From the Hill… Timing Is Everything

“You get what you pay for” and “Timing is everything”

I’ve never found anything more effective and efficient for training a dog than Mark & Reward training. It’s relies on the science of Operant Conditioning and the ability of my dog to make connections. It’s a simple process – My dog does a behaviour I’m looking for, I mark it with a sound or a word, and I reward my dog.

My dog quickly learns a few things. First, he learns that trying stuff can pay off. Second, he learns that the marker signal means that the reward is on the way. And third, he learns that the thing he just did was what I was looking for him to do. Pretty simple system and it sounds easy, doesn’t it. Well, it can be but you have to get good at it. Let me share a story with you.

My wife was teaching our youngest dog Rizzo to “backup”; literally to walk backwards on cue. One of the ways we typically prompt the dog to move backward is by gently stepping into their space. Unfortunately, our Rizzo is a bouncy boy and so when my wife would step into him, he would leap backward and fall back into a sit position. Being a good trainer, my wife tried to mark only the behaviour of him moving backward, before he actually had the chance to sit.

Unfortunately, timing is a skill that we all need to work on. My wife was just a little bit late with her marker. You see, even in training, “Timing is everything.” In fact she was late enough times that she ended up marking and rewarding the hop/sit combination a number of times. It actually became Rizzo’s default response to the cue! Which leads right back to, “You get what you pay for.”

When we train, it’s important to be on our best game and have our timing and criteria very sharp and clear. My wife has retrained Rizzo to do a proper “Backup” now but her poor timing created a problem that she could have avoided. Our dogs can make us laugh and distract us with the adorable antics during training. But the mechanics of good training are pretty unforgiving. It’s important to stay sharp. You get out of it what you put into it. “You get what you pay for.”

And one thing is certain when training with my girl, Tiramisu. Timing is a bitch. Literally.