Saturday, May 10, 2008

A worthwhile read



This is subtitled, Lessons for People from Animals and their Trainers

The lessons in this book can be applied in so many places, both with our puppies, and with our humans.
Here's a short sample: Reward the good behavior, ignore the bad behavior. Of course, we know it's not that easy, but it can work for lots of situations.
I particularly like her chapter entitled Baby Steps.
Trainers use the term successive approximations, lingo for baby steps toward learning a new behavior.
If an animal won't do a behavior it might be too big. "Likewise, expecting someone (a significant other, ourselves) to change over night is too big an approximation," i.e. new years resolutions.
One of her examples is "do yoga". It never happened; there were too many steps that had to happen first. When she broke it down into successive approximations, get yoga clothes, get yoga mate, find a class, sign up for a class, go to a class, she had much more of a chance of success.
Her rules for baby steps:
1. not use too big an approximation
2. when a behavior deteriorates, go back to kindergarten, step back to a successful place in the training process
3. only train one aspect of a behavior at a time
4. new tank syndrome, realize new settings, i.e. puppy class, is ripe with distractions, let the pup absorb the new stimuli before raising the bar too high
5. try something different, if you've tried plan A over and over, try a different way, make up a plan B

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