Level 2 Troubleshooting - Week 4
Importance of quadrants; be prepared to talk about the quadrants when we are discussing how we will train any particular exercise going forward.
300 Chickens is an exercise that will allow you to get more behaviours for fewer treats. In effect, it creates a variable schedule of reinforcement. If you do one behaviour for one click/treat, and then two behaviours for one click/treat, and then three, four, five, six and sever behaviours each for one click and treat, you can see that in 7 sequences, you have asked for and gotten a total of 28 behaviours. If you divide 28 behaviours by 7 treats, you can see that you are getting an average of 4 behaviours per treat. This means that the number of behaviours you ask for each time changes, but the average is 4 behaviours per treat. We call this a Variable Schedule of Reinforcement, and we would write this out as VSR4. Using 300 Chickens means that you can build a variable rate of reinforcement that is appropriate to your dog’s needs in that given moment.
If you look carefully at some of the exercises we do in Levels you can see that we already use 300 Chickens! Down stay is actually a variation of 300 Chickens.
Rules for 300 Chickens.
1) Increase behaviours by 1 at each stage.
2) Use only well known behaviours. Your dog must have at least 5 known behaviours, so not a level one strategy
3) When there is failure, go back to 1 behaviour per click/treat
4) Don’t overuse your dog’s name; and don’t wait for his attention to ask him to do a behaviour; if you have said his name, give him the information about what you want him to do promptly
5) 80% rule – if your dog can reliably do a behaviour 80% of the time in the last week, then you can be sure your dog knows that behaviour. If the 80% rule doesn’t hold, don’t include that behaviour in your 300 chickens.
6) Play 300 Chickens often in order to keep your dog’s behaviour fluent at higher levels of work with fewer treats.
Next week we will begin actual connected walking – this is not a rewards-based skill. It is about doing something together.
When you see connection between two people, they make intermittent eye contact. Vs creepy date
Creepy date #1 - the date who never stops looking deeply into your eyes (this is what perfect performance heeling looks like, but it does not always reflect connection)
Creepy date #2 – holding hands but no eye contact, or eye contact only by one person (this is what it looks like when someone steers the dog with the leash, but the dog is straining to go where he wants)
Creepy date #3 – sustained eye contact on different body part than eyes (this is what it looks like when the dog is fixated on a pocket or bait bag)
The goal is eye contact and then looking where we are going, followed by looking back at your partner, every 3 to 8 seconds.
Consider “Buying your date” vs true connected walking. Buying your date is what happens when you reinforce or click every step.
Don’t practice connected walking this week. Continue to practice the scramble and the Level One Step/Click/Treat to solidify your dog’s attention on how your body moves through space.
Homework – go to a public place and watch groups of people. How do you know which people are couples or not, which are on the same agenda, where is there a power struggle going on.