Clean Run - June 2017 - 50

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But My Dog Knows That!
By Elaine Coupé, photo courtesy of author

But my dog knows that! This is a
phrase or complaint I hear often when
working with a client. I hear it most
frequently in relation to weave poles
and contacts, but it could apply to anything: a down on the table, a backside
of a jump, coming in to the handler
when called, tunnel/contact discriminations, and so on.
My response is almost always "how do
you know?" How do you know your
dog "knows that?" Answers tend to
range from "well, he does it most of
the time" to "she only messes up in trials." The answers always seem to lack
one thing: some substantive proof that
the dog should indeed "know that."
Recently I had a student whose dog
was missing weave pole entries at trials. Once the dog was in the weaves,
there was no problem with her performance. But entries? Ah, there's the rub.
In class, the dog was decent at entries
if the handler could be in the right
place at the right time. When the handler noticed her dog actually starting
to avoid weaves at trials, she decided
it was time for action. The two of us
sat down and had a discussion, and
one of the first things she focused on
was that her dog "knows" the weave
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poles. My question was "how do you
know?" Where's the proof? We'll skip
all the verbal attempts that were made
to demonstrate to me that her dog
did indeed know weave poles. I simply
kept asking her "what is your dog's
percentage of success?"
Before continuing, I must digress just
a bit. I attended two chicken camps
with Bob Bailey years ago. For those of
you that don't know who Bob Bailey
is, the short synopsis is that he trained
animals-dogs, cats, dolphins, pigeons,
chimps, chickens, and almost everything from aardvarks to zebras-for
over 50 years with his wife Marian
Breland Bailey. One of the things he
stressed in the chicken camps was that
when you were training animals for
your living, you couldn't waste time.
You had to know when it was time to
take the animal to the next step in the
training process. The Baileys ascertained there was a level at which the
animal understood enough to move on
to the next step, but not so much that
they would fixate at the level they were
at. By using this information, a trainer
could confidently introduce the next
step in the process knowing that the
animal had learned the current material
well enough to be ready for more.

This "magic" level is 80%. If an animal
can correctly do the behavior 80% of
the time for two consecutive sets of
ten, he is ready to move on to the next
level in the sequence. You need two
consecutive sets of ten to be sure your
dog really does understand the current
material before moving on to the next
step; in other words, with only one set
you didn't get lucky because your dog
was just having a really good day. This
will maximize your dog's success and
minimize mistakes and confusion.
So let's continue with my student who
told me her dog understood weave
poles. She said her dog was easily
at 80% success if she didn't include
entries! Whoa, wait a minute! Aren't
entries an essential part of weave
pole performance? So I told her to go
back and check her dog, keeping track
of where the failures were as well as
tracking her successes. I specified that
she was to do at least two sets of ten
or four sets of five.
The results were eye opening for her.
When including missed entries as mistakes her dog was only at about a 60%
success rate. Her dog's avoidance of
weave poles at trials could be tied to
the dog's confusion about what constiClean Run | June 17
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