Training Tuesday: Update on the Relaxation Protocol and Other Foundation Tasks

Malcolm continues to "help" me do the Relaxation Protocol.

Despite the boringness of this whole relaxation thing, Maisy and I continue to plug away at it. Please note, dear readers, this should not be construed necessarily as “dedication” so much as “sheer stubbornness.” At any rate, I’m pleased with the progress we’re making. We’re also working on a few other tasks, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to update on those, as well.

The Relaxation Protocol
We’re doing well with the Relaxation Protocol. Although it’s still boring, we’ve been working on it for about a month now, which means it’s becoming more of a routine and less of a chore. Although I still don’t get it done every day, I manage most nights, and Maisy seems to enjoy it. If it starts to get late, she’ll whine and nudge at the travel crate, as though to remind me we haven’t done it yet. I must admit, this helps motivate me.

Last night, we did Day 5 for the first time. There is a definite pattern in our work- the first time we start a new “day,” she’s worried and a bit anxious. She won’t remain lying down, and she gets a bit frantic when she takes treats. However, I’ve noticed that we’ve needed to spend fewer sessions on each day before she relaxes for the duration of the exercise. While we had to spend seven sessions on Day 2, we did five sessions for Day 3, and only four sessions for Day 4. (We only needed to do Day 1 once, but that doesn’t really count as we’ve done that one a lot here and there over the past year.)

I repeat each day until Maisy seems calm, relaxed, and even a little bored. For Maisy, I’m looking for the following things: to remain lying down for the duration of the exercise, to roll over on to a hip instead of being in an “alert” down, to periodically rest her chin on the floor, to have sleepy or droopy eyes, to quit making eye contact with me, and to take the treats with a soft or “lazy” mouth. I find the eye contact to be an important indicator, as it lets me know that Maisy is switching from “working” mode to relaxation. Similarly, the way she takes treats tells me a lot; snatching the treats indicates higher levels of arousal.

Although I’m not sure yet, I think she’s beginning to figure out that even when the tasks change, she can still relax. It used to be that during the first session of a new day, she would remain anxious for the whole session, but yesterday, she seemed to calmer by the end. For example, one of the tasks for Day 5 is to walk to an entrance and touch the doorknob, an action which is done three times. Maisy found this unsettling, and every time she heard me touch it, she would stand up on her hind legs and peer out the top of her crate. The first time this happened, after I returned, she remained standing until I finally cued her to lie down twenty seconds later. The last time, though, she offered a down shortly after I returned.

Crate Duration
Another thing we’re working on is lying calmly in her crate for longer durations without the distractions of the relaxation protocol. I started out with a duration of five minutes, giving her a treat every 30 seconds. We slowly stretched out the length of time between treats, and got up to five full minutes with a treat only at the end! I was pretty excited about this, because that’s a long time lie still for a dog like Maisy.

Just like the Relaxation Protocol, she’s been needing fewer repetitions of each stage before we can increase the difficulty. We spent four sessions with a treat every 30 seconds, and another four sessions with a treat every 45 seconds. After that, though, I was able to spend only two sessions on the intervals of 60 seconds, 90 seconds, and two minutes, and she only needed one session each for the intervals of three minutes, four minutes and five minutes!

Last night, I increased the duration from five minutes to ten minutes. Since I made the duration longer, I reduced the length of time she needs to wait for a treat from five minutes back down to two, but I should be able to work up to five again quite quickly. Ultimately, I’m working towards one hour of calm crate time with a treat every five minutes.

Poke!
“Poke” is my either awesome-or-crazy strategy to teach Maisy a new way to get my attention. I’m hoping she’ll learn to poke at me instead of lunging at another dog when she’s feeling stressed. It’s going well. I started out by transferring a hand target to my leg, then worked on it while I was sitting, standing and lying down. Once she was reliably poking my legs, I added the cue, and then started working in different rooms around the house. She’s poking on cue about 90% of the time, even when interspersed with other known cues like sit. Last night, we started working on poke outside. Although she was confused at first, she figured it out pretty quickly.

Reorienting
The last major thing we’ve been working on is reorienting. We’ve mostly worked on it while going through the fence gates in or out of our yard. The back gate is easier, and the reorienting is almost automatic there, although she’s a bit quicker going into the yard than when leaving it. The front gate is a bit harder because there was a bunny outside that gate one time a few months ago. Ever since that, she scans for the bunny every time we walk through. Still, she’s reorienting quicker every time, and last night she only looked for the bunny for three or four seconds before she turned back to me. I’m going to need to transfer it over to other locations soon (the car, the training center, etc.).


Overall, I’m very pleased with this focus on foundation work. Maisy is really doing a great job at learning to relax- no easy task! I’m hopeful that this is the piece we’ve been missing.

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!

CU Seminar: Crate Time

Photo by Robin Sallie.

In my last entry, I laid out a plan for teaching Maisy how to get my attention. In the comments, Laura (rightly so) questioned the wisdom of this. Do I really want to teach Maisy to be pushy? Wouldn’t it be better to teach her impulse control? I know this sounds contradictory, but the answer to both questions is yes.

See, the truth is, Maisy already has a “demand behavior.” She’s barking, growling and lunging at other dogs in an effort to get my attention. And let’s face it: it works. No matter how hard I try, I can’t completely ignore it. It’s also embarrassing, and if she’s going to persist in being obnoxiously pushy, she might as well do it in a quieter, more socially acceptable way.

Beyond that, though, I really believe that she needs a way to alert me to her needs. We already have one way in the Look at That game, which Maisy only initiates when she’s feeling anxious about something, but she needs something she can do when I’m not looking at her. While teaching her a demand behavior may backfire (and knowing this dog, it’s quite possible!), I think there is enough potential value that it’s worth the risk.

Still, I don’t exactly want a pushy dog, either. And I certainly don’t want her to be dependent on me for all her needs. My ultimate goal is to help her become confident enough to relax in the face of stress without any intervention on my behalf. Which leads me to the second (and probably more important) thing I got out of the CU seminar: creating a plan to help Maisy learn how to relax.

I already knew this was important- after all, part of the problems we’ve had at trials is waiting for our turn. I really wanted Maisy to have a safe space where she could relax, but I didn’t know how to create this for her. While a crate seemed like the ideal choice, Maisy often became reluctant to go near it after a few hours at a trial site. I experimented with using her mat as a safe space instead, but this was problematic, too. Without the solid barriers that a crate can offer, the visual stimulation became too much for her, and she often seemed more stressed by the end of the day than when she’d been in the crate.

I knew that I needed to build enough value for her crate that she’d happily hang out in there, so we began playing Crate Games. As a result, Maisy is comfortable in her crate at home, but we’ve still struggled with being calm in her crate in other places. Luckily, the seminar provided exactly the opportunity we needed: 10 hours in a new, yet relatively low-stress, environment so we could practice.

At first, Maisy seemed uncomfortable. She shifted positions a lot, peeked out the top, and just generally had difficulty relaxing. I tossed a treat in her crate every 20-30 seconds or so, and dropped in a handful of treats every time she lay down. Soon, she was lying there quietly, rolled on to one hip with her chin on the ground, and I was able to gradually lengthen the time up to two minutes between treats.

The seminar provided the jumpstart we needed, because by the end of the weekend, I had a crate junkie. More importantly, it helped me turn my goal of “help Maisy be more comfortable in her crate” into a fully formed plan. Here’s what it looks like:

First and foremost, do the Relaxation Protocol from start to finish. Although Maisy and I have played with it from time to time, we’ve never completed all fifteen days, mostly because it’s mind-numbingly boring. Still, Alexa encouraged all of us seminar attendees to do it with our dogs. I’m modifying it slightly; we’ll do it lying instead of sitting, and in her crate instead of on a mat.

Next, we need to continue to build duration. I’ve created a schedule which starts with Maisy lying quietly in her crate for a duration of five minutes, receiving a treat every 30 seconds, and ending 42 steps later with a duration of an hour, with treats every five minutes. I’ll repeat each step with her until she is relaxed before moving on to the next step. Once we’ve completed the entire process, we’ll take it on the road, first at training class, then to a local obedience club, and finally, as the ultimate test, we’ll go to run-throughs or trials that allow unentered dogs on site.

Finally, I’ll incorporate impulse control and off-switch games with her crate. I’ll talk more about how to do this in the future- Alexa spent a fair amount of time on both, and I think it’s important enough information to dedicate an entire post to the subject- but suffice it to say, the entire program ought to teach Maisy how to relax in her crate even when she’s aroused or distracted.

Since all of these things are incredibly important, but not terribly exciting to do, I’ve decided that I’m going to retire Maisy from competition until we've done this. Returning to trialing is dependent upon both completing the entire relaxation protocol, and the real world test of laying quietly in her crate in a new environment for an entire hour, with treats no more often than once every five minutes.

I know that this is going to be boring, and you all can expect a whiny post from me in a week or two about how this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever had. When that happens, remind me that the result is going to be awesome, okay? Because I really think that this is one of the biggest things missing in Maisy’s foundation. Boring or not, I really believe this is the change we’ve needed, and I’m excited to see it.