March Office Hours: Should You Always Reinforce Your Dog’s Offered Attention?

For this month’s “Office Hours”, I was so thrilled to get to talk with Katie about two topics she sent us via our Substack chat (special for paid subscribers) that are related to her dog, Maggie:

1) Struggling with my dog freezing regularly on walks, which has been an ongoing challenge for us.

2) I’m really interested in your thoughts on the advice to “reward every time the dog looks at you”. I’ve started to question if it is more nuanced than that and if by doing that, I’ve actually made things more difficult for both me and my dog on our training journey.

PS: We do these Live “Office Hours” every month on Substack where we open the floor to chat with any paid subscriber about a challenge they’re having, advice they heard that doesn’t make sense, etc.

My Notes on What Happened in Our Office Hours Discussion

In our “Office Hours” video chat, Katie explained that she’d been given advice by trainers to simply give Maggie a treat anytime she offers attention. While that advice may sound simple, Maggie now essentially offers attention the entire walk. Katie wants Maggie to be able to enjoy the environment more, but also doesn’t want to create extinction conditions by suddenly not giving treats (go Katie for thinking about this!).

We chatted a bit about how positive reinforcement often gets reduced to just cookie pushing, but there is so much more to it. Behavior is complex. And training solutions honor the “behave-or” (the individual behaving) by focusing on their individual behavior and conditions. Katie also knew right from the jump that her two topics were connected. To be fair here, Katie likely could have followed this blanket advice to “reward for attention” with other dogs and gotten totally different behavior on walks (as Dr. Susan Friedman says, “Behavior is the study of one.”) Katie also told me that Maggie is already under the care of a vet behaviorist, which is great. They can be such an important part of the team — especially if conditions are hard to change. This also means Maggie has someone looking at health and pain factors that could influence behavior. Onto our chat (there’s much more on all of these topics in the video) …!

“Reward your dog every time they look at you.”

While offered attention is often something we want to reinforce, there are other things to think about. Here are some of the things we talked about as points of consideration (this isn’t a prescriptive plan):

1. While treats are often thought about as reinforcers, they are also antecedents that cue behavior. The current picture on walks is signaling to Maggie that treats are available if she orients to Katie. Again. And again. One thing we talked about for consideration was changing conditions so that checking in to access treats wasn’t signaled — in other words, teaching Maggie when treats are available and when they are not. I gave a silly example of treat pouch in front vs treat pouch in back or treat pouch on vs treats in pockets — regardless of what it looks like, Katie would have to teach Maggie what these cues meant. (Note: no treats isn’t really an option because treats are needed for management on walks.)

2. We explored if there were any walking conditions where Maggie wasn’t constantly orienting to Katie. New locations? Sniff spots? Maggie shows anxious behaviors when she goes to new locations, so that is tricky. However, Katie elegantly stumbled into one condition when we were talking about something else: when a novel object appears on a walk. When that happens, Maggie walks forward to go sniff the object. That offers us some information about how we might arrange conditions if we wanted to get some other behaviors to show up on walks. It tends to be much easier to start where desired behavior (or some approximation of it) is already showing up.

3. We thought through ways we could change reinforcers and antecedents on walks. Katie would likely need to change the antecedent picture of walks as she worked on new walking behaviors to avoid cueing the old constant orienting. Then we talked about ways to get Maggie in contact with other reinforcers on walks (we don’t want to pull back a valued reinforcer without making sure she can contact other valued reinforcers). I threw out some ideas of bringing scents into the home and doing “mock” indoor walks to explore those scents (would have to have something in the antecedent picture that helped these behaviors generalize though — e.g. a bandana … could fade it out later).

4. Related: we talked about intentionally teaching her how to access some other reinforcers that she could encounter on walks — sniffing, moving faster, etc.

5. I briefly mentioned the idea of teaching a marker cue that means a treat is going to be tossed onto the ground and then using that cue to mark and reinforce behavior other than orienting to her (i.e. walking with eyes ahead, sniffing the ground, etc.). If I was going to do this, I’d still want conditions distinct from the current walking conditions to avoid essentially fighting extinction (something that Dr. Jesus Rosales-Ruiz talks about). Maggie may orient back to Katie after eating a treat, which is often an actual strategy in LLW training to teach a dog to orient to you after a distraction, but is not what Katie is hoping to work on.

“My dog is freezing on walks.”