Teaching a dog to park while another dog is working

Lewis and I have achieved two of my personal holy grails of dog training. He can both wait quietly in another room while I train Clara, and he can successfully park in the same room while I train him. Alleluia!

The effects of these abilities are considerable.

Since late December 2021, when I had Lewis, I’ve spent most of my training time with him. That means Clara, my faithful and lovely Clara, didn’t have as much fun training with me. I was exhausted from training and managing Lewis. And she loves working out. As you may recall, we were working on her round titles, um. We haven’t stopped yet. We worked on finding lost items and preserving his other deceptive behaviors. But we don’t work every day like before.

Lewis came to me with a huge fear of missing something. As far as I know, he has no symptoms of separation anxiety or isolation distress. But he had been in a state of deprivation, living in a veterinary clinic for crucial months of his childhood. He suffered from it and also learned a wide range of demand behaviors.

For months I couldn’t do something as simple as leave him in the living room while I took Clara to another room to cut her nails for five minutes. He was screaming and shaking the door. And sometimes open it, damn it. Talk about big reinforcement.

But he learned, in almost five months, that he would get a ride. He will. Not every time, but enough to make it worth it. (Clara would like me to remind you that he’s been out of everything for months.)

I’m not good at precision training, but if you need patience and a slow, gradual progression, I’m your person.

Training two dogs

I wrote a blog post about training several dogs a few years ago, and I still follow that method. The principle of teaching one dog to wait while another receives active training is very simple. I learned it from Sue Ailsby. When training a dog to wait on a mat or other station while working with another dog, form the waiting dog. Don’t focus on the active dog and give the waiting dog a treat once in a while, or even every time you treat the active dog. Give the waiting dog After Warning, After reinforcement. When doing something with the working dog, start with very little movement and immediately return to the waiting dog and reinforce. As you progress, increase movement and object interaction by the working dog and continue to strengthen both dogs in rich ways.

The high rate of reinforcement for the waiting dog will not last forever. You can spread out your schedule later and reduce the value of the treats once they realize that overall they will get their turn. And putting in the work can become the biggest reinforcer of all.

I couldn’t find the videos where I started with Lewis. But here one of my old videos featuring Zani where I take a methodical approach to teaching this behavior. The video below shows my latest triumph: Lewis waiting nicely on a Klimb platform while I take Clara through a very active workout: stepping up and onto objects. It was a long time coming.

Three things about this movie.

• Sorry for the shitty camera angle; I almost cut it.
• I think Lewis is fidgeting as I ask him to lie down on the Klimb because he doesn’t know how to do that yet with his front feet still and there isn’t much room behind him. He realizes it.
• Clara has her left front paw bandaged due to a raw spot on the side of her foot and she is holding it back (superstitious behavior) even more than usual. It doesn’t hurt him to use his paw; I think the bandage is weird.

Next, I’ll teach Lewis to hold his position while I give Clara an object to hold, then finally while I play tug with her. It will be a challenge. Lewis can barely stand it when Clara has something; whatever she has, he wants.

Zen/Leave It/Impulse control with two dogs

Leaving available things alone is a vital skill for dogs.

People have various reasonable reviews of the terms impulse control and self control but I’m OK with them. They have precise definitions in behavioral science. If I had one criticism, it would be that the environment controls behavior. The “self” does not control the behavior, but the consequences and the history of the consequences do. But whatever behavior we call it, we can teach dogs, with positive reinforcement, to leave a present available alone for long periods of time if we start slowly and it’s worth the effort.

Methods for teaching dogs to leave out available food are increasingly based on positive reinforcement. Marge Rogers and I no longer use approaches based on extinction and negative punishment. There are no periods when the animal tries and cannot get the food as part of the training plan. This creates unnecessary frustration. Dogs don’t have to try to grab it and fail to learn to leave food alone.

Instead, I learned from Marge to teach eye contact and blend in with visible food as a distraction. Then expand “this food is just a distraction” to other behaviors. The presence of food eventually becomes a cue to reorient myself and do fun things. To be honest, when I teach behavior, I inevitably make a few fumbles. So there can be a negative punishment if I progress too fast, they go looking for food and I prevent access. My bad; I am not a perfect coach. But I’m getting better at this low error approach.

I started with eye contact, then melted into the food in my hands, then moved the food. Then, once Lewis had the basic idea, I moved on to teaching him to ignore food on the floor (no eye contact required). He now stops and even watches me in real life when I accidentally drop something. Another hallelujah.

In the video we work on food scraps. The dogs are on platforms but I do not require any particular behavior there. I start by placing the food on the floor, then I drop it and bounce it around. Note that Clara’s presence makes the stakes higher for Lewis. There’s another dog who could get the food!

You will also see an error on my part where I am progressing too fast for Lewis, too many kibbles coming to him too fast. When that happens, I don’t even try to stop him from eating. It is reinforced for bad behavior – jumping to grab food. But I’m not worried; I can keep the corresponding law on my side.

I have a verbal signal to leave him: “Pas”, the French word. I chose it years ago because I had taught Summer “Leave It” with corrections and needed an unpoisoned phrase. I sometimes feel a bit silly using it (and people think I’m saying “paw”). But I can say the short word with the plosive very softly and the signal is very recognizable. I think I chose a good word, after all. (Thanks, Lynn Shrove, for suggesting it. I haven’t forgotten!)

However, I practice dropping treats so much that staying away from them becomes default behavior for all my dogs. In most situations, I don’t need the tail.

When I have time to go through my Lewis video series, I will post other actions we took for the behaviors in the videos above. But in the meantime, if I can do it, especially with Lewis, I bet you can do it with your dog too. Know that I understand how taxing it is to have to devote all kinds of time to the “tough” dog when the patient dog just has to be patient. The good news is that this is usually a fixable problem.

It’s such a relief to include Clara in most workouts again.

Similar Items

Photo shoots

Copyright 2022 Eileen Anderson