Training Is Not Just About Results
"Well it's good enough." That phrase sends shivers down my spine when dog owners say it. Teaching a dog goes beyond the behaviour we want to see right now. We also shape our relationship with them.
Most of us are familiar with the saying, “The ends justify the means.” When I hear this phrase, it is usually being used in a derogatory fashion. A kind of scolding that someone is doing something unethical or cruel and justifying their actions by saying “But see? The end results were good for everyone.” The saying is attributed to 15th century philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli and his political book “The Prince.” Interestingly that common saying is more myth than fact. What Machiavelli actually says is “For although the act condemns the doer, the end may justify him…” In fact, Machiavelli devotes considerable writing to exploring that the “means” do matter and that they should be chosen carefully. He also considers that the “ends” do not always provide adequate justification no matter how beneficial the outcome.
It’s easy to see the parallels of this kind of thinking when it comes to dog training. “As long as my dog sits when I give the command, does it matter how I trained it?” The ends justify the means. To me, that illustrates the unfairly simple interpretation of Machiavelli’s original idea compared to his detailed exploration in his book “The Prince.” In particular, I think this concept of what “the ends” (or the goals) are deserves much more discussion. The results of what I do with my dog training might look very different depending on what aspect of living with my dog I’m talking about.
Specifics, Bob
Let me tell you about a conversation I remember having while working with a student at an agility class. She was pushing on her dog’s rear end and yelling “SIT!” very close to the dog’s face. I suggested to this woman that there might be a better way to get her dog to sit. The rest of that conversation went something like this:
Me: So what is it you are trying to do here?
Student: I just want him (the dog) to sit.
Me: Where do you want him to sit?
Student: What?
Me: Where is it exactly that you want him to sit? In front of you? Off to the side? Where ever he is when you say sit?
Student: I want him to sit at the start line.
Me: How does your dog know where the start line is?
Student: Well, I guess I have to show him.
Me: How long do you want him to stay sitting?
Student: What?
Me: I mean, do you expect your dog to continue sitting even if you walk away?
Student: Yes. He should remain sitting.
Me: Until when?
Student: Until I say it’s ok to get up.
Me: Do you want your dog to be happy about sitting?
Student: What?
Me: Do you want your dog to feel good about sitting because it will lead to something good or do you ask him to sit as a punishment?
Student: Oh. I never thought about that.
It went from there but you get the idea.
That’s often how it goes. The goals are very simple. We just want the dog to do the thing we ask. The difficulty is that we are not as specific about what we want as we could be. If this woman were training for competition obedience we could also have also asked whether or not it was ok for the dog to sit straight or rolled onto one hip, where she wanted the dog to be looking, and where the dog should be positioned in relation to her. When it comes to the behaviours we teach our dogs, it can be very easy to take a lot of the specifics for granted.
If we are not clear about the specifics of what we are trying to teach our dogs, then the training isn’t really clear. Most trainers will decide to “fix it as we go.” The dog is taught basics of a behaviour and when we find that we need some extra specifics for that behaviour, well, you improvise something to try to add the new bits later. In my experience, this process of “fixing behaviours” can create its own problems over time.
The long and the short view
Many years ago I was learning how to do Mark and Reward training with my dog, Tiramisu. She was an eager learner and learned very quickly with a clicker and some treats. By the time she was 6 months old, I had taught her nearly 20 different tricks and behaviours and she was a very eager and enthusiastic performer. But then I wanted to start working on teaching her to “Stay” in a sitting position as I prepared her for working in Agility. Suddenly all of that enthusiasm I had built by teaching her all of her other behaviours actually became a disadvantage when trying to teach a “Stay.”
My short term goal for each behaviour was to get a precise set of movements and have them performed as speedily as possible. The teaching process that I used had inadvertently taught her something else – “When in doubt, do SOMETHING…it might get a reward.” So when it came time to teach “Stay”, there was an unforeseen problem – if I paused to wait for her to “Stay”, my dog would assume that she should try and DO SOMETHING to get a reward. We eventually got through teaching Tiramisu to “Stay” but I certainly made the job harder for myself with the training I had done when she was young.
The truth of it is that I wasn’t smart enough to recognize that there was more learning happening with my young dog than just the individual behaviours I was teaching. There was a whole set of specifics relating to our day to day interactions that I wasn’t considering when creating my training plans. So while I certainly achieved my end goals for the individual behaviours (I was quite proud of them, in fact), I had neglected some longer term goals that I hadn’t even considered.
Putting the cart before the horse
Most dog training starts out with good intentions. We decide what we want the end results to look like, we choose a training method that makes sense to us, and we start working with the dog. Very often, the process of training itself will bring up issues and specifics that we hadn’t considered but that need to be addressed. In those cases, it is common to improvise; to just make up something on the spot to address this new thing that we want without changing the training session. This is where just trying to get the results we want can get us into trouble.
There is a term in aviation – “Get-There-Itis.” It describes when pilots become so determined to reach a destination that they will take inadvisable risks in bad weather because they think they can “get there in time ahead of the storm.” I think dog trainers can fall victim to a form of this behaviour. We begin training a something with our dog and we put that behaviour into practice only to find that we need more or less of something. Rather than stepping back and thinking about how we want to teach the behaviour to include the all the new criteria, we just push ahead with something that will “fix” the immediate problem we’re having. We just want to get that behaviour. It’s a kind of “Get-the-behaviour-itis.”
“Fixing” behaviour as we go along can create something I call “Behavioural Whack-a-Mole.” If I improvise a training solution to “fix” a problem with a behaviour, I might notice a week or so later that one or two new problems have come up. So I improvise more “fixes” to get rid of those new problems and get the behaviour right. And then I get the same result – more new unexpected problems from the previous “fixes”. The difficulty here is a combination of the time it takes for behaviour effects to develop and a certain amount of unwillingness to see the problems because we’re just trying to get the results as quickly as possible. You know, “Get-the-behaviour-itis.” By the time I’m forced step back and see the whole picture, I have to untangle a string of “fixes” to get the training back on track. Fortunately, dogs are forgiving enough that we can just start the training again from scratch. Frequently these issues are referred to as a “Poisoned Cue” and the dog learns all over again with a different cue.
The best solution is to avoid the problem
I think we need to be very clear in defining our training goals, the “ends” so to speak. Only after we are clear on our criteria should we look for the best means to achieve our goals. I learned a hard lesson with my own dogs about encouraging them to offer me behaviours quickly in hopes of earning a treat. It forced me to adapt my training style to accommodate the impatience it created and it prevented me from being able to teach some behaviours because I simply couldn’t come up with a way to teach it without frustrating my dog.
We have two young dogs now. We’ve been working with them for about a few years. This time I started with some larger goals for my training instead of just focusing on individual behaviours. I wanted patient learners. That meant that I needed to adjust my success and reward rate to accommodate my dogs’ frustration threshold. I wanted to keep them optimistic while still encouraging them to try to learn new things.
I wanted a resilient learners. I know I am going to make mistakes in my training and so I wanted dogs who will not react negatively if we try different approaches or new things. That meant that I needed to teach my dogs that variety and novelty were good things and not scary.
I had to change my perspective. Focusing on short term goals may have gotten me some success but it also came at a cost. Taking the time to work out longer term goals for my life with my dog meant more planning and a more careful approach to when and how I chose to train my dog. At least in my case, I did not use the “end results” of my training to justify the “means” or methods I used. Instead, my clearly laid out goals pointed squarely to the best ways to achieve those goals.
The lesson for me is that the immediate gratification of “getting my dog to sit” (or whatever the trick is) will fade very quickly if the training I used to get there creates unintended behaviour problems. It took a while for me to change my perspective but my training goals with my dogs are very different today than they were 10 or 15 years ago. That change in perspective seems to have made a world of difference for me and my dogs.
Until next time, have fun with your dogs!