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.