Unique Dog Training

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Hi Mia,

Well #SPARC2013 is over for this year. Great summary and explanation of the value of scientific discourse! Now onto the next big thing!

In just a few hours, the banging, crashing and booming of fireworks will start here in the States. In NYC, R&B Star Usher is "curating" this year’s Fourth of July fireworks (I just like saying the words "curating" and "Usher" in the same sentence). As we discussed last December, a lot of dogs are not fans of loud noises, whether from the crashing of something that unexpectedly falls, to thunderstorms and of course, fireworks. Here are our posts on fireworks:

Fireworks: Not fun for everyone, or every dog (click here to view)
What kinds of dogs are troubled by fireworks, and what to do about it (click here to view)

One of the main points is: There are ways owners can help their dogs:

In one study, nearly half of the owners surveyed reported that their dogs were frightened of loud noises. Noise phobia can show itself through both freezing (catatonic) as well as panic (excessive movement) behaviors.

Most owners of dogs showing fear behaviors in relation to loud noises reported that they were unaware that professional help (from animal behaviorists or veterinarians) was available to help. And owners had not not pursued such help.

Classical counter conditioning can help dogs change their emotional state, and thereby, change their outward behavior. Here is a video, by veterinarian Sophia Yin, showing a dog learning that nail clipping is not so bad. The same thing can be used for loud noises like fireworks and thunderstorms.

Our earlier posts provide even more suggestions for changing dog emotional states and help dogs be calm and less anxious when exposed to loud noises.

I hope that by talking about this topic often, people realize that they can help dogs decrease their displeasure with loud noises. Or, possibly even work preventatively and help dogs from developing negative associations with loud noises in the first place!

Bye for now!

Julie

Do You Believe in Dog? is approaching our one-year anniversary (Wow! Yay!!!), and in the coming months, we will be opening up the blog to guest posts from other researchers exploring canine behaviour, cognition and welfare.

Give a warm welcome to our first guest,
Clare Browne from the University of Waikato in New Zealand.

Hi Mia and Julie,

As you both know from the last Canine Science Forum, my PhD investigates dog-human communication and how this communication affects dog training.

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I would like to claim that everyone is New Zealand is a fantastic dog trainer and we all communicate brilliantly with our dogs, but alas, we’re just like everyone else. It turns out that when people give feedback to dogs during training, we’re often a bit slow. Let me explain...

You’re no doubt aware that if we want to increase the likelihood that a behaviour occurs again, positive reinforcement (AKA “rewarding” -- adding something to keep the behaviour going) will achieve this. The types of positive reinforcement that are most commonly used in everyday dog training are verbal praise, food, and patting/petting. My PhD studies investigated two things: a) how fast are dog owners delivering positive reinforcement to dogs; and b) does it matter if owners are slow in providing dogs with reinforcement?

Not really Clares gumboots

To answer the first of these questions, I put on my gumboots and spent many evenings at my friendly local dog clubs, filming owners training their dogs in beginner classes. I collected 1,810 instances where commands were given to dogs. I then went slightly mad and spent months watching videos of people training their dogs. Figure 1 shows how all the dogs responded to their owners, and 44% of the time, dogs did not respond to their owners at all. This one result made me feel like I wasn’t wasting all these years of my PhD – there clearly is a need for research into the efficacy of dog training!

I used some fancy computer software and measured very precisely (down to 25 frames per second) the time between when the owners said the command and when the dogs performed the behavior, like laying down or sitting. I found that owners varied a lot in the time it took them to deliver positive reinforcement to their dogs. Some owners were almost instantaneous with their praise and then the treat followed quickly, whereas others took ages – the longest time was over 6 s! (That might not sound long to you, but try imagining that you’re a Labrador and having to wait 6 s for a treat, all of a sudden it’s a much more serious situation.)

But does this even matter? Had I gone mad watching videos in my darkened office for no good reason?

To answer this second question, I had to run an experiment.

I had each dog work inside a large pen, and I sat in the neighbouring pen. A screen in between us prevented the dogs from seeing my body language. I held a pre-training session where the dogs learned that a “beep” sound came just before a feeding device delivered a food treat into their pen. (This “beep” is analogous to us saying, “Good dog”). Once the dogs were comfortable with this, they were taken out of the pen while I set up the equipment. I put two boxes into the pen. These boxes had held dog treats (but were emptied just prior to the experiment) so that they smelled alluring to the dogs. Each box had an open top, and infrared (IR) beams criss-crossed the top surface of both boxes. These IR beams were connected to a computer, so that whenever they were broken (i.e. when a dog sniffed inside a box), the computer delivered a “beep” and then a food treat came from the feeding device.

Click to enlarge image

There was a catch: when the dogs sniffed inside the ‘non-target’ box, nothing happened. But when they sniffed inside the ‘target’ box, the positive reinforcement food reward was delivered. The dogs, essentially, were being trained to stick their heads inside one of the two boxes (perhaps not necessarily something every owner wants their dog to do, but a good example of a simple behaviour!).

Twenty dogs received positive reinforcement immediately, as soon as they sniffed inside the target box – there was no delay. However, for another 20 dogs, as soon as they broke the IR beams, the computer started a timer and positive reinforcement (“beep” + treat) was delayed by 1 second.

The results were really interesting! Of the 0 second delay dogs, 60% learned the task; but of the 1 second delay dogs, only 25% learned the task – less than half as many with no delay.

Check out this video of a dog learning the task with a 0 s delay:

This suggests that timing of reinforcement is important when training dogs to do something new – so be fast with your praise and treats!!

A question that always gets asked about this research is “Isn’t 1 second a really short time?” Yes, it is a very short time. But if you really watch a dog (I recommend filming them) – see how much, how fast, how far they can move – a lot can happen in 1 second. In real-world, dog training, in 1 second a dog could be across the room, it could have moved out of position, or we could have reached into our pocket.

Finally, I suspect as trainers, we often get away with having sloppy timing because dogs are just so good at attending to our body language. I hypothesise that we are continually giving unintended feedback to dogs – that this feedback may be acting as conditioned reinforcers (much like a body-language-version of the “good dog”). That’s what I suspect anyway ...

Overall, the take home message is be fast with your feedback!

Sending warm regards from Wintry New Zealand,

Clare

Clare with her dogs, Flint & Apple

Unique Dog Training

Kamis, 05 Mei 2016

How to make fireworks less upsetting for dogs

Minggu, 24 April 2016

Dog training Do you get the timing right

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