Teaching Bite Inhibition

Whenever I visit a client for the first puppy socialisation consultation I am often asked what I think the most important behaviours to teach a puppy are. While it is of course important to teach your puppy some basic behaviours, and then progress to the Canine Good Citizen Scheme, by far the most important behaviour you should start teaching your puppy from day one is bite inhibition. Simply put, this is the ability of a dog to put his mouth gently on something without applying pressure. In other words, inhibiting the strength of his own bite.

Generally puppies taken from the litter before 8 weeks will need more training on bite inhibition, whereas a puppy that stays with its littermates for longer (the ideal is 10 weeks), will learn bite inhibition to a greater level because it will have had more opportunity to learn through play fighting with littermates.

Why Is Bite Inhibition Important?

Dogs are our companions, our sidekicks, best friends, but we mustn’t forget that all dogs are born with a formidable defence, their teeth. When a dog feels threatened, fearful, anxious, or is hurt, it can react by using its teeth. Teaching bite inhibition from a very early age creates a dog with a “soft mouth” this will greatly reduce the likelihood of any serious damage, if an unfortunate or unpredictable event should cause a dog to bite.

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Why Use Food In Training?

Occasionally I encounter clients who are uneasy with the idea of using food for training their dog.  They somehow see it as cheating, or a bribe. Instead, they ask why it is not sufficient to use only praise and petting as rewards, and corrections when the dog gets it wrong?

Modern trainers no longer use punishment based training because it is out-of-date, unkind to the dog, and much less effective than reward based training. Traditional training is about making a dog do what you want, modern training is about motivating a dog to want to do what you want.

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Classical Conditioning Simply Explained

Classical conditioning is an association between two stimuli. Of these two stimuli, one is neutral and in the beginning has no meaning. The other stimulus is one that does already have meaning for the dog (or human). The stimulus can be pleasant, or it can be unpleasant.

The two main events that humans or dogs don’t need to learn to react to without training are food and pain. Almost everything else is a learned association.

Let’s go back (just for a minute) to Pavlov and the metronome and the dog and the saliva. When Pavlov first started pairing the sound of the metronome just before food was presented, the dogs did not drool. However, over time, with consistent pairing (metronome and then food), the dogs began to salivate at the sound of the metronome. As far as their automatic reactions were concerned, the metronome meant food.

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Top 10 Puppy Training Tips

Reinforce The Good, Ignore The Bad: Dogs are learning 24/7 from the second you get them home. It is all too easy to inadvertently train your puppy to do the wrong thing: this is called accidental reinforcement. A typical example of this is your puppy jumping up. One minute all is quiet, your puppy jumps up at you and immediately you start interacting with him. Eye contact, voice, touch: all of this is reinforcement to your puppy. Now your puppy knows that to get your attention, all he has to do is jump up. The best way is to totally ignore attention seeking or undesirable behaviour and to reward desirable behaviours: it is much better to focus on what you want your dog to do and always remember to reinforce the right behaviours.

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Hand Targeting For Fearful Dogs

There is no doubt that owning and working with a fearful dog can be a challenge. If you own a fearful dog is it very important for you to educate yourself and learn as much as you can so that you can help your dog become less afraid and a more confident companion.

Certain breeds such as working and herding breeds have a natural predisposition to be more suspicious or cautious of new people, objects, events, etc. Therefore if you own such a breed you should make an extra effort to spend a lot of time on quality socialisation, quantity is important too, but by quality I mean that the early experiences your dog has should be positive. It is far more productive for your dog to meet 50 new people in a week and have each experience be good, than meet 100 new people in a week, but 50 of these meetings go bad.

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Variable Ratio Reinforcement

If you are new to clicker training you may well have a concern that you will always have to click and treat your dog for every cued behaviour he performs, this is however not the case.

Generally, when you are training a new behaviour, your dog will acquire the behaviour very quickly if you C/T for every correct response. This is called a fixed ratio reinforcement schedule of 1:1 or continuous reinforcement schedule; meaning that you will reinforce your dog for every response.

Once your dog knows the behaviour and it’s on cue, it’s time to introduce an intermittent reinforcement schedule. There are quite a few different schedules of reinforcement, but the most powerful schedule for strengthening a behaviour and preventing extinction is the the variable ratio reinforcement schedule.

As an example, let’s suppose you’ve taught your dog to sit on cue, and you now want to put the behaviour on a variable ratio reinforcement schedule.

The ratio is the percentage of sits which are rewarded and the variable is the number of sits in between reinforcements. First you decide what ratio, or percentage of sits you want to reinforce. This means that you reinforce 1 in 5 sits, or 1 in 10 sits, or 1 in 20 sits, whatever ratio you decide on. So let’s say you decide to reinforce 1 out of every 5 sits.

You then make sure that you average 1 reinforcement to every 5 sits, but that you vary the number of sits in between reinforcements (hence variable ratio - these names do make sense, sort of). It is very important not to reinforce the dog on every 5th sit, as he will see a pattern emerging. However, after a large number of sits he should have been reinforced on average once for every 5 sits.

So in 20 sits you would reinforce 4 times, but NOT on the 1st, 6th, 11th and 16th sits! You might reinforce the 2nd sit, reinforce the 9^th sit, reinforce the 12^th sit and then the 17^th sit, in other words, the number of sits which don’t get reinforcement is different each time (variable), and the dog has no way of working out in advance which sit is going to be reinforced.

It would go like this:

SIT	SIT + R	SIT	SIT	SIT
SIT	SIT	SIT	SIT + R	SIT
SIT	SIT + R	SIT	SIT	SIT
SIT	SIT + R	SIT	SIT	SIT

A reinforcement schedule like this has the effect of making the behaviour really persistent. For example let’s say your dog is a jumper, loves jumping to greet people, sometimes this behaviour is reinforced through attention and petting, and sometimes it is ignored and not reinforced. Because this behaviour is intermittently reinforced it stays strong and does not become extinct.

It works with people too. People who love to gamble or play slot machines, keep doing so because they have won in the past, or on a few occasions. Las Vegas is the city of variable reinforcement schedule. this is the power of variable ratio reinforcement!

Basic Clicker Training in 6 Steps

1. Charging the clicker
2. Getting the behaviour
3. Marking the behaviour
4. Reinforcing the behaviour
5. Adding the cue/phase out the clicker
6. Adding praise/phase out the treats

1. Charging the clicker is classical conditioning, like Pavlov’s bell, and his drooling dogs. You are going to take a clicker and pair it with a food reward Primary Reinforcer until the click itself gets your dog all happy.

Once your dog catches on to this type of training the presence of a clicker will be enough to get him excited and in “training mode.” To charge the clicker go to a quiet room with your dog and have a bowl of really tasty human food such as hot dog, chicken, liver, etc. cut up into very small treat size pieces. (Treats are best soft, crunchy ones take too long to eat).

Click your clicker once and then treat (click and treat, or the short version C/T) that’s all, then C/T again. At this point you are just charging the clicker so you are not asking for a behaviour (such as sit) here at all. What you are doing is creating a positive association between the sound of the clicker and a primary reinforcer; food. Try not to C/T while your dog is doing the same thing like sitting and watching you, so keep changing your position slightly and move around a little.

Take your time with charging the clicker, on day 1 aim for 5 sessions, and at each session just C/T 10 times. Before long you will notice that when your dog hears the click sound he actually starts to look for his treat. When this happens you are ready to move on to the next step.

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