Practice Makes Perfect: Helping Ginger Learn Meaning in Our Words
Imagine you got transported somewhere and you don’t know the language and need to get food and find a safe place to rest? Maybe you actually have experienced this situation while traveling the world. Now a days with translation apps available on your phone, you may get your needs met pretty easily, but in the dark ages you might try a couple of strategies like miming eating to a local to see if they can point you to an eatery, or maybe you take out your best observational skills and watch the locals to figure things out.
Now imagine how your dog must have felt when they first joined your household. It’s amazing to me that things don’t go from bad to worse from the start. I think this is due in large part to dogs’ enormous capacity to observe, desire to get their needs met, and for some dogs it’s a desire to get along with us. Did you ever see the Gary Larson Far Side cartoon where the human is saying “Ok Ginger, I’ve had it! You stay out of the garbage! Understand, Ginger? Stay out of the garbage or else!” and the caption by Ginger is “blah, blah, Ginger, blah, blah, blah…..Ginger, blah blah”. We make assumptions all the time that our dogs understand all that we are saying to them.
It is amazing that dogs do eventually learn to recognize words that we communicate. Science and our own experiences provide evidence that dogs can learn words and understand cues to perform specific behaviors. Chase the border collie learned 1022 words! How did Chase get to be so clever? By a whole lot of practice!
I recently chatted with a new pet parent with an adolescent dog who said “well Fido does it (correct behavior) about 6 out of 10 times”. This is a great example of learning underway and how important it is for the pet parent to continue with teaching. Too often we think we’ve taught Fido a cue and that the dog should perform the desired behavior immediately and consistently upon hearing the cue when in fact we haven’t given Fido adequate opportunities to truly rehearse, memorize, and become fluent in understanding the meaning of the cue.
Think about how long it took to learn your multiplication tables? There was a lot of practice of 1x2=2, 2x2=4 and so forth. We practiced this on worksheets, practiced it aloud, and then got tested on this knowledge. It didn’t happen overnight but with a lot of practice. Drills and repetition seem to be out of fashion in a culture with sound bites and instantaneous gratification, but it’s a tried and true way to move learning from short term memory to long term storage.
So the next time you start thinking “Ginger is ignoring me”, “Ginger is coping an attitude” or whatever emotion laden spin you are putting on your dog supposedly not listening to you, think about how many opportunities as Ginger’s teacher you’ve given her to practice associating performance of the desired behavior with the cue. Remember too that paying for that association (cue > perform behavior > get treat) helps the learning process.
Cheers, Tracy
