This week, one of my clients asked me, “Do I have to give my dog treats all the time?” The answer he wanted to hear was “no.” So I told him. “No, you don’t. But once your dog learns a behavior, and you never give him another treat for responding to your cue, then you’ll extinguish the behavior.” That’s how professional dog trainers stop dogs from responding. They never pay them for their work. If we want to extinguish a behavior that’s unwanted, this is a very good method.
That’s the same way a pain trainer would extinguish a behavior. With their punitive training methods, when a dog doesn’t listen to a cue, they punish. So for example, they employ a leash jerk if the dog doesn’t sit on cue. If the trainer never leash jerks again when the dog doesn’t sit on cue, then the dog will eventually think, “Nah, I’m not sitting.”
But back to the method Love Wags A Tail Dog Training uses – reward-based training. When teaching a behavior, we reward the dog every single time. Once the dog is performing the behavior under tried circumstances at least 80% of the time, including under highly distracting environments, we can reward the dog periodically. We then reward often enough that the dog is expectant, and gets his reinforcement expectations met enough of the time that responding to the cue makes it worth his while. He gambles because he might earn a treat! Put someone in front of a slot machine with a bucket of quarters and watch them gamble on a chance that they’ll win a jackpot each time they pull the slot machine arm. That’s the same methodology that dogs abide by in reward-based training.
All of us behave because we are motivated to do so. Without motivation, we wouldn’t offer behaviors at all. Dogs are no different, and if you’d like your dog to learn to behave via a training method that uses the intelligence of the dog along with our fully humane and human intelligence, contact Love Wags A Tail Dog Training to get started training your dog in Broward county, south Florida.
By Helen Verte
Certificate in Training and Counselling (CTC)
Certified Pet Dog Trainer – Knowledge Assessed (CPDT-KA)
Certified Trick Dog Instructor (CTDI)
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