Training tips???
I've been working with Jake to get him trained. He's almost 14 weeks old and I will say that my results are so-so. I signed up for a puppy training class at Petsmart. With food in hand it seems he knows when to sit, but all the rest of the commands (watch me, let's go, come, down, up) are not going as smoothly and none of them are going smoothly without the presence of treats. Any ideas of what to help the learning or what I should realistically be expecting, it seems that most the dogs in the class are taking to it no problem and i thought with JAs being so intelligent that he would to. When is the "I GOT IT" phase usually happening for JAs? Any help would be appreciated.
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Your dog is really young. Puppies don't have much focus, no matter what the breed. Keep working with him, and especially keep working with him when there are no distractions. When he's got the command down, then try with smaller distractions, and a few more, etc, etc. Make sure the treats are particularly good when working with lots of distractions. It may be that in class he's too distracted to focus--I know sometimes Oskar was. The presence of the other dogs was just too much for him sometimes!
I have an AA, and I found him to be a bit slow in his training process (at least compared to my Shibas). He needed a lot of repetition, though I had to do it in little bits, because he also got bored easily. I knew he "got it" when he started offering behaviors other than a sit for a treat (ie. no click and treat for a sit when I asked for a down or stand, and then pretty soon,he'd try the down, and the sit, etc, and I knew he understood down).
The recall is by far the hardest command to train. I was lucky in that my Akita LOVED to follow me,and so we worked up a special word for the recall, and he learned that, and will still come reliably for that. And he loves squeaky toys, so when we discovered that, I realized that was even a bigger motivator than food.
So just keep going. As one of my trainers said, just have faith and keep working, esp. when you get to adolescence and he acts like he's forgot everything. He'll come out of it remembering it all....
Of course, do puppies even question the leader of the pack at this age? i mean, Jake is just a young puppy, not an adult.
-Akitas seem to want to question your alpha role, as they are dominating dogs. They'll test you, or be stubborn and do what they want instead.
-Puppies want to figure out what the limits and boundries are, like peeing on the floor cause they don't know where to pee, or chewing the xmas tree cause just it looks fun. It is a puppy phase ...(i hope at least...lol)
So when does it stop being puppy thing and become an akita thing? I think the answer would be helpful to you. Granted, I do not know the answer, lol
Whatever the case, perhaps he is going to be more interested in doing what he wants, and not what you want. Maybe he doesn't see you as the "alpha"? Just speculating, as I'm figuring out the puppy thing with you as well, as Toki has definitly a dominate mindset, but I don't think so much as your pup does (from what I saw when I visisted, he may have changed since). To teach Toki his place in "the pack", (you should try this with Jake), I make him work for his dinner, entering and leaving his playpen, going outside, ect... by making him "sit". If he doesn't "sit", he doesn't get that awesome toy he wants in the playpen, or his awesome dinner. If Jake knows sit, just keeping working with him, a lot. Eventually, he will learn that a fancy treat means he will be learning something new, so he better pay attention. Toki has figured this out, but then, I have had him for a while longer than you've had Jake, i think.
p.s. Toki pees the EXACT same way. I always tell him he pees like a girl, but he doesn't seem to care ;P
Jake is a dog. That means he's a living, breathing, self-aware being. He makes his own decisions. And his decisions will be different than other dogs, because he's an individual. Don't measure your success based on what other puppies are doing. They are individuals too.
Every dog has their own way of communicating. Training isn't about teaching your dog to do something, it's bout learning how to communicate with each other. If Jake isn't performing the way you want him to, it's not because he's dumb, or "alpha" (which is a topic for a whole other thread of discussion, but you might want to read this:link), or isn't capable of learning. It's because he hasn't learned how to understand what you expect of him yet.
When I'm training my dogs and they don't do what I want, I don't get upset about it, I figure out a different way to communicate to them what I want. It isn't their fault they don't understand me. After all, I'm the one asking them to do something, the burden of figuring out how to communicate it is on me.
My Kai is somewhat aloof and very handler soft, so when I train him, it's baby steps. He can do a lot, but I have to go at his pace, keep it fun, keep it interesting, and always stop my training sessions after just a little bit of progress. When he doesn't know what I'm asking of him and gets confused, he loses interest in training and I have to back off. My lab LOVES to train. He's months ahead of his age in terms of his abilities. And I can train him for 45-60 minutes at a time no problem. When he doesn't know what I'm asking of him, he'll try to figure it out, so I can push through confusion pretty easily.
I'll also mention that 14 weeks is still a baby. Training is a lifelong process that requires a ton of patience and consistency, as well as lots of practice. At 14 weeks, if I had a dog sitting reliably, I'd be like a pig in slop! Which is to say, I'd be ecstatic. In fact, even my incredibly trainable lab who, at nearly six months old is a fully started retriever, wasn't doing much more than sit and kennel by 14 weeks. So, again, RELAX! Be creative in your communication, be patient, and keep it fun and interesting and you'll be surprised what he's capable of in the coming weeks and months.
At Jake's age, your primary goal should not be teaching specific skills. You want to instill in him a passion to learn and work with you. It doesn't matter what he learns, as long as he gets to understand that learning is fun! If you can succeed in that, then months and years from now, everything else will come easily.
There are even more on the Shiba side, including this one: http://www.shibainuforum.org/forum/discussion/6867/let039s-discuss-the-role-of-dominance-in-the-social-hierarchy-training-of-domestic-and-wild-canine.#Item_72
My point is, the whole alpha thing has been pretty well debunked in canines.
I'm particularly tired of the talk that Akitas as a breed will challenge people for the "alpha" role. It's so commonly bandied about when discussing Akitas that half the time I just roll my eyes (my version of the "alpha roll") and don't say anything. I'm not sure why people think Akitas are so likely to be difficult, stubborn or "dominant" but I have really not found them to be that way. Really, I think everyone that thinks this about Akitas should spend some time with Shibas. Then they'll go back and be so happy to have their likely much easier to deal with dog. (And yes, I'm exaggerating here, and I know it's about individual dogs, too, but really, Akitas are not a particularly difficult breed, and I'm pretty puzzled as to why this myth continues among Akita people).
Luring/bribing means you take out the treat and show it to your dog before you ask him to do anything and even use the treat to guide him to do certain behavior. The problem with luring/bribing is that the dog is not really thinking about what he needs to do to earn the treat, but mostly follow his nose. It will take a lot more repetitions for him to learn as he is not using his brains much.
A reward is only shown and given after a dog does what you want. Luring can be useful in early stage of training, but it should be phased out as soon as possible, so you don't rely on it and let your dog has a chance to figure it out what it is that you want.
I would recommend getting a good book on training basics, so you know the scientific theories and can adjust your training accordingly to your own situation better. Also search for doggie zen and Nothing In Life is Free or "Learn To Earn" program as they help you build a good foundation/focus skill you pup will need.
I have no idea why I haven't come across this, it just never came up i guess, so I really appreciate the references. (sorry if you got tired of hearing my ideas about alpha stuff and akitas, lol). I hope I didn't upset either of yall with my ideas, I really just did not know. There is a bunch of links on the shiba link that I want to get to tomorrow; I am pretty tired at the moment.
I think Lisa (@shibamistress) frequents the Shiba forum where these discussions are had ad nauseam, and people seem far less willing to learn, or god forbid question existing wisdom! ;-) So she might be a bit more sensitive to it than I am.
And I didn't know a ton of stuff til I was on this forum, including learning a lot more about how dogs learn, and debunking the alpha stuff, etc. And of course I still have a ton of stuff to learn! But this is has been a great resource for me, and has been a big turn around in how I work with my dogs, and I can see the difference in how they behave.
Now, adding to what I don't know, I'm interested in Sandrat888's point about luring....I know a lot of pure clicker trainers do not use luring, though one of my trainers did use both with some commands (like teaching the sit and down to puppies). I'm curious about this though--does luring really slow down learning? I know "capturing" behavior is preferred by many clicker trainers, but lure and reward training has also been around a long time, and I was curious about this....
My mantra has been, and will continue to be, that all of these training "programs" are baloney. Each dog has different needs and a different style/pace of learning. So you have to find what works best for your dog. Take a little of this, a little of that, mix it all together, and come up with something that works for you, your dog, and your collective situation.
Strict adherence to any generic training program will ultimately limit what you can accomplish with your dog. By way of metaphor, think of it like dress clothes. I can go to walmart and buy a suit for $100, or I can go buy a Hugo Boss for $5,000 (I can't actually, my pockets aren't that deep!). Neither of them will look their best on me if I wear them off the rack without having some alternations made to fit my body.
Luring has its place in training for certain things, but like Davd said, it should be phased out early, so the dog does not learn to depend on it. When the paradigm changes, the dog trained heavily on luring and paw-holding does not know what to do as he relies on you to help him and he easily gets confused.
Capturing is a very useful technique, but is usually used with shaping too. You know what your end goal is and you start by rewarding the dog to offer little steps toward that final behavior.
For example, to teach a dog to back up on command, one way of teaching this is to step into the dog and if the dog backs up, you give him a treat. The dog is forced into the position as you are walking into him, so your walking toward him becomes a cue in itself and he does less thinking on his own when learning backing up.
To teach the same behavior using shaping and capturing, you can set up a dog in a tunnel (one side against the wall, and the other side with a crate or a chair to create a tunnel), put the dog on leash and take him to the end of the wall/crate tunnel near you. Hold the leash short and just wait the dog out. If the dog puts his head down briefly to sniff, reward him on the ground in between his front paws, so he is less likely to move forward when you deliver the treat.
Heads down is one tiny step toward backing up and you capture that. Then you wait the dog out for making any movement that is not forward-motion (remember the dog is in the tunnel you create, so he can't go left or right and he can't jump out because you have a leash on him) and you reward him. Very quickly, the dog learns that backing up is what you want. When you can reliably get the backing up behavior will I start adding a verbal cue to the behavior right before the dog does it. Once the dog does the behavior reliably on verbal cue, I will start removing one side of the man-made tunnel and see how he does. Eventually, you can do this without any props.
For shaping and capturing to work, you need to break what you want into smaller pieces and reward for the initial steps and knowing when to raise criteria to make it more challenging, but not so difficult that he can't succeed.
Shaping is especially effective when training more complex behaviors and as the dog learns by figuring it out themselves with you managing their environment for early stage successes, they are more confident and willing to try different behaviors to earn the reward.
I will research and investigate all training approaches, but I will stay away from any that is intrusive or based on fear/intimidation of my dog.