Episode #35 A Bribe Or A Payment?

A key in dog training is to quickly transition from luring your puppy to rewarding your puppy. What does that mean? Learn how to effectively use food as a motivator in dog training without getting your puppy hooked on it. We want him to perform even when we don't have food. How do we do that? Have a listen.

Transcript

speaker 0:   0:00
This is The Puppy Training Podcast episode #35: A Bribe Or A Payment? This podcast is designed to help you on your journey of becoming best friends through love and learning as you train your own dog from home, and I'm here to help you every step of the way. This is The Puppy Training Podcast, and I'm your host, Amy Jensen.  

speaker 0:   0:28
Hey, everyone, how's it going? Welcome to the podcast today. I'm super excited to be here with you. This episode is a key in dog training and something that we all need to understand, so I'm super excited to share it with you today. But first, if you are looking for the perfect Christmas gift, maybe you know someone getting a puppy, maybe you're getting a puppy soon, a lifetime membership to BaxterandBella, the Online Puppy School is just the thing. In fact, if you want to go on to our website www.BaxterandBella.com, enter 'podcast' in the cart and you'll save some money.  

speaker 0:   1:02
Let's talk about the topic of the day: A bribe or a payment? Often times in dog training we use a method called luring to teach our dog new behaviors. I like luring as a method because it's a very fast way to get our dog to do something that we want. We're gonna talk a little bit more about that in just a minute. But today, specifically, this podcast is going to help you move from using a food reward or other reward as a bribe or a lure to get your dog to do something, and we want to quickly transition that over to payment or a reward. We don't want to continually be luring our dog or bribing our dog to do things. Sometimes you'll hear people say 'My dog will only do something if I have food' or more specifically, 'if he knows I have food, he'll listen, but if I don't have any food on me, my dog doesn't listen to me'. Sometimes people steer away from using food in dog training, but here's why. I like to use it. I use food to train puppies because it's number one, a motivator. It is a very high motivator for dogs. They love food. I can use it to get their attention. I can't start training until I have a dog's attention, and food is a great way to get that attention. Also, it's a very positive way to train. I'm paying my puppy. I'm rewarding my puppy for doing things that I'm asking him to do, so he's not performing out of fear, he's motivated. He's motivated to work, he has a reason to work, he knows he's going to get something for it, so it's rewarding to him, and he's happy to do it. The puppies that I train come with wagging tails, happy body language, they are excited to be with me, and they're excited to do things. That's why I like this way of training. I like to feel happy and positive. I don't like to feel frustrated or mean or stern. Yes, there's some of that in dog training because they need to know their boundaries, but I think for the most part, on a daily basis, we can get a lot of things out of our dogs with just positive reinforcement. Again, we use food because it's a motivator. Learning can't occur unless something is motivated. If our animal is not motivated to learn, they're not going to do it. If you ask a teenager to go mow the lawn, unless there's some kind of reward or payment there, there's not any motivation to do it, then they're probably not gonna want to do it. They'd rather go do something else. In order to get something done, we have to find this motivation, and food is fabulous for this. It's how we use the food that solves the initial problem of is a bribe or is it a payment?  

speaker 0:   3:29
Let's talk a little bit more about that. The reason we start with luring is it's a very quick way to get a dog to do something. Think of training your puppy to sit. If I want my puppy to sit, I'm gonna put some food in my hand, I'm gonna put it right over his nose, up and over his nose, up in over his head so that has to look up to see the food, by doing that, his rear end usually hits the ground, I can mark 'yes' the second he sits and give him the food reward. That's luring. You're basically showing your dog you have something yummy, he's following your hand. You can get a dog to roll over, to turn, to touch your hand, to sit, lie down, all sorts of things using this method of luring. The trick comes when we keep luring. If I always lower my dog into a sit or I always bribe, essentially, my dog into the down position, or I'm always bribing him to go in his crate by putting my hand in there with food. He's not necessarily learning at that point in time, he's just following the food. If you were to get rid of the food at that point because you were always luring him, he would probably be like, 'What do you want me to do? There's no food in your hand', so it's very important that once our puppy knows a behavior. So we've lured him maybe four or five times, and then he figures out, 'Oh, that's what she's wanting me to do', we need to take the food out of the hand that we're using, you can still use a hand signal, but we're gonna take the food out and hide it, so it's either going to go behind my back or maybe it's in a bowl on the counter, but it's going to be put away, and it's gonna come out only after the dog does something. That's the key. We're switching from showing our puppy this food and luring him around into position, to hiding the food and it comes out after the behavior has been performed. Then you're not gonna have a dog that's dependent on food. We're simply paying him for listening, and there are various ways that we can use intermittent reinforcement schedules and varying the times that he gets treats and how often, how many behaviors he has to do before he gets a reward, things like that. We're also going to change the reward from strictly food to throw in some life rewards. Maybe he wants a belly rub. Maybe he wants attention. Maybe he wants to play a game of fetch. That kind of thing again. The key is you can use luring to teach a behavior, I highly recommend it, it is a fast way to get your dog to do a behavior, and then after your puppy does it four or five times with the food lure, I just take the food out of my hand, but I hold my hand in the same position. There's a little dog training tip for you. When you're teaching your dog to do something, we don't want to change too many variables. We want to keep ourselves as much the same as possible to help them in their learning process. So when I'm moving into taking that food out of my hand, I'm just going to use my other hand to hold the food but my hand had the food in it -- that sounds a little confusing, we'll go over this again -- is going to look the same as if I'm holding food, but I'm not really holding the food at that point. So nothing really has changed, except for that one little detail that the food is not actually in the hand I'm using to help my dog get into position. That's going to be step one in changing over from the bribe to making it a payment. Again, this is a crucial step in dog training because we don't want our dogs to be dependent on food, we just use the food because it is a super high motivator and it gets them willing to work and wanting to work and to learn new things and to perform what we're asking them to do, so it's important that we have a motivator, but we don't want to use it always as a lure or a bribe. Let's talk about another example. Let's say that you want to teach your puppy to go in his crate. I would start with the food lure, I would show my puppy what I have, I'm gonna lure him inside the crate by putting my hand and the food reward inside to crate as well. When my puppy walks in with all four feet, I'm gonna mark 'yes', and give him the food reward. Then I'll release him so he can come back out. I'm gonna repeat that about four or five times. I want my puppy to get used to the fact that we're going in the crate, he's coming out of the crate. He's going in the crate, he's coming out of the crate, and each time he gets a nice food reward when I say 'yes'. Along with that step, you can start to introduce the cue, kennel or crate, whatever you'd like to use for this behavior, and you would say that and then you would take your lure and lure him in, mark 'yes', and release him, and then repeat several times. So he's starting to learn that this cue, this word, crate or kennel means that he needs to go in with all four feet inside of his kennel and then he's going to wait until you say 'OK' or 'release' for him to come back out. That's great. Once your puppy's to that point, this is where we want a transition the bribe into a payment. I'm no longer going to have the food in my hand. I'm now going to still use my hand is a little bit of a bridge to help him, this little hand signal that I have of going in the crate and back out again. The second I mark 'yes', I can go get the food reward and give it to him. So the payment came out or the food came out after he did the behavior of going in the crate, and then I would say 'OK' or 'release', and he could come back out again, and that's how I would continue. I would continue to practice that way without food in my hand for four or five more times. Then you can fade out even further. You can get rid of the hand going in, and you can simply stand next to the crate, maybe point at the door, but your hands no longer going to go inside of the crate with the puppy and say 'crate' or 'kennel', he'll go in with all four feet, mark 'yes', go grab your food reward from either behind your back or from the counter, whatever is close by, but definitely not in your hand that you used to point to the crate, keeping that separate again because, remember, were transitioning from bribing to payments, so the payment has to come out after our puppy has done something. Then you can release him and you can come out of his crate.  

speaker 0:   9:07
That's the big picture, you guys. You can start with the food lure in your hand, and some people like to use a toy as well. You don't always have to use food. I just generally start with food because it's such a high motivator for puppies. But you might have a puppy that love's a squeaky toy better, and you could squeak that toy and lure him in the crate with the squeaky toy. Same idea. That's okay. You can get that behavior started with a lure or a bribe, we just want to move quickly into the next phase of 'I'll pay you for going in your crate. I'll reward you for going in, but I'm not gonna bribe you to go in'. That's a really, really important key and dog training.  

speaker 0:   9:42
Okay, you guys, that's what I have for you this week. I hope that's helpful. If you have any questions about it, let me know, but it is an important concept to get down. I don't want you guys to be luring and luring and luring over and over again, so after your puppy gets to the concept of whatever it is you're trying to teach him, stop putting that food or that toy or whatever is the reward for him in that hand and eventually phase out that hand signal as well if you like, and just say that verbal cue for your puppy to respond. Then, of course, we're gonna pay him really well after now. That's a whole other topic on how we pay, how often we should pay, what we should pay with, so maybe that will have to be a future podcast that will get into all right. It was nice talking to you guys. Happy training. Have a wonderful week and I'll talk to you next week. If you have a question about anything you heard on this podcast or any other puppy training question, visit my site BaxterandBella.com to contact me.