Making Choices: The Dog, not You!

"I don't want him to choose to disobey."
"When you command the dog, make sure you can make him do the command."
"Take away his choices, so he can't make mistakes."

Sound familiar? These are all very common things that you'll hear a dog trainer say. The most common scenario is watching dogs on a leash being asked to come when called and, when they don't, reeling them in with a leash. "They should have no choice whether to come or not."

However, it doesn't matter what you do, once the leash is off and the dog is free, they always have a choice. If you train so that they never have to make that choice and you make it for them, then they'll never know how to make the right choice. They've never practiced it!

I don't make the choices completely easy for Pip all of the time. Once she has a good foundation, I ramp up the difficulty in training so that when she has to make a hard choice outside of training, she's better equipped to do that.

In the video above, I'm giving Pip the choice to either work with me or eat the kibbles on the chair. If she ate them, then the session would have been over and she wouldn't get to interact and have fun with me. That said, this was not an easy session for her, but one where I helped her and praised her for her good choices. I love this session. We both learned a lot.

The reason why you want to use choice in training is that it builds value for whatever the dog has chosen. This effect is stronger if you are NOT using a reinforcer which is much higher in value than the distraction (environmental reinforcer). It's the strongest if the dog has to choose between two similarly valued reinforcers. If the only difference between the reinforcer and the distraction is you, then, when the dog chooses you, it builds value for working with you. You can reward the dog handsomely for the choice, but not bribe the dog.

Here, I do a cold trial. This means Pip doesn't know I have treats or toys on me. She's very bright and happy to work with me. In fact, she's a lot more clear headed here than if she knew I had a toy. (If she knew I had the water bottle, she would not be able to do this. She would be so excited that she would not be able to work at all.) She clearly chose to work with me in this situation, so I rewarded her with her most favorite thing in the world! That will leave an impression on her for the next time.

So, what happens when your dog chooses wrong?

Here, Pip is destroying something. I was filming her and she decided to run off and chew up a notebook. Instead of yelling at her or rushing her or saying "NO" or "Eh-eh," I simply asked her to do a behavior to redirect her and went and picked up the notebook and put it away.

Sometimes, she gets overstimulated and crazy and bites our hands in play when we just want her to calm down. Just asking her to go into her bed calms her down. Now, she chooses to be calm more often and we will even see her trying to calm herself down. She settles easily now, even if she was super overstimulated only a few minutes prior. We just need to ask her to do what we want. And this only works when you train the dog to make good choices by giving her the ability to make choices at all.