This is my fault. I put my dog here. What am I going to do about it?
That was roughly my thought pattern as I stood in the field, surrounded by traditional trainers who, under the stress of an approaching deadline, were getting increasingly more, um, animated in their training. These were people I knew, people I liked, people I normally respect; they are generally pretty good at their chosen methodology, getting enough good results that they are reinforced for their behaviors and continue.
But I could see that under stress, they were relying more and more on P+ and R- to get the behaviors to a level the dogs had not yet reached. While I understand some of the driving forces behind some of the human behavior (one handler is having some physical problems, for example, and is increasingly worried about the dog overpowering her), that doesn't change the fact that I was becoming uncomfortable with their actions. I know these people don't think of themselves as rough handlers, and I know that they're usually fair with their dogs, and I know that not all of them even approve of all that was done, but under pressure (the pressure of an upcoming trial, the pressure of training in a group, etc.) it was those tools they had available.
I'm not going to change their minds by lecturing; they're already quite familiar with clicker training concepts. Some of them use clickers. And most of them have been training dogs far longer than I have. All I can do is do the very best that I can, and I can try to mitigate the situation for my own dog, who at 18 months old is still pretty impressionable and who had never in her life heard dogs yelp or scream in training and who has never seen a dog thrown to the ground. It takes an awful lot to really disturb Laev, but I could see some stressy behaviors starting (glancing around while working, moving on the down).
I started reinforcing more frequently and more lavishly. I protested politely when told to extend my long down duration, and when polite protests were no longer effective, I started cheating, quietly and invisibly dropping a treat beside my dog or returning to treat when the leader was looking another way. I used smaller reinforcers in between, like glancing over my shoulder to smile and nod at the dog.
For the second day of the seminar/workshop, I prepared the most fabulous treats I could lay my hands on in short notice -- cheese, hot dogs, a commercial treat sample I'd been sent. (Hot dogs! I despise hot dogs. But I was willing to compromise for the dog's sake.) I fed like crazy, a reinforcer easier to manage in a group than play.
I did let myself get pressured; I was feeling the stress of two days' training and competitive nature myself as well as the self-imposed pressure of having something to prove ("I have to demonstrate that clicker training works! I need to show them that my dog can do this just as well without all that!"), which was just silly of me. My job is to train my dog. But I succumbed to pressure and stretched a ratio beyond what I knew it could bear, Laev broke, and I feared I'd shortened my duration because I couldn't recreate the situation for a successful rep while working with the group. Lesson learned -- don't let peer pressure guide you. (Didn't I hear this in middle school? Why is it so hard to learn?)
But Laev is a bright enough dog to work out the mistake, and she seems to have suffered no permanent damage to her duration. In fact, it's gotten longer, due probably to my conscientious reinforcement. She also bore with my breaking a behavior chain she understood perfectly well in the name of a proofing exercise for dogs who had not been taught the long down as a behavior chain (handler cues down, handler leaves, handler returns, dog remains down, handler cues sit). Because I kept returning and then leaving again -- to teach the dogs not to pop up upon return -- Laev thought I was aborting the chain for a mistake, as is our usual practice. To abort a chain is to tell the dog to try something else, and so Laev did! She barked in place, she sat upon my return (something she's never, ever done before, which I know she did solely out of confusion at the disrupted chain, but something which the others saw as proof that we needed more work on this), she broke the down. If I'd been thinking clearly in the moment, I would have recognized that I was sending her a clear signal that something was wrong! But I merely re-cued the down and continued with the group practice, and Laev has enough sense that she could work out that I was just being stupid and had forgotten the ending, and if she just waited quietly I would eventually remember to finish the chain. :-)
(Now I've added an additional physical cue to help her understand, for similar situations in the future -- if I look away from her, I will leave again, but if I look down at her, I will complete the expected chain. No mistakes yet!)
All in all, it was probably a good experience for us, full of distractions and environmental stressors for both ends of the leash. We'll do it again, but I'll be better prepared the next time.
