Rehabilitating a Food Thief: Part 3 – Cueing a new Behavior

Our subject for this series is Poppy, a 2 year old Pointer cross foundling who recently gave birth to a litter of eight wee pups. Poppy has a propensity to steal food and will in fact steal anything that remotely looks or smells particularly interesting.

Her latest antics involve getting onto the work surfaces in the kitchen where she helps herself to bottles of cleaner or air freshener or whatever is in reach.  On one occasion Poppy stole a bottle of Airwick air freshener from the counter – the old sort with a wick you pull up – and took it down into a dog bed made up with a candlewick bedspread and a blanket – you can imagine the result… Poppy was found with an empty bottle and a well scented bed.

Poppy (photo: dog::links)  

Dogs like Poppy who have never had any clear guidance as to what is or is not appropriate behavior need to be taught self-control. The more traditional approach of scolding the dog, or punishing her in some way, does nothing to teach the dog how to behave appropriately, it just makes the dog fearful and more likely to perform the heinous act when no one is around to stop her.

A much better approach is to put the behaviors on cue. In this case the preferred behavior “leave it” and the current behavior “take it”. Teaching a dog opposite cues in pairs is an excellent way to control a specific behavior.  This pair will teach Poppy self-control in the presence of anything tempting with the added benefit that rather than help herself to things lying around, she will await the cue to take it.

Don’t believe it? Neither did I when I first learned of this technique during my training, but since then I have proved time and time again that teaching pairs of cues works brilliantly and seems to be more reinforcing for the dog than teaching a single cue on its own.

I first attempted this exercise with our Beauceron cross when he was about five months old. Beau was a food hog and ate everything in sight. I couldn’t put my lunch plate on the coffee table without him vacuuming up its contents, and if I left the dining table for a moment, he’d be paws up and at whatever it was I was enjoying at the time. It wasn’t really a problem at this stage, he was a puppy after all and it was his curiosity that got the better of him. Had I managed things better there would have been no temptation in his way. However rather than fix this as a problem later in the dog’s life – as we are doing with Poppy – I thought it prudent to preempt the problem and teach Beau some all-purpose self-control that would hold him in great stead for any situation in the future.

Like Poppy, Beau has a great love for bottles of anything – if I didn’t puppy-proof my soft-drink cupboard, he’d flog a bottle of tonic and proceed to mouth and roll it around the room until he managed to pierce the plastic. No prizes for guessing what would happen then. Better to keep the full ones under lock and key – the empties though are fair game, a great motivator for my emptying the recycle bin on a regular basis.

My shaping plan for Beau therefore needed to be comprehensive enough to incorporate all aspects of his fascination with human foods and their derivatives as well as those other items that were of great temptation to him as well – basically anything human related that was left in easy reach. I needed to teach him that the best way to get something was to leave it alone.

It’s a simple enough philosophy and one that applies to any number of circumstances: dog wants to go sniff bush – dog pulls on leash – trainer stops dead – dog slackens leash, looks at trainer – trainer clicks, runs towards bush, “go sniff”. The way to get what you want is not to even try.

Shaping “leave it” with Beau

The secret with any shaping exercise is to plan well, keep the increments small and the rewards high. My shaping staircase for Beau was huge. I literally broke the behavior I wanted down into the minutest detail. I needed this to work and was not prepared to leave any of it to chance. The first part of that shaping staircase was included in my last blog. The last part is too large to print here, but has to do with putting the behavior on cue and gradually increasing the criteria until I could leave a plate of food on my coffee table and not have him go anywhere near it.

 The first step then was to get the eye contact with duration. Once that was happening reliably I needed to construct a wide range of situations in which to reinforce Beau for leaving the food, while associating the act with the cue “leave it”. To do this I went back to the very basic step of holding a piece of low value food in my outstretched hand. When Beau looked at me – as he had been trained to do –I cued “leave it” and waited, counting 1-banana, 2-banana, 3-banana – “click”, then I offered him a new cue “take it” and handed him the item of food.

I then started to change the position of the food – first it was in my open hand, then placed on my knee while I was sitting, then on my foot. It was still a low value food item and it was still in close proximity to my body – I wanted to be sure there would be no reinforcement for a “snatch and run”. It didn’t take Beau long to realize that all he had to do to earn this treat was to look away from the food placed before him and to look at me for direction. If I cued “leave it” he would wait patiently, if I cued “take it” he would take it from my hand.

I practiced this for days, in different situations, inside and out. Gradually, I increased the value of the food, but I still kept it small in size and in close proximity to me. Beau continued to impress by reliably looking at me and on the cue “leave it” waiting politely until I cued him to take it, or clicked and treated him for leaving it alone.

The real test though was what would happen if I put the food on the floor. In the dog world anything left lying on the ground is fair game. How was I going to transition to that? Several ideas sprang to mind. I’d been using plastic ice-cream container lids for targeting with my other dog and I decided these made ideal “plates”. I also decided to utilize feeding times as a further reinforcer of the process.

Beau learning to "leave it"

For the first of these sessions I went back to low value treats and placed just one on the lid on the floor. When Beau went to give it a sniff, I quickly cued “leave it”, he raised his eyes questioningly to me, I clicked, and picked up the treat, cued “take it” and gave it to him. It took longer than I thought for him to make this transition, but eventually he started to show the same blasé to the food on the lid as he had to the food in my hand. 

For meal times I adapted it a little. Previously we had cued him to sit, while we placed the food down then I’d give him the release, “OK” to tuck in. Now I wanted to use that to help reinforce “leave it” even further. We would start the same, with the sit, I’d then place his food before him, and wait for him to look at me. I then cued “leave it” moved away and waited. Sure enough he had that questioning look but kept his eyes on me. “OK” the release, “take it” and he was free to have his dinner.

From the plastic lid to a sheet of paper, to the bare floor, from one piece of low value food to a small mountain of high-value treats, from my standing right beside the pile to my being on the other side of the room. We worked our way up little by little. If I said we didn’t have mishaps, I’d be lying. But nearly all of them were my fault and involved raising the criteria too quickly – too many of a particularly tasty treat in the pile at one time, a pup that was too hungry to be bothered with waiting, my not varying the duration flexibly enough and making him wait longer than he was able to, having the other dog too near forcing Beau to snatch his treats in case the interloper got them.

By all accounts Beau was a fast learner. He was young and eager and very forgiving of my mistakes. I took it into the kitchen – casually dropping a lump of cheese on the floor, or some other item that escaped my messy culinary skills – cue “leave it” and sure enough Beau would plonk himself into a down-stay and wait patiently for me to either pick up the item I had dropped (which earned him a click and treat) or to cue “take it” after which he would cautiously approach the tempting morsel.

I took the cue into the streets on our walks. There is always something lying around on the ground and I put my powers of observation to work seeking them out before Beau saw them. As we approached I’d cue “leave it”, his gaze would shoot up to me, I’d click and treat and we’d walk on by. Sometimes I wasn’t as quick off the mark as I hoped and he already had the item in his mouth before I’d opened mine. A third cue “off” or “drop” came in useful there, but that is another story.

Each new situation presented an opportunity to further reinforce the cue until we are now at the stage where I can leave my lunch on the coffee table when I leave the room for something and neither of my dogs will go near it. Ideally I should be able to leave a plate of food on the floor with the same result, that's what I'm aiming for - we've done it with cheese!

There have been other benefits as well. Beau is no longer a food hog. As much as he loves his food, he now takes to it with more control, savoring it rather than taking the vacuum cleaner approach – and this has surely helped his digestion, which in turn makes for a happier dog all round. Where once he would jump at the “take it” cue, he now gives me a look that seems to say “I’ll take it when I’m good and ready thank you.” I no longer use the cues as a pair, though that was how they were taught. I’ve paired “take it” up with “off” for our games of tug, and I’ve got plans for “leave it” in a whole new situation: Beau has a penchant for cats, he gets highly aroused whenever one crosses his path and his fight/flight mechanism kicks in rendering all previous self-control strategies useless. If I can harness the power of the “leave it” cue to work in this situation, then we really will be making progress.

It has taken many hours of setting up situations and reinforcing the behavior to get Beau to where he is now; in Poppy’s case it will invariably take longer. Her behavior is more engrained and quite likely has a psychological element to it as well. This just means that the planning has to be more carefully thought out and the criteria kept small and achievable so that Poppy gets lots and lots of success during each training session. A clear advantage for Poppy with this type of training is the huge amount of positive personal attention she would be getting for doing the right things and that is much more reinforcing for a traumatized dog than any punishment or scolding.

What Else Can Be Done to Help Poppy?

Teaching the behavior cues “leave it” and “take it” are just one approach to dealing with the Poppy’s situation, and even these can be handled in different ways. If I were working with Poppy I would build this type of training into Poppy’s routine so that she would come to expect “training” to happen thus increasing her anticipation for it. This would set the scene to teach her other things as well so that not all the training sessions dealt with this issue, though initially this might be the case. I would stringently ignore all her stealing, managing the situation to lessen any likelihood as much as possible, and focus instead on recognizing and rewarding all the moments of the day when she wasn’t stealing something (surely there were many more of them?). During the times she needed to be left alone, the times she is most likely to steal, I would leave her with a high value treat stuffed into a toy or a Kong stuffed with paté which had been frozen – these sorts of toys exercise her brain while keeping her focused on something other than stealing. I would pop out for a minute or two, and come back during the time that I knew she would still be occupied. I would “click” and reward her for being a good girl. Letting her know that the behavior she is engaged in is good behavior, and rewarding that, is much more powerful than giving her negative attention when she does something wrong.

The more I focused on what I wanted from Poppy, recognizing and rewarding any appropriate behavior at every opportunity, the greater the likelihood that Poppy would display more of this sort of behavior.  I would track my success in terms of time. How many clicks and treats can I give Poppy in a 30 second period for displaying appropriate behavior? I’d then set myself the task of recognizing her good behavior at least four times in a minute, then once a minute, I’d check in on her at five minute intervals and reward her for any positive behavior she was displaying. Rewards would vary too. I’d use food initially, but I’d also build in games and toys, or simply give her my attention. I’d then track how many hours in the day that Poppy was being good. I’d be sure to reward her for each of those hours.

Training of this type can be terribly time consuming and may be beyond the capacity of a refuge worker or a foster mum, but a new owner able to invest some time up front in Poppy’s rehabilitation, would certainly reap the benefits in the long term. Dogs like Poppy can become great family pets if they are just given the chance and a little investment of time and attention up front. If you think you might be able to offer a home to Poppy, one of her pups or any of the other dogs left in the refuges in France, get in contact with dog::links.

Rehabilitating a Food Thief: Part 2 - Changing the Behavior

Dogs steal for all sorts of reasons and our subject, Poppy, has probably the most understandable reason of them all for stealing food – fear of going hungry. 

Poppy (photo: dog::links)

In my last blog I made an attempt to analyse Poppy's situation so a strategy could be devised to deal with it. The trouble with any sort of stealing though – whether it be food or socks or your son’s new toy – is that the act itself often stimulates all sorts of reactions from the humans in the household and the whole situation turns into a self-reinforcing cycle. This in turn leads to the dog stealing just about anything it can in the hope of stimulating further reaction from her humans.

One way to help Poppy and other dogs like her to overcome this type of perpetual problem of stealing, is to shape a situation where the dog learns that better things come from leaving the food or item alone, than from taking it.

For this to work of course, it is most important that the dog is never punished or chastised for stealing, if this happens she will learn that she can’t trust her owners when food or that precious item is around and will therefore become more creative and cunning in her theft, only doing it when she is sure no one is looking. Dogs don’t understand the reasons why we go mad at them, they just know that their once happy human has all of a sudden become a grumpy, scary one and this causes further fear and confusion to our dogs.

If I want to show one of my dogs that I am not pleased with what he has done, I simply ignore him and his act. No fuss, no punishment, no shouting, no scolding, I just walk away and pay lots of positive attention the other dogs. This has a dual effect – it reinforces the dogs who are behaving appropriately and it shows the naughty dog that what he did awards him no reinforcement whatsoever. That is something for him to ponder.

The following is one approach to changing Poppy's behavior which can also be easily adapted to suit any number of situations. While the stages are worded in general terms, I have used Poppy’s situation to specify the examples.

Stage 1:  Be very clear about what behavior is wanted from the dog

What is it that we want Poppy to do? Depending on the way in which Poppy goes about her stealing – Does she counter surf to reach out-of-the-way items? Does she open the fridge to get at its contents (yes, I know dogs who do this)? Does she help herself off the table? Does she steal food out of the cats’ bowls or off other dogs? – there could be any number of possible options and each of these needs to be dealt with separately and specifically. For example, counter surfing is a problem in and of itself regardless of whether food is stolen or not. The desired behavior for a dog who counter surfs is for the dog to have four paws on the floor whenever she is in the kitchen. This not only resolves the counter-surfing issue but also inhibits the dog’s ability to get close enough to food on the counter to steal it. A training plan therefore, would focus on ways to positively reinforce the dog for having four on the floor and would ignore any deviation from that.

Too often dog owners and trainers focus on what it is they don’t want, after all isn’t that the behavior that needs to be stopped? The fact is that unless we can replace that undesirable behavior with something desirable, we set ourselves up in a no win situation and we may even inadvertently reinforce the behavior we don’t want simply by focusing our attention on it.

By describing a new behavior, one we can teach the dog to do when faced with the tempting situation that is cueing the unwanted behavior, we can set up a situation that will make it easy for the dog to be successful in the early stages and ultimately change the behavior over time.

There is also an element of management needed in many of these situations. An unsupervised dog can get up to all sorts of mischief simply because she does not understand what is expected of her when left alone, particularly if there is food left lying around.  In Poppy’s case it would be prudent to first manage as much of the situation as possible by making sure that all food and any other items she tends to steal are kept out of Poppy’s reach, as well as keeping an eye on her when she is in the vicinity of any prohibited item. On those occasions when she does manage to steal something, the best strategy would be to ignore it if at all possible. The less attention given to the act, the less likely it is that Poppy will do it secretly.

As to the desired behavior, it depends on what it is that Poppy’s foster mum or new owner might want, but here are a few with which I have had success when working with other dogs:

• Always look to her owner whenever she sees food – whether on the table, on the floor, on the ground outside
• Always keep her four paws in contact with the ground whenever she is in the kitchen or dining room
• Go to her mat or basket when meal preparation or the meal itself is taking place, or when other animals in the house are being fed

Each behavior requires a different approach and, depending on the circumstances, all might be appropriate for Poppy. It is the first though, that I will focus on here. The added advantage of this behavior is that it incorporates an element of trust building and enables the dog’s owner to build a relationship with the dog that goes beyond just stopping the stealing of food.

The following example is one with which I have worked with one of my own dogs. Essentially I created a two-part behavior. I wanted the environmental cue – the sight or smell of food – to trigger a specific behavior from my dog. I set up a situation where it became easy for my dog to refer to me whenever he saw something that looked particularly tasty. I wanted this new chain of behavior to replace the ‘rush and grab’ one he previously displayed. The following behavior chain shows what I wanted to happen when the dog found himself facing any unattended tasty morsels.

Stage 2: Build a shaping plan to teach the dog to leave a prohibited item in favor of the desired behavior

Shaping plans are made by breaking a behavior down into its incremental elements. When I was studying with the Karen Pryor Academy I got into the habit of building my shaping plans in the form of shaping staircases. Since then I have continued to use the process to map out hundreds of different behaviors.

In Poppy’s case, we need a shaping plan that deals with very small increments of behavior and provides multiple opportunities for Poppy to get rewarded.  

The following is a plan I’ve put together especially for Poppy’s situation. It focuses only on the first behavior – that of shaping her to look to her owner whenever she is in the presence of food.

Stage 3: “Charge” the clicker

If Poppy has never been exposed to a clicker before it will be necessary to “charge” the clicker before commencing any training. This will be easy to do with Poppy because the very nature of her problem suggests she is particularly motivated by food.

Charging the clicker does not require the dog to do anything other than be relatively attentive to the handler so it is best to do it when there are few distractions around (like a litter of bouncing puppies in Poppy’s case). It simply involves letting the dog know that the “click” will earn her a treat every time she hears it. The process goes a little like this:

1. Dog looks at you – click’n’treat
2. Before the dog has finished chewing – click’n’treat again
3. Repeat step 2 another 7 or 8 times in quick succession.

Over time the dog will learn that the “click” means “well done, what you just did was what I wanted” and will promise a treat of some sort (whether toy or food or game) to follow.

Stage 4: Conduct the foundation training sessions

Now things are ready to commence the first training session. I would pick a quiet time for Poppy, perhaps when the pups are taking a nap or are busy with other humans. I would prepare several sets of 10 treats and have them readily available but well out of Poppy’s sight. I’d then sit quietly with Poppy and wait for her to make eye contact with me. I’d click for that briefest of contacts and give her a treat. This is the first step of the staircase and teaches Poppy that making eye contact with me will earn her a treat. 

I like to measure duration for eye contact as it can be a good indicator of whether the dog understands what I am after. I would count the seconds Poppy holds my gaze and see if it increases in length at all. Most dogs find holding a human’s gaze disconcerting, so if I can get a couple of seconds for each glance at first, then I am doing very well. With this sort of game I like to keep the sessions short, no longer than 30 seconds, and I’d reward Poppy with a game or the remaining treats at the end of that time. I’d then keep repeating this first step until I was sure Poppy understood what this game was about – “If I look at her hard enough, she’ll “click” and feed me – how cool is that!”

Stage 5: Introduce food and work the plan

Once Poppy knows what the game is about I can then introduce a small amount of low value food to the game. I would start by holding it in my fist just in front of Poppy’s nose. Any attempt to nudge my hand or get at the food would be ignored. What I want Poppy to do is look away from my hand, just for a second, if I can capture that with the “click” then I can build on this with more repetitions and perhaps some duration (she looks away for a couple of seconds). If I practiced the first step of my process well enough, i.e. lots of sessions with lots of repetitions, then chances are high that when Poppy looks away from my food clenching hand, she will look at me - “Click’n’treat” – we’ll have jumped to the next step of the staircase. Little by little I’d work my way up the staircase, shifting the criteria minutely at first, and always going back a step or two if things don’t seem to be progressing.

The Secret to Shaping New Behavior

I’m a record keeper and I like to know how well I am doing with each session. Am I making progress in this session compared to the last? Is the dog’s interest high? Are my treats of a high enough caliber? Am I keeping the repetitions high? Are my sessions short? Are we having fun?

I’ve found whenever I try to shape a behavior I have to be very clear in my head as to what the terminal behavior looks like and I will reward any progress toward that behavior. 

I’ve played this game with many dogs and they all catch on really quickly – “ignoring the food in that hand, means I get something better from the other one – ahh, I get it, I’ve gotta look at her to let her know I know that”.

Beau, our youngest dog, is a master at this game. He uses the presence if any food as an opportunity to let me know that I “owe” him a treat by eye-balling me. The advantage of this for me is I can now trust him to leave food alone and all I have to do to maintain the behavior is reinforce him with a word of praise or something special out of my pocket. 

Poppy (Photo: dog::links)

In Poppy’s case, we really want her to defer to her owner when there is anything around that she might previously have tried to steal. To achieve this sort of reliability with the behavior will take lots of repetitions, in lots of sessions a day, over many days and weeks, but it is achievable and sets the scene for the next part of the behavior chain – teaching Poppy to leave the item that is tempting her, or giving her permission to take it. In my next blog, Cueing a New Behavior, I will discuss this part of the process in more detail.  

Rehabilitating a Food Thief: Part 1 – Poppy's Problem

The other day I got an email from my friend Jane, a dedicated volunteer with the Cahor animal refuge in France. She shared with me the story of Poppy, a young Pointer / Weimaraner cross who had recently given birth to eight beautiful puppies and, lucky for her puppies, had been fostered out to a very generous care-giver.

Poppy's pups (photo: dog::links)

Despite being a gentle, trusting and extremely affectionate dog who enjoys the company of people to the point where she readily allows them to handle her pups, Poppy came into care with little training and a pathological need - she likes to steal food. When she was found, the heavily pregnant Poppy was starving. It is likely she had been abandoned, probably due to her pregnancy, and was thus forced to fend for herself, something domesticated dogs are just not equipped to do. Perhaps Poppy had a fondness for helping herself before her ordeal, perhaps not, it is impossible to say. What would be fair to assume though, is that Poppy’s starvation and the subsequent fear of not having enough to eat have resulted in her becoming a notorious food thief.

Poppy (photo: dog::links)

Stealing food is a common behavior in many dogs, not just those who have been forced to fend for themselves; food after all is a basic requirement to survival and if it is not readily available most dogs will resort to stealing to meet their nutritional needs. In Poppy’s case it might be simply that she has a propensity to make the most of an opportunity, or there could be more to it than a basic need for food. The trauma of being abandoned, coping with the physiological changes that accompany pregnancy, and that perpetual state of being hungry may have triggered in Poppy a psychological need to steal food. This behavior can easily be further reinforced because of the attention that Poppy gets, albeit negative, should her humans shoo her away from the food, or punish her for stealing it.

If any combination of these factors is in play, then Poppy’s condition will not be addressed just by giving her plenty of food to eat. If you look at it from her point of view, Poppy has likely learned through her ordeal that the only way to guarantee she will get a meal is to take whatever she can find. Perhaps in the past she had been regularly fed and food just miraculously and reliably appeared as it does for most pet dogs or perhaps she only received meager rations from her previous owners. Regardless of her past life, when Poppy was left to her own devices any previous supply line was severed - food was no longer on offer - and Poppy would have needed to revert to whatever means possible to stay alive.

Just because food starts to appear out of nowhere once more, doesn’t mean it will last forever and Poppy’s natural instincts will tell her to take whatever she can find, whenever she can. If, when this happens, a great fuss breaks out and she is chased away from the food, this just reinforces her initial desire to steal, perhaps making the item to be stolen much higher in value than she previously thought because there is competition for obtaining it.

The table below shows one way of describing the existing behavior :

Describe existing behavior: steals food, runs away to eat it in seclusion
Opportunities	Dog loose, food readily available: laid out on the table, on the kitchen bench, in shopping bags on the floor, in the cat's bowl
Cues (triggers)	Sight or smell of food; attention of humans
Reinforcers	The physiological satisfaction that comes from eating the food, attention from humans, yelling, commotion, running, game of “get away”

Another way to look at the situation is as part of a behavior chain in which the stealing is continually being reinforced.

Behavior Chain format adapted from Karen Pryor Academy Dog Training Program

We see this happening frequently enough with humans that it should be no surprise when it also happens with dogs. People steal for the same reasons: the desire for what they don’t have is greater than any consequences that might occur for the action, and always worth the risk when faced with the option of doing without. In fact, many thieves steal for the attention it attracts to them, they like the notoriety that accompanies their actions.

So does this mean that rehabilitating a food thief is futile? Luckily for Poppy and other dogs like her, no.

Through a dedicated and consistently positive approach using operant conditioning with high levels of reinforcement, Poppy can be taught to respond to food in a different way and to look to her new owner as the source of all things good in her life. This is an ideal situation for using a clicker or a similar marker to indicate to the dog when she is displaying appropriate behavior and to reward her with a high value treat.

In my next blog on this topic, I will detail one way in which Poppy and other dogs who steal food can be conditioned to leave food alone and instead make the sight of such food a cue to do something else entirely.