Episode Details

Summary:

Hannah Branigan, of Wonder Pups Training, is back on the podcast to talk about behavior chains, and a little bit about her new puppy (because he's adorable).

Hannah is the host of Drinking from the Toilet and blogs at wonderpupstraining.com.

Next Episode:

To be released 9/28/2018, an interview with Shade Whitesel about crucial concepts when training for competition.

TRANSCRIPTION:

Melissa Breau: This is Melissa Breau and you're listening to the Fenzi Dog Sports Podcast brought to you by the Fenzi Dog Sports Academy, an online school dedicated to providing high-quality instruction for competitive dog sports using only the most current and progressive training methods.

Today we have Hannah Branigan of Wonder Pups Training back on the podcast to talk about behavior chains, and a little bit about her new puppy because he's adorable.

Welcome back to the podcast Hannah.

Hannah Branigan: Thank you for having me.

Melissa Breau: Absolutely. To start us out, do you want to remind listeners who you are, share a little about the dogs you have, and a little about the new addition?

Hannah Branigan: Sure. I am Hannah Branigan, in case you've already forgotten. I have my own podcast, Drinking From The Toilet, as well as teaching for FDSA and playing in a lot of different dog sports. Obedience is my primary focus, that's where I spend most of my time, but I'm really interested in doing really good training, and diagnosing and breaking things down, and reverse-engineering cool behaviors and high-quality performances, and figuring out how we can systematize that and then how can we teach it.

For my own dogs, I currently have five dogs. I have three Belgian Shepherds, one Border Terrier, Rugby, and my new puppy, Figment, is a Border Collie.

Melissa Breau: Let's start by talking about Mr. Figment. With a new puppy, what have you chosen to focus on, and I do assume the goal is to eventually do obedience?

Hannah Branigan: Definitely we'll do some obedience. We'll probably do a lot of different things. I cross-train with all of my dogs. Again, obedience is my central focus, but we tinker in a lot of sports, so right now I'm not doing anything with him that you would consider sport-specific, nothing that is exclusive to obedience or exclusive to agility or exclusive to anything else.

My theme for him right now, my word for him, is really balance. So what I'm trying hard to do is looking at the puppy that I have today and building his skills in how he and I interact together, how he interacts with the world, and trying to develop balance, because he's definitely got … he has his preferences, I of course have my preferences because I'm old and set in my ways, but there are things that I want to build with him. But while I'm building these new behaviors, I want to make sure that I'm not creating a lot of reinforcement history for a particular picture that will make it harder for me to then get other behaviors to change that picture later on.

That was really vague, so let me give you an example. For example, I do want to do sports with him, and so we play a lot of motivational games, drive-building games, where he's moving and I'm moving and there's a lot of excitement and a lot of arousal. At the same time as I'm playing those games in a training context, I am juxtaposing them with less exciting, less arousing, more relaxing, more thinking sorts of games. So we might play with his ball for a few minutes and work on some toy skills, and then immediately in the same session we'll go to some mat, and shape relax on a mat with some food, and then we might go back to working on some toy skills, and go back to relax on a mat.

That switching between food and toys, and again being able to balance that, is something that I'm focusing on a lot in terms of his reinforcement, and