New Unwanted Dog Behavior -- or Really? NOW? (Part 1)

A few months ago, I scooped up my worldly goods and pets and relocated to a different part of the U.S. How different,you ask? Well, it is SO DIFFERENT here that a great majority of people here use retractable leashes – yes, even for non-miniature sized dogs. To me, this signifies a few things:

1. dogs on retractable leashes don't walk next to their people – they haven't been trained to;
2. every time you see a dogs on retractable leashes, you are witnessing that dog being conditioned to pull while on leash; therefore,
3.  dogs on retractable leashes pull constantly, ESPECIALLY when they see another dog on their walks.

Now – is pulling toward another dog an indication of aggression? Probably not; my guess is that, in most cases, these dogs want to do what comes naturally to them – to go and meet the other dog.

But if the dog's person misinterprets that pulling – the very pulling that they've unwittingly conditioned and reinforced, day after day after day – for aggressive behavior, then they will pull their dogs back, cross the street, scream at their dogs to “stop,” or some combination thereof. They will do anything but allow their dogs to meet the other dog.

What do you think happens to a dog who isn't allowed, let alone encouraged, to socialize with other dogs? An action that started off as (pre-conditioned) pulling morphs into something else altogether over time – unwanted behaviors develop. Leash reactivity then becomes the new normal.

And, as it turns out, this adversely affects the otherwise well-trained, well-socialized dog, too. Dogs like mine, who are used to daily interaction with other dogs of all kinds, are then deprived of the socialization they'd been accustomed to; they get frustrated.

The frustration then leads to leash-reactivity. So now, rather than simply passing by another dog (who is, of course, on the other side of the street) without incident, my dog lunges and growls and is generally a jerk: my beautiful, happy mutt now looks and sounds like a mean dog.

What's to be done?

Agile-ity Training: Dog Training as an Iterative Process (Part Three)

Did teaching my dog not to jump take time? Absolutely. The entire process is what I would certainly describe as “iterative,” – and because we're talking about an individual living creature with a will of her own and not an inanimate project, there was backsliding, too. So I had to inspect and adapt regularly as we went along.

For instance, one day she would do her sit/stays perfectly; the next, she would act as if she'd never received a day's training in her life (as if she were raised by.. you know -- wolves). Those were the days when it behooved me to be even more consistent, to reinforce even more positively and to get creative. I would make a game of it by getting her into a sit/stay, hiding somewhere, and then releasing her to come find me: doggie hide-and-seek.

So, from the very humble beginning of a basic “sit;” over time and in small, realistic iterations, happily benefiting from the little bit of value delivered along the way, I now have a dog who does not jump on strangers and who has about a 98% success rate with not jumping on her favorite people.  As for jumping on other dogs, well.. I think I'll let that one slide: the other dogs don't seem to mind, after all.

Agile-ity Training: Dog Training as an Iterative Process (Part Two)

After the one- or two-second sit was well in hand, we extended the time and continued adding more until it was no longer an issue – until Liffey could consistently stay until I released her, however long that may take. As more time is added to her stays, my dog is delivering more value.

And as the training progressed, I was able to inspect and adapt both her ability to sit and stay (until released) and the level of distraction within which she had to maintain those stays. As I've mentioned, we practiced at home and in fun and distracting outdoor spaces.  I also increased the challenge at home by going to the door and knocking on it; sometimes the knocking would be accompanied by door rattling or knob shaking - anything to make the sit/stay process that much harder for a happy, excitable dog.

When she showed that she was ready, I introduced the further challenge of an actual visitor.

Now, I'm sure that my dog would tell us, if she could, that one of the toughest challenges she had to face in her young life was to keep her rear end on the floor in the presence of her favorite person in the world: her dog walker. But she did do it. Again, at first it was for a mere few seconds; over time she was able to hold her stay until released.*

*Of course, I should also say that this required the cooperation of our amazingly patient dog walker (we miss you, Tami!): she would essentially ignore my dog until released and free to say hello – and then she would physically lower herself to greet my pup, so that keeping "four on the floor" was much more feasible.

Agile-ity Training: Dog Training as an Iterative Process (Part One)

Recently, after spending a few hours with me and my dog Liffey, a friend asked me how long after I got her did I begin training her?

"Immediately," was my answer. He was surprised that I didn't wait for her to reach some developmental milestone before I began teaching her. I explained to him that he may have been thinking about old-school, traditional (aversive) training techniques, which generally recommend waiting until a puppy is four months old before beginning training.

But thanks to the work and research of animal ethologists, behaviorists, trainers and veterinarians from the last several decades, we know now that puppies are perfectly capable of learning simple behaviors like "sit," very early in their lives. Some service dogs, interestingly, begin their learning as early as six weeks old; a good, reputable breeder begins imprinting puppies even earlier than this.

[My pup came to me at 8.5 weeks knowing the sit,down, leave it and take it, which the fine folks at the East Bay SPCA had taught her and which we use to this very day.]

The fact is, that dog training is an iterative process; as such, the experts suggest we begin training our pups immediately, rather than wait for a select milestone in the project schedule.. er, I mean, a select milestone in their development.

What do I mean, exactly, by "iterative?" You'll recall that I previously quoted The Elements of Scrum:

“a little bit of requirements gathering, a little bit of design, coding and testing, and delivers a little bit of value..”  and then you do it again.

We can certainly think of dog training in the same way.

Let's take jumping, for example. On a regular, consistent basis, I am jumped on by every kind of dog, from 90-pound American field Labs to 5-pound chihuahuas and everything in between. I have been jumped on by every age of dog, as well, including adult and senior dogs who should have been trained otherwise but were not. Let me say to those dog folks right now: it ain't cute. I don't like having to wear synthetic clothing (aka, my “crazy dog lady clothes”) every day because you don't and/or won't properly, positively train your dog to stop jumping on me, a stranger.

But, thanks to those remiss dog people, I have now gathered a requirement – I will teach my dog that jumping on humans is unacceptable behavior. But how?

Well, to start, I didn't teach my dog to "stop jumping;" rather, I taught her to sit, stay and then "say hello nicely."

In reality it was even more iterative than that; I got value in very small amounts: first, the “sit” had to be solid – whether we were at home, at the dog park, along a hiking trail, on the sidewalk in a busy shopping area, etc. Any place that is distracting/fun for a dog is always a good place to practice or “proof” the good behavior(s) you want.

Once the sit was firmly established, we moved on to our “stay” – first, inside the house. Initially, my wriggly dog could only do it for a second or two; she could only deliver a very little bit of value (I took it, happily).

To be continued...

 

Agile-ity Training: Dog Training as an Iterative Process? (Introduction)

Most of the development environments I've been around or exposed to have been more traditional than Agile and have therefore followed more traditional methods like Waterfall. There are other places to learn more about the history and theories of waterfall and other methodologies. I'm here to relate my own experience with these methods. (One day, I may tell you the story about the time I was involved in a project that had no method whatsoever -- a project manager worth her salt would call this "crazy-making").

For now, I can tell you that, in real life, developing software under traditional models mean that you plan, plan, plan/document, document, document: you write statements of work, marketing requirements, design documents, functional specifications, product specifications, database design requirements (if applicable); and if you're planning to actually test your product, then you'll need a test plan and a set of use cases at a very minimum. These are just the basics -- your company will likely have its own further internal documentation that it requires. In any case, it's all very linear. Technically, it's supposed to be sequential; in my experience, however, a good percentage of the planning and documenting happens concurrently.

So you plan, plan, plan/document, document, document and develop and test and expect - and hope - that it all goes accordingly and that the product you end up with is exactly what the marketing, engineering, quality assurance, management and client teams all envisioned it to be. Or not. Usually, realistically, not. The end product is typically some generally acceptable estimation of all that planning and documenting: you take what you got and then move on.

At the end of the day, what has happened is that the hundreds of man-hours put in by many people across multiple teams that went into all that planning is now moot -- and you've wasted, amongst other things, the most precious resource along the way: time. (Of course, finance team members will look their P&Ls and tell you that what they lost was money or possibly "opportunity costs," etc.; since I'm a project manager and not a money person, I'm going to say it's time).

And this is where Agile methodologies come in and ask,

Rather than pouring your heart and soul into a plan that you know will change, why not jump in, do the work and assess and change along the way? Wouldn't an "inspect and adapt" approach make more sense?

Yes; yes it would.

The fact of the matter is, "a software project is too complex and chaotic to be managed via defined processes;"* yet software development has been and continues to be done in this way: we keep trying to hammer a square peg into a round hole.

In the recently-released Elements of Scrum, authors Sims and Johnson explain that, in agile development, one doesn't complete a particular step before moving onto the next:

"an agile team [..] does a little bit of requirements gathering, a little bit of design, coding and testing, and delivers a little bit of value to the customer. Then the team does it all over again..."

When compared to the traditional way of doing things I've described above, Agile, too, sounds like crazy-making. For software development, Agile represents not just a paradigm shift, but a fundamental incommensurability of Kuhnian proportion.

Okay, so: traditional methods are planning-intensive and agile methods are not. You with me so far? Good. But where does the dog training fit in, you ask? In much the same way, traditional (aversive) dog training is about planning, too: you set a dog up to “misbehave” and then you punish her, hoping that, after a few times, she'll stop doing the thing you've set her up to do. Traditional training methods may or may not work – we could argue the point all day, no doubt. But the old way of teaching your dog is in stark contrast to positive-reinforcement training, which is much more an iterative process: when it comes to dogs, you gotta "inspect and adapt" as you go along.

In the coming days, I'll discuss just how Agile methodologies line up with my real-life experience with positive dog training; both methods have much more in common than you'd think.

* Sims, Chris and Hillary Louise Johnson. The Elements of Scrum. Foster City: Dymaxicon, 2011.  p. 68.