How to Facilitate Eager Learning in a Puppy

I had a very basic understanding of dog training at the time, and assumed it was a simple process: make the puppy do a behavior, then say “good dog,” then repeat over and over until it was an automatic response. I stuck with this process for quite some time, and I have to say, the results were not nearly what I expected, and they certainly didn’t reflect the amount of time and effort I had invested in that puppy. At her best, she was reluctantly compliant. At her worst, she could be compared to a stubborn mule. I never got her to a level where she would work with me for any extended amount of time, and as a result, the skills I was able to teach her were very basic and her compliance was unreliable.

Although my initial attempts at training were abysmal, my love for dogs resulted in more dogs and more opportunities to learn. Fast-forward to today, and the approach I take to developing a puppy and training an adult dog is quite different (and much more successful). For those of you looking for a higher level of engagement, fun, and success with your pup, the principles presented in this article will challenge how you interact with your pup and will hopefully cause you to think a bit differently.

Puppies (and even adult dogs) are not all that different from humans. It’s no fun to be made to do something. The tendency for humans and dogs is to push back when forced to do something—instead of creating teamwork, the task becomes a source of conflict. Instead of eager learning, it creates reluctance and aversion. On top of that, endless repetition gets, well, repetitive. I suspect that many of you, if treated this way, would be reluctant to learn new skills, and you certainly wouldn’t be an enthusiastic participant.

A dog’s response to this training approach can manifest in many different ways, but it’s typically similar to how a human would respond. No doubt, some dogs will respond well to this approach. However, many will either become apathetic about working, shut down completely, or demonstrate that they don’t like it by giving an inconsistent result. And who can blame them!

While our structured training sessions are no doubt important, all living things are constantly learning. Typically, this learning comes from patterns within their environment that create a conditioned behavior, not from being forced in repetitive training sessions. Your puppy is learning in the same way.

When it cries in its crate and gets let out, it quickly becomes conditioned to cry when it wants out of the crate. When it jumps on a visitor and gets scratched behind the ears, it quickly learns to repeat this behavior (and unfortunately, rarely forgets this lesson!). Without a doubt, your puppy has been conditioned to offer certain behaviors in order to get what it wants (often unintentionally and definitely without a formal session), and this is something that you, as the owner, should be using to your advantage!

Using conditioned behaviors as a training technique is really quite simple—I call it controlling the paycheck. Instead of forcing a behavior, I make sure that the pup only gets paid for the behaviors that I want, but they get to offer it when they want. My job as the trainer is to make sure they understand the behavior that I want, and to create enough value that they want to offer the behavior. It may be helpful to contrast this approach with my initial approach to training.

When teaching the “sit” command with my aforementioned first Spaniel, I taught her to sit by pushing her butt down while repeating the command “Sit.” When she sat, I might give her a treat or say “Good.” I did this many, many times until she begrudgingly started sitting when I gave the command. Force, repetition, reward.

Using the conditioned behavior with a paycheck approach to teach “Sit,” I stand in front of a puppy with food in my hand. The pup can jump around and do anything it wants, but it doesn’t get the food (paycheck) until its butt touches the ground.

Sometimes, this takes some initial patience on my part, but typically, the puppy will grow tired of its antics quite quickly and sit to look at me. As soon as the puppy gives me even the slightest resemblance of a sit, it immediately gets a piece of kibble. Typically, within a few minutes, the pup is gladly offering me the sit behavior, not because it likes to sit, but because it knows that sitting is the action that produces the paycheck.

Once the behavior is firmly established (often over a handful of sessions), I can then give the behavior a name (in this case, “Sit”). It’s important to notice that the puppy was never made to do anything; it chose to do the behavior because it wanted the ensuing paycheck.

I’ve found that the process of using a paycheck to condition a behavior has many benefits. 

• It’s certainly more fun for me and the pup—we both know we’re going to get something out of the session (for me, it’s the desired behavior; for the pup, it’s usually a little kibble). 
• Dogs typically learn much faster with this approach—a good attitude typically results in faster learning, and paychecks make for good attitudes.
• Dogs that learn conditioned behaviors from a paycheck typically retain the lesson much better and don’t need constant reinforcement. That’s because they want to offer the behavior, not because they have to offer it.

Behavior conditioning with a paycheck is the foundation for all of my dog training today, from very basic behaviors such as sitting, all the way to remote handling on retrieves, quartering through a field, or staying steady in a blind with adult dogs. Over the next several months, I plan to lay out more practical applications of this approach to dog training, and I hope you’ll make sure to follow along!