072 Stashed Rewards
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[00:00:00] If you train, compete, teach, or simply love the sport of dog agility, you're in the right place. Hey there, I'm Megan Foster, creator of Fostering Excellence in Agility. Join me as we explore training, communication, handling, mindset, and all the little details that help build stronger and more confident teams, both in and out of the ring.
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Hey there. Welcome back to the podcast. This is episode 72, and today I want to talk about stashed rewards. First, let me define stashed rewards. This is a reward that is not on my body. It is put somewhere outside the training space or away from my person, away from the obstacle that I'm working with, and part [00:01:00] two is that it requires thumbs to access it.
This can be food or a toy, and regardless of where it is stashed away, it requires thumbs for my dog to access it. This just means that I have to hand the dog the reward. They cannot collect it for themselves. Even if I have left a toy on the ground, if I am using it as a stashed reward, I still need to pick up that reward and give it to the dog When do I use stash rewards?
We're going to get to the point of why I use stash rewards, but I want to talk about where it begins for me when I'm raising puppies. I use stash rewards in the house, and this is really great, especially for puppies, [00:02:00] because I don't need to have rewards on me all the time when I'm raising a puppy, and I can teach them early on that moving away from whatever it is they're doing to come with me pays off for them.
So I specifically used this when Shrek, my Parson Russell Terrier, was a puppy, because he was a contraband stealer. He would find anything and everything to put in his mouth and cart around, and when he was a puppy, he would chew, and unfortunately, he did want to consume some of these contraband items.
And rather than run up to him and show him that I have food and give him treats, I could, back when he had no skills, I could just cue, "Let's get a cookie," and that [00:03:00] would take his mind off of whatever he had. He would follow me, and we would go to a cookie jar and get some cool snacks. And then as he developed skills, this actually became a way that I could ask him to bring me the contraband item, and then we would trade for a cookie.
And cookie is just my word that we're going to a treat stash. And so even to this day, he's almost 11, he will take something that he thinks that he shouldn't have and walk past me, show me that he has it. He's not going to chew it. He's not even interested in it. He just wants to play this can I bring it to you to get a cookie game.
And some of you might be thinking he's gamed the system. Of course he has, and I love it. I have no reason to avoid it. I have no reason to prove him wrong. [00:04:00] I love that he wants to bring things to me, and I love that I don't have to have food in my hands in order to access this really cool skill that he has.
Anytime I drop something, he's there at the rescue to pick it up and bring it to me The second place that my puppies and young dogs will experience stashed rewards is throughout their foundation training when I focus on teaching essential skills like loose leash walking, like connected walking without a leash, just staying within a three or four foot radius of me when we're moving through a training space together, and down stays.
In all three of these situations, I may teach the behavior early on with food on me, but I like to progress these skills pretty quickly to stashed reinforcement, to we are moving [00:05:00] to reinforcement or we're moving away from reinforcement, but just getting them in that habit that these skills do not require a steady flow of cookies or toys in order to be maintained The third way that I am using stash rewards is as my dog's education builds in agility, I'm able to test singular obstacle skills with stashed reinforcement.
And usually when I'm just doing single obstacle skills like this, the stash is in the training space, it's close to where I'm working, but the point is, is that I don't have the food on me, the dog sees that I don't have the food on me, and the dog and I are able to move through the training space without reinforcement on me, complete behaviors to criteria [00:06:00] with confidence, with clarity, and then move with me to where the stash is.
And I think all of us listening can start to picture where this is leading to, where starting in the house with my puppies and layering it into different behaviors and eventually my obstacle skills, I think we're all starting to understand that this is mainly for my ring routines in competition.
Because most dogs that I see in competition are having to learn this skill on the fly. They're having to learn about stash reinforcement at their first few competitions, and that's not quite fair. And a lot of dogs struggle with leaving the reinforcement behind. A lot of dogs struggle with not understanding that reinforcement isn't going into the ring with them, and we can prepare them [00:07:00] for this reality from day one if we know how.
So of course, stash reinforcement comes up when I'm building my ring routines I go over this extensively in my Start Line program when we start to build chains around leaving the reward stash and moving towards the reward stash. One of the first chains that I build is leash on, exit to stash.
This is how I primarily avoid any issues of the dog trying to anticipate that we are exiting the ring to the stash now. Because if we are just talking about a reward that they can access at any time and it's available to them, that's a lot harder for them to not be thinking about the whole time. But remember, in my definition, it [00:08:00] is not on my body, but it does require my human thumbs.
So being really consistent about that, in my experience, helps bring down all of those thoughts of is it now? Is it now? Is it now? And the dog kind of looking for the point in which they're able to access it. The second layer of being very consistent of it's leash on and then stash helps me to avoid just running toward the exit area as being part of the cue.
Because in most of the agility facilities we compete in, the entry and exit gates are pretty predictable, and maybe sometimes the course goes through the exit area in the middle or even the beginning, and also really long straight lines towards the exit area. If the dog is anticipating running out of the ring to the reward without a specific set of cues, [00:09:00] then both of those situations can sometimes be problematic.
But When it is very clear that it is attached to getting the leash on and exiting together as a team, I find that less of those problem behaviors crop up
I also do specifically put it on a cue that we are going to the stash now, and depending on the dog, you can give that cue as soon as you put the leash on, and you can run to the stash together. Or, like I do with Sprint, I cue her loose leash walking first, so I tell her to, "Let's go. Let's move together in space."
And then when we get closer to where the stash is, I cue the stash and we run to it together. And so the timing of when I cue the stash mainly depends on the facility I'm at, the space I'm in, um, how safe it is for us to be bolting over to our [00:10:00] reward. And she's prepared for it, so it's not a bummer if she does have to walk all the way across a parking lot to get the reward.
We've trained for it. The second piece that I am putting together when I'm building my ring routines is that moving away from reinforcement is okay with the dog My dog needs to be able to mentally let go of the reward. They need to be able to see that it is set outside of the ring at my chair, at my crate, at my car, on the table.
that's just generally hanging out ringside. They need to be able to see that I have stashed it there and move away from it without conflict and a lot of cajoling
They need to be able to move away from the stash and go into wait your turn mode without [00:11:00] additional food or toys, for the most part. There are a few exceptions to this, and, I always say if it's not a problem for you, it's not a problem. But if this is a problem for you, this could be something to change about your routine.
Because if some part of the stash goes with you, your stash will become a lot less powerful. It will lose its meaning. Because if you're telling the dog, "Okay, we're leaving the rewards behind," but then you bring the rewards with you, you're not actually leaving them behind, and that little bit of, "Oh, good, we're not actually leaving the rewards behind," it gets amplified when you cross that threshold and, oops, we did leave the rewards behind.
So there's a lot of confusion that can be caused when we stash but take food with us and then cross that threshold where now food can no longer [00:12:00] go
So everything that I talked about with the puppies and the essential skills and adding it to your obstacle training is a part of how I build that mental flexibility in order to leave the stashed reward behind
so I got a little bit ahead of myself and started talking about the problems that can come up when I was talking about the mental ability to let go of the reward. But I want to reiterate some of the problems that I do see and places that we can be more clear about how we use stashed reinforcement.
So one, like I said before, using a stash and reinforcement on you. Um, this comes up, maybe you're doing a stash at your training class, but you also bring food into the ring with you. I do believe that you are making the [00:13:00] stash less valuable, and also you are making it unclear that when you use the stash, maybe rewards are also in your pocket, which is going to make competing potentially confusing for your dog
Using a toy in the ring sometimes, so this comes up in FEO or NFC opportunities. If sometimes you bring in the toy with you and sometimes you're using the toy, you're reinforcing sometimes, and sometimes you leave it outside the ring, if you don't have a clear protocol for we're leaving the toy behind versus the toy is coming with us, that is a point of confusion that you can clear up.
Another place where I see this can be additionally confusing is that in UKI, you are allowed to bring the toy with you to the line [00:14:00] for competition runs. As long as it stays with your leash, it can come into the ring with you. And if there are not clear protocols around it's coming into the ring to be used as a reward versus it's coming into the ring to stay with your leash versus it's being left behind completely, that can be an additional layer of confusion for sure.
Especially if the dog sees the toy and doesn't require thumbs to access the toy, they could be thinking about that toy being in the ring the entire time and not able to mentally swap to the task that you're asking them for If I have all of these ways that I'm using a toy around the ring, bringing it into the ring to train with, I do not stash a reward.
I enter the ring with the toy in my hand. The dog knows I have a toy in my hand. [00:15:00] It's really just a training session inside a trial environment. If I choose to bring the toy with me and not use it as a reward, so I bring it to the line and it goes with my leash, I need to really know that my dog is not thinking about the toy that we left behind.
The only time I've done this with Sprint is at the 1-TDC Invitational, and really, it was just easier than finding a spot kind of in the mosh pit to put her stuff. It was easier to bring her toy with us. I could use it at the warmup jump. I could tell her we're all done with it when we were in the wait your turn, and that works for her because she understood the concept of we're leaving this behind now.
And in general, she's not thinking about where her toy is on the [00:16:00] agility course. We've worked through that both as a pre-place reward situation and a stashed reward situation. But even though I had it in the ring and it was near her leash at the end, I still leashed her up, and then I handed her the toy from there, and then we walked over to get our backpack that had our cookies and things like that.
So she was flexible enough to deal with that routine because it was similar enough, and she had the skills to be able to go with the flow. Otherwise, I choose to leave my toy outside the ring for all events because it's the way I can be the most consistent.
So building a really fluent and clear routine around stash reinforcement can be really helpful in maintaining behaviors from training to [00:17:00] competition. I would love to hear what you think about this, so join me over in the Fans of FX Agility community to continue the conversation
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