Cues And Commands: Be Careful What You Label

We used to talk about the commands we use in dog training. Nowadays you’ll more often hear them referred to a cues.

A cue is a trigger or prompt for the behavior your dog performs when it hears (or sees) the cue. Often the cue is a word, like SIT. Sometimes it’s a whistle or hand signal.

I find it helpful to think of the cue as a label. Because it describes, for the dog, an action that the dog has learned to associate with that cue. 

Using cues effectively is very important if we want a dog that responds to our cues accurately and reliably. In otherwords, an obedient dog.

Avoiding the number 1 mistake

A really common mistake made by inexperienced dog trainers, is to add a cue too soon. And by too soon, I mean before the behavior is pretty much exactly what the dog is required to do.

That’s what I mean by ‘be careful what you label’. Make sure that the behavior you are attaching your cue to, is the one that you want your dog to perform in the future. It’s easier to mess this up than you might think.

In the (not so good) old days we even used to add these labels before the dog had any experience at all of performing them. Let alone performing them well. 

The ‘modelling’ approach to dog training

Back in the day, it was common to push a dog into the sit position while demanding SIT, SIT, SIT.  In the hopes that eventually the dog would make the connection between the word sit, and the act of sitting. 

Some people refer to this as modelling. 

The idea is that you show the dog what position you want them to be in, and associate that position with a word – in the hopes that the dog will then put two and two together, and realise that sit means: “get yourself into the sit position”

There are some big problems with this approach. 

Resisting pressure

One problem is that the dog’s natural response to having their butt pressed down, is to resist. So as you push down, they push back up. 

If the dog is hearing the word SIT while pushing back against your hand, they are going to learn that the word sit means … “resist the hand that is pressing down on your butt”

Not quite what you had in mind for your SIT label.

Even if the trainer is smart enough to bite their lip and say nothing until the dog’s butt finally touches the ground, there are still problems.

Labelling an imperfect behavior

There are problems because when you train this way you are labelling an imperfect action.

When we teach a dog to sit we don’t just want the dog’s butt to touch down momentarily. We want our SITS to have duration. 

But dogs used to learn this way!

For sure they did!  And they learned through a desire to avoid the pressure of the trainer’s hand, and quite possibly to avoid the trainer’s angry demeanour, which of course disappears when the magic sit position is achieved. 

So basically the dog was learning through trial and error what they have to do to make something unpleasant stop.

The scientific term for this is negative reinforcement.  In behavioral science the word negative is used in the mathematical sense, meaning subtracted or taken away.  And in this case the dog learns that if they give in and yield to the pressure on their butt, that pressure will go away.

If something unpleasant is subtracted or taken away, and the behavior we want is reinforced then that’s negative reinforcement in action. It’s the same mechanism which force fetch and e-collar training uses. 

A better way to add your cue

With modern training we get the behavior we want – which is a dog that SITS on cue and doesn’t get up until they hear a release cue – long before we add a label to it.

With any behavior that has duration, we always use a release cue, so that every behavior has a clear beginning and a clear end. And we get some duration going, before we add that all important trigger cue.

The best bit of all is that we get to this happy state of affairs without having to manhandle the dog or push them around.

The benefits of adding a cue at the right time.

Being pushed around may not be the worst thing that can happen to your dog, but introducing aversives of any kind into a training session, especially with a young dog, has an impact on the relationship between you. You can read more about that in this article: Does Treat Training Work – The Evidence

Adding cues to established behaviors avoids the use of aversives and all the baggage that comes with them.

You’ll find a clear explanation of how to train without aversives, with practical examples in this article on First Steps In Training Any Dog. You can use these methods with puppies and older dogs alike.

You might also like: Mistakes You Don’t Have To Make When Training Your Dog!