Need a strategy for getting reinforcement off your body? Wondering what other skills you should have on board before that first competition? In this episode Nancy and I talk about all of the pieces that go into preparing our dogs to perform their best.

Transcription

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods. Today I have Nancy Little here with me to talk about leaving behind your reinforcement and stepping into the competition ring. Hi Nancy, welcome back to the podcast.

Nancy Little: Hi Melissa. Hi everyone.

Melissa Breau: To start us out, do you want to just take a minute and kind of remind listeners a little bit about you and maybe a little about your current furry crew?

Nancy Little: Sure. Probably have one addition since the last time too. So sure. A little bit about me. I've been in dog sports for way too many years. Just like many started out in obedience, which tells you it was a long time ago.

There was no agility or rally at that time and my novice a dog became an OTCH which so I was hooked on dog sports. He was just amazing. He was a lab. Melissa and then nowadays I do herding agility and I still do obedience, but not as often. And I was an obedience judge for 22 years and my dog crew, I have four of my own and we have another dog here that's my husband has a toller.

My oldest dog is Lever and he's 11 years old. I won't say he's going to be 12 because he's going to be 12 in March. I can't believe it. But he still, I kind of made the decision to retire him from agility. Didn't know when my last run was going to be, but I just, it's a hard decision. He's very strong and he's doing well, but I just got worried with the tunnels are, you know, it's just I worry about him when I lose sight of him in the tunnels.

So everything else, he's doing well. So he, you know, I just kind of try to keep him active and Pose Is my, his Lever's daughter. These are border collies. She's six years old. In two weeks she's going to be seven, which is crazy. These dogs all lost two years of their lives and during the pandemic. So I have to keep reminding myself that she's had some injuries.

So she's been on and off. But she's back now and we're starting to get back our mojo and we got back into herding after a two year break and now I, you know, this whole summer I basically let agility go and we went back to do herding and I forgot how much I missed that. So we had fun over the summer doing that. Differ is my mixed breed.

She's nine pound chihuahua poodle mix, super fun little dog. And I've learned a lot from her. She's taught a lot. She's. She should not have the temperament she has. She. But she does. She's just an amazing little dog. And I work with her on obedience skills. Just kind of, you know, learning about a small dog. Whether or not we compete, I'm, you know, she's just so tiny. I'm not, I'm not 100% sure I would, but it's open in case we do.

And then my youngest dog I got is Vici, who is another border collie. Smooth border collie. And she's in training. She's just learning. She's just, she just turned a year Nov. 6, and she is learning. She learned all the skills that we'll talk about here. And it's making. We started doing the obstacles, which was just basically starting with wing wraps when she was 10 weeks old. And things are moving fast.

If we didn't have winter here right now we're getting ready for contacts and everything like that. You know, it's winter here, so it's kind of putting a. We're slowing down a bit. So enforces a break. It does, yes. So that's my crew. They keep me busy.

Melissa Breau: So as I mentioned in the intro, we're going to talk about removing reinforcement from the picture a little bit. So why is it so important that we teach our dogs how to work even if reinforcement isn't, you know, on our person or on our body?

Nancy Little: Right. I guess if you're not planning on competing in dog sports, it's not that critical. But even with those dogs, it's. Food can still be a cue to act a certain way and do things. And so we've got to kind of understand the order that we put the, you know, that in and how we do it. So it's still beneficial for people just wanting life skills. But for competition dogs, I think it's super important, especially when they're working for a long time.

Like mostly competitive obedience is super hard because the environment is quiet. In most other dog sports, it's not. It might be a nose work and. But you know, they're actually, the work they're doing there is at least compatible to the quiet in obedience. It's just a tough situation. So it just ends up being that we need to be able to communicate with our dogs that reinforcement is still available.

It's just not on us. It's the cues aren't there to help them think that or hope that it's there. And we also need to be really careful not to teach our dogs that going into that work area, I'll call the ring, you know, ring work area. I just kind of generally use it as work area, because whether it's a ring or a work area, it's still an area that you're training in.

And you don't want them to think that that area is void of reinforcement, because when they're learning the sport and all the tiny skills that build into that sport, you have to reinforce them. They've got to be paid for it. We just have to know and be smart about kind of moving forward so that they aren't depending on it. And they don't start using food and food cues as a cue itself on how to act.

And sometimes those things are difficult for handlers to see that what they're doing or patterns that they're creating actually cue the dog that they're in training mode. And now they see some efforts that aren't going to happen without those cues. So, yeah, I think it's critical.

Melissa Breau: So how is working on it or teaching it or training that kind of different than, you know, just creating a lot of fluency or, you know, just reducing reinforcement for the unit of work? Are they all just different pieces of the same puzzle, or are there some differences there?

Nancy Little: Yeah, that was an interesting question, because they are. They're all pieces of the same puzzle. They're just parts of building confidence. And we'll just kind of focus more on the competition dogs rather than the dogs that aren't going to compete. But we just still want to build all those little pieces that are important that surround that competition.

So fluent. If we talk about fluency in behavior and skills, they're going to be built individually by reinforcements. And we do that by challenging the dog with performance, cueing behaviors in different environments and different distractions to just make sure that they can do them anywhere. So fluency is. It's important to kind of understand that that's still part of the puzzle, but it isn't quite. It's not quite the same.

I mean, it's part of the puzzle, but it's not exactly what we're talking about here in this workshop. We're sort of trying to talk about reducing reinforcement, but that can be a phrase that means a lot of different things to different people. So, you know, when I think of reducing reinforcement, it's going to depend on the sport, because in some sports, you can, you can, you can pay your dog, but it just, at a certain point, it's after the exercise or after they find, you know, like in scent work is when they.

They find the hide. I'm not a scent work person, so I apologize if I'm saying things wrong. But. And so it's gonna, it's gonna be different depending on the sport, as I said, and the goal, and also the goals of the team, too, what they mean by reinforcing it. We just have to be systematic about doing that. We can't just all of a sudden show them that, you know, here we're, you know, we're not rewarding now.

We're, you know, it's not on my body. It's. It's, you know, it's a way. We have to be careful and just kind of systematically introduce that to the dog. So one, you know, there's a few different ways we refer to reducing reinforcement. One is like maybe progressing. Progressing from lowering a behavior to cueing a behavior that is actually reducing a reinforcement cue, which is the lure. So that, that, that is a way to reduce it.

And then there's also performing multiple skills that, you know, before the dog gets rewarded. That would be another way. And then we have longer duration between rewards, which I think most people are talking about when we deal with that, like in healing, we want to build longer healing or a duration stay, like a down stay or maybe a lead out in agility, something like that. One of the typical mistakes that trainers can make when they're trying to.

What they try to do in terms of reducing reinforcement is they try to expose their dog to various patterns and situations, or I call it things, and whatever that thing might be, they expect the dog to figure out what the situation is or what to expect and that. You see that kind of happening in puppy socialization, too, where you have the checklist, okay, I expose them to this and this and this, and not really taking into account how the dog is feeling about that.

It's the same thing kind of happens when people are preparing their dogs for competition. They. It's kind of an afterthought. And then, oh, we need to. And actually, some people don't even expose them. They just. They just go into the ring and hope for the best. And don't even consider that it might be really hard for the dog because at first the dog is just a little surprised that nothing's happening.

And you might see some behavior like, well, I was kind of expect, you know, the dog was expecting reinforcement, but eventually, you know, it starts affecting them in the ring. But so we have to be careful that we're not just exposing them like just doing run throughs or just, you know, or just showing them that the food is out of the ring. Go into the ring and work and then have a party coming out because we're really showing that we're not, you know, we are exposing the dog to that thing, but are we really helping the dog emotionally deal with that?

So that's kind of, you know, what I want people to think about is really taking a look at how the dog is responding so we can adjust some of these things. The trainers also, I think too, when they're reducing reinforcement, what they do is they can get a little uncomfortable when things don't go well. You know, things are not perfect and so they're quick to go help. And now the dog just never has the time to process and figure things out.

So we need to be mindful that the dog, you know, just like us, we're not perfect either. We know what we're thinking and we know what we're doing, but the dog does not. So when they aren't perfect and they go from that happy, hey, you know, really perfect heeling or perfect agility or whatever sport you're doing to a little bit different, like maybe more thoughtful for whatever reason, a dog that's very thoughtful and thinking about things, but still confident and putting in effort really bothers handlers.

I mean, I want you to really understand that dogs have to go through that process too, of thinking, hmm, what was I supposed to do here? And giving them a moment rather than us rushing in and quickly trying to help them. And so when we're reducing reinforcement, we have to be mindful of that is like give the dog some time and kind of see what their issues are before we are quick to help them, especially during training.

Because that helps, doesn't. You can't. If the dog gets used to us helping all the time, then our handling is not going to be the way it should be in any sport. And then the dog is also getting very used to that part, that piece in training. And then it's not there in the ring when we're competing. And if your dog still needs that much help figuring out the right answer, maybe you're reducing reinforcement too soon.

Too quickly and too soon. Correct. Yeah, you just, you know, and so we have to kind of step back too and respect the response from our dogs and ensure that we're, you know, reevaluating what we need to do. And train to reinforce to reduce that reinforcement.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. At what point in, you know, I know you mentioned kind of in there that sometimes people kind of wait till last minute, but at what point in your training do you like to begin kind of introducing your dog to the idea that rewards may not be on your body while they're working? What does that look like in those early phases?

Nancy Little: Right. Well, you can do some of this when the dog's fairly young. You know, we teach them reinforcement marker cues, and some of them can be just a placed reinforcer and putting that on cue because that kind of is building different structures to remote reinforcement or reinforcement that's not on our body, but it can still be part of our training for very, very young dogs, or at least when they're ready.

And that kind of puts in the idea that it's not always on us. So that can be done fairly early and that, you know, you can use that later on to build, like, heeling skills, targeting cue discriminations, things like that, and release cues as well. And you'll see lots of trainers using similar procedures to that. So that's kind of the early phase of this. You don't have to go through the whole.

I have a whole procedure on how to teach a lot of this, and that's just, you know, something a lot of trainers use. It's very smart trainer. You'll see training, and you'll see that in a lot of the videos online. You'll see, you know, toys placed, food, dish placed treat and train, things like that out, you know, so that the dog's learning that it's not all coming from you, it is coming from the environment as well, or it's out there and it just needs to be cued.

Melissa Breau: Am I understanding right then that in those early phases you have reinforcement on you and also remotely. Is that. Yeah. Yes. I mean, if I want to. There are some behaviors that work really well for, you know, to reinforce what you, you know, this. The particular skill you're building. Like, for instance, teaching a release cue. Most of the releases are not, I mean, except for maybe a recall and obedience, most of the releases in dog sports are independent of the handler.

I mean, there's handling and like, you think lead out in agility, release forward, even a release with. In herding or in field trials or hunt tests, you are. The dog is not looking at you and the reinforcement is not coming from you. It's out somewhere. So teaching a release by having them come to you for reinforcement is just, I mean, it's not going to teach exactly what we want.

Because, you know, if you're teaching a forward focusy sort of skill, so, you know, like, and there's other skills, like if you want to teach attention, stationary attention, maybe like in heel position, you can put like a place reinforcer out and have the dog really work that attention and then release them from that position by cueing the. The. Whatever the reinforcement marker cue is to get the thing.

Melissa Breau: Can you describe that for me a little bit more?

Nancy Little: Sure. So first of all, a reinforcement marker cue is introduced. Then the dog learns to follow us to a stash of treats. Next, the dog learns to move away, which really is engagement. So we're actually teaching engagement as part of this. They're moving away from the reinforcement and they perform a fluent behavior or skill. So that's where the fluent skill comes into play here.

We really need to have them in order to kind of progress through this procedure. And they can be little tricks or whatever. Then the next part would be adding multiple containers. Multiples, I call them stashes. They're stashes of treats. We have multiple ones. So the dog really doesn't know where they are. They don't necessarily know where you're headed. And then we increase the transitions, the transitions away from the food, you know, or the reinforcer, and also back to the reinforcer.

And the essential elements of all of these procedures, there's just these essential things about them, is that the dog starts to understand the communication. We're giving them a reinforcement marker cue so they're very clear on what's happening. And I'm really big on getting rid of all the extra motion there. There's no party enthusiasm, crazy behavior going on at the time we mark. That can come after the order is really important.

The marker is neutral. Then the praise can happen and the party can happen. And that way it's very clear to the dog in all situations what is happening. So the stashes. The stashes are always in the work area when we're training this, not outside of the work area. It's really important to me to build that expectation of remote reinforcement in the work area. And then we start building a transition, a robust one, from the reinforcement to the.

To whichever area you are starting. So like in obedience, that might be like moving from one exercise to another. Whatever, it's a transition. You have to have engagement with the dog. So we're really working on that. And then also just a confident and return to the reinforcement. So a dog that really understands all of that, this is really important for the dog to build in the work area.

And what I'm trying to do is not create this void of the stash. The reinforcer is always out of the ring. I want a long history of it being in the work area and building the. These transitions. And then the dogs that I've worked with, including my own, don't even notice that the transition is out of the ring. It's just another transition. Just another transition with, you know, and they don't even notice. But they do notice if we really show them that it's. It's a void, you know, in the ring is a void out of the ring. So that's the important pieces and what it looks like.

Melissa Breau: Okay, so if that's kind of the process, can you talk a little bit about how, you know, when all of this is kind of ready for you to actually take it to competition? Like, what does it look like at that kind of end phase?

Nancy Little: Right. And that's the complicated part, is because it's going to be different for every sport and every dog and handler, there's really. It's a matter of really introducing this concept to the dog and not at the last minute. So as early as you can introduce this to a dog that's ready to be introduced. So in other words, if they have fluent behaviors, they can be introduced to this procedure.

That's important. And then you just keep revisiting this over and over and building on it by going to different places and testing different skills in different places, understanding what your dog can deal with in different places without making it all about the sport. So if it's properly introduced, it can be instrumental in teaching the dog that the reinforcement is just a transition away. Because that's what we're doing is we're, you know, I'm trying to help people build these transitions, which I, you know, I've never felt that people in dog sports really work on transitions and engagement.

You know, it's basically the same thing. It's just moving together as a team, and it's everywhere. It can even be in life skills. And if you can do that and the dogs enjoy it, I think, you know, you'll know when your dog is ready. Cause this is just another fun skill to teach. Just happens to be something that people ignore and work at the last minute. I think that's probably. Well, I know this probably isn't the only thing, Right. That people overlook. And that kind of falls in that easy to overlook category when we're talking about preparing a dog to compete.

Melissa Breau: Are there other skills that you wish maybe more that more people spent more time on, you know, kind of working on before that first competition?

Nancy Little: Oh, absolutely. And that is interesting enough that these are skills that we do in the class, the Glue Skills class, which we'll talk about later, but basically crating and waiting, and those are huge things in every dog sport that I don't think enough people think about is the dogs really have to be patient.

They've got to learn patience. Patience. You know, basically, lots and lots and lots of waiting starts, like setups and lineups. They're all a part. I don't care what sport it is. Even dock diving, I'm sure field herding, everything has a setup, you know, to start. You know, whatever the first thing is, they've got to be able to do that. Transitions are everywhere. Engagement is everywhere. Leash removal, leash attachment, end of work.

You know, really, really paying attention to the end of work and the end of session and communicating that to the dog, not just walking away from our dogs. All of those things contribute to the dog really trusting you and being confident that you and it are very connected and engaged.

Melissa Breau: Can you talk a little bit about kind of how those pieces fit into that competition environment and, you know, how they benefit us if we've worked them, you know, inside or outside of the ring.

Nancy Little: Right, yeah. So they. You're talking about the behaviors or the procedure for remote reinforcement, which are you talking about?

Melissa Breau: The glue skill stuff. The glue skills.

Nancy Little: Okay. Yeah, that's what I thought. I just wanted to make sure those are going to systematically build skills that help prepare you and your dog for competition, for sure. Because if you're having to constant. This is kind of what I see happening is handlers are not really thinking about those ahead of time and just competing, and then they're struggling with their dogs, getting them to the ring, getting them to behave, and they're controlling their dogs to prevent things.

So the dogs really don't have an understanding. And what you're doing is you're adding a lot of stress to the dog even before they go in the ring. So all of these things are done with the inexpensive, or the glue skills are kind of done with the inexperienced dog, or we can actually go back with experienced dogs and teach it. It's just that once the experienced dog knows how much fun and great stuff are happening in the work area, it's harder to work those skills. So the glue skills are best done a little bit earlier, and then it makes the learning so much easier for the dog because they're really learning how to function in that environment.

Melissa Breau: Talk a little bit about what you got coming up here. So you're offering a workshop specifically on teaching dogs how to work away from the rewards. And that's coming up next week. And then you're offering your glue skills class about some of that stuff we've been talking about here at the end in the December term. So can you talk a little more about kind of each of them, what they cover, maybe who might want to join you?

Nancy Little: Sure. Yeah. So the workshop is, you know, we kind of. Most of this podcast was on that. It's kind of honing in on one of the glue skills area that's really important. So we're kind of building a procedure to transition to and from reinforcement so that the dogs don't feel uncomfortable working.

And even the dogs that love to work, you know, so people will think, well, I have a dog that really likes to work, and whatever, it still affects those dogs. So this affects every dog. They have to understand what's happening. And that's what I'm trying to do in that workshop is really focus on that procedure. The glue skills class actually covers this procedure, but the workshop will be.

It's really well organized and highlighted a lot better. So I think it will be really good for anyone that's very interested in this in any sport to take that. The glue skills expands on the framework that's needed to build, you know, both the handler and the dog's confidence, and that's building the skills necessary to be able to compete. And a lot of this is the handler learning about the dog and how the dog learns, and the dog also learning about the handler.

And there's a lot of things going on there, a lot of moving parts. So working on, you know, and I throw a lot of really important skills. There's major ones in there that I really want people to work on because I feel that they're really critical. And then there's other skills. There's a lot of skills in there. There's some other ones that, you know, you can just pick and choose.

So there's many of them in there. Basically, I call them Glue Skills because it. It's kind of the glue to hang your sports skills on. And I, I. That is something that's really helped my dogs. Like Vici, I was talking at the beginning is she was 10 months old when I started doing sports skills, and now it's going very fast because I have learned a lot about how she learns and how she deals with things, and there's not that desperation for her to get into that work environment. She just is happy to be out and, you know, doing anything anywhere.

Melissa Breau: So, yeah. Awesome. All right. Any final thoughts or maybe key points you want to leave folks with?

Nancy Little: Yeah, so the one thing I wanted to really emphasize is the Glue Skills class is in the agility area. So don't be afraid of it. Be, you know, you not being an agility person because it is for all sports.

There is nothing in there that is not part of any other sport. And I've done a lot of different sports. So I have had people that have done herding. I've had many obedience people take it. They all love it. And I've had many people take it like multiple times with different dogs and their videos are in there with different dogs. It's. So don't get concerned about it being in the agility area.

It is. It's just something that I felt that was really needed for agility because it is such a high energy sport and dogs struggle there. Dogs struggle everywhere, but they really struggle in agility and learning how to learn in that environment and learning how to wait and things like that. So that's why it's there. And then both the workshop and the class are going to help your training in more ways than just preparing for competition because you're learning better.

I'm really big on better communication between handler and dog and a lot of people really want to learn more about that. So I cover that in every one of my classes and really in the glue skills. The other thing is we have an awesome TA Heather Sather, and she is wonderful. I get lots of really lot of compliments on her. So that's the bonus for the glue skills class as well.

Melissa Breau: Yeah, fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Nancy.

Nancy Little: Thank you for having me. Absolutely. And thanks to all our listeners for tuning in. We'll be back next week with Sarah Brewski to talk about turning your dog into a stunt devil or well, at least teaching them the kinds of show stopping tricks that can add real wow to your training routine. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in itunes or the podcast app of your choice to have our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available.

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by bensound.com the track featured here called Buddy. Audio editing provided by Chris Lang. Thanks again for tuning in and happy training.

Credits

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to Denise Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty-free by BenSound.com; the track featured here is called "Buddy." Audio editing provided by Chris Lang.

Thanks again for tuning in -- and happy training!