Cooperation Instead of Compliance - A Change for the Better
"Just do it" might be a good slogan for a sports apparel company but it makes a lousy approach to training. Working together beats "giving orders" any day!
While out at a local park with my dogs, my attention was caught by a woman loudly saying “FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE JUST SIT!” As a dog person, you can’t help but turn and look. A woman was tugging repeatedly on the leash while her Labrador Retriever was excitedly trying to move toward an approaching dog. It was obvious that this woman and her dog were meeting a friend and their dog for a walk together. As her friend approached, the woman continued to yank on the dog’s leash and insist that the dog sit each time he wiggled with anticipation or tried to get up.
As I walked by, I overheard the exasperated Lab owner tell her friend, “I just want him to be polite when we’re out.” That’s a phrase I hear a lot from dog owners – “I just want [fill in desired behaviour].” We want a lot of things from our dogs. The woman at the park just wanted her dog to be polite which obviously meant that her dog should sit quietly at her side in public. Puppy owners just want their young dogs not to jump up on people. Dog sports people just want their dogs to focus on them and attend to the cues in highly distracting environments. On and on it goes.
It seems that when humans say that they “want a dog” in their lives, there is a lot of “wanting” that comes with that. Many times dog owners don’t even know that they want something from their dogs until they don’t see it or see their dog doing something that they don’t like. A busy working woman may want her dog to go out and do his business quickly each morning before she heads off to work. A family with young children may want their dog to be a calm and patient playmate for the children. We ask a lot of our dogs.
Classic compliance
The fact is, we all have lives. When we decide to bring a dog into that life, the dog has no idea how anything works. We will need to show this dog how life with us works or we may need to adjust our lifestyle to accommodate them. It’s likely that most of us will do some of both. There will be some training to help the dog fit in and some changes in our routine to deal with doggy needs. The one thing that is certain is that each household will have its own priorities for how life with the dog will work. There is no standard way to do this.
Many years ago when my wife and I got our first dogs, we were encouraged to get them off to “obedience class” as soon as possible. We were given the advice that we should teach our dog basic “manners.” Back then, we just signed up for the classes offered by the local dog club and assumed that would be enough. It was a lot of repetition of the same few behaviours – Sit, Down, Heel, Stay. The instruction was focused on how to get our dog to do these behaviours when we said so, no matter what. We were told how important it was that our dogs knew we were in charge and that they did what we told them when we told them without hesitation.
There was a lot of leash yanking. There was a lot of “NO!” There was a lot of getting my dog to do what we wanted. Looking back on it now, there was not a lot of instruction on how to watch the dog to see how they were coping, how they were responding to all of this enforced compliance.
Unless a dog acted out in some extreme way, we were just told to work through the disobedient behaviour. “Don’t let them get away with not doing what you asked!” was a common instruction from our trainers. We were to give our dog a command and it was important that we got it from them. That same mentality followed us home from class. We wanted to be able to take toys or food away from our dogs on a whim. We wanted them to “be polite” when out on walks. We wanted them to behave the way we wanted them to behave.
Wants and Needs
But then we changed the way we approached training our dogs. One of the most important things we had to do was to take a hard look at why we wanted to train our dogs in the first place. There were the simple answers I mentioned above like managing life with our dogs. But it really came down to a deeper consideration about what I wanted from my dogs versus what I needed from them. Back in the day, I was taught that my dog was supposed to sit when I said “Sit!” Why? Because I said so; because that’s what I wanted her to do. When we learned about behavioural science and modern training methods, we started to re-examine how we worked with our dogs.
I had to consider why I wanted my dog to sit in various situations. There many different answers, some made sense and some just didn’t. In some cases, I just needed her to wait a moment while I did something else. In other cases it was about keeping her safe from strange people or dogs. But then sometimes my dog was told to SIT as a punishment - they had messed up and now they could just sit still until they understood that they did wrong.
The “sit” behaviour had become an all-purpose tool for us. It was an easy way to keep my dog in one place. What I needed in many cases was for my dog to wait in place for a moment. But when I asked for a “sit”, it became important that my dog did the behaviour correctly and immediately. It was no longer about my dog waiting, it was about whether or not they were obeying my command.
That realization was an important one. Once I started to see things from this perspective, it became clear to me that many times I didn’t need my dog to do a particular behaviour. What I thought I wanted was for her to SIT but what I actually needed was for her to cooperate with me. What I wanted and what I needed were very different things. Understanding this changed my focus away from compliance and onto cooperation.
Getting what I want
Before I changed my perspective, I needed my dog to do a behaviour because I wanted her to do that behaviour. It was just that simple. Those obedience and manners classes all those years ago had impressed on me the importance of getting what I wanted. “Don’t let your dog disobey, that’s a recipe for disaster.” Modern reward-based training showed me a very different way to approach training my dogs.
We now train all of our young pups using Mark & Reward training. It’s an approach to training that uses the dogs desire for rewards to encourage the behaviours we would like from them. An important aspect of this training is that it is important to watch the dog as you train. That careful observation served two purposes. First, it was important to see the behaviour I was trying to train in order to mark it and reward my dog. But secondly, it was important to watch my dog for signs of frustration, confusion, or fatigue.
Early on, as I was just learning to use Mark & Reward training, my old training style came into conflict with this new training style. I was training my young puppy and she seemed to have learned the behaviour we were working on. I was excited by our success and I asked her for the behaviour once, twice, and even a third time. She did it brilliantly each time and I rewarded her each time.
But when I wanted to see her do it a fourth time and she paused and did the behaviour again but much more slowly this time. That was odd but I rewarded her anyway. I wanted to see her do it one more time. But when I asked her to do the same behaviour a fifth time, she looked up at me for a moment and then wandered out of the room. What I wanted was clearly not what my puppy wanted in that moment. I was wise enough not to chase her down and make her do it my way.
What the dog wants
I realized that training a dog is not like programming a machine. We work with thinking animals that have their own thoughts, ideas, and emotions. Modern training and behavioural science has shown that the best training takes the animal’s perspective into account. It’s not all about getting my dog to do what I want her to do just because I said so. A dog will be more eager to learn and work if their needs and wants are taken into account. That idea opened up a whole new set of possibilities for me and my dogs. My dogs want lots of things and any of them could be used as rewards!
Over the years we have used all kinds of things as rewards for our dogs’ behaviours. Playing tug, chasing balls, being allowed to run and play with other dogs have all been great rewards for our dogs. We have used them to strengthen behaviours and even to teach new ones.
There are also things my dogs don’t like. Some of them don’t like to be cuddled. Some don’t like to be picked up. Most of them don’t like to do the same thing over and over because they get bored. And none of them like being forced to do something. Knowing those things helped our training too. If I notice that my dog is getting bored or is feeling pressured to do something, I can just change what I was doing. Sometimes giving my dog a break or doing something else can also be a reward.
What was I thinking
Looking back on it now, I don’t know why I got so focused on that “because I said so” mentality. If my dog is reluctant to do a behaviour I know we have trained, there is probably a good reason. I have found that it is in my best interest in those moments to consider what I need rather than insisting on getting her to do some behaviour I asked for. I can ask for a different behaviour, I can change the reward, or I can most move on to something else and make a mental note to do some additional training.
Is it important that I get what I want from my dog? Sure. But I have changed how I think about that. I want her to be a happy and enthusiastic partner with me. It turns out that the best way to do that is to give her what she wants some of the time. It certainly makes her more willing to cooperate with me.
I think Mick Jagger said it best when he said, “You can’t always get what you want. But if you try sometime, you just might find you get what you need.”