I recently posted this in another group and think it might be something that gets you thinking about how to work with a dog who is afraid of a lot of things, or is afraid a lot of the time. There is not necessarily always anything wrong with waiting for a calm behavior to reinforce, but its not counterconditioning. If our plan is to countercondition, the appearance of the food is not dependent on the dogs behavior but simply the appearance of the scary object or event. In the real world we have to accept that we dont always have perfect set-ups for training, but we can still take advantage of the ever-present impact of classical conditioning and the power of positive reinforcement. _______________________________________________________ I routinely positively reinforce distance seeking or avoidance behavior. My reasoning is this: Its safest for the trigger (who is often me) since I can never know with any certainty what a dogs potential is. I do not want to allow a dog to rehearse approaching a trigger if there is a chance they might behave aggressively toward it, and with fearful dogs aggression is a normal response. I allow the dog to establish the parameters for DS/CC. What typically follows is a dog-driven change of parameters for DS/CC to the trigger. A dog who chooses to move 10 feet away from me when I stand up from a chair, gets positively reinforced for that behavior. The distance they chose to move typically decreases until my standing up, or entering a room, or appearing in the environment, cues an entirely different response, a positive anticipatory one. Most dogs make the association between the cue, me (or whatever) doing/being something scary and the predictable appearance of food and the fear-driven response decreases or goes away. Without the inclusion of the food for CC effect I rarely see the same speed in the decreasing of the distance the dog needs to feel safe. I have however seen dogs who without the CC component will decrease distance between themselves and a trigger seemingly quite confidently, and then bite it. Whenever possible if I am able to cue the dog to achieve the necessary distance in order to avoid the fear-driven response entirely that is my first choice. In a perfect world I would never set the dog up to feel the need to flee. But in the real world CC and R+ can compensate for the inevitable lack of perfect set-ups.
Posted on: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 12:07:21 +0000
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