A few weeks ago, I issued this challenge: If you think you have a dumb or stubborn dog, instead of labeling your dog, hold yourself responsible for creating an environment that motivates your pet to want to learn what you are Teaching.

To me, that is such an important challenge. It speaks to the way I see Training. We always have to be aware that all animals (whether dogs, birds, elephants or people) are behaving for a reason. That reason could have to do with some underlying medical reason, stress, avoidance, or the opportunity for something positive and valued.

If a learner is not getting the lesson, there are so many reasons.  The other day in a Zoom training, I observed that an obstacle to my client teaching her dog to do behaviors away from her was that her dog was too focused on watching her. We need to work on teaching her dog to focus away from her. Another day this week a client was having trouble with loose leash walking and when I changed how he was communicating with his dog (through leash handling and marking of behavior), there was an immediate improvement.

For the sake of this post, I want to delve more into two factors that are at the root of many occasions when your dog is seemingly lacking motivation….damaged and poisoned cues.

Understanding Cues

What is a cue anyway? One definition of that word according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary is ‘a signal such as a word or phrase to a performer to begin a specific speech or action. From a scientific perspective, a cue is a discriminative stimulus. A stimulus is simply a physical environmental event that affects or is capable of having a measurable effect on behavior. And discrimination is the tendency for learned behavior to occur in one situation but not in other situations. (Learning & Behavior, Paul Chance) Therefore, a change in the environment known as a discriminative stimulus becomes a cue for that behavior to be set into motion.

To simplify it, from a training perspective, think of a cue as a green light.  When teaching with positive reinforcement, you are in essence teaching your student that WHEN a certain behavior is performed just after that light turns green, THEN the student gets the opportunity for something it values.  As an example, WHEN you hear the word ‘drop’, IF you lay down, THEN you get an opportunity to go for a walk (or something else).

However, a cue could also be something from the environment like…WHEN your person picks up the telephone (picking up the phone is the cue), IF you bark at him, THEN you may get attention and/or a bully stick. Or WHEN you see a stranger through the window (seeing the stranger is the cue), IF you bark and paw at the window, THEN you can get that person to go away.

Damaged Cue

A damaged cue is one in which the meaning has either changed, lost value, or was never correctly learned. It can occur for any number of reasons. Here are a few examples.

It could be that you are not consistent in what you are reinforcing with your dog. Maybe there are times when a DROP looks like laying down with weight shifted over onto one back hip but DROP could also mean squatting down with knees bent but not even having his belly on the ground.

It could be that, when you ask your dog to sit and he continues to stand, that you pull out the treat and lure your dog into a sit. You have just taught your dog that ‘sit’ actually means ‘stand’ since the treat came out after your dog stayed standing.

It could be that you got distracted in training. Maybe you were working on ‘stay’, only the phone rang and you left to answer it. Your dog got up because he wasn’t taught to that level in training yet, and he became interested in something else while you were gone.

In all of those scenarios, the cue is not being taught consistently and so the meaning of that cue has been damaged from the standpoint of the learner, your dog.

Poisoned Cues

While poisoned cues can also lead to a break down in the behavior you are asking for, the reason is more often due to avoidance. Or maybe your dog is still doing the behavior but doing it to a bare minimum, only to the level to avoid what they predict will happen.

This is because somewhere in your pet’s learning history, an aversive consequence came after the behavior. You may have thought you were training with positive reinforcement but there was also something occurring that FROM YOUR PET’S PERSPECTIVE that was something unpleasant. Here are a few examples:

I saw a video a woman posted that showed how she stopped her leashed dog from lunging/growling/deep barking at other passing dogs when she was taught to use an e-collar. While he was not doing those behaviors, her dog had tense body muscles and was avoiding looking around. Then, just as she and her dog passed other dogs (that were behind a fence), the woman said ‘Good Boy’ and gave her dog a treat. As soon as those words left her lips, I saw an immediate reaction in her dog – increased frequency of lip licking/heightened state of tenseness/shake off. That reaction led me to think that it could be she was taught to apply the e-collar when her dog was doing those reactive behaviors and then when her dog stopped lunging/growling/deep barking (but still had a very strong negative emotional response), that she said Good Boy and gave her dog a treat. What caused me to think that was my seeing an increase in stress signals from her dog immediately after those words left her mouth. If that is the case, then Good Boy has been taught to be associated with those negative emotions that he was feeling at the time.

Recall cues that are aimed at teaching your dog to come, can easily become poisoned if you call your dog and when he comes, something he does not like happens. Maybe you call him to come to take him away from playing outside (to a boring inside), to give him a pill (assuming that is a negative), or to rub the top of his head and he does not appreciate being pet that way. If your dog can not reliably predict that coming when hearing a particular cue means something positive is going to happen, why would your pet choose to come?

It could be that your dog had a history of standing with relaxed muscles showing no signs of increased respiration, vigilance, tensing up when being groomed.  He even began barking in higher pitched tone (saying ‘Yay, we are here!’), jumped quickly out of the car and pulled you to the groomer’s door…until that day when a groomer nicked him and cut his toe nail too short, both of which caused him a lot of pain. The next time you arrive in the groomer’s parking lot, your dog begins to shiver, tucks his tail down, and will not willingly get out of your car.

When a cue is poisoned, you will see more stress signals, more of your dog shutting down and showing avoidance behaviors.

How do you address a poisoned cue?

The first step is to identify the cause if you can (there are times when the behavior/consequence occurred when you were not around). What was that aversive consequence that caused your dog to experience stress and conflict? Take measures to prevent that from happening again.

Reteach your pet the behavior with positive reinforcement, using new cues and even new environments when called for.

Take necessary steps to teach your dog new, positive associations using systematic desensitization and counterconditioning (usually combined). With systematic desensitization you are gradually exposing your pet to the scary thing or event, only advancing as he does not elicit the fear responses. Counterconditioning means you are teaching your pet to change how he feels about an event or something. You are teaching your pet that, instead of the trigger predicting a fear response, the trigger predicts a neutral or positive response.

Empower your pet by teaching him how to say yes or no. As some examples: you can teach your dog to rest his chin on your palm to indicate that he is ready for you to brush his face. If he moves away, that means he is not ready. If he keeps him chin there, he gets brushed which is followed by a tasty treat. Below is a video of me showing how I taught a puppy to let me know when he was ok for me to attach his leash.

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