Making Cleaning Fun!
Squid is obsessed with anything that has to do with cleaning the house – sweep brushes, vacuum cleaners and mops. I usually just put her in another room, but this was a much more fun solution!
Squid’s Herding Test
Squid, 19 months old, passed the swedish herding test yesterday! This is the lowest level of herding trials and also something the dog must pass if you want to breed it (and register the dogs with the kennel club). It was my first time competing in herding and I was really nervous (I actually can’t remember ever being so nervous about a trial, I’m usually pretty cool). Three out of seven dogs passed the test and Squid placed second. I tried to just take it very easy and keep me, Squid and the sheep calm at all times. Here is a video from the test:
Jen
Thomas picked up his new dog at the airport 3 weeks ago. Her name is Jen and she’s a 8-month-old border collie that we’ve bought from Derek Scrimgeour in England. She is a very friendly and soft girl, and she is adjusting to her new life well. She’s doesn’t seem used to living indoors and the life we live is probably very different from what she has experienced during her first seven months. She’s getting along with all the other dogs here and she is very friendly with people.
She is very keen around sheep and is doing a lot of nice things while herding. We’ve started to train her a bit, teaching her to lie down around sheep and balancing them to us. She is very easy going and cool, not at all like my crazy red head at that age… Thomas is hoping that Jen will be able to do sheepdog trials at a high level with him in the future, and maybe she’ll do some agility as well.
Jen also has to learn to offer behaviors and play with us. We had to have a lot of patience to get her to become active in learning. In the beginning, Thomas would train all of his dogs at the same time, offering them all treats for different behaviors. Jen seemed more relaxed and creative in that setting. She is now offering behaviors both at home and at the dog training club. She’ll offer stand, sit, down, bow and a simple retrieve. She has also started to play a little with us at home, but it’s a still a long way to go. It’s very exciting to see how much she changes all the time, how much more personality she gains with every week here. She might be acting like a more focused, toy crazy border collie in a while, or it might be a lot of work before she’ll work and play with Thomas. I’ll let you know!
Running Contacts Update
Spring is really here now and I’m enjoying every day. All my agility equipment is at home again and we’re mostly working on contacts, weaves and jump grids right now. Squid’s running contacts have been a bigger challenge than Shejpa’s and Missy’s. Both Shejpa and Missy chose a nice style right from the start and was pretty consistent with hind feet at the end of the contact when running straight. Squid has chose to push off with her hind feet on the ground right after the plank. It doesn’t seem as efficient to me, and it also seems that she is more likely to stride over the contact. I have been experimenting with stride regulators to get her to change her techique, but she always goes back to her old style. I have decided to let her do it in her own way, as long as she’s got at least one front paw on the lowest 2/3 of the contact. We’ll see how it works out when we start sequencing. I’m glad that she is challenging both my training and my observational skills (it’s a lot harder to see if she’s correct, since she never jumps, just strides over the contact and puts her back paw on the ground less than a centimeter from the contact). Here are some videos from a few weeks back:
When we’re not working on our agility skills, we’re spending time herding sheep. Squid is really doing well and she is going to her first trial in two weeks. Thomas bought a 7 month old border collie girl from Derek Scrimgeour in England a few weeks ago. Her name is Jen and she is a very nice dog. Calm, sweet and soft. She is starting to learn the basics of herding. We’re also training Squid’s mother Fly at the moment, and will be doing some trials with her this summer. She is so much like her daughter and it’s great to have her here.
Weaving 2×2
I’m really falling behind with the english blog, but I’ll try to update more often in the future. We’ve had a long winter and the snow has just gone (although it is snowing again today). We have still been able to do a lot of training indoors and both girls are making progress. In this blog post, I’m going to show you how Squid’s weaving with the 2×2 method has progressed over the past month.
This is the first video, where we go to four straight poles for the first time. She is having problems with entries from 10-11.
Squid weaving 2×2 from Fanny Gott on Vimeo.
In the next video, the problem persists:
Squid Weaving 2×2 from Fanny Gott on Vimeo.
So I decide to break it down and work on just that weakness:
This clip is after one more session:
These are the two sessions from the day after, where I add a jump before a set of four straight poles. It was a true lesson on latent learning, where you can see the amazing difference between the two sessions (with a five minute break in between them):
In this clip, we’ve had one short session since the last video:
This is the latest video, where I have gone from four to eight poles. We’ve had one session since the last video, where I gradually over four repetitions put two sets of four poles together:
Some videos
We’re having a pretty extreme vinter for the south of Sweden. We have about 85 cm of snow and more coming this weekend. I don’t mind a bit of snow, as it makes everything brighter and cleaner, but this is really too much. We can’t train or teach in our normal riding facility, as it is closed because of the snow (some buildings, like tennis centers and riding facilities, have collapsed because of snow on the roof). Because of that, we had to find a new place for last weekends seminar on jumping. We did, but then it started snowing, and the roads and trains just broke down. Our instructor, Vappu Alatalo, was on a train from Copenhagen to Örebo, but never got here. She spent 24 hours travelling, but got nowhere (she eventually just tried to get back home). So the seminar got cancelled.
As long as my training field was plowed, I was okay. We could do herding, obedience and a lot of foundation work for agility. Now, we’re still waiting for the snow plow to come bye again, but it seems like we’re waiting in vain. I wish we had our own tractor. On the positive side, you can really tell that spring is coming. It’s so much lighter in the afternoons now, and the sun shines on our fields. We didn’t get any sun in the middle of winter, as we’re surrounded by trees that blocked the sun for a couple of months.
Thomas and Pogue did an obedience trial in class II on Valentine’s Day. It was a bit early and not everything was perfect, but they got enough points to be able to move on to the next class. They will focus on search and rescue trials this spring and summer, and then do more obedience (class III and elite) in the fall. They are a wonderful team to watch, you can really tell how much Thomas loves that dog. He is only 16 months old, one month younger than Squid, who hasn’t done any trialing yet.
Here is a video of Thomas and Pogue training scent discrimination, the first step towards the exercise with scented articles in class III and elite:
Here is a video of Squid and I doing some shadow handling:
And we’ve also started training weaves with the 2×2 method:
Adding a Cue
I got a question about how I add a cue to a shaped behavior, and why I do it that way. When you add a cue, you can choose to add the cue before the behavior, as the dog performs the behavior, or after the behavior (just before the click and/or reward). As I pointed out in this post last summer, I choose to add the cue before the behavior. It just makes much more sense to me than any other way of doing it, and it seems like my dogs learn faster than they did before (when I did differently).
A cue, or a discriminative stimulus, is information for the dog. It tells him what behavior will be reinforced (or punished) right there and then. Even before we’ve added a cue, there are discriminative stimuli at work. When there’s a behavior, there is a stimulus preceding it. When we add a verbal cue, there are already stimuli that cue the behavior (our position, what we’ve rewarded recently, the way we reward etc.). Our goal is to get the verbal cue to become the most important one and override the other stimuli. In order to do that, we need to make the new cue valuable to the dog, it needs to give information.
In theory, I think this is the most important thing. I try to make the cue mean something to the dog as soon as possible. When I only reward the behavior if the cue has been given, the cue becomes valuable to the dog. I also want to mix in other cues pretty soon, so that the cue is not only valuable, but also contains information on which behavior I want. I think this is the important part, and it can only be done with the cue happening before the behavior.
Pairing the cue with the behavior for a long time is probably not as important, but I do that as well. I can’t really explain it in theory, but it seems that you can add a cue to an operant behavior, using a procedure more like classical conditioning (pairing the cue with the behavior, not really focusing on the consequence). If we are using a classical conditioning procedure, it is absolutely most efficient if the cue is presented before the behavior (just like we would click before we give the treat, when we want to condition the clicker). In both operant and classical conditioning, the stimulus comes before the behavior.
If we add the cue at the same time, or after the dog performs the behavior, we’re not effectively pairing the cue with the behavior, and other stimuli will still be what gives the dog information about what behavior to perform. Of course, people teach their dogs cues in many different ways, so they all work. I just don’t think that adding the cue when the behavior already is happening is teaching the dog much at all. Eventually, most trainers change the timing and give the cue earlier and earlier, why not do it with perfect timing right from the start?).
Please write a comment and tell me what you think!
Herding in the snow
Squid’s uncle Fog
Squids mother Fly
Fly
Fly och Fog
Squid
Mother and daughter herding together
Fly and Squid
Fly with Squid in the background
My friends puppy. Strandängens Flynn, 10 weeks old
Flynn meets the sheep for the first time
Flynn
Flynn
Flynn
Flynn
Halfsiblings Arvid and Fly
Arvid and Fly
Some of my Thoughts on Shaping
Wow! I love that so many have contributed to the discussion on shaping. In total (Swedish and English blog) there are over 50 comments made. This seems to be a topic that needs discussion. I’m going to write some of my own thoughts on the subject, but of course, I don’t have all the answers (no one does). I don’t think that shaping only works for a certain type of dog. Our dogs are all very different, but they are all successfully shaped. Some of them have been easier to train, but that would probably be true regardless of method. I think it’s up to each trainer to decide how they want to train their dog, as long as the method is reward based. I see a lot of great benefits with shaping, compared to luring or targeting, and that’s why I use it a lot.
How ever you choose to train your dog, think twice before making statements like “shaping makes my dog stressed” or “my dog does not like to think for himself”. Of course, dogs are born with different personalities, but we can do a lot to nudge them in the right direction. I will always try to strengthen the weaker sides by building toy drive, socialization, handling etc. In this, I also include shaping how my dog acts in training. I believe that you can get all (with very few exceptions) dogs to be calm and focused in shaping. And that all dogs can learn to love shaping.
It is, of course, a matter of what you feel like spending time doing. Some dog trainers seem to always look for the path of least resistance – if the dog won’t play, they’ll give him treats instead, if the dog won’t retrieve, they won’t use toys, if the dog get’s passive in shaping, they help him out. A trainer like that might feel that she is simplifying things (in contrast to the poor people like me that will “make everything so complicated”), but she will without a doubt get shaped by her dog. That leads to the dog developing his strengths, but he’ll never get a chance to work on his weaker sides. When people ask me where I get the patience to do shaping, I quietly feel that it would require a lot more patience on my part if I had to help my dogs through all their life. Shaping might require some patience for a short period of time when you’re just starting out, but you will gain that time many times in the future. A dog that is shaping wise will learn advanced things so much faster than the dog that always needs guidance.
Champions in any field make a habit of doing things others find boring or uncomfortable
The biggest problem in the Swedish comments, were how people desribed the training. Here is one example: “I’ve heard about dogs shutting down a lot as soon as they are expected to offer behaviors”. The key word being expected. Stop expecting anything from the dog, and you’ll do well. All dogs “offer” behaviors all the time. They stand, sit, lie down, sniff, drink, eat, pee, scratch, turn their heads, walk, yawn, prick their ears, wag their tails… If one of these behaviors start producing a reward that the dog really wants, that behavior will increase in frequency. Voila! – The dog is offering behaviors.
Stop your efforts to influence the dog and start observing to find behaviors to reinforce.
If your dog gets worried while shaping, you shouldn’t be staring at the dog and expect him to offer behaviors. This is a great comment posted in the Swedish blog:
Jessica says:
“I thought that my worried young dog couldn’t be shaped. She never offered behaviors and she would get more and more anxious and finally go lie down somewhere. Not good. But then I tried to click for all movements, as long as she did something. And all of a sudden, she got it. You can really see how proud she gets and how her self confidence is growing. “Look at me! Isn’t this worth a click!”
If you have a dog that gets worried by shaping, try this tonight: Get a bowl of really tasty treats ready. Lock the other dogs away (if you have more than one). Turn on the tv and watch something that is interesting enough for you to have patience, but not so interesting that you forget all about the dog. Choose if you’d like to use a clicker or not (depending on your dog’s previous experiences with the clicker). Watch TV. Reward all movements from the dog by (clicking and) throwing a treat to the dog. Do reward ALL movements to begin with. If your dog starts repeting only one behavior, you can choose to not reward that any more, but wait for something else. It’s a good idea to make sure that the dog has to move to get the treat (if your dog lies down, throw the treat so that he has to get up to get it). If your dog goes to sleep – let him. He will eventually get thirsty, need to pee or get up just to change position. If you don’t get a lot of behaviors tonight, you can put the bowl of treats in the fridge and try again tomorrow.
There is no simple answer to this. But I am convinced that there are a lot of dogs that could enjoy shaping if they only got the chance. There’s so much to write on this subject and I’ll have to come back to it. Especially if you keep discussing it in the commend field!
Is shaping for all dogs?
I posted this question in my Swedish blog, but I would love to get some thoughts from my international readers as well. I’ve got the impression that shaping is less common in the US than it is here. Clicker trainers seem to choose targeting or even luring more often.
Please submit your thoughts on the matter in the comment field, and I will adress this as soon as I feel that I’ve gotten some input from you.
Do you think that shaping suits all kinds of dogs? What kind of dogs should not be shaped? Do you have any related experiences with your own dogs?
