Teaching your dog a recall just makes sense — but what about those situations when running to you might be more dangerous than staying put? In this episode, Julie makes the case for why an emergency stop is just as important... and the added benefits it can offer for sports dogs.
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'll be talking to Julie Flanery about teaching an emergency stop. Hi Julie, welcome back to the podcast.
Julie Flanery: Hi, thanks for having me back.
Melissa Breau: Absolutely. Always happy to chat. So to start us out, do you want to just kind of remind everybody a little bit about you?
Julie Flanery: Sure. I have been teaching for Fenzi for almost 10 years now. Wow. I'm feeling very old having said that. So my primary sports are freestyle and rally free and I've been showing at those for about 25 years now. I've also titled dogs in other sports, Obedience, agility, tricks, parkour. Most recently I've been doing some Barrel Racing and Lost Item Recovery.
Needless to say, I like to do things with my dogs. So currently I have two dogs, both are mixes. Fee is my 7 year old Australian shepherd, Shih Tzu cross. And yes, she is as cute as that sounds. And then Will is my youngest, he is two and he is a border pap, a border collie Papillon cross.
Melissa Breau: Awesome. All right, so emergency stops. When we're talking about an emergency stop, what do we mean? And can you kind of describe the actual behavior?
Julie Flanery: Yeah, so the foundation behavior itself is literally a freeze out of motion, a freeze out of a fast run. And since when in motion the dogs are on all four, then that's where we start with the dog freezing in a stand. So the dog is running to you and on cue they immediately stop in a stand with no creeping forward. So that's the initial goal. And then we would start to expand on that basic foundation.
Melissa Breau: What are, you know, what are the real world implications here? What are some scenarios where having an emergency stop could really make a meaningful difference in terms of safety or control?
Julie Flanery: It's often referred to as an emergency stop as it can be used to actually prevent an emergency. I always picture my dog across the street from me wanting to get to me and I see an oncoming car.
And most often in those situations we tend to scream or throw our hands up or do something hysterical because we don't want our dog running across the street. So, you know, in, in we want that dog to immediately stop even though they may already be running to us or they might be running away from us, they may be running into the street or they may be chasing something that they shouldn't be chasing or Chasing something that's going to take them into, you know, an unsafe situation.
And, you know, we. I don't think that we consider a lot of these sometimes extremely dangerous situations, that an emergency stop can help to prevent that emergency. So a dog that understands a freeze cue, Freeze is the verbal cue I use. Freeze, meaning to immediately halt all forward movement, even out of a fast run, whether they're moving to you or away from you or next to you, is going to give your dog a lot more freedom than a dog that doesn't have that.
So it's like having a strong recall. A dog with a really strong recall is going to be much safer than a dog without a strong recall. And so I like to think of the emergency stop is like an opposite recall. It gives the handler another way to ensure that the dog is going to be safe out in. Out in the real world. I mean, if you think about it, there are a lot of times when you're out with your dog, they're off leash.
You enjoy off leash with your dogs and they see something, they run quickly away from you, or they're way far ahead of you and want to run back to you. And it just gives you another tool to. To be able to feel safe when you and your dog are out and about in the world. Why is the ability to kind of stop immediately or that free skill a valuable skill, especially when we're talking about, you know, sports dogs or working dogs.
So this can be transferred from the dog running to us, which is one of the first steps that we do, to teach this to a dog running away from us, moving alongside of us, I said, or even add different positions, like a down. So initially we want to teach the dog how to abruptly collect themselves and stop on a dime, so to speak. Right. So that's not an easy skill at all.
It's not something that's easy for a dog to do physically. Like, you could try it, you could try it yourself. You could run as fast as you can and without slowing, stop at a specific point and don't allow your momentum to carry you forward past that, and you'll feel how difficult physically that is to actually do. The tendency is always to kind of slow a little bit, to buffer that stop by slowing your momentum.
But there are a lot of sports where we ask the dog to do just that, to run fast towards us or away from us and stop quickly and abruptly and control their momentum. Drop on recall comes to mind. A moving stand. Even though there's less forward momentum in the moving stand, the stop has to be immediate. We have go outs in herding or Treibball. We need the dog to abruptly stop or change direction abruptly, which is also physically difficult when the dog has a lot of momentum carrying them through that motion.
And even if we don't need the full stop. So like in agility, there are often abrupt shifts, shifts in motion, where the dog needs to collect fully in order to change direction in rally, even though there may not be a lot of speed in rally, there are several signs where the dog needs to learn the skill of collection and stopping out of motion. And of course, it. It makes a really cool wow behavior in freestyle to have a dog running full speed at you and slam on the brakes as if he's about to hit a wall.
I'm sure there are more. It's just anytime we're going to ask the dog to move and abruptly stop or change direction, that's a skill that we want to teach separately from the actual behavior that the stop is included in. Right. So like with the drop on recall, often handlers teach the stop and the drop as a single behavior. Right. And if. If we teach the dog first how to use their own body to stop the forward momentum, the drop will be much cleaner and it eliminates a lot of that creeping.
Add a stop and a backup before adding the drop, and that drop piece becomes almost easy to the dog. Right, because they've learned how to stop themselves, and then the drop can happen much more easily. They're not the dog, you know, because the dog is controlling their body, it allows them to not need to creep forward in order to do the drop. Does that make sense?
Melissa Breau: Yeah. Do you find that teaching these skills can, you know, relate to a dog's understanding of impulse control more broadly? Or are there any, you know, kind of less obvious benefits or carryover?
Julie Flanery: You know, I personally, I don't think that it helps with impulse control per se. So to me, impulse control should be thoughtful. The dog considers their options, and they choose the best option, given the opportunity for reward. Okay, so it's like the marshmallow test. You know, the marshmallow test where they have kids in a room and they have a marshmallow there and they tell the kids, now, don't eat this till we get back.
And when we get back, you can have two marshmallows. And so the kids are sitting there with this thing they really, really want, and they're having to control their impulses to eat that marshmallow in order to gain bigger reward later. So to me, that's what I think of when I think of impulse control and how a dog learns impulse control, the emergency stop should be an automatic response.
It's not something the dog thinks about. It's a reflex to a cue. And as a matter of fact, we teach it as a reflex, and then we put that reflex on cue. So the dog is going to have a full amount of energy. They're going to be running aroused, they're going to be up, and we don't want a lot of thought process coming in there, which is what we really want with impulse control.
I think I want thoughtfulness and impulse control. I want the dog to make that choice here. I want it to be an automatic reflex to the cue. I don't want it to be a thoughtful process. Does that make sense?
Melissa Breau: Yeah, I think that's kind of an interesting. I think that's an interesting differentiator. Right. Like thinking about impulse control as that piece versus this being something that we kind of want to happen before the thought.
Julie Flanery: Right. I mean, it looks like to someone looking at an emergency stop, I guess it might look like impulse control, control yourself from moving forward. But there really is. Once we teach it there, there isn't going to be any kind of thought process involved. The cue is going to happen, and it's going to happen immediately. And reinforcement happens immediately on this when we start training it. So it's not. There's no delayed reinforcement, which often there is in impulse control for this when we train it, that reinforcement comes immediately.
Melissa Breau: So talk to me a little bit about how you actually approach training this. What's kind of that first step in teaching the dog to stop on a dime, either physically or conceptually, or maybe both?
Julie Flanery: Right. So conceptually, the dog is learning that something they want is coming to them and moving forward will not benefit them.
So in essence, we're training it like we would anything else. The dog is learning what is in my best interest to earn reinforcement. Okay, so we kind of start it there a little bit. There's some pre-training that has to be done physically in order to get what they want, they have to stop abruptly. Right. And then reinforcement for that stop is immediately. So basically, it all is going to start with a game of catch.
Don't worry if they can't catch. When I first started teaching my dogs, as Phee especially, was horrible Phee. I would toss a treat. It would be big, it would be fluffy, it would be light, and it would just land on her head and then drop to the ground, and then she would eat it. And she knew she could eventually get it? If she just stood there and did nothing, I thought for sure she was never, ever, ever going to learn how to catch.
And there are some really fun ways that we can actually help a dog that doesn't seem to get the concept of catching something in their mouth. So that's the first step. And then we start to add motion and speed and distance. Actually, before we add the speed, actually, I should say we do add the motion and the speed pretty quickly. And that's where once we have the motion and the speed, then we start to add the cue, and then we can start to add more distance, and then we can start to add more distractions and difficulty and things like that.
Melissa Breau: Interesting. All right, so we're talking about being able to rely on these emergency stops in some pretty interesting situations. Right. So how does. How do things like arousal level impact a dog's ability to kind of execute this reliably? Right. And how do you kind of build the skills that holds up to you know, you mentioned the not running in front of a car situation. Like, how do we build it so it'll hold up even in, like a high distraction or high arousal or high pressure situation?
Yeah, yeah. So that's kind of a multifaceted question. But because we are utilizing a reflex, the stop is faster when the dog is aroused, because they are. Because it's not a thoughtful process, the arousal level can often benefit the immediacy of the stop. And I know that sounds weird, but once you see how we train it, you'll see how that can actually work. So we actually want the dog running, and that usually includes a level of arousal.
When we get into the meat of teaching it, that's where we're going to teach it. So they're learning the stop in a state not quite as high of a state, but we're adding that state of arousal into the process of teaching it so that when we need it, they're already used to that feeling of being in an arousal. Does that make sense? So we do want the dog responsive to the cue, and that does take the brain as well as the body.
But we teach the skill with the brain and the body working together so that movement and arousal is the context in which the cue will be given, in which they're actually learning the cue that's different from other things. Normally, we're in a calm state. We're in a quiet area. When we add cues, the dog, we want the dog thoughtful and thinking about the cue. But in this. Because we're adding a cue to a behavior that the dog is already doing in an aroused state.
Arousal isn't something we add later because it's happening all throughout the training process. In terms of like building skill with distractions, we do that just as we would with any other skill. So we would methodically add layers of difficulty, distraction, pressure. All the things that we do with other behaviors we would do with this. We would obviously adjust for any errors. We would keep the rate of reward really high for more difficult scenarios.
But most importantly, on those skills that are the most important to us, we need to keep the dog practiced at it. And if we don't, then it will degrade. So we want to make sure that we're maintaining it and keeping a high rate of reinforcement for it if it's something that we're going to actually need and want to use in real life.
Melissa Breau: Can you talk a little bit about kind of the role of timing and handler position when what we're doing is essentially trying to build this reliable emergency stop behavior?
Julie Flanery: Yeah. So a couple of things. Yes, timing is super important for the handler. When you think about the times when we need this for an emergency, we are also in a state of arousal often. And that means our movement is likely to be quick. And so one of the things that happens at the start of training this is the handler's movement will be quick. There is a progression of steps for the handler that can be a little difficult.
And the dog is first taking physical cues from the handler before learning the verbal cue. So there's definitely some skills for the handler that you wouldn't expect when just playing a game of catch. The speed at which the handler gives the initial cue to stop is important. And that's a skill that we'll work with handlers on. In the class that I have coming up, actually, I have a class coming up on this.
So that's one of the things that we work on is the handler skill. The handler skill actually is more important in teaching a dog to catch than the dog skill. So we'll be working on that as well.
Melissa Breau: So speaking of the class, we're talking about this because you're offering a three week class on this stuff in the March term. Do you want to share a little bit more about the class and maybe who might want to sign up?
Julie Flanery: Yeah, it's going to be a really fun class. We will start as if you and your dog know nothing. Your dog doesn't know how to start, your dog doesn't know how to catch. You don't know any of the mechanics. Mechanics on tossing so you'll learn the first week how to actually build the foundation skill for the actual emergency stop, and we'll move into refining your skill, your dog skill.
We'll add movement and speed and distance and all of those things that can make this a really difficult skill to teach. Teaching an emergency stop. You know, it's funny because, to be honest, when I first started teaching my dog the emergency stop, I wasn't. I mean, I knew it'd be useful. But I have to tell you, to see a dog suddenly freeze out of motion the first time you see it is, like one of the coolest things that you'll ever see.
It's like, whoa, boom. They're running through you, and all of a sudden they're frozen. I put that right up there with, like, the first time that I ever taught my dog to do mimicry, and the first time she mimics something I did, I had that same feeling the first time I saw my dog, like, just freeze out of motion. It was such a cool thing to see. And to be honest, I think the dogs kind of get to like it. It is a really fun game.
Melissa Breau: Who should sign up?
Julie Flanery: If you are someone that tends to be out and about with your dogs a lot, if your recall is important to you and you use your recall, you should have the opposite recall. You should have an emergency stop where you want to interrupt your recall, maybe, or you want to stop a dog from coming to you. Both the recall and the emergency stop are two sides of the same coin.
You know, really, we want both to have the most control of our dog's movement and safety. I think those of you in sports teaching a dog to control their bodies and stop first before asking for the down gives the dog another tool to use in their learning of things like the drop on recall or the standout of motion, or any of those things where we're asking the dog to literally stop.
All forward momentum. All forward momentum. And as I said, if you think that's easy for a dog, try it yourself. You know, run full blast and try stopping. And physically, it is very difficult. Mentally, it is very difficult. And yet in all of the sports that we participate in, there is some measure of us asking our dogs to do that very physically difficult maneuver. So really, it's. I mean, anybody is who this class is for, whether you're in sports, whether you enjoy just being out in public with your dog, hiking with your dog, it's just another really fun, cool skill to have.
Melissa Breau: Any final thoughts or maybe key points that you want to leave listeners with?
Julie Flanery: I think a couple of things if you want this to be useful, like your recall, it needs to be practiced. And again, if you feel like a recall is an important skill for your dog to have, the emergency stop is also an important skill for your dog to have. You may need one, you may need the other, you may need both.
But like they always say, it's you can't train a behavior at the time that you need it. Best to maybe take these steps now so that when you need it, you have it.
Melissa Breau: Excellent. All right, well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Julie.
Julie Flanery: Thank you for having me. It is always fun to chat with you.
Melissa Breau: Back at ya. And thanks to all of our listeners for tuning in.
We'll be back next week, this time with Irit Bloom to talk about reducing alert barking. If you haven't already, subscribe to our podcast in iTunes or the podcast app of your choice, our next episode automatically downloaded to your phone as soon as it becomes available. I think I need to listen to that podcast. 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 bensounds.com The track featured here is 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!