The Dog Training Triad Part 2: Rewards How To Train Your Dog With Love And Science - Dog Training with Annie Grossman, School For The Dogs

Once you've set the stage to up the chances that you'll get lots of behaviors you want (see The Dog Training Triad Part 1), you'll need to figure out how to reinforce those behaviors. In this episode, Annie discusses: -The difference between reinforcers and rewards -Discerning whether something is a reinforcer -Figuring out your dog's individual reward cornucopia -Understanding rewards as currency -The changing value and appropriateness of rewards -"Real life" rewards -The importance of treat size when using food Read more about this on our blog: schoolforthedogs.com/rwrds 

Products mentioned: Lamb Lung - Liquid Treat Dispenser -  Kalles - Tricky Trainers
"Big Rock Candy Mountain" cover by Nicole Toombs
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Partial Transcript:

Annie:

Hi, there. This is the second episode in a three-part series on the training triad. The training triad is made up of three things: management, reward and timing. And, in my opinion, these are the three big things that you need to consider when you're creating any kind of positive reinforcement based training plan.

So in the last episode, we talked about management and management is just setting the stage for your learner to succeed, really creating a path where you are definitely going to get lots of behaviors you like, I like to call it the yellow brick road. So it’s a path that has boundaries which make it impossible to get a lot of behaviors that you wouldn't want. But within those boundaries your dog is going to have a lot of opportunity to do all the things we want him or her to do. And we talked about different ways you can think about management: you're going to physically manage their space, manage their time and you're going to manage their energy. So definitely go back and listen to that episode.

But now we are going to be moving onto the next step. So you have this well thought out path where your dog is going to be engaging in lots of appropriate behaviors, things you want him/her to do. Now what? We need to communicate to the dog that we like all these behaviors that are going on. We need to encourage these behaviors and how are we going to do that? Well,  we're going to reward them.

I’m using the word reward here, rather than reinforcer, but truth is to use these words pretty interchangeably, I find most dog trainers do which is really fine but I just wanted to explain the difference even though, like I said, we often just use one word instead of the other. But the truth is that not all rewards are reinforcers  and not all reinforcers are rewards.

Technically speaking, reinforcer is anything that encourages the likelihood that a behavior is going to happen again and usually those are rewards. Right? Anything that your dog likes is gonna be reward. And if your dog engages in a behavior you like and you reward appropriately that behavior should be reinforced. The thing is there's another kind of reinforcer which is called a negative reinforcer so the reinforcement that we usually think of we think of that reward is now good stuff right: money, love, affection and attention, but a reinforcer is anything that encourages a behavior, that’s the definition of what a reinforcer is..

Full Transcript available at Schoolforthedogs.com/Podcasts