It sounds logical. It’s everywhere. And it may actually be undermining your training.

So what does the science actually say about how to build and maintain behaviors? And why does the slot machine analogy fall apart under scrutiny? Let’s dig in.

Where the Slot Machine Analogy Breaks Down

You won’t catch me at a slot machine — or gambling at all, even with pretend money at a prom after-party. The whole thing feels like the opposite of fun to me (does this make me a bore?).

But when trainers invoke the slot machine to explain why you shouldn’t reinforce every correct instance of behavior once it’s learned, they’re drawing on a familiar image: the person who keeps pulling that slot machine lever for hours, convinced the next one will pay out.

Because at some point, it will. My understanding is that, legally, it has to.

The problem is, that image — and the story behind it — probably isn’t the best foundation for how we train our dogs. It’s missing a great deal of nuance.

A Quick Primer on Reinforcement Schedules

When somebody tells you to reward your dog like a slot machine (i.e. reward sometimes rather than every time), they are referring to a specific schedule of reinforcement.

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“Just ignore your puppy’s biting.”

“Ignore your dog when they are barking.”

“Ignore your dog when they jump on you.”

This advice is a lot trickier than it sounds – and has the potential to do more harm than good.

What People Mean When They Say “Just Ignore It”

To be fair, you can trace this advice back to science, but the way the advice is often given doesn’t bring all of the nuance of that science with it. When people ignore their dogs, they’re usually trying to practice something called extinction, which is a procedure to decrease unwanted behavior by permanently removing the reinforcer that maintained the behavior.

If behavior continues to show up under certain conditions, it’s because something is reinforcing it. If that behavior no longer works to produce reinforcement (in the case of extinction), the dog will stop performing it (or really, the behavior will return to baseline levels).

Easy peasy, right?

Not so fast …!

The First Problem: Frustration

Imagine you are in an app on your phone and you tap some icon but nothing happens. You start tapping harder and faster. And you likely feel quite frustrated. It can be a deeply unpleasant experience when the environment and your learning history indicate that a reinforcer is available contingent on some behavior but that behavior doesn’t produce the reinforcer. If some behavior normally “works” and then suddenly doesn’t, it tends to be quite frustrating.

In fact, extinction comes with many of the same potential side effects as punishment, which means you could very likely see frustration-related behaviors (usually escalations) and even aggression emerge. There are even some people (I forgot whom) who think extinction should live on the same level as punishment in the LIMA (Lease Intrusive Minimally Aversive) hierarchy.

The Second Problem: The Extinction Burst

But the problems don’t end there. What did you do when the app wasn’t working? You did the same behavior – just MORE … BIGGER. This is called an extinction burst. It’s very common for a behavior to actually increase before it decreases during extinction. And while you may have been able to ignore the behavior at its lower levels, are you able to ignore the escalation?

What happens if you’ve had the world’s worst day and your head is killing you? What happens if the neighbor in your apartment building knocked on your door yesterday to ask you to keep your dog’s barking down? What if you have a guest over with a sleeping baby? At some point, you are likely not going to be able to ignore your dog. And when that happens, you will effectively teach your dog to bark more intensely and more persistently.

If you want to ignore a behavior to reduce it, you better be able to ignore it forever.

It Can Be a Long Haul

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What Most of Us Were Taught About “Charging the Clicker”

When I first started dog training, I always heard people talk about “charging the clicker” (or whatever marker you were using) by marking and delivering a treat repeatedly, independent of the dog’s behavior: click-treat, click-treat, click-treat.

The idea was sort of to give the marker some “value” (aka establish it as a conditioned reinforcer) before you actually use it. However, you can pair the marker with treats quite effectively even if you are using it to mark behavior right out of the gate. I often introduce a marker by marking and treating every time the dog looks at me. The pairing of the marker with treats still happens – the presentation of the pair is just contingent on the dog looking at me: behavior > click-treat, behavior > click-treat, behavior > click-treat. I am still delivering the treat contingent on the click, but the click is contingent on the behavior.

Hat Tips/Credit: I recently heard Kiki Yablon’s talk on the science of clicker training, and in it, she talks about the ways conditioned reinforcers are established. I am relaying what I remember from her talk below. Also, I’ve learned a ton about reinforcement systems and markers as cues from Mary Hunter and Dr. Jesús Rosales-Ruiz.

Four Ways Conditioned Reinforcers Are Established

Here are four methods for establishing conditioned reinforcers (aka “charging”) that I now can succinctly talk about thanks to Kiki’s talk:

• Response-independent pairing – In this procedure, you mark and deliver the treat back-to-back based on some time interval (the presentation of the treat is contingent on the presentation of the marker). The learner doesn’t have to perform a particular behavior in order to produce the stimulus-stimulus (S-S) pairing.

• Response-contingent pairing – In this procedure, the S-S pair (marker-treat) is only presented contingent on the learner offering a certain response (behavior), so you would only mark and deliver a treat when your learner offers the target behavior (the treat is still presented contingent on the presentation of the marker, but the marker is presented contingent on a behavior). This might mean you mark and then deliver a treat when your dog looks at you.

• Operant discrimination training – This is where you establish the stimulus as a cue – you are making the marker predict reinforcement following a specific behavior. In this approach, you condition the reinforcer by teaching it like you would teach any other cue. For example, you might teach your dog to walk over to a bowl and take the food out of it and then add the cue “take it” to that whole chain of behaviors (take it predicts a treat if the dog walks over to the bowl).

• Observational learning – This is where an individual learns by observing another individual. I don’t know enough about this to talk much about it, but I have no doubt dogs can learn this way.

So How Do You Actually Start Using a Marker?

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There are a few skills that I would teach almost every dog, and this one might surprise you: I call it “take it” (the name doesn’t actually matter though). When I show this skill, it’s easy to zero in on a dog who is leaving some distraction alone. But that isn’t my focus when I train it. By teaching a dog when to take something, I get to tap into a million other behaviors – and without all the frustration that might otherwise come with not having access to something they want. Your dog already knows how to go get things. “Take it” is really about teaching stimulus control.

Now do I think this is a skill that creates huge problems when it’s not in a dog’s repertoire? Probably not. But I think it can make a huge difference when it is.

Here’s what you’ll get in this article:

• What “take it” is

• Why this skill is valuable

• A number of video tutorials showing different options for teaching “take it” (you can pick the one that best suits your dog’s existing skills)

• Additional video tutorials for activities for using “take it” to reinforce skills like walking near you past distractions and recalling away from distractions

• What about real life distractions that your dog cannot access?

What Is “Take It”?

Your dog already knows how to go grab something they want. They don’t (generally) have to learn how to walk to a food bowl and eat it or run to a toy and pick it up.

When you teach a dog “take it,” you are teaching them when to access whatever the stimulus of interest in the environment is (yay stimulus control).

For example, you might have a tug toy out on the ground and your dog is walking with you. When you say “take it” (or whatever cue you choose), they run and pick the tug up (and then maybe bring it back to you to tug). Or maybe you have food out in a bowl in the training area, and your dog performs some task with you, and to reinforce, you send them to access the food that has been out on the ground by saying “take it.”

What you get on the other side of “take it” looks a whole lot like a “leave it.” You can put a lot of other behaviors on the other side of “take it” too. For example, one of my favorite ways to practice recall is to have a distraction (food or toy) out on the ground and recall the dog away from it. To reinforce, I send them to “take it.”

Why I Love Teaching Dogs “Take It”

If you know me, you know I like to empower my dogs as much as possible. This skill looks very “obedience-y,” but that isn’t why I love it. It has nothing to do with my dogs needing me to give “permission” to access things they love. If you knew my dogs, you’d know how free they are to behave even though they have this skill. The reason I love teaching dogs “take it” is because it’s a foundation skill for working with distractions that can reduce a lot of frustration – for you and your dog. It can also be used as a reinforcement system to strengthen a lot of other behaviors like walking near you or recalling.

I could leave it there, but I’ll elaborate a bit on why “take it” may be an awesome thing to teach your dog:

• If you want your dog to move away from a distraction, teaching “take it” will probably help you. They learn that orienting to you is actually how they get access to objects of interest “out there.”

• “Take it” provides a lot of clarity and can reduce a huge amount of frustration for your dog. By teaching “take it”, you are teaching your dog exactly when and how to access what they want. This tends to get you a lot of other behaviors (leave it, movement away from the object, etc.) – all without a bunch of unnecessary stress.

• I find a good “take it” invaluable in working through distractions in the context of other skills like loose leash walking and recall. It gives you the ability to turn distractions into powerful reinforcers.

• When you teach “take it,” you’re teaching a reinforcement system that can be wildly powerful in building other behaviors.

• I find that teaching “take it” is often one of the fastest ways to strengthen “leave it.”

• Underrated: This allows you, as the dog’s human, to practice focusing on what (and when!) you want your dog to do something rather than what you don’t want them to do (e.g. don’t go towards that distraction). This is a skill that will serve you over and over again.

• This skill allows you to add some extra mental stimulation to toy play with dogs. You can throw a toy down on the ground and have them walk with you for a second and then send them to take it. Or maybe practice a short recall away from a toy before sending them back to it. This can be a helpful way to meet more of your dog’s needs, create play sessions that might be lower stress on your dog’s body, and (if desired) work in a few reps of training without needing a separate training session.

• For what it’s worth, I have personally found that my dog Otis’s experience working on “take it” has allowed us all to coexist better outside when my son is playing with toys that Otis might want to grab.

How To Teach “Take It” and Use It To Strengthen Orienting to You Around Distractions

There are many ways that you teach “take it” (and by default, teach an implied “leave it” until you give the cue to take it). You can work up to asking for more behavior from your dog before you cue them to take whatever you have out in the environment.

These bullets below are written as a progression, so while there are a variety of options for teaching “take it,” I want to see a dog who can stand in front of you while a bowl of food is on the ground before you ask them to walk with you away from the bowl.

I find teaching this skill with food to be easiest, but you can very easily transfer these behaviors to toys. One of my favorite ways to get a little distraction training into everyday life is to simply build a few moments of it into toy play.

(The hyperlinks to the videos are all underlined in the text below.)

First teach them when to take the food:

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All this to say: I love the shit out of her.

And yet, there was a time when I wasn’t sure if it made sense for me to keep her in my home.

The Time I Wasn’t Sure I Could Keep Her

Sully used to show a lot of resource guarding behaviors. She was relatively quick to snap if anyone (dog or person) approached when she was eating, had a chew, found a stick, was messing with a leaf, or was simply comfortable on the couch/bed/floor. But this alone wasn’t the reason I hesitated to keep her in my home. It was the simple fact that I knew I wanted kids one day, and I wondered how possible it would be for me to reduce the risk to the point that I was comfortable.

With some training, I watched her resource guarding behaviors nearly disappear, but I never lost respect for the fact that they were in her repertoire. I became far more knowledgeable about behavior and training, and so by the time I got pregnant, I actually had very little stress about Sully. But that doesn’t mean I was totally relaxed either. I knew I would have to be diligent. I still have to be. That is what is needed in order to keep Sully comfortable (she deserves that) and the people in my home safe.

I am two and a half years into having my son, Ford, and my dogs share a home. I count my blessings everyday for how well they’ve all integrated into this new version of our family. However, there is not a minute that goes by that I don’t have Sully’s history somewhere in the back of my head. And so I thought it might be helpful or interesting to give you a little glimpse into real life – what it’s like sharing a home with a dog who resource guards and a young child (I recently shared a small instance of resource guarding in this Instagram post).

My First Big Mistake

I will never forget the first time Sully snapped at my son.

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That’s why today we’re using something simple: a hat.

Last week we practiced building a dialogue with an object using a mat and nose target. This week, I’m walking you through another step-by-step framework — how to cooperatively put a hat on your dog. This video is actually from our digital e-course, Challenge 2.0. It’s low pressure, highly transferable, and a powerful way to build the shared language you’ll need when the stakes are higher.

If you work on this, we’d love to see a picture of your dog cooperatively wearing their hat!

The Goal, Supplies & Setup

The beauty of working with a hat is that the stakes are low, so it gives you a chance to practice skills without the pressure of needing to reach a goal by a certain date for some appointment you have. (Feel free to pick another low-stakes item if hats aren’t your jam.)

🥇 Goal

• Put a hat on your dog using a cooperative care framework

🧰 Supplies

• A hat

• Treats

• Optional: a mat

📍 Location

• A low-distraction spot indoors

✔️ Steps

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In reality, there are opportunities for us all day, everyday to give our dogs more control. But today, I am going to give you a step-by-step, low-pressure cooperative care training session you can do with your dog to practice having a dialogue with them. In the context of the dialogue we will set up, they are going to control your behavior. This is powerful! It makes what you do and what is done to them predictable. And that tends to reduce uncomfortable feelings and escape/avoidance behaviors (think running away from eye drops).

What You’ll Learn in This Session

• How to engage in a back and forth dialogue with your dog in a training session – their behavior is going to control theirs. This can help you bring these types of dialogues into a million other contexts with them.

• Build the skills you and your dog need in order to develop these dialogues and cooperative care frameworks that you can use in other contexts (e.g. nails, teeth, hair, etc.).

• How to cooperatively contact your dog with a dish towel or a spoon – this is a low-pressure context on purpose! We are going to give them a way to opt into the session as a whole to start and then control what you are doing with your hands.

Why It’s Worth Practicing This Low-Pressure Cooperative Care

• Who cares about contacting your dog with a spoon or dish towel?! That’s the whole point! Low-pressure for you takes the stress off, so you can practice YOUR behaviors. So much of cooperative care is about your ability to observe and create clear contingencies. It can be hard to do that when you are working in the context of some care activity you REALLY want your dog to opt into or one that they’re already actively behaving to avoid (e.g. nail clipping, teeth brushing, hair brushing, etc.).

• Using a more neutral object like a dish towel, a spoon, or coffee cup (pick something neutral for your dog!) makes it more likely for your dog to opt in, and more importantly, keeps the uncomfortable feelings and escape/avoidance behaviors out of your picture. It’s so much easier to practice engaging in a dialogue with your dog when they aren’t uncomfortable or trying to get away.

• The skills and history built in this low-pressure context (for both you and your dog) can be transferred to other contexts.

• Added bonus: this is enriching for both of you! So if you are someone who likes being presented with ideas, here’s my pitch for this week! If this week isn’t ideal for you, save this for later.

The Framework: Clear, Predictable Dialogue

As a note, there are A MILLION frameworks you could use to practice cooperative care. I am starting with this one because the dog’s behaviors are really crystal clear, so it’s harder as the person doing the care to mess up what should be a predictable contingency. Happy to do more of these with other frameworks if yall enjoy this!

Getting Started With a Low Pressure Cooperative Care Session

If you are a more visual learner, there is a video at the end of this article.

What You’ll Need

• Treats

• A mat (this can simply be a towel)

• A neutral object (e.g. a dish towel, a spoon, a spatula, a pen, a coffee cup, etc.) – pick something you feel confident is neutral for your dog (e.g. something they aren’t obsessed with getting access to and also aren’t trying to move away from)

Set-Up: Choosing the Right Space

• A low-distraction area with a little space. Your dog needs to be able to lie down. Ideally, you’ll also have enough space to toss a treat off the towel to send them away (it doesn’t need to be a huge toss).

Step-By-Step: How To Do a Low Pressure Cooperative Care Session:

Note: These steps assume your dog is familiar with automatically lying down on a mat when one is laid out in training and targeting with their nose. If these behaviors are not familiar, you can either teach them first or use other behaviors in your dialogue (e.g. standing in front of you and eye contact, for example – I am happy to do more of these tutorials using other frameworks too).

Before you start, make sure you have your towel, treats, and neutral object easily accessible (but not right out in front of your dog).

1. Place a mat out in front of you and give your dog treats when they lie down on it.

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If your dog falls into this category, I’d first recommend looking into pain and discomfort as this could be a potential sign of it. Once you’ve either ruled it out or gotten it well managed, there are some very simple things you can do to support them.

What “Check It Out” Means (and Why It Works)

The one I want to cover today is “check it out.” This is a cue I would use to essentially indicate to a dog that it is safe for them to go investigate whatever the “object of interest” is in the space (that was a super “construct-y way to explain what’s going on, but I fear overly technical talk at the top here here won’t serve my goal – I promise my explanation will get better and more nuanced).

“Okay, but how do you teach a dog that it is safe?”

This is where carefully arranging antecedents comes into play to give them a history of investigating objects while feeling comfortable. They’re going to contact reinforcers (and no aversive stimulation). Let’s walk through a training game I love to use to teach “check it out,” so you can try it too.

Here’s why I like this game so much (you can watch a video of me playing the game here):

• There’s so little risk of creating conflict (you aren’t tossing treats at the object).

• You are not going to be pushy about getting them to move towards objects. You’re going to arrange antecedents so they are very likely to choose to approach it on their own.

• You build from where they are already comfortable rather than trying to “change how they feel.”

The Training Game: How to Teach “Check It Out” Step by Step

Be sure to read to the end to get some answers to frequently asked questions, some additional tips, and how to apply this in real life. Without further ado, here’s how to play the training game:

1. Gather some objects.

You want fairly neutral objects – especially to start. What’s going to make them of interest is going to be the fact that they are out of place. Depending on your dog, you may need to go up or down in interest level, but avoid anything that might spook them.

Examples: Chair, stool, pot, jacket, water bottle, etc.

2. Find an open area that will serve as your “stage” (aka your training space).

You want a space that is open that you can put your objects in. You want to give your objects main character energy – spotlight on them. When you put that object down in your training space, it should stick out as THE object of interest.

3. Have your dog station away from your training space.

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A Quote, a Songbird, and a Broken Branch

I was scrolling on Instagram the other day, when a photo of a bird demanded that my thumbs stop. The picture of the perfect little songbird had a quote written over it:

“A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because its trust is not on the branch but on its own wings.”

― Charlie Wardle

I am certain this wasn’t the first time I’d come across this quote, but it landed differently on this day. Probably partly because I feel like the life branch I was perched on just broke and partly because I am now deeply nerdy about behavior. I know overthinking gets a bad wrap, but sometimes I think it’s fun to overthink the shit out of something – like a simple quote over a photo of a songbird. Is it possible, in this endeavour, to glean something useful about how to support our dogs and build their confidence?

I think so, but let’s see!

When I typed the quote into Google to make sure what I had read on the Instagram image was accurate, I discovered that the quote actually has one more line to it:

“Always believe in yourself.”

What Does It Mean to “Believe in Yourself,” Anyway?

But how does one come to believe in themselves (and what does that even look like)?

I’d argue through experience. Through learning.

For the sake of our overthinking exercise, let’s imagine a baby bird who definitively has wings but has not yet learned to use them to fly (yes, birds must learn to fly) and is sitting on a branch. The branch snaps and the bird tumbles to the ground (uninjured but not thrilled). Hmmm. The same bird ends up on another branch (don’t ask me about how this imaginary bird got up there again) that also somehow snaps. The young bird falls again. There’s a decent chance this bird is going to start avoiding branches and feeling uncomfortable when they find themselves on one. Why? The bird didn’t yet have the skills needed to successfully navigate a branch breaking when it broke.

Now you put a bird who has a boat load of flight experience on a branch that snaps, and while it may startle them, they’ll simply start to fly. They have the skills to navigate that situation.

Confidence Is Built Where Skills Meet Environment

Trust comes from having the skills needed to navigate situations and successfully access reinforcers. Big skill repertoires help with this. But the environment is not a non-factor. If you put an individual in environments where they don’t have the skills they need to access reinforcers and avoid punishers, they’re not going to feel great.

Anytime I think about confidence, I think about this quote from B.F. Skinner:

“Astronauts are not successful because they feel confident; they feel calm because they have been thoroughly trained, have clear procedures, and are operating in an environment where behavior has been carefully shaped and supported.”

Astronauts have to operate in some objectively risky environments, but the way they feel and behave in tough situations stems from having experience in environments that have been carefully arranged. Their behavior – including their emotional behavior – has been shaped by very thoughtful antecedent arrangements.

If you were teaching a bird to fly, you would absolutely make sure you had a stable branch/perch for the bird to launch from. Often to build the skills and feelings we call “confidence,” we have to pay a lot of attention to the literal and metaphorical branch (aka the environment). We need environments that will gradually shape behavior and allow a learner to successfully access reinforcers. Once they have those skills, they’re more likely to remain comfortable even when the environment presents a challenge.

Trust and confidence comes from mastery. It comes from having skills. It comes from experience.

Why Some Can Feel Calm Doing Risky Things

I don’t know if you’ve watched any of the winter Olympics, but I recently caught a little of the snowboarding Big Air event. It’s the one where they go super fast down a big hill and then up a huge ramp and are launched into the ether where they twist and flip and hopefully land rightside up. I always chuckle at how calm all of these athletes look. Why are they so calm doing something that could go so horrible wrong if you land a few degrees off? Is it simply because they are confident and trust their abilities? But why do they trust their abilities?

I don’t know exactly how these athletes train, but I feel certain that they don’t start out on the jumps we see in the Olympics. They likely first build skills on gentle hills and gradually build up to steeper hills. They likely start on jumps that only cause them to leave the solid ground for a second or two. They don’t magically have the confidence to do these wild Olympic jumps simply because they decided they could. They slowly built skills in environments that were suitable to their skill level. They mastered skills in those contexts and then progressed. The feelings of confidence arose from that mastery.

Oh, and by the way, the verbal thinking behavior that we’d label as “believing in themselves” was learned along the way too!

What This Means for Our Dogs

So how does any of this relate to dogs?

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So, what exactly is a marker?

Have you ever seen clicker training where the person clicks and then gives a treat? Or maybe you’ve been told to say “yes” when your dog does the thing you want them to do? The click and “yes” are examples of markers.

There’s a lot more to know about markers, so let’s run through some of the things you might hear about them.

“Markers tell the dog that they did the right behavior.”

When first explaining markers, most people say that a marker essentially tells a dog “good job, you did the right behavior!” I think this can be a useful starting point for someone new to training because it alludes to the marker’s ability to select desired behavior and communicate information. I personally think that it helps to understand a bit more than this to use markers well.

“Markers are conditioned reinforcers.”

Reinforcers are stimuli that strengthen the behavior that they follow (common examples: a treat or a tossed ball), and you can categorize them as primary or secondary/conditioned reinforcers.

Primary reinforcers are innately reinforcing. They don’t require any prior experience with them in order to strengthen the behavior that they follow. They are the result of evolution and tend to mostly be basic needs like food and water.

Unlike primary reinforcers, secondary (or conditioned) reinforcers only gain their reinforcing strength through learning. They are previously neutral stimuli that have become reinforcers by close, repeated pairing with an existing reinforcer (either a primary stimulus or strong secondary reinforcer).

Markers like the word “yes” or a click don’t mean anything to your dog when they first come into the world. But as these sounds are repeatedly heard right before a treat shows up, the sound itself gains some reinforcing power.

If the explanation stops here, I think we run the risk of someone thinking that the marker alone is sufficient “since it’s now a reinforcer.” I worry about the same thing when the explanation for a marker stops at “it tells the dog they did a good job/the right behavior.”

Markers should always be followed by a primary or very strong secondary reinforcer. Just because they have become conditioned reinforcers doesn’t mean they should be delivered on their own. They could lose their power very quickly that way. Plus, we need to consider the other (cueing) properties of markers … (stay tuned)!

“Markers are bridges and help you select precise behavior.”

Picture someone trying to teach a puppy to lie down.

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I wrote this article a few years ago after I had just recently moved with my two dogs, Otis and Sully, and while I still found the overall process of moving to be quite stressful, the thinking and prep work I did related to my dogs set them up for success, thereby reducing at least one aspect of my stress!

While no two dogs are exactly the same, there are some common questions and concepts that you can leverage to create a plan specific to your dog. I cover a lot of topics (some people will want to and/or be able to do more prep than others), so if some of these ideas feel unnecessary or impossible in your situation, just skip those. This is meant to offer ideas that you can pick from to tailor a plan for you and your dog. You can still prep really well even if you only focus on a few of these ideas.

This article is broken into two main sections:

1. The preparation you can do without your dog to hopefully make your move as smooth as possible. A lot of the work you do here will inform the prep you do with your dog.

2. The preparation you can do with your dog to support them as best as possible.

[Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links, meaning TOC may get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through our links, at no cost to you.]

Pssst … stay tuned for future articles with tips on the day of the move and after your move!

Before Your Move: Start To Plan Without Your Dog

Explore Your New Neighborhood (Without Your Dog)

One of the first things I recommend doing is exploring your new neighborhood without your dog so you can get your bearings and take note of what your dog is going to be exposed to. This is especially helpful if you have a dog with a history of reactive or fearful behaviors. Being familiar and comfortable in the area yourself may help you set them up for success when you add them to the equation. Here are some things you may want to consider:

• What is the overall activity like in the neighborhood?

• Do your neighbors have dogs or kids?

• How busy does the area seem at various times of day?

• What walking routes might work best for your dog?

• What management procedures of yours will work best if you run into one of your dog’s triggers?

• If you’re moving to a building, what stair & elevator options are there? How easily can you navigate a lobby with multiple dogs?

Explore Your New Home (Without Your Dog)

While this may sound simple at first, it’s actually one of the most important steps. It’s likely that you have a mental picture of your new home, but I recommend that you move through the space using a “dog lens” and take notes. These notes will help you determine what training & management you’ll need, and may reduce some of your worries about unknowns in the future (or is that just me?!). Here are some things you may want to consider:

• What can your dog see from within your home and from your patio or yard or balcony?

  • For example: Does a window give clear sightlines to delivery personnel or people passing on the street? Can they see your neighbors from your porch or through your fence?

• What is your dog likely to hear from inside your home?

  • For example: Is there construction next door? A barking dog? Are apartment hallway sounds audible?

• Do your neighbors have kids, dogs, or cats?

  • Do your neighbors spend a lot of time outdoors? Do the kids ride scooters around in the driveway after school? Does the cat wander in the front yard?

• Is there anything your dog is going to be exposed to for the first time?

  • For example: An elevator, a garage, a big city bus, a neighbor’s cat, etc.

It may also be helpful to stand in your new home and observe it from this angle:

• What do I notice that I think my dog might struggle with?

• What do I notice that might really excite my dog?

If you’re not worried about how your dog will do in a new environment & don’t think you will have to focus so much on them that you miss what is around you, you can certainly try to take note of some of these things with your dog there exploring the neighborhood with you (go to the “Take Your Dog to Your New Neighborhood” section to read more).

Get Your Management (Support!?) Plan Ready

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“You should always reinforce your dog’s effort.”

“Always give a treat when your dog opts out.”

…or should you?

We live in a culture so rooted in punishment, and that can be seen throughout the history of dog training. There has been so much progress towards a kinder (and more effective) way of working with animals without all of the risk and potential fallout that comes from aversive stimulation. Sometimes nuance gets lost in quick sound bites that feel a lot better than “ignore the unwanted behavior” or “correct the mistake so your dog knows not to do it.”

I thought it might be fun (lol – this should tell you something about what I enjoy) to go through some of the quick sound bites you might hear as advice for what to do when your dog makes a mistake in a training session and end with the strategy I tend to use.

“Don’t give a treat, so they know that is not the correct behavior.”

I understand the thinking behind this if you are trying to clarify which behaviors are the right ones and fear that giving treats for the wrong ones may confuse them. Providing clarity for dogs in training sessions is a worthwhile pursuit.

However, when you withhold reinforcement for the wrong behaviors, the overall rate of reinforcement in the session drops. When your dog is performing the behavior that their learning history and current conditions tell them will lead to reinforcement but reinforcement is not showing up, your dog is experiencing extinction conditions … and they feel like crap. Just think about how you feel when you open an app on your phone, and it doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do (I want to scream as I press and tap furiously). Those are not the feelings you want to capture in your training environment (also, we just don’t want dogs to feel like that when they work with us).

Plus, while you wait for your dog to try to come up with the right answer, your dog is still practicing the wrong behaviors in the conditions where you want the right ones to show up. There is a very real chance you are going to find yourself having to clean up what you trained in the end (which often means starting over).

You could definitely make an argument for withholding a treat following a mistake every once in a while for some dogs in some situations, so I am not saying that this is always a problem. But as a general strategy, it kind of sucks.

“Always give a treat to reinforce your dog’s effort.”

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While l will continue to be a huge advocate for honoring your dog’s no – for giving them ways to opt in and out of any interaction, the truth is that many of us will have moments in our dogs’ lives where we will have to do something our dogs don’t want us to do.

I recently got this comment on a cooperative care post I shared on TikTok where the start button behavior was a chin rest: “The thing I don’t understand about it is what do you do in the interim? If [my dog] never offers a chin rest or avoids it but he still needs eye drops etc. What do you do?”

So let’s chat.

Challenge your understanding of what is required right now.

Is it really required? Even if it is, is it required right this second? There are so many veterinary events that are “required” but still flexible – to a degree. I think the first thing we owe our dogs is to challenge our own urgency.

Often, we can at least buy ourselves a little time to prepare for a specific event.

But if care is truly required right now (e.g. an acute eye infection) and your dog wants no part of the care, there are some things we can do to minimize harm and reduce risk to your relationship with your dog.

Distinguish between choice and no choice moments.

If you are not able to honor your dog’s no, then don’t ask your dog a question.

Imagine a cooperative care routine that looks like this:

• You sit down with a pillow in your lap and a food bowl at your side

• Dog puts chin on pillow → You lift eye drops → dog remains with chin on pillow → You put eye drops in eye and give a treat

• Dog doesn’t put chin on pillow → You do not lift eye drops & still give a treat

If your dog has an acute eye infection and needs drops right away and you think there is no chance your dog is going to opt in, then your setup needs to look different than your cooperative care setups where your dog has a choice. For example, instead of sitting down with a pillow for your dog to offer a chin rest (in this case, a familiar cooperative care framework), you might use a leash and harness (but we should take special care to avoid poisoning these cues — more on this below).

Put something unique in the environment for the aversive event to attach to.

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Why It’s So Hard to Change Emotions in the Same Place They Show Up

As it turns out, it’s a lot harder than it sounds to change emotions in the context that those unwanted emotions already show up in. For what it’s worth, it’s also difficult to change observable behaviors in those contexts too.

Here’s why: Behavior, emotions, and cues are all being learned together.

While your dog may learn to bark and lunge when they see another dog, the emotions we describe as “fear” are also being captured in that context.

And the conditions can be bigger than just the presence of another dog. The broader environmental context of that street in your neighborhood where a dog barks from a yard may get control of the behaviors and emotions that you are trying to change. Then even absent the dog, those fearful emotions and barking behaviors may show up on that street.

The environment cues the observable and emotional behavior. It can be really hard to get new behaviors and emotions to show up in the conditions where those unwanted behaviors and emotions already appear if you are starting literally right in them. Those cues mean something else.

Counterconditioning Isn’t a Cure-All—Here’s What It Actually Does

You’ll often hear people call feeding dogs around triggers “counterconditioning.” Counterconditioning is a valid, useful strategy for helping dogs with fear, but the term is often used more broadly than its technical definition. For example, people will say they are using counterconditioning to change their dog’s barking and lunging behaviors around skateboards, which are actually operant behaviors (behaviors influenced by the consequences that follow them).

But with counterconditioning, an animal's respondent behavior (think instantaneous, involuntary reflex – often physiological response) to a stimulus is replaced with an opposite automatic response. For example, if the oven beeping elicits emotions we call fear and respondent behaviors like tension, rapid breathing and heart rate, then the beeping could be paired with food so that it elicits positive emotions and behaviors like steady breathing, relaxed muscles, etc. So technically speaking, counterconditioning works with respondent behaviors, not operant ones.

Either way, this sounds good, right? Out with the fear and in with the positive feelings! But in order for it to work, the new eliciting stimulus has to elicit a stronger response than the old fear response. In other words: the appetitive stimulus would have to be more appetitive than the aversive stimulus is aversive, and that can be tricky.

So if all the cues in a given environment already evoke and elicit behaviors and emotions we consider “fearful,” this is going to be a really challenging environment to work in. Again, the context and cues already have behaviors and emotions attached to them.

A big reason why so many behavior professionals emphasize keeping a dog “under threshold” (aka in conditions where the “unwanted” behaviors are not evoked) and encourage the use of management is so the unwanted behaviors and feelings are not rehearsed over and over again in that context (making it more and more likely for those behaviors and emotions to show up in that context and potentially others as learning occurs).

(FWIW: counterconditioning works better when done with systematic desensitization.)

Where is your dog already comfortable?

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An Accidental Discovery (and an Immediate Spiral)

I immediately went inside and turned to the all knowing internet to determine if I had just robbed these baby birds of a future – and therefore to determine the fate of my mood for the rest of the week. Some internet people told me that adult birds may abandon a nest if it’s disturbed at all, so I peered back out hoping to assure my brain that the couch was exactly where it used to be. With nothing else to be done there, I started researching incubation – as if more knowledge of adult bird behavior might somehow help this whole situation. With twenty minutes of research under my belt, I abandoned the internet for the next most useful thing I could think to do: worry.

Later that day when my husband, Ben, came upstairs for lunch, I greeted him with, “This is why I shouldn’t clean outside.” He looked at me with some degree of confusion, but because he knows me well, he simply waited in silence for me to go on. I explained the whole ordeal and told him that I couldn’t stop thinking about the birds. He told me he thought they would be okay, but my brain thought it would be wise to stay the course with worrying until there was evidence that all my worrying had been fruitful.

What Worry Built — A week of rule-making, porch-guarding, and emotional investment

And in case you’re somebody who thinks worrying isn’t productive, allow me to present you some of the fruits of my labor: a new house rule that all humans and canines should steer clear of the back porch so the bird parents felt safe to resume their incubating. I likely created eight more problems in our typical house flow with this rule, but I was optimizing for bird comfort.

The next morning, I woke up and immediately walked to the back porch door. I told Ben that I had this sinking feeling that I messed it all up. He walked out onto the porch, leaned over the railing, and paused. I held my breath.

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Why does this matter? Well, put simply, it’s going to make your training a million times (a very scientific quantification) easier and more effective and likely minimize the stress your dog experiences during your training.

What Behaviors Do You Actually Want to See?

Let’s say your dog currently pulls like a maniac towards other dogs on walks to try to get closer to them. Training around other dogs is not where I would start (though I would spend some time making sure I understood the “when” and the “why” for the “problem” behavior, which I am going to gloss over here).

I would think about what observable behaviors I actually want to show up around other dogs, e.g.:

• Continue walking near me while maintaining slack in the lead

• Orient to me (perhaps upon seeing the dog/certain environmental stimuli and/or when verbally cued)

• Turn around and walk away from the dog with me

• Stop when I stop

• Eat food I offer

From there, I would ask myself: under what conditions do these behaviors (or approximations of them) already show up?

There are three main reasons I ask this question:

• You can’t reinforce behavior that isn’t showing up. I have to figure out how to arrange conditions so that desired behaviors can actually contact reinforcers in the dog’s environment.

• I don’t want to compete so hard against other strong cues and contingencies, so I am going to where those contingencies aren’t signaled.

• I don’t want to keep reinforcing all the unwanted stuff under the “problem conditions.”

Sometimes we inadvertently ask a whole lot of our dogs. The distance between a quiet living room and a city street filled with dogs is often far greater than the few feet it takes to walk out the door.

What You Can Adjust: Space, Additional Stimuli, Learning History and Motivating Operations

Here’s the thing I think is so cool: there’s so much we can play around with to arrange conditions so we can work where desired behaviors show up. For example:

• Space/Location: is this location (broadly speaking) distracting? I think about indoors versus outdoors, new versus familiar, quiet versus loud, big versus small, empty versus filled with life, etc. For example, my familiar living room (without anything intentionally set out to distract my dog) is likely going to be a less distracting space than a new empty field (aka a field my dog has never been to) where other dogs have been (even without dogs currently present).

• What is in the space: The location itself is going to have a “level” of distraction, but it’s also important to think about what may move through that space. Are there cars driving by? Are there people walking around? Is there a toy on the floor? Is a friend whipping a toy around ten feet away? Is there a bowl of food out on the floor? Do I have a friend walking their dog 50 feet away? In some cases, I am intentionally adding to the space, and in others, I am picking spaces because of what/who fills them.

• Other distant antecedents: While playing with the space alone gives us plenty to work with to support our dogs, there’s even more we can think about! How big is my dog’s reinforcement history for these skills? Is my dog more likely to orient to me/walk near me if I’ve given him a play date that week? What about if my dog goes on a nice sniffy hike before we train? There are so many ways to play with setting events and motivating operations that can shift how likely or unlikely it is for certain behaviors to show up during training.

We may need to play with all of the above to create conditions where desired behaviors reliably show up.

Progress Isn’t Always Linear (and That’s Okay)

Often, when we progress on one dimension, we scale back on another. For example, we might start off in a living room because that’s where the dog can orient to their person and walk beside them with a loose leash. Then while their person plays a pattern game with them, I might start waving my hands. Can the dog still orient to their person while I wave my hands? Yes, good. What if I wave my hands and talk. Yes? Good. What if I jump? What if I hold a toy and walk around. You get the idea. Then when we take it outside, we drop the added distractions (like the toy) and make sure the behavior is stable in the new location without all the additions before we work back up.

Ultimately, you are trying to get the old “problem” behavior conditions to be a part of the antecedent conditions for desired behaviors. By starting where behaviors already show up, your job is to move those behaviors to the old “problem conditions” rather than to try to squash with all the other unwanted stuff showing up. So you slowly change conditions and add variety until those desired behaviors are showing up where you want them to.

If It’s Not Working, Back Up

So if you find yourself feeling frustrated because your dog cannot seem to do what you are asking of them, one option is to change conditions until they can.

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I used to do this really weird thing with granola: I always opened new bags before I finished the old ones. I don’t know if the opened bags just got buried in the back of the cabinet or if I was avoiding something about the bottom of the bags, but it was leading to a lot of partially eaten granola bags that eventually went stale – not ideal. One day, my husband, Ben, started combining the open bags and leaving the one that was already open on the counter instead of putting it back away in the cabinet. Suddenly, I was finishing the bags before I opened a new one. It was such a low stress way to change my behavior.

We do stuff like this in our own lives all the time. For example, I have bowls right inside the front and back door, so Ben and I are more likely to put our keys down there (as opposed to some random place we won’t think to look when we need them next) when we come home. This way of influencing behavior has a technical name and is so important when it comes to working with dogs. It’s called an antecedent arrangement–essentially changing the antecedent conditions (conditions that precede and set the stage for the behavior) to make desired behavior more likely and undesired behavior less likely.

What’s an Antecedent, Anyway? (And Why It’s So Powerful)

When we are talking about operant behavior at its most basic level, we talk about the “ABC” unit: Antecedent–Behavior–Consequence (read more on some “behavior basics” in this previous post). In 1938, Skinner introduced the operant as a three term contingency: when A-antecedent, if B-behavior, then C-consequence. Looking at this three term contingency, we could change the antecedent cue (the discriminative stimulus) to change the behavior (because changing the antecedent would change what behavior-consequence contingency was signaled). For example, you could put up window film or curtains to block the visual stimulus of people walking by to reduce the behavior of barking out the window (if the dog can’t see the people, the barking behavior may not be cued). However, we can do more than simply removing the cue (not always possible) to influence behavior when we arrange antecedents.

Distant Antecedents: Setting Events, MOs, and Why Your Dog’s History Matters

Behavior scientists have long recognized that there are other factors in addition to the stimuli in the three term contingency that may influence the likelihood of a behavior. In 1959, Kantor described setting events (originally called “setting factors”) as antecedent factors that were broader and more complex than discrete stimulus variables (like a flash of light). Settings events include factors like the individuals learning history, the broader environment, health, etc. The concept of motivating operations, or MOs for short, (a term that now tends to subsume the older “establishing and abolishing operations” terms) was introduced by Keller and Schoenfeld in 1950 and redefined and expanded by Michael in 1982. In 2007, Michael described MOs as an “environmental variable that momentarily changes the value of a consequential stimulus (e.g., reinforcer, punisher) and changes the probability of members of that functional response class.” In other words, MOs are variables that make certain consequences (reinforcers or punishers) more or less reinforcing or punishing in a given moment and therefore make the behaviors that lead to those consequences more and less likely in that moment. For a very obvious example, the value of food goes up the longer it’s been since I last consumed a meal. Thus, the longer it’s been since I had food, the more likely it becomes that I perform the behavior of opening the fridge door. You may hear people talk about both setting events and MOs, which is why I bring them up here. They are both concepts meant to address the broader antecedent phenomena that can impact operant contingencies–setting events are rooted in interbehaviorism while MOs have their roots in radical behaviorism (you can read more about their distinction in this 2015 paper from Nosik and Carr). I see MOs talked about more than setting events, but for the average person trying to support their dog, I think the key is understanding that there are distant antecedents that don’t directly cue the behavior but make it more or less likely to occur.

Let’s look at a common example. The word “come” is the discriminative stimulus for the behavior of running to you, but I am sure you’ve experienced other factors at play beyond the cue and the reinforcer that influence their behavior. For example, how long my dog, Sully, has already been on the trails walking will influence her response to the cue “come.” Early in the walk, the relative value of my reinforcers is lower (so many good sights and smells to take in). As the walk wears on, some degree of satiation with those environmental stimuli happens and suddenly my reinforcers, which are the ones signaled by my cue (“come”), go up in relative value.

It’s Not Just the Cue: The Case for Arranging the Environment

Often when people think of or talk about training, they focus on consequences – the events and stimuli that immediately follow a behavior and influence its future strength. I don’t think it’s wise to ignore consequences because they are going to happen whether we pay attention to them or not, but by thoughtfully arranging the distant antecedents (settings events, motivating operations) and/or the immediate ones (the cue or discriminative stimulus), we can make it more likely for desired behaviors to show up (and get reinforced!) and less likely for undesired ones to.

Have you ever heard people talk about meeting a dog’s needs before thinking about “training them”?

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It’s one of those deceptively simple questions that opens the door to a much deeper reflection—not just about who feeds or walks the dog, but about evolving relationships, life transitions, and the emotional bonds we build (and sometimes rebuild) with the animals in our lives.

The Early Days: When I Was Stanley’s Human

At first, Stanley was my dog, no question. We did everything together—training, walking, feeding, vet visits. I was the default handler, the treat dispenser, the person who signed us up for classes and tried every harness under the sun. My husband, Alex, had never had a dog before. He grew up with cats and, to be honest, was a little intimidated by Stanley—who is, to put it mildly, not an easy first dog.

But everything changed when I got pregnant with our first daughter. Suddenly, I couldn’t even be in the same room as Stanley’s food. The smell of his kibble (and especially his treats) made me nauseous. Without much discussion, Alex started taking over more of Stanley’s care.

After Natalie was born, I had an extended postpartum recovery. I was off my feet more than I expected. That’s when the real shift happened. Alex and Stanley became a team. Walks, playtime, enrichment—Alex took it all on, not because I asked him to, but because he saw a need and stepped into it. They bonded. Deeply.

Processing the Shift

A few months later, one of my best friends came to stay with us and casually observed, “Stanley’s totally Alex’s dog now.”

At first, I felt a pang. I had poured so much time, energy, and love into building a relationship with Stanley. He was my first baby. He’s the reason I co-founded this community. It felt like I had somehow failed him—or maybe failed myself—for letting that bond slip away.

But when I sat with it a little longer, I realized something else: I hadn’t lost anything. What had changed was the shape of our family. Stanley didn’t belong to me or to Alex—he belonged with us. And it was actually beautiful (and a bit of a relief) to see Alex become such a steady, devoted presence in Stanley’s life.

I’m incredibly proud of Alex. Not just because he took on the hard parts of dog parenting—walks in the rain, cleaning up messes, managing reactivity—but because he opened his heart. He and Stanley found their own rhythm. Their own bond. And I’ve found a new role too—guiding, observing, and, when I can, joining back in.

So Tell Me: Who Does Your Dog “Belong” To?

I want to ask you:
Who does your dog “belong” to in your home? Has that always been the case? Has it changed over time due to life shifts, new routines, or growing relationships?

And let’s talk about the word “belong” while we’re at it.

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What Is a “Problem” Anyway?

I got out some pens and decided to try to map it out. I had a hard time coming up with measurable (or semi-measurable) ways of diagnosing a problem. When I finished my little flow chart, capital “P” Problems seemed to boil down to those that impact the dog’s quality of life, the guardian’s quality of life, or others’ (who are around them) quality of life. Is that right? I’m not sure. When is it wise to pay attention to a lower-case “p” problem?

I think a big part of the human population still has warped expectations for dogs. There is this notion that they will do exactly what people say and move through the world quietly in gratitude for the food and shelter they are provided. So anytime a dog isn’t meeting those expectations, it becomes a problem to be fixed – usually to make the human’s life easier. But here’s the thing: in all my life, I’ve never lived with a human who I had zero “problems” with. Some of them left dishes everywhere, others were really loud late at night, etc. Living with others comes with challenges. Full stop. I don’t know when people got it in their heads that living with a dog would result in zero interruptions. In many cases, the problem lies with the expectations – not with the dog. But not always.

And what does it say about a problem if one day I think it’s fine and the next I don’t? I think it likely clues me in about the rest of my conditions. I seem to co-exist with certain dog behaviors better when the rest of my life doesn’t feel like a complete shit show. So is the problem the dog’s behavior or the rest of the chaos in my life?

Little Behaviors as Clues, Not Crises

I’ve found that the little annoyances of living with a dog (or just another living being) are mostly signs of issues in my broader environment and not things that need to be addressed. But when does it make sense to pay attention to lower case “p” problems? In some cases, I think those small problems serve as little hints about how we might change our dogs' environments to better help them thrive. For example, do they stop pawing us non-stop during post-dinner TV time if we just proactively play with them for five minutes before we settle into our show? In other cases, the small version of the problem may not drastically lower anyone’s quality of life but if the problem got worse, it certainly would. I think my silly flowchart holds up for the obvious big problems, but when a little problem is likely to become a big problem, it probably makes sense to work with the problem while it’s small.

Finding the Line Between Acceptance and Action

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The Early Days: When I Did A LOT

When Otis was younger (and so was I), I couldn’t get enough of training with him. We practiced basics like attention, recall, leash walking, settling, etc. I trained to help him with his fears. I taught him new tricks. We went to classes and took him on adventures. We practiced cooperative care. I got in a rhythm of doing a little training almost every day. Otis lit up and came running with a full body wag anytime I asked him if he wanted to train. And in case daily walks and training were not enough, I also prepped Toppls and did nose work almost every week and made sure he got social interaction with the dogs and people he loved.

His life doesn’t look like that anymore, and I often feel guilty. Is that guilt a call to action – a sign that something is wrong? Or is it pointing towards expectations that may not actually be fair? How did the checklist of things to be a “good dog guardian” get so long? Who is the checklist serving?

When the Checklist Gets Too Long

When I think back to when I was doing so much with Otis, a lot of it was for me. I loved getting to interact with him. I loved learning with him. I loved the way the rest of the world slipped away when we trained, and it was just the two of us. And I don’t think that’s a problem. In fact, what a gift. But over time, I got it in my head that he needed all of that in order to thrive. And that checklist started to feel heavier as my life shifted.

No matter what sort of mental gymnastics I do, I won’t be able to change this simple fact: my dogs are captive animals. Even though I cannot imagine life without dogs, there is something about that that will always break my heart. Since we control so much of our dogs’ environments, we have a responsibility for their welfare. So we do have to do some things. But what? Do we need to get involved in sports, take them to classes, prep meal time enrichment, train every day, etc.? How do we know we are doing enough?

I’ll be honest, anytime I hear that “doing enough” language, I think about capitalism. How much of my learning about productivity is seeping into how I am thinking about my dogs’ needs and making me feel like shit? Is there a chance my dogs might actually be quite content to rest despite my own learning around it?

What Contentment Looks Like These Days

These days, I still sometimes feel the weight of that old checklist, but when I look at my dogs’ behavior and their lifestyle, I see a different story. I see dogs who get physical activity every day, access to lots of scents out in nature, time to rest under a shady tree or in a cozy bed. I see dogs who get to ask us for pets or to tug a toy. I see dogs who by and large seem content. And when they are not, their behavior tells me that. Rather than settling, they paw me or huff at me more. And then I can make a change. But I find that I just don’t feel like training and prepping enrichment as much anymore, and it doesn’t seem to be negatively impacting them. I think they are both (well, at least Otis lol) thrilled to train if I offer it, but their welfare doesn’t seem to drop without it (that being said, their big training history with me has been helpful over the years). These days, I mostly just want to enjoy them without a big to-do list. As I’ve released some of the expectations around achievement and productivity for myself, it seems I’ve slowly been able to do the same for my dogs. So I think the guilt I sometimes feel is telling me that it’s time I let go of an old checklist that doesn’t fit anymore and adjust my thinking about what my dogs need in order to live a good life. Maybe meeting their needs doesn’t have to look like what it once did.

I will always find joy learning new things with my dogs. In another stage of life, there’s a chance I’d be going to more classes (and if I was honest, a big part of it would be for my own enjoyment). But I don’t have the ability to do that right now, and that is okay (pep talk for myself).

A Working List for a “Good Life”

So how do we give our dogs a good life?

I polled a number of people who are all either dog trainers or what I consider to be incredibly thoughtful dog guardians, and here’s what I got (I’m taking the liberty to synthesize some of what they said in a few instances):

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