Tag: r+ recall

Distraction recalls, iteration 5.3.A: off leash, low value distraction (fish), high value reward (cream cheese)

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I’m naming this post iteration 5.3.A because we are still on our 5th attempt at distraction recalls and will be working on level 3 (unprotected distraction, off leash dog) with the easiest new food distraction (A).

August 28, 2023 – location 1: Kiba’s Park

I set up the fish distraction while both dogs were back in the car and hid the camera in some bushes. No scaffolding! Got Chai back out for a surprise recall that wouldn’t feel like a set-up … Well. Turns out I had hidden my tripod so well that I didn’t find my distraction anymore. So we meandered around the area looking for it (me) and enjoying her run or potentially also following the smell (Chai). She ended up approaching it from a different side than I did. I only realized she had found the distraction once she had started eating. I called (off camera) and she responded IMMEDIATELY! YAY! While I had planned to call her before reaching the distraction, this works as well. For most dogs, it will actually be harder to recall once they have started eating something – so we’ll call it a win! Chai enjoyed her cream cheese and then finished off the entire pile of fish. Unlike yesterday, I hadn’t touched it but poured it out of the bag – that alone (not smelling of me but of found food) may have upped its value. Or maybe she was just hungry. In any case – off-leash recall away from unprotected fish in location #1 is a win!

August 29, 2023

Chai didn’t know it was a set-up in either of today’s sessions. In the first one, I set up, tripod hidden in the bushes, and then let her out of the car. She runs back and forth on the path before going in the direction of the fish that I indicate because (I suspect) she is used to be let out of the car together with Game. Game stayed in the car and Chai is likely looking for her.

Location 2: Fresa Parque

Location 3: Toy Play Plaza

Chai didn’t know it was a set-up in this session either. She and Game were chasing squirrels as I poured a pile of fish on the ground. Then we approach and I recalled when they were close to it. Game also came running. I wouldn’t usually feed her, but can’t have only one dog eating cream cheese, so she got lucky today! I released both of them to the distraction and it is really interesting to see how much Chai’s enthusiasm about the fish treats is upped by the fact that Game is eating them as well:

The distraction recall plan going forwards

I’ve succeeded in 3 off-leash unprotected low-value food recall sessions. Now, it’s time to make things harder and go for the distraction I originally didn’t master: kibble (henceforth distraction B)!

Chai has taught me that food distractions are MUCH harder than anything else for her (by now, I have successfully recalled her away from dogs, people, squirrels and birds, pet cats and farm animals. Street food is paws down the hardest for Chai.) Because of this and because a strong recall is my favorite behavior, I am upping my own challenge: I will work up to unprotected kibble (intermediate food value) in 3 different locations with Chai off leash, and then unprotected LIVER (high value) in 3 different locations with Chai off leash.

I am sure some of the items on the list of found food I’ve made are even higher value than liver. However, for anything other than my 3 food distractions, rather than systematically working up to it, I will bank on the force of habit, lots of high-value reinforcement for easy formal recalls in our recall “account” and the trust that Chai will be sent back to eat the distraction that we’ll build in the next steps of her recall distraction plan, which will always include access to the distraction within training sessions – but only after coming back to me. She will be sent back to eat whatever she has found in real life as well – except for the very rare occasion where I can’t let her go back. In general, I want her to learn that coming back unthinkingly when called pays off BIG time. Once we’ve mastered the difficult food distraction recall, I will make her formal recall a rare and coveted word she can’t wait to hear – precisely because it is special and is followed by a-ma-zing experiences.

Distraction recall round 4 – chuting back to a closed container, or: Chai’s formal recall: the barrier levelS (plastic kibble container #1)!

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Enter: a new reinforcement strategy

After returning to our headquarters to strategize, I decided to start over with the last successful step: a closed plastic container taped shut. I also changed my reinforcement strategy: not only would Chai get a handful of chicken – I’d also open the kibble container for her after the “okay” release. She has taught me that she needs both reinforcers for me to be successful: knowing that she can reach a distraction, even if it is lower value than what I have, trumps coming back to me unless she also gets that distraction. So we’ll try for a compromise: what, little Border Collie, if I reinforce you from my hand AND give you access to the distraction after?

A closed plastic container!

July 18, 2023

Another barrier attempt at distraction #3 at the park! The reinforcer: a handful of chicken (rather than a single piece), “okay” release, and I am opening the plastic box for Chai to eat the kibble distraction as well: look how powerful your person is! That opposable thumb thing is quite amazing!

5-rep session:

In the session above, I set Chai (or rather myself) up for success in all the ways I could: we haven’t done any impulse control work today and she has already had some time running around to get out the cabin fever. I also made sure she acclimated to the space I was going to train in before setting up.

When acclimating, Chai met two toddlers (human kids her age who were fascinated watching her). Nice experience! They just watched each other; no direct contact, which is perfect.

Then our first session with the closed see-through container taped shut took, as you just saw, FIVE reps until we got a success! Good timing: after rep #5, I was both out of kibble and chicken.

This is fascinating to me! Chai clearly learned yesterday that in this situation, she can blow through her recall because she’ll get the kibble – and this set us me back in the sense that she now also tries going for a closed container that she used to succeesfully recall away from in the past!

With the adjusted reinforcement ritual, I hope Chai will learn that she’ll get everything (chicken AND kibble) if she comes back, but will not get chicken if she doesn’t. With the closed container, she still got the chicken after trying to open the closed container in vain. Once I use freely accessible kibble, if she doesn’t come back before reaching the kibble, she won’t get the chicken (but still get the kibble if she blows through my recall). We’ll have to see how good the pragmatic little Border Collie’s mental accounting skills are!

Tomorrow morning, we’ll try for a single-rep success at this same location, repeating today’s set-up and reinforcement ritual!

July 19, 2023: will we get a single-rep success after a night’s break?

We changed the direction of the recall … away from the piano mural rather than towards it … because the piano mural stage had a dance class going on. Now if you were a student of mine, I’d tell you to just wait and try for your single-rep success some other time. But I am me and with my own dogs, I LOVE to experiment. Since I knew Chai wouldn’t be able to help herself to the distraction without my help, I decided to give things a try with this slightly different location. I had no idea if she’d succeed the first time – but I wanted to find out! It took her two reps:

Would she have been able to do it in a single rep if we had kept the environment exactly the same (not changed recall directions because of the dance class)? Maybe! Maybe not. There’s no way of knowing! One thing, however, I know for sure: tomorrow we’ll go for that single-rep success again!

July 20, 2023: single rep success with the closed container!

Woohoo! Now just to decide how to proceed from here … I don’t expect the previous strategy of the open container to work – at least not yet. We need another, more different dragon plan! Time to take a break and strategize, little Border Collie …!

CHAI’S DISTRACTION RECALL TRAINING, ROUND 3.3.1: breaking down the transition from barrier to off-leash recalls

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After succeeding at the barrier level, I came up with a plan of how to – potentially – set myself up for off-leash recall success. By now, I know that Chai is either a pragmatic dog or is going through a pragmatic phase (she’s a juvenile pup – a different dog every day!)

Either way, I don’t want to wait for her to be older to continue training my formal recall. I’m very much enjoying our strategy game here: Chai’s goal is to get to the distraction as fast as possible, and mine is to convince her that it’s worth her while to come back to me as soon as I call. We are playing a game in which the two of us have different goals. My way of getting closer to my goal is to set up the game board in such a way that it maximizes the probability that I’ll get a recall. Chai’s way of getting closer to her goal is to try and see through my game board set-ups (OR train me to up my reinforcers!)

I’m having fun with this, so I’ll continue. If you were a student of mine, I might ask you to take a training break and revisit the challenge when your dog is a little older. That would be to make things easier for you in case it was a phase rather than your dog’s personality.

In any case, I decided, since Chai has “won” when I presented her with unprotected food distractions in the past, to break down the big step from protected to unprotected distractions by using an in-between step: opening the barrier she has already succeeded at, but leaving that same barrier there in order to remind her of how well things used to go for her when she recalled away from said barrier. After recalling her away from an open barrier (in my case the open plastic box), I’d then recall her from the same distraction without a barrier present.

Note that at this point, I am not following my recall protocol anymore, and quite consciously so: I’m just experimenting with my own dog and I am also curious what I can get away with and how Chai will respond to different set-ups. Having eliminated the empty plate at our last stage, I’ll also eliminate distraction B (the bag that used to have food in it) at this new stage I’m inventing for Chai:

While I’m breaking down the step from closed to open container, I’m no longer splitting down environments. I want to find out if we can take this additional step (open kibble container) as a short-cut to off-leash food success (kibble without barrier in the real world). Note that experiments like this, where I don’t know what the outcome will be, are something I LOVE doing with my own dogs but wouldn’t ask a student to do. My students get tried and true protocols – it wouldn’t feel fair otherwise.

(Still) July 17, 2023: our first park experiment with the open box!

We play at our usual spot, but it’s unusually busy – and a number of the people out here are eating. So we have people weirdness and distracting food smells, which leads to a slower recall response and to a hesitant approach of the kibble box once I release Chai. Since I want to see a response at baseline speed (as fast as if there was no distraction) and the usual joyful approach of the distraction itself after my “okay” release, I’ll repeat this same set-up before checking the box off the list above. She did very well though and recalled despite all the distractions!

We hung out and explored the park for 15 minutes, and then tried again:

Oh puppy! You are making me laugh! This session was really interesting!

Sometimes, the best way is to end and go back to the drawing board, which is my plan here. Nevertheless, I couldn’t help but wonder on our walk back from the park: WHY did Chai blow through this recall after nailing it the first time? Here’s a few possible explanations I can imagine:

  1. She only recalled the first time because the people were confusing and Chai didn’t realize what she was even recalling from.
  2. She didn’t recall the second time because the first time, she learned that the kibble container was open. in the second session, she KNEW that we were working with an open rather than closed container and went for it. In the first session, she may only have learned that the kibble had been accessible all along after my “okay” release.
  3. She didn’t recall the second time because right before, during our break, I had removed her from eating something that looked and smelled like a mixture of poop and unidentifyable dead animal (Chai has a sensitive stomach; if not, I would let her eat whatever she finds, like Game) – about 3 or 4 times. (I kept releasing her once we were at a distance from the disgusting food source because she wanted to play with her adolescent Doberman friend Sam. However, inevitably, after a little play, she ended up back at the food source and I ended up walking up and removing her again – it was too good for our “Leave it,” which is still under construction, to work.) Maybe this frustrating experience did not set her up for success in the recall session right after.
  4. We’ve worked on impulse control (“Earn it”/Zen bowl/a marker cue for taking food from a bowl) quite a bit today. Maybe after all this impulse control – impulse control is hard for puppies! – she couldn’t help it and HAD to go for the distraction right away.
  5. Or one of countless other possible reasons!

In any case, I’ll need to come up with a game plan! This distraction recall step is tricky – it keeps coming back to bite us in the butt! I might need to gamify this for myself some more …

CHAI’S DISTRACTION RECALL TRAINING – ROUND 2.3: level 3 (off leash) in the house and level 2 (barrier/helper) revisited

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June 30, 2023: I follow the plan! Woohooo!

After having succeeded outdoors, I stuck to the plan this time – hence the title: round 2 (the 2nd stab at distraction recalls) .3 (level 3: off leash) in our first location with our first distraction.

FUTURE ME CHIMING IN HERE FROM A BIRD’S EYE VIEW:

Steps we have already tested out of are indicated by a check mark, past steps I skipped are crossed out and the steps I am tackling in this post have a green arrow in front of them. Future steps have a square:

Off leash recall away from an empty plate in the house

Reinforcer: a piece of cooked chicken from my hand and “okay” release to check out the distraction.

Extracalifragilisticexpialidocious! Upwards and onwards: distraction #2 – the bag. I didn’t have the paper bag anymore and used a plastic bag that used to have pastries in it instead:

Off leash recall away from empty plastic bag in the house

Chai nailed this distraction as well! Go puppy!

According to my notes, I did not trust that Chai would recall away from kibble off leash. I did not take video, but this is what my notes say:

Long line recall away from kibble in the house

I wanted to go back a step due to my faux pas the other day where I skipped a few steps and she got the kibble. My helper was still working and I don’t have a barrier other than him, so I went back to a long line. And indeed: she hit the end two (or was it three?) times before we could end on a success: recall on a loose long line, chicken from my hand and release to eat the kibble.

So we did end on a success … but not at the off leash (level 3) stage.

July 1, 2023: revisiting the barrier/helper level (level 2)

I had my helper back and revisited the barrier stage with Chai off leash and Zane protecting the most difficult distraction – kibble – in the house. She nailed it on her first attempt! (No video.)

Next, we went up to the roof for an off-leash kibble recall with Zane ready to pick up the kibble plate: by now, I had realized I hadn’t done the barrier level for kibble on the roof the last time.

It took two sessions with a break in between: Zane had to lift the kibble plate in the first rep of the first session. In rep #2, Chai nailed it. We took a recall games break and then had another helper session, getting a single-rep success on the roof (no video).

At this point, future me with his bird eye’s view can proudly show you the following table:

Yay – no more skipped steps! But will I remember that I haven’t yet worked on off-leash kibble in the living room? Stay tuned to find out …