The training criteria are the answers you will reinforce in each session. At the same time, they are the goals you want to achieve in that session. These criteria can be intermediate steps to accomplish an exercise, the entire exercise, or sequences in a chain of behaviors.
When you train your dog, you should teach him each criterion separately, reaching small goals in each session. Although it seems illogical, moving forward little by little will allow you to advance faster. Therefore, never try to train many criteria at once.
As your dog's training progresses, you will find that most exercises share a general set of criteria to be met. On our site we explain what the dog training criteria are:
A single criterion in each session
In each training session you should focus on a single criterion.
For example, imagine you are training your dog to sit. The initial criteria could be that his bottom touches the ground. So every time your dog's butt hits the ground, you reinforce that behavior with a piece of food or a game.
Your training criteria is clear: your dog's butt must touch the ground. So it doesn't matter if he sits quickly, slowly, sideways or straight. As long as his butt touches the ground, you reinforce the response.
Instead, you will not reinforce responses where your dog half sits (without touching the ground with his butt), lies down, barks, jumps, walks, approaches you, etc. All those actions produce failed replays.
Raise the criterion
"Raise" or "increase" the training criteria means increase the difficulty of the exercise For example, your dog sits when you you ask for it, but it does it tilted (leaning on one side). You want him to sit up straight, so your new training criteria calls for you to distribute his weight evenly. You've raised the criteria, so you'll only reinforce responses that your dog feels right about. You will no longer reinforce responses that he feels lopsided in.
Do not forget that even if the dog does not do what you ask him to do correctly, you must treat him with respect and affection so that behavioral problems do not appear. Review the 5 most common mistakes when scolding a dog and don't fall for them.
The criteria in dog training:
- Get behavior. It simply consists of getting your dog to do the behavior you want to train in response to a signal. For example, getting your dog to sit when you say "Sit" or when you make a hand signal.
- Refine the Behavior Once you've got the behavior, you need to refine it to make it just the way you want it. With dogs that are only companions in the home and with puppies, there is not much to perfect in most of the exercises. If the dog sits when you ask him to and if he comes when you call him, that's fine. However, sporting dogs (schutzhund, agility, etc.) and working dogs (service, police, etc.) have to perform behaviors with certain characteristics. For example, sitting correctly balanced without leaning to one side or sitting in front of the guide after coming.
- Latency. In most exercises it is important to reduce the latency so that the response is as fast as possible. Especially the call, the latency has to be minimal, since the dog must respond immediately.
- Discrimination. Your dog must correctly discriminate the different signals and execute the corresponding exercises. For example, when you say "Sit" he should only sit, not lie down or come to your side.
- Duration. In many of the exercises you also need to achieve a certain duration. For example, have your dog sit for a while.
- Distance. Distance has two components. For one, your dog must respond from a distance. On the other hand, he should maintain the exercise (for example, staying still) while you walk away.
- Distractions. Your dog should respond even if there are distractions in the room.
- Diversity Your dog must answer correctly in different places. This is the response generalization of operant conditioning. To get it, you have to retrain each exercise in different places, because dogs do not generalize easily. This is very important and that is why you have nine numbered boxes for each training criterion on the tracking sheets. You should check each box when you have generalized (retrained) each criterion in different situations or places.
