July/August 2010 - Dogs Naturally Magazine

Part 3 Getting Behavior
Dogs are always behaving. Your job as a trainer is to convince
your dog to do the behaviors you like by reinforcing
the behaviors you like. The problem is, you have to get that
behaviour in the first place! Fortunately, there are several
ways to set your dog up to start doing the behaviors you
want, although some are much more effective than others.
© K Delong Photography
Luring
Luring would involve having the dog follow a cookie or toy
in order to produce the behaviour you want. An example of
this would be putting a cookie on his nose to entice him to
sit or holding it up to your face to get eye contact. There are
definite limitations with luring. The first problem is the
timeline: you are putting the reinforcer before the intended
behavior. You learned in Part 1 that consequences drive
behaviour. If you intend to teach your dog to look at you by
luring him with a cookie, then you must be aware of what
he is doing when you pull that cookie out of your pocket
because you will be reinforcing that behavior. This is a
problem with luring: the trainer can inadvertently reward
an unwanted behavior. If your dog looks away and you
then pull out a cookie to lure him to look at your face, you
are rewarding looking away because it is that precise behavior
that makes the cookie appear.
This brings us to the second problem with luring: it rewards
passivity. Clicker trainers love behavior: the more
behaviors a dog can give you, the faster and better we can
teach him which ones you want. Trainers normally bring
out lures when the dog is doing nothing and the dog quickly
learns to do nothing because that is exactly what earns him
reinforcement.
The third problem with luring is that the dog is not actively
involved in the learning process. If you lure the dog into a
sit with a cookie, the dog is not thinking about the sit, he is
thinking about following the cookie. The sit just happens
and there is little learning occurring. Once again, the dog is
passive in the process.
Finally, luring can be very reinforcing for the trainer because
the dog actually does the desired behavior very
quickly. The problem is, you want the dog to learn, not just
behave. The dog will be a lot more reliable if he is actively
learning, not just following cookies.
Prompting
Prompting is similar to luring although you would use body
language to persuade your dog to do the things you
want. You might blow in your dog's face to teach him to
wave or start running to teach him to come when
called. Prompts have the same limitations as lures.
Capturing
Capturing would be waiting for the dog to offer the behavior
himself and reinforcing it when you get it. If you wanted
Dogs...Naturally! July/August 2010
by: Dana Scott