dog training illustration annie grossman

22 MayEpisode 60 | The Most Important Behavior You’ll Ever Train

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There is one behavior we teach every dog we work with at School For The Dogs: Touch! This is an easy-to-teach building block that you can use to build... whatever you want! In this episode, Annie outlines how to teach touch, and talks about this behavior's countless uses and variations.

Transcript:

Annie:

Hey everyone. Annie here. Thank you so much for listening. If you're hearing this on Friday, May 15th, today is the last day that we are offering 30 minute free sessions at School for the Dogs. This is something that we started to do at the beginning of quarantine. We are bringing an end to this offer for the moment. So if you have not booked one yet, you should do so at schoolforthedogs.com and we can work on whatever you want to work on with your dog. Whether you want to talk about an ongoing issue you're having, or you just want some ideas of fun stuff you can do with your dog, or maybe you're thinking about getting a dog, whatever is going on. Our certified trainers would be psyched to talk to you, but again, today is the last day that you can get one of these sessions for free if you book before the end of the day today schoolforthedogs.com.

Today I wanted to talk about my favorite behavior to train and the behavior that I think is probably the most important behavior for anyone to train, especially if you're just starting out training a dog. I would even go so far as to say that this might be the only behavior you need to train. I'll explain a little bit more about that in a moment, but the behavior is a Touch, specifically teaching a dog to touch his nose to your fingers.

Now I first want to describe what this behavior is going to look like, what it's going to consist of, and then I'll talk about some variations and why I think it's such an essential building block behavior. Your first job is to decide which hand your dog is going to touch and which hand is going to hold the treats. Now you could certainly reward with play or lots of other things other than food. But I want to first describe how you could train this with small bits of treats. And that's important. You want your pieces to be very small for this. Not super gooey.

Although, sometimes I use a big piece of lamb lung and break off tiny bits as I go with my fingernail. Lamb lung, dried lamb lung, breaks up really well that way. Or sometimes I'll ball up a bunch of cheese in my hands, like string cheese or American cheese or cheddar cheese, and pick off little bits of that too. But if you're gonna start out with precut treats, they really should be like no bigger than a Tic Tac. You could certainly use a dog's kibble too. If you're going to use the kibble, again, you want the pieces to be as small as possible. So sometimes like larger pieces of kibble, you can break up, again with that good old thumbnail.

I suggest that you hold your treats in your nondominant hand, your non-writing hand. So I’m righty, so my treats live in my left hand. If I'm going to use a clicker, I also hold the clicker in that hand. My right hand is going to be the hand that the dog is going to touch. And I usually use two outstretched fingers to teach this behavior. You could use your full hand, you could use a fist, you could use your elbow. It doesn't really matter. That's just my style. I don't know why I started to do that. I'm not sure if that's something that lots of dog trainers do and I just picked it up or if it was my brain that thought of doing this. I guess I haven't noticed so much what other dog trainers do.

But I think I like having two fingers out because it's a little bit more of a distinct different thing than anything else I do in my life, cause there are other times where I might have one finger out. But having two fingers out, like unless you're signing the letter “U” in sign language, is kind of a unique hand position. I think that's why it feels right to me. But plenty of trainers also just use their full hand out and that is also absolutely, totally fine. Usually they put their fingers together, or you could use a fist. But as I'm going to explain, it really doesn't even matter, because your dog doesn't even need to touch this hand for very long. And might not even touch it at all. And you could certainly use an object, which we'll talk more about.

Anyway. Two fingers out. And my treats ready to go in my left hand. My left hand closed, though, either behind my back or I keep it sometimes at my chest, but I don't want those treats visible. And I'm going to use a clicker–if I'm going to use a clicker, the clicker is going to be in the same hand as the treat. So that I think of the left hand often in training, that's really, it's just like the pocket hand. Your dominant hand should be the one that's really doing the work. So fingers out, I'm going to put my fingers so close to my dog's nose. I usually go like hand under, but super close to my dog's nose or whatever dog I'm working with. And that dog is usually going to come and investigate my hand even though it's empty. Why? Because probably your dog has gotten lots of good things in his life from hands. And you know, dogs are curious creatures who like to investigate whatever is in front of their nose.

Now you might have a dog who's worried about hands, a little bit hand shy. That certainly happens and it's actually one reason why I think this is a great behavior to work on with all dogs. But if your dog is a little bit nervous about hands, you can just reward your dog for looking at the hand at this point. But I would say, especially if you're working with a puppy, if you're not working with a dog who has any baggage associated with hands, chances are your dog is going to go touch that, that little wet nose to the tip of your fingers right away.

I'm not saying anything when I start teaching this. I'm not really asking the dog to do anything at all. I'm just sort of presenting the opportunity. Hey, here's my two fingers right in front of your nose. Why don't you check it out? And then I'm going to mark that moment that the nose touches my fingers with a click or with a word like “yes.” And then I'm going to reach into my left hand with my right hand and pull out one tiny treat and give it to the dog. And sometimes it matters where we're delivering a treat. Sometimes it doesn't really matter. In this situation, if you're just starting out teaching this behavior, I would just go ahead and give it right in your dog's mouth, only because I don't want your dog to have to waste time looking for the reward. I want it to be available right away.

And this is, this is often the case. Sometimes we treat in such a way that we can reset a dog, use treat placement to reset a dog to get another repetition. But, often we just want to deliver it quickly. We don't want to waste any time. And I think of it, it's like if we think about the fact that dogs are just constantly learning, learning is just a constant thing that's happening every second of every minute. I want as much of our training session being focused on the thing that I'm training and not on them putting the treat in their mouth, them chewing the treat, them swallowing the treat, them looking for the treat before that. Right? I just want it to be, in and out, quick, quick, quick, and in human terms, this is why employers do direct deposit, right? They're not going to like send you on a treasure hunt to go find your paycheck every week. If they want to get the best work out of you, they want it in your hands quickly, easily, so you're not wasting time finding it.

Anyway. This is all a very long way to say you're going to have your dog touch his nose to your fingers, reach into your other hand, pick out a treat, and then give it right to your dog. And then you're going to do the same thing again. Again, super close. Once your dog is touching your hand, at a distance of an inch, eight to 10 times in a minute, you could try moving it a little bit farther away. You could try moving into the side of your dog's nose or above or below your dog's nose a little bit. You could have someone else in your household try this activity. But it should be super easy when you're just starting out and every time you return to do the exercise again for another practice session, start at the easiest level. We want this to be a fun, easy exercise for your dog.

Now we're using that clicker to pinpoint the moment your dog's nose touches your hand because, well for a few reasons. One, it's just a lot more efficient than trying to perfect the timing of getting a dog, getting a treat into the dog's mouth. The second that the nose touches your hands, if you can use a clicker, it's kind of like you're pinpointing that moment and then saying, I am now going to back this up with something good. And one nice thing I like about the clicker is sometimes that good thing is going to be those treats in your hand. Sometimes it might be throwing a ball or a game of tug, but the clicker stays the same. The clicker is the consistent thing.

Again, bringing it back to humans, this is like, money is the consistent thing that represents lots of things to many people. But again, the employer paying you analogy, it's a lot simpler for your employer just to give you a paycheck than to give you all the things that that paycheck represents. And frankly, I think it's similar. The clicker is an easier thing to deliver in the moment quickly than the thing that is backing it up. Technically speaking, the clicker is a conditioned reinforcer. It is a learned reinforcer. Your dog is not born knowing about the sound of the clicker. But after a couple of repetitions, your dog is going to learn, every time I hear that click noise, I get a treat and that clicker itself is going to take on meaning. But you really should always back it up with something.

Now why do I love this behavior so much? It really has nothing to do with dog noses or human fingers. It's because teaching this behavior is simply teaching a dog a basic kind of math equation. If I touch A to B, good thing happens. Now in this instance, A is your dog's nose and B is your hand. But think about all the other things that could go into that same equation that would be useful to teach if I touch butt to ground, good thing happens. If I touch body to crate, good things happen. Even something like teaching a Look, it's kind of like you're telling your dog if you touch your eyes to my eyes, good thing happens. And like I mentioned before, this is a behavior where you could even start out teaching a look if that's easier for your dog. If all your dog can do is look at your hand, then you could click and treat that. It is a different kind of touch.

Now another reason I like teaching this behavior is because it's a great way for a dog to learn to interact with hands appropriately, right? Not nipping on our hands. And if they're rewarded for simply touching our hands over and over, that could become a more interesting behavior to the dog than chewing on our hands. It's also a great way for a dog to learn to interact with new people. In the show notes, I'm going to share a lovely video that Veronica Deronn did. She works at Animal Care and Control, which is a the New York City shelter and she is currently doing our professional course. And she shared this lovely video of her working with a beautiful pit bull, teaching the dog to touch her hands. And in the course of just a couple of minutes, the dog went from hardly wanting to approach her at all to happily touching her hand and clearly enjoying the whole thing as a game, which is how it should be. It's such a simple thing, but for that dog in the city shelter, he may have never had any good interactions with people before. We don't know. So it's a nice way to introduce the dog to this body part that most of us have.

And you could teach your dog a kind of handshake in this way. Like it's an appropriate nice greeting to meet someone who shows you their hand and to go touch their hand and you're giving your dog information about what you want him to be doing, you’re training an incompatible behavior. If he's touching someone's outstretched hand, he's probably not also going to be jumping on top of him. And you're also giving your dog choice. Your dog can choose to touch the outstretched hand or not. And that alone can be important, cause it could be your dog giving you information about whether or not he feels comfortable interacting with this person.

I also love teaching “Touch” because it's a great way to teach “Come.” If your hand becomes a magnet to your dog's nose, you can control where your dog is because that nose is going to want to connect with those outstretched fingers. From the moment you start teaching this touch behavior, you’re teaching come. Your dog might just be learning to come two inches in the beginning, but the next day that might be a foot and the day after that, that might be two feet, and you can continue to add distance to shape the behavior so that your dog can do it at longer distances. You can also do it in new places. You can do it in new people. All of these are ways of refining this simple Touch behavior to the fine point of being an excellent Come that can be done even when there are distractions and distance between your hand and your dog's nose.

Now you can certainly add a word like come to this, although I suggest starting without any kind of word or cue when you're on a very close distance, but as you add distance, if you want to cue your dog to come touch your hand, you can simply give the cue and then give the hand gesture. Usually when we are adding a cue, we are careful to separate the new cue and the old cue. The new cue should always go first. But in this case if your new cue is saying Touch or Come, it kind of can't be separated from the actual visual cue of holding out your fingers because your dog needs to touch your fingers in order to complete the loop, in order to get click or whatever your marker is.

And I should mention this is actually not my preferred way of teaching Come. I prefer teaching Come and also Drop it using classical conditioning. I do have a whole podcast episode about that which I will link to in the show notes. I prefer teaching a Come where there's basically no criteria. I don't need the dog to come to me and touch my hand and sit, da da da. Whereas teaching Come in this sense of the hand touch, you are asking your dog to do something when they get to you, in that you're asking them to touch your hand. But like I said, you're kind of teaching this at the beginning at such a short distance that I think it can be helpful to think about a long distance of hand to nose touch as still being some kind of Come, because it is.

However, if you are going to teach Come in this way and in the classically conditioned way, I would suggest using two different cues. We sometimes call the classically conditioned Come the Emergency Come. You want to use something that is very different than anything else your dog hears–a whistle is a good one. Or sometimes we challenge our clients to reach deep into their brains and think of a word that they don't say very often and they can use that word. One time a client of ours named Aliyah in a class picked the word Godzilla. She said, you know, I just don't talk about Godzilla very much. And so Godzilla became her Emergency Come. Whereas this hand touch Come, you might call Come or Touch.

Another great thing about teaching a hand touch like this is that you can use your hand to lure new behaviors because you've turned your fingers into a dog nose magnet. So rather than having to lure your dog by sticking a treat in front of his face, your dog will know, Oh, I just need to follow her hand wherever it goes. And it's nice to do this if your plan is to fade the lure, which it should be. We like to use a lure to help a dog or prompt a dog when necessary, but often it's not necessary. And we humans get stuck in the habit of luring a behavior, often with like a fake treat pinned between our fingers. If you notice, people often try and lure their dogs with these pinched together fingers. I call it like the Mama Mia hand.

If you're using two outstretched fingers, rather than pretending that maybe there's food in your hand, you're going to have an easier time of eventually getting away from having to help your dog with that hand lure. And I think you're probably also asking your dog to mentally engage a little bit more, because your dog isn't just like, there's food, there's food. I must follow the food. He's like, I know that I need to go touch that hand. And when that happens, there's a consequence that I like. Rather than, oh, I don't know, like you could probably take a Shake Shack burger and put it in front of my face and walk me into oncoming traffic because I would just be thinking about getting my mouth around that thing. So that is one reason why you want to keep the treats in your nondominant hand out of sight until after you click or offer your pinpointing marker word.

Now, if you have a training partner, you can have your dog work at going to touch one of your hands and then the other one's hand. And you can literally exercise a dog in a small space that way by having them run from one of you to the other one. And again, you're teaching a form of Come.

Another fun, kind of silly, but fun thing that you can teach when you're just starting out with this. And this can be particularly fun with kids. Download the app, Doodle Buddy, if you have a touch screen device on iPhone or an iPad, or I think you can also get on whatever Android device you have. It's a very simple drawing app, and it has a function where you can choose a rubber stamp and the rubber stamp makes a heart or a smiley face and a little noise whenever the screen is touched. And if you're teaching a dog to touch your hand, they can quickly learn to touch whatever is in your hand and close to their nose. And the second that their nose touches the screen, it makes a little ding sound or whatever the stamp is that you've picked. And it really does the job of a clicker for you in that moment, by pinpointing the exact moment that the touch happened, then you can follow that with a treat. This is more partner training. Like I said, better to do this as a pair, because that way one person can hold the device and the other person can be delivering the treat, but you could finagle a way of doing this solo as well. And this is simply a form of targeting.

Now, I tend to use the words Touch and Target interchangeably for this kind of behavior. But the reason we call it targeting is because you are teaching your dog to go touch a target of some kind. And in this case that I'm describing, it's some kind of device, but it could also be the end of what we call a target. We have target sticks that have a clicker inside of them. Or we also have target sticks that are just like batons. You could use something as simple as a flyswatter or a wooden spoon.

A dog who has learned to do a touch to your fingers is one who can learn to interact with lots of different kinds of objects, again, on his own terms. And if you can get some kind of interaction with an object with your dog's nose, you can build on that. You can shape new things. A dog who does a good nose touch could learn to turn on a light or to close a door. I had a client who wanted her dog to walk right behind her, just behind her to her right side. So we taught the dog to nose target the back of her right knee. And when her dog was nosed targeting there, she was in the position she wanted her in. But again, the nose touch is only one kind of Touch that your dog can learn, and your dog can learn to target different parts of his body to lots of different things. “Going to bed” is a kind of targeting of the bed object.

And it's a behavior that's often used for husbandry reasons as well. If you think about it, like any behavior, this is one that can be endlessly refined. A lot of animals in zoos, for instance, have to learn a kind of stationing behavior. They need to learn to be in one spot, perhaps have a part of their body in one specific spot so that they can get shots or have their teeth brushed or be groomed. And in those instances, it's like the animal has learned, I need to touch this thing for a period of time while something unpleasant happens. And that is the criteria for the behavior, for which I will get a click treat.

There's a trainer named Chirag Patel who developed what's called the bucket game, which kind of boils down to this equation as well. I'm simplifying the bucket game, but basically a dog learns that he can choose to touch his eyes to a bucket of treats and he will then get some of the treats. And if he is uncomfortable with anything that's going on, while he maintains this duration behavior of looking at the bucket of treats, he can look away, and the thing he dislikes will stop. Again, super simplified explanation. I will link to more about the bucket game in the show notes, and actually would love to have Chirag Patel on the show to talk about the bucket game, but just another example of how teaching some kind of simple touch–in that case, eyes to bucket–gives a dog choice and can lead us in so many good directions.

The last thing I wanted to mention about teaching touch is that early on, I like to teach dogs to touch a Post It note, whether you focus on teaching a dog to touch this with their nose or with their paws, it doesn't really matter. If you're going to teach them to go touch it with their paws, I would teach that more like I was shaping a dog to go to a mat, which a mat is something you could cut down to something that is super, super small, right? Like the size of a postage stamp. You can check out the episode that we have about shaping a dog to go to a mat. But it's really easy if you're working on teaching a dog to touch your hand, to then just put a Post It note on your hand and your dog will learn to touch his nose to the Post It note. And then you can kind of put the Post It note wherever you want your dog's nose to be.

Whether they're going to go touch it with their paw or with their nose, either way, you're teaching a dog to basically go hit a mark. And eventually we can go further places with that. We can decide we want the dog to go hit a mark and then sit, or go hit a mark and do something else. Again, we can add distraction. We can add duration. We can add distance. But in its simplest, you can use this to teach your dog, “I want you to go into your crate.” You can teach your dog to go target something at the back of their crate. In fact, you could turn that into a great game that could result in your dog going in and out of the crate, in and out of the crate. Which can also be a way to exercise your dog, you know, with so many people with their dogs in their homes right now.

I think that teaching a dog to go target a Post It note, say, on one side of your apartment, and then to run to the other side to get a treat is a great way to have them get in some laps. You could even work crate practice into that by, say, having the dog go target something on one wall, and then you could toss the treats into the crate. So, your dog runs into the crate to get the treats and then back to the wall. Again, that kind of thing. I would love to see you practicing touch with your dog. You can send me a video on Instagram, @schoolforthedogs, and I will try and share it.

Next week, I'm going to bring you an interview I'm really excited about. It is with the one and only Ken Ramirez. And in the show notes for this episode, I wanted to share a link to a live video. He did, he's been doing these wonderful weekly live sessions from his ranch out in Washington. And, he did a session showing seven different kinds of touch every dog should learn that I thought was lovely. And so you can find that in the show notes too. Lastly, just a reminder that we have been doing free webinars every day on lots of different subjects, with lots of interesting people, you can find them schoolforthedogs.com/webinars. And for the moment, all the replays are also there for most of them. So do make sure to check them.

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