DOC is our Environmental Management Protocol. It is designed to help dog trainers learn to passively handle their dogs through shaping and reward and repetition.

The concepts of On and Off can be taught quite quickly by marking the off and tossing a cookie. The dog leaves the Spot to go grab the cookie and then immediately returns to earn more cookies for doing the Spot again.

Change the venue of your multiple dog working environment. Start to generalize the environment.

Adding action by way of the distraction dog while maintaining a working relationship with the working dog.

Paying the Release of a duration behavior is important as duration is defined by the Release. Without the Release, duration can’t happen. It’s also important to have the dog seek out the handler for reinforcement after the duration behavior has been performed.

A sample session of working multiple dogs on taking turns using a pedestal.

We have the Working Dog, the dog holding the duration behavior and a Distraction Dog(s) that is doing stuff.

Set Position

When we set the working dog on their Spot or Pedestal, it would be a good idea to use a very high rate of reinforcement not unlike Step 2 from last week – Creating Desire for Duration.

At Pawsitive Vybe, any time we encounter a challenging situation or absolutely must have the dog hold position (pictures, filmwork) we go ahead and revisit the foundational aspects of this behavior, namely Desire for Duration. We trigger, or rekindle, the memory of the learning process, they get tons of cookies. Then we release the dog.

3 Successful Reps

Before working with the Distraction Dog, we need a few reps of the Spot Behavior for the Working Dog. We need to get our Working Dog successfully released 3 times before we add the Distraction Dog.

Reinforcement as Distraction

Last week we talked about giving our dog a cookie … Read More »

In this Video, Apryl Lea and Pan work on a Pedestal, or raised spot. The intent of the session is to Manufacture the Approach and Generalize the Handler position.

While it is true that dogs do not generalize as well as humans, generalization may be enhanced through training. And the dog surely won’t be able to generalize unless they practice. Generalizing the spot behavior is critical to being able to use the skill successfully in our daily interactions. We need to be able to put our dogs in many different spots, as it is not practical to always have ‘your’ Spot with us.