마이클 엘리스의 훈련 의식과 장소의 목적

we have extremely elaborate rituals, meaning I tell my dog beforehand in a different way what we're doing. Like I have a different ritual for search work. I have a different ritual for beginning obedience work. I have a different ritual for tracking. I have a different ritual for a variety of different behaviors, right? And that way I tell my dog before we do what we're going to do, what we're going to do, right? And these rituals are incredibly important because when people talk about why we have engagement, right, the idea that I want you're paying attention to me when I teach you something, but I'm also going to ask you to pay attention to me and not other things in the environment as we move forward in our training. But my dog can't just pay attention to me all the time. It's not possible. You wouldn't want it. You don't want your dog paying attention to you 24-7, right? Not only is it impossible for them to concentrate that amount of time, but you wouldn't want your dog falling around staring at you all the time. You want them to be able to turn it off and on. So how do they know when and where it's appropriate? I have to build in a way of telling them, right, when it is. Telling them when to pay attention and telling them when they can stop. So as soon as I have something to prompt, I begin to cue the dog before I do my engagement work. And I make a cue that I can transfer to new locations. So don't make the cue something that won't be there in the end. So here's the big deal. Somebody we were talking before about letting your dog out and then getting ready to train while your dog's out, right? So I got my bait pouch. I let my dog out. My dog's watching me. I put on my bait pouch. I fill it up with my stuff. I go get their leash. I go out my thing. And now we start training, right? That's my ritual, right? Now later on, I'm walking with my dog out in the park. And I don't have my bait pouch on. I don't have any of that stuff on. Is that dog going to pay attention to you? No. Right? Because the whole signaling system for that was that. They had to see the food. They had to see the pouch. They had to see this ritual, right? So my ritual needs to be independent of that. In the beginning, it doesn't matter if I have the bait pouch there, but that's got to go away. And then I have to come up with a ritual that I can do anywhere. So I have different ones for different behaviors. My engagement one is after I've taken my dog out. My dog's gone in the bathroom. I put them up again. I get myself all set for training.

I know that they know how to pay attention to me. I bring them out. And when I bring them out, I say, you ready? You ready? You ready? And then I have a few behaviors that I teach my dogs. I teach them a spin or a hand touch or something like that. These little reward-based behaviors I've taught them. I do those. And then I go straight into engagement. First, it's ready, ready to work, ready to work. And then straight into, yes, engagement. We do our thing. And then we build on that. And then once I have that, I go practice that in different places. Like I don't take my dog out to the park and try to do obedience. I take my dog out to the far end of the park. He's potty. I'm ready. I pop him out. I say, you ready to work? You ready to work? And I do a short engagement session. I put him up. I go to the Home Depot parking lot. I do the same thing. I go to different places. And at the end of that session, after the short engagement session, I say, we're done. That's my signal that they can turn off again. Right? And so because you're developing attention span, the dog can't pay attention all the time. So they have to know when it's time to pay attention and when you can stop paying attention. Right? And that means that when I say we're done, we're done. I'm not rewarding you at that point if you're sitting there staring at me. Right? Otherwise, they don't believe the cues. We're done. Doesn't mean we're done. If I said we're done and we're walking away and my dog's looking at me and I go, yeah, good, nice dog. Now they don't buy it anymore. They're like, we're done doesn't really mean we're done. We're going to keep going. And so I want to tell them when we're starting and I would tell them when we're stopping. And this is super valuable. Right? Because later on, there are going to be spots in which I need to be able to call my dog's attention on me. When we talk about leash reactivity tomorrow, it's a big piece of the puzzle. If I'm going to ask you not to pay attention to things in the environment, I have to give you an alternative place to put your energy. And in the beginning stages, that's some form of engagement. It's not going to be obedience behaviors in the beginning because your obedience behaviors are not strong enough. Right? Your obedience behaviors, in order to be strong enough, have to be built to the point where my dog will do them and tune out distractions. That's a process. I teach you this behavior and then I gradually introduce distractions at low intensity until you'll tune stuff

out. So that means I'm going to be managing you in a variety of situations before I have functional real world obedience. I got to take my dog out to go to the bathroom and he sees something over there that I don't want him paying attention to. Like I need to be able to call him in to focus on me there, but that's not going to be through sit and heal and that kind of stuff because those aren't constructed to a point at which I could ask for them in the face of real world distractions right off the bat. That's a developmental process that takes time. And so this ability to call your dog in in different locations, in different places is going to be insanely useful. Right? And engaging with the handler is one of the ways that I give the dog an alternative to other things in the environment. And this is where lots of people get themselves in trouble. The people taking their dogs out to places when they have no value and letting their dog focus on the environment. And that's the root of a lot of behavioral issues that get started. And then they come to you as a professional trainer and say like, my dog's berserk every time it sees skateboarders. Right? And that's somebody let that get happening. And our job now has to be to provide an alternative to that. And if I don't have a meaningful, valuable behavior on the other end, all I have is pressure and suppression at that point. And there's lots of downsides to that. So this engagement not only is going to be the precursor foundation piece to our teaching, it's also going to be an alternative to other things in the environment while I'm trying to manage and socialize my young dog and things like that as well. I'm not a fan of having the equipment predict the activity. Right? Yeah. Because then if I don't have the equipment, maybe I can't get what I want from the dog. Right? And so I like all of my rituals to be independent of equipment. Right? Now, and I want to neutralize my dog to pieces of equipment too. So for instance, we use harnesses and protection work all the time. Right? But I don't want my dog to think every time he has a harness on, he's going to bite. Right? So I neutralize him to that. He wears the harness sometimes in my work and he wears the harness sometimes when he's not. Right? If it were a young dog who lacked motivation, maybe that connection between the piece of equipment helps him. But if the dog has a meaningful amount of motivation for that, it gets me in trouble pretty quickly. Right? And so for me, I want a ritual that doesn't have any, I like to say, if I do my job right,

I could be naked and my dog could be naked and he's going to listen to me. Right? So that would be the ideal thing. I'm not relying on a certain kind of vest. He doesn't have to have collar X, Y, or Z on. Now, there are many disciplines in which the dog will always be wearing a certain kind of equipment. Right? So you may have a service dog and if he's in public, he's always going to be wearing a service dog vest. So if that's the case, then chaining that, those activities to his vest may not hurt you. Like, because you're going to have it on him all the time in those circumstances. And the only point you don't is in a place where he doesn't necessarily have to perform his job. So maybe it's not an issue. I have lots of, I work a lot with police departments and military trainers who now deploy their dogs on the street with electronic collars. The dogs are always wearing an e-collar. Right? The military working dogs, they have them on all the time. Right? And so once they're in the field, they've got one. So they don't have to be independent of that tool. If those, are those dogs collar wise? Oh yeah. If you were to take that collar off them, are they likely to have the same results? Mm-mm. But they get to wear them all the time. So maybe it's not such a big issue for them. And so that'll be the case too. And I've had pet dog clients that were the same way. Like we'd use electronic collars for recalls and their dog was great everywhere except maybe when they go hiking every once in a while, the dog would want to chase a deer or something where they're hiking. But everywhere else, the dog was completely fine. So they only put the e-collar on the dog when they go hiking and they don't care. Like they're around the house. They don't feel like they need it. They never had that spot. Is their dog going to potentially blow them off without the e-collar? Yeah. Could the dog be wise to that tool and be reliant on that tool to perform their job? Yeah. But it works out for them. So it could be okay for you if you don't care. But I like to have the ability to tell my dog to pay attention to me that's independent of those things. So my rituals are all like verbal and physical sets of cues that have nothing to do with what the dog's wearing or I'm wearing. And I deliberately make sure, like I wear a training vest a lot when I train just because it's convenient. I've got a bunch of pouches. I can stick all my stuff where I need to get them out. But I make sure I do sessions without those too. Anybody that trains dogs, we frequently have

what I would call a training lab, right? So you've set up a room, a dog room, whatever. At the school, we have a training room or whatever. And so we have a place where in the beginning stages, we'll take the dog there, right? It's great. There's no distractions. The dog associates that location with this activity. There's a conditioned response to the location. They're like, yeah, this is the workplace. They come in a drive and it allows me to teach them. But if that is the only place you teach it, you're going to have big holes in your finished training because that's not the environment the dog's going to perform the behaviors in the end. So they all need to get transferred there, right? So, and your rituals, whatever they are, can't be specifically related to location, meaning they have to be something else. And you could build them there. I could say, you ready to work, buddy? You ready to work in our training room and then do my stuff and then start to transfer that to other locations. But you must go through the transfer process. If the environment, if the dog's relying on the environment to connect to the task, you'll have the same sets of problems, right? That dog will go home and won't do any of the things you taught it to do for those other people because it's connected to that one location. So this is part of our generalization process where a skill can be taught in a specific place. And we also, I like to pattern certain activities to certain locations, right? So I would like to say, I want my dog to be especially wound up in this environment. This is especially true of working dogs, but it could be also true of pet dogs, right? So for instance, if I have a companion dog and that person wants to play ball with the dog and, or play frisbee with the dog as a way of exercising the dog, I tell them, don't play in your house, right? Don't toss the ball down the hallway. Like the, in, in the house is low arousal activities. Outside is high arousal activities. We can pattern that. Our dogs know that for work, like a lot of competition dogs know that for working stuff. My dogs come in the house, nothing exciting ever happens in the house. I live with six mile in my house, like nothing exciting happens in the house ever. Like nothing. You lay on your beds, you chill out, you get bones to chew on, you know, like all that stuff. But no training happens in the house per se. Not like the kind of training I would do. They, so if I started, they'd be like all the time, right? So this is a low

arousal zone. This is a high arousal zone, right? And so there's the idea that I can manipulate arousal to location. I can manipulate arousal to behavior. I mentioned already, place beds, low arousal. Touch pads, which is an obedience target. It's a different, it's another target behavior. A place bed is a target. It's a big square target. You get on it. It's a whole body target. You put your body on that target. I have a foot target. You put your front feet on this target. I use them for obedience a lot. That's low arousal. This is high arousal. When I practice foot targets, I make all kinds of motivation for that exercise because I'm going to ask my dog to run great distances to touch it. I'm going to teach it for jumping and all kinds of stuff. And I want my dog to be super jacked up over that behavior. But I don't want you to be jacked up on your place bed in my living room, right? That's where I'm going to send you when I want you to chill out while I watch the basketball game and have you stop bugging me. Or I have a friend over and I don't want you in everybody's face. So that's a relaxed spot, right? If I were using the place bed differently, maybe I want my dog to be excited about the place bed because I have a really bad problem with a dog that charges the front door. And I want to be able to send him completely into the other room to go jump on a place bed when somebody comes to the door. In which case I might make a little more motivation for the place bed before I compelled you to go there. So it depends on how you use it. But I can pattern arousal and intense activities to locations or behaviors too. And so having a beginning training space, like I train in this room, I do these things in that space, that's useful. I can limit distractions. The dog comes in there ready to work. We see it at the school all the time. I have our training room. The dogs very quickly figure out what happens in there. So even dogs come into class after a few days, they're like, yay, the room. They want to jump on the door to get in the room. They're like, that's the good place. That's where all the fun stuff happens, right? That serves us in the beginning. But then I have to transfer that to other places. And then I also have to make them think, if you're doing that kind of training in your house, right? Now, how does the dog know when they're supposed to be excited in the house and when they're not, right? And so you have to start thinking about transferring skills they've learned in one environment to another environment. But you

also have to start thinking about controlling the level of excitement over certain types of activities in certain locations, if you want to make that dog livable. And when you're talking about companion dogs, that's an issue. Like people will say, like, my dog's a pain in the ass in the house. And I'm like, well, what do you do? She'll say, well, she keeps bringing me her toy. And I'm like, what do you do when you bring her toy? I throw it down the hallway for her. Yeah. You've now classically conditioned your house to be the training field, the fun spot. So we need to manipulate those things as we go forward. But having a spot like that in the beginning is super useful. When I start engagement, I don't want to go to the park to teach engagement in the beginning. Don't do it there. Like you're going to teach that initially someplace where there's no distractions, nothing but me. I'm the most exciting thing in the space. There's nothing else for you to pay attention to. That's super helpful. Once I've built it to a certain level, we begin to transfer it someplace easy, a little harder, a little harder, et cetera. And hopefully, if I do my job right, I could call my dog into engagement and my dog will pay attention to me almost anywhere is the goal.