06 AugEpisode 19 | How to train a dog to “sit” from scratch
Newsflash: Your dog already knows how to sit! But he may not know the cue you want to associate with that behavior. Annie breaks down how to use the "capturing" technique to teach "sit" anew and to add a novel cue.
She covers:
-The downsides of "luring" a behavior or "molding" it
-The trap of trying to teach a behavior by asking for it repeatedly
-The difference between a "cue" and a "command"
-How to add a cue
-The never-ending process of "shaping" a behavior
-How to fade a lure and turn it into a cue
Subscribe: iTunes
Podcast Episode 19: How to train a dog to “sit” from scratch
Transcript:
Annie:
Hey everyone. I am so glad you are here. Today we are going to talk about how to teach a dog to sit and whether or not your dog already knows how to sit. We're going to start from scratch. You can always start from scratch. And of course if your dog does already know how to sit he or she might not know, however, the word or whatever cue you have attached to that behavior.
So rather than use the word “sit,” which I think if you've tried to teach your dog to sit before, if you have taught your dog to sit before, that's probably the cue you've used, we are going to use a new cue, just for the sake of showing how to teach something totally from scratch. The cue we're going to use is either going to be a finger snap or a hand clap. I usually do two.
But before I get into the details of how to teach this behavior, I want to talk about some of the common ways sit is taught and I'll talk about some of the pros and cons of using these methods. And then we will go over how we teach it at School for the Dogs.
Now, I think probably the most traditional way of teaching “sit” is basically just to say the word sit until your dog sits and then praise your dog, kind of like the word “sit” is eliciting the “sit” from the dog. I've heard this called the midwife approach as you are pulling the sit out of the dog. And in reality, two things tend to happen. One, usually people start saying it and then they repeat it and then they do kind of like something with their body to kind of try and help the dog, whether it's leaning or holding their hand over the dog's head, or even pushing the dog's butt down, which I'll talk a little bit more about in a minute. Or they just keep repeating it until the dog sort of gets frustrated and tries to do something. And when you think about it as kind of actually teaching, using negative reinforcement, the behavior that you want to happen, “sit,” is encouraged because it makes the annoying person who keeps saying “sit, sit, sit,” it makes them stop.
Again, negative reinforcement is just another way of encouraging a behavior, but it's encouraging a behavior by making the behavior be the off switch that makes the annoying thing go away, as opposed to positive reinforcement, which is a behavior is encouraged because it produces something good. Now, if these methods of teaching “sit” have persisted for generations and generations, I think it's just because dogs are so forgiving and tend to pick things up pretty quickly. So even though, uh, these might not be the most efficient ways of teaching so that they kind of work and that tends to be good enough. But my suspicion is this generally doesn't teach a dog that the word “sit” is attached to the behavior of, butt hitting ground, it's more like a teaches the dog that when the human asks something, usually if I sit, it'll make him stop asking me this annoying thing. And you can kind of run this experiment by going up to your dog and saying “banana peel,” and nine times out of 10, I find if you say some random thing to a dog like that with sort of like intentionality, the dog will sit.
Especially if you start to notice the body language that you're using when you ask the dog to sit, because like I said, usually without even meaning to, people tend to kind of lean forward or put their hand above the dog's head as if they're holding a treat or lifting something in the air above the dog's nose. And, uh, often I think dogs are more tuned into our body language and the fact that we're saying something, then they are tuned into whatever it is we're saying specifically.
Now, like I said, I've often also seen plenty of people teach a dog to sit by pushing their butt to the ground. When I did training as a kid, I actually think they taught me to sort of lightly squeeze the back of the dog's spine between two fingers and then that would make the dog sit. And again, this is an example of using negative reinforcement. You're encouraging the behavior because it makes the annoying pushing or pinching go away. It's generally called molding and, again, while it might work, I just find it kind of inelegant. And in general, I prefer training that really doesn't involve having to touch the animal.
Almost all of the training that we do with dogs is exactly like training that is done with zoo animals and marine animals, if you listen to the episode I did on the training triad on timing, where I talked about dolphin training and how a lot of the training that we do with dogs is totally based on training that was originally done with dolphins. And the training that was done with dolphins was done with methods that were adapted from training that was done with pigeons and rats in labs. And when you think about it, you know, you're working with a pigeon or a rat or a dolphin, these are not animals that you can necessarily manipulate with your hands, a dolphin, obviously hard to manipulate with your hands, a rat, maybe you could, but I sure wouldn't want to and birds do not usually respond well to lots of handling and prodding, but that's fine because we really don't need to do a lot of handling and prodding to teach whatever behavior we want to teach whether it's “sit” or go to the fridge and get me a beer.
Another thing about so-called molding is that we are so much larger than dogs. And I admit that physics was never my strong suit, but I remember enough to know that a larger person is simply going to be able to exert a lot more force on a smaller person or smaller animal than vice versa. So you might not feel like you're pushing down on your dog’s butt very hard, but it's easy to forget that you might be like 10 times your dog size. So imagine a being 10 times stronger than you pushing down on you even lightly could be unpleasant. I also think that at its best dog training should be about helping a dog, figure out what it is you want, not forcing them to do whatever it is you want. And I tend to think that whenever we're touching an animal in a weird way, they're not using the best part of their brain to do problem solving. They're trying to figure out how to escape being touched in the weird way. I sometimes demo this with my students by asking them to do like a simple math problem in their head. And then I'll grasp onto their neck with my hand, not in a way that's meant to hurt them, but just to show that it will slow them down, if someone is suddenly touching them in an unusual, potentially threatening way.
So the method that I'm about to outline for how to teach a dog to “sit” is a method you could use to teach another person to “sit” Now, not that you would actually need to do this, but just as a thought experiment, let's imagine you're in a room with someone who doesn't speak the same language as you, and you want to teach this person that the word “sit” means, I want you to sit in this chair. But you can't touch the person. And for the sake of this thought experiment, let's say the person is blind or blindfolded, at least. The reason I say this is because as humans, we can teach each other things by modeling, right? I can sit and indicate to you that I want you to do what I'm doing. Now, some animals are better at modeling than others. Most animals are going to have a harder time modeling from a different species and generally speaking, dogs are not great at modeling what we're doing or even what another dog is doing, as far as we know. Although there are exceptions to this and they can certainly learn, it's not the most efficient way to teach a dog by sitting and then trying to get your dog to do what you're doing. And that applies to most nonhuman animals, that is one big difference between the way we learn and the way they learn.
So you have this blind person who speaks another language in the room with you and you need to get them to sit in a chair. Well, what are you going to do? You could say the word “sit” repeatedly until they eventually sit. And then you could praise them to the high heavens, that might eventually work. You could also get something smelly and delicious, like I dunno, a fresh baked chocolate chip cookie and put it under their nose and try and manipulate their head in such a way that eventually you kind of lure them into the “sit” position and then as you do so you could say “sit ”and then you could give them the cookie that might also work. Again, could take a little while, but it's possible. Or you could take the focus off, teaching them the word and just focus first on teaching them the behavior. So you might clear out the room of anything other than the chair where you want to sit and then wait for them to sit. And then when they do, communicate to them what an awesome thing it is, they just did. Once they get the hang of sitting, you could then add in the word.
So this is kind of like how we're going to teach our dog to sit. We're going to be doing what we call capturing. So go ahead, bring your dog to a room where there are not a lot of distractions and count out a whole bunch of treats. I suggest using something small, that'll break up easily. My favorite go to treats are lamb lung, tricky trainers, you could use string cheese, you could use bits of chicken. But if all you have on hand right now is your dog's kibble, that's fine too. Grab like a good handful. Let's try, I don't know, maybe 50 or 60 small pieces of something, small enough that your dog is going to be able to chew and swallow the treat very quickly.
Now I want you to have those treats either in a bowl, on a table next to you, high enough that your dog can't see them or in a treat pouch, if you have a treat pouch. And if you have a clicker, grab that too. If not, you can use the marker word, “yes.” But if you do have a clicker, put it in your nondominant hand. So if you're a right handed person, put it in your left hand and you have your treats in your pouch or on the table next to you and you're sitting in a comfy chair and you're ready to go.
So what are you going to do? You are going to sit back. You're going to be very still and your dog is probably looking at you, “like what is going on here?” That's fine. Remember your hands are empty. I don't want you to have treats in your hand. The only thing you're allowed to have in your hand at this point is a clicker, if you're using one and you are going to wait for your dog to sit. That's all that's happening right now.
You are not allowed to help. You are not allowed to put your hand above your dog's head. Although if you're really into doing that, I will give you a little cheat in a minute so that you can do that. I don't want to torture you by, by taking away that security blanket. But before you go there, try sitting on your hands and just waiting it out.
Now, if your dog does sit, what you're going to do is you're going to click or if you're not using a clicker or you're just going to say the word, “yes”, very enthusiastically staccato like that. And then you're going to give your dog one of your treats from your treat pouch or from that bowl. And I want you to place the treat about a foot, foot and a half, in front of your dog just far enough away that so that he or she has to get up to get it, but not so far away that he or she has to travel very far, but you're using where you're putting the treat to reset your dog so that he or she now has an opportunity to sit again.
Now, if your dog lies down before he or she sits, I say, click and treat that or “yes” and treat that anyway. And my reasoning is that I'd rather be clicking and treating some behavior than waiting and letting my dog get really frustrated. So then your choice is either you can switch and do the same exercise we're doing right now, but you can do it with “down.” Or you can see if after you click and treat a bunch of “downs,” your dog at some point does try and sit. And a down is closer to a sit then anything else than just standing. And really what we're doing from the beginning is shaping the behavior of sitting. Shaping is just the process of rewarding, close, approximations until you get what you ultimately want. And we're always actually shaping the behavior of “sit” even if your dog already knows how to sit when you say “sit” and does it very quickly, there's still shaping to be done.
That's why when someone calls School for the Dogs and says, “Oh, I don't want to do that class ‘cause I see that you teach “sit” and my dog already knows how to sit.” We all kind of giggle because there are a million ways of sitting. Does your dog know how to sit? When you ask from 10 feet away, does your dog know how to sit? When you ask and your back is turned. Does your dog know how to sit when a child asks? Does your dog know how to sit in the middle of Grand Central Station? Does your dog know how to sit on a mark? You can always hone a behavior. So it's kind of like down is like a very first step for a very broad first step towards the behavior of sitting. It's kind of like if you're going to buy shoes at Macy's, well, first you have to decide to go to Macy's and then you have to figure out what floor to go to and then you have to find the shoe department, and then you have to find the shoes that are in your size and the style that you want. And then eventually you'll find the shoe that you're there for. But you know, at least, at least with the “down” like we're in the shoe department.
Now, if you're sitting there and let's say two minutes have passed and your dog is still standing and hasn't lied down and hasn't sit, you have two choices. Either you can just take a break, which is probably what I would do. Or, like I said, if you have a dog who tends to sit when you hold your hand over his or her head, go ahead and do that. So this is called luring. And the reason I don't do a lot of luring is because it's really easy for us humans to get stuck in lure-ville. We tend to use our hand to pretend we have treats, to get dogs to do things long after they actually need that kind of prompting. And I think in the end it seems kind of inelegant, but when you're trying to get a new behavior, sometimes luring two or three times can be a way to kind of jumpstart it. So I suggest doing your lure in the most subtle possible way twice or three times and see if that will get a “sit” from your dog. And once you've done that three times, again, you're still not saying anything, you're only using your hands in the most subtle way. Once you've lured three times, I want you to sit on your hands again and see if you can just wait it out and wait and click and treat or “yes” and treat the next sit that your dog does on his or her own.
Or like I said, you could just take a break and then start again. So I tend to think though, if you are very still and boring and you're in a room where there's not a lot going on, if you wait it out for two minutes, you are going to get a ‘sit” from your dog. And again, you're going to then reset by tossing the treat just a little bit in front of your dog to get him or her to stand up again. So once you've gotten a couple sits from your dog without you eliciting it in any way and, again, you're using your clicker or your “yes” to pinpoint the moment the butt hits the ground-capturing, we call it. It's like you're taking a picture. It's like the shutter of a camera coming down on that moment. And remember, I don't want you to reach for the treat until after the click or the “yes,” the click or the “yes” is highlighting the moment and then the treat is backing it up.
And again, if your dog is not food motivated, you could be using play to reward after the click or the “yes,” you could be using praise. But for the sake of speed for this exercise in particular, I would suggest using some sort of small food treat. So after you've gotten a couple of sits, what I would like you to do is set a timer for one minute and I want you to count how many times you're able to click and treat or “yes” and treat your dog for sitting during that one minute. And again, all you're focusing on is pinpointing that moment when the butt hits the floor, or like I said, if you're doing a lie down when their body hits the floor.
And I also want you to be thinking about your body language. I want you to be as still as possible, as quiet as possible. I want you moving your hands as little as possible. You shouldn't be talking. This exercise is all about trying to get your dog to figure out what it is that you want. What is the thing that is producing this sound followed by a treat? So once you've set your timer for a minute, our goal should be to get eight sits in that minute. I want your dog to figure out eight times in the course of that minute, “h, all I need to do is put my butt on the ground.” Once you get those eight reps in your one minute trial, take a break and try again. I want you to get at least three one minute trials where your dog sits eight times and then it's going to be time to add the cue.
Now you might have noticed that I say the word “cue” instead of the word “command” and it kind of doesn't matter because it's just a label we're giving to something, you could call it bubble gum, whatever. But the reason that we tend to call it a cue and not a command is going to be exemplified in this exercise as we add the cue, because you're going to see what we're doing is really giving a signal to the dog that if you “sit now, something especially good is going to happen” rather than a command which suggests you know where you must do this right now or else. In reality, the two words colloquially in training, can kind of be used interchangeably, but there is a different idea behind the word “cue” in that it is a signal rather than like a mandate.
So you have your dog who is reliably sitting now at least eight times in a minute with you just sitting there, ideally not doing any kind of prompting. So we're going to add the cue and like I said, just for the sake of doing something different, because I think those of you who have already taught your dog to sit and probably use the word “sit” before, we are going to use a snap or a double clap as the cue here.
Only thing is if you're going to use the double clap in lieu of a snap, you probably shouldn't use a clicker because you're not going to have enough hands. So either you're going to use the word “yes” as your marker, if you're going to use a double clap or have a friend do this exercise with you and your friend can click and you can clap. So again, I want you to set your timer to a minute. You have your treats ready to go. You have your dog in front of you in a room where there's not a lot going on and you are just going to wait for that dog to sit. The second your dog looks like they're about to sit, if you would bet $50 your dog is going to sit within the next two seconds, what you're going to do is snap or do your double clap or just go ahead and say the word “sit.” If you really don't want to do the snap or the clap here and you want to use the words “sit” the same exact exercise, will work with the word, but I suggest starting with something new just for fun here.
So your snap or your double clap or your word is going to proceed the “sit” only by like a fraction of a second. Then your dog's butt hits the ground and you're going to click or say your word “yes” and then give the treat. So basically everything is as it was before, except you've added in this cue a fraction of a second before the behavior occurs. And that's the way it's going to be for this entire one minute trial. So you're going to give the treat far enough away so your dog has to get up to get it. And then again, right before you are pretty sure your dog is about to sit, you're going to do your snap or your double clap, say the word then you're going to click or say your word “yes” and give the treat.
Now for your next one minute trial, you're going to do the same thing except this time I want you to give your cue a little bit earlier, like maybe four seconds before your dog sits. Now, this can be difficult for people because we are very impatient with our dogs and we tend to want them to sit immediately, but it's really important that you only give this cue once. Again, this is not the midwife style training where the queue is eliciting the behavior from the dog. You're simply telling the dog that behavior that you're doing right now, we are now going to call it snap or a double clap or sit or whatever. And really this is always going to be the process when we add a cue, and if you think about it, this is really how you learned to sit as well You knew how to sit long before anyone ever told you what that behavior was called. You knew what an apple was long before someone told you. The word that's attached with that thing is an apple.
Now, you might not remember this from being a child, but if you've ever learned a foreign language, you've certainly experienced this process of figuring out that there is a new word attached to something familiar that you already know or know how to do. And that's exactly what we're doing when we're adding a cue to a behavior. We're first making sure the dog understands that we really like when they do this behavior and then we're telling them what the behavior is called.
But like I said, we tend to get super impatient with dogs, especially when they don't sit right away. If we were that impatient with people, we would murder each other at a much higher rate than we currently do. You can see what I mean next time you watch someone else ask their dog to sit, chances are they're going to say “sit” five times before the dog actually sits, but the amount of time that passes between when the person first asked for the sit and when the dogs, but hits the ground is usually only a couple seconds at most.
So if you give your cue and your dog does not respond right away, lightening fast, that's okay. I'd rather you wait it out a couple seconds, than ask again, because if you ask again, what you're doing is teaching them the cue is snap, snap, snap or sit, sit, sit. If you wait it out, you are just starting the shaping process, right? So at first it might take a couple seconds for your dog to respond. But again, we're always shaping behaviors. We're always making them better and more perfect and, with time, you are going to shape the behavior to the point where you give your cue and your dog sits right away.
And actually one reason why I really like to teach “sit” with a cue that's a snap or a clap besides the fact that it tends to really impress people if you can clap or snap and your dog sits. But one reason is that if your dog doesn't sit right away, you're probably not going to snap a whole bunch of times in a row or clap a whole bunch of times in a row without noticing it. But the word “sit” might fall out of your mouth three or four times in a row without you even realizing it in my experience.
So with your next trial, you are now going to give the cue just a little bit earlier. And one of the reasons why we try and get the behavior like eight times in a minute is because if it's happening that often, then you're going to be able to just kind of add in this cue at the moments when you know it's going to happen anyway, which is what we want, right? We're trying to attach the cue to the behavior. We're not trying to trick the dog at this point. We're just trying to let them know that if the behavior of butt hitting ground follows the cue that we've given, something good is going to happen.
Now, once you've practiced this a bunch of times, I want you to pick a new room in your home and start from scratch. I want you to start by seeing if you can capture eight sits in a minute, at least during three different trials, and then you can start adding in the cue. Once you've done that, you can maybe try it outside or you can see if a friend can do it instead of you. But each time you add a new challenge, I suggest starting from scratch, starting from the beginning, making it as easy as possible and quickly building up on that.
Now of course, like I said, “sit” is a behavior that can be endlessly refined. We can speed up the time between when you give the cue and when your dog actually sits. We can refine it by working on duration so that when you give the cue and your dog sits, you're not going to necessarily be clicking right away. You're going to be building a “stay” by adding some time before you click. You can refine it by doing it in new places, like I said, with new people. You can refine it by doing it from a distance. It's never ending the shaping that you can do to perfect your sit. But what I've given you here is just a very basic beginning outline of how to teach a basic behavior.
Now, I promised that if you're really married to luring, a sit by holding your hand over your dog's head, which is a very common thing to do that way I would give you a little cheat that you could use. And this is it. So what you're going to do is give your cue, so you're going to snap or do your double clap, and then you're going to hold your hand over your dog's head, and then you're going to click and treat. So basically exactly what we were doing before. But now I'm allowing you to do that little lure if you need to. Again, though I do suggest that you be sitting, I suggest you try and stand up straight, not lean forward, lean over your dog, which a lot of people tend to do. I want you to make this little lure as subtle as possible. And most importantly, it's gonna follow the cue that you've just given. So again, you're going to snap, then hold your hand over your dog's head, then click or treat.
So I suggest you do this just for one one minute trial. Again, I don't like luring because we tend to get stuck doing it. So try this just once. Now in your second one minute trial, and I should say that in that one minute trial with luring, you should have been able to get at least eight sits in a minute. If you didn't get eight sits in a minute and you were doing all of those luring, then I suggest stop doing the luring. It's not working, just go back to straight capturing. But assuming you did get about eight times, eight reps in that one minute, now I want you to snap, count to three in your head and then lure your dog.
And I really hope that at this point if you are doing kind of luring, that you're just using your hand that you're not actually luring with food because it's going to be more complicated to snap and then go grab food and lure it. Again, if you're going through all of that and having to use food as a lure and you're not able to just lure with your hand, then I suggest you're probably better off just going back to straight capturing, see if it'll work. But if you have the habit of holding your hand over your dog's head, then you, what you're basically doing is fading out this lure by sandwiching it between the cue and the behavior happening. And what I bet is going to happen is during that moment when you're counting to three and in just your second trial, your dog is going to figure out what you want pretty quickly before you even have to produce that lure.
One last little tip here. When you're using a marker, be it your clicker or your word “yes” I suggest for this exercise that your marker come earlier rather than later. So it's better to click the beginning of the sit than be late and click after your dog has already been sitting for a second, when you're adding the cue. And the reason is because the thing that you're clicking for at this point in the exercise is the response to the cue. You're not necessarily clicking for the world's perfect “sit,” although you will be later. But again, part of the whole shaping process is figuring out which part of the behavior in particular you want to strengthen and then focusing on that and when you're adding the cue, the response is the thing that you're looking for. Clicking a tad earlier rather than later willl also tend to get more rapid repetitions of the behavior and you always want to get more of the behavior rather than less, especially in the beginning because that's really what's going to keep the dog in the game.
It's so important to keep your dog engaged and excited and into it and by making sure that you're getting lots of reps really quickly, you're going to have a better chance of not losing their focus.
So I hope you'll let me know how it goes. You can get in touch if you have any questions about teaching your dog to sit either email podcasts@schoolforthedogs.com or you can leave a voicemail at (917) 414-2625.
Our Fun Dog Fact of the day, this month marks the 40th anniversary of New York City's pooper scooper laws. Prior to August of 1978, when your dog pooped, you did not need to pick it up off the streets of New York City. And there was a lot of debate about this law when it went into place, whether people should be required to pick up their poop or if perhaps there was another option. There was actually a group of people who wanted dog toilets put in on the sidewalks. I wrote a little bit about the history of this law, which was the first of its kind in America on our blog that you can find it a schoolforthedogs.com/blog.
Our Woof Shout Out goes to little Leo Tolstoy. He is a rescue dog, sort of like a Chihuahua terrier mix of some kind, totally adorable who has been coming to our Sidewalk Psychos class for a few months. His two dads bring him down to the East Village all the way from Harlem, which is no small trip and he has made amazing progress and is mostly able to coexist on the sidewalk now with other dogs, which as any New Yorker with a dog knows is important because we live on a streets where there are a lot of dogs and it can be stressful to have a dog who freaks out whenever another one passes by. So nice work, Leo, for all the hard work that you've done and a two thumbs up to your dads for being pretty awesome.
This episode has been sponsored by SaneBox. SaneBox is this incredibly handy email tool that I've used for years to get on top of my email. I honestly don't really know how it works. It's kind of like magic, but basically you can train it to figure out what emails are important, what emails are junk and what emails fall kind of in that middle gray area. Things that you will want to read but you don't really need to deal with right away and it'll categorize all those things in separate folders for you. I also have it set up so that it'll categorize all of my receipts into a separate folder, which is really handy. But basically the end result is it just sort of like clears out the static so that in the morning when I sit down at my computer to check my email, only the really important good stuff for me.
If you want to check it out, you can get two weeks free plus a $15 coupon. Just sign up schoolforthedogs.com/sane.
If you have suggestions for future topics or questions about training, please make sure to join our Facebook, facebook.com/groups/schoolforthedogs. See you next week.
Links:
