10 Strings to Pull to Manage Drive and Untie Behavioral Knots – Pt 2
The last two installments of this series outlined the behavioral strings and knots metaphor and examined 5 ‘strings’ of behavior and their relationship to behavioral…
Tag: Theory
10 Strings to Pull to Manage Drive and Untie Behavioral Knots – Pt 1
Yesterday’s piece was about how solving behavioral problems is kind of like untangling knots. Today I’m going to talk about the strings that make up…
Pulling Strings and Untying Behavioral Knots with Bitework
solving problems with bitework is like untying a knot. work on one strand or maybe a couple at a time and tug, loosen, and manipulate…
Go Do Dog Stuff: Seven Simple Ideas for Effective Dismissal
What Is Dismissal? Dismissal is the opposite of Attention. Practically speaking, it means that the handler is not available at this time. It does not…
Performance vs Understanding – Human Clicker Game
This is a few minutes of a human clicker game we played at a recent Discdog B&B. The idea here is to teach a person to perform a skill using a clicker…
Performance vs Understanding – Context vs Concept
Performance can be based upon conceptual or contextual understanding. How does a handler communicate conceptual understanding to the dog and avoid per…
Performance is not Understanding
More lessons in this series: Human Clicker Game Context vs Concept Performance is not understanding. Just because a dog has done or is doing a behavior…
Four Qualities of Good Dog Trainers
I ran across this great article on Clickertraining.com. This is how it's done. It's a long article written by Clint Matthews about overcoming an early…
Metaphor and Understanding in Dog Training
In our business, teaching people to do cool things with their dogs, we rely on metaphor all the time to communicate complex ideas. A metaphor can be t…
Success Vs Performance Requirements
Disc dogger's have a problem. We all want to play this game so darned much that it's hard to remain consequent and focused on the component skills tha…
Reframing Reinforcement: Overpaid and Under-Reinforced
I learned this lesson not too long ago with Hops. Focusing on Paying and Rewarding this little Jack Russell Terrorist for good work meant that I never…
Bite as Cookie
When a Bite is offered as a cookie the dog has earned the right to attempt to Bite that object. It's a very empowering experience. The dog learns that…
Anatomy of a Behavior
Most of the behaviors that we create with our dogs are really chains of small concepts and chains are only as strong as their weakest link. Dog traine…
The Consequent Game
The Consequent Game is an infrastructure of communication for learning through play. Performance of target behaviors is tied to energy levels...
Marking with a Finger Point
One of the things we like to do at Pawsitive Vybe is to use a finger point to mark behaviors. The above video is a…
Some Thoughts on Teaching in Drive
A dog that is engaged in drive is often hard to handle and gives many good discdoggers fits. It is important for handlers to be able...
Rewarding with Action
At Pawsitive Vybe, Dogs don’t earn cookies, they earn the opportunity for cookies. When the mark leads to opportunity, dog’s are conditioned...
Generalizing the Pedestal with a Circuit
Generalizing the Pedestal behavior can be done quite easily by creating a circuit of many different pedestals and working them in rapid fire successio…
Humor, Repetition and the Classical Condition
Yesterday, I did a piece on Reframing the Dog’s Understanding of the Door. A couple of the comments pointed out some gaps in the one…
Reward Placement
Reward Placement is a key aspect of Dog Training. The Dog goes where rewards happen.