01 OctEpisode 172 | Where should you deliver a treat? The (easily forgotten) importance of treat placement during training
If you want to get the best work out of employees, do you send them on a scavenger hunt each week when it's time for them to get paid, or do you put the money directly into their bank account? When it comes to dog training, it's equally important to think about where you're delivering "payment." Annie suggests where you might want to put a treat, depending on the circumstances, why this is an important thing to think about, and talks about how she once witnessed a dog training miracle that involved nothing but a paper plate.
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Mentioned in this episode:
Liquid Treat Dispenser at Store for the Dogs
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Transcript:
Annie:
I wanted to give a quick update on the friend I spoke to during last week's episode. Right after we talked, she text messaged me: “Thank you for having this conversation with me tonight. I'm so clueless. I feel so comforted after our talk. Can't wait to try the Flirt Pole, and I bought some bully sticks already. We'll get lots of toys and I will do everything you said.”
And then the next morning she wrote me, “I literally just made a maze on the ground with his food this morning. And he was so happy. I should've called you when my kid was struggling in school and was quote unquote bored. He really was bored, and we fixed it by packing his schedule with activities.”
And then about a month passed. And I didn't hear from her. And I had sent her access to a couple of our on demand courses. But I could see she hadn't logged in. And I thought, you know, maybe she did decide to go the shock collar route, or maybe they decided to re-home the dog.
So anyway, I texted her to check in and she wrote, “Hi, I was just thinking of how grateful I am for your help today. We had a playdate with a Coonhound. Much better. I did what you recommended with the intro to drop it by throwing hotdog pieces at him that helped a lot. Mike,” that’s her husband, “occasionally works with him in the field.” He does skeet shooting? Or I don't know what you call it. Something with guns. [laughs] “Mike occasionally works with him in the field but has the shock collar on vibrate just to get his attention to come back. He's having lots of play dates with my mom's dogs.”
So that was really nice to hear. And I'm glad she and the pup and the family are doing well. Tangentially related, if you are in the New York City area and you were trying to figure out how to get some good play time in for your dog, which was one thing that she and I spoke about last week, do make sure to check out a School for the Dogs’ web page, where we have information about our off-leash sessions.
We have puppy play times for dogs under 20 weeks, throughout the week. We also have a really cool service, really unique, called school yard, which is a trainer supervised members-only dog run. You can apply to join at schoolforthedogs.com/application. We have an indoor outdoor space where we hold it. The outdoor space is covered in case of rain. The indoor space is of course cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
And we put in a lot of effort to curate which dogs are there. There's a maximum of six dogs. And it's a really nice way for dogs to be able to play with dogs that they are truly friends with, rather than what happens so often at dog parks, where dogs show up and just end up trying to play with whoever may be there.
I will link in the show notes to the episode I did with Adam Davis, who is our off-leash program manager, but check it out. You can learn more about schoolyard, puppy playtime and all of our services schoolforthedogs.com/services.
[music and intro]
Annie:
When I was doing the Karen Pryor Academy, 11 years ago, when I was going through that and going to their four weekend workshops as part of the course with Steve Benjamin in Endicot New York — Steve is an excellent trainer. I learned so much from him. I hope to, at some point in the near future, have him on the podcast.
Anyway, there was this one moment that really blew my mind and it involved a paper plate. So, there was another student in the class. There were only three of us, and she was struggling to get a lot of reps in a row with the dog she was working with. I think she was teaching the dog to target something, maybe to target a cone, and the dog was going and touching the cone and then coming back to her and to get the treat.
And I think she was experimenting, maybe, with tossing the treat so that the dog didn't have to come all the way back to her. But she kept tossing the treat, and then the dog couldn't find where the treat was on the ground and was sniffing around for it.
And Steve put a paper plate on the ground and said, put the treat there.
So she did. And the next trial, the dog knew exactly where to go to get his reward. And it was just a little moment of, it was just a real aha moment for me, a real moment of seeing how simple and beautiful problem solving it can be when it comes to dog training, because it made so much sense.
When you're training, whatever it is you're training, you want as much time as possible spent teaching your dog what it is you want your dog to learn. You don't want a lot of time spent with your dog learning about how to find a treat, looking for a treat, chewing a treat, picking up the crumbs from the treat. If learning is something that's happening all the time, you want as much of the time as possible focused on the dog learning what you have in mind for him or her to learn.
If you are a reward based trainer, you've probably thought a lot about what kinds of rewards you're going to use. And if and when you're using food rewards, you've probably thought about what kinds of food rewards you're gonna use. What is your dog gonna like, what are you gonna be able to deliver quickly and easily? What can be broken up into very small pieces? What is gonna be interesting to your dog, but not overly filling, et cetera, et cetera.
Of course, you should also be thinking about how you're going to be delivering your food rewards to your dog, if and when you're using food rewards. Now with dogs, this is pretty straightforward most of the time. I like to keep my treats in my non-dominant hand, if I'm using a clicker, I keep my clicker in the same hand so that I have one hand totally free.
But you also might keep your treats in a plate somewhere out of reach for your dog or in a treat pouch. You might prefer having the clicker in your dominant hand. Whatever you're gonna do, just make sure to put some thought into it.
And certainly you wanna make sure that you are not reaching for a food reward or also that you really don't have it super visible until after you click or use a marker word if you are doing training that is going to involve either of those things, because you want your dog focused on figuring out what it is that you want, not focused on there's food in your hand, how do I get that food into my mouth?
You can get caught in treatland that way, and our goal is to not be luring our dogs here and there with food, but to be teaching them how to figure things out so that they hear that click or marker word and then get the reward, which may or may not be food. And the more you train probably the less food treats food rewards you will use.
But with dogs, the logistics of getting the food into your dog's mouth, you know, it's pretty simple. You are either going to be tossing a treat or giving them a treat from your hand to their mouth. You may be using a liquid treat dispenser or some kind of liquid treat. We’re big fans of these at School for the Dogs. You can get our favorite refillable liquid treat dispenser at schoolforthedogs.com/ltd. And check out some of our lickable treat options at storeforthedogs.com.
But yeah, overall, not that complicated as opposed to training other kinds of animals, where it can be far more complicated to figure out how to deliver a food reward. For instance, if you're working with an animal in the wild, you may need to figure out how to deliver a food reward without them perceiving you at all. If you're working with an animal who is much smaller or much larger than you, that can certainly present its own challenges. And there are technologies for delivering food rewards to animals who are very different sizes from us.
It's the kind of thing that you generally don't think about until you're faced with another species and you have to figure out how to give them a food reward in an efficient way. For instance, in chicken training, which I've done a little bit of, we used a sort of a measuring cup with millet, I believe it was, in it and a clicker attached to measuring cup.
And before we started doing any real training with the chickens, we practiced holding this measuring cup very still at our chest, and then delivering it very quickly to a specific spot right in front of the chicken face, right after we clicked, and then bringing the measuring cup back to our chest, holding it very still there. There is an art, [laughs] there is an art and science to feeding a chicken during chicken training.
Now, I don't wanna suggest that the “what” of reward delivery is unimportant. It is very important to be quite thoughtful about selecting food rewards. I also wanna underscore the point that it is crucial to think about how you are delivering your food rewards. You want to, like I said, be as still as possible, not delivering that treat earlier than necessary. You want to have a plan in place. You want to know exactly where your treats are going to be during a training session.
But I want to stress that it is very important, and I think frequently overlooked, that you want to be equally thoughtful about where your dog is going to get their food reward.
Now, sometimes you are going to want to reward your dog in the place where you want them to be during training. An example of this is if you are training loose leash walking, we call it the magic zone. That's where you're going to wanna reward your dog, depending on your dog's height. That might be by your ankle, by your knee, by your thigh, by your hip. I guess it depends on your height too.
But generally speaking, whether or not you're using a clicker or a marker word, you want them to be getting the yummy stuff in the spot where you want them to be. Kind of like with chicken training, I like to have the treat — I often use a liquid treat dispenser when teaching loose leash walking. I like to kind of hold it up by my chest and then deliver it in a very…what's the word, a concerted way or a very thoughtful way periodically, while I'm walking, in that specific spot. And what happens is a dog learns to default to that spot. That magic zone area is where good things in the form of yummy edible stuff tends to appear.
Sometimes trainers talk about clicking for behavior and rewarding for placement. So if you're using a clicker while you're loose leash walking or a marker word, you're marking or clicking at the moment when your dog it's not pulling. And then you're rewarding in the spot where you want the dog to be.
You’re rewarding because the click is a contract that needs to be followed by a reward, but you are rewarding for placement also. You are rewarding in the place you want them to learn to like. You are using that food reward to create a good association with being in that space, in that area.
But sometimes you might actually reward in the opposite spot from where you want the dog to be often. This is the case when you are resetting a dog. For instance, if you want to train a dog to go to a mat or go to a bed, you might toss the treat away off of the bed to reset them so that they then have a reason to go back to the bed.
Frequently, I will start training a dog to go to something like a mat — I like using like a yoga mat — by rewarding on the mat. After they go there, I click when they get there, I reward on the mat, and then I will toss a treat off the mat to reset them. But usually pretty quickly, I will stop delivering any reward on the mat and only will deliver a reward off the mat so that I can get more of those repetitions in.
And sometimes I'll even skip giving the treat on the mat to begin with. It can be nice to do that in the beginning to, again, to create a good association with the mat to encourage the dog to be interested in the mat. But in many cases, especially with a dog who's done more training, you can skip that all together and simply deliver the food reward off the mat to reset the dog.
Similarly, when I am teaching a dog to look up at me, teaching eye contact or attention, I like to reward the dog right in front of me on the ground, which forces the dog to put his or her head down. And then what happens once the head is down? Well, there's nowhere else to go except up. So I'm using where I'm putting the treat in order to really secure the chances that the dog is going to do what it is I want, which is look up.
Likewise, if I wanna teach Bow to a dog, which is just sort of the opposite thing, I will reward above the dog's head because that forces the dog to put their head up as high as their head can go. And what is gonna happen after that? Well, if the dog's head is fully extended up, it has nowhere else to go, but down. So that gives me a chance to then click the behavior of lowering the head.
Now, it's not only important in order to refine your training to think about where you're gonna put the food reward. It can also be a way that's gonna keep your dog from kind of like dropping out of school. It might seem counterintuitive, but even in reward-based training, a dog can get frustrated and kind of give up.
Now, that's one reason why we're always trying to, like I said, get a lot of reps, raise criteria in very small increments, make sure that we're setting up our dogs for success. But if your dog is having to work too hard in order to find the food reward, they might become less and less interested in training.
Kiki Yablon, who I had on a few weeks ago, she posted an example of this recently on Facebook, which I thought was great, where she said how she really hates it when she's getting change from a place, and they give her the bills on her hand and then put the coins on top of the bills, how this of course causes the coins to slide off and is not the most seamless delivery of money.
Now, every person is different. I can't say that that bothers me that much when that happens, but I can certainly see how it might be annoying. And if you are a shop and you're trying to encourage people to come to your shop, you might want to be thoughtful about how you are giving people the cash that they get after they make a transaction with you, the cash and the coins, I should say.
The analogy that I've used many times with clients, and really, I think what I thought of as soon as I saw Steve Benjamin put that paper plate on the ground, was that it's like paying your employees or getting paid by direct deposit.
As an employer, Kate and I want our employees to not be spending a lot of time chasing down their paycheck each week. I don't think that that would be a good use of their time, and I would rather that they spend their time doing the good work I'm paying them to do. I also think if they had to go on a scavenger hunt to get their paycheck each week, it probably would not endear them to us as their employers.
As a former freelance writer, I certainly know what it is to have to chase down people in order to get paid for assignments. And I can think of several occasions where the process of trying to get paid for work that I did was so punishing that I never worked for those people or those places again.
So don't do that to your dog. Pay them by direct deposit, as it were, whenever you can. Make it easy for them to get their food reward. Use the placement of the food reward to up the chances that you're gonna get behaviors that you want to get. And that is the moral of the story here.
Next week, I am going to try and do a Q and A episode. So if you have a Q and you would like an A, go to Anniegrossman.com/ask to submit your question. If I am able to answer it on the podcast or live on Instagram, I will try to let you know in advance. Thanks for listening.
[music and outro]
