CU Seminar: Leave it

Picture is unrelated. But cute, no?
I did take it in Omaha, so it's kind of on-topic.
And if we pretend that I told her to leave the ball, it's fully relevant.

Leave it is another foundation exercise we worked on, and it’s one that I think is incredibly valuable. Maisy has a pretty good leave it, but even so, I enjoyed working on leave its with Alexa. She reminded me of places I can strengthen the cue for Maisy, and brought a few interesting twists to a familiar game.

Leave it is pretty self-explanatory: the dog leaves “it” (whatever that might be) alone unless you allow him to have it. Alexa was clear that leave it is not about proofing a stay. She doesn’t expect the dog to hold a particular position while performing a leave it. In fact, she views leave it as a movement exercise; the dog actively chooses to move away from the distraction. I like this view, because my reactive dog is always rushing towards whatever is bugging her. I’d love it if she came away from it instead!

She started teach leave it exactly the way I do: hold a treat in your hand, and let your dog investigate. As soon as your dog moves away from your hand (which can take awhile for the dog who is new to this game), click and treat. Repeat this process with the treat in an open hand (which you will close into a fist if the dog tries to eat the treat), on the floor under your foot, on the floor in the open, and then gradually dropping the treat from higher and higher distances.

Maisy can do all of those steps as long as I give her a verbal cue. However, Alexa encouraged people to teach their dogs that all treats are off limits unless they are handed to the dog, or unless the dog has been given explicit permission to take the treat. This means that when you’re training the exercise, you don’t need to give a cue to leave it (although I think it’s nice to teach one anyway). It also means you should always use a consistent cue to tell your dog he can have the treat now. Ultimately, you want your dog to learn that a treat on the floor is an environmental cue for the dog to move away from the treat and turn back to the handler.

I really like teaching it like this, because Maisy is like a vacuum: if there’s a treat on the floor (or if she thinks something is a treat, like a bit of lint), she’ll dive on it. This is clearly not good in the performance ring. It’s worse in obedience, where you can’t talk to the dog, but even in rally, where you can, there’s no guarantee that I’ll see the treat before Maisy. Add to that the fact that Maisy has food allergies and you can see why I love this approach so much!

Although Maisy will sit and ignore a handful of treats that is raining down on her head, it’s much harder for her to ignore a treat that I drop while she and I are both walking. The movement really seems to make a difference with her, which makes sense. For a long time, I only trained leave it while she was sitting, so the whole picture changes when she’s moving. We did start working on this earlier this summer while on walks, but even so, it’s a struggle for us, and she utterly failed when we got to the point of walking over more than four or five treats scattered on the ground.

Maisy and I will definitely work on leave it some more, because it is a great exercise. In addition to the benefits it will provide for competition, it can keep dogs safe, especially if you’re prone to dropping human medicine, like I am. It also helps teach our dogs impulse control. I especially like leave it when it’s done with environmental cues, not verbal ones, because I like the additional layer of self-control, which gives our dogs another opportunity to think and make good decisions. Most importantly for our reactive dogs, leave it is also great for creating a rule structure in which the dog learns that it’s always best to control his impulses and turn to his handler when he wants something or is distracted by something.

Tell me about leave it and your dog: do you have it on verbal cue, as an environmental cue, or both? How far can your dog go before he can’t resist anymore? What do you need to do to take your dog’s leave it to the next level?

CU Seminar: Whiplash Turns

Sorry, I don't have a picture of this from the seminar.
Instead, look at this pretty picture of Maisy
at this little park near our hotel in Omaha!
Also, hey, another use for whiplash turns: taking pictures!

Another one of the foundation exercises we practiced at the CU seminar was the whiplash turn, which is a great game to play with any dog, reactive or not. Simply put, the end goal is to get your dog turning his head towards you so fast when you call his name that you think he’s going to get whiplash.

There are endless applications for a whiplash turn. It is the foundation for a brilliant recall. It allows you to get your dog’s attention when he’s distracted. It can even serve to interrupt the beginnings of a reactive response, assuming your dog hasn’t gone over threshold.

Whiplash turns are easy to teach, and the way Alexa taught it is also fun for the dog! All you do is toss a treat to one side, letting the dog chase after it and eat it. (Side note: It’s wise to give the dog a verbal cue signifying that the treat is his- something like “get it!” works great. Giving permission will help him later on when we teach when we teach leave it.) Just as he finishes eating, call his name. The timing here is important, because you can essentially stack the deck in your favor- your dog was likely to look back at you at that moment, anyway. When he does, click and toss the reward treat in the other direction.

Tossing the treat isn’t required to play the game, but it is recommended in the early stages because it helps set up the exercise again. Also, if your dog is anything like Maisy, you’ll get a dog that quickly learns where the treat is likely to show up next, and as a result, dashes off to that location, ping-ponging back and forth like crazy. That’s actually okay because you’ll end up conditioning a speedy and enthusiastic response to your cue.

Once our dogs were doing great whiplash turns with relatively low distractions, we upped the difficulty. Alexa came around holding tempting, tasty treats in a closed fist. All of the dogs naturally ran over to her to sniff her fist. Again, we tried to stack the deck in our favor by allowing our dogs a moment or two to sniff, long enough for them to realize that Alexa wasn’t just going to give up the goods, but not so long that they’d already turned back to us. The goal was to call our dog’s name right at that sweet spot so that we could get a response.

Even so, the responses were generally not as impressive as just a moment before since the exercise suddenly got much more difficult. If we had timed our cue right, the dogs generally looked, even if it wasn’t with the speed and enthusiasm we hoped for. But if they didn’t, it wasn’t a big deal. We simply lowered our criteria and accepted a smaller response. Then we built it back up in subsequent trials.

Anyway, when the dogs finally responded, we clicked and told our dogs to go take the treat from Alexa. Most of the dogs weren’t expecting this, but they sure welcomed it! Giving the treat like this was a demonstration of the Premack Principle: if you turn away from that yummy treat when I ask you to, you’ll get to eat it anyway! This allows our dogs to learn that we won’t always end their fun. They don’t need to choose between us and the fascinating environment, instead, they can get access to it even faster by responding to us.

Maisy and I plan on playing this game some more. While she has a pretty decent whiplash turn, it could be more consistent. There are times where it’s brilliant. For example, at the hotel, Maisy began running down the hallway. She was off-leash (I was tired and not thinking clearly), but I didn’t want her too far from me, so I called her name… and she turned on a dime to come tearing back to me. Talk about brilliant! Then there are the times where she barely responds, like when there are chickens around. Certainly this has to do with the level of distraction present, and like anything else, I need to proof out her whiplash turns, especially if I want them to be useful for reactivity work.

But what about you guys? Have you trained this behavior? If so, how good of a response do you get? What influences this? I’d love to hear if you’ve got any good stories!

CU Seminar: Reorienting

This dog does a great job of reorienting to Alexa.
Photo by Robin Sallie.

One of the first exercises we worked on at the Control Unleashed seminar was reorienting. Although Leslie talks about reorienting in the book, I’ve never really thought about it as a CU exercise, mostly because it is deceptively simple. Simply put, reorienting means that any time your dog passes through a boundary- a door way, coming out of his crate, walking into the obedience ring- he should turn to sit in front of you, all while making eye contact.

There are lots of benefits to teaching a dog to reorient. It creates a routine for the dog, which pretty much all dogs like. For reactive dogs, though, it creates a sense of predictability, and helps them know both what to expect, and what is expected of them. This relieves some of their anxiety.

Reorienting also teaches the dog impulse control; instead of rushing off to check out the exciting new environment, the dog learns to contain himself and check in with you first. This, in turn, leads to increased team work and attention to the handler- skills we definitely want in our performance dogs!

Finally, reorienting helps mitigate some of the sudden environmental changes that happen when you move from one location to another, largely because the dog becomes patterned to look at you automatically instead of scanning the environment for a potential trigger.

Ironically, after Alexa discussed the value of reorienting at the seminar on Saturday, I experienced first hand how valuable reorienting can be. Maisy and I were walking out of our hotel room, and as we headed into the hallway, an older man was walking towards us. Because Maisy has not learned to automatically reorient to me, she shot to the end of her leash and barked and growled. She was truly over threshold; nothing I said or did was able to get her attention. Although I’m quite sure she would have been nervous about the man no matter what, I believe that if she’d been conditioned to automatically turn to me, there is a decent chance I could have prevented that reaction. Needless to say, I’m going to teach Maisy to reorient!

So, how do you teach reorienting? Alexa had us start with the dogs exiting their crates. In turn, we each opened the crate door and fed a constant stream of treats as long as the dog remained inside the crate. If he tried to exit without a release cue, we calmly shut the crate door and then tried again. Pretty soon, we had a group of dogs that really enjoyed being in their crates! This step helped create some impulse control in the dogs.

Next, we stood next to the crate so that we were facing the same direction as our dogs, and called them out. As they did, we watched for the tiniest movement in our direction. Even an ear flick or a slight head turn earned the dog a click and treat. Each time, we waited for a little bit more of a turn in our direction. It really didn’t take long for the dogs to rush out, make the u-turn towards us, and plop down, watching us expectantly. (The sit, while not necessary, is nice. It is an added demonstration of self-control, and it also means that if your dog is feeling especially wild, you have a better chance of catching him if he's loose.)

Astute readers will notice that we didn’t give any cues, verbal or otherwise. We didn’t ask them to “wait” before getting out of the crate, and we didn’t call their name or otherwise ask them to pay attention to us. This was a deliberate choice, because we want the dog to learn to reorient to us based on environmental cues. The cue to seek out the handler is the transition from one location to another, not anything we said or did. This gives the dog the ability to think and make the right choice, which creates both confidence and self-control. It also means that you don’t need to be constantly nagging your dog with commands, something that I find mighty appealing.

Once the dogs were easily reorienting while coming out of their crates, we worked on reorienting while walking into a box made out of ring gates. Again, the process was similar. We would approach the opening to the ring, and stop and wait. Some dogs automatically reoriented, while others would take a few moments before they turned back towards their handlers, impatient about the lack of movement. At the first sign of turning towards us, we clicked! We repeated the process again as we moved through the gate into the interior of the ring. After only a few repetitions, the dogs were offering up the reorienting behavior on their own.

This is something that would be easy to practice at home. Practice it when your dog comes out of his crate, as you let him into the back yard, or as you go through the gate to your fenced in yard. All of these are pretty low-distraction environments, so it should be easy for your dog to learn. Once he gets good at the game, you can make it more challenging by putting a toy or bowl of treats on the other side of the boundary.

Reorienting a simple behavior, but it’s a powerful one, too. Like I said, I’ll definitely be working on this one with Maisy. But I want to hear from you guys. Have you taught your dogs to reorient? Has it ever helped you and your dog? I’d love to hear your examples!