This week, Tony breaks down conditioned responses, rewards, and how we can get the best behaviors out of our dogs no matter their age.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Foundation's podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about figuring out
how to connect positive associations to specific dog behaviors and
why it's the foundation of almost all successful dog training.
You know, this is a pretty easy one to understand
on the surface, but when you dive into it, you
realize that the concept is pretty nuanced when it comes
(00:24):
to our everyday interactions with our dogs. Positive associations, conditioned responses, rewards,
that sweet, sweet dopamine hit that comes from getting what
you want, Well, that stuff works with our dogs too,
and we should think about it whether we are working
with an eight week old puppy or a middle aged dog,
which is what I'm going to talk about right now.
(00:50):
You guys might not be super aware of a lot
of Russian physiologists who were doing whatever physiologists did in
Russia around the beginning of the nineteen hundreds. I know
I'm a little light on knowledge when it comes to
that topic myself, but there was one fella in the
field at that time, not surprisingly named Ivan, which doesn't
(01:11):
mean anything to you, but his last name was Pavlov,
which might ironically ring a bell Pavlov won the Nobel
Prize in nineteen oh four for his studies on digestion
in dogs, and as any good researcher will do, Pavlov
didn't set out to study conditioned responses in canines, but
(01:32):
he did notice that the dogs he was working with
started to salivate when his assistants would walk in the room.
During his research, Pavlov or one of his assistants would
introduce either edible or non edible items and then measure
how much saliva the dogs would produce. His thought process
was that salivation was a reflexive response, or in other words, unconscious.
(01:57):
It just happened, like how some folks in their heart
rate will skyrocket at the site of a snake or
a giant, hairy, dumb spider on their wall. Now, throughout
his research, Pavlov realized that the dogs would salivate not
at the site or smell of food, but simply when
a white coated research assistant would enter the room. The dogs,
(02:17):
in his reasoning, would have had no reason to salivate
at the mere sight of a person unless he deduced
correctly that the dogs had been conditioned to associate those
people with some potential calories some reward. A lot of
great scientific discoveries have happened when a researcher said something like, hmm,
(02:38):
that's interesting, and they followed their curiosity down an unintentional path.
That's what Pavlov did first with a metronome that he
used as an auditory connection to the delivery of some food.
He knew because he checked that hearing a metronome at
the onset of the experiment didn't elicit a salivation response.
(03:00):
It was only after he connected the food to the
sound that the dogs also connected the prospect of food
to the sound. While he wasn't a psychologist, he did
jump start the whole field of behavioral psychology with his findings.
This is spiraled out into the world of us humans
and has greatly influenced behavioral modification treatments and mental health treatments.
(03:25):
Now we take this for granted. Now we think, well, duh,
you can get a dog to do things you want
if you promise it something it wants. But this was
back when dogs weren't hanging out on the couch with
us and snuggling up in our beds at night. The
View on Dogs one hundred and twenty five years ago
was vastly different from our view today. His research was groundbreaking,
(03:49):
and the crazy thing is it works on us too.
If you don't believe that, go get your ass married
and pay attention to the times when you find yourself
doing a bunch of landscaping in the yard or some
other tech you'd rather just hire out or not do
at all, and then think about the prospect of what
that might mean to you, uh rewards wise. That's all
I'm going to say on that. Conditioned responses are what
(04:12):
we are all aiming for with our dogs, which is
a concept you can hear an actual dog trainer touch
on if you listen to the upcoming interview episode I
did with Jordan Horrock, who is a badass trainer who
knows a lot about dogs. We want our dogs to
want to work for us, and that means we need
to motivate them. It's as simple as that, but it's
(04:34):
also kind of not simple, or I guess not as
simple as we would like it to be. The easiest
way to understand this is to look at what Pavlov used,
which is food wild animals like the kind that we
eventually molded into chihuahuas and German shorthaired pointers spend their
lives in the pursuit of two things, well maybe three
food safety in a mate, but we'll call food and
(04:56):
safety for now. And food is a powerful motive because
without it then it's time to die, a usually not
very enjoyable death. Treat training is wildly effective, which is
why it comes up a lot on this podcast. We
know how to get young dogs to pay attention to
us and to offer us certain behaviors, and it works
very very well. In fact, there was a time not
(05:20):
long ago which might have been born out of just
trying to be contrarian, where you would hear some trainers
talk about how treat training is never necessary, and maybe
it's not, but it's also very uncommon to hear these days.
Most people who are tasked with getting dogs to do
something people want dogs to do will reach for a
(05:41):
handful of kibble right off the bat. Even low food
drive dogs which I don't meet too often but they
do exist, can be coaxed into behavior with some kind
of treat. At its most simple point a to B
level that is just a conditioned response. Offer the food,
often by letting the dogs see it or smell it,
(06:02):
give it a command, and if the behavior is delivered,
the food is provided. If you do nothing else but
that to start to cement the foundational elements of obedience
in your dog, then you have at least put them
on the right path early on. Where this gets muddy
is that we forget sometimes that everything we do can
elicit a conditioned response over time. So let's say you
(06:24):
go to treat train your puppy to sit. Simple right,
let it smell the kibble in your hand, tell it
to sit while pushing down on its rear end, and
then minute butt hits the ground, the dog gets the reward.
But what if you don't always wait for that butt
to hit the dirt before you release the treat. Then
your dog will figure out it can kind of half
(06:44):
squat to get the reward. You've conditioned it to a
partial behavior and not one you want, because it'll only
get less solid the more you reward the half delivery
of that behavior. Now, if you think that some dogs
won't do this kind of thing, keep try training them.
I had a Golden retriever that I was potty training
figure out that if she faked peeing, she'd get a treat,
(07:07):
So suddenly she had to go outside all the time,
and suddenly she had to pee a lot, but only
for like one second at a time. She got greedy,
and as smart as she was as a little pupster,
she was no match for one of the more successful
squirrel hunting article writers out there. The lesson here is
one that will come up a lot when you're trying
to get a dog to do what you want it
(07:29):
to do. There is always room for error if you
allow it. I recently had a conversation with a trainer
who said that every dog needs to be force fetched,
but there are different ways to achieve that. Now. Some
dogs need the toepinch method and the pressure on pressure
off stuff to instill in them that not only will
they be expected to pick stuff up, but they'll be
(07:49):
expected to hold it until they are allowed to give
or drop. You can condition this response by force, which
is very effective and not nearly as bad as it
sounds on the surface, but you can condition this other ways.
I love dogs that have so much retrieving desire that
they are annoying as hell. If I have that, I
usually have quite a bit of natural hold and carry
(08:12):
to work with, which makes my job of training hunting
dogs a hell of a lot easier, but it's also
a way to deliver what the dog wants or to
withhold it, so that dog that needs to learn how
to pick something up and hold it can control its
own fate with the next retrieve. They drop the bumper
at your feet, they don't get that next throw. They
(08:33):
come to heal and wait to deliver it to hand.
They get the next retrieve, which is all they want.
If I had forty dogs a quarter to train in
a limited amount of time, I probably wouldn't go this route.
But with one high retrieving desire dog every half decade
or so, this is an easy way to condition a
response out of them. They get to choose what behavior
(08:54):
they deliver, and they will almost always give you what
you want if that behavior also gives them the rewards
that they want. I know that's kind of a muddy sentence,
but it's true. At their most fundamental level, Connecting positive
associations with certain behaviors works to facilitate specific tasks that
the dog is expected to do. But there is also
(09:16):
a reason why when you go to the vet, the
texts and the vets will love up your dog and
give them treats if you allow it, because that's a
potentially high stress environment that can bring out the worst
fear responses in dogs, some of which will manifest themselves
into aggression and just generally uncooperative dangerous behavior. But your
(09:37):
dog will have to go to the vet clinic multiple
times in its life, and so wouldn't you rather have
a dog that is conditioned to be excited about it
over a dog that cowers in the corner and bears
its teeth. These are the things in our lives with
(10:01):
dogs that we often overlook solely to work on their
behaviors at home and in the field. But it's the
parts of life that don't involve tossing a bumper in
the backyard or looking for a few october grouse flushes
that fill up most of our relationships with our dogs.
This line of thinking works for training into a dog
(10:22):
the kinds of things we want, like not having a
dog jump on people, not having our dogs range four
hundred yards out to blow the whole pheasant field out,
or not having our dogs jump out of the duckboat
the minute the first bird strafe overhead and the group
three cattail points down from you touches off. The first
three shots of the morning. It's also the most valuable
(10:44):
tool for getting over fear based issues. Let me tell
you an example here about how dumb I am to
cement this point. When my daughters were eight, I decided,
much to my wife's surprise, that they were ready to
turkey hunt with shotguns. So I went and bought a
Youth Model twenty gauge. It weighs a shade over five pounds. Now,
the thing about lightweight guns is there easy to handle,
(11:05):
but they kick like a Muytai fighter in the first
ten seconds of round one. They are brutal, and because
I'm dumb, I didn't factor this in, and I even
shot that gun a couple of times to show them
it wasn't scary. But I'm also six two and not
very small, and I've shot a lot of shotguns for
a long long time. But when my first daughter sat
(11:27):
down and aimed to beat at our turkey target, I
watched in horror as she picked up her head to
look at the trigger. Then she pulled it. That created
about an inch of space between her face and the
stock of that little shotgun, which means she got cur
walloped right in the lips. And that was it. I
had a gun shy daughter and her twin sister, who
(11:47):
saw the blood on the lips and the tears flowing
down the cheeks, said, you know what, Dad, I think
I'm good because she's no dummy. I had to dig
out an old four to ten I actually forgot I owned,
and then lock it into a heavy tripod and then hey,
each girl twenty dollars and give them twinkies to get
them to shoot that smaller shotgun. I had to offer
up a reward sufficient enough to get them to get
(12:09):
over their fear of shooting all guns. And I'll tell
you they are thirteen now, and while things have gotten
much easier, neither one has forgotten that ill fated day
at the gun range when their expert hunter father did
just about everything wrong that he could. So let's say
you do something wrong with your dog at some level,
with some task. Swimming is an easy one, right. You
(12:31):
take your little lab puppy out on the boat and
think it's all kosher until you hear a splash and
see the panic swimming. You scoop that dog back into
the boat and you realize that a core memory is
formed and not one you really want for a future.
Duck dog. Can you untangle that mess? Yes, you can,
but it'll take a lot of positive associations with water.
(12:52):
You're gonna have to start them over and figure out
a way to reward them somehow where they will eventually
get over their fear and step in and then even
walk in deep enough to have to swim. That might
be a handful of treats. It might be utilizing their
retrieving desire, it might be offering up shitloads of praise,
or in reality, it might take all three at separate
(13:13):
points and during the same sessions to break that fear.
Tom Dokin likes to explain this very simply by saying,
if you were super scared of skateboards, but someone started
rolling one by you that had one hundred dollars bill
on it, you know that would be yours, just for
the taking. If you could get over your fear, you'd
probably start to look at skateboards differently. It's simple, but
(13:33):
it's true. I used to be scared of heights like bad.
That's not a great affliction to have. If you're obsessed
with bow hunting white tails, and eventually your paychecks indirectly
hinge on your ability to successfully bow hunt white tails,
mostly from up in the trees, you know, after climbing
into a hell of a lot of trees and realizing
that when I was hunting pressure deer like the bucks
(13:55):
that live on public land, the higher I went, the
likelier I was to not get busted, and to have
deer walk by me that had no clue I was there.
My desire to arrow more deer started to outweigh my
fear of gravity and losing my ability to walk and
talk by slamming into the ground in the woods somewhere.
The positive association there is that I like filling my
(14:16):
deer tags and eating venison, and I became conditioned to
climbing higher to achieve that because it worked. But it
was a process. Now, as I mentioned earlier, there is
the reality that you have to understand what the best
rewards are for the moment and how to be very
consistent with them. A big mistake a lot of people
make is that they don't give the connection enough time
(14:37):
to truly solidify in the dog's brain. Take that puppy
that is being treat trained to sit on command, for example,
That puppy will give you that behavior on day one
if you give it a few minutes to understand the
ask and then the reward. That's pretty amazing stuff. But
do you think if you do that on day one
and don't work on it for a few days or
(15:00):
maybe a week, that that puppy is going to be
rock solid on that command when you come back to
it later. It won't, and it will only get worse
if during the time between, let's say your kids give
the puppy treats simply for being cute and yawning and
chewing on the remote and whatever else. There's no value
proposition in offering up extra behavior to get the same
(15:22):
reward you can get for not doing something you don't
want to do. This is where it gets tricky because
some dogs are fast learners while some are slow learners,
but most of them just need more consistency and repeatable
lessons than we like to think. This is why you
hear so much about day to day to day to
day training when it comes to the pros, and why
(15:43):
so many normal people dogs aren't very well behaved. It's
not that much fun to work on the same stuff
every day for weeks or months. But if you want
a dog that will give you some type of behavior
and not need a treat. Eventually, you have to play
the long game and figure out how to you use
whatever reward you can, because eventually you're going to change
(16:03):
the game up on them and ask them instead of
taking a treat to just take some praise or maybe
the next bumper toss. You're going to change that reward.
So I guess a parting thought here is this, think
about how you're conditioning your dog to all kinds of things,
not only when you're actively training and trying to make
(16:24):
the connection between something positive and a behavior, but all
of the times in your life when you interact with
your dog and there is some kind of positive or
negative reaction out of you, or a positive or negative
experience for them, because they are learning all the time,
they are paying attention to what we do and what
(16:44):
they can get away with. They're simple creatures that are
motivated by simple rewards, and that's a blessing and a
curse depending on how we view it and definitely how
we use it. But it's also the best way to
get a really good dog as long as you approach
training with the idea that there is nothing more beneficial
than that mental connection that your dog can make to
something that it can do to get something good from you.
(17:08):
As long as what that is is what you want,
it's win win. Think about that and think about coming
back next week because we are launching the Dog Days
of May here at Meat Eater. That's right, We're finally
celebrating dogs here, even though our fearless leader, mister Ranella
is a diet in the wool cat guy. I'll be
(17:30):
dropping a pile of podcast. There's going to be a
whole bunch of new articles up at the mediator dot com,
and we're going to do a sweet Dog photo contest
where you can post up pics of your favorite hounds
and possibly win some prizes. So, as always, thank you
so much for your support. I'm Tony Peterson. This has
been the Foundation's podcast. I hope you have a great week.
(17:52):
I hope you take those pups out and you train them,
and I hope you head on over to the Mediator
dot com if you want to find some more hunting
and fishing content because we are dropping new stuff daily.
Thanks again,
Hey, everyone, Welcome to the Foundation's podcast. I'm your host,
Tony Peterson, and today's episode is all about figuring out
how to connect positive associations to specific dog behaviors and
why it's the foundation of almost all successful dog training.
You know, this is a pretty easy one to understand
on the surface, but when you dive into it, you
realize that the concept is pretty nuanced when it comes
(00:24):
to our everyday interactions with our dogs. Positive associations, conditioned responses, rewards,
that sweet, sweet dopamine hit that comes from getting what
you want, Well, that stuff works with our dogs too,
and we should think about it whether we are working
with an eight week old puppy or a middle aged dog,
which is what I'm going to talk about right now.
(00:50):
You guys might not be super aware of a lot
of Russian physiologists who were doing whatever physiologists did in
Russia around the beginning of the nineteen hundreds. I know
I'm a little light on knowledge when it comes to
that topic myself, but there was one fella in the
field at that time, not surprisingly named Ivan, which doesn't
(01:11):
mean anything to you, but his last name was Pavlov,
which might ironically ring a bell Pavlov won the Nobel
Prize in nineteen oh four for his studies on digestion
in dogs, and as any good researcher will do, Pavlov
didn't set out to study conditioned responses in canines, but
(01:32):
he did notice that the dogs he was working with
started to salivate when his assistants would walk in the room.
During his research, Pavlov or one of his assistants would
introduce either edible or non edible items and then measure
how much saliva the dogs would produce. His thought process
was that salivation was a reflexive response, or in other words, unconscious.
(01:57):
It just happened, like how some folks in their heart
rate will skyrocket at the site of a snake or
a giant, hairy, dumb spider on their wall. Now, throughout
his research, Pavlov realized that the dogs would salivate not
at the site or smell of food, but simply when
a white coated research assistant would enter the room. The dogs,
(02:17):
in his reasoning, would have had no reason to salivate
at the mere sight of a person unless he deduced
correctly that the dogs had been conditioned to associate those
people with some potential calories some reward. A lot of
great scientific discoveries have happened when a researcher said something like, hmm,
(02:38):
that's interesting, and they followed their curiosity down an unintentional path.
That's what Pavlov did first with a metronome that he
used as an auditory connection to the delivery of some food.
He knew because he checked that hearing a metronome at
the onset of the experiment didn't elicit a salivation response.
(03:00):
It was only after he connected the food to the
sound that the dogs also connected the prospect of food
to the sound. While he wasn't a psychologist, he did
jump start the whole field of behavioral psychology with his findings.
This is spiraled out into the world of us humans
and has greatly influenced behavioral modification treatments and mental health treatments.
(03:25):
Now we take this for granted. Now we think, well, duh,
you can get a dog to do things you want
if you promise it something it wants. But this was
back when dogs weren't hanging out on the couch with
us and snuggling up in our beds at night. The
View on Dogs one hundred and twenty five years ago
was vastly different from our view today. His research was groundbreaking,
(03:49):
and the crazy thing is it works on us too.
If you don't believe that, go get your ass married
and pay attention to the times when you find yourself
doing a bunch of landscaping in the yard or some
other tech you'd rather just hire out or not do
at all, and then think about the prospect of what
that might mean to you, uh rewards wise. That's all
I'm going to say on that. Conditioned responses are what
(04:12):
we are all aiming for with our dogs, which is
a concept you can hear an actual dog trainer touch
on if you listen to the upcoming interview episode I
did with Jordan Horrock, who is a badass trainer who
knows a lot about dogs. We want our dogs to
want to work for us, and that means we need
to motivate them. It's as simple as that, but it's
(04:34):
also kind of not simple, or I guess not as
simple as we would like it to be. The easiest
way to understand this is to look at what Pavlov used,
which is food wild animals like the kind that we
eventually molded into chihuahuas and German shorthaired pointers spend their
lives in the pursuit of two things, well maybe three
food safety in a mate, but we'll call food and
(04:56):
safety for now. And food is a powerful motive because
without it then it's time to die, a usually not
very enjoyable death. Treat training is wildly effective, which is
why it comes up a lot on this podcast. We
know how to get young dogs to pay attention to
us and to offer us certain behaviors, and it works
very very well. In fact, there was a time not
(05:20):
long ago which might have been born out of just
trying to be contrarian, where you would hear some trainers
talk about how treat training is never necessary, and maybe
it's not, but it's also very uncommon to hear these days.
Most people who are tasked with getting dogs to do
something people want dogs to do will reach for a
(05:41):
handful of kibble right off the bat. Even low food
drive dogs which I don't meet too often but they
do exist, can be coaxed into behavior with some kind
of treat. At its most simple point a to B
level that is just a conditioned response. Offer the food,
often by letting the dogs see it or smell it,
(06:02):
give it a command, and if the behavior is delivered,
the food is provided. If you do nothing else but
that to start to cement the foundational elements of obedience
in your dog, then you have at least put them
on the right path early on. Where this gets muddy
is that we forget sometimes that everything we do can
elicit a conditioned response over time. So let's say you
(06:24):
go to treat train your puppy to sit. Simple right,
let it smell the kibble in your hand, tell it
to sit while pushing down on its rear end, and
then minute butt hits the ground, the dog gets the reward.
But what if you don't always wait for that butt
to hit the dirt before you release the treat. Then
your dog will figure out it can kind of half
(06:44):
squat to get the reward. You've conditioned it to a
partial behavior and not one you want, because it'll only
get less solid the more you reward the half delivery
of that behavior. Now, if you think that some dogs
won't do this kind of thing, keep try training them.
I had a Golden retriever that I was potty training
figure out that if she faked peeing, she'd get a treat,
(07:07):
So suddenly she had to go outside all the time,
and suddenly she had to pee a lot, but only
for like one second at a time. She got greedy,
and as smart as she was as a little pupster,
she was no match for one of the more successful
squirrel hunting article writers out there. The lesson here is
one that will come up a lot when you're trying
to get a dog to do what you want it
(07:29):
to do. There is always room for error if you
allow it. I recently had a conversation with a trainer
who said that every dog needs to be force fetched,
but there are different ways to achieve that. Now. Some
dogs need the toepinch method and the pressure on pressure
off stuff to instill in them that not only will
they be expected to pick stuff up, but they'll be
(07:49):
expected to hold it until they are allowed to give
or drop. You can condition this response by force, which
is very effective and not nearly as bad as it
sounds on the surface, but you can condition this other ways.
I love dogs that have so much retrieving desire that
they are annoying as hell. If I have that, I
usually have quite a bit of natural hold and carry
(08:12):
to work with, which makes my job of training hunting
dogs a hell of a lot easier, but it's also
a way to deliver what the dog wants or to
withhold it, so that dog that needs to learn how
to pick something up and hold it can control its
own fate with the next retrieve. They drop the bumper
at your feet, they don't get that next throw. They
(08:33):
come to heal and wait to deliver it to hand.
They get the next retrieve, which is all they want.
If I had forty dogs a quarter to train in
a limited amount of time, I probably wouldn't go this route.
But with one high retrieving desire dog every half decade
or so, this is an easy way to condition a
response out of them. They get to choose what behavior
(08:54):
they deliver, and they will almost always give you what
you want if that behavior also gives them the rewards
that they want. I know that's kind of a muddy sentence,
but it's true. At their most fundamental level, Connecting positive
associations with certain behaviors works to facilitate specific tasks that
the dog is expected to do. But there is also
(09:16):
a reason why when you go to the vet, the
texts and the vets will love up your dog and
give them treats if you allow it, because that's a
potentially high stress environment that can bring out the worst
fear responses in dogs, some of which will manifest themselves
into aggression and just generally uncooperative dangerous behavior. But your
(09:37):
dog will have to go to the vet clinic multiple
times in its life, and so wouldn't you rather have
a dog that is conditioned to be excited about it
over a dog that cowers in the corner and bears
its teeth. These are the things in our lives with
(10:01):
dogs that we often overlook solely to work on their
behaviors at home and in the field. But it's the
parts of life that don't involve tossing a bumper in
the backyard or looking for a few october grouse flushes
that fill up most of our relationships with our dogs.
This line of thinking works for training into a dog
(10:22):
the kinds of things we want, like not having a
dog jump on people, not having our dogs range four
hundred yards out to blow the whole pheasant field out,
or not having our dogs jump out of the duckboat
the minute the first bird strafe overhead and the group
three cattail points down from you touches off. The first
three shots of the morning. It's also the most valuable
(10:44):
tool for getting over fear based issues. Let me tell
you an example here about how dumb I am to
cement this point. When my daughters were eight, I decided,
much to my wife's surprise, that they were ready to
turkey hunt with shotguns. So I went and bought a
Youth Model twenty gauge. It weighs a shade over five pounds. Now,
the thing about lightweight guns is there easy to handle,
(11:05):
but they kick like a Muytai fighter in the first
ten seconds of round one. They are brutal, and because
I'm dumb, I didn't factor this in, and I even
shot that gun a couple of times to show them
it wasn't scary. But I'm also six two and not
very small, and I've shot a lot of shotguns for
a long long time. But when my first daughter sat
(11:27):
down and aimed to beat at our turkey target, I
watched in horror as she picked up her head to
look at the trigger. Then she pulled it. That created
about an inch of space between her face and the
stock of that little shotgun, which means she got cur
walloped right in the lips. And that was it. I
had a gun shy daughter and her twin sister, who
(11:47):
saw the blood on the lips and the tears flowing
down the cheeks, said, you know what, Dad, I think
I'm good because she's no dummy. I had to dig
out an old four to ten I actually forgot I owned,
and then lock it into a heavy tripod and then hey,
each girl twenty dollars and give them twinkies to get
them to shoot that smaller shotgun. I had to offer
up a reward sufficient enough to get them to get
(12:09):
over their fear of shooting all guns. And I'll tell
you they are thirteen now, and while things have gotten
much easier, neither one has forgotten that ill fated day
at the gun range when their expert hunter father did
just about everything wrong that he could. So let's say
you do something wrong with your dog at some level,
with some task. Swimming is an easy one, right. You
(12:31):
take your little lab puppy out on the boat and
think it's all kosher until you hear a splash and
see the panic swimming. You scoop that dog back into
the boat and you realize that a core memory is
formed and not one you really want for a future.
Duck dog. Can you untangle that mess? Yes, you can,
but it'll take a lot of positive associations with water.
(12:52):
You're gonna have to start them over and figure out
a way to reward them somehow where they will eventually
get over their fear and step in and then even
walk in deep enough to have to swim. That might
be a handful of treats. It might be utilizing their
retrieving desire, it might be offering up shitloads of praise,
or in reality, it might take all three at separate
(13:13):
points and during the same sessions to break that fear.
Tom Dokin likes to explain this very simply by saying,
if you were super scared of skateboards, but someone started
rolling one by you that had one hundred dollars bill
on it, you know that would be yours, just for
the taking. If you could get over your fear, you'd
probably start to look at skateboards differently. It's simple, but
(13:33):
it's true. I used to be scared of heights like bad.
That's not a great affliction to have. If you're obsessed
with bow hunting white tails, and eventually your paychecks indirectly
hinge on your ability to successfully bow hunt white tails,
mostly from up in the trees, you know, after climbing
into a hell of a lot of trees and realizing
that when I was hunting pressure deer like the bucks
(13:55):
that live on public land, the higher I went, the
likelier I was to not get busted, and to have
deer walk by me that had no clue I was there.
My desire to arrow more deer started to outweigh my
fear of gravity and losing my ability to walk and
talk by slamming into the ground in the woods somewhere.
The positive association there is that I like filling my
(14:16):
deer tags and eating venison, and I became conditioned to
climbing higher to achieve that because it worked. But it
was a process. Now, as I mentioned earlier, there is
the reality that you have to understand what the best
rewards are for the moment and how to be very
consistent with them. A big mistake a lot of people
make is that they don't give the connection enough time
(14:37):
to truly solidify in the dog's brain. Take that puppy
that is being treat trained to sit on command, for example,
That puppy will give you that behavior on day one
if you give it a few minutes to understand the
ask and then the reward. That's pretty amazing stuff. But
do you think if you do that on day one
and don't work on it for a few days or
(15:00):
maybe a week, that that puppy is going to be
rock solid on that command when you come back to
it later. It won't, and it will only get worse
if during the time between, let's say your kids give
the puppy treats simply for being cute and yawning and
chewing on the remote and whatever else. There's no value
proposition in offering up extra behavior to get the same
(15:22):
reward you can get for not doing something you don't
want to do. This is where it gets tricky because
some dogs are fast learners while some are slow learners,
but most of them just need more consistency and repeatable
lessons than we like to think. This is why you
hear so much about day to day to day to
day training when it comes to the pros, and why
(15:43):
so many normal people dogs aren't very well behaved. It's
not that much fun to work on the same stuff
every day for weeks or months. But if you want
a dog that will give you some type of behavior
and not need a treat. Eventually, you have to play
the long game and figure out how to you use
whatever reward you can, because eventually you're going to change
(16:03):
the game up on them and ask them instead of
taking a treat to just take some praise or maybe
the next bumper toss. You're going to change that reward.
So I guess a parting thought here is this, think
about how you're conditioning your dog to all kinds of things,
not only when you're actively training and trying to make
(16:24):
the connection between something positive and a behavior, but all
of the times in your life when you interact with
your dog and there is some kind of positive or
negative reaction out of you, or a positive or negative
experience for them, because they are learning all the time,
they are paying attention to what we do and what
(16:44):
they can get away with. They're simple creatures that are
motivated by simple rewards, and that's a blessing and a
curse depending on how we view it and definitely how
we use it. But it's also the best way to
get a really good dog as long as you approach
training with the idea that there is nothing more beneficial
than that mental connection that your dog can make to
something that it can do to get something good from you.
(17:08):
As long as what that is is what you want,
it's win win. Think about that and think about coming
back next week because we are launching the Dog Days
of May here at Meat Eater. That's right, We're finally
celebrating dogs here, even though our fearless leader, mister Ranella
is a diet in the wool cat guy. I'll be
(17:30):
dropping a pile of podcast. There's going to be a
whole bunch of new articles up at the mediator dot com,
and we're going to do a sweet Dog photo contest
where you can post up pics of your favorite hounds
and possibly win some prizes. So, as always, thank you
so much for your support. I'm Tony Peterson. This has
been the Foundation's podcast. I hope you have a great week.
(17:52):
I hope you take those pups out and you train them,
and I hope you head on over to the Mediator
dot com if you want to find some more hunting
and fishing content because we are dropping new stuff daily.
Thanks again,
Host
Cal Callaghan
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