E462: 멜리사 브로우(Melissa Breau) - "신뢰할 수 있는 콜백 가르치기"

life recall how is that different from the kind of recall people needed from like formal obedience yeah so when i think about a formal obedience recall right it's really set up so you go into the ring you leave your dog usually in a sit stay um you're walking across the ring you're turning around you're facing your dog you're waiting for an indication for the judge you're recalling your dog they're coming to front position which is a very formal official position right uh and then you're gonna finish your dog to your side and continue whatever to the next exercise that's super different than if you are out in the real world uh not in a super controlled environment with a very precise exact setup and you need your dog to come to you so if you are at the dog park if you are off leash hiking with your dog if you're out in the yard and there's a car coming if there's you know any of those real life situations what you actually need is to be able to call your dog and have them come to you and stay with you until you either release them back into the environment um or until you leash them back up and go wherever it is you're going to go next so those are very different pictures both from the dog's perspective and kind of from the handler's perspective and i really think they should be trained pretty differently so it sounds like it's easy to get some misunderstandings then so what do you think people misunderstand most about teaching a reliable recall so if we're talking about a real life recall that people misunderstand i think a lot of people kind of take it for granted like these little bitty puppies that are eight weeks old and want to follow us everywhere and they're happy to chase after us and you know all those good things and so it doesn't last forever no i mean it does i'm not gonna say never because some people get really lucky especially with their hurting dogs and you know you get a puppy where as long as you you know reinforce it a couple of times and they're pretty young you know you end up with a recall that just never goes anywhere it's always great give me that one for the rest of us we have to do some training um so yeah so i think a lot of time people kind of take it for granted they get the baby puppy the baby puppy's got a great recall they never really break it out and train it they never really think about it as a training project that they have to put some intention into um again sometimes we get lucky but for the most part you know it is a skill that the dog needs to learn is a valuable skill

for them to have the second thing i think sometimes gets misunderstood is a lot of the times you have that little baby puppy recall and it carries you pretty far and so people skip straight to proofing right they just are like i have the basic behavior in a basic setup let me just make this really hard for the dog in all the ways and then something breaks and then all of a sudden we don't have a recall anymore um i think that's probably more common than people realize uh but it you know we really do need to think about teaching a recall and building reward history intentionally and not just let's make this more difficult and see when our dog fails right uh and then kind of a third misunderstanding or misconception i think people you know denise just sort of post on this on facebook the other day um that i shared but i think people have this idea that in order to recall your dog away from something exciting you have to either have something more exciting or be more exciting than the other thing the dog is interested in and i just don't think that's true in my experience it's really about building a really robust reward history for the behavior you're looking for in this case a recall and basically training it to the point where the dog doesn't stop to think they hear their word and they assume that coming to you is going to be incredibly incredibly valuable because that's what the reward history tells them and so they don't do a conscious analysis of thing a versus thing b they just turn around and run to you and that's really the type of recall that i want in my real life recall i loved that post that went like broke a lot of people's brains it's a great misunderstanding because i mean that's i felt that way for a very long time as well it's like well i have to have something better than that there's just some things that are never better so i i love that that distinction um you did mention what your what your recall is going to be but what exactly is a good recall like what does that look like in everyday life yeah so i touched on a couple of those points right so the the first thing for sure is that low latency to talk about it in scientific terms right we say the cue the dog turns around they run to us immediately so there's not a pause between when you say the cue and the dog stops to like think about it we don't want them to stop and think because then they might decide the thing that they were doing was actually more interesting than coming to you and that's just not the decision we don't want that to be an option so uh the second thing is once they

have turned around to come to you i'm looking for a fast recall i don't want my dog to kind of gradually walk in my direction as they get around to it plodding along like i want whatever a fast speed looks like for my dog i want them to do that when i call them right that they're going to run to me with some enthusiasm and motivation and oomph in their step um once they get there uh i really want a recall that doesn't result in a dine and dash we've all seen a dine and dash recall especially somewhere like the dog park or you know in training class you're trying to get your dog back to you you call them you call them you hold out the cookie they come they steal the cookie and they take right back off across the room right um i love that dine and dash i gotta i'm gonna steal that i don't i don't think it's original i'm sure i picked that but just in that context i've never thought about it that's great yeah so um we don't want to dine and dash recall we want to recall that ends with the behavior that's predictable for us and predictable for the dog so whether that means you're going to come to me and stay with me for some period of time or whether that means you're going to come to me and i'm going to do a collar grab right we want to think about what that end behavior looks like and build it into our entire recall picture on a consistent basis so that we know that once we call our dog we've got our dog if something's happening where we need control um there are kind of two end behaviors i usually look at i mentioned the collar collar grab when training the other option i look at is what i call buffet feeding so we intentionally build in a reward sequence that involves multiple cookies usually at least three and you know initially it's come to me and i feed you three cookies basically as fast as i can but over time we space those out so the dog is always anticipating more than one cookie which teaches them to come to you and wait for that additional reinforcement you know with some delay built in and then kind of the the third piece of a really good recall is that it works even in distracting places right we want a recall that's going to work even if there are other dogs in the room even if you know there's a really good smell over there even if they kind of saw something out of the corner of the rye that's maybe equally interesting to you and whatever you've got um we really want to have built the reinforcement history that's going to hold up even in situations where if the dog stopped to think they might make different choices i mean they are sentient beatings

you are talking about reinforcement history so why is that such a critical piece of the recall training i feel like i've said it like 18 times already but you don't want to teach the dogs to stop and think right we need a history that is so reinforcement heavy that they don't pause to evaluate when we say come they just come right but do you only do it with cookies it doesn't have to be cookies you can use all sorts of things so uh funny enough and just to like emphasize the fact that it's really about the history of reinforcement not the reinforcement itself when i was teaching this class in person i taught this class many many many times in person we had a little shih tzu thing it was very overweight and on a diet okay um so the the two owners were fabulous human beings came to class with this little shih tzu and they're like well so we can't use really exciting reinforcement because our dog's on a diet we can't use really good cookies i said okay what can you use they said carrots we can use carrots um so they taught their dog to recall for carrots to the cute kitty cat that was their that was their chosen cue um and by the end of week six in the class they yelled kitty cat and that dog came flying across the room you know away from me holding cookies away from kind of whatever other distractions were present wow but that's because we built the history right we built the individual pieces in the class what i recommend is homework uh is that you do two sessions a day about five minutes each and you can totally do one of these right before you feed your dog you can build them into whatever part of your routine makes it really easy a commercial while you're watching tv and in that five minutes i want you to do 10 recalls so that means that ideally you're doing you know 10 recalls twice a day for 20 recalls a day and they don't need to be big recalls right we don't need to call the dog across the house we don't need to we want the dog can be sitting in front of you and you say your recall word and you feed them some of the time right like that can be a rep but if you practice twice a day 20 recalls a day seven days a week right so we've got one week we've got 140 recalls by the end of week one by the end of week six that's 840 reps that's some fast math i pre-wrote it out don't i was like whoa what but if your dog is successfully recalled to a cue 840 times what do you think is going to happen the 841st time that you use it yeah that expectation is there exactly you've just built the behavior right it's just it's a

habit it's so instinctive at that the dog doesn't stop and think about it they really truly do just do the thing because it's what they've done 800 and something times yeah um and you know your dog's going to do the thing the dog knows the dog's going to do the thing right there's there's a high degree of confidence on everybody's part that what's going to happen is very predictable so when i'm talking about building reinforcement history that's really what i'm talking about i'm talking about doing the reps so that everybody on the team knows that this is just what we do this is just how this works yeah i'm i'm listening to what you said about reinforcement so it's about the history but so like carrots for that dog uh it could be kibble for another it could be toys for another like how do you choose that reinforcement yeah i think i mean for sure in class we do a little bit of analysis of what your dog finds most valuable like that's like exercise i do want people to think through but honestly when i'm working on recalls my own dogs i try to look for opportunities in everyday life when i might be giving my dog something they're excited to get and insert a recall practice into that right so like let's say this happened last night i ordered cookout cheese bites at and didn't finish them on my way home right so i had four cheese bites left when i got home cool that's impressive you didn't finish them i don't know how that's possible i am totally from all of you just saying sorry but i i came home with a couple of cheese bites that i wanted to share with the dogs so rather than you know you know i didn't plan this but because i'm going to give the cheese bites to the dogs anyway i can't i'm going to use the recall cue before i give them that reinforcement it's just an everyday thing but it's a high value exciting novel thing that they're you know certainly enthusiastic to receive um and it gives me an opportunity to add additional reinforcement history into that particular behavior so you can do that if your dog's really excited to go outside you can call your dog and release them outside you can do that if your dog is excited about getting out of the car at a new event or in a new space right um you can do that uh if you're going to be playing with toys with your dog for sure i'm a little cautious about thrown toys with a recall just because we do want our dog to come to us and stay with us so it's a thing to think about and it doesn't mean you can't use a thrown toy but you just have to be a little more intentional and really

think about how you're doing it um you might choose to feed a cookie pause and then throw the toy for example you know you may just want to build some sort of extra sequence into that uh so that you aren't your dog isn't just learning to come to you ever so briefly and then take off again dine and dash in this case it's not dining so i don't know you need another fancy term yeah yeah absolutely yeah um maybe touch and toss i don't know yeah but our goal again is to be able to have our dog under control after that recall so you know if we do need to lease them up or we do need to you know stop them from running into a road or whatever we have those options so just kind of build that piece into it but hopefully that answers the extra piece about re-importing i think anything your dog finds valuable can absolutely be used as part of the process yeah i love your everyday part of that like you are absolutely layering it into every day it's it's just something you can do all the time that's oh what a gift and for something that's a valuable uh behavior that we all need yeah um we did mention choice earlier how does giving dogs choice actually improve their reliability rather than weaken it yeah so while we don't want our dogs to consciously stop and think on individual um reps right like we don't if we're out in the real world and we're trying to recall our dog away from the road we certainly don't want our dog to pause and think then or if we're trying to recall our dogs there's another dog in person approaching and we want to put our dog back on leash we definitely don't want our dog to stop and think then um it does make sense to set up structured choices to teach our dogs that the right choice is to come to us and so the way that i like to do that is i have a game i call the magic bowl game um and when we're playing the magic bowl game the magic bowl has cookies in it when we send the dog to the bowl and has no cookies in it magically they just disappear when i'm calling the dog to me instead and so we intentionally set up reps of differing difficulty based on bowl placement and dog placement and human placement um that allow us to teach the dog that if they make the wrong choice there's no reinforcement available so it's not setting them up to fail as much as possible we don't want to do that um but we do intentionally set it up so that there's a chance that the dog is going to make a choice and that if they make the wrong choice there's no reinforcement involved in that so we're it's a very controlled

structured way of doing it rather than out in the real world where it can fail but it does introduce that concept into the dog's brain where you know right at that key part portion of the of the learning process for this particular behavior um where essentially it introduces that like thought in the back of their brain that oh when mom calls me the other thing is going to become less interesting actually doesn't pay off to choose something else what pays off the most is going back to you know mom or dad or whoever's calling me so that sounds like it's also the layering in distractions right so sure how do you gradually build reliability around distractions yeah um rep by rep right we start small so we for sure uh use like a series of games in the class we we you know i usually start with really really simple easy games that my dog basically can't fail and then keep it fun and reinforcing as we build things i try to set up you know we again we don't really want to test the dog to the point where they're making the wrong choice um i usually tell people in class that you shouldn't use your formal recall word unless you're willing to bet a hundred dollars that your dog is going to come to you uh you know if you're not willing to bet a hundred dollars use something other than your formal recall word until the recall is really well trained and by then you should be confident enough to bet a hundred dollars even in a pretty distracting environment your dog's gonna come to you again by the time you've done 800 reps yeah you've got some reps in your bank yeah you're willing to bet some money on the fact your dog's gonna come but you know when it comes to uh distractions i usually proof my recall for lack of a better term you know against moving things against toys against equal value treats um against uh scents against movement right we take each of those components and break them out individually with different games and kind of teach the dog really truly coming to me is what pays off the best right we we do do it in a structured and controlled way we're not like setting the dog up an environment that's going to overface them or be really really hard we start really simple and we gradually build that up so you know for a dog that tennis balls are their be-all end-all maybe there's a tennis ball in a box in the room that they can see but they can't access right or maybe it's up above where they can reach in the initial spaces right it depends on exactly how ball crazy we're talking yeah yeah yeah but you know eventually being able

to progress to maybe that ball is rolling across the floor and then maybe that ball is bouncing and then maybe that ball is you know each gradually taking that and moving it up and up and up and up and having the dog kind of make the right choice each time because we're splitting it finely enough and we're building up their success level enough with enough reps that ultimately you know we still get the behavior we're looking for nice uh you mentioned kitty cat as a cue earlier and then you said maybe don't use your formal cue i'm just curious what what kind of cues have you heard or do you recommend or ones that stand out that's a really good question um i think my favorite two kind of different cues kitty cat's certainly up there that's pretty memorable um we used yahoo in a couple of the classes uh for me for huey um he's totally gonna wake up when i say this but like uh if you think of like a pig call like the suey so i say huey that way oh i love it he's awake he's like um but so yeah poor buddy um but anyway so that's like his you know his recall cue that means like really no really come right now um i'm as we work through the class materials to make the sample videos and he decided he had to come say hi because you know clearly hi huey um but as i work through the class materials i'm teaching him kind of a more typical recall word just like from scratch to make his videos and stuff so we're using here for that um that is what i use with my german shepherd who i originally went through this material with years and years and years ago uh come is obviously a super common one with me or to me is pretty common um there's the ones i can think of off the top of my head anyway do you think the tone matters for sure i think if you want to be able to say your word in a lot of different tones and still have it result in the same behavior you have to practice that right like that has to be a part of the training a lot of the time though i think it's fine to pick a particular way of saying a word and use that as part of the recall cue so that it sounds the same way every time the closer you can get to sounding the same way every time the better but obviously when you're actually panicky about something that's in the environment you may not say it the same way that you have you know 800 times before so thinking about that and maybe intentionally varying it as you're practicing is helpful too yeah or pick a tone that sounds like when you panic right my friend did that her just bed so it's a really sharp bed like a like

and for what it's worth i know um somebody had asked me if they could work on a whistle recall in this class and i i don't see any reason that wouldn't work you can it's just a cue right like it's just the cue you choose to use and the rest of it that sound yeah nice i'm curious long lines management tools does any of that have a place in reliable recall safe and being safe about it for sure so at some point we need to go from working on really easy baby reps of our building reinforcement history in our house in our living room or in our basement right and take it into the real world and at least initially the handlers at least if the folks that i'm working through the course material within advance of the class to get some videos are any indication a big piece of handlers aren't super confident their dogs are going to come and so a long line or a fence really goes a long way towards giving you a chance to breathe yeah well i think it's good we do need oxygen important part of living and just that stress like if we're feeling all stress i wouldn't want to come to me if i'm a stress ball absolutely that's a really good point uh so you know there's that from a safety perspective um the other thing about that is you know having that long line gives you the option to work on a developing skill in a more difficult environment than maybe maybe you're not willing to do a hundred dollar bet quite yet in that particular environment so we're going to build some baby skills first and then work on the more advanced stuff in that environment right and a lot of the times um i like to use especially when we're working in new places some games i learned from deb jones around focus and attention and starting a session so one of the things that she does is she does uh she calls it rapid fire treats and so essentially you feed your dog very quickly for free when you first get to a new place if your dog can't eat 10 cookies for free they for sure aren't going to be able to give you any measure of work so start there yeah the other thing that i used to do with my in-person classes is um every time we went to a new well we started in our in the training building with the facility um i'd set a one minute timer and the goal during that is not to talk to your dog and not to kind of do anything to solicit their attention but each time they check in they get a cookie and you count how many cookies you give and so how hard is this environment for my dog well in a known environment my dog in a minute checks in an average of you know 20 times right now i go to a

new environment and i do that exact same exercise and i say you know how many times did my dog check in in a minute in this place oh he only checked in four times this is a really hard space for him yeah i'm gonna set up our training scenarios accordingly right i'm gonna play easier games i'm gonna give him easier choices i'm going to do things that increase the likelihood for success instead of really pushing our limits now if i take my dog to a new place and maybe you know at home or in our known training environment we get 20 check-ins and in this new place we got 15 well i'm pretty close to as comfortable as at home and i can probably push things a little more i can probably do things that are a little more difficult it just gives us a really good measure um kind of a where our dog is mentally and how tuned in they are with you know basically just a handful of cookies so yeah that's nice i love that um i'm thinking about sometimes i'll speak for other people definitely not myself um sometimes recall becomes inconsistent i don't know how that would ever happen or maybe optional but if that's happened to someone um is it possible to rebuild a recall that's become optional absolutely i will say my favorite method for rebuilding an optional recall is to start over with new cue absolutely just rebuild it from the ground up if it's once you have multiple reps one rep isn't a big deal like one failure isn't a big deal but once you have a recall cue that your dog has learned is optional it's just never going to be as reliable as a recall cue that's never failed right obviously like dogs are not machines nothing's guaranteed there's always a chance even if you've done a ton of work on a recall that your dog doesn't hear you one time or that something happens and you know failures occur but if it is a thing where your dog is actually not recalling to you most of the time or really seems to stop and think about whether or not they want to come or look at you to see what you have before they're going to come just start over with a new cue it's going to make your life easier it's going to give you a better recall at the end of the game yeah and you know if for some reason that's not an option if you know you have a cue and it's just the word that comes out of your mouth and you know that an emergency situation it's the word that's going to come out of your mouth you know do the work start from the very beginning try not to use the cue other than in training while you're retraining it and rebuild the value

just start literally from scratch where we say the word and we feed the cookie and you know really teach the dog that that thing that previously was a thing that you thought wasn't valuable for you truly has a lot of value associated with it i don't know if it's okay to share a quick story yeah i gave that to my mom uh she does animal rescue and there were a couple dogs she would say their name and say their name and say their name and then she said you want a cookie and they would all come running in the house and i was like mom you do realize your recall word is cookie right so it goes to that reliability and that consistency and so yeah it just made me think about that for some reason i mean in my in my opinion your recall word should be almost as consistently reinforcing as your marker cues right like you think about your marker system it literally means hey you're going to get a thing yeah um in denise's example that she shared in that big long post she wrote you know the thing that she called out was not necessarily as in recall it was the word switch which has a lot of value for him and it's a very specific thing and includes recalling to her as part of that behavior yes and you know that's such a reinforcement history and a habit for him he didn't have to think about it yeah and that's really what we're looking to do yeah i've had to do that where i don't actually use my recall word but i've used my marker word and then that kind of sunk in my head i was like wait a minute what does that say about my recall word your marker word has a higher reinforcement history than it means i need to take your class because i'd love to have you because we're talking about this because you are offering a new class it's the coming together reliable recalls for real life and it is uh through fdsa in june uh is there anything else you want to share a bit more about the class or who might want to sign up because i'm signing up it'd be great to have you in class so the the class does start kind of at the very beginning we assume you have no recall whatsoever we're building value from the word entirely for from scratch and i think for some people you know they're gonna look at week one lectures and they're gonna be like oh this is really easy that's kind of the point right we want to have games that are super simple maybe even your dog already knows the game and we're adding the recall picture into that so we have a foundation to build off of we want those first you know 140 reps to basically be really easy really rewarding reps for your dog that first week should be about you know word means

food word means reinforcement word means whatever that reinforcer is for your dog but really intentionally building that piece um the uh so the class starts at the beginning we build all the way to a fairly proofed recall i am trying to give you guys enough that you know you can kind of work beyond the class if you want to you can continue to build a new environments and advanced pieces um as far as who might want to take the class if you've got a young dog a puppy somebody just about to hit that teenage year it's a great time to take a recall uh so that you've reinforced that thing captured kind of that puppy follows me behavior and now you're turning it into something that's a little bit more reliable that you know will kind of hold up as your dog gets a little bit older somebody who really wants to do off leash hiking or really wants an off leash reliable dog um great fit for this class it's absolutely a great opportunity to build up those skills so that you're confident as the handler that if you get into a situation you call your dog they are going to come and so that your dog actually has those skills at the level that you might want them um one note that this class is not for uh if you do have a dog that's very prey obsessed if you have a dog that like really truly wants to hunt and kill prey animals in the environment uh or that i always think of tracy mclennon's story about her own dog who would disappear into the woods for hours on end hunting prey wow and she had no way of getting him back right if you are an extreme case in that type of scenario tracy does offer classes specifically for those types of dogs and i don't have the same experience she does in that particular arena so if you if that is your very particular nut that you can't crack i'm going to recommend you take tracy's classes instead certainly you could still work through the recall class i don't it won't hurt anybody right like it's not going to do damage to your recall in any way or form um but you for sure will be best served by either also taking her class or taking her class instead because that's really what she specializes in she really understands that brain in the dog and like how that kind of fits into all of the sciencey bits um for training around that particular issue but otherwise it basically if you want a better recall you're welcome so i think about my two retired seniors i've kind of uh gone slack on my recall with them so it might be good motivation for me to go okay guys i know you're retired but yeah yeah what a fun way to i mean it really is just a series of fun games and so just a

little bit of using your brain and a little bit of you know making the right choices and a little bit of focus stuff and a little bit of you know doing the thing when i call you yeah i will say with the seniors you've also got that hearing thing that maybe comes a little bit but yeah there's that yeah but it's kind of an interesting because i think about the puppies and then kind of the seniors become almost similar to the puppies in a lot of ways so yeah this might be kind of fun for them yay i'm looking forward to it i'd love to have them so yay well it feels so fun to say this but thanks so much for coming on the podcast melissa thank you so much for having me and definitely thanks to our listeners and our viewers and our viewers right uh for tuning in melissa will be back in the host chair next week this time with brona daily about dogs with big feelings around agility if you haven't already you should subscribe to this podcast because it rocks it's either in itunes or the podcast app of your choice or now on youtube so be sure you never miss an episode today's show is brought to you by the finzy dog sports academy special thanks to denise finzy for supporting this podcast music provided royalty free by bensound.com the track featured here is called buddy editing provided by chris lang thanks again for tuning in and happy training