Problems Don't Stay Fixed

I thought I might mention something that I've been thinking about lately.

I don't know whether it's true for all field dogs (2Q and 4Q alike), all 2Q dogs only, particular breeds, or just my dogs because of flaws in my training methods. But the fact is that with Lumi and Laddie, some training gets accomplished once and permanently, while other training does not. For some problems, the problem gets fixed and then comes back. For those, we practice some drills to fix the problem, it stays fixed for awhile, then creeps back in.

A case in point is pick-up speed with birds. This is really a complex of problems. The dog may simply not want to pick up the bird for some reason, but other issues may also occur: The dog may be finicky about getting the bird positioned just right in her mouth. Or she may want to "shop" if several birds are in a "pile" (that is, a small grouping), picking up one bird and then putting it down and picking up another. Or the dawdling might be a resource-guarding maneuver, intended to give the dog as much alone-time with the bird as possible. At the extreme, the dog may actually put a paw on the bird. That's a serious matter, it means the dog is getting ready to try to pull the bird apart and eat it. Fortunately, neither of my dogs has tried that in a long time, but I continue to see the other behaviors I mentioned intermittently with both my dogs.

We can discuss specific approaches to addressing these problems if you like, but my main point in this post is that problems like this do not seem to go away permanently. Unlike many other dog sports, field retrievers are subject to enormous natural temptations during performance. As the Kellers described in their seminal 1950s article "Misbehavior of Organisms", situations arise where no amount of operant conditioning seems able to permanently defeat what the authors called "instinctive drift". For a competition field retriever, every series presents those temptations.

To me, it seems that in a sport like obedience or free style, challenging though those sports are, instinctive drift presents a minimal challenge. Even with agility, as enjoyable as the obstacles may be for the dogs, at least the handler is always in fairly close proximity, which significantly increases the handler's influence. But in field work, you have the combination of enormous suction from the dog's instincts, combined with distances measured in tens and hundreds of yards: 120 feet would be an exceptionally short retrieve for a competition retriever. Both my dogs retrieve from 1000 feet away or more several times a month.

The moral of the story is that you're never finished training some behaviors in field work, including some of the most basic building blocks. For a 4Q trainer, this means that the dog probably wears an ecollar during every retrieve except in competition. I'm not a 4Q trainer so I'm not sure about this, but I have the impression that routine -R reminders for slow recalls, sits, and pick-ups occur fairly frequently -- several times a season -- invisible to bystanders who may not even see the dog react to the nick/burn/stim. The bystander just sees what appears to be reliable, enthusiastic behavior.

I think a 2Q trainer needs to be equally vigilant, or even more so because laboratory experiments show that -R is the strongest quadrant, and we don't use that. For my dogs, the most effective solution I've found is what I call a Walk Out. I call "no, sit", walk or run to the dog, gently take away the bird if the dog has picked it up, and walk the dog back to the start line. At that point, I usually re-run the dog, but sometimes I run my other dog to pick up the first dog's bird. In one case training with a group, the group leader asked me to put the dog in the van and not run him again for the rest of the day. I think he believed that the dog would learn more from that than running the dog again, and I've heard others say the same thing. The method doesn't appeal to me, since it doesn't give the dog an opportunity to immediately compare outcomes between correct and incorrect responses, but maybe for something as well-known to the dog as a retrieve, that's not necessary at that point.

The Walk Out makes a powerful short term impression on my dogs, improving their performance dramatically for the remainder of that session and to some extent over the days that follow. But the impression seems to wear off. So far, I haven't found a long term solution to the pick-up speed issue. Since Lumi and Laddie are much better in that regard now than they were, say, a year ago, perhaps it's just a matter of time before such problems go away for good. I'm not going to count on it.

I think as dog trainers, we're used to building one behavior upon others that by then have been trained to fluency. Of course that's true in field training also. But I think you also have to always expect, and be prepared to respond to, breakdowns in the basics.