The Sacred Treat
Several years ago I worked with a family who had high school and college age kids and 3 dogs. Each dog had a human to whom they were most attached and so the large, busy household was quite efficient. We worked on various skills for each of the dogs and saw a lot of progress with their training goals.
However, one issue was an ongoing problem. All members of the family had to be up fairly early and so a standard bedtime was important. Dogs could be outside in the evening but when it was time for bed the youngest and most exuberant of the 3-dog pack was very resistant to coming inside. It was summertime and the grass was cool. Why wouldn’t a dog want to stay outside?
The strategies to get the dog to come in weren’t working, but they couldn’t think of any others. They would call, dog wouldn’t come in, they would do something else, dog wouldn’t come in, and on it went. Without realizing it, they effectively created a pattern of behavior that the dog had learned very well. It involved a very lengthy ritual that unfortunately ended in a later bedtime for humans.
In order to make a behavior change you need a solid reset. I refer to this as going back to zero. In the case of this dog, the routine of calling followed by no response and then a series of other strategies was becoming more ingrained with every rehearsal of the routine. Nothing about this was ever going to change.
Enter the Sacred Treat! What worked for this dog was reserving his favorite treat for his return to the house in the evening. In this case, the treat was Velveeta cheese. By keeping the cheese “sacred” for one specific thing at a specific time the value of coming inside at bedtime became commensurate with the value of Velveeta.
It took a couple of weeks for the dog to realize what would happen when he came inside at night, but when the association became solid the problem was solved.
Another Sacred Treat success was with my own dog, Chewy. When we began a pre-novice agility class Chewy took the opportunity to run as fast as his 3 legs could carry him and do victory laps around the arena. Cute as it was, this is not the goal when entering a training space.
Enter the Sacred Treat. Chewy had never had roast beef from the deli so it was pretty exciting the first time he tasted it at class. I used a cue he was familiar with, “cookie”, and when Chewy came to me rather than run a victory lap, he got a bite of roast beef. This is the only situation where roast beef appears so the association between the desired behavior and the food doesn’t get muddy and the value remains high because of the relative scarcity.
Dogs are so good at making associations and they are doing it all the time whether we realize it or not. When we get right down to it training is simply helping dogs make associations that result in behaviors we want. It’s simple but not always easy!
The Sacred Treat is just one of countless strategies that help with the process of training our dogs. It’s not magic, but it can work wonders if it’s implemented correctly. Give it a try next time you need to get back to zero and start over.
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