Many people contact me to say that their dog struggles to cope with people they see from the car. Sometimes, that can be people the dog sees from a distance, and other times, when the people pass close to the car. It might not just be people who are the problem, but other animals. Dogs might also have problems coping with passing cyclists.

These people, animals or cyclists are what’s known as triggers.

My first question is to ask how the dog usually behaves outside of the car with the same triggers. For instance, both of my dogs have been known to bark at things outside the car when they’re inside. Heston used to struggle hugely with pedestrians and also with cyclists. He still has his moments. Lidy also has hers.

Both of my dogs would bark at certain people or at dogs even if we weren’t in the car. The other morning, we were surprised by a man and his Aussie shepherd at 5.15am. Heston yipped. Lidy glared. We all hurried on our way.

In other words, the car isn’t simply the problem. My dogs struggle with pedestrians and dogs whether we’re in the car or not.

However, when he was young, Heston really, really struggled with pedestrians, cyclists and dogs outside the car. That behaviour was much, much worse than when we were also outside.

If your dogs are barking at pedestrians, at animals or at cyclists when you’re not in the car, then working outside the car will make your life a whole lot easier, I promise.

Other dogs’ behaviour is much worse when they’re in the car. Some guardians tell me that their dog is guarding the car or that they’re guarding them. Nothing is impossible. A quick rule out to make sure it’s exactly this is to set up a camera and video what the dog does if the guardian isn’t present. If the dog still goes nuts, then they aren’t guarding the guardian. If I suspect the dog is guarding the car, a quick rule out is to see how the dog does without the car when people pass at the same distance. And if I suspect that the dog is protecting their guardian as well as the car, then I will test the dog with a pedestrian when the dog is being held by someone other than the guardian and we’re not in the car.

I‘ve never yet found a dog who is actually protecting either the car or the guardian. Even so, it’s a useful rule out to do. One day, I’m sure I will find that.

Often, what I find is that in actual fact, the dog is likely to bark when they’re in the car or out of it, when the guardian is present or not, and when they’re behind a gate or window. In other words, the car is just one place the dog barks but it’s particularly embarrassing or loud or annoying.

And, like Heston, it may actually be louder, more frequent or more easily triggered if they’re in the car. I mean he’d go absolutely nuts at cyclists and passers by and it became very difficult to work with him.

Sometimes, if I’m working with a dog who does bark and lunge at people, dogs or cyclists, the place where the dog lives is so full of triggers that we need to get the dog in the car just to drive somewhere quieter in order to do a little bit of work at least.

It’s not just protective behaviour that you will need to rule out. You’ll also need to rule out how the dog feels in the car. Many dogs are anxious in the car and often, seeing triggers that scare them tips them over the edge. In other words, if your dog doesn’t normally bark outside the car, but they do when they’re in it, you may actually have a dog who’s nervous of the car and you may need to start on that first. A good behaviour consultant will help you identify the exact nature of your problem and give you a protocol to help your dog feel better in the car.

It’s also really important to understand what your dog is doing. That will mean understanding any vocalisations such as barking. Heston has two barks: the excited yip and the angry, lower pitched ‘back away!’ bark. Lidy only has one: the ‘back away’ angry bark.

Heston’s excited yips tell an interesting story. The car is very exciting to him. More exciting than anything else on the entire planet because it means walks. Thus, he’s amped up before I even put him in the car, and it doesn’t take quite as much to set him off.

Say, for instance, he could cope with seeing a person walking a dog at 50m when we’re just on a walk from the house, seeing a dog and person walking at 200m when we’re in the car would be much more likely to make him bark because he’s more excitable in the first place.

He’s not, however, yipping all the time. Sometimes, he’ll give a very cross bark indeed, but that’s very rare. Mostly, he’s excited. He’s more excited because he’s in the car, and then there’s yipping when other stuff goes by where normally, he wouldn’t be likely to.

The car worsens his behaviour.

Lidy actually copes much, much better when she’s in the car. I mean, she did bark at the Eurotunnel guys walking past, but we’d been driving ten hours. She can usually cope in car parks even if people or dogs walk right past us. In fact, the car has been a really useful way to work with her because she seems to feel safer in the car. She’s right. She is safer.

The car improves her behaviour.

In a way, it doesn’t particularly matter whether it’s excitement, fear or anger, though it might slightly affect the kind of work you do. For instance, you may choose desensitisation over respondent counterconditioning with food if your dog is more excited. You can read here about how I choose which method to use. What it won’t affect, however, is your need to go gradually and to build up slowly. That’s the same for all training you’ll do.

If you’ve got a barker who responds to noise in the home and alerts you to every passerby like some kind of furry motion sensor and burglar alarm, starting with my protocol to reduce alert and alarm barking will really help. Simply put, if you’ve done that and it works in the house, then it’ll work in the car too, though you’ll still need to work at a distance and you may need to increase the value of your food for a while.

A ‘Thank you!’ is all it takes now for my dogs to stop barking completely. I did nothing other than teach them to stop when I asked in the home and garden. We then took it on the road for walks. Then we trialled it in a careful setup in the car. One simple cue, ‘thank you!’ and all my noise problems are dealt with.

Even so, there are some other steps you will need to take.

#1 Management

If your dog is barking at anyone they see, then you can’t keep driving down the high street every day hoping they’ll get better. When you’re training, you’re going to need to make sure that your dog doesn’t keep practising the barking or lunging.

One way to do that is to put a crate in the car and then cover it with blankets. You can also put up screens and even put up blackout fabric as long as you stay legal as far as road safety is concerned.

However, crate training may be more challenging than simply training your dog not to bark, so if your dog isn’t used to a car crate and you’re struggling to train them to go in, don’t worry.

You will need to make sure, however, that your dog is safe and appropriately restrained. I watched a car drive through the village the other day with a huge Newfie with his head sticking out of the car window. Cute he may have looked. Having the time of his life, he definitely was. Safe, he wasn’t. A truck came along and on the narrow road, that huge dog nearly had his head taken off. You may still find that sticking up sunscreens and clever use of fabric can make it much more difficult for your dog to see triggers they’re not capable of coping with. Yet.

Management isn’t forever.

But don’t expect your dog to change if you keep putting them in the same situation over and over.

If you need to drive down a busy high street, leave the dog at home. Get a sitter. If you’re struggling with separation-related behaviour, that might make you need to take your dog with you on the drive, but with so many businesses offering delivery, you might need to stop taking your dog out until you’ve dealt with the separation issues first.

Of course you may have a dog with separation-related issues AND barking issues who can’t be left with a sitter if they can’t cope with other people easily… it happens. Again, for a short time, reducing the number of compulsory journeys you need to make will help you manage until you’re ready. Living with an epileptic dog who I don’t leave alone has its challenges if I’m trying to restrict myself to journeys where I know he won’t get to practise barking, but going out at off-peak times can make life much easier. In other words, should I need to take my dog in the car and I can’t block out what they can see, going out when there are fewer triggers around definitely helps.

#2 Plan

You’re going to need to be able to park up for five minutes where there is a steady but intermittent flow of triggers. Let’s use dogs as an example, imagining my dog is barking at other dogs outside the car.

This sounds easier than it actually is. Firstly, you need to go to a place where you can get there without setting your dog off. Secondly, you need a steady but intermittent stream of triggers. For instance, parking opposite the canicross meeting point is not intermittent: there are dogs everywhere for about thirty minutes, all barking and going nuts themselves. On the other hand, parking near the local park, I might wait two hours and not actually see anyone walking a dog.

So you need venues.

You also need a gap between triggers. If it’s just dog-dog-dog-dog-dog, there’s no way for your dog to learn to connect what you’re going to do next with the appearance of the trigger.

I’m a big fan of several places: industrial parks and off-peak very large supermarket car parks if my dog barks at people; across the road from groomers or vets if my dog is barking at dogs.

You need to have a few venues, because the last thing you want your dog learning is a very strong connection to that single place. You want them to understand that what you’re going to do works in all places.

So plan for your venues. Do a reconnaissance trip. Scope it out at the time you plan on doing the training. Park up for five minutes. Count the number of triggers you see. Note within those five minutes at what point the triggers arrive and leave. Ideally, you don’t want them in view for longer than three or four seconds, but that’s not always possible. I have used other parked cars as a way of blocking out some of the view, using a vista rather than a panorama, so that can help.

My tally might look like this:

0.08 man and dog arrive

0.14 man and dog enter clinic

1.17 woman and two dogs leave clinic

1.47 woman and dogs get in car

2.30 man and dog arrive

2.50 man and dog enter clinic

4.00 woman, child and dog leave clinic

4.38 man, woman and dog arrive

4.59 man, woman and dog enter clinic

5.17 woman, child and dog get in car

This would be a perfect time to do some work with my dog, except I may find we’re a bit near, or I don’t have choice to park where I need to, and another morning, it’s simply a dribble of one or two people with cat carriers over a 15-minute period.

Reconnaissance is everything. I ask my vet when they’re doing vaccine clinics, as they tend to do a lot of dogs in a short time. I also check for days when they’ve got three vets on. There’s no point going on a day when they’ve got one vet doing nothing but pre-planned surgery.

If the worst comes to the worst, I’ll even enlist my friends as well-timed accomplices, arrange a meet-up time, ask them to move at very specific times and avoid a pile-up, and make sure it’s as controlled as I can make it. The better I plan, the more clear it’ll be for the dog. The more successful the first time, the better it’ll be after. That’s not to say you can’t do it anyway – just that less clean setups tend to lead to less clean results. It can be overwhelming and confusing for the dog.

You also need to find the ‘Goldilocks’ spot: safe parking at a distance from the trigger where your dog can see the trigger but the trigger isn’t that close that you’re going to end up with a barkfest. You need the trigger to be noticeable. What you’re going to do in #4 needs your dog to be aware that there is a pedestrian, dog or cyclist present. At the same time, you also need to be far enough away that you don’t trigger your dog’s barking. For me, that’s the back of the supermarket car park if I’m working with dogs whose barking is triggered by people – and the other side of the road from the vet clinic if I’m working with dogs whose barking is triggered by dogs. Narrowing the vista can definitely help if you have little choice but to be too close.

#3 Secure your delivery system

Obviously, you’re going to start the work when you’re static, unless you’ve got an accomplice who can feed treats to your dog. If you’ve got someone who can do this, that is genius. However, it’s going to be important to fade those people out if you ever drive alone, because otherwise your dog will learn not to bark at triggers when you have a treat-feeding passenger, and that all other times are fine.

If you’re working with an accomplice, you can of course continue to drive around. Mostly, though, you may find yourself knowing that you’re going to be going it alone and that you don’t have an accomplice, or that eventually, you’re going to be alone and driving when your dog sees someone walking their maltipoo down the high street.

Eventually, you may be forced to deliver treats while you are driving.

This carries enormous risks for safety and legality. All in all, it’s probably not as risky as the distraction it causes if you can’t safely drive past a school without your dog going nuts, but even so, you do need to think about how you can deliver food when you’re on your own in an emergency.

The easiest way is to train a marker.

Markers, like my ‘thank you!’ mean the treat is on its way.

You can’t wait ten minutes from saying ‘thank you!’ to delivering it. Well, not at first. But you can build up to it, especially if you practise in the home. Thus, when my dogs fail to bark at the yappy chihuahuas who pass every morning, and I can say ‘thank you!’ and stretch out the time before I pay up for the non-barking, I can start with it being a simple matter of seconds and build up to being a few minutes. This is one way of helping your dogs learn that if the magic word is said or the clicker sounds, they will get reinforcements.

Marker words definitely help with that and you don’t need hands free for clickers.

Most of the time, you should find yourself doing at least three or four weeks of practise with 3-4 short 5-minute sessions every other day. They’ll start static, where passing a treat over your shoulder would probably work.

However, if you’re not very mobile, if you have a large car, if you have the dog in the crate in the boot, if you can’t actually get a treat from your person to the dog, then you need some other solutions.

One is a secure remote treat dispenser. These are quite cumbersome, but we did use one on top of a crate when the dog was in the boot. The treat dispenser was strapped over the crate at a slight angle. When the remote was pressed by the driver in the front seat, the treat rolled into the crate and all was well. We velcroed the remote to the door panel. Treat delivery made easy. The guardian would press a button and a treat would roll out.

Another guardian had the treat dispenser on a secured box just in front of the dog’s seat. The seat belt harness gave just enough flexibility on a harness that the dog was able to bend forward and get the treat from the bowl that’s part of the treat dispenser into which the treat was delivered.

It doesn’t have to be that high tech or expensive. I bought two plastic plumbing tubes and an angled joint for each. I taped one tube starting from the shoulder rest on the right hand side of the driver’s seat and taped the bottom to the driver’s side rear passenger seat. Then I taped another tube starting from the left hand side of the driver’s seat to the passenger’s side rear seat. I could drop a round treat down the tube and it would be magically delivered to the dogs in the rear. This stayed in place until we’d worked our way through the programme, just for emergencies.

Obviously, I’m not a fan of throwing treats into the back seat. I have two dogs. It’d be a free-for-all. Treats would get lost and within a week, my car would smell of mouldy dog treats.

#4 Train

Once you’ve managed it so your dog doesn’t end up barking when you’re putting training into place, and you’ve planned where and when you’ll do the training, and you’ve decided how best to get treats from you to your dog, then you’re ready to train.

As I said, you need that ‘Goldilocks’ distance. When you have that, all you have to do as soon as the trigger comes into view is mark the response with a marker word, and then deliver food until they go away. Repeat four times more in a very short timeframe (less than five minutes, ideally).

Plan to get closer and closer to the trigger, or to have more and more challenging triggers. Little old dogs toddling into the vet are not a challenge for Heston, but a load of loose scenthounds just before the hunt, or a load of loose huskies and collies before canicross, that’s a challenge. I’d also choose to do it at the end of our walks when he was less excited, and I’d gradually have more trials, more challenge, more dogs and a longer time. Instead of watching five slow people from 200m away for five minutes on a Tuesday lunchtime supermarket visit, we’d end up watching 200 teenagers come bursting out of school right outside the school gates over a ten minute period.

Eventually, as soon as you see your dog notice the trigger (and not bark!) mark it (I say good!) and then feed them.

You can add another word if you like: I say ‘Good job!’ just like I do for any non-barks in the house. It’s what my dogs understand happens when they don’t bark, and the thing they know I say before I give them a treat.

Then the next session, we just get a little closer, a little more challenging.

It’s that simple.

Finish on a win. Never ask more of your dog than they can take. If your dog barks, you’re not back at square one, but you may need to adjust your programme so that it’s less challenging.

The most difficult bits are setting up a delivery system for treats. Using an accomplice is very helpful but you will need to fade them out and pick up the slack unless you never, ever drive your dogs about without a passenger.

It can also be difficult to get those first staging areas set up properly. Get that right, and everything else is easy.

There may be times that you’ll have a bark or two – sometimes there’s just too much to cope with – and that’s fine. That’s life. But I wouldn’t keep putting my dog in that challenging position if they couldn’t cope with it usually. I mean, one or two yips when a team of Tour de France cyclists go past isn’t the end of the world. Telling a Eurotunnel guy to step away from the vehicle when you are very tired is also not the end of the world. But a little bit of training, marking them as soon as they see the trigger then feeding them until the trigger disappears can really help them cope much better with the world passing by outside their window.

If you’re a dog trainer looking for gifts for your friends, my book is out now!

In the last two posts, I’ve been taking you through respondent conditioning and respondent counterconditioning. Big terms indeed. The key question we’re looking at today his is perhaps the biggest one in working with highly emotional dogs: when do you switch?

Honestly, it makes me despair when I see people who are still trying to use respondent counterconditioning alone and they’re 8 months into a programme but they’ve seen so little progress that the dog is practically over threshold the moment they step out of the door. Something is profoundly wrong with their timing and their understanding that’s leaving their dogs stranded as emotional jetsam, tossed about on the tides of life.

If dogs live such short lives – and some bigger dogs have perhaps only 8-10 years with us – then spending a year of their life where you’re making so little progress as to be negligible means that a very long section of your dog’s life is spent facing triggers on a daily basis and still feeling pretty icky about them. I don’t think I can live with that.

We owe it to our dogs to make progress as quickly as possible. Spending portions of their life too uncomfortable to even pee outside because they’re that anxious is no way to live.

If you’re really, really struggling, please consider medication. This is a welfare issue. Medication won’t help your dog overcome their issues without concurrent training, but it will help you work faster once you get the right medication.

Stop thinking supplements, as well, please. I supplement my dogs’ diets. I use herbal remedies. I have no beef with using non-pharmaceutical products. I use them for physical support and emotional support.

What I hate is seeing dogs who are floundering being left without medication because we’re worried it’s not ‘natural’. Stupidly, people would rather pay a small fortune for herbal remedies that are unproven and untested, often where the product is not held to the same scrupulous standards as pharmaceuticals, and we owe it to our dogs who have severe anxiety to consider how we can help them better. Remember also that there are many behavioural medications and you may not hit on the right one the first time. You may need a combination. Don’t stop until your dog has a baseline of relative stability that means they’re not spending vast portions of their day feeling uncomfortable. Sometimes, training and supplements can be like trying to hold back an emotional tide with your hands. We owe it to our dogs not to let them suffer. Please also check that your dog does not have underlying health issues. So many times, ‘reactivity’ is driven by ill health, especially when it’s sporadic.

If your dog needs desensitisation because whatever flips their switch is exciting, you also need to on-board frustration tolerance activities and impulse control activities. These are not the same. The former is about learning how to tolerate life’s frustrations when you can’t get or do what you want. The latter is about learning to control your own body. A month of these in the home and in low-arousal spaces outdoors can really make a huge difference.

Counterconditioning should not take long. We can’t talk in one breath about single event fear learning, where dogs learn in one single episode to associate a trigger with something unpleasant, and not understand that counterconditioning shouldn’t progress at glacially slow speeds. It makes no sense. We know so much about fear conditioning and counterconditioning from laboratory and applied settings that we can say that it shouldn’t take that long.

If it does, then the previous post will definitely help you up your game.

I’m looking for such high value food and such well-controlled, straightforward set-ups that we’re talking a few 5-minute sessions over a week or so for the dog to truly know what you’re up to. That’s the moment to switch to operant conditioning.

There’s another reason that you should also switch to operant, Skinnerian methods. Remember, these are driven by the learner.

Pavlov is about how the world works on us. We are jetsam on life’s tide. The light turns green and we put our foot to the pedal. The light goes red and we stop. We sniff pepper, we sneeze. We get a puff of air in the eye, we blink. We chew sour sweets, we salivate. The cute boy in class talks to us, we blush. We’re weak little response machines bobbing around on life’s ocean.

It’s powerful stuff, but it’s not empowering. All we’re doing is learning new things that make us respond in particular ways.

Pavlov is one-to-one. One trigger. One response.

And it’s an all-or-nothing or a graduated response, but it’s a helpless kind of response. You can’t do anything about it. Trigger, response.

Unless, that is, you bang in some support in the form of desensitisation and/or respondent counter-conditioning.

Skinner is about how we can change the world. We are in control. We behave if we want access to reinforcers that are valuable to us in that moment, including escape from aversive situations. We don’t behave if we want to avoid aversive situations or if we understand that good stuff gets removed from us. It’s about our needs and desires in the moment. We have choice. Choice is hugely empowering.

One reason I switch as soon as I can to operant methods is because of the effect on the learner.

My old girl Tilly was a prime example. When she arrived with me as a five-year-old, having bitten numerous children and seen a legion of specialists for her behaviour, she was an anxious hot mess. When my partner at the time stood up, she’d pee on the floor. She’d growl if anyone touched her.

What made a difference for her?

Showing her how to work the world. You want to go out? Tap the door. You want to be petted? Come and sit near us. You want it to stop? Move away.

I can’t ask her how these things made her feel. The world was predictable and it was safe. She worked us like a finely tuned instrument. Soon, she was scraping the water bowl if it was empty and she was telling me she wanted to go out in the middle of the night instead of peeing on the floor. Five years of incontinence and she finally found a way to ask for what she needed. Five years of biting and she finally felt safe enough to keep her stuff and hand it over when asked.

Skinner turns triggers into questions.

Instead of being forced to respond, because Pavlov gives us no choice whatsoever, Skinner says: ‘Would you like to?… It’s up to you!’

Now I’m making this sound more thoughtful than it is. Learners don’t need to be conscious of that question, but we learn that we have choice.

That choice is the bane of our lives if we’re searching for the perfectly obedient dog. Only Pavlov makes us perfectly obedient to the world. Skinner says, if you want the paycheque, go to work. Skinner says, press the lever if you want a seed right now.

So much so that he had to keep his animals at 80% body weight because when that light came on to say that if the animals pressed the lever at that moment, a seed would pop out, if the animals were not hungry, they’d just opt out.

Not so good for a behaviour scientist if your mice won’t run mazes and they’re all, ‘not today, thanks!’

Operant training is a choice that depends on how much we want the stuff or want to avoid the stuff that happened in these circumstances in the past.

It’s not an obligation to respond.

Where you’re turning former triggers into things that are simply cues for other behaviour, it’s mightily empowering. You’ve got choice. The triggers make predictable things happen.

Operant training is an absolute gift for many anxious dogs. This weekend, I was working with one old dog who’s got a few issues related to being as old as dirt, and we pretty much had NO training on offer simply because he’d lived life in control of his own stuff. My girl Flika was like that. Clearly, nobody had ever met her needs and she would take life into her own paws. Door closed? Open it. Door locked? Chew through it. Or find another door. Hungry? Go in the kitchen and help yourself. Bored at a meeting? Rifle through handbags and find some snacks. Both dogs had lived life on their own terms. It may be a struggle and it may not always be rewarding, but you’re the master of your fate.

For other dogs, especially anxious dogs, the world is unpredictable and the world works on them all the time. These are the dogs like Lidy, the first time I met her. She was a head-butting, bitey, circling, frantic, snatching, grabbing out-of-control piece of work. Operant methods have been the absolute making of her.

The first time she realised, ‘oh! That’s how you make the monkey do stuff!’ when she got food for a behaviour … it was a revelation. She looked at me like, ‘I could take your bag and run off into the woods, lady!’ but she cooperated and she worked out how to make me spit out treats. Operant training builds a partnership between the guardian and the dog.

Years ago, the shelter rescued a number of animals from some incredibly grim circumstances. There were three timid collie siblings in the mix. Two of them went to live in incredibly loving homes with wonderful, lovely people. One went to live with a Swiss dog trainer who does heelwork to music. The difference between the three dogs couldn’t be more marked. Two can’t cope well outside of their small social group. Joey, well, Joey performs heelwork in front of huge crowds, travels across Europe and is worlds away from that nervous little guy found cowering in a room eight years ago. He’s not the same dog. He may look like the same dog, but he’s not the same.

What caused that difference?

Well, I think operant training did.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not a fan of training for training’s sake. I am lazy and I’m somewhat ethically opposed to dogs having to perform for the stuff in their life. I think the ethics come from the laziness to be honest.

Operant training builds confidence. It builds reliability and trust in the world around you.

It builds a bond between dog and human.

Joey, when he’s with Sylvia, he’s in her world. All the world, all the crowds, all the games… it’s all just background noise. When he’s with her, the world is predictable. They do their routines and it’s comfortable. All she’s really been doing these last eight years is proofing his trust in her in a variety of diverse and challenging circumstances.

I do the same with Lidy, just on a smaller scale. Mainly because I’m lazy. I do as much as we need to. But four changes in home this year and she’s shown me what that means. When I am there, I am her safety cue.

There’s fallout, for sure. She’s not so hot at coping when I’m not there. But we’re working on that.

Operant training makes her life predictable. It builds her trust in me. It also does in others. Whoever holds the training pouch is now good people. Whoever holds the paté pot is also good people. Including the vet. In a foyer surrounded by barking dogs and moving people. Operant training helps me trust her too. This is one reason that I so completely fell in love with Leslie McDevitt’s Pattern Games. They just work so well.

It’s for these reasons that I switch to operant as soon as I can. Choice. Predictability. Empowerment. The learner has ultimate control over their environment.

I’m going to let you into a dirty little secret… most of the behaviour I see with dogs is actually not respondent.

Or, it’s not as respondent as all that.

It’s definitely subject to consequences.

Well, sometimes.

Poor Loupi the pointer, aged 10 weeks, saw a sleeping kitten and went into full point.

Not so operant.

Lidy couldn’t have cared less about cats until she was in a new environment, one shot out and she caught it. That woke up every predatory urge in her body.

More operant.

Predatory behaviour is an urge that needs scratching. When it’s being scratched, we can put parameters on it and make it stop when we ask. This is often about the games we play with our dog and giving them opportunities to scratch itches as well as learn to stop. Lidy was not so hot on play at first and there was a lot of grabbing, frustration and lack of impulse control. Now, she’ll sit and wait before I toss the toy. Now, she’ll release and lie down when I ask. She’s in control.

What’s happned to her predatory behaviour?

Well, it didn’t dry up altogether!

But there are glimpses where things become a game again.

The other day, we’d been practising a middle before chasing. It’s pretty simple. She sticks her head between my legs and sits. I throw the toy and we play tug a bit. Then the toy goes dead and we repeat.

What happened when she saw a cat? Well, no word of a lie, she did a middle. ‘As if,’ says I, ‘I am going to let you chase the cat just because you sit pretty, my girl.’

But I saw a glimpse of the operant. A fracture where a bright Skinnerian light glimmered through the fissure.

Not a glimpse, actually. Not a fracture. Not a fissure. A huge great gully. A gully where instead of taking advantage of my weakened state (I was bent over bagging up a turd…) and pulling me over as she made for the cat, she took control of her own body and did a predictable thing.

I did reinforce her with a few games of chasing the food. Predatory behaviour is completed where food is consumed. Ten treats thrown in the grass are not that much different than a cat in a bush. We need to remember that. Predatory behaviour is about the action and about eating. That’s why food and toys are your friends here. They can quite often substitute for predatory behaviours, if that’s what you’re dealing with. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that, in adding more interactive play with rules, you’re helping the dog cope with frustration, learn to control their bodies and building your relationship, as well as scratch a biological itch. A quadruple whammy.

If you’re dealing with dogs who don’t feel safe, much of their behaviour has been put there operantly, I hate to say it. They’ve been placed in situations where they’ve either been forced to respond, and they’ve learned that reactivity and aggression keep stuff away. Or they’ve been placed in situations where they just passively learned to sit it out. Food and toys are not your reinforcers here. The behaviour has been maintained by safety and by distance. You can of course add food into the mix, or even play or toys. However, you’re dealing with something very different.

Much of that behaviour will also become superstitious; the dog feels the need to react. Skinner defined superstitious behaviour as any the dog feels the need to perform in order to get a particular consequence, where the consequence was not contingent on the behaviour. In other words, the consequence might be completely unlinked, but the learner feels they need to do the behaviour to get the consequence to happen. One prime example is barking at postal workers and passers-by. Their leaving is not contingent on the behaviour.

Behaviour is in itself very lazy. I’m a perfect example of that. I do as little as I need to to meet our needs. Behaviour does the same. If we can break the chain for superstitious behaviour so that the dog realises they don’t need to do X in order to make Y happen, then the innate laziness of behaviour will eventually take over. If the postal worker goes away anyway whether you bark or not, then what’s the point of barking? All we need to do is set up enough experiments where the dog can see that happen. It’s one reason I think my alert and alarm barking protocol is so very effective. The dog may well simply be learning that they don’t need to behave to get strangers to go away.

Still, it may also be inherently reinforcing for the dog. Heston, for instance, does love a bark. However, he doesn’t actually like strangers passing. He likes to do fanfare barks and excitement barks and other barks of joy. He doesn’t actually like barking at annoying pedestrians or people who come too close to the house.

How do I know?

Because he doesn’t bark like that at other times.

Thus, I can’t control all his barking (and neither would I want to… his joyful big barks are his celebration of life’s glory) but I can minimise his need to bark at passers-by in operant ways.

You’re still here to find out when you can do that, I know!

When you are doing a clean set-up of respondent trials with great stuff, you should find that, if you’re at the side of the dog or behind the dog, there’s a moment when the dog sees the trigger and then turns to you in expectation. If you delay just a tiny moment, you should see them look to where the food is delivered.

That’s the moment.

At that moment, when they disengage from the trigger, you can shape that turn to you.

That’s to say, you can make it bigger. You can turn that fissure into a gully and then into a canyon. You can stretch it out.

I’ll just say here that you do not want to strain that shaping. You don’t want to decide you’re going to count to ten before you give the dog their food for turning to you or looking at you and disengaging. Many dogs will just go back to what they were going to do instead.

Instead of TRIGGER > BEHAVIOUR within a millisecond, you should now have… TRIGGER > MICROPAUSE > BEHAVIOUR.

That micropause can be shaped into something bigger.

If you get a TRIGGER > PAUSE > BEHAVIOUR, you can then insert a prompt just after the pause:

TRIGGER > PAUSE > ‘TOUCH’

This way, you are substituting another behaviour. Same trigger. Different behaviour.

In fact, a small but philosophical thing has happened. It’s no longer a trigger, it’s a cue.

Let’s take a typical Lidy example. At first it went like this:

SCARY PERSON > LUNGE & SNAP & FLIP ABOUT ON THE LEAD

Then, we did a nice, clean set-up where a person came into view for a short period at a controlled distance…

SCARY PERSON > CHICKEN RILLETTES > SCARY PERSON LEAVES.

Within three trials, she’d sussed it. I left a micropause:

SCARY PERSON > MICROPAUSE > CHICKEN RILLETTES

Within two more trials, she turned to me really briefly:

SCARY PERSON > MICROPAUSE > TURN TO EMMA > CHICKEN RILLETTES.

Now, if you’re a hot marker trainer, you’ll be able to capture and shape this or simply shape it. Capturing would look like this:

SCARY PERSON > TURN TO EMMA > ‘GOOD’ or CLICK > CHICKEN RILLETTES.

Shaping would look like this:

SCARY PERSON > PROGRESSIVELY LONGER TURNS TO EMMA > CHICKEN RILLETTES

You don’t need the marker, in other words.

When would I use a marker?

When it’s meaningful to dogs. Skinner works without marking – shock, horror! If I’m working with a dog who hasn’t got a history of marker words, I may not use a marker at all. How unconventional of me, I know! Markers can make dogs reliant on us, however, to tell them when they’re doing right. That’s my opinion. No marker means the behaviour itself is working it out. If you’ve done my Hagrid method of loose lead walking, I often don’t use a marker word as the dog is waiting for the marker and focusing on that, not what they were doing.

I’d also use a marker if I’ve got a dog who needs a lot of guidance. In my opinion, malinois need a lot of guidance. They freelance terribly if they don’t get it, and immediately revert to the behaviour they’d wanted to do in the first place. German shepherds are much less reliant on the click. Just my experience! I also use a marker if the dog has a number of triggers. It’s efficient.

I don’t use a marker if I have a dog who doesn’t know markers or if they’ve only got one trigger. They know what you’re up to, believe me, if you set it up right. Markers can also be challenging for clients who aren’t so hot at timing. In short, we don’t need to always mark behaviour. It can, in my opinion, put the human more in the driving seat than the dog.

Whether you capture or shape, you’ll also be able to cue other behaviours, or let the dog lead you with a self-selected behaviour.

SCARY PERSON > TURN TO EMMA > ‘TOUCH’ > DOG TOUCHES NOSE TO GUARDIAN’S HAND > CHICKEN RILLETTES

You can cue whatever behaviour you like here. I’d go for something your dog likes doing and they’ve a good history of doing. This is why I’ve often been teaching a behaviour discretely. I may start with that weeks before doing the respondent set-up. You can cue a ‘Look at me!’ or a ‘Wait!’ or a ‘Watch!’ or a u-turn or a sit or a down or a hand touch or a middle or a peek-a-boo – whatever floats your dog’s boat. However, I would say that moving behaviours are better than static. I’m not a fan of asking dogs to sit and stay while stuff goes past. I’d prefer to be mobile so we can get the hell out of Dodge if the situation makes a turn for the worse. I’m a huge fan of u-turns, since they offer safety, relief from the cue and distance. Since this is what reactive dogs are seeking out anyway, it provides more reinforcement than simply getting yummy food.

Ironically, it was also Hagrid that taught me the beauty of these strategies. We’d been doing u-turns and practising faithfully when one day, he saw two bouncy labradors about 200m away. He turned to me as if beginning a u-turn. We turned around, got out of the way, did our own thing, let the labradors go past and I had a lesson in how dogs tell us they’d rather not bother being reactive or aggressive, thank you very much.

Eventually, you will fade out the second cue:

SCARY PERSON > DOG TURNS AND TOUCHES NOSE TO GUARDIAN’S HAND > CHICKEN RILLETTES

This is the ultimate goal. The dog sees their cue, does a behaviour that tells you they’ve seen it and you reinforce. As I said, lazy.

Whatever behaviour you choose can go in there:

SCARY PERSON > DOG U-TURNS > CHICKEN RILLETTES

In that moment, then, where the dog turns to you for whatever you’d been doing, wait for that millisecond of recognition that you’ve not yet delivered the food that you’d been doing before, and stretch the hell out of it. Insert other behaviours when you’ve done that and experiment.

Should you prompt?

What would that look like?

A prompt is a gesture or word that you’d use to encourage the behaviour if it’s not forthcoming:

SCARY PERSON > NO TURN TO EMMA > Prompt ‘TOUCH’ > DOG TURNS and DOG TOUCHES NOSE TO GUARDIAN’S HAND > CHICKEN RILLETTES

I don’t tend to prompt unless the dog gets stuck and the trigger is too overwhelming for them. Skinner is voluntary and choice-based. We can ignore prompts and cues. It’s likely that the prompt will fail. Nevertheless, if I see my dog getting stuck in that moment before they’re going to react, I’ll prompt. I was sitting on the step the other day doing some of this with Lidy and two guys walked down with two shi tzus. I could tell by how long it took her to turn away that she needed a prompt. I told her ‘in’ and she went in the house. Seconds later and she would have exploded.

I don’t prompt if I know the dog isn’t even aware of me at that moment. That is a lesson to me that I’ve failed them and put them in too far. I also don’t prompt routinely. The dog is still reliant on me to tell them what to do.

The other important thing about this is then you can also begin to mix in lesser reinforcers. I’m so cheap these days that Lidy does all this for rubbish dog biscuits and kibble, or even – and how cheap is this? – me telling her she’s a good girl. You can’t put respondent counter-conditioning on cheaper food or mix in other stuff or even phase it out. You can with operant.

One thing that I do like to do with dogs with multiple triggers is cue them to be aware of the possibility of the imminent appearance of that cue. Leslie McDevitt’s Look At That is a good example, but as you can tell from ‘that’, it’s not a specific trigger. Lidy know’s her ‘Where’s Wally?’ from her ‘Where’s the Dog?’

‘WHERE’S WALLY?’ > DOG LOOKS FOR PERSON > SEES PERSON > TURNS AND HAND TOUCHES > CHICKEN RILLETTES

‘WHERE’S THE DOG?’ > DOG LOOKS FOR DOG > SEES DOG > TURNS AND HAND TOUCHES > CHICKEN RILLETTES

Why I like these pre-cue cues so much is that in my opinion, they prepare the dog for what they are about to see. For reasons I’ll explain in future posts, this can help lower the aversiveness of an unpleasant situation and it can also prepare them, making the world predictable. It turns the world into a predictable game. We know from some work by Adam Miklosi’s team that dogs are surprised when their expectations based on scent are not met. From this work, we can extrapolate that dogs do expect things from scent. If they have expectations of who or what to expect based on one environmental stimulus, there’s no reason that they can’t learn to expect different things. Of course, this adds an unnecessary layer of complication for most dogs, but it’s a gift for those dogs who have multiple triggers and I believe it can work to reduce anxiety about what generalised cues like ‘Look at That!’ might mean if the dog has different emotions or different intensity of emotions related to different triggers.

Other times, I’m really just letting the dog process the world themselves. If stuff is under threshold and well controlled, food has no value. In this way, I’m working more with BAT 2.0, where you’re just letting the dog make their own decisions and make sense of the world. For Lidy, for example, all she’s doing is making sense of stuff, and often, if I give her time to make sense of it, she’ll make good decisions on her own.

In this video, you can see that moment really clearly. There were some dogs barking outside (I think!) and she was listening to them. You can see up to 0.22, she’s focused on the sounds outside the house. At 0.22, she looks to me. That’s the switch. That’s my gold. That’s when I know she’s switched from a respondent brain which is jetsam on the tides of life to an operant brain that is able to do things.

What is ‘Good girl?’

A marker that says treats are available.

Where are the treats kept and delivered?

Well, the dogs tell you.

We move away from the dogs barking and we get food.

Dogs barking, here, are no longer a trigger that causes my dogs to bark.

Dogs barking are simply a cue that says, treats will be made available from the cabinet near the door.

As I said, behaviour is lazy. It takes the least unpleasant course and the least effortful course to get to satisfactory outcomes.

Here’s an annotated video of the above:

It’s that moment at 0.22 that I want.

This comes back to why I want clean set-ups. The above video is not a clean set up. I have no control over how long the dogs will be outside the property for. It’s not clean. I don’t know how many seconds it took me to find my phone, switch it on, switch to video and record, but even if it only took me three seconds, that’s almost half a minute of exposure to a trigger.

That’s too long for good respondent counterconditioning. The longer the exposure, the more likely she will be to bark back. Also, as you can see, I’m not counterconditioning. I’m just letting her process it. We move then into operant. We do a lot of ‘just processing’ – I want her to make good decisions and decide that things are nothing to be bothered about without me telling her so. If I were counterconditioning, I’d be feeding her from 0.01 right until the dogs stop. I’m letting her make sense of stuff.

All we’re really looking for, then, is higher latency. Latency is just the amount of time between a stimulus and a response. Low latency is great for computers and the internet… Instant reactions. Low latency is not great for dogs. Instant reactions are not a good thing. When we’re switching from respondent counterconditioning to operant methods, we’re looking to stretch that latency to a high latency. We’re looking for a lag between noticing and reacting. When we’ve got lag, when we’ve got high latency, when we’ve got SCARY STUFF >>>>>>>>>>>>>> REACTION rather than SCARY STUFF > REACTION, we have something to sculpt…

Time. We have time to stretch and sculpt.

We’re also looking for less intense behaviours. Listening intently and tracking is less intense than barking and jumping up at the window. We can sculpt those too.

I did try and find a video where I switch from respondent to operant, only to realise I don’t have that many. Respondent counterconditioning done well means a handful of careful trials that give way easily, naturally and quickly to operant work. It’s probably 2% of my time with a learner. Once your dogs know what you’re up to, you get that head turn whenever you are working under threshold with savvy dogs, whatever the trigger. I don’t have videos because respondent set ups are delicate things, and I need my eye on the dog, not on the camera.

You should end up with moments like this, where something salient happens and your dog looks to you:

The one that follows is an annotated version where I outline the processes. It’s sloppy. It’s chatty. It wasn’t done for professional showmanship – a bit like my training. It’s impromptu and casual and it’s on the spot – a lot like my training.

You’re looking for that tiny moment of ‘Hey, you’re slow with the stuff!’ where the learner turns to you.

At that point, they are beautifully conscious of what’s happening to them and the processes that are affecting them.

They’re no longer jetsam on life’s tide of offensive stimuli. They are dogs who think that offensive stimuli mean treats.

They’re no longer at the beck and call of predatory behaviours. They are dogs who are learning to disengage and do other stuff instead. In the end, a thousand reliable repetitions of ‘find it!’ or ‘get it!’ will always win out over something chaseable that they never get to catch. With predatory behaviours, what we’re essentially doing is putting it on cue, not unlike gundog trainers might. Only our dogs don’t get to chase cars and bicycles… so we need a substitute to pop in there instead. You’ll find lots, I know, on predation substitute training, that will help your dog scratch itches and cope better with moving stuff.

The key is in waiting for that millisecond where the dog becomes conscious that you’ve not delivered the expected unconditioned stimulus. When you’ve got that, you are ready to switch. It might take a few more repetitions, but a dog who is conscious of the game you’re playing is a dog ready to switch.

It’s a beautiful, beautiful moment because you can extend the time your dogs take thinking and processing rather than reacting. You’re stretching the time between the trigger and the response. That latency means you can insert other things if you like, such as another behaviour. It means you can turn triggers into simple environmental cues that tell the dog to do something else instead of what they used to do. It helps the dog make sense of predictable sequences of events.

Of course, where Skinner goes, Pavlov goes too. They’re shackled to one another. Just because you’ve switched from obligatory responses to triggers to optional and voluntary behaviours subject to consequences does not mean Pavlov has packed up his kit and buggered off. He’s still there, helping your dog feel good about you, about the world and about what’s happening to them. If you opt for an incompatible behaviour instead of whatever the dog had been doing instead (you can’t chase AND recall… you can’t lunge at a target AND touch your guardian’s hand) then you’re not only doing an incompatible operant behaviour, you’re also doing an incompatible respondent behaviour – the very essence of both respondent counterconditioning. Thus, you enter the world of operant counterconditioning – the most powerful tool of all.

If you’re a dog trainer looking for ideas on how to work more effectively with your clients, why not check out my book?