#92 PET TALK TODAY: Dog Training with Will Bangura. How Dogs Learn, Classical and Operant Conditioning, Teaching a Dog the Emergency Recall, and Teaching a Dog Door Manners.

PET TALK TODAY #92  Dog Training with Will Bangura.  How Dogs Learn, Classical and Operant Conditioning, Teaching a Dog the Emergency Recall, and Teaching Your Dog Impeccable Door Manners by Going to the Dog's Place or Bed When the Door Bell Rings or There is a Door Knock. Dog Training, Dog Trainer, Dog Behaviorist. Cat Trainer, Cat Training, Pet Trainer, Pet Training, Will Bangura

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Raised by Wolfs with canine DNA in his blood, having trained more than 24,000 pets helping you and your fur babies thrive. Live in studio. It's Pet Talk today with Will Bangura answering your pet behavior and training questions. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome your host and favorite pet behavior expert, will Manura .

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Good Saturday morning, pet lovers. I'm Will Bandura . Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Pet Talk today here live on Facebook. We also record this for the Pet Talk Today audio podcast. Um, if you haven't subscribed, because sometimes I do audio podcasts that are not here on Facebook, so there's a lot of great content on the Pet Talk Today audio podcast. So go to Apple Podcast, go to Stitcher , um, any of the hosting platform, Spotify, and , uh, check out the Pet Talk Today podcast. We appreciate that. Hey, show us some love, hit that like button. Let us know that you're here today and hit that share button so that more people can benefit from the information that we discuss helping you with your dog's training and behavior issues. So if you're brand new to Pet Talk today, let me talk a little bit about how this works. If you've got a question about your dog or your puppies training or behavior issues, all I want you to do is go ahead and type those questions into the comments section. Just go ahead, type your question into the comments section, and also do me a favor. Let me know where you're watching from and also what kind of dogs that you have and what are their names. Tell us a little bit about your pets. We love to hear that stuff. Um, also, I'll be taking calls , um, today, a little bit later, I'll announce that number. Um, I haven't been taking calls in a while, but I really like to do the calls because I can get a lot more information from you about your dog's problems and I can give you a more detailed answer. And so a lot of times , um, the answers to the questions that we get by phone are more interesting because we get to ask you more questions. But if you're shy, you can always type your question in the comments section. Um, and then I will try to do my best to answer all of your questions. Now, there are times when I get just bar a barrage of questions and I can't get to all of them. And also there are some topics that I wanna talk about today. Um, two weeks ago I talked about, I wanted to , um, discuss the emergency recall, what that is, why you need an emergency recall or an emergency come command with your dog and , and how do you teach that. And then the other thing that I, I talked about a little bit and I want to talk about again in detail, and that is door manners . Door manners . Because I don't know very many dog owners that have dogs when somebody knocks on the door or they ring the doorbell that they're calm, cool, and collected. No, most homes that I walk into then have dogs. The doorbell rings or somebody knocks on the door and the dogs start rushing the door. They're barking, they're all excited. They go from energy level of one to 10. And usually the pet parent is struggling at the door to open the door, let somebody in, listen to what the person on the other side of the door is trying to say. And the dogs are barking like crazy. Uh , and then guests coming into the house and the dog's not having good door manners , jumping on the guests , being hyper. What do you do about that? Can we finally put an end to that? Can we finally come up with an alternative solution to teach our dogs? Of course we can. And it's gonna make your life a whole lot better. It's gonna make your household a whole lot calmer. Okay, and then I also want to talk today a little bit about how dogs learn. You know, we talk a lot about the behavior problems of the dogs, the training and behavior issues, but we don't talk a lot about how they learn. And primarily the way that dogs learn are by making and perceiving very black and white cause and effect associations. Dogs are masters at figuring out patterns. If there are things that are paired together over and over, dogs are great at recognizing that, figuring that out, and holding onto that. So classical conditioning, maybe you've heard about that. Maybe you've heard of Pavlo, the Russian , uh, physicist or psychologist. I'm not sure remember what he was anymore. But , uh, he was doing some studies with dogs and he was the one that came up with classical conditioning or associative learning. If you remember from your Psychology 1 0 1 college course where pavlo paired the ringing of a bell to their dog food, he rang a bell, gave food, rang a bell, gave food, rang a bell, gave food. Is this sounding familiar to anybody that knows anything about marker training or clicker training? Exactly, because marker training, clicker training works on the principles of classical conditioning or associative learning. So I talk a lot about marker training. To be successful, you, you need to know how your dogs think, how they learn, how they process information and match that so that you can have the most efficiency and be the most effective as possible with your dog. And knowing that they create these black and white cause and effect associations. When you're training, you need to make things very black and white. You know, when you're playing, when you're just hanging out with your dogs, things can be gray. You can have all kinds of conversations with them, whether they understand you or not. You can talk all kinds of silly stuff to your dogs and have a lot of fun. But when we're training, actually good training is kind of boring because it's pretty mechanical. Now you can make it interesting and exciting, but the principles are pretty mechanical. And when we can stick to those principles, when we understand how dogs think, how they learn, how they process information, and we communicate in a way that they can understand, change happens quickly. So the first thing is understanding classical conditioning. And that is associative learning and clicker training or marker training is classical conditioning. It is associative learning. And what that, what a marker is or a clicker is, it's a tool or a marker. Sometimes we use a word like yes or nice , um, as opposed to the clicking sound, but that word, that marker word, nice or yes or that clicker sound, click, we pair that. We pair that with food. Okay? And over and over we do click treat, click treat. We condition this, that click means treat, click treat, give the dog another treat. Click treat. Now, this is not just about feeding the dog, this is about making a , an association that click means treat. Or we could do it with the word yes, we could go, yes, give the dog a treat. Yes, give the dog a treat. Yes, give a dog a treat. Well, once they've made that association through classical conditioning, now we can use that clicker, that sound or that marker Yes, to signal the dog with perfect timing when they do something right, that they're gonna get a reward. Because remember that click equals treat or yes equals treat the treat being the reward. Once we condition that, let's say we do click treat 30 times in a row. We did that for three days in a row. The dog's gonna understand, click means treat, you can test it. Day four, click the clicker. Does the dog come running to you looking for the treat? If it does, it understands click as treat. If you're using a marker word rather than the clicker, like yes or nice, it's the same principle. Yes, treat, yes, treat nice, treat whatever you, whatever the word is you want to choose, it's your marker. You are marking a behavior that you like that the dog does and signaling to them that you like that and signaling to them that they're going to get a reward. And when they understand the marker system of training through associative learning, through classical conditioning, your timing can be perfect. And timing is one of the most critical components to good training. You know, a lot of you are rewarding your dogs or a lot of you are using food in training, which is great, but you're doing it wrong. Number one, a lot of you are bribing your dogs. You've got food in your hand before you ever ask them to do something. And, and that's a bribe. A reward is not seen. The food is not even brought out until after the dog does the behavior. So let's say that I ask you to do a job and I'm dangling a hundred dollars bill in front of you as I'm asking you to do it. Well , I'm bribing you, but if I ask you to do a job, I don't have that money out front. You go do a job, then I go reach in my wallet and I pull a hundred dollars out and I pay you. Now, that's a reward We need to use. Treat pouches. If you're not using treat pouches when you're training your dog, you're using food in a wrong, you're , you're , you're gonna mess it up. Now, a lot of you, because you're not using markers like a clicker or a marker word, you don't , you're not doing marker training. You don't have a marker system. There's a lot of you that are feeding your dogs in training and they love the food and it might be a pleasant experience. But whether or not they're connecting the dots, making the association that the food is related that you're giving is related to their behavior, is dependent upon the timing. You literally have about one second to get the food in the dog's mouth from the time they do the behavior you like for them to understand and connect the dots. Hey, this is why I'm getting the food. Well, a lot of times that is very difficult to do. And imagine if we don't already have the food in our hand cuz we don't want to use the food as a bribe. So we've got it in a treat pouch. When the dog does the behavior, we've gotta take our hand, we've gotta go in the treat pouch, get the treat, take it out, give it to the dog. What if the dog is 50 feet away and we're working on teaching the dog to do, sits teaching the dog to do downs and do those things at a distance. Well, we're not gonna be able to get the food to the dog within a second. This is where marker training, this is where one aspect of classical conditioning associative learning is very powerful and very important. If you're not using a clicker, if you're not using a marker training system, if you don't have a marker word or a clicker, if you don't know what that is, I encourage you to learn about it because it's a game changer when it comes to training your dogs. It's gonna go 12 times faster. And who doesn't want problem behaviors to go away quicker? Who doesn't wanna train new wanted behaviors in their dog quicker? If you go to the Pet Talk today audio podcast, just do a Google search, pet talk today podcast. You can go to episode 80. I probably say this in every one of these episodes. You can go to episode 80 and you can download that podcast. That's an entire podcast where I'm talking about nothing but marker training, nothing but clicker training, nothing but a marker training system. So get more information on that because I've gotta talk about a lot of other things here today. But classical conditioning, how dogs learn, that's one way by association. They associate things like when they sit and we say the word sit. If we pair that cue or command with the behavior that the dog is doing, they begin to understand what sit means. It means my butts on the ground. When we pair the cue or command down with them lying on the ground, they're belly on the ground. They start making the association that's associative learning, classical conditioning. Okay ? Now there's other ways that dogs learn by association and classical conditioning. How many of your dogs, when you grab the leash, go absolutely crazy, excited, happy, they wanna go for that walk, right? And that wasn't the way it was in the beginning when, when they were brand new, when they were just puppies, you could grab a leash and it meant nothing to them. But guess what? Over time, day after day, week after week, maybe month after month, and maybe even year after year, that leash came out, got hooked to the dog, and we took the dog out for a walk. So the pairing, the association is that leash represents walking. And if they like going for the walk, when they see the leash that is marking or symbolizing or communicating to the dog, we're going for a walk. That's another aspect of classical conditioning. That's another aspect of associative learning. Now all of that has to do with timing. Good timing. The other way that dogs learn is through operan conditioning or what we call instrumental learning or consequential learning. I had to take a drink of the coffee there. But with operan conditioning, this is about consequences of behavior. They learn based on what are the consequences of their behavior. Now in opera conditioning, in learning theory, in behaviorism, how dogs learn with opera end conditioning is, there are two things. There are reinforcers on one side, reinforcers strengthen behaviors. Think about reinforcement like a bridge, right? How we strengthen a bridge. So reinforcers strengthen behaviors. And then on the other side we've got punishers. Punishers weaken behaviors or stop behaviors. Reinforcers strengthen behaviors or make it more likely the behavior's gonna happen again. Or brings about more permanence and reliability, which again strengthens that behavior. Rewards reinforcers, punishers corrections. You could, you could think of it that way as consequences, reinforcers rewards punishers, corrections. But you know, when we talk about reinforcers, that comes in two different flavors. One of 'em is positive reinforcement. Now most of us understand very clearly what positive reinforcement is. It's talked about a lot, right? You ask your dog to sit, hopefully you're marking with yes or clicking, and then your dog gets a reward. Your reinforcer, your positive reinforcer is you giving the dog or something being added that the dog likes, right? When the dog performs the behavior or immediately after, within a second. So the dogs , I ask for sit, the dog sits, and boom, I click, I give it a treat. That is a reinforcer. It's a positive reinforcer. Now when we say positive, we mean it's a plus sign, like mathematic, adding or giving, we're giving the dog. Or something happens to the dog that the dog likes, that the dog finds pleasant. And that happens immediately after the behavior. And if that happens over and over, if it's consistent and you create a pattern, now what's that? That's associative learning, right? The pattern, the consistency, the pairing. So they kind of go hand in hand . They start understanding that, hey, there's value to me sitting or there's value to me laying down. If every time I do it, I get a, a reward, I get a reinforcer. A positive reinforcer, you're giving me, remember, positive is a plus sign. The other flavor of reinforcement is negative reinforcement. Now, a lot of people confuse negative reinforcement with punishers. Remember , punishers, stop or reduce a behavior from happening. Reinforcers strengthen a behavior. We use reinforcers to teach new behaviors. And we use reinforcers not only to strengthen behaviors and teach new behaviors, but to get more reliability, more permanence that it's more likely that we can predict it's gonna happen again. Now, negative, just like positive and positive reinforcement. Negative and negative reinforcement is a minus sign. It means removing something or taking something away. Now remember we're talking about consequences. So either the consequence of a behavior is we're adding something, reward that the dog likes. That's positive reinforcement. When the dog does a behavior or we're taking something away, negative. What's reinforcement? Well, the reinforcement part of negative reinforcement is the removal of something unpleasant. That if a behavior occurs and immediately after that something unpleasant is removed, that's gonna motivate the dog. If that's consistent, to do the behavior because they , they want that something unpleasant to go away. Now there are some natural in the environment, environmental negative reinforcers. Let me give you an example. I've said this before on the show. Um, you get a delivery person, Amazon person comes to the door and they drop off a package and your dog finds that maybe a little scary. Oh my god, who's this coming onto my property? Who's this coming onto my territory? And they bark, bark, bark, bark, bark. And the reason dogs do that is they want distance and space. They're trying to say, Hey, get away. They don't like them. They're uncomfortable. Now if the dog's barking, that's a behavior. And then immediately after the barking, the u p s person leaves the dog believes that the barking caused the delivery person to leave. That behavior of barking becomes functional. That behavior of barking gets reinforced and strengthens because a result of that barking, the consequence, that's something unpleasant. That Amazon delivery person that the dog doesn't like is removed. Remember the minus sign in negative reinforcement, something unpleasant goes away. Um , a leash and collar training, negative reinforcement. The dogs , uh, we want the dog to do something. We put a little leash and collar pressure on the dog as we ask the dog to sit. As the dog begins to sit, we release or take away all of that unpleasant leash and collar pressure. That's negative reinforcement. You're walking your dog. And as the dog's pulling the leash is tight, that's unpleasant. When the dog stops pulling, that's something unpleasant goes away because the leash is no longer tight. That's some examples of negative reinforcement. Okay , so we got two kinds of reinforcers that strengthen behaviors. Positive reinforcement, negative reinforcement. Don't confuse negative reinforcement with punishers. Now punishers come into flavors too. Can you figure 'em out? Yeah. Positive, positive punishment. That sounds kind of funny, huh ? Cause we think pun punishment, we think negative, right? Or bad. And when we think positive, we think good. But again, you've gotta think about in mathematical terms, we're adding or subtracting we're giving or taking away something. So with positive punishment being that that is a plus sign that we're adding something, we're adding punishment. Now what is punishment? Punishment is something that the dog does not like. It's an aversive. Okay? So , uh, what's an example of punishment? Well, the dog could be getting in the trash. You don't want the dog to get in the trash and you yell at the dog. If the dog finds you yelling at them unpleasant, that's a positive. Punisher. You're adding something the dog doesn't like at the moment. The dog's doing a behavior you don't like, which will then make it less likely to happen in the future. And if you're consistent with that, the dog's gonna say, Hey, there's a consequence to me getting in the trash. Or there's a consequence to me jumping or there's a consequence to me getting on the counter and taking things off the counter. And that is, I get punished. Now, a lot of, you know, with my show and what I talk about, that punishers are used way too much. We punish our dogs before they even are taught what is appropriate to do. We expect them to live in our world, understand what behaviors we want them to have, and we don't take the time to teach 'em. And then when they do normal behaviors, when they do what dogs do and we didn't teach 'em to do something else and we don't like it, we punish 'em. It's not fair. It is not fair. You wouldn't want somebody doing that to you. Imagine that. You send your child to preschool. It's day one of preschool preschool. Teacher gets up on the board, she draws a triangle, he draws a circle, she draws a square. Says that's a triangle, that's a circle that's a square. Erases the board. Goes to recess with the kids. Comes back 15 minutes later, draws a triangle on the board and says, who can tell me what this is? Raise your hand. And there's Johnny raising his hand. She says, Johnny, what is that? Johnny says, it's a circle. No, it's not a circle, you idiot. How unfair is that? Did we take the time to actually teach to make sure that they understand? Did we motivate them? So they want to learn that. They want to remember that the behavior has value. You know, jumping on people. Cuz most people pet the dog that gets positively reinforced. They like that. They want to check out the new people. How many times does that happen ? And that's what's reinforcing the jumping. Now, when you teach your dog an alternative behavior, and that's what I suggest week in and week out, that rather than punish your dog, teach an alternative behavior that's incompatible with the behavior that you don't like. So let's take that example of jumping. If we teach the dog to sit instead, every time somebody comes in and that gets a high value food reward, but jumping is ignored, meaning that we're not positively reinforcing it. We stop, we freeze like a tree, or we turn around and walk away. But we don't sit there and pet the dog when he is jumping. But when somebody comes to the door and we ask the dog to sit, they get a high value food reward. And we do that consistently. And by the way, for behavior issues, you should be proactively training. Don't wait for somebody to come to the house. You're not prepared. You don't have your treat pouch on. The dogs are going crazy. You're not prepared to train, you're not training them proactively. You have somebody knock on the door proactively. You create training sessions. Somebody's ringing on the door proactively over and over three to five times a week so that your dog can learn. You need repetition. You work on those door manners, the doorbell rings, somebody knocks, person comes in, you ask your dog to sit, you make your dog sit and you reward the dog. Now I said earlier today in the show, I wanted to talk about door manners . And I talked about 'em a little bit a couple weeks ago. I like when I've got a client that has a dog that has really bad door manners. I like to teach them to go to their bed or go to their place when the doorbell rings of the door knocks. I like to teach a very strong implied stay on that place or that bed because I know there's a lot of motivation, a lot of excitement. When a new person comes in the house. Most dogs wanna run to them because why? Because they're getting positively reinforced. We don't think about it. They're motivated to do it cuz they're, they wanna get something they like. Now we're taking that away from them. First and foremost, when we ask 'em to go to place or go to their bed, we're taking away something that they like. That's negative punishment. Remember taking away minus sign something they like that's taken away is negative punishment. It changes behaviors. Now remember, punishers weaken behaviors make them less likely to occur. Reinforcers strengthen behaviors make them more likely to happen. So if every time the dog jumps, your guest freezes like a tree turns around and then maybe even walks away, taking away the attention, taking away what the dog wants. If the dog finds that unpleasant. And again, we're not positively reinforcing the behavior. Eventually the behavior extinguishes, the jumping behavior extinguishes. But we wanna teach the dog. That can take a long time ignoring any of you tried to just ignore your dog. When it had a barking problem. Any trainer ever said, just ignore it. How well did that work? Now it works. But the problem is, remember I talked about naturally occurring environmental reinforcers for barking. So if you're getting a delivery a day coming to the house and your dog is triggered by the delivery person and barking, and that behavior's consequence, the functionality of that behavior causes, or at least in the dog's mind, the dog thinks the behavior caused the delivery person to go away. And the dog found that delivery person being in its territory on its property unpleasant. So the behavior happens, barking the trigger or the delivery person goes away. That's the consequence. Removal of something unpleasant. Negative reinforcement. Well, a negative punishment, we're taking away something that the dog likes. But again, I said we need to teach different behaviors, alternative behaviors, behaviors that are incompatible with the behaviors we don't. Like. For example, your dog cannot be committed to sitting and be jumping at the same time, right? Your dog would have to give up sitting in order to jump. It cannot do two behaviors at the same time. Now, the behavior that gets reinforced the most and the strongest is the one that's going to win out. And also repetition has a factor. How many times has your dog, or how many times have your dogs jumped on you or jumped on people and been positively reinforced? Probably a lot, maybe in the hundreds. And now we're trying to modify that behavior by teaching an alternative behavior that's incompatible with jumping, like sitting and being committed to sitting. But on the ground, you're not jumping. But remember how many hundreds of times has the dog been positively reinforced for jumping? And now we wanna modify that behavior. We're teaching an alternative behavior. Sit. We better make that consequence. We better make that positive reinforcer, that reward, that something the dog likes, awfully special, awfully good, much, much more valuable than maybe the love, praise, and affection the dog gets, the petting the attention, the positive reinforcement when it jumps. And we need to stop reinforcing the wrong behavior. We turn that into negative punishment. We turn around, ignore the dog if the dog jumps. But we need to proactively be teaching alternative behaviors. Remember I wanted to talk about door manners. So this fits in with classical conditioning, opera and conditioning learning theory, how you train dogs, how they think, how they learn, how they process information, rewards, punishers, consequences directly after their behavior, making black and white cause and effect associations. I said, I like to teach 'em to go to the place. I like to teach 'em to go to their bed. I'm gonna proactively be doing that, maybe 10 repetitions of that every day . 3, 4, 5. Hey, if I'm really motivated, six, seven days a week, the more repetition I put in, the more time I put in, the quicker it's gonna happen. But every time your dog goes to its bed, every time your dog goes to its place, it needs to understand that's what you want. It needs to be motivated. So there's gotta be a reward. And the more valuable the reward, the more motivated your dog is, the better your timing, the quicker your dog learns. And that light bulb goes off. So with classical conditioning, one of the big examples is using clickers or conditioned reinforcers, because that's what a clicker is, right? Classical conditioning, it's a conditioned reinforcer. Food is the primary reinforcer. We don't have to teach a dog that food is good. But the clicker starts off as a neutral stimulus. Doesn't mean anything to the dog until we parrot or condition over and over. Click treat, click treat, click treat. Now that clicker, it's a positive reinforcer, but it's a conditioned reinforcer. It was conditioned to the food. It's a bridge to the food. It buys us a little bit of time. So our timing's really good. We don't have to have bad timing. A dog could be far away. We ask a behavior, it does it . Click that signals to the dog. That's a behavior I like. That's a behavior you're getting reward. We can be a little late with the food then, but if we're not using a marker system, we're not gonna be successful. So make sure you're checking out the pet talk today podcast. Uh, number 80, go to Google, go to some kind of a , does anybody use any other search engine than Google these days? Um, duck, duck go. I think people, I, I watch people use that. But go to the pet Talk today podcast. Check out episode 80 on marker training. One of the best things you'll do is adding markers to your training and your routine. Now, the other thing we need to do, you know, dogs, classical conditioning, they learn by associations, right? Remember I talked about the leash? And the leash comes out, it's an association. The dogs going for a walk. And that's why dogs typically go crazy when the leash comes out. By the way, if you change that association, if you were to take the leash out for three weeks and nine out of 10 times, you didn't go for a walk. Only one out of 10 times you went out for a walk. Eventually your dog's not gonna know whether or not that leash means we're going for a walk. And then eventually that excitable behavior extinguishes, you change the association, but it takes conditioning. Lots of repetition of that black and white cause and effect association that we're trying to change. Okay ? Now back to classical conditioning. What would happen if we rang the bell? Asked the dog to go to its better place. Clicked and reward, rang the bell, asked the dog to go to its better place marked with our marker word, which could be a substitute for the clicker. It's still marker training. We say yes, we reward the dog. Somebody knocks on the door, we ask the dog to go to, its better place. We click and reward . Somebody brings the doorbell, we ask the dog to go to its place. We click and reward. We do that over and over and over through repetition and having really good timing. Now the timing's gotta be good. It's gotta be ding dong . Place, place, place. Get the dog to place. When the dog gets there , click and reward or use your marker word. If you're not using a clicker, yes or nice, had a person, their marker word was sweet, thought that was cool. But you've gotta use your marker and you've gotta do this repetitiously. You're creating the association. Repetition. You're conditioning. What is conditioning muscle memory. When things are conditioned, there's not a lot of thinking behind it. It's, it's like an automatic process. Now think about this folks. Have you ever played an instrument or maybe you learned to drive a stick shift? There's a process to that. There's learning that needs to take place. Just like with your dogs now in the beginning, anybody that learned to play an instrument, unless you're some kind of a savant , in the beginning it was brutal, very clumsy. You had to think about it. You didn't know where to put your fingers on the instrument. You were, it sounded horrible. You , we were, you drove your parents crazy. Some of you parents have children right now that are in band class and you know what I'm talking about. Or they're in orchestra, right? Hang in there. It gets better with repetition, right? It gets better with consistency, it gets better with practicing. And at some point in time, there's a magic number. We don't know where that number is. You know, when we're learning to drive a stick shift or we're learning to play an instrument, we really have to think about it. Takes a lot of concentration, takes a lot of effort, takes a lot of repetition and conditioning. And then there's the day that the light bulb comes on and it switches from thinking about it to an automatic process. Now, I don't even have to think about where my fingers need to be on the piano keys just automatic. Now I don't have to think about all the steps in the process of shifting a manual or standard transmission. When it becomes automatic, that's muscle memory. When that happens, that's conditioning. Most of you do not condition your dogs. Most of you have been giving your dogs a few things to do and not enough repetition. Not enough days of doing it sequentially for there to be conditioning. And then you wonder why your dogs don't do what you want or why they struggle to do it. Remember when you struggle to play the instrument. Remember when you struggled to drive that stick shift? It takes repetition, it takes conditioning. So when we're ringing that doorbell, when we have somebody knocking on the door and then we ask the dog to go to place and we get them there, and then we mark with our clicker, or we mark with our reward marker word like yes or nice. And then we give that high value food reward. We're using both classical conditioning and opera conditioning. How dogs learn actually how all animals learn. Not just dogs, how all mammals learn classical conditioning and opera and conditioning. You too. Just open your eyes a little bit. See what are the consequences of your behavior after your behavior? What happens that you really like or what happens that you don't like? Same thing for people. So by doing this exercise over and over, what happens is eventually the door knocking becomes the cue or command to go to the better place. Eventually the doorbell ringing becomes the command or the queue to go to place. And then you can go ahead and just remove the word place . It'll just happen automatically. If you've done conditioning, if you've just been playing around with it for a couple days or maybe a week or two, it's probably not gonna happen. There's not enough repetition. You're still gonna be helping your dog. And by the way, if you still have to help your dog do something, or if your dog can't do something, you ask when there are distractions, you're not done training. A dog is not trained until they're conditioned and it's automatic and you don't need to help them. And l you know, no animal's gonna be perfect. But nine out of 10 times, even when there's a distraction, if you ask your dog to do something, it should do it. That's a well-trained, that's a conditioned dog. But we need to understand how dogs think, how they learn, how they process information that's classical and operan conditioning. And so that is one of the things that you can do using classical conditioning, using opera and conditioning, is you can begin to teach your dogs to have really, really good door manners. Okay , I wanted to , wanted to cover that today. And we did. Um, the other thing that I wanted to cover was an emergency recall. I had to take another drink for the coffee. I say that for the people that listened to the podcast, they wonder why is there that, that pause when it , what's an emergency recall? Well recall means the dog coming to you. So it's a come command. An emergency recall is different than your regular come command, your emergency recall. You train every day . You don't, you don't have to do a lot of repetition with it. But you train the the emergency recall every day and you hope you never have to use it. This is not something that you use casually. The first thing you're gonna do is you're gonna pick a special word like pudding. It doesn't matter what the word is, but pick a word that you don't typically say that the dog doesn't typically hear. I had a client that used Poughkeepsie as their cue or their command, the word for the emergency recall. And the way that we begin this process, we start inside. We need to have our treat pouch. We need to have high value food rewards. What's a high value food reward? I don't know . Cooked up chicken. Little pieces of hotdog. Not your dog's kibble, not some moderately palatable treat from the store. Bring out the good stuff, especially for this. This is an emergency behavior that you need. This is when you need your dog to come to you. No matter what's going on in the environment. When all hell's breaking loose, this is an emergency. So you wanna make sure your dog is highly motivated. Well, how do you do that? The better the currency. You know, if I give you a hundred dollars to do something, you're much more motivated than if I give you a $5 bill. It's no different with the food. Think about the food as currency. You wanna use the highest value food reward, especially for the most important cues , commands and behaviors that you need to condition and train in your dog. So with the emergency recall, we've got our treat pouch, we've got our high value food rewards. We start off doing this in the house. We put a long leash on the dog. What's a long leash? Well, it's just one of these cotton training leads. They're just like a regular leash, but you can get 'em in different lengths. 10 feet, 15 feet, 20 feet. I don't like retractables. You'll find most trainers don't. But why do we need that? That long line or that leash on the dog. And I'm not talking about a four or six foot leash minimum 10 feet because we may need to help the dog. Remember, this is brand new for the dog. The dog might not do the behavior. And the last thing that we ever wanna do is ask for a behavior and not be there to make it happen. Then the dog learns that that cue or command is optional and you poison it, it it loses its value. It absolutely loses its value. All right , how do you start teaching this emergency Recall? You put that long line on your dog and what you're gonna do is you're gonna say, your dog's gonna be close to you. Okay ? And I want you to take three or four pieces of this high value food. I want you to drop it right at your feet. And I want you to say the word you're going to use, the cure or command word that you're gonna use for your emergency recall. I'm going to use Poughkeepsie. Okay , so my dog's on a leash, I'm in the house, got my treat pouch on. I got high value food rewards in my treat pouch. And the dog's paying attention to me. I say Poughkeepsie and I drop a couple high value food rewards on the ground by my feet. And the dog eats it and likes it and I do it again. I go Poughkeepsie, drop a few treats on the floor by my feet. Then what I'm gonna do while the dog's eating those, I'm gonna back up a few feet from the dog. Keeping a loose leash, a long leash, maybe I've got a 10 or a 15 foot leash on the dog. But I don't wanna put tension on it. I don't want to interrupt the dog. I don't want the dog moving just yet. When the dog finishes eating before the dog starts moving towards me, I'm going to drop some food on my feet. But I'm gonna say Poughkeepsie. And then drop the food. That's the sequence. Poughkeepsie drop the food, the dog comes running to the food from a few feet away. Remember because we moved away from the dog while it was eating. Now we're gonna repeat that process over and over, but we're only gonna do that maybe five times maximum when we practice. So when you have a training session on the emergency recall five repetitions in that training session. One training session a day, five times. That's it at the most. When you're using that special high value food reward for this emergency recall, that should be the thing your dog loves the most. That reward should only be used for the emergency recall or it's not special. It loses its value. And we want what's most valuable. Cuz again, we wanna motivate the dog that hey, when it hears Poughkeepsie or whatever your emergency recall word is going to be, that they come running to you and they are getting the greatest reward that they could absolutely have a little doggy caviar. Okay ? So we're gonna begin to add more distance to that over time , day in and day out. Now, once we get the dog coming in the full length of that leash, 10 feet, 15 feet, 20 feet, whatever it is, and it's loose, and we don't have to guide the dog with the leash, then we're just gonna drop the line. We'll walk away from the dog, we'll drop the line, we'll pick it up as needed if we do need to help the dog. But you know what, if you're doing this right and you start off with no distractions, and then you start working with very tiny distractions and you take the time necessary gradually, systematically, slowly at the dog's pace, adding more and more distractions, but not too many, not so intense that the dog's not doing the behavior. See, the problem is and and you say, well yeah, my dog listens when I got a cookie in my hand. But boy, you get outside, you don't have a cookie and there's distractions. My dog doesn't listen. Well, first of all, if you've got a cookie in your hand, your dog's listening, you're bribing your dog. We talked about that in the beginning of the show. Stop bribing your dog. Learn what a reward is and start rewarding your dog. Okay ? The other thing is, if your dog is more interested in the distraction than you, shame on you for not being more interesting. Shame on you for not creating more, reward, more positive reinforcement than the distraction. Listen, rewards are motivators. Punishers are motivators. Distractions are nothing more than either a reward or a punisher. And that distraction is a motivator. Now the question is, which motivator is stronger? The distraction or the reward? The reinforcer. That's your motivator that you're using. Now you've got to again, go into these distractions gradually and systematically. If you're losing your dog's attention, back up, go back to less distractions where your dog would focus, where your dog would not get distracted and listen, go back and do more conditioning there. Then move into a little more distracting environment. You gotta do it gradually, but I guarantee if you don't try to work faster than the dog can handle it, you're going to get there and you're gonna have a very happy dog doing it. And we need great motivation for this emergency recall. Now, little by little, you're gonna be adding distractions. So eventually you're gonna go outside, right? There's lots of distractions outside. But go into a a less distracting location outside to begin with. Then you can go into greater distractions. Again, using the same principles. If you're losing your dog's focus that distraction's more motivating than your dog. You need to create more motivation, be more interesting to your dog, and have more repetition and conditioning so that's stronger. And the dog's more interested in that when you begin to get out in those distractions. But there's a distance from the distraction where your dog knows the distraction is there, but really doesn't care cuz it's far enough away. That's the distance you begin to do your emergency recall at. And little by little, your dog will get desensitized to those distractions and you'll be able to be closer and closer to those distractions. And you won't lose your dog's focus. Your dog will stay focused. Your dog will respond to your cues and commands. Your dog will do the emergency recall. Every time you say Poughkeepsie, the dog comes into you, the dog gets an incredible high value food reward. Sometimes make it a jackpot. When you finish on that fifth repetition, give an entire handful. You know, kinda like when you're pulling the handle on the slot machine, the jackpot. Give the dog a jackpot. Not always, every once in a while, maybe every third. Then mix it up. Maybe it's the second time they do it the next day. Maybe it's the fourth time they do it the next day. Mix it up a little bit. That's gonna really motivate them. Now here's the thing. Remember, you never use this emergency recall except in an emergency. But you're training every day . Why? Your come command is not reliable. Your regular come command. Yeah, I'm gonna say it. Your regular come command is not reliable. You know why? I know? Because there are times in the house you ask the dog to come to you and your dog doesn't, and you let your dog get away with it. Because in your mind it's not that important. There are times when some of you, not all of you, some of you, your dogs are taking something and putting it in their mouth and moving away from you and they shouldn't. And you're calling them back to you. Come. They come and you take away that something that they liked. Uhoh, let's go back to learning theory. What does it mean when we take away something the dog likes? Is that not negative punishment? And remember we talked about punishers weaken a behavior. So when we do that, we're weakening the likelihood the dog's gonna come again. Because rather than the dog being positively reinforced for coming, when it grabbed an object it shouldn't have, and you call the dog to you, you take away the object it shouldn't have, which is negative punishment. Well do that enough times or attempt to do that enough times. And you will poison that command. You will poison that cue . And when you do that, it's no longer gonna be effective. Your dog's like, ah , no, I'm not coming in. Ah , I'm not coming. When you call, bad things happen. You take things away from me, even if your dog doesn't have something in their mouth. If you've been doing that in the past, over and over, remember the sequence of behavior. Dogs learn by classical conditioning too, that cause and effect black and white association. I have something in my mouth, they call me, I go to them, they take away something every time I go to them, something unpleasant happens. I'm not going to go to them. I want to avoid that. Something unpleasant from happening. So you ruin the recall, you ruin your come command. I need to know, you need to know that in an emergency you can call your dog. And that your dog is gonna come back to you no matter what. No matter what. And it works. It really does. Trust me. Go through that process. You may never use it, but I'll tell you the day that you need to. You're gonna be grateful that you did the training. It might be the thing that saves your dog's life. It might be the thing that saves your dog's life. Now you've gotta train this with distractions. I don't want you to think because I said, hey, start off with little distractions that you're not gonna train with big distractions. You are going to train with huge distractions or this is not gonna help you when you need it. Because think about it, when do you need your dogs to listen? Hey, it's not late at night. 10 o'clock you and the dog are hanging around in the living room watching tv. It's calm. It's quiet, nothing's going on. The dog's fine. When you need your dogs to listen is when there's chaos, when all hell is breaking loose. When there's all kinds of distractions and competing motivators. Think about distractions as competing motivators. You need to be more motivating than the competing motivators in your environment. You need to be more interesting than the distractions. And you need to do your work gradually and systematically with stronger and more intense, bigger distractions over time. And when you do that, you are going to have a great emergency recall. Now, this whole process of distraction work, it's the same for any other command that you might be teaching. It's the same for any other queue . If you want reliability, you need to work in distractions. But you're working too quickly with your dog, you're, you're asking too much too soon and you're making it too difficult and you're not doing enough repetition. So there's not enough conditioning. So you need to back up a little bit. When you see a dog that's incredibly well trained, trust me, it did not happen by accident. Somebody put in a lot of time. But you know, there's nothing better than having a dog that you can take anywhere, even off leash when there's crazy distractions. You can take your dog anywhere. You get to enjoy your dog a whole lot more and your dog has a much better quality of life because your dog gets to go all kinds of places it might not otherwise have gone. Because let's face it, if our dogs aren't well trained and we go to places where there's lots of distractions and the dog is hyper and excited and pulling on the leash and barking and it's frustrating to us, we don't have an enjoyable time. So we don't take the dog with us. If we did the work, if we did the training and we put in the time, we could have the best relationship ever with our dogs. They get to go everywhere with us. Their quality of life goes up. We get to enjoy them a whole lot more. And I said, it works. Remember I said I had that client that the word they used for their emergency recall was Poughkeepsie. They have never themselves used the emergency recall. Oh, they train it every day . And here's what happened. They went out of town, they hired a pet sitter. They've got two dogs. By the way, both dogs have the same word for the emergency recall. I don't know that I would've done that, but I guess it's not a bad thing. Anyway, the pet sitter is there with the dogs. The dogs bolt out the door. I don't know what happened. I just know they ran out the door and they ran down the street and they're having a blast. You know what dogs do? They're sniffing everything, looking at everything. It , they're just having a great time. And the the pet sitters yelling their name and saying, calm . And they're not coming. Yeah, they're they're not coming. No, they're not. And gisha , they're calm and she's crying. Tears are streaming down her face. She doesn't know what to do. She's panicking. She doesn't know what to do. So she's out there on her cell phone looking at the dogs far away. She can still see them that they're sniffing around, but they're not coming. She's on the phone and she's talking to the pet parents that hired her to be the pet sitter to keep these dogs safe. Man, imagine, imagine what that feels like. She's crying. She says, I don't know what to do. I can't get your dogs to come back. Pet parents says, Hey, yell Poughkeepsie. I think he had to say it two or three times cuz she didn't know what the heck the word was or could , couldn't pronounce it Poughkeepsie. But sure enough, she yells Poughkeepsie, what happened? Yeah, those two dogs turned around and came running to her immediately. Without fail quickly, that may have saved those dogs' lives. Imagine if she couldn't get them back. She doesn't know them that well. She's brand new in their lives. She doesn't have a relationship with these dogs. It's, it's not like the pet parents asking them to come who have a relationship with the dogs. These dogs just met her. She just met these dogs . There's all kinds of crazy competing motivators and distractions out in the real world. The biggest ones are sniffing every other dog's pee, right? Running around to houses where there are sense of where other dogs were. This stuff works. It really, really, really works. If you're not teaching your dog to have an emergency recall, start doing that today. Start to , even if you never have to use it, it's the one thing that could save your dog's life. Do yourself a favor. Make a commitment right now today. Say, Hey, I'm gonna take the next 30 days. I'm gonna work with my dog every day . I'm gonna work on that doorman thing that Will was talking about, because I want people to be able to come over, knock on the door, ring the doorbell. I want to be able to let those people in my dogs not rush the door, not bark at the door, not be jumping on my guest . I want a calm house. Start teaching your dog through classical conditioning and opera conditioning how dogs think, how they learn, how they process information. Start teaching them. Start teaching them to take the cues. Take the cues of the doorbell, the cues of the knocking, running to their bed, running to their place. We are just about out of time. Well , we're actually, we're out of time. And you know what, I didn't take anybody's questions today, but we were able to talk about some really important things. Have a great weekend. Everybody will be taking your questions next week. I promise.