Improving and maintaining response times by adjusting your strategies over time
When I first got Ellie as a little puppy she listened well and stuck by my side, but as time passed she grew more confident and independent. She began running away to meet other dogs despite commands to stay. She became more distracted and felt less compelled to listen. It was harder to grab her attention and if she wasn’t giving me eye contact there was a significant dip in obedience. That’s when I began considering “response time” as a new focus to our training.
Unfortunately, training response time is challenging and hard to influence without rigorous consistency. My commands are just not as interesting as the outside world and this is problematic because eye contact and breaking away from interesting stimuli can greatly improve your dogs obedience. If they glance at you, even for a second, the command to stay and not chase after another dog suddenly gains more weight and they’re hesitant. So how do you make responding to your voice more consistent?
My original hypothesis was simply that training and rewarding responsiveness whenever possible will eventually yield results based on the assumption that she will grow more bored with the world as she gets older (i.e. there are less surprises, less interesting, engaging stimuli and thus she will become more inclined to respond over time). But this mindset is hard to maintain because it is inherently frustrating when you’re on a schedule, when you want to train, etc. I kept telling myself, “she’s young, just reward when she does give attention, reward eye contact, don’t repeat commands too frequently, just reward for the quick ones.” But I also found myself occasionally forcing eye contact with my hand, pulling her away from interesting things to try and regain control, etc. It made for less positive walking experiences and thus was not an optimal solution. Again the issue being simply that trying to be patient is not always easy and so dealing with a lack of response time is just hard to deal with. One of the other problems with this hypothesis is that it breaks down if you encounter novel stimuli throughout the dogs life. If she gets bored of her normal life, but travels with me to the mountains or a new locale I should expect a dog who no longer listens.
Another aspect of this training is that we often look at behavior as either “good” or “bad”, but there is a third type to consider: “neutral behavior”. Neutral behavior is something that changes frequently based on setting updated expectations about behavior. In this case, “not listening or responding” is neutral because of her age and training experience, but eventually “not listening or responding” will become “bad” if she does well in the future and I update my expectations about what is reasonably expected from her. Neutral behavior doesn’t require a response from you, it is neither good nor bad. Instead it helps diffuse frustration when training challenging commands because you have one additional non-bad area your dog can operate in. Otherwise you might lump in not responding quickly as “bad” when running away from you is bad, but not listening is neutral, and quick response times are good.
So I went back to the drawing board and began to consider new strategies and also what I might be doing wrong. One recent instance came to mind. I was in the elevator with another person and Ellie was overexcited. I tried to get her to sit and eventually had to force her down. I realized after reflection that I was skipping steps here. This is kind of hard to explain but basically I imagine two extreme ends: on the left is an overexcited dog that doesn’t want to listen, on the other a well-behaved, calm sitting dog. I tried to jump from the left to the right without any intermediate stages. First up should have been a resounding “no” to break her focus and tell her that she’s doing something wrong. It probably would have taken a few of those plus a shortened leash and a commanding voice. From there I should have re-positioned her away from the person and focused on getting eye contact. Sometimes this means kneeling down to their eye level so they really know you’re talking to them. From there I should have used treats or faked a treat to get her to pay closer attention followed by a sit command. This would have been far more realistically achievable. The lesson here is to start at the most basic level of a desired behavior and work towards an actual goal. If you don’t know what those stages are this is a good red flag that you might need to study up and reflect on it. Remember, we know what we want, but they are relying on a loose understanding of our desired behavior.
From here I started focusing a lot of attention to rewarding eye contact and treating walks more like training sessions and less like an opportunity for exercise. I stopped forcing eye contact but also stopped looking at this as something I couldn’t train. And from there I began to realize some new opportunities for how to train response time which will be covered in Part 2 (I have to stop writing because Ellie is whining and wants to go outside).