What do cues and mechanics have in common? A lot, it turns out! If you've ever asked your dog for a behavior you'd have sworn they knew, only to have them stare at you like you're speaking Greek, this episode is for you. Behavior expert Karen Deeds shares how conflicting cues come to be and what we can do about them.

Transcript

Mellissa 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 Karen Deeds about the ways dogs learn and how sometimes we accidentally introduce multiple competing cues for our dogs. Hi, Karen. Welcome back to the podcast.

Karen Deeds: It is good to be back. It seems like it's been a while. I think it has, but I'm excited to chat again.

Melissa Breau: Me too. To start us out, do you want to just remind everybody a little bit about kind of who you are, who your current crew is, what you're working on with them, that kind of stuff?

Karen Deeds: Yeah. I'm Karen Deeds. I live in the Memphis, Tennessee area.

I am a certified dog behavior consultant through the IAABC. I think I've been teaching for Fenzi now about four or five years, I can't remember. But the brunt of my work, of course, is behavior. And I'll get into that in a little bit when we start the questions and why we're talking about training things when I specifically mainly do behavior. But I also obviously work with students that are training for various things.

In fact, I just got done teaching three workshops last week in the Texas area and tomorrow we're heading to Michigan to teach for a bunch of people in Michigan at a dog scout camp. So lots of fun.

Melissa Breau: Lots of fun. Yeah. So you want to tell us a little bit about your dogs?

Karen Deeds: Oh, yes. I have Stoney. Stoney the six year old yellow Labrador retriever. Best dog ever.

Cool. Couldn't have asked for just a nicer dog. He's about as easy as they come. I mean, Stoney the Stoner is what I call him. Big and dumb is always is kind of nice. And then I have the border collie who's a lot different, edgy. It seems like as he's gotten older, he's gotten a lot more anxious, a lot more clingy, needy. I'm seeing some things in him that I hadn't seen seen before.

And my newest crew member is Tink and she is a coated American hairless terrier. She's just a little over a year old and she loves to swim. So I'm excited about that because we have a dock in our area. So I do plan on getting her into the water and do some dock diving. I think she will excel at fast cat as well. So she might even do Frisbee. If I could just get her to return the toy.

Melissa Breau: Fair enough.

Karen Deeds: I took Sarah Brueskye's pay to play class and she ended up going into heat at 5 months of age, which lasted for 3 months. Don't give me stuff. It was horrible. Horrible. Yeah. And she kind of went, yeah, I, she wasn't great at training anyway. She's got some, she's got some, some nerves as well. She's a little fearful of people.

Little barky, lungy, runaway kind of sort of stuff. So she's one of those fearful dogs that I talk about in my reactive class. But anyway, that's my crew and I hope that's where I'm going to end it for a while anyway.

Melissa Breau: Yeah, sounds good. Yeah. Since we're having a conversation about cueing, I think a lot of times, you know, people kind of hear that word and the thing that they, they're thinking that they're mentally picturing is a verbal cue.

Specifically. Is that the only type of cue that you're talking about here? You know, how are you defining the word cue?

Karen Deeds: Basically, I, and, and I, I could have googled and come up with a definition, but I think of a cue as something that elicits a, A response. So that could be a verbal cue, obviously. It could be a visual cue, it could be a tactile cue, it could be mental cue, and that's the one that kind of gets us into trouble, actually.

All those kind of put together can. Can really make a huge difference. So when it comes to competing cues. So I, I think, and I'm start trying to think. You know, I've worked with some deaf dogs and obviously visual is, is very important. I've worked with some deaf and blind dogs and use tactile. And I do also teach tactile responses to leash pressure as part of some of the training that I do, even with reactivity.

So anyway, that's kind of what I think about when I hear, when I say the word cue. It's not just a verbal. So you mentioned the idea in there of kind of competing cues, and that is part of what we're talking about. So can you, can you talk a bit about what you mean when you say that? What. How are they competing? So basically, if you're talking about overshadowing, so we're talking about overshadowing and blocking.

Overshadowing happens in the learning process. And that is probably the one that I see. The most common is that. And probably the most common one that I see is the hand is in the bait bag and they say their marker cue, which Means to eat food. And the dog doesn't make the association because the more salient thing, of course, is anticipation of food from the hand, from the baby back, or they are actually delivering food at the same time, as they say, and the movement is going to trump and be more salient than the spoken cue.

And especially when I'm dealing with behavior. Let's say I want to cue my dog to. To eat food, which is a huge thing in behavior work for me. If my dog is looking at something and I tell them to eat food, but they're used to only seeing me deliver food, and that is their cue, then they don't know that I delivered food because they're not looking at me.

And so that can really get us in trouble. So that's a really big one that I see. But it could be as simple as you teach the word sit with the hand signal at the same time, and probably the movement of the hand is going to be more salient than the spoken cue. So that's. Those are competing cues. It could also be your dog is in the kitchen, and you teach your dog to sit in the kitchen because that's where you feed them.

And they learn that, oh, this is the behavior to get my food bowl as I sit, but it only applies to the kitchen. So that's that environmental competing cue. So it's fun stuff. And really, when you start thinking about training in a more systematic way, those things have to all be considered, because a dog has to start to parse out what really is the most salient, important thing.

Is it the word? Is it the location? Is the movement? Because if we go to another location and she says that same word, I'm no longer in the kitchen. She still might be giving me the hand signal. So maybe that's what it is. But then the next time we go somewhere else and we don't do the hand signal and just like, okay, so that word must have the most important meaning, because that's the thing that she's expecting me to respond to.

So, you know, we kind of have to work through all of that, those distractions, in a systematic way. Yeah. And then you mentioned blocking. Yeah, I do. Because this is. And this goes back to my competition days. I actually did competitive obedience and rally. In fact, we. I did quite well with my big red or my little redhead. And I remember I did rally a lot. Right. And, you know, it's all spoken.

You can use. You can use. There's probably a lot of overshadowing going on in there. And I remember when I finally decided to get into obedience and I was doing position changes, which are our hand signals, well, I had gotten. Oh, my God. I've really got my dog proficient on verbal cues. That's. That's impressive, right? Sit, Bam. No problem. So then when I'm trying to do hand signals, she's like, I have no clue what that word means, because the sit has.

The verbal. Has always resulted in the reinforcement. So it was hard to get her to understand there is a new cue in town, and it looks like this. So. And that's hard when you start to. If you've trained a dog to only do one behavior one way, and you. Then you try to go, okay, well, now I need you to do it. For example, a lot of people, when they're standing, we used to do this in class a lot.

People would say, oh, my dog knows how to sit. I promise. I'm like, okay, turn around. Put your nose against the wall. Cue a sit. Their dogs couldn't do it, amazingly enough. And so I have them turn around, and they. I'd ask them, I said, okay, go ahead. Say sit. And they invariably would either bring their hands up to their chest or they lift their head or their eyebrows.

And that had become the actual cue, and that was. Is what was resulting in the reinforcement. So when they were like, nose against the wall and they couldn't see the eyes, they couldn't see the headlift. There was no headlift. They couldn't see the hand signal. The dog was like, I have no. I. No. No clue. Yeah. So that's the. The difference between the two. So we're going to have fun with it, I hope.

New class, new curriculum. Probably should get to writing that or something. I don't know. You got a little bit of time, but I'm going to be a little bit busy between now and then, but that's okay. And maybe I'll get some really good examples. In fact, I know I will. And luckily, I do have permission to videotape people up there, so that's lovely. Cool. Because I'm sure we will talk about it because it's very important.

Yeah. What are some signs that maybe, you know, overshadowing or blocking is happening? That we have competing cues that are kind of in play and that that's part of our training. Problem team is a great example of this, actually. In fact, I really. I'll probably dig up some of my own. My old team videos with my golden. I remember one of the. One of the levels. I don't remember what it was 3, 4, 5.

You literally had to be like at a distance of 20ft, but you had to cue your dog. Position changes, like sitting in a chair. I remember one where I literally ducked my head between my legs and stuck my head between my legs and she was behind me and I cued her to do a behavior. And that's. Man, that's some, that's some really weird stuff right there. So that could easily be, you know, be a.

Blocking things like. Okay, the word maybe doesn't mean something. Obviously she's never seen me train with my head between my legs, but that's beside the point. So I think the most common is typically going to be overshadowing. I say that and we'll see. I don't know the answer to that. And as somebody who's been out of competition for a while, you know, there's so many cues that we can give our dog in the ring, even just with our shoulders and our, our, our hand or our, our hips or our feet.

Does a dog actually really know heel position or do they know an automatic sit? Is it because. Let's say I'm oh. Another good analogy. It was when I was working on my first new knee, now that I've had two. And I remember I was at a rally competition and I was limping and I remember my leg kind of buckled when I came to an auto sit. And I mean, I normally didn't have to cue a sit in rally, let alone obedience.

And she kind of went, I have no idea what that means. So even though it looked different, so she's like, okay, that is just not a sit cube because your feet are not together. You're. You kind of like leaned almost fell on her because my knee gave out and I actually blew that. That sign and got a 10 point deduction. But so that comes to mind when I think about that would be, see, and now I'm sitting here going, is that blocking or is that overshadowing?

That's blocking because it was a. Her cue was very well known. Feet come together, mom stops, she throws her shoulders back. That's a cue to do an automatic sit. But falling on her is not a cue to do an automatic sit. So she's like, yeah, I'm not sitting. So that was definitely the old cue. Had blocked the new cue of falling on her. Not that I ever wanted to teach that, but still.

So it's, it's, it's a lot of fun. And I'm hoping that if nothing else, you'll be able to or anybody who joins me in class will be able to go, oh, I understand the difference, because believe me, I have. I have looked and studied and gone, okay. And even, like, right then I was just like, okay, is that blocking or overshadowing? Because you have to remember. The easiest way to remember it is overshadowing happens during the learning process, and blocking happens after learning.

So. But like I say, I think competing cues probably happens the most with overshadowing. I think so. So what it sounds like is if we have a situation where you're, you know, either expecting the dog to do a behavior on a cue that you think they kind of know it and you don't get it, that may mean that you have a competing cue problem, or you're training and you're trying to get something on cue, and for whatever reason, it doesn't seem to be happening, is probably a competing cue situation.

Are there other situations that indicate that, okay, maybe we've got one of these things going on and we need to think about them, and obviously we need to kind of figure out how much fluency we've allowed the dog. You know, they've acquired the information, they're fluent at it. And this kind of gets into that whole generalization process sometimes. Does the dog actually understand the cue? You know, if I'm, you know, got my head, my hands above my head and I say sit, do they sit?

Or if my hand. During overshadowing or doing, teaching a cue, if I actually start to have my hands in my pocket all the time, is that the more salient cue? More than likely it is if you've ever delivered a cookie from your pocket. And so, I mean, we have to. I think we have to understand, number one is we have to be very aware of ourselves. And because a dog is definitely not going to cut us any slack, they are very observant about what we do because they're.

That's their. That's. They're an observant species. Some breeds more so than others. And I will tell you, you know, the border collie, you know, I have to be very efficient at how I deliver cues. Spin and twist, for example, or left and right is what I call it. And, you know, if you teach it with a handset, with a lure, then you've got to fade that lure and turn it into a hand signal.

And then if you want it on a verbal cue, you've got to do a cue transfer. So. And half the time, most people that I see go twist or spin, they're still doing this or something, and the dog says, I have no idea what those words are, but your body is telling me what to do. Yeah. So it's fascinating. And I think the biggest benefit is just videotaping yourself and watching yourself back, which I do far too frequently.

Melissa Breau: Yeah. So if we, if we kind of think about all of this, how does, you know, really having a solid understanding of these things improve the final, you know, reliability of the behaviors we've trained with our dogs. Why is it so important that we kind of get this stuff? You know what I mean?

Karen Deeds: I mean, if you're competing, it's probably extremely important. But again, I look at it as even in behavior work.

Number one is I want clarity. I want the dog to know I know exactly what that means versus, well, I think, I'm guessing. And I think that ambiguity can actually lead to more anxiety and obviously frustration, which can turn into over arousal. Whether it's over arousal, what I call active over arousal, the dog that, you know, barks at you because they're frustrated because they're not sure what they should be doing, or the dog that goes, well, I have no clue, so I'm just going to quit.

I have both of those dogs. By the way, my border collie gets frustrated and he's like, and you know, in the past he probably would have just jumped up and bit me in the face, but he's past that now, thank God. The terrier would absolutely go, I have no clue. You are not making this clear enough. I don't understand what you want. Peace out. The Labrador is going to get frustrated.

Not angry frustrated like the border collie, but frustrated and frantic, kind of like, and maybe even start offering a bunch of other things because they're just not clear. And I think that clarity that we can give them, that when we say something, we mean something. And again, I mean, God, this goes all the way back to multiple marker cues or the location specific marker cues and how powerful they can be.

Because one, you know, way back when, gosh, I've been using location specific markers now since 2014. 17. I don't remember. It's been a long time. I'm old. And it was click for everything. And you know, I remember, in fact, it was Bob's second FEMA dog. He would click and throw a cookie and she's like, no, you want me to go away? She would actually shut down. We were actually at Clicker Expo one time and he was click, tossing a cookie, click, toss a cookie.

And she's going, that's not what I do. When I click, I come to your hand. To get a cookie when you click. And it took us a while to figure out what was going on. So he stopped clicking and started just saying like, get it. And she's like, oh, I could do that. It was like epiphany. I mean, this is long before LSMs, so. And now I look back at that go, well, that makes sense because she was a really sensitive.

Even though she was a tough broad and she did disaster work. She was a weird, anxious. She was just. Yeah, she was weird. But. So I think that clarity that it gives dogs can really help reduce their anxiety from my point of view or their frustration from a competitor's point of view. And I'm sure there's more as I, as I start to think about it. But. And I think it's really important for the handler too, to be very.

It helps them understand. Right, okay, well, that didn't work. What did I do wrong versus blaming the dog? That's another thing is, you know, your dog, you give your dog a cue and they go, yeah, I'm not so sure about that one. And then, you know, some people might go, well, you know that here, leash correction, you know, lift, push or whatever. And so if we are aware of that, we'll avoid that type of conflict, which might lead.

And granted, with the FDSA students, it typically doesn't lead to that, that kind of correction. But, you know, I remember hearing it for years and years and years. My dog knows that behavior. I'm like, does it really? Does it know it in all of these conflic contexts. And obviously there's no way you can teach a behavior. You can't train for a highly competitive location and environment at home.

So you have to build resilience some way else. And part of that is to add some of those weirdness things like, you know, standing on your head when you give a cue, or laying on the ground when you give a cue or turning your your back to them. So when give a cue or saying, and I've always wanted to try this, I might have to mess around with it, you know, sit and bending forward, what is my dog going to do?

Well, it probably is going to depend on how I taught down. If I used a lure, I'm going to guess, unless I proof the living daylights out of it, I'm going to guess that they're going to down even though I said situation because I lured it. And that's the picture of a lured down. So interesting. So if somebody's kind of listening to this and they're going well, that explains a few things.

And kind of shaking their head along, you know, what do we do once we figure this out? So we figure out that we've maybe set ourselves up, we have some competing cues going on, we're doing some overshadowing or, you know, we've kind of unintentionally set up a scenario. We've got some blocking happening. Like, how do we fix it? You know, both, you know, in the moment. Like, if we're in the middle of a training session or they're in the middle of a thing and we find a problem, can we fix it in the moment?

And then longer term, like, how do you set up a training program? And that's a. That's a great question. I mean, I remember, I think, was shade when she, I think was with ones. I think she ended up with like eight or nine down cues, like through every language I think she went through because she didn't like what she was getting. And maybe there had been some competing cues.

I don't need to speak for her. But it just. To me, that is one thing that we can change is to, okay, I made a mistake somewhere along the line. So instead of saying sit, I say squat. And I'm very aware that my hand is not in my bed bag or in my pocket and that I'm not nodding my head or I'm not, you know, moving my arms.

You know, I just, you know, that would be one thing. Or we go back all the way to getting the dog to offer the behavior again so that then we can interject the cue cleanly. And that's the key. Cleanly. And it's almost like, you know, you almost need a sound studio sometimes where there's nothing going on other than, you know, nothing. There's a. You're in a vacuum. And I know that annoys the heck out of a lot of people.

In other training concepts that, you know, we. We train in such a vacuum. And I, I think that's only fair to our dogs that we train in a situation. We teach not to train, but teach in a situation where the dog can get it, where they can be successful. And so it might have to go back to, okay, well, you know, worked in the living room. We're going to go back to the living room and then we're going to, you know, move two feet closer into the dining room and see if it still works.

And then maybe go back to the living room where it worked well and we change something there. So we're going to be changing contexts to Help. Proof. That's a good word. Or not to help the dog understand. Oh, it's the word that matters. Or the hand signal or the touch or the whatever the cue we want it to be. So the other way is just like I say is, is you could.

You could go back all the way to getting it offered again and putting on cue, or you can rename it and be cleaner with something like the context problem. Would you ever like. So let's say you taught us sit in the living room and you take it into the. The bedroom and your dog totally forgets it. Would you ever just retrain it to the same in the bedroom?

Okay. Yes. Yeah, I would. Might even go back all the way to. To offering again and. And do it. Do it that way. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a huge lure. Lure. Although I think shaping can be really hard on some dogs. They have to really like shaping. My. My. Terrier, she's like, that's the stupidest thing. I don't want to try that. But my border collie and my Labrador is like, what do you want?

I'll try anything. So he's an easy dog to shake. But again, if I'm lumping, then I'm probably going to get some bad stuff, too. So I think shaping alone can be really hard on a lot of dogs if you're not good at it because you're inconsistent with your. Your acclimation change. So. So again, I do a lot of luring, but I just want to get rid of that as fast as possible.

And I end up doing a cue transfer a lot. Yeah. And we'll talk about cue transfers because that is really how we end up fixing, fixing, blocking is with a good cue transfer. So I remember Cassidy when, you know, sit. Absolutely. I can sit at any distance with whatever. You know, you're sitting in a chair, you're laying on the ground. I can do all that, but you want me to do it when you do that?

She's like, yeah, I'm just not so sure. So I had to start with cue transfer. New cue, old cue. Right. So it was like, okay, this predicts situation. Yeah. And you have to make sure you're not converging those two. It's not sit. Right. This predicts sit. Yeah. So there's got to be just a little bit of a pause in there. Yeah. Anyway, so that's how you fix things.

And we'll be doing a lot of that. I have a feeling we're gonna basically, week one is going to be talking about overshadowing because that's where the concept starts, where there's competing cues. Because that's when the learning process. And like I say, I think that's probably the most common place that I see it. And then we're going to look at it from an environmental way, a body language way, a, you know, even I know dogs that love to sit on platforms, but they have no idea what to sit really.

It's. Yeah, it's a platform. Yeah. No, I can place on a platform, but I don't know what a place is just like without a bed or a mat or something. And that's a very big thing that I teach too, is I want my dogs when I say settle, that doesn't have to be on a mat because they have generalized to get off the mat. And it's a verbal or hand signal or lure, tactile, all of those.

Melissa Breau: So. All right, so we're talking about this because you're teaching the cue Wars. May the best signal win in the three week class term September at FDSA. And you also have, I guess a webinar coming up that's kind of related to all of this. So it really is. Tell me a little more about each of those things. Maybe who might want to sign up?

Karen Deeds: You bet. So I think the, the cue wars is just going to be number one.

I think it's going to be fun. And number two, two is I think it will really help people with mechanics. I'm a huge person on mechanics and I know a lot of people, especially with behavior, they're like, oh, mechanics doesn't matter. And you know what, I've been doing behavior almost exclusively for long enough to go, it does matter. And it just does because I think it can really reduce that frustration that I talked about earlier.

So I do think mechanics is a extremely important. And so with that, the webinar I'm doing is about systematic dog training. And again, this came from the fact that I would follow not so much here in Tennessee because I don't have a whole hell of a lot of business. But even when I go back to Texas, which I just came from, and it's a matter of, well, you know, I've been working with this other trainer and we started out on the street with her decoy dog.

And I'm like, did you do any foundation work first? Does your dog actually know what, I don't know a sit is or a scatter is or to offer eye contact? Well, now we were going to teach that out there and I'm like, yeah, that's not going to happen. So it's a very systematic approach. And again, the overshadowing and blocking kind of pairs into that or goes into that concept.

So that's the webinar. I think it's, it's the first Thursday of September. I can double check that date, I think so I guess the fourth, if I'm not mistaken. I will double check.

Melissa Breau: Cool. And you know, do you want to talk a little bit about maybe who should be interested in the two things while I'm pulling up that date?

Karen Deeds: So. Sure. So I think anybody who wants to make their mechanics better and, or, and that's a problem with mechanics.

People don't know they have a problem or that they need to improve themselves. You say, I'm going to teach a mechanics workshop. And they're like, yeah, I'm good. I'm like, yeah, you're really not. And so I think it's anybody who is struggling with clarity with their dog's verbal, physical, tactile cues or having their cues be salient in a novel environment, both of those things will apply. Both the workshop or the, the.

Excuse me, the class. Three week class and the, the webinar. The webinar is kind of wordy. I did throw in some videos, but. But it's a little wordy because it just is. It's a system, you know, and you just kind of have to take steps at a time. And it's not like we, we don't want to lump things together. So if, like we've already talked about, if you go to the bedroom and your dog was doing great in the kitchen and now they don't do it in the bedroom, you kind of have to go, okay, well, let's make it easier.

Let's, let's go back a step and see if we can't make something, do something easier and, and then ask for the more difficult new behavior. So there, that's kind of included in the systematic training, but it's also within the context of the three week class on overshadowing and blocking.

Karen Deeds: Yeah. Awesome. All right. It is September 3rd.

Melissa Breau: So I looked up the webinar date. September 3rd. Gotcha. I should probably record that. Getting close. Any final points or kind of takeaways that you want listeners to kind of walk away with after listening to this?

Karen Deeds: I mean, even though I'm a behavior person, I think that competitive people can get a lot from this as well. And even pet dog people could get something from this or even shelter people because, I mean, I see that one all the time. Well, he knew it in the shelter.

Like, well, did he. He knew it in the green room that you train in every day, but he didn't know it, you know, when, when somebody else came in or they were sitting down or whatever. So I think it's really important that. And even just behavior in general, they act one way that very differently than when they get to a different context. Right. I mean, we, we know that happens.

I mean, you know, acclimation and that kind of thing happens all the time is like, well, my. It works at home. My dog is flaw. Like, okay, so what changed? Well, the context changed and so their emotions change. And that's a big deal to take into consideration too, is their emotions. And as a behavior person, and even, even more so, as most Fenzi instructors will know, that emotions are a big part of.

Of why what we do. Yeah. That is that it's not like you will do it or else. I just, I just don't see that working well for many dogs I deal with. I could. Oh my God, I could take Stoney the Labrador and make him do anything and he'd still be fat, dumb and happy. Fair enough. Well, thank you. But he's not normal. No, certainly not 100 typical.

Melissa Breau: But you know, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, Karen. This is great. Great. Thanks, Melissa. Appreciate it. Absolutely. And thanks to all of our listeners and our viewers for tuning in. We'll be back next week, this time with panelists from the upcoming conference on living your life with multiple dogs. So The Multi-Dog Life, if you haven't already, that's me too. Is it you? Well, yes, if you haven't already, subscribe to the podcast either on itunes, the podcast app of your choice, or over on YouTube to be sure you never miss an episode.

Today's show is brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy. Special thanks to niece Fenzi for supporting this podcast. Music provided royalty free by Benson.com the track featured here is called Buddy. Audio and video editing provided by Chris Ling. 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!