How to Make Your Dog Excited to Train With You

Now we're going to be building what I like to call the reward event. We've already been rewarding our dogs and now the reward event is when we reward our dog. It's pretty simple. It starts when we want to reward them and it ends when they get the reward. Depending on what the reward is is going to depend on how long or short the reward event is. If I give my dog one piece of food, then that was a very short reward event. If I give my dog a couple, if I give her a reward here, here and here, now that's a slightly longer event. I might pull out a tuck toy or a ball on a rope. That's going to be an even longer reward event, but the reward event we want to give away to our dogs for free. In the beginning, we want to say, here you go. Here's a bunch of reward events. We want to build the desire for the dog to want the reward event. And once we build that addiction, then we start putting barriers in front of the reward event that the dog has to walk or work through or navigate through to get to those reward events in the form of engagement training or luring exercises, leash pressure, all the stuff that we're going to be doing. Now there's a couple that I like to teach my students that are very basic, but I want you to be creative with your reward events. These are simple ones that you can think of. So I have nine different basic reward events that I'm going to show you. And these reward events, once you get good at doing this, this is going to lead into our engagement training. So make this just like with those other exercises feel very natural. So the first one is we just give our dog a reward. That's one reward event, or we can give our dog a reward with praise. Good girl. That could be another reward event. Or I can give her a piece of food. Good girl. Praise her and pet her. That could be a reward event. I might give her one piece of food and then another piece of food, praise, and pet her. That could be the fourth reinforcement event. And we want to reward our dogs on occasions with a variety of rewards, instead of always doing the same thing. If you always give your dog one piece of food or one piece of kibble, after they perform something, then they're going to learn that pattern and often dogs will check out. Once they get a reward, like we were talking about earlier, they go, Oh, I got my one reward. I'm going to take a quick break. But if the dog thinks they might have more rewards coming, they're going to be more invested in the training process. Now I might reward the dog with movement, which is going to add some excitement. We're going to be using that prey drive by moving something away from our dog. The play drive by making it fun and the food drive because we're using food. So we're going to drop back like we did on that, um, that, that reward exercise, that treat handling exercise and reward our dog. So that could be a reward event. Maybe I drop back, good girl. And I praise her as she gets the treat or I can do that praise and pet and give her some affection. That could be a reward event. And as I said before, we can go back and forth. And then a really great simple one that we utilize throughout our training is simply going to be tossing the treat. Now I have bigger treats from earlier instead of the kibble. So these are pretty big nuggets. If I'm tossing it, I want it to be easy for my dog to see. So again, this is the reward event. It comes into play often starts after we mark a behavior. So if I tell her free, we've entered that reward event. She's in the event. Now I'm done with giving her the reward. So that concludes the event. So build these up, make it feel easy for you. Your dog should understand it. Your dog should have focus and engagement. And once you feel really comfortable doing these, then we're going to do the next step, which is engagement training or loading the markers. But you want to have this down first before you start that. Now we're ready for engagement training. Engagement training is to allow us to teach our dogs the markers or the words that predict those rewards that we talked about earlier. So this is classical conditioning. Now, if you remember earlier in the course, if we say the word, this goes with commands as well as markers. If I have a piece of food and I go, yes, as I give the food to my dog, she's never going to become classically conditioned to the word. Yes. I have to say the word pause for a half second, then deliver the reward. Now markers are very, very valuable for two main reasons. Number one, it bridges the gap. This is why people call it a bridge between when the dog does the behavior and when they get the reward. A lot of times people don't really even know what a marker is for. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people just walking and clicking a clicker randomly. The click or the yes, pinpoints the moment in time the dog does the behavior that we're trying to capture, like we talked about before. And then the reward comes after that. Once our dog is classically conditioned to the sound that predicts the reward, you're going to see a change of behavior. So the most common ones that I see are opening the mouth, licking their lips, salivating, moving their paws or wagging their tail. So if I get my dog in front of me, like watch, you'll probably see a change of behavior. When I say the marker, you see that? It was subtle with her, but she moved her body. She heard the marker. She knew something was coming. Once the dog is classically conditioned to the marker, we have as long as it takes to get the actual reward to the dog, as long as we don't lose the dog's focus. So if I have my dog all the way at the other side of this field and I tell her to sit and she sits and I tell her yes, and I start walking towards her, she's going to be paying attention to what's happening. She's going to be going, Oh, here he comes up there. He's reaching into his treat pouch. There's the treat. I'm going to get paid. And we made the connection. But if I'm walking towards my dog to reward her and she's going, here comes the treat. Here comes the treat. Here comes the treat squirrel. Now I've lost her focus and now we've left that event. So again, this is the reward event. Now a reward event can be broken if we lose the dog's focus. But as long as the dog maintains focus, we have lots of time to deliver the reward. So if you understand the concept of markers, this can really help out your training. So you don't feel like you have to rush all the time to get the reward to your dog within that first second or so of them completing the behavior. Now, of course the dog's going to learn better and faster. The closer the actual reward is to the behavior, but you're not always going to be able to get the reward to your dog within that first second or so of them completing the behavior. So we use our markers to help facilitate this to where they know it's coming, even though we can't get it to them right away. So let me show you what I mean. I'm going to tell her to go to the climb bed. And then I'm going to walk away. So her, yes, if I say that she knows, and I say it slightly different than how I'm saying in conversation. If I say that she's going to know that I'm going to bring a reward to her. So I'm going to walk back a little bit. And once I say it, as I start to walk towards her, you're going to see she'll be licking her lips and she's going to be excited that I'm coming to get the reward or bring the reward to her. Yes. So you saw that she licked her lips once. She didn't do it that many times, but she knew that the reward was coming. So markers are incredibly valuable. Remember I said two main reasons, one, bridge the gap gap between the behavior and the consequence. And then number two, it helps us pinpoint very fine details within our training. So even if I am able to give the reward to my dog, so like if I'm trying to get her to sit, I can just give her the food the moment she does the behavior. I don't need the marker, but even if I have the dog right next to me and I can get them the treat quickly, sometimes we can use that marker to pinpoint a very fine detail within the training. So let's say I'm doing that backwards follow exercise that we were doing earlier for those reward or food handling exercises. I can start bringing my hands down, which is known as fading. We're fading that physical cue. And as I bring my hands down, she's looking straight up at me. Then I can mark the behavior of her looking up at me. And then I can follow it up with the reward. And even if she drops her head down to get the treat, she still knows it was looking up at me that triggered that reward event. I'll show you what I mean. So I'm going to use the common call. I'm going to keep my hands behind my back, come and see she's looking up at me. That's the picture that I want free. And now she starts looking for where the reward is going to come. Now, if you notice, she looked off to my left, I will reward opposite hand of what the dog is expecting the reward to come from. So if my dog looks to the left, I'm going to reward off to the right. And that's because dogs will end up usually choosing a preference. They'll pick a side that they prefer. And then your dog is really going to be focusing on one hand. If you always reward in the direction your dog is looking. So keep that in mind as well when you are doing these exercises, but that's the value of the markers. They are incredibly, incredibly powerful. So again, we are going to charge the marker by saying the word before we deliver the reward. We do that enough times until the dog becomes classically conditioned. So that was by Pavlov, the whole dinner bell theory. And he also discovered that if the sound came at the exact same time, or if the sound came while the dog was eating, they never became classically conditioned. The sound must come before the reward. So now what we're going to do is we're going to take those reward events that we had practiced earlier. And now all we're going to do is we're going to put that marker before the reward event. So we marked the behavior. We entered the reward event. Once she gets the reward, that concludes that reward event. And then we do it again. And what I'm looking for is I want my dog looking up in my direction. So we can have our dog focus on two different things. Either one, we can have our dogs focus on the source, which is fine. So they're focused on the food source, or we can have the dog focus up on our face. All right. She's looking at my hand here. So now I'm going to pull it away. There. She's looking at my face now. So we can have them look at our face or our hands. Either one is fine, but I do like to get them used to looking up. So I hold my hands up by my face. When I start this exercise, when the dog looks up at that direction, whether they're looking at the source or my face, then I'm going to mark the behavior. There's going to be a half second pause. Then I'm going to enter the reward event. So I'm going to show you what that looks like right now. I'm going to get my dog in front of me. Don't worry about commands. A lot of times when people start this, they're trying to tell the dog to sit or down, do it. Don't worry about that. All you're looking for is your dog looking up at you, whether they're sitting or standing. It doesn't really matter. You're going to say the marker. The moment your dog looks at you. Now she's staring at me because we've done this plenty of times, but when you first start, the moment your dog looks, that's when you mark. Remember duration can often kill motivation. If your dog looks at you and you're sitting there and you're going, all right, I got to say the word I have to pause. And then I'm going to move. I got my supply. If you have all these things going on in your head, you're going to do it very poorly. So you want to be good at this. This is why we practice a lot of this stuff prior to build these skills. Dog looks, we mark pause for that half second, enter the reward event. So this is what it's going to look like. And I'm going to use one marker for every single one. If you want, you can use different markers, but the easiest way is to start with one. This is going to be a termination marker. It means release plus reward. Notice the pause free. Very good. Ari. Nice job. So that was a bigger event that when I gave it to her free. Good job. Couple in the center. Free. Very nice. Sorry. Excellent. Good job. And you see how she's starting to move before I do free. Very good. Nice work. I want to see if I have another big piece. No, I don't. I don't think so. Bummer. All right. I'm not going to toss it cause I don't have a bigger piece. I don't want her sniffing the ground, but you could also say free and toss the treat free and toss the treat free. Very nice. Free. And if you're using a clicker, this is where you would click and then move. And again, notice we have that half second pause, roughly the half second pause between the free and the movement. Another thing is I say free the same way every time I'm going free. I sound like a broken record. You don't want to do this. Your dog performs well and you let's say you're using the word. Yes. Very common. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. That's not a marker anymore. So clickers were very successful for two main reasons. One, the click always sounds the same. And number two, it's much easier for most people to separate a physical from a verbal click or I'm sorry, a, uh, it's much easier for someone to separate two physicals click reward than it is for them to separate a physical and a verbal. Yes. Reward. That's harder for most people. So those are the two main reasons why clickers were successful. These exercises, when I do engagement training with the dog, maybe I'll do it for one to three minutes. It's very short. It's fun. Lots of movement. The dog should enjoy it. Then we end the session when they're still invested. You want your dog to go, that's it. It's over. You're like, don't worry. We'll do it again later. And then they're going to have more excitement, more energy for the next session because we ended it when they were still invested. You don't want to do this when your dog's already full and you don't want to do this to the point where your dog's like, Oh, I'm stuffed. I'm not interested anymore. And they go lay down. You want them still invested when you end the session. So when you're done, you go all done and then you can go and put your dog up or inside or whatever. And this, if you do it correctly, if you say the marker before the reward event, most dogs can become conditioned, classically conditioned within a couple days. So Pavlov came up with that whole concept of classical conditioning and classical conditioning is just when we take a neutral stimulus, like the word yes or the word no, and we pair it up with something that is either good or something that the dog perceives as unpleasant if we're using no as a correction. So it makes the dog change the way they react because we take a neutral stimulus. We pair it with the unconditioned stimulus, which is the actual primary reinforcer, food, toy, affection, or even a correction. And then they end up having a condition response to the neutral stimulus. And that's basically what classical conditioning is. You probably have also heard, or maybe someone has mentioned at some point counter conditioning. Counter conditioning is the exact same thing as classical conditioning. The only difference is we are pairing a fear inducing stimulus to something that the dog likes. So that's the difference that we're looking at classical conditioning and counter conditioning, but we use classical conditioning throughout our training and throughout this program. So it's important for you to understand how that works. From my experience, knowing and understanding how to use a marker is going to greatly enhance your overall skills as a trainer. So take the time to get good at this. And I also want to point out in the video, I said that counter conditioning is when we're taking a fear inducing stimulus and we're changing what it means by changing what it predicts. It doesn't necessarily always have to be fear inducing, but something that the dog perceives as a negative. And the way that I think about how this works within the training is when I think about classical and opera conditioning. Now classical conditioning primarily focuses on the dog's emotional state, whereas opera conditioning is mostly focused on the dog's behavior. But if I can classically condition the dog to a word or sound that makes them feel good and happy and excited, I can take that emotional state and I can connect it to behaviors. I want the dog to repeat, effectively making the dog happy and excited and all those feel good sensations to train and work with me. So this is really powerful and it makes such a big difference when we think about our dog's emotion and not just the dog's behavior by itself. Next week or in our next lesson, we're going to be going over luring at least the introduction to luring, how we're going to use that in our training and how we can get a dog to do a forward lure with a few basic, simple exercises. So make sure you check that out. If you liked the video, hit the like button. If you haven't subscribed, subscribe, it helps the channel out a lot and I really would appreciate it. And you know, if you want, leave a comment. Thanks again. I'll see you guys in the next one.