079 Adding Distractions to Your Training
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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 and 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. Today, episode 79, I wanna talk about adding distractions to your training. First, a distraction is anything that pulls your attention away from what you are doing. Distractions can be both something that you would normally seek out or something that you would try to avoid.
And so really understanding [00:01:00] kind of how each distraction motivates your dog's behavior is really important as you start to make these deliberate changes to your training Having a distraction in your training causes their brain to open a tab. So something changes in the environment and your brain alerts you to it, you open a tab about it, and the more tabs that you have open, the less bandwidth you have available to focus on the task that you set out to do.
So when we think about this in terms of dog training, and especially competing, we want to give our dogs the ability to notice things and close out those tabs.
My goal is to make my cues clear and salient regardless of what's happening in the environment. So as long as they are safe, and they feel safe, and [00:02:00] they are confident that they are safe, I can teach them that changes in the environment do not change my cues, and therefore do not change the behaviors that I'm looking for.
So it's also important that I can continue to cue clearly and act appropriately and respond in the way that they expect me to respond even when distractions are present. So again, I have to know pretty well how my dog is going to view that distraction and feel confident in how the dog will interact with that distraction so that when it does get deliberately added to my training, I can remain calm and my dog can remain calm.
So there are a couple of ways that I like to do this throughout the dog's education. One is making small changes to my training environment pretty much [00:03:00] every training session. Things like moving the furniture, leaving a coat or a blanket draped on a chair or over the couch, just changing something in the training space Um, train in a different portion of the training space.
Face a different direction. Um, these are things that can just keep the environment constantly, uh, novel on a small scale, so that way your dog doesn't get attached to a very specific picture, and then is really alarmed when that picture changes.
But again, my cues, my clarity, all the routines that I use, everything, all the information that I can give them stays the same, even if the environment around us is changing And then the second way I do this is very deliberate distractions that my dog is meant to [00:04:00] notice. In the first example, when I'm changing small things in my training space, I don't really expect the dog to notice those things, not really.
But when I'm adding distractions into my training, and I've talked about this type of thing when I talk about ring prep or proofing or things like that, I do want the dog to notice those things. I want the dog to open a tab and close that tab, and I deliberately want them to practice that skill.
So there are a few requirements to doing this well, and number one is they need to know how to respond to those distractions separately from training. What should the dog do when they see a person? I think most of us are thinking to ourselves "Well, if they're training, they should just ignore that person and continue training," right?
Think about what your dog does when they see a person in a [00:05:00] non-training context. If your dog is allowed to leave you to visit that person when they see a person in a non-training context, you are likely going to be fighting that behavior in a training context. So this is kind of me plugging in some really good life skills before training can even begin because if your dog already has the concept of see a person, check in with my guardian for what to do about that person, you will have already laid a super solid foundation for how to ignore people in a training context.
Because instead of running over and seeing that person, they're probably going to look at you and go, "What should I do about that person?" And that right there is your time to be a good leader and give information. And it could be the information is just continue with the task that we were doing, it's no big deal.[00:06:00]
Or that information is, let's take a short break so that I can see what that person needs. Or the information is, you know what, that's your best friend, let's go say hi. It can be any of those things, but if the dog understands how to ask you what to do with that distraction, they don't have to keep the tab open about it, and they don't have to fight that instinct of wanting to go say hi.
So this applies to any distraction that you could want to add, people, dogs, um, noise, anything like that, massive environmental changes. If they don't know how to respond to it out of the training context, you're going to have a harder time having them ignore it in the context of training Second really important thing is they need to have a fairly significant reinforcement history of the task that you're asking them to do.
If they don't have the appropriate motivation [00:07:00] to do the thing, and their best friend just walked in the room, they're going to be in a bit of conflict about what to do. And again, you might start to feel like you have to fight to keep their focus. And any time that I feel like there's a conflict between what my dog wants and what I want, and I'm feeling like I need to, um, do a bunch of things to, like, keep their focus and convince them to stay with me, I don't feel good about it and I don't feel like I'm in a good training space.
So, working first with behaviors that have already been heavily reinforced, that they already have pretty high levels of motivation to do. And yeah, I'm using really good motivators when I'm deliberately adding distractions because I'm going to continue making it worth my dog's while to choose to work with me over visiting or checking things out or, [00:08:00] you know, diving into that bag of goodies that is on the edge of the ring.
Whatever the distraction is, I want what I'm asking them to do to be way more interesting to them because of the previous reinforcement history that they've gotten. So it's going to be way more powerful. It is way more likely to pay off if they continue to work with me rather than go check out that thing.
The third thing that I really have to think about when I'm deliberately adding distractions is the intensity of the distraction. I want to be working within a range where the dog does notice the thing but can easily close that tab and continue working with a pretty high level of confidence. So I'm okay if I see the dog look and get back to work.
I'm okay if I see the dog do an ear flick towards the thing and get back to work, uh, or continue working. I'm okay if they slow down if [00:09:00] they're... especially, like, something like weave poles or a little jumping sequence. If I just see a little bit of they're, they're not going quite as fast as they normally would, I'm okay with that.
They've got another tab open. But I would like to see that tab close pretty quickly and the dog's behavior return to normal within a handful of reps at, at most. Too little distraction is okay because you're still kind of habituating to there are things happening in the environment and you are just really good, just really focused, in the zone in training.
Totally fine. It's not the exact same skill as I've opened a tab and I've now closed the tab, but too little distraction is also practicing I don't even have other tabs open. This level of simulation in the environment is okay. I don't want [00:10:00] to add too much distraction, especially chronically. It's going to happen from time to time that your estimation of how much distraction could be tolerated was wrong, and your dog might have an overreaction to that stimulus.
They might leave you. They might bark at it. They might go sniffy, right? But it, it's okay. As long as that's not chronically happening, it's okay. But it's something that, like I said, I'd rather have too little distraction than too much distraction, and it's also why I'm filming my training and I'm paying attention to all the things throughout.
A few episodes ago, I talked about where we can be more clear in our training, the things that we can look for to make sure that there's not any, um, confusion or unwanted behaviors in our training loops, and that definitely applies here, especially when we're introducing [00:11:00] something into the environment to deliberately distract them.
So I don't want it to be so much that we get a behavior that we don't wanna see. I want to stay in that range of they open the tab, they close the tab, they keep working Both of these ideas, changing something every time and adding deliberate distractions, work best when you can start them earlier in your dog's education.
Right? If your dog gets very habituated to a sterile environment, it is more difficult to add them in later, but it is never too late to start. You will need to start though, like they are young puppies and have no concept of how to close a tab once it's opened And you have to be aware of your dog's tendencies.
So in that, in my last sentence, I said the earlier you start, the better. However, [00:12:00] when Sprint was a tiny puppy, she had a really negative reaction to novelty and changes in her environment. Those changes I talked about, moving the furniture, having a coat somewhere, when she was 12, 14, 16 weeks old, she had negative reactions to those things.
She would enter a room, something was different, she would bark at it. So that means that I can't use that as a deliberate distraction yet because her natural reaction to it is not neutral, and it's certainly leaning negative. I don't want those feelings ever in my training.
So first, the behavior work had to happen to get... So that when she just rounded the corner in my house and saw something that wasn't there yesterday, she'd go, "Huh. All right, no problem." She [00:13:00] had to learn the concept of being neutral to those things and not even opening a tab, or opening a tab and closing a tab, in her life first.
And then once I started seeing it in her life, I started to have it happen in her training situations as well. This is true of any distraction that they do not respond neutrally to: people, dogs, things. We need to know how they feel about things before we can use them as deliberate distractions, and the more education they have about responding to those things, the easier it is to add them as d- deliberate distractions later on.
And yeah, if you're thinking, "Well, that's just socialization," you're right. It is. A lot of this is we get these observations, we learn how our dog responds to these things through [00:14:00] socialization when they are puppies. We also teach them how to respond to those things when they are puppies. So back to my people example, if your puppy has been habituated to see a person visit a person, you need to first teach the dog how to see a person not visit a person before you expect them to do it in work.
So I'd love to hear your ideas for adding distractions to your training, so please come and join the free Fans of FX Agility community to let me know what you think.
Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love for you to leave a review, share it with an agility friend, or connect with me on social media. Your support helps more handlers and teams find the podcast and be part of this community. You can also find all of my training programs, coaching, and resources at fxagility.com.
Remember, excellent agility is [00:15:00] built one training session at a time, and every small step forward matters. Until next time, happy training
