The Dog Training Triad Part 3: Timing

So, you have a carefully engineered environment (see: The Dog Training Triad Part 1) where your dog is likely to do lots of things you want him to to do, and you have also selected really appropriate rewards (see: The Dog Training Triad Part 2). Now what? you need to make sure your rewards are being given with really excellent TIMING! Dogs are doing things constantly, and concurrently. Behaviors are overlapping at every moment, and a dog may sometimes think a reward is for something other than what you thought it was for. In this episode, Annie explains how to deliver rewards with A+ timing by using a "marker" signal. Read more about this on our blog: schoolforthedogs.com/tmng Parts 1 & 2 of The Dog Training Triad series: SchoolForTheDogs.com/mgmt SchoolForTheDogs.com/rewards Show notes: AnnieGrossman.com/podcast18 Music by: TheEnergyCommission.com Sponsor: Take control of your email! Get a 14-day free SANEBOX trial & a $15 coupon. Sign up at SchoolForTheDogs.com/Sane --- Partial Transcript: **music** Annie: Hello, humans, Annie here. I have got to tell you that I am pretty excited because this episode is the third in the three part series about the dog training triad, as I call it. I think of the triad as basically like a universal recipe that you can train any animal to do almost anything that you want, that of course they are physically capable of doing. And this recipe is not species specific. I really believe it can work on all animals. Of course it is individualized from one individual to another. And I can't tell you the specific ingredients you're going to need to train your individual student, but it's kind of like baking bread. There's like a basic recipe for making bread, and then you can riff on it from there. So if you can really grasp this training triad, I think you're about half way to figuring out how to train whatever it is you want to train. I say about half, because I do think there are three other really important factors to dog training. I think you have to understand operant conditioning. I think you have to understand classical conditioning. And I think you have to develop the ability to read some basic dog body language. And those are basically the big pillars. So we have the training triad and then we have operant conditioning, aka learning by consequence. Classical conditioning aka Pavlovian conditioning or learning by association and then dog body language. And we've talked about those latter three things in some previous episodes. And I will go into more detail about all those three things in future episodes, don't you worry. But if you've listened to the first two parts of this series, and now you're onto this third and final one about the dog training triad, give yourself a pat on the back or pat on the head or wherever you like to be pat, because you are well on your way to becoming an excellent dog trainer. So first part of the dog training triad, which we spoke about is management-setting the stage for your dog to succeed. Management I think of as everything that we can basically do from the outside in, in order to control behaviors and to make sure that we're going to get lots of behaviors we want and reduce the likelihood that we're going to get behaviors that we don't want from the get go. Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcasts/ Get full access to Don't Be a Dick to Your Dog at dogtraining.substack.com/subscribe