capturing

cue

decompression

Capturing is when we reward a dog for a behavior they offer all on their own. We can use this to reinforce any behaviors we’d like to see more of, like when your dog looks back at you on a walk to check in with you. Certain behaviors, like sitting down, are easy to capture.

A cue is whatever prompts the behavior in a dog. Some cues are environmental, like when you pick up the food bowl and your dog comes running. In modern dog training we also use the word cue to replace the word ‘command’, as a cue is our way of asking a dog to perform a behavior.

Decompression refers to the process of relieving and releasing stress. You may have heard the term ‘decompression period’ after bringing your dog home for the first time, as your dog will have needed some time to recuperate from the stress of the transition and acclimate to a new environment. Just like us, our dogs need help to decompress after exciting or stressful events, and it’s good to build in decompression time regularly to prevent their stress bucket from getting full.

displacement

emergency recall

Displacement behaviors are any behaviors that occur out of context, which indicate feelings of stress, avoidance or conflict in dogs. Common displacement behaviors include shaking off when a dog isn’t wet, yawning (often with an audible whine) when they’re not tired or scratching themselves when they’re not itchy. Have you ever pulled out your phone in an elevator and pretended to be doing something just to avoid the awkward silence with another passenger? That’s a displacement behavior!

The emergency recall word is our 'fire alarm'- we don't use it except when training or in an urgent situation so that we can protect the value of it. It can be any word or phrase you like, though it needs to be something that you’re dog isn’t going to hear all the time and learn to tune out. When training, we always need to pay handsomely for a response to this word in order to keep the response strong and reliable.

Engage/Disengage

enrichment

flooding

jackpot

luring

management

pay and pay scale

punishment

Reinforcement

reinforcement schedule

threshold

trigger stacking

This is a protocol that involves reinforcing the dog for noticing or observing the presence of a trigger in the environment and disengaging from it. The rules of this game are fluid- sometimes a dog is going to be able to disengage by herself and look back at you, and in some circumstances where the difficulty is higher or she's getting 'locked in' you may need to prompt her to disengage. You reinforce her for giving her attention back to you in both instances. Focus on timing as much as possible- we want to 'mark' her looking before she becomes fixated or starts getting too excited, and in the beginning that is going to mean our window for marking and rewarding is very short.

Enrichment is a term for any activity that allows your dog to practice species-specific behaviors and utilize their naturally occurring instincts. This includes things like sniffing, digging, foraging for food, and engaging in certain parts of the predatory sequence like shredding or chasing. This also includes licking and chewing, two behaviors dogs naturally engage in to manage stress and alleviate boredom. Providing diverse enrichment opportunities is essential for keeping dogs mentally stimulated and happy.

This refers to when a dog is exposed to a potentially fear-inducing stimulus for a prolonged period without the possibility of escape. This can be done accidentally or intentionally and is done in an attempt to overwhelm a dog’s anxiety response and get them acclimated to something quickly. This might look like forcing a dog that is afraid of cars to sit very close to the street no matter what they do. In my professional opinion and experience, this is not an effective or compassionate technique. We will avoid flooding in favor of a program of gradual exposures that keep your dog under threshold.

A jackpot is when we give a dog a big reward. This usually refers to the volume of treats- generally a handful- but can also refer to the value of the reward as well. I will sometimes call this a treat party, because it’s meant to be a celebration for something your dog has done really well or mastered for the first time. We will use a jackpot when teaching and practicing an emergency recall, for example. We want your dog to learn that coming back to you when he hears that cue pays very well.

Luring involves using a treat held in the hand to guide a dog into a position or space. This is one of the most common techniques for teaching basic behaviors like sit and down as we can get a dog to follow the lure and get into the position we’d ultimately like them to assume. We can also use luring to get dogs to follow us when teaching things like emergency U-turns or when asking them to get on the scale at the vet.

Management involves the use and manipulation of the environment to influence behavior, increasing the likelihood of desirable behavior and reducing opportunities to practice undesired behaviors. This isn’t the same as training, which involves active teaching, but the two go hand in hand for effective learning and behavior change. Management might look like putting food away in cabinets so that your dog can’t swipe anything from the counter when you go out, or using a baby gate to prevent access to the kitchen altogether.

For our purposes, pay is both a verb and a noun. If you hear me say “pay her”, I’m letting you know it’s time to reward your dog with a treat. Payment in this case refers to reinforcement, which is usually food but can include anything else your dog finds rewarding and valuable. We will often talk about your dog’s pay scale, which refers to our options for reinforcing her behavior and the relative ‘worth’ each of those options holds. A piece of kibble is probably going to be on the lower end of the pay scale, which means it will work fine as a reward when we’re asking for something easy or low effort. When we ask for harder behaviors, we need to bump up our pay to something she finds more valuable. Nobody works for free, no matter how much they enjoy their job!

Punishment, in behavior terms, has a specific meaning. A punisher is any consequence that reduces a behavior. This might look like an electric fence that zaps a dog whenever it approaches the boundary of the yard. In order for a punisher to work, it has to be something a dog finds unpleasant. By that logic, anything a dog finds scary, unpleasant or painful is punishing. Our dogs dictate what is punishing for them, so even if something seems like no big deal to us, we have to respect when our dogs tell us that something is aversive to them. While punishment can work in the short term to reduce behavior, it’s not the same thing as teaching a dog what we’d prefer them to do. Punishment can erode trust, damage relationships and comes with some unintended fallout that makes it a risky choice. If you’d like more information on this, you can read the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior’s position statement on humane training here.

Reinforcement is any consequence of a behavior that increases the likelihood of that behavior occurring in the future. You’ll often hear me say that what gets reinforced gets repeated. In the simplest terms, a reinforcer is anything a dog finds rewarding. Food is a really convenient reinforcer in most contexts, but we can also use toys, play, praise and access to the environment as a reward when your dog does something desirable. In behavioral science, we have two types of reinforcement: positive reinforcement (adding something good when a dog does something we like) and negative reinforcement (removing something unpleasant as a reward when a dog does something we like). Because we want your dog to have good associations with training and a drive to participate, we’re going to stick to positive reinforcement by harnessing the power of stuff he loves.

A reinforcement schedule is a fancy way of talking about how often we’ll reward your dog for a given behavior. Continuous reinforcement means rewarding every instance of a behavior. When we’re first teaching your dog a skill, this is the reinforcement schedule we’ll use, paying her every time until she’s got the hang of it. Intermittent or variable reinforcement means we will reward a behavior only some of the time. This is how we maintain strong behaviors over time once a dog has learned them. Intermittent reinforcement is what keeps people playing the slot machine- if they never won, they wouldn’t play. The same is true for your dog.

We can think of a dog’s threshold as the point when their emotional and behavioral state shifts and they are no longer in a responsive or teachable state. In reality, dogs have multiple emotional zones they can pass through, but I use the word threshold to refer to that big emotional line in the sand. When I describe a dog as being ‘over threshold’ it means that they’re too agitated to learn and are physically reacting in some way. Our goal is to prevent your dog going over threshold whenever possible.

Trigger stacking refers to the compounding effect of multiple stressors on your dog. A dog who was feeling poorly, then went to the vet where lots of other dogs barked at him in the waiting room, might be a bit crabby later in the day. He might even be more reactive on his walk or be less tolerant of handling due to multiple triggers stacking up and pushing him closer to his personal threshold. Humans can experience trigger stacking too!