Expanding Your Dog’s Reinforcement Horizons

What is Reinforcement?

Any time we are trying to educate another living creature using positive reinforcement, it is imperative that we accept this universal truth. Only the learner decides what is a positive reinforcement for them. 

By definition, a positive reinforcement will cause an increase in the likelihood of the behaviour that precedes it. So basically, if the “thing” you are trying to use as a positive reinforcement, isn’t causing an increase in the behaviour you are trying to reinforce, the “thing” isn’t a reinforcer. It is both that simple and it isn’t. To make matters more complicated, this changes from one situation to the next. What is reinforcing in one situation might not be in the next.

There is some good news which we will dig into in another post, but skilled teachers can influence the value of a reinforcement, but for this post we will look at the different categories of reinforcements.

The More the Merrier

When it comes to positive reinforcement, the old saying, “the more the merrier” definitely holds both literally and figuratively. I mean think about it, the more things you find reinforcing in your own life, the more joy you have each and every day. The same is true for our dogs.

Engaging with what could be a reinforcement is actually a behaviour in and of itself, and in many dogs, these behaviours need to be taught and cultivated so that our dogs have a wider variety of reinforcements in their lives. As the human half of our relationship with our dogs, we have a very big say in what reinforcements our dogs can access and which ones we don’t. 

When I’m asked to help someone with a behaviour challenge they are having with their dog, whether on the agility field, on walks, or at home, one of the first things I ask is what reinforcers they can use with their dogs. Very often, folks only have a few things on this list. Perhaps they sometimes give them dog treats and maybe they play fetch. In reality they have a lot more going on, but they aren’t really capitalizing on the reinforcers that are in use in their daily life.

Four Types of Reinforcement

In dog training, it is helpful to consider 4 different categories of reinforcement commonly available to us to use when teaching our dogs; social interactions, food/water, activities and conditioned reinforcers. Many dogs only have a small number of these that they find reinforcing in all situations and so, part of our job as the human in the relationship who has the privilege and the responsibility of making the decisions in this regard to ensure that our dogs have a rich, and broad reinforcement life.

Getting to Know Social Interactions

I’ve grouped a wide variety of reinforcements under the heading of “Social Interactions”. In this category we have, all the pieces that go with attention, orientation toward, verbal praise/talk, and physical touching. In my experience, many dog owners would like this category to be a really potent source of reinforcement for their dog. It is convenient and is often often very reinforcing for us. However, also in my experience, many dogs do not particularly like social interactions with us, instead their reactions, particularly to physical touching, indicate that they are merely tolerating the interaction or worse, they find it aversive.

I recommend a few small tests to see if social interactions are of value to your dog.

1. When petting your dog, stop periodically to see if they move away or if they try to elicit more petting.
2. Video some interactions and look for signs of discomfort such as looking away, lifting a paw, moving away, yawning or “whale eye” (which appears as some white showing in their eye).
3. Try different orientations to your dog when petting and try different spots on their body. Watch carefully to see if particular spots or orientations from you elicit more signs of discomfort.

Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice

Food is an innate drive, meaning all dogs need to eat. This makes food a favoured choice among dog trainers. It is literally universal. Now, as stated before, the potency of a reinforcement isn’t static, it can change depending on other environmental factors that we have to take into consideration when we are training. Still, it is such a universal reinforcer that is generally easy to use, we often lean on this one very heavily, sometimes to the detriment of investing time and energy to cultivate the other options. It is just easier to use food… 

One of the things that makes food so easy to use is the sheer variety of types available, different flavours, different textures and different sizes can impact the value a particular food item has for an individual dog. Do they like hard, crunchy peanut butter treats, or is it the soft chewy and sweet rabbit they prefer. Do they do backflips for cheese or chicken? If your dog seems to be pickier about food, there are ways to increase the treats they will be willing to work for using, you guessed it, positive reinforcement. 

If eating food is itself a behaviour (which it is), you can make it more likely by following it with a preferred reinforcement. For example if your dog won’t eat kibble as a treat for work if there is chicken around, feed a piece of kibble and when they eat it, feed them chicken. One trap we often find ourselves in is that when we offer our dogs Treat A and they say “no thanks, I’d rather have Treat B…” If we then switch up treats and give Treat B, we basically reinforced our dog fo refusing treat A… 

If I know that my dog will take Treat A at home, when Treat B isn’t an option, I usually find another tactic if I can to get my dog to eat Treat A. I will write another blog post later about food eating as this is something I have worked through with a few different dogs.

Action!

Now we are getting into the geeky but critical stuff about reinforcement because not recognizing these are reinforcers is often when behaviours we don’t like persist and become worse over time if we do nothing to interrupt the pattern of reinforcement that is already at play.

Activities themselves are reinforcing. Basically everything I’ve already listed are actions when you break it right down, so it will not be a stretch to acknowledge that there are some activities that dogs find reinforcing. Eating (as previously explored) smelling other dogs’ scents, greeting dogs and/or people, running outside, playing with a toy, urinating and chasing squirrels are all activities that many dogs find rewarding.

And so we have to be careful about the behaviours that we allow to happen right before these behaviours. For example “pulling on leash” is a common complaint of many dog owners. But if my dog pulls and I allow her to gain access to sniffing smells or greeting other dogs or people, I’m sending a clear message that those reinforcers can be accessed through pulling. Therefore, I can’t really complain about pulling on leash as I basically have trained my dog to do it. I mean, of course they are going to try it, it makes sense from their perspective, but if we allow them to pull and access these high value reinforcers, we are setting ourselves up for a dog who pulls. It is just a fact.

There are ways to use these same reinforcers to get more desirable behaviours, but it does take a strategic plan. That said, if these are particularly high value for your dog, it is definitely worth the effort as these things that you once labelled as a high level environmental distraction become under your control.

Cues as Reinforcers?

If you thought the last one was a brain bender, here is another. When we teach a behaviour through reinforcement, the dog associates that behaviour with the good feelings about the reinforcement and they learn to like that behaviour and look for a chance to perform it. When we put that behaviour on a cue, the cue becomes permission to perform the behaviour and get a reward so the cue also becomes tied in a positive way to the reinforcement. 

Because of this learning process, the cue becomes a type of reinforcer called a “secondary reinforcer”. You don’t really need to know that, but what is important is that cues attached to behaviours that were taught through reinforcement become reinforcers themselves. This is complex so let’s look at two examples, one where this process enhances our training and one where not understanding this process actually gets in our way and hinders our training.

In agility, I teach all the obstacles with positive reinforcement. This means I am often creating cues that are secondary reinforcers. This helps me out because it allows me to use the cue for the next obstacle to reinforce the last one in the chain. For example, if I have a stopped contact on my dogwalk, when my dog executes the stopped contact to criteria, saying the verbal cue for the next obstacle comes to reinforce the proper execution of the stopped contact.

In real life, this fact of learning doesn’t help us. I particularly see the impact of this when a dog breaks from their hold position. If I was to ask my dog to sit and walk away and the dog gets up, I cannot ask them to sit again with my cue. This is because saying the word “sit” acts as a reinforcer for the things that came before. How often have we heard trainers tell us not to cue the sit again if they get up?

Where to next?

Well there you have it, an introductory list to many of the things that dogs might find reinforcing. Is your dogs list of reinforcements pretty vast or is it limited to just a few things? Does it come primarily from one category, or is it more eclectic drawing from most or all of the categories. In a future post I’m going to explore how different reinforcement strategies and reinforcers themselves can enhance or derail our training so increasing your dog’s variety of reinforcement might be worth some additional effort.

I’m offering 2 courses this fall that focus on just this idea. 

The first one focuses on putting the behaviour of splitting on cue. The program teaches you how to harnesses the power of sniffing as a reinforcer while also teaching the dog that scents in the environment are a cue to focus on the handler. This is a face-to-face class in Thunder Bay, ON. This course is full, but will be offered again, CLICK HERE to be put on a waiting list.

The second one focuses on teaching tug and retrieve. I find these behaviours very useful in agility training but they can take time to build up to the level of fluency needed for them to be helpful in your training. Because tug and retrieve are often best learned at home to start, this course is an online course. It is a hybrid model with lessons presented through video. Weekly implementation sessions on Zoom allow you to get individualized feedback on your specific training progress and questions. This course begins Nov. 15. CLICK HERE for more information on the Tug N' Retrieve Course.

I hope to see you in my Tug N' Retrieve Course.

Until then,

Love that Dog.

Heather