What is “engagement?”
Engagement simply means that the dog will pay sustained attention to you and wants what you have to offer in terms of a reward event. Whether it's food, toys, play, some kind of interaction. The dog wants something from you, and we'll hold their attention on you and then attempt to get it from you.
Without engagement, the only way anyone can get a dog to do something is to FORCE that dog to do what you want it to do.
This is the cornerstone of our entire training system. If your dog is not paying attention to you, then we have no business trying to teach the dog behaviors. We spend a significant part of our early training developing engagement. It goes hand in hand with developing value in the reward event. These two things happen together.
When I start training, I start charging my markers, teaching my dog to follow food, teaching my dog to chase food, play with toys, I start doing restrained recalls, and all of the things that we talked about. In the course of building the desire for these activities and these interactions with me, the dog naturally pays attention to me, and what we want to develop is a dog that pays continuous attention and wants something from us. An engaged dog is a very easy dog to train.
Extra energy devoted to developing engagement in your dog and to building power and passion for the reward event will carry you a long way in your training life. So you are better off focusing your attention in the early part of your training on developing these things; the reward system, communication system, and engagement than you are worrying about what behaviors your dog does. It doesn't matter if your dog sits, downs, retrieves, or any of those things. If you devote the energy necessary to these other aspects of your training, engagement, communication, and building solid reward events, interactive reward events, then all the rest of the stuff will come into place easily.
Movement is Motivating!
In this segment we're going to talk about the reward as an interactive event, and some of the principles that surround that. For those of you that have been around much of our training, you’ll notice how much we talk about the interactive nature of a reward.
Tug of war is a game that we play with our dogs on a regular basis because it's highly motivating for certain dogs, but not all logs. Also, because it's directly an interactive game between the dog and the handler. The dog can't tug by themselves. We want to take that interactive nature and apply it to all of our reward systems, whether I'm using food, a ball, a tug, or just playing with my dog physically; having the dog chase me around and pushing my dog off of me and playing games with my dog. I want it to be something that the dog and I do together.
So we're going to talk a lot about the interactive nature of that and some of the concepts that we're going to cover in this section are on how movement is reinforcing. This is huge. Sitting still and handing your dog's rewards is not very motivating. So we're going to focus a lot on how we move ourselves to make that more interesting and exciting for the dog.
Contrast between reward events & what’s happening around the reward event (normal behavior) It’s not simply that we move, it’s that there’s a strong contrast between what was happening before the reward event occurs and the reward event itself. For example, if I’m standing still and suddenly I jump and run, that’s highly reinforcing to a dog. There’s a big contrast between normal behavior and what happens during the reward. The more that my normal behavior and my rewards start to look alike, the less motivating that is to the dog. We want to make our training full of peaks and valleys.
Hunger Drive & Movement Prey Sequences
Something some people do is use just the food to motivate their dogs. They’ll get their dog hungry and your dog wants food, and will work for it. Which works great but the dog is being completely motivated by his hunger drive. At that point, it's simply how hungry he is. Where hunger drive does not intensify through rehearsal. Your dog can be hungry, and when he eats it satiates that and the drive drops.
So the more you train that way, the less motivated the dog becomes for the food. Whereas prey or movement based reward systems with food or toys intensifies through rehearsal. So if your dog chases a ball as a young dog, the more you throw the ball for your dog, the more intense they get about it. So rehearsal intensifies prey based or chasing behaviors. Rewards are going to be predicated on moving that way, whether we're using food or a toy, because it's more motivating.
Post Reinforcement Pause / Inattention:
A lot of people when they reward their dog in training reward with a fixed length. For example, I have my dog sit and I give him a single piece of food which lasts a few seconds; a very short period of time. If I'm predictable in how I do that, then my reward always lasts a certain amount of time causing my dog to start to check out right after the reward for a brief period, knowing that there's no reward coming for ex seconds again. And so we call this post reinforcement pause, where your dog says, “Okay, I got my reward”, then he checks out for a few seconds, and then he checks back in because he knows that he's not getting another reward.
So we vary the duration and number of our reward events. Sometimes it's one piece of food. Sometimes you have the dog chase three pieces of food for 10 seconds. I vary that duration so that I would never know how long the reward is going to go on. The reward event is going to go on, so they don't check out after each reward because they expected to kind of keep going. That variability keeps them engaged, and you don't have those little moments of checking out.
Techniques for Increasing Motivation
When we're teasing a dog with a toy or food, we make little noises, and we condition the dog that these noises are stimulating and exciting. If my dog is chasing a piece of food that's in my hand, and I make a little noise as the dog chases it. Whatever you want, you could make any kind of noise you like. The auditory noise becomes classically conditioned to stimulate the dog and get them excited. So later on, we can use that to stimulate our dog during the reward event and bring up their overall motivation and excitement for the activity.
Getting the Reward
A dog's brain is wired in such a way that the acquisition of rewards is more reinforcing than having them. Dogs are wired to like chasing and searching behavior. It's biological.
For example, if there's a canine in the wild and they’re hunting for something, on most hunting attempts they’re usually unsuccessful. Everyone’s watched nature documentaries; 80% of the time the dog or the animal does not get what they're going after. What behavior would you continue to do if you were 80% unsuccessful? Very few of them. So biology has conspired to keep them doing it by making it feel good. So chasing and searching activates a part of the dog's brain that feels good and the more they rehearse that the more they like it. Our rewards should include searching and chasing. It's less about actually getting the piece of food and more about acquiring the piece of food. It's more motivating to the dog to be in the acquisition phase.
How do we incorporate that into our reward event? Tugging, chasing and eating; which are the basic three pieces of our interactive puzzle. Tugging is obviously directly between the handler and the dog. We'll be using the dog's hunger drive to motivate them for food, and then how we deliver the food predicts how valuable that reward event is going to be.
