ClickerExpo Session Details 2014 - Bromley Cross, Lancashire

Big and Tall, Round or Small? Modifier Cues & How to Teach Them
Ken Ramirez

• Big and Tall, Round or Small?: Modifier Cues In Action (Learning Lab)

At the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago where Ken Ramirez is vice president of Animal Collections and Animal Training, marine mammal trainers make use of modifier cues to indicate specific behaviors. Left and right are good examples that can be applied to objects (fetch the left object), actions (jump the left bar), body parts (give me your left flipper—or paw, if you're a sea otter). Modifiers need not be limited to two alternatives; cues can be developed that identify targets or objects as large, medium, and small.

In addition to marine mammals, Ken Ramirez has employed modifier cues with dogs, steering search and rescue dogs at a distance, for example. Ken will discuss and show on video training procedures for developing modifier cues with both marine mammals and dogs, and will suggest some of the many applications of this sophisticated tool.

The Special Sauce Hidden Cues & Prompts for Stunning Freestyle Routines
Michele Pouliot

Participant notes:
You are encouraged to bring one or more props to work with. The Lab will also have some props on hand that you may use. For participants, this is an Advanced Lab; Dog and Handler teams should have several (three or more) freestyle behaviors well established (reliably on cue). There is no Session prerequisite for this Lab. Observers at all levels of experience are welcome.

Routines that "wow" the audience and the judges—that's what you want! You have a solid basic routine and great music selected, but what will really impress your audience? What else do you need? First, props. Props can add "wow" to a routine and heighten audience enjoyment. Second, cues that are "hidden" in the choreography of the routine—discernible only to the savviest of onlookers—will give your routine the edge you’re looking for.

This Lab covers the use of props and hidden cues. Participants will learn how to select a prop that enhances the routine, train with it, and incorporate it into the routine creatively. Participants will then learn and practice the skill of "hiding" cued behaviors in the choreography—creating what freestylers call choreography cues.

Come and discover your own “special sauce” by working with freestyle champion Michele Pouliot.

Big and Tall, Round or Small? Modifier Cues & How to Teach Them in Action
Ken Ramirez

Prerequisite:

• Big and Tall, Round or Small: Modifier Cues and How to Teach Them (Learning Session)

Participant notes:
Dogs in this class should have a well-established retrieve and/or numerous clicker trained on-cue behaviors. Dog and handler should both be experienced and comfortable with freeshaping. You may participate with your dog or you may attend as an observer. Handlers must attend the prerequisite Learning Session in order to participate. Observers at all levels of experience are welcome. Observers should not bring dogs to the Lab.

Modifier cues are an advanced concept. Once you can get an animal to understand a couple of concepts—left and right, for example—and to understand the idea of a concept, you can move forward very fast. Dogs learn to generalize their knowledge, which is a huge advantage in advanced training.

This Learning Lab provides the opportunity to begin to practice what you learned in the Learning Session that is a prerequisite to this Lab. Participating dog/handler teams will practice with their own dogs the core techniques used in the Learning Session.

Hidden Aversives Drawbacks of Negative Reinforcement & Extinction
Karen Pryor

For thousands of years, people have been tending and using animals, driving and herding them, riding, leading, and steering them. The tools we use are worldwide and millennia-old: bits, bridles and reins, goads, prods, whips, collars, and leashes.

All of these tools are based on negative reinforcement—taking away something bad. I put pressure on the left rein and the horse discovers that by turning left, it can be rid of the discomfort. That’s reinforcing! Soon the left turn becomes automatic, and I can reduce the pressure to the lightest of warning touches and still get my left turn.

Join Ken for this fascinating and highly useful Session about how to deal with mistakes or unwanted responses from your animal in an effective and positive manner.

Once an animal has learned all the behaviors and all the cues for those behaviors, it can interact in reasonable comfort with the person controlling its behavior. However negative reinforcement—taking away a bad thing in order to increase a certain behavior—requires the ever-present possibility of the bad thing happening. The learner is more interested in avoiding discomfort than in learning something new. And rightly so! If the required behavior does not occur, the human in the equation is likely to respond by escalating the discomfort, sometimes to extreme levels.

Rather than equating negative and positive reinforcement as two sides of the same coin, Karen Pryor suggests that negative reinforcement creates a continuing underlying state of stress in the learner, and consequently has little place in modern training practice. In this Session, she will give examples of circumstances in which negative reinforcement can be valuable as an initial tactic when positive reinforcement is impossible, as when an animal is too fearful to approach.

If reinforcement maintains behavior, what about stopping an unwanted behavior simply by not reinforcing it any longer? Surely that’s a kind way to eliminate behavior? That process is called extinction—when reinforcement stops, the behavior that is being reinforced eventually stops, too. One problem with trying to use extinction to get rid of an unwanted behavior is that the reinforcers maintaining the behavior may be hard to eliminate. Sporadic reinforcement may maintain the behavior more strongly than ever. Furthermore, once learned, no behavior ever really disappears. You can hope you have extinguished the behavior to all reasonable extents and purposes; however such behavior may resurface, an event known as resurgence. Meanwhile, sudden cessation of reinforcement may escalate the behavior in what is called an extinction burst: the dog barks louder and longer than ever; the person trying to get a soda out of the broken Coke machine punches the buttons harder, puts more money in, swears, and may end up hitting or kicking the machine. Extinction is an intrinsically aversive experience, capable of triggering anger, aggression, and even despair.

In this Session, Karen will discuss how to recognize when you are accidentally triggering extinction bursts, as well as some reinforcement-based alternatives to the unnecessary cruelty of deliberately induced extinction.

Better, Faster, Smarter! Competition Training with Platforms In Action
Michele Pouliot

Prerequisite:

• Better, Faster, Smarter: Competition Training with Platforms (Learning Session)

Participant notes:
Handlers should be able to work their dog effectively in a distracting environment with other dogs nearby. To get the most out of this Learning Lab, handlers should already be familiar with using platforms. The dog should also be very familiar with and "magnetized" to platform use (dog automatically mounts an available platform).

Michele Pouliot is one of the most successful canine freestyle champions in the history of the sport, dazzling audiences and judges with her creative routines that are full of imaginative behaviors. Using raised platforms as a positive training tool has aided her in creating dozens of advanced routines consisting of 80 or more behavior cues, and in accomplishing three Obedience Trial Championships with three dogs.

No matter what your sport or performance needs, platform training can help you and your dog make training progress faster, and at the same time add some fun to the challenge of training precision.

In this Lab, you'll focus both on using platforms to train a new complex behavior and on using platforms to improve upon an existing advanced behavior. The skills that you'll be practicing include making the most powerful use of a platform by planning your goal behavior, keeping the fun in training sessions while making notable progress, and assessing how to modify platform use during a training session.

This Learning Lab provides the opportunity to practice what you learned in the Learning Session that is a prerequisite to this Lab. Participating dog/handler teams will practice with their own dogs the core techniques used in the Learning Session. As explained in the Participant Notes, participating dog/handler teams should already be familiar with using platforms.

Use platforms and you'll find that you will soon begin developing your own ways of speeding up training with this versatile tool!

Reward Ends, Then what?
Eva Bertilsson, Emelie Johnson-Vegh

A desired behavior is followed by reinforcers, which strengthen the behavior in the future. That's the bottom line of positive reinforcement training. But does it matter what happens immediately after each reward? You betcha. What happens right after the reward is a neglected part of the training loop that deserves more focus. Whether we intend it to or not, the end of the reward functions as a cue for some behavior. The behavior that regularly appears and is reinforced after a reward ends will be under stimulus control of that reward ending. By being aware of this process, a desired behavior can be promoted and other undesired behaviors nipped in the bud before they are built into the training experience.

This Session will discuss rewards both as consequences and as antecedents. Attendees will learn how to predict and develop specific behavior so that what happens after each reward is beneficial for future training. Examples and video demonstrations will be included.

Hold It, Get It, Bring It, Give It! The Multi-Purpose Clicked Retrieve In Action
Michele Pouliot

Prerequisite(s):

• Hold It, Get It, Bring It, Give It!: The Multi-Purpose Clicked Retrieve (Learning Session)

Participant notes:
This Lab will cover the steps for training a reliable retrieve via clicker training. This is an Advanced Level Lab for handlers, but suitable for dogs at any level of retrieve training, even dogs that have negative responses to seeing the retrieve article. Beginning dogs in retrieve through advanced dogs in retrieve are welcome. The handler must attend the prerequisite Session. Observers at all levels of experience are also welcome.

Mandatory skills and equipment for dog/handler teams are:

• Handler should bring rewards the dog is already very enthusiastic about.
• Dogs should be comfortable in a seminar environment, and able to focus on working with dogs nearby.
• Dog should be clicker-savvy. For example, dogs should be able to offer behavior for the handler and should be completely comfortable learning behaviors (not necessarily retrieve-related) and cues via the clicker training process.
• Handlers should bring the article they will be using for retrieve training. The article should be a training dumbbell or other article that has a circumference easy for the individual dog to place its mouth over and around.

You may participate with your dog or you may attend as an observer. Observers should not bring their dogs to the Lab.

Join Michele Pouliot and practice training the retrieve clicker-style. Building on the knowledge gained from her related Session, Michele will help you get started if you are just beginning retrieve training, get back on track if your retrieve training has gone off-course, or hone your technique and build on what you already know.

This Learning Lab provides the opportunity to practice what you learned in the Learning Session (a prerequisite to this Lab). Participating dog/handler teams will practice with their own dogs the core techniques used in the Learning Session.

In this Lab, participants will learn and practice the following: the steps in clicker training a retrieve, modifying clicker retrieve training for a less-than-enthusiastic retriever, technical skills for the handler in training the retrieve, reward placement, attaining goal behavior, adjusting retrieve-training techniques for the individual dog, effective timing of the click and the handling of rewards, and the role of classical conditioning in retrieve training.

Specific exercises to help teach these concepts will include:

• Training duration hold behavior
• Training mouth on the article
• Training pick up of article from the ground
• Training delivery to hand or other target

Prior to 2001, Michele used traditional methods to train the retrieve, personally training more than 350 guide dogs and several pets to retrieve via traditional methods, including three Obedience Trial Champions. In 2001, Michele trained her first clicker retrieve and never looked back. After training five horses to retrieve, she realized just how reliable a clicker retrieve could be. Michele’s clicker retrieve training has been applied successfully to guide dogs, service dogs, and dozens of dogs in the competitive sports of canine freestyle and competitive obedience.

Aggression Treatment & Context
Ken Ramirez

Dealing with reactive dogs, handling aggression, and working through problems with highly sensitive animals can be a challenge for even the very best clicker trainers.

Over the years, many creative trainers have presented various alternatives to handling aggression and reactivity problems. The explosion in the number of approaches, combined with an array of new nomenclature, is often confusing for trainers seeking to choose an approach for themselves or to recommend to others.

Today, some of the most discussed approaches include, but are not limited to, Counter Conditioning, Constructional Aggression Treatment (CAT), Click to Calm, Behavioral Adjustment Training (BAT), the “Look at That” game (LAT), and a host of others. How do these varied treatment approaches compare? What common or distinct scientific principles are being employed? Are certain plans better for certain situations than others?

This Session is designed to help you sort out the choices. It will explore the science underlying the approaches, look at their known efficacy, and help you see what these approaches share, as well as their differences, so that you can make informed choices. Attendees of this Session will also learn to ask the right questions and listen/look for thoughtful answers in order to be prepared when the next approach makes its way forward.

Join Ken Ramirez for a Session that is important and informative for anyone involved with aggression treatment in animals.