Leerburg » Articles » Marker Training » The Theory of Motivation in Dog Training

The most important concept that every new pet owner must learn, if they want to become an effective dog trainer, is how to get engagement with their dog. After training dogs for more than 50 years I have come to believe that engagement is the most important behavior every dog trainer should teach their dog.

Engagement is a state of mind that can be taught and learned. It means our dog is totally focused on us. A dog that's engaged wants to be with us and he wants what we have. What we have is either his favorite toy, or a high value food treat. Some dogs will even maintain engagement because they simply want to be praised by their owner. Engagement means the dog is more interested in what his handler is doing and what his handler has than anything else in the world.

A dog that's engaged with his trainer is not interested in a strange dog that's walking across the street or even a dog that's walking past on the bike path. A dog that is engaged is not interested in the kids playing ball next door or the 15 dogs that are running around on the other side of the dog parks fence that's 50 yards away. A dog that is engaged is not interested in the door bell or guests that come into the home. They are only interested in their owner, what the owner is doing and what the owner has.

Once dog owners understand that engagement can become a trained behavior that can be put on cue (on command) they are way ahead of the game. In the old days we used to be more interested in training behaviors first. We taught the dog to sit, down, come and heel and then worried about getting a happy attitude. We had it ass-end backwards. We found out that dogs that learn engagement as their first behavior become dogs that have a great attitude towards learning and training. Dogs that are trained to engage with their owners all have stronger bonds with the owner.

Understanding how to put engagement on cue, on command, has changed the way we raise our puppies. We now spend the first 6 to 8 months of our puppies lives teaching puppies to engage with when we ask them to. We focus our time with puppies on getting engagement in changing environments. We teach them to engage in places that have more and more distractions.

We call distractions "motivators" because the distraction motivates a dog to pay attention to them. When we want to learn how to train engagement we learn to become our dogs motivator. For us the goal to socialize a puppy or even a new older dog is not to get our dog to be social with other people or with other dogs. Our goal is to teach our dog to engage with us, to look at us as a motivator in the presence of other motivators. The other motivators can be other people or other dogs. Other motivators can be do0r bells, children, cats, etc etc etc. I wrote an entire article on how we socialize our puppies. You can read this article on my web site - click the link here if you want to read it.

If we could get people to think of dog problems in terms of competing motivators then trainers could look at a problem as an opportunity for them to come up with a motivator that is more interesting to their dog than the motivator that's causing the problem.

Several years ago I produced a number of training videos (DVDs) that teach dog owners and professional trainers exactly how to train engagement. They are:

1- THE POWER OF TRAINING DOGS WITH FOOD

2- THE POWER OF PLAYING TUG WITH MY DOG

3- ADVANCED CONCEPTS IN MOTIVATION

The Old System Vs. The New

The old old system of dog training had it's foundation based in either guiding a dog through a behavior and then praising the dog when he did what was asked, or using food to lure a dog through an exercise (I.E. sit or down) and then rewarding the dog with a food treat after he did what was asked. The thinking was that if the dog was lured enough times it would anticipate the reward after performing the behavior and that would then build motivation for work.

The hole in that system is your dog needed to be in the right frame of mind and want to cooperate. The problems came up when the dog was in an environment that had something going on that were more interesting than cooperating with you. In other words the competing motivator was strong than you were. This distraction could be another dog walking across the street or a house guest that just stopped over.

In the old system when that happened the owner had to either force the dog to pay attention by using a leash or by using some other form of physical pressure. Over time this pressure made our dogs dislike training. It also damaged the bond between the trainer and is dog.

This can be easily seen at most dog training obedience classes in the country. When dogs start these classes they are all excited to be there. But it doesn't take long fore the new owners to start to pressure the dogs to pay attention and after that the dogs tails go down when the enter the room because they know there is nothing fun about whats about to happen.

Think about this for a minute:

What are the competing motivators in a class of 20 other dogs? Then what could you do that would make you more interesting to your dog than 20 other dogs?

What are the competing motivators when a dog won't come when called? Then think about what could you possibly have with you that would make your dog turn and come to you when you called? What could your competing motivator be?

If your dog is barking at the door when house guests come over? What would you have to do to be a competing motivator that would make you more interesting than the door bell or the house guests?

When a dog jumps up on furniture or when it jumps up on you or your children? What would be a positive competing motivator to your dog than his urge to jump up?

The easy solution would be to snatch these dogs up and correct the snot out of them for not minding. That's exactly what we used to do. But we learned the better way is to figure out what we can do to make our dog forget the motivator that is causing him to not pay attention and then come up with a better motivator to make the dog want to engage with us.

I hope you can see where I am going with these questions. For some people the answers may be easy, for others they will need a little help to figure out the process.



No dog trainer can take a brand new dog and motivationally engage that dog when its barking at the Door after the door bell rings. Nor can they pull a rabbit out of their hat and make their dog want to come when called if their dog is right on the ass of a rabbit it's chasing towards a busy highway.

But an experienced trainer can, over time, teach a dog that they must mind and when they do mind they will be rewarded with cool things.

I have been producing dog training DVDs for thirty years and from day one I have explained that good dog training is accomplished by breaking a behavior into small training steps, or training segments, or building blocks and then teaching each piece by itself. Once the pieces are trained they can be put together into a behavior. The same concept applies to engagement.

We train engagement by starting way. We start by teaching the dog with markers (I wrote an article and did a DVD with the same name THE POWER OF TRIANING DOGS WITH MARKERS - click here to read it). After first establishing what treat a specific dog considers a HIGH VALUE FOOD TREAT we establish the value of our marker - the word we use for a mark is YES. The short sort explanation means that when we say YES they dog learns it gets a high value treat.

Once the MARK has been established we teach the dog the LOOK command or the ARE YOU READY command. Which basically means look in our eyes because when you do we MARK the eye contact and give a reward.

From that point on we expand and enhance the presentation of the reward. We turn reward deliveries into a game. By that I mean when we MARK a behavior we can toss the food, we may hold the food out and make the dog chase our hand, we can jackpot the delivery of rewards, we can mix and match different presentations. In other words we do things that keep our dogs interest and engagement. It never knows whats going to happen, it never knows how many rewards it is going to get. In doing this it is constantly paying attention because it doesn't know when the game will end.

As training progresses we gradually increase the expectation of what we expect a dog to do before it gets a reward. The road to that work is beyond this article. It's covered in the many training DVDs we have done. I will say this though, new trainers expect things to happen much quicker than they actually do in real life. They end up creating problems with motivation because the skip training steps or they don't spend enough time on a training steps.



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HOW TO SOCIALIZE YOUR PUPPY OR RESCUE DOG -

THE EVOLUTION OF DOG AGGRESSION AND REMOTE COLLARS

ASK CINDY YOUR DOG TRAINING QUESTION

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