Intro
Our greatest roadblock as intellectual beings is our desire for complexity. Too often we feel that the more complicated a system is, the more depth it has and therefore will offer greater value. In dog training though, this couldn’t be further from the truth. Instead, having simple, black and white drills that follow barebone progressions will help you reap more benefits from every session.
Testing ≠ Teaching
When I was first starting off as a trainer, I tended to find myself overcomplicating many drills, because I was following the falsehood of: complexity = knowledge = proof of expertise. I used to try to teach concepts in ways that just didn’t make sense. For instance, if I wanted to introduce angle backs, I would start in the yard with piles of bumpers. Then I would transition directly to a field based application. The problem is that this left a lot of gray area for the dog to have to figure out on its own. Teaching does not mean introducing a topic and then testing it. To teach properly, you introduce and then slowly add complexity and contextual interference to increase the student’s ability to perform the desired behavior.
The Fix
One simple tool that I have found that helps me bridge the gap between yard work and fieldwork, and more importantly keep things simple, is the use of markers (white buckets/posts). A dog’s ability to learn thrives in black and white environments. If you’re teaching a dog to stay on its bed, it becomes much clearer to the dog that they messed up (by getting off their bed) if the bed is raised off the floor. There is no gray area where they can say, “Well, I’m technically still doing what you asked”. They either are on the bed or they aren't.
When used correctly, markers tell a dog where they can find a reward. This helps increase their confidence as drills become more complicated. Once they are confident and performing at a near perfect level, we can start to remove those markers. Going back to my example of teaching angle backs, it is much easier to send a dog on a blind and give them an angle back cast to a very obvious white bucket than it is to give them a cast towards, from the dog’s view, complete empty space.
Recap
When we go out and train our goal should be to teach, not to test. Teaching involves clear and concise objectives that are achieved via easily understood progressions. So the next time that you are out training and your dog is struggling with taking a cast or keeping a straight line, step back and ask yourself what you can do to make your ask clearer to the dog. As the boxer James J. Corbett once said, “Only those who have patience to do simple things perfectly ever acquire the skill to do difficult things easily.” Keep it simple stupid.
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