Hi,
I've been working with my nine month old Siberian Husky Utiw pretty regularly. We started with come, then sit and stay, down and stay, and leave it. We've also worked on heel, drop it, find it, and various training games.
This is the first dog I've really tried to systematically train in various places; I've trained other dogs in the past but only for simple things and only in easy environments.
I know I've made various mistakes. Especially I've had trouble trying to use a reinforcement schedule; I've basically only read some general guidelines on how to use them (going from treating every time to every other and every third, etc). I think this has led me to moving too fast, which seems to be not only making things difficult now that we are in fairly complicated situations, but also seems to be leading to Utiw forgetting some of the things in easy situations.
Last week I noticed that Utiw was getting a lot worse with lying down; he would usually listen but sometimes only after being told twice or waiting thirty seconds or more. This even just inside the house with minimal distractions. I decided to stop working with anything more advanced and just try to get him to lie down quickly when I told him.
I was pretty successful doing that, and when Utiw seemed reliable with that with voice only and giving treats every other time I decided to work back through the steps we had gone through. The next thing we started on was sitting and downing from a distance (I usually work sit and down together: sit, down, sit...). Once I got three steps away, Utiw started to slide toward me everytime he either sat or lay down.
This is something that he was doing before, but not until I was around 20 feet away. I made a mistake then in just letting it go and moving on to other behaviors instead of trying to fix that.
For right now the idea I have is to stop working these behaviors for a couple days and do some work on heeling. Then I want to return to the sit and the down, at a very basic level, and try to shape his behavior with my hands, not letting him move from his spot when he does the behavior. Then I would move on again, little by little.
My questions are:
Does that sound like a reasonable way to fix the problem?
How long should I work with using hand signals before moving on to verbal? The few times that I did that with hand signals this morning everything was great, but I don't want to move on too fast and have to come back again.
Regarding reinforcement schedules, should I implement the reinforcement schedule at each step of the behavior (before adding distance, distractions, or duration), or should I only do it after certain progress? I'm not really sure on this, and I'm positive it's one of the reasons for some of the current difficulties. Also because I still need to work on being more consistent and systematic in training at all times, and not just during the three or four short formal sessions we do every day.
Thanks for your help,
Steve
I've been working with my nine month old Siberian Husky Utiw pretty regularly. We started with come, then sit and stay, down and stay, and leave it. We've also worked on heel, drop it, find it, and various training games.
This is the first dog I've really tried to systematically train in various places; I've trained other dogs in the past but only for simple things and only in easy environments.
I know I've made various mistakes. Especially I've had trouble trying to use a reinforcement schedule; I've basically only read some general guidelines on how to use them (going from treating every time to every other and every third, etc). I think this has led me to moving too fast, which seems to be not only making things difficult now that we are in fairly complicated situations, but also seems to be leading to Utiw forgetting some of the things in easy situations.
Last week I noticed that Utiw was getting a lot worse with lying down; he would usually listen but sometimes only after being told twice or waiting thirty seconds or more. This even just inside the house with minimal distractions. I decided to stop working with anything more advanced and just try to get him to lie down quickly when I told him.
I was pretty successful doing that, and when Utiw seemed reliable with that with voice only and giving treats every other time I decided to work back through the steps we had gone through. The next thing we started on was sitting and downing from a distance (I usually work sit and down together: sit, down, sit...). Once I got three steps away, Utiw started to slide toward me everytime he either sat or lay down.
This is something that he was doing before, but not until I was around 20 feet away. I made a mistake then in just letting it go and moving on to other behaviors instead of trying to fix that.
For right now the idea I have is to stop working these behaviors for a couple days and do some work on heeling. Then I want to return to the sit and the down, at a very basic level, and try to shape his behavior with my hands, not letting him move from his spot when he does the behavior. Then I would move on again, little by little.
My questions are:
Does that sound like a reasonable way to fix the problem?
How long should I work with using hand signals before moving on to verbal? The few times that I did that with hand signals this morning everything was great, but I don't want to move on too fast and have to come back again.
Regarding reinforcement schedules, should I implement the reinforcement schedule at each step of the behavior (before adding distance, distractions, or duration), or should I only do it after certain progress? I'm not really sure on this, and I'm positive it's one of the reasons for some of the current difficulties. Also because I still need to work on being more consistent and systematic in training at all times, and not just during the three or four short formal sessions we do every day.
Thanks for your help,
Steve