반려견을 위한 타임아웃: 반려견에게 타임아웃이 필요할까요? #34

I stop talking. So, if I'm playing tug with my puppy and I, I love to sing to my puppies. It's not weird. You're allowed to sing too. You know, show tunes, anything you like, hip hop, whatever. Keep the language clean though, would you? So, I'll be tugging and I'm on, I'm often just, you know, singing or babbling to my puppy. And if they go from tugging on the toy to grabbing my hand, I stop singing. I stop moving the toy. They get off my hand and back on the toy. Ah! I start singing again. Life is good. Everyone's happy. So, the time out, what we're taking away could be attention in the form of the fact that we are talking. Are we looking at the dog? It could be our motion. For example, if you're walking and your dog starts pulling on leash, you stop that motion. They aren't getting any reinforcement until they come back into position. So, that could be a timeout. These are what I classify as my mild timeouts. So, my attention, it could even be like if a dog was jumping up, I might turn my back on them. So, they don't get my eyes. I won't speak to them. They don't even get my physical presence of looking forward to where they were my body facing them. I turn my back to them. So, those are mild timeouts. A moderate timeout I might use with one of my trained dogs. And it might be I send them to what I call the hot zone, which could be a bed. It could be hopping it up on the table. It could be hopping them up. I say hop it up. That's my cue. So, hopping it up. It's, you know, it's a verb of the cue to hop up. Welcome to the language that is Susan Garrett. So, hopping it up on the couch or in their hot zone. If I decided to give a dog a timeout, again, back to a puppy, I might just take the collar. Let's say that they are grabbing my pant leg. I might take the collar. That's what I call a moderate timeout. A more severe timeout would be confinement. So, it would be putting the dog in a crate or maybe locking them in your bedroom. I want you to make note of all of those are the, those are all the things that I would use if I was using timeouts. And I'm going to go back to the fact when I said off the top here, I believe that when I'm giving a dog a timeout, I'm saying, please will you pay the price for my inadequacies as a trainer? That's what I'm saying to my dog, right? Because that's what I've learned in all the 30 years of teaching and dissecting and watching behavior. And what I've learned is the better we get at reinforcement, the less we ever need to punish a dog. And timeouts are punishment. I already told you

they are negative punishment. And the challenge with punishment of any form, punishment has fallout, in that it creates a small stress. It could be a big stress depending on how severe the punishment is, but even a timeout is a stressor. And the more we use timeouts, whether it be a child or a dog, the more anxiety we are creating for that dog or that child. For example, a friend of mine came to me and said that their son would get excited when he would play with their daughter, their younger daughter, who was a lot smaller. And he would push her and knock her over and she would cry. And they'd send them to the timeout chair in the corner. And when he was there, they would go and talk to him. And he was always really upset and he would cry and he would say he was sorry and he didn't mean to. And it happened time and time again. That's a big red flag. If you're giving a timeout and you're not seeing a change of behavior, then why are you continuing to do this? Right? So, I helped them modify the environment to help their son see how to be successful and engaging with their daughter. And that's my number one rule of giving a timeout. If I am going to give a timeout. Number one, I'm pretty confident that that animal knows how to be successful. So, let's say you come into a home and a puppy starts jumping on you, you turning your back on them. You know, it's a mild punisher. But has the puppy had any training whatsoever on the appropriate way to greet people? Then if they haven't, is it fair to give them a timeout? It would be like you driving your car, you're going through an area, you know it's 50 and the police officer pulls you over and said, you're getting a ticket. You are going 50 and it's a 20. No, it's not. I drive this route all the time. It's a 50. No, we changed it a couple of weeks ago, but we haven't got around to changing the signs yet. How frustrating would that be? You're getting punished and you didn't know how to be right. Welcome to your dog's world. So, you never ever give a punisher a timeout. And that when I say punisher, I'm always meaning timeout because I would never use a positive punisher. Never give a timeout unless you are confident the dog knows the rules and knows how to be successful. All right. So, that's number one. Number two, that training environment is one rich of reinforcement. That the dog is for sure having a great time and they are because here's what happens. A timeout, a negative punishment can easily turn into a negative reinforcement. Now what does that mean?

It means when you say to your dog, you're getting a timeout and you're going to go to my bedroom. Now, if the dog didn't like working with you in the first place, if what you were doing was not that much fun and the dog just started shutting down and sniffing and you said, okay, you're done. Your dog singing Ding Dong the Witch is Dead and skipping all the way to your bedroom. Because all of a sudden you sending them off is a reinforcement. It is not a punishment. So, I see it all the time in the sport of dog agility where the dog is running off and visiting the judge and the dog is, you know, stopping and scratching or sniffing and they're showing obvious signs that they are not having fun and agility. And their owner goes, that's it. You're getting a timeout. And the dog's going, yay, me. I am so happy. This is so cool. So, what's the solution to that? Don't ask the dog to do agility until you're a hundred percent sure that the foundation you've laid is one that ensures the dog is having fun when they're playing the sport. All right. So, that's a topic for a different conversation. But that's the second rule of giving a timeout, right? It is that what you were doing is reinforcing to the dog. So, that rule number one, the dog knows how to be successful. Rule number two, that the environment that you're training in is one that's got a lot of reinforcement. So, the dog doesn't really want to leave it. Number three, your timeout has got to be non-emotional. Right? When we're making that transition, if for those of you who are transitioning from being a balanced trainer or a trainer who uses positive punishment or corrections to one that we're going to use games and reinforcement to teach what we want. When we transition and we're going to give a timeout, if you always say, I'm going to give a timeout, you're going to pay the price for my inadequacies as a trainer. You, it'll be easy to be unemotional. All right. Timeouts shouldn't happen. Oh, get in your kennel. You get in your kennel now. That's not a timeout. That's a positive punisher. That's adding stress. All right. That's, that's not cool. Remember, we're giving a timeout because we sucked as a trainer. So, let's not make the dog pay that price. Make sure that you're record keeping every time this happens. Because if you see a pattern that you're giving your dog a timeout every single time they see a rabbit or every single time Aunt Martha comes to visit, then you haven't prepared the dog how to be successful when Aunt Martha comes to visit.

Right. So, if you record keep, you absolutely will know where your dog training needs to focus. All right. So, my next rule, rule number five, the place where you're sending the dog or taking the dog in this timeout when we're using more moderate or severe types of timeouts, like you're telling them to go in their crate or into a room, that is not meant to be scary or bad or like stressful to the dog. The punishment, really listen to this, lean in. Come on, listen. The punishment isn't that the dog's being sent somewhere scary or icky or cold or dark or horrid. The punishment is that you are stopping the reinforcement they're getting from playing with you. Boom. Therefore, it's got to be reinforcing when they're playing with you. So, I've seen people put their dog in a broom closet for a timeout or chain them in their cellar. Oh, nay, nay. That's not training a dog with kindness. So, if I ever use a timeout, the location the dog is going is one that's filled with reinforcement. This goes back to our last episode, episode number 33 that we just put out where I was explaining that when I give a dog a timeout, I'm going to put them in their crate or take them by the collar and take them out of the kitchen or put them in a hot zone. And people might've been thinking, but we just gave them lots of cookies for a collar grab, or we just gave them lots of cookies for putting them in the hot zone. Exactly. If I'm giving them a timeout, I want that the collar grab is 99 times more reinforcing than it is ever punitive. So, if I'm giving you a timeout, it would be, you know, one to 10% of the time that I would grab your collar to give you a timeout. Because otherwise your dog's going to get really good at avoiding your hand if you are grabbing their collar for punishment, or if you're putting them in their hot zone or their crate for punishment, they're going to start putting on the brakes before they get anywhere near that door. Right? So, the location that you're taking them for that timeout has got to be filled with more reinforcement than it ever is used for punishment. I mean, I used to say rule of thumb, a dog in any training environment should have no more than 15% timeouts. You should try to get that to 1%. You know, that should be your goal. A timeout needs to be immediate. You cannot come home and find poop on the rug and then give a dog a timeout. It's not effective. I remember watching a friend of mine, we were driving somewhere, her kids were acting up in their car seats and she told them that they were in trouble. And when they get home, they're going to be… It

was a 30 minute drive. And by the last 20 minutes, her kids had settled down and they were having great conversation with me. When we got home, she gave them a timeout. How does that make sense? If you are going to, it's like there is a moment, there is a magic moment. If you miss the magic moment, you need to set it free and let it go. And just work hard to do better the next time. The moment needs to be timely. You see something, you say, all right, I'm, I think I'm going to make the decision to give a timeout. Now the question is, do you market? Some people say, right, you're getting a timeout. If I ever market, I would say things like, you win the prize. You're going to go to your hot zone. You're going into your crate. You win the prize. And that dog's going to be like, I don't want this price. What, why, why are we getting this price? So, they're going to work hard at not winning that prize next time. That's the idea. So, it needs to be timely and it needs to be a pause to allow the dog to regroup and come back and be successful. A pause isn't counted in hours. A timeout can be a matter of seconds when I'm, you know, just, I might be averting my eyes or freezing or stop my talking. It could be a matter of minutes, but it shouldn't go on longer than that. You know, sometimes it's a pause for me. If I give a dog a timeout these days is more than likely it's for me because I can't figure out what's going on and I need to regroup and go to my notes and see what I've written in my records and see how I can do better. Okay. So, you want to think about how can I avoid using timeouts? And the way you're going to avoid using timeouts goes back to episode number six here on Shaped by Dog, the art of manipulation. You're going to manipulate your environment to set that dog up for success. And you're going to get really good with your mechanics so that your training goes fast and then you could end it. Because if you were sending a dog or giving a dog a timeout constantly, what we're saying is time away from you is bad. What happens when you want to go to work? You're going to be creating so much anxiety for the dog to be left alone or be sent away from you. You potentially will be creating more anxiety when you're not there. So, minimize, ideally eliminate timeout. So, if you know that your dog goes cray-cray and jumps all over Aunt Martha, then set your dog up for success. Train as much as you can. And if you aren't willing to bet me a hundred dollars that your dog's going to have success, then put your dog in a crate. Give them a

stuffed topple or a stuffed Kong when Aunt Martha comes so that when all the excitement of Aunt Martha arriving, it dies down, then you can bring them out on leash where he can be successful. So, set the dog up for success. And you are only, remember, anytime you're giving a timeout, you're saying to your dog, I'm sorry, pal. You're paying the price for my inadequacies. If you keep that mindset, I know you're going to minimize the amount of timeouts you use with your dog. And I know your relationship with your dog is going to soar and you are going to be a great science-based trainer who's going to look for better ways to create solutions for your dog using games and reinforcement. That's it for this time on Shaped by Dog. I look forward to seeing you next time. Thank you. Thank you.