16 JulEpisode 16 | The Dog Training Triad Part 1: Management
There are three major ingredients required in any positive reinforcement-based dog training plan. They are: Management, Timing, and Rewards. This episode is about Management, and is the first of a three part series on the Triad.
Simply put, management is all about making the right options the easy options for your learner in order to up the chances of getting the behaviors you want. In this episode, Annie looks at the many ways in which we can set up our dog students for success by controlling their physical space, and the ways in which we can also smartly manage their time and energy.
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Transcript:
Annie:
Hey there everyone. So today I am going to talk about management and this is going to be the first part of a three part series on what I call the training triad. And this triad as its name would suggest is made up of three things. Management being the first, the other two are timing and rewards. And I think that with any kind of training that you're doing, management, timing and rewards are the three things that you need to consider in order to basically get whatever it is you want out of your dog in whatever the training situation is.
So when we're thinking about management, in terms of dog training, we're really thinking about the stage that we're setting. We're thinking about all the parameters within which our dog is going to exist and thrive and have a great likelihood of doing the things that we want him or her to do, and not have a lot of opportunities to do the things we don't want him or her to do.
The three most important things that we're managing when we're training dogs is their space, their time and their energy. And while these are really three things, I kind of lump them together into two: with space being one and time and energy being the other.
So let's talk about space first. Now there are certainly a lot of things that you're probably already doing without even thinking about it, to manage your dog's space. You might be managing your dog's environment by using a crate or using a penned area. Even a leash is a management tool, right? Could you teach your dog to walk nicely next to you and never run in the street? Absolutely. But with a leash you're greatly reducing the likelihood that your dog is going to have a chance to run across the street when you don't want him to. And I know that sounds kind of obvious, but I think it's worth pointing out because a lot of the time, when we're managing our dog's space, in order to encourage behaviors we want or not allow behaviors, we don't want to occur, the management techniques that we use are gonna seem kind of obvious. But that should be good news because dog training doesn't need to be hard and complicated in order to be effective.
And a lot of the time as dog trainers, when we're giving management solutions, I am sure our clients are like, “oh, wow, I can't believe I just paid someone to come tell me this obvious thing, but I probably wouldn't have thought of it on my own.” For example, do you have a dog who is going into your closet and taking your shoes out and chewing them-close your closet door? Do you have a dog who's peeing on the rug – roll up the rug. Now you might say, but I just want my dog to know that he shouldn't chew on my shoes or pee on rugs. But the thing is, if we have the option to set things up so that your dog is never going to do those things to begin with, then he is never going to have to learn X, Y, or Z, it's something that shouldn't be done because it's just never going to be an option.
It's important to remember that positive reinforcement is happening all the time. It's not just something that we do to teach dogs something, anything they do that they find enjoyable is being positively reinforced. So once your dog pees on the rug, peeing feels good. The behavior of peeing on the rug has been positively reinforced. Once your dog finds a pair of shoes and chews on the shoes and realizes how much fun shoe chewing is as a hobby, the behavior of chewing on shoes has been positively reinforced and anything that's positively reinforced is more likely to happen again.
So even if your dog already has built up the habit of peeing on a rug, once you remove that rug, the behavior of peeing on the rug is not going to keep happening, right? It's like, he's not going to keep working out that muscle. The memory of the enjoyment of rug peeing is going to move farther and farther into the past.
Now, especially when you have a puppy, there are an endless number of things in your home that your puppy could find to do that will be positively reinforcing to do that are not activities that you want him or her to know about, right? And this is why you do a lot of the puppy proofing that you do, right? You don't keep things on low shelves that your puppy could get to. You don't keep things that you don't want your puppy to eat on a low coffee table. You make sure your puppy doesn't have access to places where he or she is going to get to chew on cords. But the main way that you're going to manage your dog’s space and not let them develop these habits that are going to be positively reinforced that you don't want them to have habits you don't want them to learn is by controlling their space.
And you can do this by teaching them to be in a crate or by keeping them on a leash with you in your home. Or if you have a dog that's small enough, you can literally have them in a bag or just carry them. When I'm watching a puppy, I feel like I spent a lot of time with a puppy, like literally under my arm, because I know that a puppy who is under my arm is not going to be in the other room, getting into trouble. And as far as a bag goes, you know, if you're not even leaving your home, it can just be any tote bag. It doesn't have to be a dog specific carrier. And if you're using a crate, I always suggest using the smallest crate possible for the size of your dog. Even if that means eventually you're going to need to get another crate.
I believe I talked about this a few episodes ago, in episode I did on housebreaking, but the reason you want a crate that small and not just a big crate with a divider in it is the smaller, the crate is the easier it's going to be for you to bring it with you from room to room. And if you have a small puppy, you can even put it on your desk with you when you're working for example, or put it on the couch with you if you're hanging out on the sofa, I want you to treat the crate like a mobile safe spot, where you know exactly what your dog is going to be doing and not so much as a piece of furniture that just stays in one corner of one room.
Of course, it's important to teach your dog to like being in the crate. You can feed meals in the crate. You can give treats in the crate. You can do training with your dog in the crate. There are lots of things you can do to make the crate a happy spot. But one major thing is to have the crate with you so that you're spending time with your dog while your dog is in the crate. So it's not just a place where your dog is like, “Ugh, they put me in here when I'm going to be alone and it's boring. And it sucks.”
The way I think of it. It's like when we're thinking about management, we're thinking about how we can create a really narrow path on which your dog is just going to be really psyched to travel. It should be like the yellow brick road, right? There should just be lots of things that your dog wants to be doing on this road. And there are walls up so that your dog can't get off this road and discover all the other things that could be enjoyable, but we want your dog to not even notice those walls because your dog is so psyched to be on the path that we're providing.
It's almost like school is with kids or how it should ideally be with kids, right? I always think like probably the most important thing about school for me growing up was that, you know, I had to be in a specific building. My parents brought me there. They picked me up and between the hours of eight and three or whatever it was, they knew exactly where I was. There was literally a guard at the door, making sure I was in that building. And whatever happened in that building, you know, ideally should have been, you know, enjoyable, educational, whatever, but it almost doesn't even matter because it was more about all the things that weren't happening because I didn't have the option to not be in that building. Because if I could have chosen to not be in that building, think about all the other things I could have learned to enjoy, right? But my parents never had to worry about me breaking the habit of smoking cigarettes on the street corner, in the afternoon, or hopping on a bus to another state or doing drugs in the park, right? I never developed any of those habits because, you know, I'm sure if I had discovered how much fun it would have been to do any of those things, those behaviors would have been positively reinforced. And then those would have been habits. My parents would have had to deal with and try to remedy, but I didn't do those things because I wasn't aware that those were even options of things to be done in the world because I was either at home or at school and I had someone bringing me back and forth from one of those two places.
And actually when you think about it, all the afterschool programs that exist, you know, especially for what they call “at risk youth”, are about managing where kids are spending their time and of course how they're spending their time and energy. But like I said, we're going to talk more about time and energy next. I did have a couple other things I wanted to say about managing space, but I think it's worth pointing out that there are lots of ways in which we do try and manage people's space in order to keep them from doing things we don't want them to do or to encourage them to do things we do want them to do. And often that comes down to simply limiting what the available options are.
So when you want to teach a new behavior, for example, you know, you're going to want to do it in a room for instance, where there's not a whole lot of other things going on, because you're going to have a better chance of getting the behaviors you want, if you're not competing for your dog's attention. And that's why I often find it's also helpful to have a specific training spot, particularly something that is slightly raised. At School for the Dogs, we use Klimbs a lot, a Klimb that's K L I M B. They're just slightly elevated platforms. They're, oh I don't know, maybe a foot, a foot up from the ground. And there may be three feet square. For a bigger dog, you can of course put a few of them together or you can hack something similar out of something in your home. But the idea is just having an area that is slightly removed from everything else where your dog can focus on whatever it is you're working on training. And it's not so high that your dog can't jump off. They're low enough to the ground that most dogs can jump off without much of a problem.
But again, it's this yellow brick road idea. You want to create a spot that is a little bit removed from everything else and totally awesome so that your dog wants to be there. Your dog isn't being forced to be there. But I find that having just that little bit of distance from the ground keeps them more focused, keeps them less interested in investigating everything else that there is in the room. And the more time they spend on the platform, the more psyched they are to be there.
So just to recap, if you are working on training something new with your dog, think about your space, think about how you can literally control the environment in order to up the chances that you're going to have your dog's attention and focus, and that your dog is going to be inclined to do whatever it is you're trying to train him or her to do.
And if you are having issues with your dog, doing things you don't want him or her to do again, consider the space. Consider what your dog literally has access to and how you can change that access. I feel very strongly that when it comes to getting rid of behaviors we don't like, there is almost always a management solution that we can come up with that is going to be less aversive and more effective than any other solution that is possible for keeping the dog from doing whatever it is you don't want him or her to do.
You know, an example that dog trainers come upon all the time is dogs who won't stay in the yard. Could you get an invisible fence that shocks the dog whenever they attempt to leave the yard? Sure, you could do that. Could you keep the dog tethered all the time? Also, it's something you could try. Could you just not let your dog go outside unattended? Also a possibility. But I would say the best management solution, which might not seem like a training solution, but I would call it a training solution, would be to put up a fence, right? Physically make it impossible for your dog to leave the space where you want him or her to stay. But of course, you also want to make sure that within that contained space, your dog is having a great time, right? Yellow brick road. You want your dog to be psyched, to be in that space, to the point where he or she isn't even noticing that this fence has gone up, right? You don't want your dog being like , “if only I could be selling drugs on the street, right?” You want your dog to be really into being where he is, which brings us to our second point, which is how we can use smart management to manage our dog’s time and energy.
Now, obviously making sure your dog gets plenty of exercise is an important part of managing their behavior overall, right? You want your dog to exert his or her energy in an appropriate way and making sure that your dog is getting exercise every day and an adequate amount for whatever kind of dog you have is super important. I had a client who had a dog who peed and pooped in the yard all the time and the family never took the dog for walks. And this dog would just sit by the front door and cry all the time. And everyone in the house would yell at him for being so annoying, crying all the time. And again, like I said, often the management solution is a solution where I think someone is probably like, I can't believe I brought a dog trainer in to tell me this obvious thing. But I said, this dog needs to go on some good walks every day and if you can't provide that for him, then you need to hire someone. Because not only does he need to stretch his legs, burn some calories, but he also clearly is dying to see everything that's happening outside to smell the pees of all the other dogs in the neighborhood. There's all kinds of mental stimulation that takes place during a walk and this dog is being deprived of all of that which is producing this annoying behavior of crying inside all the time. Like I said, I think it can be hard to separate management of time and energy because the two things tend to go hand in hand.
When you have a puppy, a lot of managing their behavior has to do with making sure they get an adequate amount of play with other puppies. Puppies are basically designed to be playing with other puppies every day. The majority of the day when you think about how they are in their litters. And I think if we can at least get them 15 minutes a day of play with another puppy, uh, we're doing them such a favor, because otherwise they're basically trying to turn everything else into a puppy, right? Nipping at your socks, chewing on whatever they can find. That desire is so strong in them and so many of the things that puppies do that we don't like, I find, that those problems just totally go away if you're providing your puppy with just even a little bit of really good puppy puppy play time every day.
So, um, obviously if you're in Manhattan, we have Puppy Playtime six days a week. If you're not in Manhattan, find a trainer who hosts play times.Ask your vet if your vet has played times or else. Just ask your vet if they know someone else who has a puppy that's the same age as your puppy or nearly the same age as your puppy who lives near you because they don't need to play in great masses, right? One-on-one play is usually sufficient and they don't need to play for a very long time. I'd say 15 or 20 minutes is generally enough, but I think it can make a huge difference in the life of any puppy owner if you can get that for your pup daily.
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The last thing I want to talk about when it comes to managing time and energy is possibly the most important thing, which is how you're feeding your dog. I am a huge fan of what we call work to eat toys and these are any kind of toys that are providing your dog with a little bit of a challenge at mealtime. And I say meal time, of course, it doesn't have to be mealtime. You could put treats into these toys as well as regular meals. But I think it's a good idea to think about putting meals into these toys because your dog has to eat two or three times a day and each of those meal times is a great opportunity to manage how your dog is spending his or her time and expending his or her energy.
The way I see it is dogs really evolved to have jobs, right? It's only rather recently that they can count on us to put their meals into a bowl a few times a day and they don't have to worry about anything. But that doesn't mean they don't still have a very basic need to scavenge, to problem solve, to figure things out. And if we don't give dogs jobs, if we don't give them the opportunity to do those things, they're going to make up their own jobs and they're probably not going to be jobs that you want them to have.
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So there are lots of different types of work to eat toys and I'm not going to go into too much detail about all the different types because I am putting together an episode, which I will put out in a couple of weeks all about some of my favorites. And you can also see a nice breakdown of different kinds of work to eat toys. If you go to schoolforthedogs.com/worktoeat, and of course you can purchase a huge array of some of our favorites storeforthedogs.com.
But basically work to eat toys, there are different kinds. There's kind of, let's call it three categories. There are toys that work best with dry food or dry treats where you kind of put them into a ball or whatever the shape of the particular toy is and your dog's gonna knock it around until the treats or the dry food falls out, I call these kibble balls. Some of my favorites are the Bob-A-Lot and the Twist N Treat and a new one, uh, that I've recently discovered that's really cool called the Tikr that operates on a timer with holes that open at different intervals.
Then there are toys that I call Kong style toys. The Kong is kind of the best known work to eat toy. It's been around for a long time and these are toys that you stuff food into. One that I really like a lot is called the Toppl, which has by the company West paw in Montana and kind of looks like a big thimble. You can pack it really good with wet food or you can put cream cheese or peanut butter or anything like that in it and then freeze it. Well you don't have to freeze it, but I usually freeze these toys when I give them to my dog just because it makes them last all the longer and it makes him spend that much more time and that much more energy getting the food out.
Then there are toys that are kind of like bowls that have different, like, obstacles in them. I call these slow food bowls or just bowls with stuff going on in them. The Northmate feeder is one. The Buster maze is another. Mostly these are like hard plastic toys that sit on the floor. They're nice cause you don't, they don't move around, they stay in one place. You can put it in a dog's crate. It's really no harder than throwing your dog's food in a bowl to put it into one of these toys. You can use them with wet food or dry food or treats. You can freeze food and them. They're awesome. I also like them because again, I freeze most of my dog's food so I can stack these bowls really nicely in the freezer.
Gosh, I said there were three kinds of worksheet toys. Well, I guess I kind of missed missing two here. Snuffle mats or another kind of work to eat toys. These are kind of like slow food bowls except they're made of fabric. So you can't really use them with the wet food, but they're kind of like rugs or they have different kinds of snap on parts, but they're, they're fabric based toys that you can hide dry food in or, or treats.
And then also there are what's called puzzle toys. Uh, Nina Ottosson is the big brand of puzzle toys and puzzle toys are a little bit more complicated. Sometimes these are toys that have little drawers or flaps, different kinds of challenges that your dog has to conquer in order to get the food out. Anyway, like I said, I'll do a more comprehensive episode about work to eat toys, but I think even if you just get one or two work to eat toys and feed your dog his or her meals in the toy, even just once a day, but I mean, I would suggest every meal you're going to find that your dog has a lot less time and energy to use to do stuff you don't want your dog doing.
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So the reason that management is so important as a trainer who is trying to not use aversive methods is because we're trying to set up situations where we're not going to get behaviors we don't want because once we have behaviors we don't want then to get rid of them, you are often going to have to use punishment. Now I say “often” because I think with dog training it is possible to simply create new parameters to figure out how to manage your situation differently, so you don't necessarily have to punish a behavior. You're simply creating a situation where there's going to be no chance at that behavior is going to happen again. Now obviously I'd prefer if my management was so smart and so on point that the behavior didn't happen in the first place, but once it does usually reconstructing my parameters to avoid letting the opportunity happen again is going to be my go to method.
But I think it's interesting to note that with people, this method doesn't necessarily work so well. Now, of course, when you start to think about it, you'll see that your behavior is being managed all the time by forces that you're not necessarily thinking about – the buildings that we live in, the cities that we live in, the products we use. All of these things are designed in large part to encourage us to behave in certain ways and to not behave in other ways. And that control isn't just about space, right? Think about how you use your phone, for example, and all the thought that has gone into how to encourage you to spend as much time and energy as possible looking at that screen. When you begin opening your eyes to it, you'll start to see subtle and not so subtle ways that our behavior is being controlled almost all the time by forces that we didn't necessarily agree to have controlling us.
But one big difference that I have found between managing people and managing dogs, when you're trying to get or not get certain behaviors, is that with dogs you can often just change the parameters in order to make sure you're not going to keep getting an unwanted behavior. With people if you've already gotten the unwanted behavior and, again, as any kind of smart manager, whether you're dealing with dogs or people, it's always preferable to situations where you're not going to get the behaviors you don't want to begin with. But once you've gotten a behavior you don't want, it's usually wise to call it out, right? It's you, it's usually ill advised to simply change the parameters in order to stop the behavior from happening.
You know, an example would be putting someone in jail. If you're putting someone in jail, you are very seriously limiting the options of what they can do right there in a very fixed environment. But we don't usually put people in jail without telling them why they're being put there.
I had a situation with an employee who kind of repeatedly wasn't doing a good job. And rather than calling this person out on it and punishing this person's performance in any way, I tried to just keep changing the parameters of what I was requiring in order to make it more possible for this person to succeed. But I eventually realized I was actually only positively reinforcing this person's poor performance by narrowing my parameters and that I was really only positively reinforcing poor performance. You know, with humans, we can punish in very specific ways because we have language and if you really need to get rid of a behavior, sometimes I think that can be the best tool in your toolbox.
But when you're working with a dog, let's say you're working with a dog who has the issue of eating garbage on the street, I would absolutely say, think about management before you think about punishment in order to get rid of the behavior, right? Eating garbage on the street is inherently positively reinforcing behavior because nine times out of 10 they're probably going to find something delicious to put in their mouth and let's say your dog eats something off the street and then you do something your dog clearly doesn't like, whatever that is, yelling at your dog, hitting your dog, shocking your dog- I'm not suggesting doing any of these things. I'm just giving examples of punishment you might try to use. Well, it's possible your dog might think that eating something on this block is bad, but that eating something on that block isn't bad. Or it's possible your dog might simply associate being near you on a walk with something bad or it's possible that your dog will think eating a banana peel is bad, but eating a cigarette butt isn't bad. Of course, it's also possible that any punishment you're going to use really isn't going to matter because there's no way it can combat the intense enjoyment of scavenging and finding something delicious to eat on the street.
So management solution. Well, I would say put a muzzle on your dog unless you're going to only walk your dog on streets where there's absolutely no garbage on the street. And if you can find that magical street, let me know where it is. And then of course inside, make sure that your dog has lots of appropriate things to do to try and satiate that scavenging energy that he is accustomed to spending on the street.
The behavior of scavenging isn't so much the problem. It's scavenging on the streets so you can hide your dog's food in some of the toys like I was just talking about, or literally, you know, high delicious things under the couch, right? You can use smart management to control your dog's energy so that they're getting out some of that energy inside rather than on the sidewalks. Anyway, that's going to get you a lot farther than, uh, verbally trying to explain to your dog why it's not a good idea to eat things off the city streets.
Our Woof Shout Out today goes to my client, Maria of Brooklyn who has two dogs, Delilah and Apple. And Maria lives in a house with a backyard. And she came to me with an issue, which is that both her dogs were really too fearful to walk outside. And Maria wasn't that keen on walking them outside anyway. And it was okay because she lives in a big house with a big backyard and they go out there all the time. But the problem was that Apple was eating the grass in the yard and it was making her really sick. So I assessed the situation and I said, look, I think you have a few options here. One, you could teach these dogs to walk outside, she wasn't too keen on doing that. I said two, you could keep Apple on a leash when she's in your yard, but Maria didn't really want to do that because her dogs really loved to run around and play with each other.
So I said, okay, well your other two options are either to put a muzzle on Apple when she's outside in your yard or pave over your yard so there's no grass there, right? That's the ultimate management solution. And she did. She paved over her yard and her dogs love playing out there and Apple no longer gets sick from eating the grass.
Fun Dog Fact of the Day. Did you know that the Kong toy got its name because someone thought it resembled what King Kong's earplugs would look like? True story.
I'm putting together a Q and A episode coming up in the next couple of weeks. If you have a question you'd like answered, please ask it through Anchor, just click the send a voicemail button or you can call and leave a voicemail 917-414-2625 email at podcast@schoolforthedogs.com.
Links:
School for the Dogs podcast, How to Housetrain your Dog
