Most dogs learn to sit pretty fast. It is often the very first thing we teach a dog. When we teach a dog to sit we’re teaching them to put their bottom on the ground, often lining up directly in front of us to receive the treat. Excellent!
The challenges come when things start to happen around us when we are out and about with our dogs, like when there’s a distraction, like a person, dog, or cat on your walk. Will your dog still sit when those things happen? If they could it can bail us out of some tricky situations. If your dog is sitting, then they’re not jumping, begging, chasing, or doing some other rowdy, unruly, or potentially dangerous behavior.
When we’re working on sit as a foundation behavior, one that they have essentially mastered, and one that we can use to help manage a dog in a multitude of situations, dogs come to understand that the word “sit” means to put your bottom on the ground no matter what’s going on around them. It may sound easy, but this can be a pretty challenging request for many young playful dogs that are having such a good time with their buddies or who are distracted by the many things in the outside world.
Trainers sometimes call working around distractions in an attempt to strengthen behavior proofing. With this kind of practice, we’re proofing the behavior so that it becomes more reliable around distractions.
The basic trick in proofing is setting the distraction at a level that does not yet throw the dog off too much. There is a direct relationship between the likelihood a behavior occurs and is relationship to reinforcement. Behaviors that access reinforcement more readily will happen more frequently and more often in situations where the reinforcement is available. This truism called the Matching Law, is clearly evident when we are trying to choose a restaurant to go to, or a movie to watch. We move toward the one that we think will pay off the best for us. Dogs are no different!
So, if chasing a crow pays off well, but a sit doesn’t, the dog will move to chase the crow (think Thai food over pizza, if that works for you : ). With creating a foundation behavior through proofing, we must keep this Matching Law in mind. It helps us set up the situation so that our dog is much more likely to get reinforced for sitting and far less likely to get any reinforcement for chasing crows.
More coming…
