Upping the Anti

I am still very much on my quest to find the right combination of treats for Kobi. Kobi is not exactly the most food motivated dog, I mean most mornings I have to smother his food in yogurt and plead with him to eat (once I am done my giant bag that I have of food at the moment I will be searching for something new). As seen with some past posts we have tried everything from store bought to home made. The rotation that I have going on at the moment is Fresh Pet Select which can be purchased at the Windsor St. Sobeys. If you haven't been since their renovation check it out! The store is fantastic, and the pet section is the best grocery store section I have ever seen. A whole corner of the store is dedicated to pets and they have a refrigerated section. 

I decided to give this stuff a try because it's hard making your own treats all the time. For $10 a bag (or $4 for the cat food which I have also used and is fantastic as an even smaller treat) the food is tasty, smelly, and already in little bit sized pieces. I also have been using cheese and some freeze dried liver (will be attempting to make my own soon and will post if it works out), but in both cases I need to spend time cutting them up into little bits.

Anyway, back to the point. A few weeks ago I noticed Kobi loved bread, so I bought a massive amount of croutons to use when out walking, worked for a couple days, then he would spit them out. Though I did not want to have to use a high value  treat on walking, sometimes to get the results you want you need to up the anti. Upping the anti also doesn't have to be in the form of food, you simply need to know what your dog wants most. I still can't always figure out what Kobi wants most, but in an effort to control more of his resources, I realized when walking, I almost always give Kobi a stick. He loves sticks, must have a stick when walking or he's not truly happy. So I decided, I will control the stick. For about 4 days I walked holding a stick, rewarding him by letting him mouth the stick for a few seconds before continuing on. The focus I got from Kobi was unreal, he didn't budge from my side, if someone walked by he got to tug the stick and had no interest in them. The only downside to this was if he felt he wasn't getting the stick fast enough he would start jumping at me. To solve that problem would have required more training, but instead what happened was the next walk we went out with a bag full of the Fresh Pet stuff and the new clicker.

What happened was because we had upped the anti with the stick to show him where we want him to walk to get his reward, he was able to learn the behaviour significantly faster than he did with croutons, hot dogs and kibble. He was finally walking where we wanted because I had something he wanted. When I switched to the food, I didn't drop back down to something he disliked again, I kept the anti up, just slightly lower. He still gets a high rate of reinforcement, and is still held back when I notice his ears perk up as a sign of him possibly passing threshold.

The end result, we have now gone on several walks where he is happily glued to my side, accepting rewards, not pulling, not lunging and remaining calm and focused.
So if your stuck with your training. Try upping the anti and see what happens.