 |
Wednesday, August 02, 2006 'Nick' of Time: Lessons from a great dog
|
|
|
|
|
In this Issue:
A Rough Start
Defining Performance Criteria
|
A Rough StartNick was less than a year old when we started his agility training. Sherry entered him in his first USDAA agility trial soon after his first birthday. At that time you could start competing in USDAA when the dog was just a year old. Agility training was in its infancy and there were as many training methods as there were trainers. Everybody was experimenting. Defining Performance CriteriaOne turning point in my agility training was when I learned how to use the clicker to train. I began using it to train Nick to do tricks. I learned I could actually mold his behavior with it. The first thing I had to do was know what I wanted to train. I needed to understand what my final results were to be. In other words, I needed to define my criteria. The first trick I taught Nick was for him to turn his head away from me. Before I could start I had to know which direction he was to turn it and how much to turn his head. So I set my criteria for him to turn it to his right. I waited until he would turn to his right and then click and reward. Any turn of his head in that direction would earn a click, and a reward. At first the amount that he turned it didn’t matter. After clicking him several times for turning his head right, he began to try other things. He tried to turn it to his left, down, or up. The only way he could get his click and reward was by turning it in the direction I had set for the result I wanted. At first he would only turn it a small amount. As he began offering the same behavior several times in a row I started asking him to turn it more. I was then adding criteria to what I had up to that point. By adding more turn of the head I was asking for more of the same, or stronger behavior. I also learned that if I clicked at the wrong time or for something other than turning his head to the right he would try to repeat that same behavior at his next attempt. Clicking at the wrong time changed the criterion from what I had originally I started. I would then get different results. He would also get confused and then it would take longer to get him to repeat the ‘turn to the right’ performance. I learned that it wasn't a good idea to change the criteria. This was a step in the right direction but it wasn’t quite that simple to apply it to agility. First, we really didn’t always know what our final results for the obstacles performance were to be. For example, we knew we wanted the dogs to put a foot into the yellow contact zone but we didn’t know how we could accomplish it. If we didn’t know what behavior we wanted, it was not possible to set the criteria. I tried many ways to accomplish this. Some were my own ideas and some of the ideas were from other trainers and seminars. This meant I kept changing what Nick was supposed to do. My good friend Phil Mathew saw what was happening and finally told me to “pick one method and stick with it, even if it’s wrong”. Once I selected one set of criteria , I made progress. Over a period of time, I tried so
many ways to do the contacts that Nick never really did understand what
I wanted. Because I
originally used negative methods to train contacts, he even thought
he was supposed to avoid them. There
were a lot of obstacle performances that I needed to define when it came
to training Nick on how to do the obstacles.
If I didn’t know what was to be done how was he to know? What I learned from this was to define what I wanted my end result to be; develop a strategy to get there and follow it. I could add criteria in small increments to improve the performance. If I needed to change criteria I needed to do it early (training it correctly the first time is more accurate and less time consuming than retraining). In the early years of agility the learning curve was very steep. As time has passed trainers have learned how and what to train for. There are many ways one might define the way an obstacle is to be trained. Agility training has become much more precise through the years. Obstacle performance is now very well defined. Agility training and course running is becoming more and more exact. I have said many times that both Nick and I should have been born about five years later. We could have taken advantage of today’s knowledge.
|
|
|
|