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Have a Question for Our Team? |
Send us an email with the subject: Advice Question or a message to My CRPS Service Dog's Facebook page and we'll answer it! |
March 23, 2019 Q: What incentive should be used to get a dog to do a task? Ideally, any finished service dog should be able to perform their tasks with vocal praise or the fulfillment of the task itself being the reward. I would find it a hassle to have to carry around treats all the time to reward each time my dog did something right, but some handlers don’t mind working that way, and that's their choice. Ultimately, different dogs will be motivated by different things, and some dogs will need a variety of motivators depending on what’s being asked of them. Various incentives you could experiment with to find what works best for your dog include: It may be that you use motivators while the dog is learning, but wean them out over time to make learning more fun but develop them into a dog who doesn’t need them to perform once fully trained. You won’t know what works best for your dog until you try a few things out. You can certainly use different incentives in public than from you use at home. Personally, I believe that using treats or toys are fine for in-training or working at home, but I wouldn’t encourage using them in public because it means you always have to have them. If you forget treats one day, are you 100% sure that your dog can work without them? Toys would be a disruption in public, and wouldn’t be professional. In public, I rely on my voice, physical pats, and task fulfillment to be our rewards for working. Additionally, every public access day ends with playtime once we get home. When we work at home, there are some tasks that need more motivation than others. Robbie does retrievals, and he is learning to enjoy them more, but it’s not a task he enjoys as much as pulling firewood or opening doors. So, when we do laundry, for instance, we use a variety of motivators to turn it into more of a game. Every few pieces of laundry he brings or puts in a basket he gets either a small treat or I throw his toy a few times. We do that until the basket is full. After he has pulled the basket through the house and loaded the washer, we end with a bigger reward, usually the chance to gnaw on his antler or eat an oral chew. In the summer he might get a few broth ice cubes outside instead. I don’t mind giving him the extra motivation because he is still helping me, and he works for every little bit. He doesn’t get a reward for every piece of clothing, he has to do several rounds of “Take Cloth. Basket. Good!” before he gets something. And, if I had no treats, no games, no toys, I know that he would still do this task with vocal praise alone. It just may take longer. Most of his tasks don’t require extra motivation though, because he loves his job. He gets fulfillment from helping me off the floor, he absolutely loves pulling his firewood cart, and if someone else tries to open a door for me, taking away his chance to do it he gets downright perturbed that someone else did his job! In public, he opens doors by pushing the handicap buttons, then lights up as he watches the door swing open, tail wagging furiously. I would worry about a dog who refused to do any tasks without treats or toys, who couldn’t be reliable with voice or physical praise, and especially who didn’t seem to have any interest or enjoyment of the task itself. To me, that would signal a dog who couldn’t reliably be a service dog or
that maybe didn’t really want to be one.
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Advice PostsEvery week, or so I try, I answer one question on Robbie's Facebook page. I will share each question & answer here, as well as on his page. All questions are kept anonymous. How Can I Ask a Question?1. Send me a message on Robbie's Facebook page Types of Questions- A specific problem a team may be experiencing ArchivesCategories
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