조작의 기술 #6

I think we all can agree. We're not going to get great behavior from that dog with respect to the sit-stay. We're going to get great innate behavior in regards to I see small animals I can run and chase and hunt them. And so, at some level, everybody understands we need to manipulate our dog's environment to set them up for success. So, manipulation of the environment means decreasing sensory stimulation. So, decreasing what that dog can see, decreasing what that dog can hear or smell, decreasing it so that you actually have an opportunity for success. And commonly in dog training, we'll call this distractions. We're going to decrease the distractions. So, if you have a child and you wanted to, you know, go back to what we talked about in the episode number four or five about getting a child excited about doing some housework, if you had the TV on and their favorite show was on in the background and somebody was in the kitchen making popcorn and you could hear the ice cream truck going by, the chances of getting the child excited about doing housework are now sliding down. And the same is true when we're teaching or training anything or anybody or any animal. We want to manipulate the environment so we minimize distractions and that includes, so it's two parts when I think, when I talk about environmental manipulation, it's decreasing all the sensory output for that animal availability and decreasing the area. So, if I wanted to teach a dog anything, I want to minimize the distractions by decreasing the area. Now, when I think about manipulation, I think way back when I got into dog training, when I got my first dog that I was training for sport, which was back in the 80s, I was told I need to keep this dog isolated, isolated from any other dog so they couldn't learn how much fun other dogs could be and that they had to learn that working with me was the best fun ever. Some people say you need to tether the dog to your waist when they're further around the house. That's a great way of manipulating the environment. And some sport enthusiasts took this a step, really step, far beyond what I would ever suggest, in that they kept the dog either in a run or in a kennel and they only allowed that dog freedom was to work with you. So, their life was a life of confinement and the only time they got any kind of joy or reinforcement in their life was when they were working on the sport you wanted. Now, I'm not denying that would produce results, but anything I do in the name of dog training, and I would encourage you to have that overarching umbrella of core values. What's really the most

important thing to you? And I think if you're listening to this podcast and you resonate with the kind of dog owner that I am, what's most important is that your dog grow to be confident, they grow to have a deep relationship with you, and they grow to have as much freedom in their life as possible. And so, those things aren't conducive with living their life in confinement. Now, one of the most misunderstood piece of literature I've ever written was my first book, Rough Love. And we'll put a link to the show notes for Rough Love. My mistake when writing Rough Love, people say, oh, don't you regret ever writing it? Well, I know that it has helped a lot of people with their dogs. But it's a very thin book. And so, I didn't detail, I didn't think I needed to detail the overarching core values of what we really want is an amazing family pet who has freedom in their life. And that, you know, your dog will be in confinement when you can't supervise them. Now, people thought I meant, like some of those old performance sports dog owners, that the dogs got to have no joy in their life other than when you're around. You know, confinement should be, obviously when you have a puppy, they need to be a puppy, they need to be in an X-Pen or a crate and not have all these available options for chewing and getting into trouble until they have learned the good choices that allow them to grow those, the freedoms and the options. That's what manipulating an environment for success is. And rules are, in anything in life, can be destructive towards relationships if they don't have some sort of moral, ethical groundwork that involves, or that lays down the goal of having a brilliant relationship. All right. It doesn't matter what kind of creature that we're talking about. So, I'm hoping at this point you can say, see, all right, I can see where a manipulation of an environment could be successful. So, how could I do that with my dog? For me, one of the easiest things when I get a new puppy or a rescue dog in is I'll do training in one of three ways. Number one, could be on a leash. So, I'll just keep that dog on a leash so that the area that they have access to is limited by the extent that they can go out on that leash. But if I am training that dog on a leash and my other dogs are wandering about, I haven't really eliminated all the distractions in the environment. So, if I choose to train on a leash, I need to make sure that the other dogs aren't running around outside, that there isn't outside things that they can hear, that the other dogs are

probably in another room. And when the dog gets better, I might put all of my dogs say in the hot zone on dog beds and then call, they each get a turn. But for that new puppy, if I'm going to train on a leash, I need to eliminate all the other dogs in the environment. Number two thing that would be my go-to is if I have a gated community for that puppy where I have an X-Pen set up, I might go inside the X-Pen again, all of my other dogs need to be somewhere else so they're not a distraction, minimize all the outside distractions. My third and one of the most common, and it's going to be a little weird to you, common things that I do to manipulate the environment for my dog, my puppy when I'm training is I go into the bathroom. I call it crapper training. And the reason I go into the bathroom is it's a small area that puppy can be off leash. So, they have the freedom to choose whatever it is they want to choose. I want to empower my dogs. I want them to know that, you know what, you're in control of all the great things in your life. And so, they have this small bathroom. Now you could say, I'm going to close off the kitchen and I can train in the kitchen. They have a lot of big areas that they can investigate in, in the kitchen, which is going to cut into your training time and also lower their focus for you. Get into a bathroom. When we built this house, I actually designed a bathroom downstairs so that it would be great for dog training. True story. So, if you, when you get into the bathroom, you need to make sure that if you've got like a bathroom brush, a toilet brush, some garbage with tissues, all of those things need to be picked up. So, that you've got the floor and there's a porcelain toilet there. There's really very little to stimulate that dog or to distract them away from what you're going to do. And the number two, most important guiding thing, or I guess it's number three, if I have eliminate all the, or decrease as possible, all the, all the, all the, any, any kind of stimulation, distraction, decrease the area. Number three is you've got to have something of value that is going to captivate the dog. So, the, you want to do your dog training in layers. And the very first layer that I add is the distraction of food because I need to train with food, but I don't want my puppies or dogs to be so focused on the food that they can't focus on what we're doing together. And so, the first layer that I put in is the game, It's Your Choice. It's Your Choice is a super easy game. And all it sets the dog up to do is you make a good choice and reinforcement comes to you.

If you would like to learn more about It's Your Choice, we have it in a, it's part of our Recallers program, but we also have it broken out in a small, a small summit that we invite people to, from time to time, join in on. Any of you who are watching this on my blog, a podcast, or watching this on my blog or on YouTube, or are listening on the podcast, we're going to include a link in the show notes where you can actually get a backdoor into learning. It's Your Choice in a very fun environment. The idea is whenever you are manipulating an environment, success needs to be super obvious, super obvious. So, if you were going to teach a child to make their bed, number one, the task can't be overwhelming. You've manipulated the environment because the bed's in their bedroom. Ideally, there's not a lot of, like you don't have a TV on in that bedroom. You don't have, you know, a tablet available. The dog isn't running around being goofy. It's just you. And you might've made, you know, you're going to say, Hey, let's make the bed. You make the bed. And the last thing that your kid has to do is just place their pillow on top. And then they made the bed. It's a small task. You celebrate, you run out, you do something really reinforcing. And then your child every day sees making the bed as something that's great to do. Let's go to, if you are a team leader like myself, big mistake that I made. The very first person that I ever hired, I apologize to you, Melissa. I didn't set her up for success because I didn't know what that looked like. So, I just hired her and said, yeah, there's a lot of shit that's got to get done because I want to change the world for dogs. So, have at it. And pretty much that was my job description for her. Today, when someone joins our team, we have something called SOPs that are guideline to success. That it shows them how they easily can achieve success. Now, when you make the path super clear, success isn't just, it's obvious and it's inevitable. And that's what we want for our dogs. That success is obvious and inevitable. You're manipulating the environment, but always, always leaving the element of choice in for the dog. So, if we go back to making a child's bed, you might've allowed them, you know, said, here's how we're going to make a bed. Part one, part two, part three, and you do everything. And then the final thing is make a big deal. The final place is we put the pillow on and celebrate, put the pillow on and celebrate. And then the first time you ask them to do, you're going to say, maybe put the pillow

perpendicular instead of putting it parallel to the headboard and say, well, what do we have to do to fix that? They can fix it. And then boom, right? Success is obvious and it's inevitable. That's what we want when we're manipulating environment so that the animal that we're working with can see success clearly. We've eliminated distractions from the environment. We've gone in with a high value reinforcer. We've, and so that the dog, the dog wants to engage with us and, and success is inevitable. Right. And, and as I said, it starts, for me, it starts with, it's your choice and it's your choice. You know, as I said, there's a link in the show notes here, but it starts by putting a high, high value food in your hand and you eliminate the distractions. You might play this on leash. You might play this in crapper training. I like to just sit in a chair and anchor my arm to my knee. And when the dog sniffs at my hand, I don't move my hand. So, here's the thing that people do is you've got to remember, as, as I talked about in earlier episodes, dogs can shape us. And here's a great way they do. You're carrying a big meatball in your hand and the dog grabs at the hand. What do you do? Yeah. You put your hand above the head, above your head because you want to get the food away from the dogs. You don't want them to eat your meatball. And so, the dogs learned, well, dogs are prey driven. So, their prey moves, they're going to try and chase it. And they're going to start maybe jump up and try and grab it above your head. Rather, what we're doing with it's your choice is teaching them, I'm not going to be moving in response to you moving. That my arm is anchored, the big meatball is there, and I need you to ignore the meatball in order to earn the meatball. So, the dog is learning, their choices creates what they want. What we have to remember is everybody who owns a dog is manipulating the environment. The difference is when you're doing it and for how long. So, I choose to keep the dog's environment small when I first get them as a puppy or a rescue dog and grow it when they make good choices. Why would they make good choices? Because we set them up for success by manipulating the environment. For example, our rescue dog, Tater Salad, when he came to us, he had horrible behaviors. He would run away. He would play, he grabbed something, he'd play keep away. You couldn't catch him. And by setting him up for success through many frequent training sessions throughout the day, keeping him in X-Pen so he couldn't chew the furniture, keeping him on leash when we took

him outside, but doing a lot of off-leash work when we could set up an environment that was safe, like a fenced-in environment or in our training building. That has turned him into an amazing dog that we can completely trust. So, you can manipulate the environment early with the overarching core values of your goal being to give that dog all the freedoms possible. Or you can do what most people do, is they get a puppy or rescue dog and go, Oh, I love dogs. I'm not going to control them. I'm not going to keep them in a manipulated environment. And I'm letting them have the life of leisure like, you know, Disney told us they'll all make good choices. And what ends up happening is the dog see squirrels or other dogs in the environment or cats, and they start running off and they ignore you and they don't come when they're called and they do destructive things. And so, you end up having to keep them on leash at every park. You end up not being able to trust them and put them in a small room every time you leave, or you having to manage the environment by putting the garbage on the kitchen table every time you go out. By saying, Susan, I believe this, it sounds amazing. And embracing manipulation, not as deception, but as a tool that allows to develop love and trust. Short environmental manipulation when you first get that dog and tater salad, it was less than a year. When I get a puppy, it's much, much faster because they don't have the history of poor behavior that tater salad came with. Manipulate the environment. Don't allow them to learn the rehearsals of inappropriate behaviors like tater did, which means they only learn the rehearsals that are good. And by the time they're four or five months old, they have a lot of freedoms. By the time they're six months old, they have even more. And by the time they're a year old, they're every bit as trustworthy as any one of my older dogs. That's it for today. I hope you look at embracing manipulation a different way, and I'll see you next time on Shaped by Dog.