#but as with most things Sarah Stremming it's concept based and so not that helpful

[blueboyluca]

I practiced a bunch of crosses last night and Topaz was amazing! But also her ringside skills are so bad it's embarrassing. I have to stop bringing her on Tuesdays because she just practices all the behaviour I don't want while I'm trying to coach my classes. Ringside skills are so hard to train. If I can't give her my full attention she loses her mind. And I can't keep letting people see what's happening and think it's acceptable. I don't want to set a bad example.

[theadventurek9]

I found this slightly related to the discussion about tolerance and FF bitework a few days ago. I have a hard time grasping the full use of errorless learning. In this article she advocates the dog learning resilience to frustration through puzzles and what not instead of trying to implement it into our training plans.

I can admit that I have relied heavily on negative punishment causing frustration in training. There have been so many times that Aayla has gotten stuck on a behavior. She will forget the original task and start offering other behaviors. I can see how this is a trainer error and that I’ve moved too fast for her. We do want our rate of success to be higher than the rate of failure. Yet with such a driven and forgiving dog, she continues to work. While other dogs may choose to check out.

At the same time I really still wonder on how the dogs cope with handler errors that relate to frustration. That handler error recovery is important, which I don’t think handler free puzzles can really help with. I think specifically of agility, where the handler trips, forgets their course, gives a sloppy cue, or in general confuses the dog. Anything that makes the dog go ‘what?!??’

Yet at the same time I do really really like what Sarah Stremming says in a lot of her blogs and podcasts. (I’ve found a few things I disagree with, but they are not typically training related) I believe if she is saying it, there is a great point behind it.

Then again, I start to wonder about when a dog gets frustrated or something isn’t working we teach the dog that they are wrong, and need to try again. So say there is a handler error the dog may in fact believe that they did something wrong. I’ve seen it so many times that a handler (myself a lot of the time) mess up their handling and send the dog in the wrong direction. We typically will stop and redo the sequence.

If I have to repeat a sequence, Aayla gets discouraged pretty easily. She will run slower and more carefully. Often giving very mild signs of stress for lining up to the start of the sequence and is delayed for her start button behavior. I’ve started play more exciting games when we have to do a reset, or rewarding every time we reset. I don’t use corrections as a part of my agility training. She is sensitive enough to respond to my own frustrations and mood though. Yet some part of me is wondering that she is getting frustrated because of our trial and error based learning. That she is slightly shutting down on me because she can’t figure out what she is doing wrong, when most of the time it’s me.

I’m always trying to improve my own training skills and learn more. I’m slightly conflicted on the concept of letting the dogs build up a frustration resilience or to strive hard for errorless learning. Better trainers have less errors, yet I’m confused how shaping falls into this as well. I’ve had a lot of fun with shaping, but at times its takes a while to get start of a behavior and there is a lot of attempts at things that are failures. I wonder how that falls in.