Look, Mom! No P+! The hold and bark exercise

Training the hold and bark is traditionally a touchy thing. The dog is in hyperdrive -- and must be, to perform the behavior correctly -- and he has a long history of R+ for going directly to the sleeve (necessary to teach correct foundation behavior). The hold and bark asks the dog to clamp down on all that and control himself in the face of distraction and apparently available reinforcement.

Here's the finished behavior:

• dog circles empty blind
• dog runs to sixth blind
• dog rounds to face helper
• dog barks loudly, forcefully, deeply (intensity of barking is judged!)
• and for our discussion we'll stop and reward there, although in competition that leads into another behavior chain.

Original training methods include sending a dog on a 38' line and pinch collar to a helper at 40'. This has the effect of stopping the dog, for better or worse, but it also requires some re-training later. Later methods were developed which weren't quite as harsh or dangerous, but all of them rely on R- and P+ as well as the final huge R+ at the end of the chain.

I shredded my hair over this. It *should* be possible to train this without R- and P+, I felt. But I couldn't find any information anywhere on anyone who had ever done it.

For weeks I brainstormed, picked the brains of clicker trainers in other sports, worked and re-worked plans. In the end, the solution was far simpler than I'd tried to make it -- good old management, R+ and P-!

(This process is documented in a more real-time format on Laev's personal blog [www.caninesinaction.blogspot.com], but here's a brief recap.)

My club had used gates before to help block access to the helper, so we went back to this technique first. Laev had to give us excellent barking to bring the helper to the gates and then slide the gates apart. It didn't take long for her to figure that out! but she was sorely tempted to jump on the gates. That we solved by skillful line handling, giving her just enough room to bark and move without jumping, or P- of moving her backward after a jump.

Here we found an interesting twist due to Laev's clicker training regimen -- instead of just barking at the gates, as most dogs did, Laev barked while offering a wide variety of accompanying behaviors. Do you want me to bark while sitting? Standing? Lying? What if I sit at a 45-degree angle? What if I bark and scoot sideways? She was very obviously testing the parameters of the criteria and experimenting -- anything to open that gate faster!

Then we took this behavior to the blind, opening the gates a little more each time and adding a little more distance to the send each time. Touching the gates or helper ended that trial and Laev was dragged away, screaming and tearing up turf, for another try. :-)

The photo here is from our last session with the gates; they were handy in case she forgot her job and they needed to close, but she didn't need them. She was pretty confident by now that "vertical barking" would get her the opportunity to bite the sleeve! (The line in the photo is actually loose and bouncing with her.)

We then abandoned management and threw the responsibility of performance on Laev. If she was sent to the helper and touched him with paws or teeth, she was dragged away for another try; if she held herself and barked well, she was rewarded with a bite. Of course, the responsibility of planning was still on the humans; I carried a 3-ring binder full of charts showing our reps, the distance at which we were working, our success rates, etc.

Laev's doing quite well at this at present. We still keep a line on her and someone ready to monitor -- one improper R+ at this high level of value would make for months of retraining -- but I am really quite proud of her accomplishment. She just might have the first-ever hold and bark trained without P+.