Session 118: Use Transitional Rewards to Help Your Dog Settle

The Dog's Way Podcast: Dog Training for Real Life

In this episode I talk about natural transitional rewards. Many may not have heard the term, but a lot of you may have used them in the training of your dog whether you realize it or not. If you want to do a real dive into the behavioral part of training, I encourage you to listen to my two episodes on conditioning - Session 73: Skinner's Four Quadrants Part One, and Session 74: Skinner's Four Quadrants Part Two.

I'll talk about the conditioning baked into every day interactions with your dog (like the feeding ritual). The same thing goes for when we are preparing for a walk. Those rituals can be a good thing. But it's it's more than simply the obedience skill you're teaching - it's the nervous system state that is occurring during that sit/stay and from the moment that you give the command to "break free" or say "all done". I'll describe how those commands and practices get embedded in their head, and how that fixation needs to be inhibited in certain instances.

Here are a couple of other instances where you might practically use this training;

• Preparing for a walk
• Preparing for feeding time
• The "Getting out of a car" ritual
• Going through the front door ritual
• Going through the gate at the dog park ritual

I'll talk about how sometimes we unintentionally signal to our dog when we reward certain types of gregarious responses is "I love it when you freak out and run around when I do this action!" Identifying those habits is a real eye-opener to what you might want to consider adjusting during these routines.

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