19 JunEpisode 64 | Cues & Commands: How We Communicate To Dogs What We Want From Them & Vice Versa

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Before Annie became a dog trainer, she assumed all dogs were trained using "commands" and cues were for... pool games and stage actors. In this episode, she talks about the difference between cues and commands, describes the process of adding a cue, noticing cues, changing cues, and more.

Transcript:

Annie:

Mark Twain, satirist of the 19th century, one of my favorite writers, wrote the book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. And it's a story about–it's a time travel story about a guy who gets bonked on the head and wakes up and thinks at first that he's in Bridgeport, Connecticut, but actually he's gone back in time from the 1800s to King Arthur's court and he's in Camelot. He gets himself into trouble there, he's going to be burned at the stake. And then he realizes that he had learned in school that in the year 528, the year that he's found himself in, there was a solar eclipse. So he predicts this natural event, and he makes everyone believe that he caused it.

I think about this book sometimes when I'm thinking about the process of adding a cue to a behavior that we want our dogs to know. Now, before I first went to dog trainer school, I referred to commands. You gave your dog a command and the dog followed the command or not. It would have never occurred to me to call it anything other than a command. Instead, I was encouraged to think about how we can cue a dog to do the thing we want. Now, at first I understood the reason as, like we don't want to be coercing dogs and it is coercive if you're commanding something, because it's like, you're saying do this, or else. There's an implied or else. And you know, that made sense to me, but I also thought that, you know, it would be possible to command and then reward. So maybe it was just too narrow a reading of the word command.

But then I started to understand that the notion that we are commanding a dog to do something really gives us way too much credit. We are sometimes cueing a dog to do something perhaps on purpose, but perhaps not on purpose. And it would be funny to call that a command. Dogs do things all the time because of things that we do that we might not have actually wanted our dog to do. You wouldn't call that command, but it might be some kind of cue to your dog, if your dog is perceiving it. What's more, there are lots of cues that your dog is perceiving that have nothing to do with you. They are learning cues from the environment, all around them, from each other, from things we might not even be perceiving.

We can also use cues to help dogs. Really, ideally that should be the whole idea of giving a cue or a command is that we're trying to get dogs to do something that we want them to do most likely for their own good. And it's true that we don't usually think of the word “command” as being something that has much to do with helpfulness. Like, I don't say to my husband, “I command you to do the dishes. It would be really helpful. I'd really appreciate it.” We can use “cues” to help our dogs be safe and happy in the world that we're asking them to live in because a cue is really just a piece of useful information that can help your dog understand what is wanted and what is going to happen next.

Now you're probably wondering what any of this has to do with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Well, the process of adding a cue can sometimes look a little bit like magic to those who are looking on. This is because you're going to be adding the cue when you know, the behavior is about to happen. And especially at first, this can give the illusion that you are the one causing the eclipse, when actually you just were able to predict it, except the thing you'll be predicting is maybe just your dog's bottom hitting the ground and not the moon going in front of the sun.

So for instance, if you're gonna teach your dog to sit, let's say you are using a clicker or a marker word. The first step is just to wait for your dog to sit, be very boring. Don't be in a very stimulating environment, and don't let your dog see that you have the treats on you. What's going to happen? Well, eventually your dog is probably going to sit or lie down and whichever one of those things your dog does, you're going to click and treat, reset your dog so that your dog then has the opportunity to do it again. This is capturing, and this is positively reinforcing the behavior of, but hitting the ground without you even asking for it. This is such an important step in training. We want our dogs to think that they have figured out how to get what they want. You know, “Oh, all I need to do is plot my butt on the ground. And, the human clicks and treats.”

Step two is where we can start to tell the dog what we are going to call this behavior. Now in more traditional training, this might be where the “or else” stuff comes in. So usually you would imagine someone right away saying to their dogs, “sit,” and then pulling up on their dog's neck until their bottom gets to the ground. Or saying sit and then pushing on the dog’s butt until the dog sits. Or, you know, at later stages, maybe just saying the word, “sit, sit, sit, sit,” nagging the dog until the dog sits. All examples of getting the behavior using negative reinforcement. Reinforcement because the behavior of sit is being encouraged, but it's being encouraged because something is making the annoying butt pushing go away. It's making the person stop nagging you to sit. It's making the pain in your neck go away. That's why it's negative. And this fashion of adding a cue, I don't know if fashion is the right word, but method. This traditional way of adding a command, let's call it. I also think of it as a kind of midwifing, I think. I think that's like a term from psychology, where it's like you as the teacher or a therapist or whatever, like you're pulling this behavior out of the dog. You are creating this behavior. And to be honest, I think it just overcomplicates things.

When you think about how we as people learn to understand cues in our environment all the time, you realize that it can actually be a rather simple process of making associations that then give us information about what to do or what not to do. Now, there are lots of cues that we learn all the time that help us live the lives we live. Language is just a very advanced kind of cueing, giving each other information using these complex oral and written symbols. And sometimes these cues are kind of like commands, right? I stop at a red light because there's a big “or else” if I don't. I mean, even a green light, it's not like you may choose to drive now where you may choose to stop, right? Even a green light, there's an implied command, “go.” But there are plenty of other times when there are cues that we might choose to ignore based on what our prerogative is at the time, right? Somebody might yell “lunchtime, everybody,” and you decide to stay at your desk. You know, all throughout France, they have these green crosses whenever there's a pharmacy. And I always think, Oh, that's such a nice, subtle and clear cue that if I need toothpaste, this is a place I should go right now, but I don't have to go in. I'm just being given the information that may help me choose what I'm going to do.

Now, that is not to say that when we are teaching cues to our dogs, that they are optional. But two things. One, it's possible to get a dog who responds to the cue that you want your dog to respond to nearly a hundred percent of the time without using this sort of “or else” style training. Two, you do want your dog to be making some choices for himself. With service dogs, there's something called trained disobedience with the idea being, you know, you don't want to cue your dog to do something dangerous. You know, if you're blind, you might not see that there is a ditch right in front of you. So if you cue your dog to move forward, you don't want your dog to obey that cue no matter what. You want your dog to use some judgment. You want your dog to make the choice that that's not actually a good idea. Just like you are not controlled in some robotic way by the green light–there might be times where, even though the light is green, you're going to stop in the middle of the street so that you don't hit a kid on his bike. It's like we are giving the animal the best possible about what to do. And then we're trusting our animal to make the best possible decision about doing that thing.

A lot of the time we lure our dogs, and then that lure ends up becoming the cue. And luring, you know, it could also be prompting, you know, not necessarily being about using food. For instance, when I first started training my dog using a clicker and adding a cue in this way, I realized that I could get him to sit just by kind of leaning forward a little bit. And it really didn't matter what I said. I could have said “Popsicle stick.” He wasn't even paying attention. He was just looking for my subtle little lean. And you probably have things like this with your dog, too. A lot of people reflexively hold their fingers over their dog's nose to get the dog to sit as if they were pinching food in their hands, to hold it over the dog's nose. We call it getting stuck in treat land. You are doing this motion long after your dog actually needs that lure. But your dog has learned that the cue for sitting is you holding your hand in this way.

Think about what cues you're giving with your body. It can be useful to record yourself or to ask someone else to observe you when you cue your dog using cues that you regularly do. And you know, another thing about a cue is that you shouldn't have to repeat it. So to go back to our example of clicking a dog every time he sits, the process of adding the cue is going to be that you're just going to start to be attaching the word or whatever your cue is. A cue doesn't have to be a word, but in this example, your word, your word “sit,” you're going to say “sit” when you are pretty sure your dog is about to sit.

It's important to at first get that rhythm going of knowing that your dog is going to sit 10, 12 times in a minute before you start inserting the word. Because remember, this is not about you eliciting the behavior with your words, it's simply about you attaching the behavior to this new word by saying the word and then rewarding the behavior that was going to happen anyway, just like that eclipse.

When you start adding a cue, you probably want to think about adding cues to behaviors that you know your dog is going to do. And in a way, I think that it's very similar to how we learn languages. It's useful if you are very familiar with how to do something, or familiar with a certain object, before you learn what that object is called or what that behavior is. So, you know, for example, if you're learning how to speak Spanish, you are probably going to start by talking about waking up in the morning. Something that you're very familiar with doing, or with words like, you know, shoes, kitchen, food, drink. You don't usually learn a language by starting by talking about abstract concepts or objects that you rarely encounter.

In fact, when you're talking to a very small child, this process can feel really intuitive. So, you know, my daughter is, she's about 18 months and I've been trying to teach her the word “nose.” She can't speak yet, but I wasn't going to introduce the word until I had her pretty reliably touching her nose, which I was able to do pretty easily by having her mirror me and making a big deal about it when she did touch her own nose. Only after she was reliably touching her nose would I start saying “nose.” If she had no idea what a nose was, or where it was, or if she had no idea how to touch it, I probably could have said nose over and over and over again and it wouldn't have had much meaning. But now I'm able to attach it with this very specific behavior that I've built.

I sometimes give my clients the “cookies in the kitchen” example. If I had a foreign exchange student who didn't speak English in my home, and I was trying to get him to learn the word kitchen, I could say the word kitchen over and over. I could push him into the kitchen. Or I could put some cookies in the kitchen over and over to make sure to build the behavior of him going into the kitchen. Then as he was going into the kitchen, I could say “kitchen.” And again, for someone looking on, it might have seemed like I was predicting the eclipse, but actually I had just built this behavior. I knew it was going to happen. And I was in the process of communicating to my learner what this behavior is called.

Once you have attached the cue to the behavior, then you want to start giving the cue at moments that are not so predictable and work towards the step of your dog having a behavior under what we call stimulus control. Once your dog understands what the behavior is called, you want your dog to engage in that behavior when you ask for it, and not engage in it when you don't ask for it or when you're asking for something different. Now, of course, different behaviors are going to require that you work to different levels of stimulus control. It's a hundred percent fine, or most of the time, it's fine if my dog sits and I haven't asked for a sit, right, but I do want him to sit when I do ask for it. However, it's a behavior that does not have to correspond to a cue being given by me. Again, there are environmental cues that might cue him to sit. For instance, you can teach a dog to sit at a curb. The curb itself can become a cue, or there might be cues in the environment that I'm not even perceiving that to him indicate that sitting is a good idea. But then, you know, there are certainly other cues. You might teach a dog that you don't want your dog engaging in, on their own. You know, if you have an attack dog, you want to have that behavior under very, very good stimulus control.

I wanted to mention, of course, that dogs give us cues as well. It's not a one way street. And one really great thing about good dog training is that you can teach your dog to give you cues that you're okay receiving. You know, often dogs learn to bark their head off when they're hungry, for example, or if they want to go out or whatever. Barking is a good cue to the humans that, “Hey, there is something that I want.” Or maybe it's really a command [laughs]. “I'm going to bark until you give me what I want.”

But we can teach dogs to give us more appropriate cues. You can teach a dog to sit nicely on her bed when she's ready to get fed, or to ring a bell when they want to go out, or to bring you the leash. I actually taught my dog to bark when he wants to come inside. I have a little back deck area, and it's great. He does not bark and bark and bark. I taught him that one bark is enough. And just like, we don't want to have to repeat cues, you want your dog to understand a cue well enough and to have the behavior, have enough of a reinforcement history to be worthwhile to your dog, you don't want your dog to have to repeat cues that he's offering you. So when my dog barks, once outside, I make every effort to drop whatever I'm doing and get him right away so that he understands that one bark really is enough.

So to summarize, you only want to add a cue to a behavior that your dog clearly understands, that your dog understands that engaging in this behavior will net something good from you. So focus first on getting the behavior you want before you focus too much on adding the cue. You can certainly often add a cue from the beginning or fade–kind of like fade a cue into a lore. If you listen to the episodes that I've done on teaching sit or lying down, I talk about how to fade a cue into a little bit of a lure and then get rid of that lure. And there are times where I like adding a cue right from the beginning, but I am always thinking first about getting the behavior that I want, making that behavior at worthwhile, before I'm turning too much of my focus to the cue, and making sure that the cue is being paired in a way that the dog understands.

Also, I should mention, you know, you have to pick a cue that your dog is going to understand. This might seem obvious, but you know, if you have a deaf dog, you're not going to want to use an oral cue, you're going to want to use some sort of visual cue. If you have a behavior that you're working on, that is going to be something you're going to want your dog to be able to respond to at a great distance, then you're probably gonna want to use a cue that you will be able to give at a great distance. And you want to make sure that you're adding cues to behaviors that are going to be happening a lot, and that are going to be enjoyable for your dog. Think about the “cookies in the kitchen” example, much easier to add that cue than the “were going to the dentist” cue, or the “it's time to leave the dog park” cue.

Anyway, lots more that could be said about cueing, but I just wanted to use this time to talk a little bit purely about the word “cue,” which I think we covered, and to touch on how to add a cue. And maybe we could do a future episode on getting stimulus control and really proofing cues. Although, you know, one quick thing I'll mention that's maybe a little bit more advanced is that you can give a behavior that already has a cue, you can give it a new cue. The trick is to always give the new cue first and separate it from whatever the old cue is. You know, I really like teaching behaviors with both a visual cue and a verbal cue, but I think it's nice when they can be given separately rather than together. And often you can just separate, you know, if you have, for instance, a sit cue where you move your hand and say sit at the same time. Many people do this. You can work to separate those cues by giving one of the cues, say the word, pause, and then give the other cue. Or if you need to give them both at the same time, if that's the cue that you've built, you can do that. But give the new cue first, whatever that new cue is, and your dog is going to learn to anticipate the next cue, which is the known one.

Just a funny example, I just thought of how sometimes we try and get behaviors by giving the cue in a way that actually doesn't make that much sense. I've been putting my daughter on her little potty and trying to get her to do her business there. And I put her on it and then I go psssss, like making a peeing sound. And now when I put her on it, she looks at me and she goes psssss. So rather than teaching her to pee, when I make that noise, I've actually taught her to just sit on the potty and make the noise. Which, at least, is pretty cute.

Links:

Episode 19: How to train a dog to “sit” from scratch

Episode 40: Teaching a stellar “Down” with a verbal or visual cue

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Find Annie's new MasterClass at http://anniegrossman.com/masterclass