Take it to the Bank

Several times a month I make may way over to the bank to make deposits and withdrawals.  Could you imagine if there came a time where my withdrawals exceeded the deposits?   Obviously there would be a great penalty enforced for that and I would be in debt.  Nobody wants to be in that position, so we save for the future and prepare for inevitable expenses.  So it’s important in our personal lives to make sure we have plenty in the bank, to cover our various needs and wants.

Today I’d like to carry that line of thinking into dog training.   Science has proven that if a dog finds something rewarding there’s a greater likelihood of that behavior being repeated.   Positive Reinforcement training is built on this principle.  For instance, if we want to teach our dog recall, we make it a very rewarding experience.  The more we do that, the better the recall will be.

I’d like you to think of every time you reinforce/reward a behavior, that you’d like to see repeated, as you putting a small deposit into your dog’s bank account!  Your goal should be to have a lengthy reinforcement history, and build up that bank account slowly but surely.  And, every time your dog does that same behavior and isn’t rewarded or reinforced for it, think of that as a withdrawal from the account.  In a dog world the withdrawals are bigger than the deposits.  As you build up an adequate balance, you can start making withdrawals.  Just make sure you don’t spend more than you make if you know what I mean!  In fact, you never want to get close to the red.

I find that many people underestimate how much reinforcement is needed when training their dogs.  In many cases it takes many months and thousands of reinforcements to develop a solid response.  So build up that bank account and watch what happens as a result!