In the last post I mentioned that I would be helping with a talk about foundation skills. Here are the five skills I grouped:
Reinforcement: Knowing how to evaluate, how to deliver, and what exactly is a reinforcer can make all the difference for a trainer. This is what I tend to list as the variable that is most important to training. Many owners ask what breeds are the smartest, or what age, or other interesting variations. It comes down to motivation!
Body language: Being able to recognize body language for a stressed or relaxed or happy or excited or fearful animal can make a huge difference in training. This is especially important with dogs as we live with them every day and there can be serious problems if we aren’t able to even recognize that there is a problem.
Attention: This can be a byproduct of good training and doesn’t always have to be specifically trained. I used to do a lot of attention work in classes. This changed for me after Kathy Sdao mentioend that she doesn’t really do much (any?) attention work, it just comes as a result of good reinforcers and a high rate of reinforcement. So, the next day, I dropped attention exercises and in the last year and a half I haven’t really noticed a difference. We do pull this out if a team has a specific goal or if an exercise has other benefits. I carefully monitor attention and if I notice a dog is less attentive, we work to address that.
Moving together: Owners like dogs that walk nicely. Being able to move together makes daily life easier. It helps with self control. It provides more opportunities. This can be nice walking or moving together like in agility, or just interacting at home and being able to ask the dog to move out of the way or towards the owner.
Stay in place: Self control. Used in many dog sports or activities. Being able to be with the family without needing specific prompting and interaction. We’ll be presenting to an audience that typically has successful stays (but isn’t always so great with other things), however the stays are typically trained with quite a bit of punishment. A dog that stays to avoid trouble is different than a dog staying to earn reinforcement.
This may change between now and when we give the presentation, however it’s a start and I wish I had weeks and weeks to be working with the audience!