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TRAINING: ON/OFF SWITCH WITH THE PREMACK PRINCIPLE

Your All Done cue is permission to go be a dog. Thinking in Premack terms, if there is something that your dog already wants to do in the environment, your All Done cue is permission to go do that. In other words, you can use All Done to reinforce behavior. Playing with a food puzzle or eating treats off the ground is a high probability behavior, so those of you who have carefully timed your All Done to when your dog is paying attention to you have been applying the Premack principle.

For your On/Off Switch training this week, work around a moderate distraction. It should be

• Something your dog can go freely engage with (like another person, squirrel in a tree, etc.)
• Distracting/valuable enough to your dog so that your dog will choose to do that instead of stick around with you once you’ve said All Done
• Not so distracting that your dog won’t work with you for a bit

Go through this sequence:

Have 5 treats available. Value should be enough to keep the dog with you but not overpowering the activity so much that he won’t go to it when released. Have your dog work on something that involves focus with you. You can do the same attention activity that we’ve been doing or you can do something like a trick. For the last correct behavior, release him using All Done. If he just stares at you, help him understand that he can now go do the activity by walking in that direction.

Let him enjoy the distraction for several minutes. Repeat the above exercise with fewer treats each time: 4, 3, 2, 1, and then 0. A true use of Premack’s principle is to only have access to the activity as a reinforcer (so not the treats), but doing it this way allows you to get repetitions in more rapidly. If your dog is too excited to eat, work farther away from the distraction. If that’s not possible, keep him from getting to the distraction (fence, harness/leash, etc.) and then ask for a simple behavior and release/reinforce with All Done, granting access to the distraction.

TRAINING: SPEED TRAINING FOR LOOSE LEASH WALKING

One of the needs (or wants) that our four-legged friends have is to simply just walk faster. Humans are terribly slow. If you have walked off leash with your dog, then you know what her normal pattern of walking looks like. Dogs run, walk a bit, run, stop a bit, walk, and run more. If we recall Premack’s principle from above, being able to walk at the pace that your dog wants to walk is a big reinforcer.

So keeping in mind that your dog may also want to slow down or stop, let’s assume he wants to go more quickly than you on average.

This is meant for walking along a sidewalk or trail, not your meandering BAT walks in a field. The closer your dog gets to heel position, the faster you go. If you can run or jog with your dog when she is right beside you, so much the better. When she starts pulling ahead of you, slow down. If you’re close to losing your braking distance, use a Slide and Slow Stop so that she doesn’t suddenly come to a stop. If she just pulls on ahead, call her name or otherwise get her attention and then change direction. Let out some line as you go so that you don’t pull her.

So if your max speed is 100%, then when she’s in heel, you are at 100%. If she’s half of the leash length ahead of you, you are at 50%. If she stops, you are at 0% and if she starts pulling, you switch to -10% or so (going away from her), then when she comes along, that’s your new “forward” and you do the same as above.

If she stops to sniff or appears to want to walk more slowly, then by all means, let that happen.

Warning: I lost a good amount of weight doing this with Peanut, since it turned out that he was really great at heeling on hills when he was a teenager. You may also accidentally get into shape using this technique.

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