A-B-C! It’s easy as 1-2-3!

Ok, so that title is a bit misleading. The ABCs of dog training are not always as easy as 1-2-3, because our dogs are living, breathing, moving, thinking creatures; but in very simplified terms, we can look at the ABCs - that is, antecedents, behaviours and consequences when training our dogs.

When we’re talking about behaviour - whether it be a dog’s or a human’s, or any animal for that matter, there are important things that happen just before that behaviour. This is what we call an antecedent.

For example, you may feel a grumble in your stomach, which cues you to walk to the kitchen to make yourself a sandwich. So now we have the A and B of the equation.

Behaviours never happen in a vacuum - there are always things happening that cue the subject to perform in a specific way. Behavioural antecedents cue an organism to perform a behaviour, much like the stomach growl that sent you to the kitchen. So when we are looking at training our dogs, we should always be conscious of what the antecedents are.

Following the antecedents and behaviours, we have C - consequences. If we return to the sandwich scenario, after you’ve made yourself a sandwich and you bite into that delicious masterpiece you just crafted, you may experience pleasure, which reinforces your behaviour. If it’s really good, you may decide that tomorrow when you are hungry, you’re going to make yourself another, equally delicious sandwich. If the sandwich had an unpleasant consequence - say, an egg shell in your egg salad - that might turn you off from making another sandwich tomorrow. This is a punishment consequence.

Ok, cool, so what does this have to do with dog training, you might ask?

In positive reinforcement dog training, we look to these ABCs to set our dogs up for success by arranging the antecedents in such a way that it makes it super easy to get the behaviour we want to see from our dogs and to reinforce those behaviours we want our dogs to repeat. Remember that yummy, satisfying feeling of eating a scrumptious sandwich? We want our dogs to feel that way about doing those good behaviours and about us too!

For example, if we are teaching our dogs a recall, we would start by making the environment distraction-free and practicing at a very short distance. This is stacking the deck in our favour by not allowing our dogs’ attention to wander away. It is what we call an antecedent arrangement. Once you have successfully called your dog over to you (the desired behaviour), you reward them (consequence) so that they know great things happen when mom/dad calls them over. Behaviour that is rewarded (or reinforced once it is a learned behaviour) gets repeated.

Sometimes we cue our dogs to do something, whether it be a sit, a stay or a recall and it seems like they “don’t listen”. It’s not because they are being stubborn or defiant. It is very likely that the environment is different than the one they were taught in (pro tip: you need to teach each behaviour you want in each new environment), the environment is too distracting, the dog is stressed or it hasn’t been reinforced enough to make it worth repeating (what we call a reinforcement history). So in order to be successful for the behaviour you want the next time, look at what happened just before and after the behaviour and make an adjustment to your antecedents in order to get the behaviour you want so you can reward and reinforce it.

But what about corrections and punishment? When you realize that you can make behaviours happen through understanding your dog’s environment, you don’t have to use punishment or corrections - you need to change some of those antecedents. Make it easy to for your dog to understand what you want and reward them for it.

We don’t want to be the egg shell in the egg salad. Bleh!

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Happy training!