This is my wrap up of the Jane Killion seminar - When Pigs Fly that we attended in February. I can't do as through a job as Crystal over at Reactive Champion - check out her blog post here and here
One of the reasons I don't think I am able to give a very objective review of the seminar (unlike Crystal's very excellent posts): I was experiencing it with Tibby. I wrote about our week-end here, here and here. It was stressful for both of us and I was very sleep deprived.
I think Tibby did an amazing job. Considering the whole stressful crating situation. She worked for me almost the entire time. A few times she went to check out the crowd, but she could have shut down or refused to eat treats or done any thing she wanted to do! But she stuck with me.
It was a big crowd of people. I don't get nervous in front of large groups, so that was good :) Make me talk to one or two people though and I have trouble! I guess Tibby doesn't get stage fright either.
Heeling with me.
Jane showing me how to heel Tibby past a difficult spot - scary people. Although she didn't mind going to check them out on her own!
This was one of the times that Tibby went to check out the crowd. It could have been a lot worse. I was happy every time she came back to me!
These people are getting closer and closer.
Look at Tibby's awesome recall here!
So here are a few notes that I thought were interesting:
Attention is like respect. If you have to ask for it, you've already lost it. If your dog can't perform a trained behavior in every distracting situation - then your dog doesn't know the behavior.
90% of problems with clicker training/training behavior are because the person is clicking too late.
Pleasure that does not strengthen behavior is indulgence. Punishers that do not decrease behavior are abuse.
Reinforces fail, because 1-not reinforcing in that context and 2-emotional interference (stress)
The seeking action of free shaping a behavior activates a vigorous release of dopamine in the dog's brain - like doggie crack!
The customer (dog) is always right - What does your dog want? That is the reinforcer.
Binary training - Either a 1 or zero. Reward or no reward. She doesn't use no reward markers.
To phase food out of training she uses a method called Thinning the Ratio. It's the same method used by casinos - random pattern of reward.
There isn't any special quality that makes someone a better trainer - they are just mechanically better and it is something that can be learned.
Difficult dogs are your trainer and they make you a better teacher.
Attention is 2 steps - Teach the concept and work the envelope. The envelope is the edge of where you can get the dog to perform the behavior without going over threshold/distracted.
Distractions are cues for attention.
Any one that knows Tibby, knows that this next part was Amazing! I mean last summer I sat with her in the car for 2 hours at an agility trial. We tried to get out of the car for 2 hours, but she was so over the top about the other dogs that being in the car far away from every one else was as close as we could get with out Tibby having a whining, screaming, lunging, pulling on the leash fit. Not a focused, attention giving dog like she was here
The other dog actually touched her tail. And she stayed focused on me.
So it was a great seminar. It was a learning seminar. Not all the things we learned were in the seminar. I learned just how much I can trust Tibby. How far she has gone and how far she can go.
Here is the video from our working spots. I know no one is going to want to watch an almost 46 min. video! But if you do here it is!
