Over the last three months, I’ve run dozens of experiments attempting to repair Lightning’s returns on retrieves and train him not to go into a game of keep-away once he’s picked up the retrieval article. I’ve described some of my observations in previous posts, but we’ve made progress since the last one so this is an update.

We are now at the point where Lightning can run fairly advanced marking setups, including triples, retired guns, and mama-poppa doubles, with factors such as wind and strips of high cover, at distances of 200y and more. Lightning is able to run good marks with thawed ducks as well as duck and pheasant dokkens and bumpers.

However, he isn’t reliable at the beginning of a session and may go into keep-away with the first few retrieves. Therefore, we first need to go thru a process I call a retrieve tune-up. Once the tune-up is complete, Lightning stops switching into keep-away mode and we can run normal marking practice.

The retrieve tune-up is performed as the following steps:

1. Throw the dog’s ball for him a few times. Of all the reinforcers we’ve used, only two have worked well with Lightning. One was a small animal carcass he had found that only lasted a couple of sessions but was extremely valuable to him while it lasted. The other is a red rubber ball, similar to a Kong but round. Occasionally I forget to bring the ball out for the session and Lightning immediately starts playing keep-away on his returns. As soon as I bring the ball out, that stops.
2. Run the dog on a 60′ long line on marks up to 20y, with the handler holding onto the line and reeling the dog in if he/she switches into keep-away mode. When reeling in is necessary, do it as quickly as possible so the the dog has minimal time to experience pleasure playing keep-away.
3. For the sake of efficiency, use the most difficult article at first, that is, the article with which the dog is most likely to play keep-away. If the dog goes into keep-away mode, the handler should reel the dog in as quickly as possible, minimizing the time that the dog can self-reinforce.
4. If the dog drops the article, cue Fetch repeatedly until the dog is close enough for delivery to hand. If the dog is doing well with deliveries at heel, use those. Otherwise, just accept the article when the dog is close enough for you to take it.
5. No matter how the dog performed, at the instant the article is delivered, throw the ball. Allow the dog to play keep-away with the ball as long as desired, but Lightning stopped doing that after the first session. You can toss the ball another time or two if desired, but don’t wear the dog out retrieving a ball.
6. Randomly alternate which side the gunner throws to.
7. When the dog comes straight back with the article on both sides, have the gunner back up to around 40y. Now the handler won’t be able to hold onto the long line, but the dog will still be fairly easy to catch if he/she goes into keep-away mode. Always reinforce every return, whether the dog played keep-away or not, by throwing the ball at least once.
8. When the dog is returning reliably at the longer distance, switch to a shorter long line. For Lightning, I switch to a 15′ line. Switch as quickly as possible so you can call for the next throw with minimal change in cadence.
9. If the dog plays keep-away on the shorter line, switch back to the longer line and the shorter distance, and try to work back thru the steps again. There’s nothing to do but wait for the dog to come back when he/she does that on a short line, but don’t keep repeating it that way.
10. When the dog is reliable for several consecutive retrieves and on both sides, the handler can take the dog’s collar off and run the dog without a line. As before, if the dog goes into keep-away, back up to earlier steps and try again. It’s a judgment call how many steps to back up; the key is minimizing how much time the dog is able to self+reinforce playing keep-away. The simplest approach is to go back to step 1 every time the dog plays keep-away in a later step, but if you can get good results without backing up that far in the process, it saves time.
11. Once the dog is reliable with no collar on both sides at 40y, incrementally back up to the dog’s normal practice marking distances. You can also introduce easier articles, as well as doubles and triples, and other challenges. For multiples, you can have the handler throw the go-bird, and you can have a single gunner move to two different locations to throw a double, so that the first throw is in effect a retired gun.

That completes the tune-up. At that point the dog is returning reliably without a collar for that location and you can continue to practice as long as you like, assuming the dog’s stamina holds up. Lightning is good for at least an hour in cold weather. However, in Lightning’s case, the tune-up process has to be repeated if we go to a different location or for the same location if we leave and come back later.

As long as Lightning requires a tune-up at the beginning of each series in a new location, he’s  still not ready to train with a group again, much less compete. But the number of times he attempts to play keep-away is growing smaller every day we practice. I’m hopeful that a time will come, preferably sooner rather than later, that his attempts to play keep-away will fade entirely, eliminating the need for the tune-up.

But even now, our work has reached an exhilarating phase. For months I had to wonder whether we’d ever find a solution to the horrible keep-away game. Now we have a reliable process for getting Lightning to the point each session where he can run one retrieve after another and come running straight back with the article every time. It’s a wonderful sight.

I was lucky enough to have two assistants a couple of days ago, so I used one to take some videos while the other one acted as gunner, and tried my hand at editing one of the videos. This one shows Lightning running a single and a momma-poppa double (that is, one gunner throwing both marks) after we’d gotten Lightning to the point that day of being able to return without playing keep-away. At that point, he’d been training for about an hour, but luckily the weather was cool so we still had plenty of dog.

This particular video is not especially instructive, but I guess it’s a chance to see what Lightning looks like these days.

Lightning seems to be back in excellent health, and in a couple of days he’ll be fifteen months old, so here’s an update. For weeks now, my assistants and I have been trying a variety of methods to address a problem in Lightning’s performance so serious that no further progress in Lightning’s training was possible till the problem was resolved: Lightning’s tendency to go into a game of keep-away rather than returning with the article during a retrieve. He stopped doing it some time ago with 2″ bumpers as long as they didn’t have ropes, but it has been a maddening problem for any bumper with a rope, as well as 3″ bumpers even with no rope, to say nothing of dokkens and birds.

We’ve tried many methods to address the issue, variations of running Lightning on a long line, using many kinds of positive reinforcement for correct performance, and even running Lightning and Laddie simultaneously to bring out Lightning’s competitive streak. We’ve met with some success with several of the approaches. But none was able to produce consistent results.

Finally yesterday I came up with a way to add negative punishment to the mix. In the science of operant conditioning, negative punishment, abbreviated “-P” or “P-“, means causing a behavior ( an undesired response) to become less probable by removing reinforcement, or by removing the opportunity for reinforcement, when the behavior occurs.

Here’s the method I came up with: My assistant and I stand some distance apart, but both about the same distance from my van. One of us handles Lightning, the other acts as gunner and throws bumpers. If Lightning returns to the handler with the bumper, he receives one or more kinds of reinforcement, such as a bite of a cheeseburger (no bread), or a tossed toy or bumper. Then the handler calls him to heel for another retrieve.

But if Lightning picks up the bumper and goes into keep-away mode, the handler calls out “Stop” and then both the handler and the gunner start walking toward the van. Lightning may continue to run around with the bumper for awhile, but soon he realizes he’s alone out there and brings the bumper to the handler. The handler reinforces that delivery in some way and we all go back to setting up for the next retrieve.

Once I had worked out the basic approach in my mind, I planned to use it with 100% constituency for several sessions, in the hope that Lightning would eventually learn the no-reward-market (NRM) “Stop”, and gradually learn to avoid it and the associated -P of having the retrieve game stop, by making good returns. I thought it might take a week or so before we could evaluate whether it was working, that is, whether correct responses were becoming noticeably more probable than incorrect responses.

Well, it took a lot less than that; it took about five trials. The first few times we used it didn’t seem to make any difference, and Lightning continued his annoying practice of going into keep-away mode after picking up the bumper. But soon he noticeably shortened the time he stayed in his  game before bringing the bumper to the handler who was on his way to the van, and finally he began bringing the bumper straight back to the handler after picking it up.

The progression wasn’t perfect. Lightning would display extinction bursts as he gradually tested the new rules, but by the end of the session, he was able to run a nice momma-poppa double with both retrieves over 100y. Of course we worked toward that setup incrementally from the original setup.

That was yesterday. This morning I went out with a different assistant and we used the same method again. Lightning needed to re-learn that keep-away would end the retrieve game, but it didn’t take long. By the end of today’s session, he was able to run a series of triples, with the gunner throwing a momma-poppa and the handler throwing the go-bird from the start line.

So far we’ve worked with 2″ and 3″ bumpers, all with ropes. Tomorrow we’ll try it with dokkens, and in subsequent sessions hopefully a time will come where Lightning won’t bother to go into keep-away mode with bumpers or dokkens at all. Then, hopefully, we’ll be able to use the method with thawed birds, and eventually, finally, flyers.

If all that goes as hoped for, we’ll be able to resume the steps of our PRT program. It will be too cold for water training till next spring, but we have plenty of land work to do, on both marked and blind retrieves and associated drills, in the meantime.

Dogs are all different, and I don’t have the data to know how other dogs who stop bringing the article back would respond to this -P solution. But hopefully it will prove to be a useful tool for some of them at least. It’s been invaluable for Lightning’s training.

Update: Although all dogs are different, and the method described in this post might work for some retrievers, it turns out that it was not successful for Lightning over the long haul.

What happened was that as each day went by using this approach, Lightning became increasingly likely to go into sustained keep-away mode. The tendencies were subtle, so it took a few days to realize what was happening. But eventually it was clear that this approach was having the opposite of the desired effect.

I’m not sure why. It may be that Lightning became less concerned about me stopping the retrieve game, as he learned that we always resume once he was done playing keep-away. Or it could be that the more keep-away he played, the more reinforcing it was, gradually outweighing in value the retrieve game.

Thus, at least for Lightning, the -P method described in this post was a bust, possibly even setting Lightning further back.

This has been the challenge of developing a new training method. Sometimes you need to test a false path to discover it won’t work it.

However, in a later post, I’ll describe an alternate method I’ve come up with, using both a long line and a rubber ball, that has been far more effective.