Celebrating Small Victories & A Reminder About Reinforcers
I had a wonderful breakthrough with a beautiful Dalmatian named Lucy this week — Lucy is a very insecure girl who reacts to strange people and especially strange dogs because she's unsure of them. Her family has been working with me to teach her better coping skills so that they can take her out and enjoy walking without the stress of waiting for her to explode at passersby. She's been practicing foundation skills like focus on leash manners at home and has been doing awesome, but we needed to begin to teach her to generalize these skills in new environments and in the face of new distractions, so we went to Andy's Market where we could work in a quiet spot in the parking lot.
Lucy was too amped up to take food treats at first, which is common when dogs become overstimulated. We spent some time letting her smell the area, showing her our relaxed, low-pressure body language and waiting for her to check back in with us. A lot of times, our dogs are used to doing very exciting and stimulating activities when we go out, so it's good to teach them that sometimes we can just go somewhere novel and hang out and do nothing! After a while, her focus started to come back to us but she still wasn't taking high value treats. I asked her mom if there were any toys that Lucy might be willing to work for and she laughed and said she loved to play tug with a kitchen towel that she happened to have in the car. I asked her to go get it in and BINGO, we we able to start working!
This is a great example of the fact that our dogs get to choose what is reinforcing, and sometimes we have to get creative in order to figure out what that might be (more on reinforcement here)! After working on voluntary eye contact with the tug reinforcer for a while, Lucy was able to relax and begin to take food treats, too. We had a great evening checking out shoppers from a distance as they unloaded their groceries and practicing our loose leash walking skills in the parking lot.
Great job Lucy & family!
This is a great example of the fact that our dogs get to choose what is reinforcing, and sometimes we have to get creative in order to figure out what that might be (more on reinforcement here)! After working on voluntary eye contact with the tug reinforcer for a while, Lucy was able to relax and begin to take food treats, too. We had a great evening checking out shoppers from a distance as they unloaded their groceries and practicing our loose leash walking skills in the parking lot.
Great job Lucy & family!
