I Was Right!
My class students have heard me say many times, “When your dog fails, he fails. When your dog succeeds, he learns.” I bring this up most often when we’re working on Stay. My pet peeve is our human tendency to prolong the Stay if the dog is succeeding. People take a step back, and if the dog is still staying, they take another step back. The problem with this method is that the stepping back doesn’t stop until the dog breaks the stay, so we’re setting the dog up to fail!
I want one step back and then get that reward to the dog before he moves! It is the responsibility of the handler to make sure the dog succeeds as often as possible! Slowly, depending on continued success, we add more steps...one at a time.
I know there are more traditional trainers who see this as a sissy way to train. I’ve seen the Stay trained in many different ways. For example, the outdated practice of putting the dog in a sit with a choke chain and leash on. The dog is enticed to move, sometimes by being called, and receives a painful jerk of the leash when he moves. Kinda sneaky, don’t ya think?
Well, guess what? According to researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, it looks like learning takes place as a result of getting things RIGHT instead of getting things WRONG! Just as I'd suspected. The researchers at MIT used monkeys in their study and found the following:
“"If the monkey just got a correct answer, a signal lingered in its brain that said, 'You did the right thing.' Right after a correct answer, neurons processed information more sharply and effectively, and the monkey was more likely to get the next answer correct as well," Miller said, "But after an error there was no improvement. In other words, only after successes, not failures, did brain processing and the monkeys' behavior improve."
Hey! Doesn’t that sound similar to what I say? “When your dog fails, he fails. When your dog succeeds, he learns.” Oh how I love to be right! And now I know why.
I hope you’ll read the whole article about this study and pass it on!
