Lorrie [00:00:07]:
Welcome to the Maximum Fun Agility Podcast. I'm Lorrie Reynolds, owner of Maximum Fun Dog Sports. We help your agility team build your relationship, communication, confidence and fun in training so that you can joyfully succeed on any course. In this episode, we'll discuss why it's important to reward not just the difficult things, but the simple behaviors and obstacles as well. A friend came up to me during some downtime at a trial and asked about a training issue she was having with her young dog. If there was a discrimination in the training sequence, he always, always chose the contact obstacle. It was also happening at trials, causing her to lose out on qualifying runs. She tried moving the equipment so the tunnel was on the other side, moving the tunnel out away from the contact, changing to a lighter colored tunnel, and even putting a jump wing in front of the A frame.
Lorrie [00:01:06]:
But that just made her dog go around the wing to get on the equipment. Her dog wasn't afraid of tunnels and hadn't had any bad experiences with tunnels. If they were in any other sequence that wasn't a discrimination, he would go through them without any issues. A person in my online trick training group messaged me with a similar problem. Her dog had apparently forgotten how to sit on cue. When she asked him to sit, he sat pretty, waved, or did his cover trick with his paw over his eye instead of just sitting. The alternate behaviors were random and didn't appear to be in response to a cue. She'd even recorded herself and couldn't see what she was doing differently.
Lorrie [00:01:51]:
Neither of them could figure out why their dogs wouldn't do this simple behavior that had previously not been an issue. I asked both of them the same question. When is the last time you rewarded just the tunnel or just the sit? Not surprisingly, I got the same answer from both of them. Well, he knows how to do it and it's easy. Neither of them could tell me when they had rewarded the tunnel or the sit last. Both thought the behavior was so easy or fun for the dog that it didn't really require a reward. Then I asked when they had rewarded a contact obstacle or one of the more difficult tricks the dog was doing instead of sitting. They both said that it was during the last week while they were training.
Lorrie [00:02:39]:
Dogs do what works to get them a reward. If they're always rewarded for the contact or complex trick and rarely rewarded for the tunnel or a sit, they are going to start defaulting to the behavior that gets the reward. A bit of recency bias comes into play as well. The thing that was rewarded most recently is often what the dog will try first. During the next training session, I asked them both to focus on heavily rewarding the fun or easy thing for a week and let me know what happened. It worked! When my agility friend tried some discriminations again, her dog paid attention to her cues and took the correct obstacle. The trick person's dog remembered how to sit when cued and didn't default to a more complex behavior.
Lorrie [00:03:28]:
Too often, we only reward the dog for the things that are challenging the perfect contact performance, a confident teeter, a beautiful sit, pretty or fast and flowing weave poles. Remember that jumps and tunnels make up a significant portion of agility courses. Don't forget to intermittently reward the fun or easy behaviors or the dog will default to the behavior that pays better. Maintain the value of jumps, tunnels, sits or downs by remembering to reward them regularly. This week, think about the simple behaviors you may not have rewarded lately and make a conscious effort to reward your dog for doing them. You made it through another episode of the Maximum Fun Agility Podcast. Come see how we can help you and join our community at www.maximumfundogs.com. Happy training!
