Wally vs Me: Day 3 - Vámanos/Pare

First, no scorecard picture as my camera's battery ran out so I can't get the picture. Sorry about that.

However, I can report that Wally surprised me with his performance as I thought this would be quite the challenge for him, but instead, he mopped up.

The final score was Wally winning 29-7, a 80.5% success rate. This is his highest percentage so far, beating out his Day 1 percentage of 76.3%. This was great to see as at first, he had a real hard time with these two, especially "pare" as he couldn't get the connection that this was the old "wait" behavior.

Wally, though, clicked and clicked often. There wasn't even much of a "warm-up" period where he would struggle and then run off successes. This time, he mostly struggled from excitement. It didn't help that there was a lot of movement going on and without any run of failures, his spirits were always sky high and ready to go, sometimes missing what I would want him to do or not coming to a stop and staying put when I said "pare".

As such, there was no real context that created more problems for him. Even at distance, he was able to get the cues and working well. Granted, his success rate was just above that "magical" 80% mark, observing him carrying out the task, he knew what he was doing, instead of the errors being ones of confusion or him hesitating and "over-thinking" the cue.

The running total thus far is Wally: 81, Me: 33, Rate: 71.1%

Not bad at all. Just really one struggling day, Day 2 with opening and closing the door.

Tomorrow is All-Positive Monday, so no game for sure as he might not always get it right (since the All-Positive Mondays are attempting to find ways where true 100% positive reinforcement training can be used). In fact, I think I'll delay as I reconsider the next two scheduled game days. Main reason being that he may not know them in enough contexts to really give him a fair chance. Those days involve object discrimination and color discrimination, two things we're really just getting the handle on.

We'll see, but for now, a good job for Wally and his part game and part training times!

New Game Idea: Wally vs Me or Competitive Training

I just got this idea in my head and have started to flesh out how I'd go about it and what the competition would be like. But first, I'll explain what I mean.

Competitive Training?

"Competitive Training" is what I call it because Wally and I will be "competing" for a common high-value resource that we both want. Badly.

If he performs the required behavior correctly, he'll get a piece. If he does, he gets to watch me eat what would have been his piece.

But this won't just be with Ye Olde Bread Balls (at least not this time, and he does love them) but this will be what might be his highest-of-the-high value, the penultimate food prize, the true to-die-for morsel he could ever think of...

Lemon cake.

I have some, and I will use it as the bounty.

Oh and we'll keep score, and I'll post it, just like a baseball box score.

Fun With A Practical Side

I love games and think they are a big help to training dogs. These "competitive training" sessions will help him learn the skills that are the subject of the day and also give him more opportunity to practice them in a highly positive emotional context/environment, which seems to help him learn things very quickly. It will also take some of the edge/frustration of getting a no-reward marker and he'll have to control himself enough to understand the situation, listen for the cue, and then think about what the right behavior is.

Doing this will also allow me to mix up the training sessions for him. I can be more animated and dramatic because I'm not as concerned with picking up the behavior as I am making it all this big deal to him. I'll also do this to up the challenge subtly as I'm now being as big a distraction as anything else and revving up his emotions to higher than usual levels. Oh yes, I plan to get him barking and wagging and jumping up.

Plus, if it's easy, what does he learn?

There's also another practical purpose - the days he "loses" or "barely wins" are areas in which we need to work more on during "formal" training sessions. Gaps/weaknesses in what we've done so far will show up, giving me a better picture of where we are.

Rules of the Game

Here's the rules:

1. The only "behavioral rule" will be to stay engaged in the game at all times. This won't be a problem, though, unless something unexpected happens and freaks him out. We'll put the game on "pause" if that happens to let him settle down.
   
   
2. Each day, a new skill will be picked and at least 20 trials will be run through but there could be any number at the high end (realistically, probably about 40 at the most - I only have so much lemon cake and can make the pieces only so small!)
   
   
3. Any known context is applicable and can be called upon.
   
   
4. Only reasonably well-known behaviors/cues will be required. For example, asking him to get his dumbbell from a pile of objects is fair game, asking him to get "azul" instead of the "conejo" is not.
   
   
5. A success gets him a treat, a failure means I eat it instead.

And the preliminary schedule of "events", so to speak:

Day 1 - Abres y Cierras (opening and closing doors)
Day 2 - Arriba y Abajo (going up and down stairs)
Day 3 - Vámonos y Pare (going and stopping)
Day 4 - Pelota y Conejo (determining his ball and rabbit)
Day 5 - Azul y Amarillo (the return of the blue and yellow cards or cones)

If I think of more stuff he'll have fun competing against me with, I'll add them in somewhere and the schedule can change.

Oh, and yes, all the cues will be the Spanish words I've been using.


Hopefully, we'll be able to kick this off tomorrow. Also, I hope Wally wins and beats me badly! That would mean he's learned everything very well and in more than just one situation!

"All-Positive Monday 8" - Serving Up A Main Course Of Stop And Go With A Sprinkling Of Objects

We devoted much of today towards drilling "pare" in his head - meaning "stop". And we went about it taking one step at a time.

While at the same time, "vámonos" (let's go) was formally worked on as the "let's move" cue. I figured this would be good synergy in training.

To start this off, I first began with "vámonos" to get him moving as he was sitting on the porch. As soon as he stood up and began moving, he got marked and rewarded. Then I cued "pare" and gave the hand signal, and once he stopped, he got another mark and reward.

This alternation between "vámonos" and "pare" literally went step-by-step. The frequency of rewards and the completely different "walk" we were on totally captured his interest. He didn't know what kind of game this was, but he wanted to keep playing and win his prizes (this time, a left over failure of what was supposed to be a belgium waffle).

With the continued reinforcement, Wally was eagerly going into the movements, making it harder for him to stop promptly on "pare". Seeing this, I slowed down the whole process in terms of calling out the cues. Adding in this twist also added in a little work on controlling his excitement. He couldn't start shooting forward on "vámonos" because the "pare" would be coming right behind.

Once he was getting the "pare" down nicely ("vámonos" was no problem for him!), I stopped using the hand signal. Once I did that, he had only listening to tell him when to stop. Harder, as expected, but he didn't do all that badly with it.

From there, we went to more random "pare" cuing. At first the stops came kind of late (but once he did, he still got rewarded), but he must have got in the back of his mind that I'll call for a stop at any time, making him stop more promptly. All the while, he kept getting excited and was watching me intently.

Each walk we went on today went like this, giving plenty of chances for him to see what the two cues mean. The walk before dinner went without treats, as it I didn't want to spoil his appetite, earning him verbal praise and some hearty pats on the side. He got just as excited, maybe because he thought that was the invite to a game. While this wasn't a game, it did give me an idea for one to play with him sometime.


Don't Forget Your Rabbit And Ball

After his dinner and post-dinner name, but before going to bed, I had him work some more with the rabbit and ball, mostly a run through of what "conejo" and "pelota" are, his rabbit and ball, respectively.

Nothing really fancy, mostly the same beginning lessons as before. Mostly it was a review of what the objects are called, but there was more distance between him and the object to get him used to looking in the distance for the object and going to it from farther away.

No real problems here, but there shouldn't have been! Still, this must have been some challenge for him as he promptly went to sleep right after we were done. I mean he went straight to the "dead dog" position!

Maybe it was harder than it looked, or perhaps he made it look easy because he still had to really, really focus and concentrate to remember what the object looked like. I was surprised to say the least to see him that worn out, as if I had taught something completely new.

I had thought maybe it was just the time of day, his body winding down, but he was very active and alert during the actual exercise. Go figure!

Muy bien, Wally. Another good Monday for us both!

From "Housework Dog" to "Treat Finder" and A Couple New Spanish Words

Whew, a multi-faceted day for Wally on this Saturday!

The Housework Dog

Or, at least my assistant of sorts. He got a lot of practice with opening and closing the doors today as I had lots of things to carry around and stuff to do all over the house. Actually, he got a lot of practice all the way around because he had to go up and down the stairs as well.

In addition, I was cooking so there were times when he had to bark at timers going off (a job he loves). He even barked at the tea kettle when I got side tracked and forgot I had it on. If only I could get him to bark at when a pot boils over!

About only thing I didn't have him do was carry things for me. I didn't think about it at the time, and too bad because this would have been a perfect time to get him more used to carrying different things. Other than that, he was very good with getting the doors opened and closed and he remembered all his Spanish nicely.


The Treat Finder

Instead of having to hunt around for leftover treats and other crumbs, I had Wally do it. This gave me an excuse for using a kind-of-new Spanish cue, "Donde esta?", the new cue for "find it" (it means, "where is it?", prompting him to go find "it" in the future, I'll be trying to attach names of things). We've been working on this a bit, so he had an idea of what to do.

He was a bit confused at first because I didn't set up anything for him to find (he's used to me explicitly hiding things for him to find), but after some encouraging and saying the cue again in an excited way got him going and sniffing around. Once he did that, he was finding some crumbs and stuff. He sniffed around for a little while and then looked up at me since he couldn't find anything else.

There a few he ended up missing (and stepped on, which prompted him to sniff and eat the crumbs...and lick my shoes), but I think he did a pretty good job. This gave me some ideas for how to step up the challenge for finding things in the future as well.

A Couple More Spanish Words For Wally

Today, I introduced him to a couple new words, one of which I can't believe I forgot about.

That word is "Vámanos" meaning "Let's go" (or is it "vamos"...or "vayamos"...ARGH I remember why I hate irregular verbs in foreign language...or in general...*random verb rant* would some Spanish-inclined person please help this newbie? Por favor?) - anyway...the reason I can't believe I didn't use this one is this is like the first word ever on Dora - which is where all of this Spanish trying started from, his (Wally's) fetish with that girl.

So (at least after I try to figure out what it is before I say "gah" and just go with "vamos" and call it a day...) I started using it as cue for when we start moving or are going somewhere. It's basically my "come on, let's get moving, we're going" cue.

The other is much easier for me to figure out - "Bien" meaning "good" and it will be used as a reward marker. This will be easy enough, though I'll probably want to formally teach it using classical conditioning (in other words, "Bien", shove food in this mouth, "Bien" shove food in his mouth, etc, etc) so that it can have the intended effect I need for a marker.


That's it for now, oh, and to all the mothers out there "Feliz Diá de las Madre!"