Stimulus Control

As I have said before, working with a living breathing animal is fun because behavior and responses are always changing and evolving. That means that I am always training Morey because we are always being faced with new experiences and challenges.

Morey and I have lots of routines in life. We have predictable patterns that means I sometimes go on autopilot and act without thinking. Morey does the same thing. However, in the past few weeks, I have been challenged to evaluate the effect that patterning can have on Morey's responses. Because B always follows A in our pattern (or another way to look at it is that A means B comes next) Morey has started to jump ahead and do B without waiting for a cue. He likes to jump the gun and anticipate what I will ask next.

I became aware of this last week as we were leaving work. The door button is out of my natural path of travel to the door and so I drop Morey's leash and have him touch the button. The other day I dropped his leash and right then a person with a cart was coming through the door. I told Morey to wait and he took off toward the door button. He wasn't listening to my cue, he was following a pattern of me saying "touch" when I drop his leash. I called him back to me and told him to "sit". Once again, he started running toward the button. I gave him an "oops" and he stopped and looked back at me. I repeated my cue of "sit" and he slowly sat, giving me a look like "what are you doing? That's not how it works!" I gave him several more cues before I gave him the "touch" cue. Since that day, I have started to mix things up and ask for several different behaviors before sending him to open the door. I want him to listen to the cues I am giving instead of using the environment and pattern as a reference for behavior.

This experience made me go back into dog trainer mode. In dog training, we call that stimulus control. Training a behavior means not only that a dog will do the desired action, but that they will do it on cue and only on cue, kind of like an on and off switch. For example, although I ask Morey to retrieve objects I drop, I need him to do it on cue. If I drop a knife or a pill or something else that I don't want him to retrieve, I don't want his automatic response to be to retrieve it. I want him to wait and look to me for direction-usually either a "get" or a "leave it".

These situations are also true in entering and exiting vehicles. Usually when you open the door the next thing that happens is the dog is asked to jump in or out. Soon the cue to get in/out is the door opening, not the command. This can be avoided by opening the door and then asking for a sit or another behavior so the door opening doesn't always mean the next thing that happens is a cue to get in/out.

The longer I am with Morey, the more habits and routines we create. However, I am now much more aware of the need to vary our routines so that we are both thinking and responding, instead of just going on autopilot. I am often asked if Morey is fully trained. I guess a good response is that yes, he is trained, but he does require maintenance :)