feet
• step on with front and one back foot
• get on with all four feet
• back feet on; front feet in dirt
• run to & get on from a short distance away
• run to & get on from further away
• run to & get on after a tunnel

Hoops

Before we introduce jumping and the other agility obstacles, we’ll introduce hoops and gates. These give us the ability to teach the dog (and handler!) some agility moves without having to worry about correct obstacle performance .

Agility is a timed sport. We never want to reward lackadaisical performance. We want the dogs driving through the hoops quickly, with focus and intensity, to the best of the individual dog’s ability.

Tunnels

Borrowing from the horse world, we’re going to “make the right thing easy and the wrong thing hard.”

1. “Call to” — with the dog on harness, the owner goes to the other end of the tunnel and calls the dog. There is only one right answer. There is back tension on the harness when the dog makes the “wrong” choice and tries to get to the owner by going around the tunnel. The tension is released when the dog is in front of the tunnel. Eventually (and there is no “right” amount of time, each dog learns in his own way) the dog will try going through the tunnel. Voila! Right answer! After the first time, it’s easy. And, the dog will always be driving through the tunnel, eager to get to his owner.
2. “Run with” next week, you’ll start running with your dog as he enters the tunnel.
3. “Send” from various distances away, and from both sides, so that the dog is working out in front and independently.

We’ll use this same progression of call to—run with—send when teaching many of the obstacles.

Next week:

• body & space awareness, using body pressure to move your dog out and away and back in again.
• Moving with your dog, reversing direction, crossing in front, come and switch.

Dogs need to get paid. In daily life, payment might be a kind word or a skritch behind the ear. But agility is demanding and complicated, and the pay scale needs to be higher. We’ll use both food treats and play (retrieve and tugging) when teaching new agility skills.
In order to be effective, the reward has to come quickly: AS an action is occurring, not afterwards. A delay of even a few seconds can be too long. If you wait until the dog has finished performing the action before getting the treat to him, he probably has already gone on to think or do something else when the reward finally arrives. The dog must clearly understand what he is being rewarded for.
But it’s difficult to get the treat to the dog at exactly the right moment. We could throw it at the dog as he goes through or over an obstacle, but obviously that wouldn’t work!
Here’s where clickers come in handy. Clicker training is simply a way to communicate with dogs. Initially, the clicker means absolutely nothing to the dog. It’s just a mechanical sound. But by pairing the sound of the clicker with a treat, the dog quickly learns that when he hears the sound “click”, a treat always comes.

Technique. “Charging the clicker”. Just click/then treat, click/then treat twenty, thirty, forty times in a row. Don’t ask or expect the dog to do anything. All we’re doing is pairing the sound with the treat.
Once the dog looks expectantly for the treat the moment he hears the click, we’re ready to go on.

A Bridge
The sound bridges the time between the action and the reward. Timing is everything in dog training — the clicker/marker tells the dog that what he was doing the exact moment he heard the sound is the action being rewarded… and bridges the time between the mark and the reward. Rewards (and punishment) need to be given within seconds of the action for the dog to understand what he’s being rewarded for; the marker allows you to MARK the moment, then take your time giving the reward.
But we don’t always have the clicker with us. And, for me, I already have the dog, the leash, the treats, a toy… I find a clicker awkward to manage as well.
We can use a verbal marker in exactly the same way as a clicker. Choose a short, distinct, unique word, and pair that sound with a treat. I use YES, but you can choose anything that’s easy to say, but you don’t use regularly with your dog.
Again, “charge” the marker by saying YES then treat over and over again until the dog looks expectantly at you for the reward when he hears YES.

What the clicker does:

• The clicker freezes the action, allowing you to mark behaviour as it occurs.
• The clicker predicts or promises a reward. Thus, every time the dog hears the clicker sound, a reward must follow.
• A clicker ends an action. When you click something the dog has done, you have promised a reward, so anything the dog does between hearing the click and getting his reward is immaterial. Don’t click an action, then make him sit to get his reward.

Goal:
The dog’s actions CAUSE the reward, the reward doesn’t cause the action.
A dog who is clicker-literate knows that his actions are what causes the reward, and he will become an active, engaged participant in the learning process.

CLICKER BASICS

• Start with a hungry, interested dog.
• A reward ALWAYS follows the click or marker word.
• Mark during the desired behaviour, not after it has finished.
• Click ONCE. If you’re really excited about the dog’s progress, give more treats, not more clicks.
• Mark-and-treat every correct response (continuous reinforcement).
• Release between attempts. You can throw a treat to get the dog to move away, then bring him back to try again.
• Set up for success! Don’t make learning difficult. If your dog is not getting it, step back to something easier, where he will be successful. If he loses interest and wanders away, put him up for a bit before trying again. (This is where a crate is handy.) Wait until he is hungrier.

Agility — it’s not about the obstacles.

Really! Agility is not so much about the obstacles as it is about getting your dog around the course between the obstacles. If you can accurately communicate to your dog, who is running at top speed, where you want him to go, you can get him on the obstacles.
So the first skill needed is for the dog to understand about following your hand and going where you point him.

Space
With your treat held in front, move into your dog’s space. To keep from inadvertently pushing your dog away with one hand, hold the treat between both hands and plant your hands against your legs. Have your hands at the height of your dog’s point of chest. Lean into your dog. You don’t actually have to step into him, just rock forward. When your dog yields by moving back or away, even slightly, reward by rocking back, moving away from your dog and inviting him back into your space. Give the treat as you invite him back. Reward the slightest try your dog makes at this point. You just want him to get the idea that you can take space and give space.

Teach to follow your hand
Have him follow in a circle around you. Your arm is straight and pointing out; bring your hand down to your side when you reward. This is the beginning of the dog understanding to come in close when your arm is down, and get out to a distance when your arm is up.
Then, try going straight as your dog follows your hand. First thing to learn is for you and your dog to go in the same direction of travel. Hold your hand with the palm parallel to the floor, shoulders facing forward. This tells your dog that you’re going straight.
Turn and go the opposite direction. Switch hands as you switch sides.
Turn in to your dog, pick up with the opposite hand and change directions.
Have your dog sit on your right side… lure across your body and treat on the other side. Repeat the other direction. Don’t let your dog go behind you — step back into him if he does. Then wait… and treat when he chooses to be in front.

SHAPING BEHAVIOUR

Agility is a string of tricks — unlike herding for border collies, or flushing birds for spaniels, there’s nothing natural about agility. A dog might run over a log across a river, or run around trees, but executing the dog walk correctly or doing weave poles is nothing natural. So because we’re essentially training tricks, we need to use a high rate of rewards, especially in the teaching phase.

We will introduce many of the obstacles by “shaping” the behaviour. You’re probably used to helping your dog, showing him what you want. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you always help your dog, he’ll get used to waiting for you to help.
Remember, we’re looking for an active dog, one who understands that it’s his actions that cause the reward and not the other way around.
Shaping allows the dog to learn by trial and error. If he tries something that is rewarded, he’ll try again. If he tries something that isn’t rewarded, he’ll keep looking until he gets the reward. Like the childhood game of “Hotter and Colder”, shaping teaches by rewarding closer and closer approximations of the finished behaviour. The exercise is broken down into steps, and each incremental step the dog takes towards the finished exercise is rewarded.

Technique: Shaping the wobble board. Start by first rewarding anything that might bring him into contact with the board. If he looks in the right direction, reward. Then, reward any movement towards the board. Then reward if he puts a foot on the board. Next wait for two feet. Then all four feet. As you progress, the actions you rewarded in the beginning are no longer rewarded: you wait for and reward closer and closer approximations of the finished behaviour. Breaking the behaviour down into TINY steps encourages the dog to keep trying and allows the learning to progress quickly.
Reward frequently. Sometimes you may need to reward anything that’s different; any new try, even if it’s not getting any closer to the board. In the beginning stages, we need the dog to be active and engaged. If he has to wait too long between rewards, he may get frustrated or bored and wander off to see what the other dogs are doing.

What to do if you dog visits the other dogs
If your dog is distracted and wants to go to another dog, let him. Stand still and just wait. The other dog and handler will ignore your dog. (As the class continues, this is an excellent chance to work on attention and focus.) Your dog won’t get rewarded by visiting, and at some point he’ll maybe turn back your direction. The moment he does, become animated. Tell him what a good dog he is, and if he continues in your direction, say YES or click and wait for him to come in for his reward.
If he continues ignoring you, follow after and scuff your feet. All we’re looking for here is for him to glance your direction. The moment he does, immediately yield by backing up and inviting the dog back into your space. Reward if he moves with you; scuff back in his direction if he turns away.

Homework. Click and treat your dog for getting on any obstacle you can think of: put his feet in a bucket, on a board, in a laundry basket. The more you work on shaping behaviours, the quicker your dog will understand that it’s his actions that cause the reward. You will also improve your timing.

Hand touches are a great game to warm up before training or an agility run, and to ask for your dog to become an active participant.

Have your dog touch her nose to the palm of your hand. In the beginning, most dogs will investigate your hand naturally if you just hold it out a few inches away from her muzzle. As soon as she moves to sniff your palm, mark “yes” and treat. Don’t move your hand any further away than a few inches until you see the “light bulb come on” — that is, you see recognition in the dog’s eyes that she understands what she’s being rewarded for. At this point, you can start moving your hand further away, up high, down low.

We’re looking for active engagement. The dog should enjoy the game and be actively pushing her nose into your hand. She should understand that it is her action that is causing the reward.

We’ve “turned on” your dog… now we need to turn her off. Consistently use a command such as “we’re done” or “that’s all” to let her know the game’s over. Put her on a leash and ask her to sit or lie quietly at your side. Break eye-contact. Look away from your dog with “soft eyes” that allow you to take in everything.

When you’re ready to work again, make direct eye contact and ask “are your ready? Let’s go!”