Shyla's Incredible Nose

Shyla and I have continued our "nosework education" by taking another Fenzi course. I am absolutely amazed by Shyla's amazing drive to find the target scents.

I've also noticed that Shyla becomes more confident when she is doing nosework. Kids screaming nearby or things unexpectedly falling still scare her but her love of finding the hidden scent overrides her fear. She simply loves using her nose to search!

To give you an idea of how far she's come, I'm including a fun search that we did on a recent camping trip. I hid six scent sources (q-tips soaked in the scent and placed in a tube or a tin). They were all on one side of our LabMobile but not necessarily on the structure of the LabMobile itself.

In the short video, if you hear me say "alert", it means that Shyla has indicated that she found a scent source. I then give her a series of treats before saying "find another". When I say that, it means that she needs to find a *different* source of scent than the ones she already found. I am utterly amazed by how good she's become at remembering which sources she's already found, passing over them, and looking for new ones.

As you'll see in the video, Shyla found all six in under three minutes, and that includes the time that I was rewarding her for each found scent source. The barking is our crazy R. Ever since he restarted some nosework post-surgery, he wants to be involved in every search!

I hope that you enjoy the video either here or at Youtube!


It's fun to realize that Shyla learned to do this completely using positive training - being rewarded for finding the scent. I love training when it's positive!

Have a great Monday!

Recalls - the most exciting kind of training!

Today is the first positive training bloghop. It's been a long day but I really want to participate because I love training my dogs using positive techniques. By positive training, I mean training that mainly involves rewarding good behavior and involves very little "punishment". Thus, I train a dog to come when called by giving them incredibly great rewards for sprinting to me at top speed. I've used other training techniques in the past, and none of them work as well as positive training, especially for off-leash work when I need my dog to have very high motivation to listen to me.

Every time my dogs and I go for a hike, I practice recalls with them. At the start of their off-leash time, I leave them in a "stay", and I walk far away to call them. The Labraduo is in a "sit-stay" in the photo below.

They both learned "stay" very soon after arriving at our home and can stay reliably.

R literally shakes with excitement before I call the dogs to me. I can see him shaking from a distance. So, when I call, he bolts toward me like a rocket.

At the start of a hike, I do a number of these structured recalls, getting the dogs mentally ready for more freedom. Sometimes, I have them stay a distance apart from each other before a recall, which seems to be harder for them. In fact, if Shyla is in a stay behind R, she sometimes tries to sneak closer to R while my back is turned. Fortunately, her bell alerts me to her sneaky move!

I motivate them for recalls by having a treat bonanza when they get to me. Both dogs get lots and lots of treats when they arrive, and I praise them excitedly. I think that you can see from these photos that both dogs are very motivated to get to me fast when I call them.

I find that practicing recalls is really fun! It feels as if the dogs and I are playing an exciting game rather than doing "onerous training".

After the opening series of structured recalls, I let the dogs run around together as I hike but I periodically throw in a recall, to help keep their focus on me.

Of course, my dogs are not perfect in real life situations but they're pretty good. R will recall away from wildlife with almost 100% reliability - I still smile with glee when I see him turn away from a deer to come to me. Shyla is not as good as R yet but she's doing very well for a young dog. If one of them ignores a recall, I repeat more structured recalls like we did at the start of off-leash time. Usually, that works to sharpen up their responses.

But, I do accept that there are situations that are simply too difficult for a dog to be off-leash and obedient. For example, if wildlife like coyotes, deer, bears, bobcats or elk are close enough that I can see them, I think it's prudent to rely on a leash rather than on the dogs' training! I also tend to leash the dogs when their body language tells me that they've caught scent of something extremely exciting. Around here, that "exciting scent" could be a mountain lion eating a dead deer, and I sure don't want my dogs barging in on that!

However, those situations are rare. Normally, I can count on a very enthusiastic response when I call the dogs, like Shyla leaping a small rock to get to me this morning!

Building Confidence

As I've talked about many times here, I use positive training techniques with my dogs, rewarding behaviors that I like and ignoring ones that I don't like. With Shyla, I never deviate from this reward-based system because she's so sensitive.

I'm what professional trainers call a "cross-over trainer" because I first learned about dog training back when the predominant technique for training a dog was to use aversives, like "corrections" with a prong collar or a shock collar. Indeed, I trained a search and rescue dog using primarily negative techniques. Fortunately, that dog was afraid of nothing, and she flourished despite heavy-handed training.

I shudder to think what would have happened with Shyla if I'd tried to train her using punishment-based learning. As many of you know, Shyla is sensitive to the point of being fearful. Indeed, when I first met her a year ago, she was afraid of many normal aspects of everyday life, partly due to her sensitive nature and partly due to lack of socialization to the real world. If I'd tried to "force" her to take on her fears, I suspect that it would have been disasterous. She wouldn't have gained the confidence that she now has.

Even now, if I use an angry voice in Shyla's presence, she slinks away. For example, the other night, R was up to mischief. He knocked over my water glass while I ate dinner. Then, as I tried to quickly clean up the water, our black "puppy" tried to steal my dinner. I yelled to stop R from inhaling my entire dinner in one fell swoop. A quick yell is something that I can do with R that I'll probably never be able to do without really scaring Shyla.

Over the past year, I've spent innumerable hours with Shyla, using positive training techniques, to help her learn to live happily in the bustling world of humans. It's been so rewarding.

Recently, I've noticed another change in her that shows a trust that is new. She likes to look me straight in the eyes. I took this photo at sunrise this morning, and her trusting eyes warm my heart.

I feel confident saying that, if I'd used the old punishment-based training techniques on Shyla, she wouldn't trust me so much now.

And she wouldn't be so thrilled to "offer" tricks that we've worked on together!

Shyla is a poster-dog for one who would have wilted under the pressure of old training techniques. I'm so glad that I learned about a different approach before Shyla sprinted into my life!

Training Tuesday

To keep myself on the ball, I'm going to post on Tuesdays about the training progress that Shyla and I have made. I also want to do this so that I can look back later, when I may be training yet another dog, and remember how long it took me to achieve various training goals.

Up until this week, Shyla and I were hiking out every morning to see the sunrise, and I was no longer using a leash because her "heel" and "stay" are so good when we hike solo. This week, I started biking up to see the sunrise, and that has presented a whole new set of training needs. First, Shyla needs to learn to "stay" while I make final preparations to pedal my bike away from the door. While her "stay" is almost perfect when I'm on foot, it has completely fallen apart since my bike has become part of the scenario. This morning, after working on Shyla's stay by the door for what seemed like an eternity, we finally made it up to where we could see the cloudy but pretty sunrise.

I have to remember not to become frustrated when a goal that I thought was "checked off" (like "stay") falls apart in a new situation. Dogs don't generalize well, and, of course, adding the bike to the scenario changed everything for Shyla. Moreover, Shyla is so sensitive that *any* frustration in my voice makes her less able to think and learn.

I'm also starting to teach Shyla to heel next to my bike. I choose short straight stretches of trail, and I ask her to heel, just like I'd do if I were on foot. Then, I reward her for being in the right place by feeding her small training treats as I ride. Heeling next to my bike will become critical when I try to take Shyla riding anyplace where there might be other people on the trail.

In other training, we're working on retrieving. Last week, I reported that she would go get an object from the floor a short distance away but she'd only place in my hand about half the time. We've worked on this daily, and now she's placing the object in my hand about 90% of the time. I've also introduced other toys to retrieve (we started with a Kong toy), and she's doing great with all of them. This week, I hope to move our retrieving training to new locations, including outdoors. Since Shyla isn't naturally enthusiastic about retrieving, we'll have to go back to Training Step 1 when we change location, gradually building up to a real retrieve like we've done indoors.

Since I've vowed to start a new trick each week, I've started to shape a paw lift, using a clicker. Even though we just started this 2 days ago, Shyla seems to have figured out the trick almost immediately. She is freely offering a high lift of her paw right now, and I plan to shape it into several different tricks like a "paw shake", "high five", "wave", and a faked "limp".

Last, but most importantly, I am continuing to put the most energy into socializing Shyla to people and the bustle of the real world. That's an ongoing process that is certainly not a straight path from Point A to Point B. On Saturday, she had a tremendously relaxed and happy visit with my family, including my young nephews. But then, on Sunday, she was severely terrified by a man who was yelling angrily at his dog. The man was about 30 yards away but Shyla cowered to the ground next to me, scared almost to the point of paralysis, by his enraged voice. All that I can do to help with this is to continue to have her meet new people, including kind and soft-spoken men, and hope that she learns that men are not generally scary.

I took Shyla into town twice this week, and she did very well with our progressive program of exposure to people and town bustle. She met numerous people on one outing to a shopping area. She approached women with ease and happiness. Approaching men was much more difficult for her - she tended to cower when faced with them. However, her naturally outgoing personality made her still want to approach them, albeit very tentatively (which my trainer and I allowed her to do if the man was amenable to helping with the training). I asked the men to hold out a hand toward Shyla, and then I'd cue Shyla to nose-poke the hand. That worked with most men but not all of them. It's an ongoing process.

I think that the socialization work is, by far, the most important training that we're doing. To be able to live without excessive stress in the human world, Shyla needs to be able to meet new people and go new places without becoming scared. Since she missed out on this type of socialization as a puppy, this process is taking tons of work now (and has been my main focus since she arrived in late August at age 9 months). We've made huge leaps toward that goal but we still have lots of work to do. I don't mind - it's incredibly rewarding to see every tiny improvement in Shyla.

Thanks for reading this wordy post. My hope is that, by chronicling my work with Shyla, I can perhaps help someone else training a dog with a similar background as Shyla and help myself to objectively see our progress. I get exhausted by the process sometimes but, when I realize how far Shyla has come and how much my bond with her has grown, I know it's worth it.