It’s market day again! Chai and I went for her second visit:
All treats in the video above are for giving in to leash pressure or responding to an informal puppy recall away from tempting market distractions that would either disturb other people or require me to buy something (you eat it you buy it – and I do not want chicharrones or chicken intestines, thank you very much!). My one criterion for the treat delivery is 4 feet on the floor. Sometimes, I only get to the point after she has jumped up – sometimes, I am fast enough to meet her before the front paws have left the ground.
I love what a difference I see in her confidence in this (2nd!) market visit compared to Chai’s first visit a week ago! Her tail is up the entire time, and she is VERY curious about the environment this time! She even gets fed by a market visitor. The golden strategy: keep putting treats into their hands so they don’t get a chance to touch the dog and then move on as soon as they have fed the last treat.
The reason I’m not feeding any voluntary check-ins yet is that she freely offers them and she’s a Border Collie. I’ll get those check-ins for free and want to keep her focus on the environment a little longer before I start feeding check-ins and focus.
The second project of the day: basketball sounds. The sound that makes Chai uncomfortable is the ball hitting the metal plate. I brought a hard rubber ball to replicate the sound today. Since I didn’t bring a tripod and can’t handle a long line, ball and camera at the same time, I briefly tied Chai to a post. While her tail is down (my interpretation: she’s hot and bored after our exciting market loop), she doesn’t flinch let alone retreat from the sound, which she is free to do. I say we are over our basketball feelings!
By the way – the person in the market video isn’t the only one who fed Chai a couple treats today. I’ve been working our strategy (make contact without food and then feed if Chai seems interested) aggressively convincingly and charmingly with strangers and am happy to report that she got fed by 5 different people today – one of whom, our friend below, we’ve already chatted with the other day:
The rest of the day was spent working hard at home (Chai has discovered chairs and she likes them):
Tuesdays are market days at Diagonal San Antonio! We used this opportunity to walk through as the vendors were just setting up shop in the morning.
A week later, the Tuesday after, we went back to this same market. You’ll see the remarkable difference in Chai’s confidence!
We also did – as we do most days – a little (or a lot of) shaping, drove a slightly longer (about 2 minutes while yesterday was about 1 minute) loop on an empty stomach (success! No throwing up or pooping!), spent some time in the car crate, and hung out at home with Game.
Today Chai went to Parque las Américas and saw lots of people and dogs, heard new sounds, walked on different park surfaces and smelled new smells. Before we got there, we had this little encounter:
We then walked all the way to the park on our own four paws and saw and met, among others:
A person who followed my instructions about how to invite Chai to approach: not from above, but from below, being still and letting the dog take the first steps. I decided, after seeing Chai shy away from hands reaching for her a little more than I’d like to in the last two days, that I will make a point of having her meet people “the right way” every day. There is, of course, no one right way – you’ll have to look at the dog in front of you to find out what works for them. In Chai’s case, I opted for asking people to stand still and hold out their flat hand, palm facing up. If and only if Chai approaches, sniffs the hand and looks comfortable, I will then give the person a few pieces of kibble to hold in their other hand and feed them, one after the other, from their flat hand without touching Chai and holding the hand low enough so all four paws stay on the floor.
I would NOT start with food without having Chai opt in and approach voluntarily first, and if she was shyer than she is, I would not use food here at all. Food can backfire extremely easily if used as a lure to get an uncomfortable dog closer to a stimulus they are unsure about: they’ll take the treat and then realize they are WAY TOO CLOSE! With Chai’s level of people curiosity, it is really just the head reaching she has feelings about. And because she is cute, people will reach for her head. I am countering these experiences by means of providing positive ones in the way I described above. My instructions are simple and easy to follow, and they work well for Chai. In the case of my very first helper (random stranger from Costa Rica I met in the street), we chatted long enough that they actually ended up making friends with Chai and being able to scratch her chin:
We also saw a bakery bike!
… and several dogs …
We met another person who also ended up touching Chai on the side of her head – not something I encouraged, but she was okay.
We walked past an outdoors assembly of some kind and saw a person on a skateboard with a dog, a kid in a stroller and more dogs:
And the Chai and I rested in a (comparatively) quiet corner of the park and she posed serenely for a bit before we made our way back home.
How much is too much?
… you may be wondering. Didn’t Chrissi just get this puppy, who had been confined to her house and yard and a crate from 8 weeks to 3.5 months of age, literally three days ago?
Indeed, I did. And indeed, this would be too much for MANY Border Collie puppies with this (lack of) experience. It would have been too much for Hadley right after T got him and it would have been too much for Mick (and would still be too much for Mick today. Mick is a farm dog who wants exactly three things in life: sheep, a person to work sheep with, and zero other people). Hadley today, as an adult, would likely be okay in this environment – he’d just pull all over the place trying to sniff things, I suspect.
Is it too much for Chai? Am I flooding the poor puppy? No – at least I wouldn’t say that I am. But in order for this term to have any meaning at all, I need to first define it. “Flooding” is one of these buzzwords everyone uses slightly differently.
I just looked at the glossary of my 4 go-to behavior books, and it isn’t in any of them. That surprises me – but maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe flooding is a term trainers borrowed from human psychology, or maybe it is simply a layperson’s word. Next stop: Google.
Bingo! I got lucky at the APA Dictionary of Psychology, which sounds like a decent source. Plus it matches my own definition of the term and the way I’ve been using it, which is reinforcing.
So – no, I have in fact not flooded Chai. She is not an anxious dog – just a curious one who lacks experience. I have not exposed her to a maximum-anxiety-producing situation or stimulus. (I would have on day 2 when I was just trying to get a feel for where we were in terms of exploratory behavior, fearfulness and resilience. Based on what I saw on day 2, I made choices for day 3, and based on what I saw on days 2 and 3, I made choices for day 4.
Because Chai is not an anxious puppy and her sensitive socialization window is rapidly closing, I want a lot of exposure to what is going to be normal in her world if she becomes a Mexico City dog. If she doesn’t become a Mexico City dog but finds a home somewhere else, all the experiences she is currently having won’t hurt either. For example if she goes on to be a sports dog, these experiences might help her learn how to focus on what matters (“gate”) in busy trial environments.
The reason I ran out of both high-value treats AND kibble is that I did not expect to go more than 2 or, at the most, 3 sessions. But such is life! I learned:
As long as the toy is out, Game will keep going.
Game is indeed able to choose the toy over the cat after running down the staircase several times (her motivational state is likely different at that point due to being hot and tired because neither of us is used to this climate).
Game can take kibble within this staircase marker game – at least starting at the 4th round.
Once in the bedroom after the 7th scatter (no sight contact to cats or toys), Game is able to relax right away.
Based on this, I will adjust in the following way:
Remove the toy during the scatter (leaving it on the floor until then will give Game the option to grab it if she needs to earlier on).
Only go down the staircase once.
Move swiftly to the bedroom after the scatter and take a break – no matter whether there are cats or not.
Making it measurable
I’m going to do a session like this, and then decide how to best measure our progress. I also realize this is not necessarily going to be easy to measure because there are different cats, and the distance at which they appear often differs, too. Sometimes they move, and sometimes they are stationary. Sometimes there is only one at a time – and sometimes there is more than one. Sometimes, they stare at us (we are in a display window at this AirBnB – for people and cats). This means the sessions are not directly comparable, which is a shame. We don’t live in a lab!
If anyone readong along wants to throw their suggestions of how they’d measure this at me, go right ahead! I’m writing this up more slowly than I’m training, so by the time I read our suggestion, I will likely already have implemented whatever I came up with myself. But if you want to think along and decide what you would do in my situation – go right ahead and have fun with this in the comments, and I’ll be sure to get back to you there!
Since I have no video for you today – take one of the cats instead:
In part 14 of Puzzle’s Superbowls series, we reached our goal: Puzzle is now fluently taking me to bowl #5 and back, and doesn’t worry about the vacuum we’ve plugged into the pattern. This video is a 6-minute review of the training process (explaining the pattern to Puzzle) to the first scary stimulus she conquered with its help (the vacuum).
If you are familiar with CU, but new to the Superbowls game, this video should give you a pretty good idea of how it works:
Will it always take 25 sessions to reach the goal?
We worked on the Superbowls game for 25 sessions. Will it always take this long?
Not necessarily. Remember that the first few sessions were an explanation of the pattern itself – they were not about the vacuum, but about teaching Puzzle how she could make the next treat appear (eye contact), and where that treat would show up (in the next bowl of the line). The first nine sessions were all about the pattern rather than about a specific trigger.
Now that Puzzle knows the Superbowls pattern, we can plug different triggers into it. Say, for example, Puzzle was scared of the coffee maker. I could start my work with the coffee maker right away, and plug the coffee maker in the same spot where the vacuum sits in the video above. Or if Puzzle was scared of grandma, I could ask grandma to calmly sit in a chair in the spot where the vacuum was in this session. I won’t have to start over with a trigger-free line up.
Unless I plug something excessively scary into the pattern, it is also likely that Puzzle will reach the goal faster with each new trigger: in the vacuum series, she wasn’t just learning about the vacuum – she was also learning about the fact that within the structure of the Superbowls game, she will never, ever directly have to interact with the trigger. Every approach will be followed by a retreat, and there will be no touching of or being touche by triggers. This is HUGE. With every new trigger we work with, Puzzle’s trust in the pattern itself will grow, empowering her be braver faster.
Puzzle makes it all the way to bowl #5/5! I release her when she doesn’t offer eye contact quickly after the fifth bowl. The amount of time I waited her is out right for this puppy – this is what we’re aiming for.
I’m curious whether she can approach again, and give it another go after the treat toss release. She doesn’t make it back to the last bowl. This is good information: my gut feeling was right. With Puzzle, I should end sessions after a treat toss release, and try again after a break. (This may differ depending on the dog you are working with! Some will do better in later approaches within the same session. Others struggle more and more as the sessipn continues. Always train the dog in front of you (as Denise Fenzi would say)!
Puzzle goes all the way to bowl #5 in the first round of the session. We approach again after the release, and only make it to bowl #4. I don’t want to push too hard – at this point, Puzzle is a one-approach-at-a-time kind of puppy. However, eventually, I want to get to a point where we can cheerfully approach and retreat several times in a row. That’s when I’ll know that Puzzle truly understands that she will never have to directly interact with a trigger in the context of the Superbowls game!
Puzzle makes it all the way to bowl #5/5 AND BACK! YES! You go, puppy!
Puzzle leads me all the way to bowl #5! She hesitates at the fifth bowl, and I opt for a treat toss release rather than waiting for her to give me eye contact. Since she was so brave, we do another approach. At 00:36, right after eating her release treat, she offers eye contact again: “Let’s keep playing!” So we start over with the first bowl. She’s being a superstar, and makes it all the way to bowl #5, and then back to bowl #4. On her way back, she starts feeling uneasy about the vacuum. That’s okay – treat toss release, and end the session! A well-deserved break!
The most amazing puppy makes it all the way to the vacuum – not just once, but twice, and if I didn’t run out of treats, she’d have kept going! You go, Puzzle!
This ends our Superbowls adventures with the vacuum! Tomorrow, I will show you the Leslie-approved video I submitted for my CU instructor certification, and share some wrap-up thoughts. No worries though: the fact that we’re almost through the Superbowls videos doesn’t mean there will be no more Puzzle posts. Stay tuned!
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For more dog training tips and videos, join Chrissi’s February class at FDSA: Calling All Dogs!
We stay at the very first bowl, and then end the session. Puzzle lets me know she wasn’t ready to approach the live vacuum any further, and I listen. CU is all about communication!
In her second session with the live vacuum, Puzzle is being very brave, and takes me all the way to bowl #4. At that point, she does not make eye contact again. I listen to her, increase the distance, and end the session.
Followed by another short session:
We make it up to bowl #4/5 again:
… and again:
In the next session, you’ll see Puzzle reach the fifth and last bowl for the first time! Stay tuned!
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For more dog training tips and videos, join Chrissi’s February class at FDSA: Calling All Dogs!
Now that Puzzle has shown me that she can predict where the next treat will show up in the Superbowls game, it’s time to add the trigger into the pattern. In Puzzle’s case, that trigger is the vacuum. She thinks it’s quite creepy!
When working with fear or anxiety, raising criteria slowly (rather than starting with the trigger at full intensity) is always a good idea. In the case of the vacuum, I’ll start with a dead – i.e. silent – one before asking Puzzle if she wants to approach a roaring, growling live vacuum.
Doing SO well! Puzzle is ready to face the live vacuum in her next session! (And if she isn’t, that’s okay, too: she’ll be able to ask me to stop approaching at any time.)
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For more dog training tips and videos, join Chrissi’s February class at FDSA: Calling All Dogs!
We’re starting to move between bowls! My first click in this video is late.
Puzzle still has to figure out where the respective next treat is going to show up! The wheels are turning …!
An excerpt from Puzzle’s second session involving movement between the bowls:
The subsequent session resulted in a blurry video – that’s what you get for not cleaning the lens of your phone before hitting record! I’ll spare you that video. Below is the session after that one:
Now things are starting to get interesting! You can see Puzzle look ahead to the respective next bowl in some of the reps below: she is starting to predict the location of the next treat! Smart puppy!
Towards the end of the session below, we are getting some lovely looking ahead/prediction. That’s it, Puzzle! You’re a superstar!
In our next session, we’ll be plugging the silent vacuum into the Superbowls pattern! Stay tuned …!
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For more dog training tips and videos, join Chrissi’s February class at FDSA: Calling All Dogs!
+ Since the counter-conditioning strategy has stagnated, I’m curious about how Brindle Girl will repsond if I present the collar loop, and try to lure her into it.
+ I talk about why in general, luring is not the best approach when working with dogs and fear.
When we came back from our walk, Brindle Girl (who we had left sleeping in the shade of the door), was gone. Let’s hope she’ll be back tomorrow – our last day at Cerro de Oro, and my last day of hanging out with my Brindle Friend!
