Hey! It turns out I have some bragging rights I haven’t collected on. So here goes.
Back in Spring 2013, I wrote two posts about practical issues with multiple dogs that were both quite popular.
A Secret for Training Two Dogs delineated a trick I learned about how to train one dog to wait quietly, unconfined, while another is actively trained.
The Right Word: Reducing Errors in Verbal Cue Discrimination is related to the first, in that it described how I taught my dogs their unique cues for individual releases. If you train more than one dog, and they are waiting quietly as mentioned above, you need to be able to tell one that it is her turn, right? And the others need to ignore that cue and wait for their own. I taught the individual release cues following the guidelines of errorless learning (which I refer to as reduced error learning, following the terminology lead of Dr. Susan Friedman).
Both of the above posts had movies attached with real life training.
At the end of the movie about teaching individual release cues, I was still working with the dogs one at a time, but I promised to show more as we improved. By this time, almost two years later, I use these cues virtually every day.
It seems that stays, boundary training, and releases are trendy “show-off” exercises right now. So I’m going to show off a little, but I also want to direct people to the idea of using positive reinforcement to train these very useful behaviors.
As it happened, I taught the releases with almost pure positive reinforcement. There was a tiny bit of extinction, for when the dogs made wrong guesses, but I minimized that as well.
In today’s video I am showing the end behavior as I use it in my house. If you want to see how I trained it, click on the blog names above.
Link to the video for email subscribers.
Link to my YouTube playlist: Helpful Behaviors for Households with Multiple Dogs
I would love to see a proliferation of positive reinforcement based videos of individual releases and boundary training with happy dogs. Anybody else up for it?
© Eileen Anderson 2015 eileenanddogs.com
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