Troubleshooting Training Issues

There are a variety of places to get stuck during training and each dog will provide its own unique challenges. It could be that you are stuck getting started with a behavior, struggling to increase the difficulty of a behavior, or having difficulties maintaining your dog’s attention.

Having trouble getting started with a behavior:

• Have you built engagement, a reinforcement history, or done any cooperative activities?

  • Not all dogs want to "work" with us by default

    • Some may not even have every taken food from someone

  • Practice giving your dog food/treats in various ways: handed, tossed to catch, tossed to chase, scattered, hidden, lured, slowly, quickly -> show your dog how many ways they can have fun getting food from you

  • Reward for proximity - being and staying near us for long enough to do some work is skill 1 for any (most) training plan

  • Play with your dog. Relationships are built on play and the give and take that occurs during play is a great way to establish a shared language

• Is your dog motivated?

  • Transition to a training area with less distractions

  • Try to find a higher value item to get your dog’s focus

  • Provide your dog some physical exercise to help it reach a calmer state before training

• Is your communication clear and consistent?

  • Assess your body position. Can the dog clearly see what you are communicating? Ideally, you’ll be positioned in front of your dog and utilizing a consistent movement.

  • Assess your delivery method. Are you consistently using only 1 word/phrase or signal for each unique behavior?

  • Cues should ideally be given once (or twice) and in the following order: Verbal, Hand Signal, Lure.

    
    

Having trouble increasing the difficulty (dog consistently struggles to achieve the target behavior):

• Determine if the behavior needs to be broken down into smaller steps.

  • For some dogs rolling over isn’t a natural or comfortable movement so we can’t jump straight to training the full behavior. We first train down, then train them to lie on their side, then to shift towards their back, then to lie on their back, then to roll over, and finally back into a down or seated position.

  • Transitioning to a 10 second stay if your dog was successful at 5 seconds but failed at 15 seconds

• Determine if too many variables have changed - Distractions, Duration, Distance

  • Ideally, we only change one of these variables at a time when we are teaching a new behavior

  • It’s easy to increase the difficulty to fast by changing multiple variables

    
    

Having trouble maintaining your dog’s attention:

• Take stock of your environment and find ways to limit distractions or increase the value of the reward.

  • Common distractions can include toys, people, dogs, ambient noises (TV, birds, appliances) or smells

• Has the training session gone too long?

  • Dogs learn best by repeating short training sessions throughout the day

  • When they get tired it's much harder to focus so takes breaks or play in between reps

  • Having to stay focus for long periods of time is hard and generally the longer the task the less fun that task is. Recognize that if we ask for long periods of focus it can feel like a punishment and reduce the dog's motivation to train

• Does the dog’s energy level match the behavior?

  • Active exercises should be done first with static exercises performed later in the session.

    • Practicing stationing activities after a 5 hour nap is like having to take an 8 hour test after being stuck inside for 3 days.