Hi!
It's Lily here from Dogfullife.
I wanted to chat with you today about 3 of the most common mistakes I see dog parents
make when using luring to teach a new behavior.
I’ll also demonstrate how to avoid these mistakes using clips of me teaching my two
dogs, Patches and Kiko, the behavior “Middle” or “Between” the legs.
If you’re not familiar with the term, luring is a technique where you use food to guide
a dog into a position or place without using any force.
Luring is most often used to teach behaviors like sit, down, or spin because it’s very
easy and intuitive.
But the 3 mistakes that I see dog parents make when luring are:
1. not setting up the environment to make it SUPER easy for their dog to do what they’re asking,
2. forgetting to mark the behavior,
and 3. not removing the food lure soon enough.
So let’s get into how to avoid these three mistakes.
If you’re teaching a child to swim, you wouldn’t just throw them into the deep end of the pool.
You would set up the environment in a way that they would succeed.
So you would start maybe with a bathtub or a kiddie pool, and then eventually as they
build more confidence you would increase the criteria.
This seems like a no brainer but for some reason we forget to do this for our dogs.
For example, if you’re teaching your dog to sit, you would start in a low-distraction
environment and use a non-slip surface.
If your dog sits and their butt is sliding backwards, they’re going to end up popping
their butt back up into a stand or sliding into a down position.
If your dog is sensitive to temperature, think about things like whether the floor is too cold.
Environmental factors like these can make your dog hesitant to perform the behavior.
And when we think about the environment, we have to think about us, because we’re part
of the environment.
So we should think about things like how our body is positioned, whether we’re sitting,
standing, even what we’re looking at.
When teaching my dogs “middle”, I decided to use a very narrow hallway and even used
a box to make it such that the only way to go through was essentially between my legs.
So this made it very easy for them because the only option was to go between my legs.
Then gradually as they started getting good at that I switched up my body position a little
bit to make it just a little harder for them.
In training, a marker is something that indicates to the learner that what they did at that
exact moment was correct.
Markers can be audial (a sound) or visual.
Common audial markers include things like a word “Yes”, or a clicker, or even a
tongue click.
Visual markers are often used for dogs that are deaf, and include things like a hand flash
or a thumbs up.
The reason why markers are so important is that it gives clear and precise information
to the dog so that the dog can understand what it is we’re asking them to do faster.
After you mark the behavior, reinforce it, because reinforcement increases the likelihood
that the behavior will occur again.
Once your dog is able to follow the lure about 3-5 times, make sure to remove the food from your hand.
This is also called fading out the lure.
Use the exact same hand motion you used before, just without the food in it.
This is a very important step when teaching your dog a new behavior through luring.
If you don’t remove the lure soon enough, your dog will start to become dependent on
the food being part of the cue, being part of the picture before they perform the behavior.
Here’s an extra pro tip.
If you teach your dog how to target something, like your hand or a target stick, you can
skip the food lure all together.
Instead of luring with food you could just use the target to guide your dog into that position.
My dog, Patches, is really good at hand targeting so when I taught him “middle” I didn’t
even use a food lure to start.
I just used my hand to guide him into the position.
So I hope you can use these tips the next time you use luring to train your dog.
Comment below and let me know if you find these videos helpful or if you’d like to
see some other types of videos.
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