When teaching your dog obedience skills, being rewarded (food or toys for example) for good efforts and getting things right is a great way to help your dog learn.
Most trainers these days will encourage the use of a reward marker when training, essentially pairing a word (we generally use “YES”) or a sound (eg a clicker) with the delivery of a reward.
This helps your dog to understand the exact moment that he did the right thing and that it will be followed up with a reward, thereby reinforcing that behaviour and the likelihood that it will be repeated.
Once a command, and the expected behaviour, becomes well known to your dog, you can start to fade the help (rewards). This is usually done through changing your schedules of reinforcement from continuous (always rewarding for the behaviour) to intermittent (not rewarding every time).
There are other factors at play here of course, including distance and levels of distraction that will dictate when and how often you reward. But for the purposes of this post, we want to talk about the role of the reward marker.
We see a lot of pet parents continue to use their reward marker even if they don’t plan to reward, believing that the marker itself will eventually become the reward.
But if you think about it this doesn’t really make sense.
Let’s say you were taught to do something using a reward marker and money and every time you did that thing you were asked to do, someone said “Yes” and gave you $10.
But then, once that command and behaviour starts to become second nature to you, that person continues to say “Yes” but stops giving you the $10.
Several things are likely to happen here:
You might be a bit confused.
You’re going to be disappointed.
The word “yes” loses value to you pretty quickly.
You’re possibly not going to respond immediately every time because there’s nothing in it for you.
On the other hand, if they asked you to do that thing and sometimes they said “Yes” and sometimes they didn’t, but you were ALWAYS given $10 if they said “Yes”, then you’re going to try harder at the skill in the hope that you will get a “Yes” and therefore a reward.
What we are getting at here is that the reward marker should be a binding contract, where the use of it means a reward is guaranteed.
So, if you start using your reward marker less, but continue to keep the contract of rewarding your dog when you do use it, you are still fading the help while the reward maintains its value.
When fading rewards, we like to give lots of encouragement (eg “great job” or ‘good boy”) so they still know they are doing well but not to expect a reward right now.
And then when they do hear that “Yes” it’s like Christmas!
So don’t water down your reward marker. Keep it nice and strong.
An important side note here: Dogs don’t all see the same things as rewards. Different dogs value different things, and this can change significantly in various environments or circumstances. It’s well worth experimenting to find out
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