Creating a Training Plan March 21, 2009

There are some people so experienced in dog training, they just know what to do and when to do it. It’s like the skills are second nature, and low and behold, out of their efforts comes a spectacularly trained dog. Those are called cream-of-the-crop professionals. I’m not one of them.

For the rest of us, especially if we have more than a good companion in mind when we come home with a pup or pound pooch, we need to have put a bit of thought into what we’re going to do. And how we’re going to do it. When I began training Kenai as an assistance dog, I found out fast how little I understood about what I’d committed to.

In the year or so since, I’ve come across some very helpful blogs and books, and some very not helpful blogs and books. Mostly because I needed to solve some problem. One of the good blogs by Sue Ailsby quite literally begins at the beginnings, and leaves nothing out. If you need a detailed plan, you’ll spend more time at this link than with your human “better half”!

Sue Ailsby has developed “levels” of training a behavior, like sit. Her approach is for everyone, from basic companion sits to high-end competition dog sports. Based on clicker training, she breaks the behavior down into small bits, making even very complex tasks approachable (and do-able) for most anyone. In her own words:

 ”The Levels are designed to give dogs and handlers a clear path to follow, a reminder of things that might be neglected in training, and a good cross-section of necessary skills. Each behaviour starts easy, and gets more and more difficult as the team progresses through the Levels. Skill is based on skill, proficiency on proficiency.”

http://www.dragonflyllama.com/%20DOGS/Levels/LevelBehaviours/LevelsBook.html

Having come across Sue’s blog a full year after Kenai’s training started, I can’t say I’ve used her levels. But boy do I wish I had! I am becoming inspired enough to entirely start over, following her training levels while I wait for Kenai to get healthy again so we can resume public access.

An excellent book I’d recommend to anyone is “Control Unleashed” by Leslie McDevitt. It is loaded with excercises to build communication, problem solve, distraction training, and just basic good doggie manners. (Wish I’d read this earlier too!)

Here’s the key, career-saving book for Kenai’s future as a service dog in training: “When Pigs Fly–Training Success With Impossible Dogs” by Jane Killion. Nearly all training methods assume you have an operant, biddable dog; one that is human focused for direction. You can’t train them if they aren’t paying attention, right?

Kenai is a highly independent, environmentally focused dog. ie, he’s not especially operant by nature. Lots of dogs out there are rehomed, washed out of programs, and called “impossible” to train. They’re not, they just need the additional step of shaping them into an operant dog to train like an operant dog.

“Pigs Fly”  is going to help me to make the best use of “Control Unleashed” and other operant-based training methods. I have bewailed his inattentiveness for over a year now, and I am immensely glad to have finally gotten my hands on this book. I was ready to just give up.

Another good blog belongs to a down-to-earth lady named Melissa. I picked out the posts that have taught me the most, particularly when it comes to the “trainer lingo”. She actually explains what words mean in dog training, and how it manifests in teaching a dog to do what you want. (Too many blogs just say “taught Fido to target brush”)

Much of the training skills can also be read on the page “helpful techniques” on this blog, btw. 

http://blackseadogs.blogspot.com/2008/11/dog-friendly-methods-of-getting_09.html, http://blackseadogs.blogspot.com/2008/11/random-topic-4-solving-behavior.html, http://blackseadogs.blogspot.com/2008/11/random-topic-3-what-is-behavior.html, http://blackseadogs.blogspot.com/2008/11/dog-friendly-methods-of-getting.html,

Starting from scratch

Creating a training plan can be a tricky business. I had a detailed plan, all laid out and shiny when my brown buddy came home with me. It went sideways within a month *grin*. Puppies don’t always follow the plan. So flexibility is a must.

But generally, it’s best to have a plan, whether you see it in your head, or pin a giant flow chart on the wall to check off mastered skills. http://blackseadogs.blogspot.com/2008/11/random-topic-6-making-training-plan.html is a good post about figuring out the details, and Sue Ailsby’s training levels can relieve you of alot of the planning, if you’d rather follow than figure. http://www.clickersolutions.com/training/index.html Has alot of help too.

The Ultimate Goals

Saying “I want an agility champion” is the place to start, but hardly enough. You want to understand in great detail the “finished” dog. That means you can close your eyes and literally watch the dog run the course, noticing the confident body language, sharp attention, instantaneous reponse to you, easy problem solving…

For me, it was “I want a mobility assistance dog”, unpreturbed by dropped dishes at the cafe, a snoozing downstay while I eat, easy counterbalancing my wobbles, glued to my hip at all times, automatically positioning himself to stop a fall in any direction, pulling me up the incline and stopping the pull at the top without being told…

Knowing what you ultimately want is essential, or you’re going to bounce around from this to that without any clue of where you’ll wind up. Some folks are really good at “winging it”, but when you have a big job for the dog, the journey there is long enough without wandering down rabbit trails.

Break the goal into parts

For Kenai to be a service dog, he has to have considerable training. It takes about 2 years. Longer if you get sidetracked. But there are “parts” to his job; the personality stuff, and the tasks. SDs will find themselves in every kind of situation imaginable, things a companion wouldn’t. So he has to have an unflappable, bombproof personality.

So Part One would be shaping his native boy style, from curious, handler ignoring, independent cuss of a puppy (affectionately said)…to a calm, handler focused, willing partner. That’s where 99% of my trouble has been, because I didn’t know enough, or have thought enough about this part. Ooops.

Part two would be deciding the neccessities. Long duration down stays, leave its, loose leash walking in close proximity, and unmovable standing stays are to be the backbone of Kenai’s daily work. These should have been the biggies worked on first and longest.

Once the required skills are decided on, there are things that I would have to prepare for but couldn’t teach until he was a year old: counterbalancing, bracing, or carrying weight. Still, I could teach him to come stand in front of me when I wanted to reach for something. After that are nicities, like will he ever learn to pick up my dropped keys?

Break the parts into specifics

Each skill has to be understood in detail. Down stays for example: Kenai’s rump will be 3 feet from his head when he’s grown, so he has to down exactly where I want him and not move. Rump rolling results in tripping the waiter.

So the down has to be imagined precisely; where the body is, where the tail is, where he lays his head, how long he stays without moving and the like. I want him leaning against the booth, legs NOT stretched out, tail tucked in, head down, snoring softly, for an hour or more. A look when a plate drops is okay, but no moving.

Working on the personality part, he’d have to focused on me more than the girl dog over there. So I would need to have exercises geared towards looking at me, waiting for a command, ignoring distractions and the like. This is socialization with a purpose, and building an intimate working relationship.

Breaking the specifics into peices

This is where my original plan went kaplooie. I tried to go from raw pup to finished down in one swift move. I didn’t prepare for the rump rolling or pooch ooch that developed when he turned 6 mo old. Had I practiced not rolling, or rewarded each part of getting his boy self where it “should” be, he would have understood exactly what I wanted and didn’t want.

A bracing skill may look like a one-dimension command, but it’s not. Bracing involves moving to the proper position, being willing to have weight on his shoulders, holding steady under the weight, and even shifting his body as needed to get me balanced on my own two feet again. It’s much more fluid than it looks.

All those moving parts have lots of places for a brace to go wrong. So getting a puppy who won’t put the feet where they should be, to a totally reliable dog that can put himself where he needs to be without command has to have every single peice of the command shaped and practiced individually before putting it all together.

Even a sit is more complicated than you might think. Many dogs will just pop down a pretty sit and never give a moment’s trouble about it. But if you have a pup that resists the sit in front of a stranger, you find yourself breaking a sit into peices to reward: shift the weight to the hind legs, bend the legs, tush on the legs, the tush on the floor, and even side of the rump on the floor.

Problem solving

With any living creature comes communication or motivation issues. The best laid plans, of the most experienced trainers, will inevitably have a few kinks in the hose. A 12 week old pup is not the same dog at 8 months old, changing as they develop. Kenai decided at 5 mo old to sit facing backwards when we stood in line. oy…never saw that one coming!

If a pup suddenly begins to pull when they see another dog, then the ability to disengage interest and return it to the handler has to be added to the flow chart and broken into peices to practice. But if you know the “finished” result you want, you can begin to find out how to get there as you play and experiment.

Each dog will have their own ways of learning, and individual motivations, that you’ll have to take into account. You’ll learn something new from every dog, which is part of the reward of training your own dog. It can be a frustrating, triumphant, hair pulling, life enriching journey. I think it’s worth it!