In a Monday night class, we talked briefly about the benefits and risks of other people handling and cueing Griffin.
Griffin was added to my home to be my competition (obedience and agility especially!) dog…. but also my demo dog and to go out and help me help other people learn about training and dogs. Both are very important, almost equally important and possibly a bit contradictory.
Other people cuing Griffin runs the risk of Griffin learning to generalize. He might responding to cues I would not normally want to be cues. He might start giving poor behaviors or responding incorrectly. And he may be reinforced for it. This could hurt his behaviors and hurt the concepts he understands.
At the same time… I do what I can to preserve our cues and behaviors.
- Performance and Casual cues: I don’t give away my special, “sacred,” unique competition cues. I show people things that are not as important.*
- Supervision: I can specify what things we will or will not reinforce, so the new trainers are doing things correctly.
- Consistency: I am careful that when – I- train, I do not accept poor responses. Dogs can and do learn that different people have different requirements. I want to be very clear with what I expect and always expect.
- Fluency: In some ways, his response to cues given by other people show that he has behaviors with a high level of fluency. He really gets it. The behavior is proficient. I can see what parts of the cue are relevant to the behavior and which are not.
- Discrimination: At the same time, there are some behaviors and situations where I do not want him to respond to cues given by other people (competition obedience). So, I don’t give away these cues. We don’t work on these behaviors in the other-people-handling environment.
Tired Luna. |