Level Up Your Dog Training: Positive Reinforcement Primers, #1

By Natalie Bridger Watson

Level Up Your Dog Training is written for the DIY-minded dog owner who believes in learning by doing.

 

The core of this book is the same pet manners curriculum that I teach to local dog owners every day. As you work through the exercises, you'll train your dog how to sit, lie down, come when called, leave it, stay, settle on a mat, walk politely on a leash, potty promptly when asked and more.

 

And in the process of teaching those behaviors to your dog, you'll pick up a few new skills yourself! You'll learn fundamental concepts of dog training such as the three ways to build any new behavior, how to train effectively with positive reinforcement, how to attach a cue to any behavior, how to level up the difficulty on your dog's skills and all the techniques you'll need to train a totally new trick from scratch without a recipe holding your hand.

 

If you and your dog both do your homework, by the end of the book, you'll know the basics of how to teach a dog anything (some assembly required).

 

Praise for Level Up Your Dog Training

 

"Level Up Your Dog Training is an accessible and personable guide for non-professionals to work toward professional results. With warmth and humor, Watson lays out not just step-by-step instructions, but background for why we do it this way."

Laura VanArendonk Baugh, KPA-CTP CPDT-KA

Author of Fired Up, Frantic, and Freaked Out

Author of Social, Civil and Savvy

 

"The perfect book for the dog owner who wants to have a well-trained dog and also wants a peek into the science behind efficient training. As a dog trainer, I'm impressed at the seamless way Natalie Bridger Watson weaves together the practical and educational components of training. This is the book I've been wanting to recommend for my students who want to dig a little deeper into the why and how of training." 

Abigail Curtis, DVM CPDT-KA

Co-founder of International Dog Parkour Association

Co-owner of Adventure Unleashed Dog Training

• Language: English
• Publisher: Underfoot Publishing
• Release date: Apr 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781955179003

Natalie Bridger Watson

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Book preview

Natalie Bridger Watson

Level Up Your Dog Training

How to Teach Your Dog Anything (Some Assembly Required)

First published by Underfoot Publishing 2021

Copyright © 2021 by Natalie Bridger Watson

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

Natalie Bridger Watson has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet Websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such Websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book and on its cover are trade names, service marks, trademarks and registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publishers and the book are not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. None of the companies referenced within the book have endorsed the book.

First edition

Editing by Eileen Anderson

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

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Contents

I. HOW DOG TRAINING WORKS

Introduction

Why I Wrote This Book

The Theory Dilemma

Skills You Will Learn

Think Positive

Choosing Reinforcers

Reinforcement Drives Behavior

Why Use Food?

Toy Reinforcers

Life Rewards

Social Reinforcers

Moralizing Reinforcement

Dogs Don't Understand Debt

Using Food For Training

Count Your Blessings: The Reinforcers You’re Already Using

The Ammunition Argument

Becoming the Food Bowl

The Rosy Glow of the Good Stuff

The Magic Marker

What Is Clicker Training?

Why Do We Use a Clicker?

Can’t I Just Say Yes?

Charging Your Marker

The Importance of Order

Marker Timing Drills

Why Timing Matters

Clicker Timing Exercises: Tennis Ball and TV

Why Delivery Matters

Food Delivery Exercises

Contextual Learners

Starting In Kindergarten

Boredom? I Don’t Think So

When to Move On

II. SKILL BUILDING

Offered Versus Cued Attention

Hooray, Your First Training Exercise!

My Pet Peeve About Watch Me

Attention Is the Dog’s Choice

Learning to See the Good

Hands Off, Mouth Closed

Trusting the Process

Targeting: Hand Target

What Is Targeting?

What Does a Hand Target Look Like?

How to Teach a Hand Target

Troubleshooting

When Will I Ever Use This?

Capturing: Default Sit

What Is Capturing?

Why Is Capturing Amazing?

Teaching Your Dog to Be Stubbornly Good

What Types of Behaviors to Capture

Building a Default Sit

Luring: Spin

What Is Luring?

Benefits of Luring

Downfalls of Luring

Luring a Spin in Both Directions

Luring a Down

Fading a Lure: Down

Fading a Lure Quickly and Smoothly

Lure to Hand Sign

Side Note: Why Hand Signs Rock

Shaping: Settle on a Mat

What Is Shaping?

Benefits of Shaping

Downfalls of Shaping

Easy Intro Shaping Games

Shaping Four Paws in a Box

Shaping Go to Mat

Shaping a Settle on the Mat

Attaching a Cue: Potty

Yay, You Finally Get to Talk!

How Cues Work

The Difference Between Cues and Commands

Attaching the Cue

Troubleshooting Cues

III. SELF-CONTROL BEHAVIORS

Voluntary Leave It

The Skill That Will Save Your Dog’s Life

Leave It = Turn Away + Eye Contact

Building Impulse Control with Slow Treats

Adding Eye Contact

Resisting Temptation

Installing the Zen Force Field

Attaching the Cue to Leave It

Very Important! How to NOT Break This Behavior

Building A Stay: Duration, Distraction, Distance

Raising the Bar

Boiling Frogs in Dog Training

Building Duration

Building Distraction

Building Distance

Oops! Troubleshooting Errors

Combining Criteria

Generalizing and Proofing

Generalists and Specialists

Generalizing to New Environments

Proofing Handler Positions

Cue Discrimination

Differential Reinforcement: Jumping Prevention

What Is Differential Reinforcement and Why Should You Care?

Teaching Four on the Floor

IV. LEASH MANNERS

Loose Leash Walking

Your Graduation Project

Why Most Dogs Pull

By Your Powers Combined

Captured Heel Position

Kindergarten: Indoors, Off Leash

Loose Leash Walking Equipment

What Goes in Which Hand

Lucky Lefts

Building Duration

Lured Turns

When You Might Need Tight Turns

Luring Right Turns

Luring Left Turns

Step Back Reset

Teaching a Yellow Light

Circle Method Reset

Red Light: When to Circle

What the Circle Method Looks Like

V. DOG MEET WORLD

Leashes and Thresholds

Working with Distractions on Leash

Tame Distractions and Wild Distractions

Yo-Yo Leave It Practice

Management

An Ounce of Prevention is Worth a Pound of Cure

Are You in Trainer Mode? If Not, Then Manage

Environmental Cues

What Are Environmental Cues?

Sit at Doorways

Sit for the Leash

Voicemail Behavior

Fading Reinforcement

Moving to Life Rewards

Behavioral Bank Accounts and Canine Credit Scores

But Wait, We Never Taught Him NO!

In Conclusion

Solving the Theory Dilemma

About the Author

Bonus Lectures

Mental Versus Physical Exercise

Moving Beyond the Bowl

Kong as Babysitter

Ring a Bell to Go Outside

Why We Don’t Say Hi on Leash

No, You Can’t Pet My Dog

Trail and Sidewalk Manners

In Case of Emergency: It’s Okay to Lure Past

I

How Dog Training Works

Introduction

Why I Wrote This Book

With pages of dog training information a few clicks away on the internet, why do we need another dog training book to reinvent the wheel?

The difference is that most of the dog training books fall into one of two categories. I think of them as give a man a fish books and teach a man to fish books.

Give a man a fish books are geared toward the general public. They’re very approachable, recipe-based training guides without a lot of jargon or theory. These books are the just tell me what to do and we’ll worry about why later kind of books.

And on the opposite end of the spectrum are the teach a man to fish books, which are written by and for dog trainers. These books assume that you want to do a lot of this dog training stuff and will be reading a small library’s worth of additional training books to round out your education.

And in the middle of those categories is a gap that I hope this book will fill.

I’ve written Level Up Your Dog Training for dog lovers who want to learn how to train their pets, but who also want to know why to do those things.

The ideal reader of this book wants the training recipe to solve their problem in the short term, but they also want to know the basics of how and why it works so they can make their own recipes in time⁠—without having to become a dog trainer to do it!

My goal with this book is to combine a beginner-level obedience class curriculum with a broad-but-shallow understanding of the theory behind what we’re doing. By the end of this book, you should have the tools to improvise as needed.

Will it make you a professional dog trainer?

Heck no.

Will it give you a deeper understanding than a face-value recipe with no explanation for why you’re doing what you’re doing?

I hope so.

And for those aspiring dog trainers who stumble upon this book, I hope that it will make an approachable entry point into the field⁠—a launching pad toward bigger and better things.

This book assumes that you have a dog to work with and that you want help with pet obedience and day-to-day life manners. It also assumes that you are curious and willing to have a little fun in the process.

By the end of this book, if you work through all the training exercises as prescribed, I hope that you will have two things:

First, a better behaved dog.

And second, a general understanding of how that happened, including how to use those same skills to improve other aspects of your life with your dog beyond the scope of this book.

You can have a well-behaved dog without taking them to task, scolding them or pushing them around⁠—and you can get results much faster than you ever dreamed.

The Theory Dilemma

I started teaching basic obedience classes about a decade before writing this book.

In that time, I’ve wrestled with a dilemma that I’ve never solved to my own satisfaction.

I call it the Theory Dilemma. In a nutshell: Trying to find the balance between long-term theory and short-term practice within a short one-hour window is an exercise in frustration.

My clients always want practical, hands-on exercises to train their dogs immediately. That’s why they hired me! They want to be able to see big progress within a one-hour lesson. All practice and no theory sounds great to them.

But as a professional, I know that they would benefit tremendously from understanding the theory so they could apply the same skill in other situations down the line without having to hire me every time they need to teach a new behavior. Because the training skills you learn in the average puppy class are transferable and replicable—if you have enough theory to understand how to apply them to new problems.

There just wasn’t enough time in class to get all the relevant information into my clients’ heads, no matter how hard both parties were trying. My lessons became a sort of triage—just enough theory to hold up this behavior, but never quite enough for them to apply the same principle to the next behavior. I always wanted to be able to give my clients a little bit more support on the theory side without taking away any of their practice time.

This book is my compromise and my attempt to solve the Theory Dilemma.

It’s also the handbook included with all my obedience classes, which allows me to trust that my students have access to the theory if they want it. That way they can focus on the practical applications within their lesson times and I can sleep better at night knowing that the theory is available to them when they’re ready for it.

This book will show you the training tools you already have and how you can apply them in the future.

I firmly believe in the power of citizen scientists. I want to empower my students and clients to tackle training problems on their own years after they’ve worked with me. I want to give them enough information that they never need to hire me again because they can troubleshoot their dog’s behavior on their own in the future.

I hope that this book gives you similar tools!

Skills You Will Learn

By the end of this book, your dog will know how to sit, lie down, go to a mat, stay, come when called, leave things alone, spin in a circle, walk politely on a loose leash, give you their attention, potty quickly when asked, wait at doorways, sit for their leash, stand calmly for petting instead of jumping, and tell you where they’d prefer to be petted.

That sounds like a pretty well-behaved dog, right?

Even more exciting are the skills that you will learn while teaching those things!

While working through the exercises in this book, you will learn how to use a clicker to train your dog to do basic obedience skills. Layered in at the same time, you’ll pick up general principles that you can apply to whatever training goals come up over the course of your dog’s life.

You will learn how to use a marker signal to change behavior without having to push your dog around or show them who’s boss.

You’ll learn the four critical building blocks for all sorts of different behaviors: luring, targeting, capturing and shaping, and when to use each one.

You’ll learn how to mix-and-match those methods to come up with the best solution to problem behaviors in the future, and you’ll apply all four of them together to teach your dog truly beautiful leash manners as your graduation project.

This book is every bit as much about training people as it is about training dogs. I hope you take this information and run with it.

At the end of the book, if you have a well-trained dog but no idea how you got there or how to handle the next behavior outside of the context of this book, then I haven’t done my job. I want you to leave feeling like you have the skills to accomplish whatever you set your mind to.

And if working your way through this book means you don’t need to hire me as a trainer after all because you can solve your dog’s problems on your own, then that means I’ve done my job. My job as a writer is to educate you so well that I put myself out of business as a trainer.

I hope you are as eager to learn as I am to teach you!

Think Positive

In the past few decades, dog training has undergone a quiet but profound revolution.

Years ago, we believed that dog training was a matter of do it or else. The humans gave commands and the dogs obeyed. If the dogs didn’t obey, the humans corrected the dog by making them uncomfortable in various ways, either physically or emotionally, so the dogs would understand that they had erred. If you trained your dog when you were growing up, this is probably the model you’re familiar with.

You’ve likely heard that a training class taught with positive reinforcement is desirable. But what does that mean in a practical sense and why is that something to look for when you are hiring a trainer?

Positive reinforcement is what happens when a behavior is increased (reinforced) by the addition (positive) of something that the dog wants. Or in other words, it’s building behaviors by strategically giving dogs rewards instead of waiting for the dog to get it wrong and punishing them for it, which was the previous model.

There are dozens of reasons why we prefer to train without the use of aversives (threatening or uncomfortable things, things the dog works to avoid), but the gist of it is that they’re unnecessary and often carry the risk of negative side effects later in the training process, even the methods that seem relatively harmless in the moment.

We’re going to focus on systematically building the good behaviors we want to see instead of punishing the behaviors we don’t.

At its most basic, the sequence of training that we’re going to follow is: Cue -> Behavior -> Click -> Treat. In other words, we are going to ask for a response from the dog (cue), the dog is going to do something in response to that request (behavior), we are going to use a clicker to mark that this behavior was correct (click), and we are going to pay them for their effort (treat).

While simple, this methodology is robust and builds long-lasting behaviors that can hold up under the pressures of real life: no or else necessary.

Choosing Reinforcers

Reinforcement Drives Behavior

Behavior is almost infinitely complex. Cats lick their coats to clean themselves, raccoons wash their food, monkeys throw poop, humans read books and dogs bury their bones in the back garden for later. Despite the wide range of behaviors we see in the world, the driving factors behind these behaviors are shockingly simple.

At the end of the day, it’s all about The Good Stuff and The Bad Stuff.

Behavior doesn’t happen in a vacuum⁠—which is to say, the point of behavior is to achieve some sort of consequence.

If you’re thirsty and you get something to drink, the behavior of pouring a glass of lemonade will lead to the consequence of decreasing your thirst.

If you woke up this morning and went to work, that behavior will be reinforced with a paycheck and the continued ability to pay your bills.

And so on.

These consequences can be broadly separated into four categories:

1. Adding more of The Good Stuff to increase behavior (positive reinforcement)

2. Removing some of The Good Stuff to decrease behavior (negative punishment)

3. Removing some of The Bad Stuff to increase behavior (negative reinforcement)

4. Adding more of The Bad Stuff to decrease behavior (positive punishment)

In these cases, positive and negative can be thought of in their mathematical sense as additive and subtractive rather than in their moralized sense as good and bad.

You have probably heard that positive reinforcement is the best place to begin when training a dog, but if you’re like most of my clients, you may be a bit fuzzy on what that specifically means if asked. It’s a lot more specific than just being nice to dogs or setting fair boundaries, which are the answers I get most often.

Positive reinforcement means that you are becoming a source of The Good Stuff: food, toys, petting, praise, access to walks, access to novelty, access to other dogs, or anything else your dog will happily work to earn.

Things which are not positive reinforcement include: fussing, scolding, intimidating, clapping your hands, spraying with water, shaking noisy things, throwing startling things, alpha rolling, shocking, stimming, vibrating, beeping, pinching, choking, correcting, or the ever-present TSST. Those are techniques that involve teaching your dog to avoid The Bad Stuff. As a rule of thumb, if it comes after the behavior and means stop that, it’s not positive reinforcement.

For the purposes of this book, we’re not going to spend much time talking about The Bad Stuff⁠—because really, who wants to be sharp with their dog if they don’t have to?

Instead, we’re going to work to leverage The Good Stuff to build robust behaviors without compromising our dogs’ emotional health or damaging our relationship with them. Being kind doesn’t make you a pushover and it doesn’t mean that your dog gets to run roughshod through the house.

If you read the list above and felt a guilty twinge because the things on The Bad Stuff list sound a bit familiar, you’re not alone. You’ll learn viable alternatives here so you don’t feel the need to rely on those options in the future. The better you get at working with The Good Stuff, the less often you’ll feel tempted to bring out The Bad Stuff.

Why Use Food?

Most of the time, when we’re talking about using The Good Stuff for training, we’re talking about food.

Why?

We need some sort of motivator that our dogs are very interested in earning. In order to use The Good Stuff to build behavior with positive reinforcement, it’s pretty important that the learner actually wants to obtain the reward we’re going to leverage. Food is an effective currency for everything with a pulse⁠—if we didn’t behave to obtain food, we would all starve to death shortly after birth.

Using a currency that your learner values is critical to training success.

For example, if you went to work and your boss decided to pay you in expired coupons instead of dollars and cents, I’m going to hazard a guess that you probably would not stay employed at that job for very