Do Not Over-tighten: Why and How Dog Training Needs to Get Specific
Earlier today I was installing a dog gate to keep the dogs out of the basement (useful tangent: dog gates are the best thing ever, and if you have places in your home where your dog shouldn’t be, feel free to install them—the nice ones, because life is brutish and short and we may as well have nice things—wherever you’d like). I was following the instructions very closely because I’ve certainly learned that lesson one or two or forty seven thousand times, and I came upon this line, which just made me cringe:
“Turn the hinge until tight. Do not over-tighten.”
The problem here is that the hinge, when “tight”, stuck off in an odd direction that would not have functioned in our actual physical world. I was left with two options: unscrew the hinge so that it sat in the right place but was wobbly and loose, or tighten with a wrench as needed and hope that this act did not invoke the terrible and horrific “do not over-tighten” clause, perhaps ending life as we know it.
(Pro tip for those installing the same dog gate: go with option B).
In the face of uncertainty, unclear instructions are pretty much the worst, right? What does over-tightening actually mean? How much pressure could I safely apply? Does my hand need to be a go-go-gadget torque wrench? What will happen if I over-tighten? My hands aren’t particularly strong, so does the fact that I needed a wrench to turn the hinges the last ¾ turn still rest within regular tightening and not over-tightening?
Help.
This is a similar dilemma to instructions that come with prescription medication. If you miss a dose, the instructions will say to take it anyways, unless you are close to the next dose. OK, sure, but...how close is too close? One minute? One hour? Five hours?! The medical establishment probably also recommends avoiding stress whilst you’re taking your pills, but then they issue instructions that are pretty much guaranteed to cause stress, in the somewhat likely event that the patient in question happens to be, you know, human. And, you know. Forgets things.
Sigh.
Aren’t clear instructions a beautiful thing? Imagine if my dog gate installation instructions had said “screw the hinge into place by tightening by hand until you can no longer move it, and then use a wrench for the remainder of up to a single rotation.” Imagine if the pill bottle said “take your missed dose unless you are within two hours of your next dose”.
Well, my dog-gate-loving friends, I’m here with some good news. I can offer you that exact kind of instruction, and I can offer it in a context that really needs it: training your dog to do a new thing (or to do a known thing, in a new location). Get ready for certainty. Get ready for clarity. And trust me, you’re going to love it.
Professional dog trainers who use production-style dog training have this glorious, wonderful bag of tricks: they use training plans with a list of things the dog needs to do to earn reinforcement at each step, and they use easy-to-understand rules about when the dog should progress to a harder step. My personal fave in the “rules about when to move to the next step” works like this:
Train your dog, repetition after repetition. Learning a new behaviour requires reps, typically.
But don’t just bang out the reps, do a bit of minor counting in your head: count each run of successes (when your dog does what you ask and earns a treat) and count each run of fails, too. A fail is when the dog does something but it’s not the right thing...you ask for a sit, and they spin, or you ask for a down and they do a sit pretty. If the dog is thinking and working you for treats but doesn’t commit to an incorrect behaviour, you can wait them out...they’ll get faster over time.
Yes, this does mean if your dog fails even once, you have to start over at “one”, for the next successful repetition. Sorry. Pro tip: have a lot of small, delicious treats at the ready.
Once your dog does five correct behaviours in a row, move to the next harder step.
If, and this will absolutely happen and is no big dealio, your dog fails out of school three times in a row, drop back a step immediately.
See? Easy. Peasy. Pumpkin Cheesy. The numbers make the decision so you don’t have to. You can save all that angst over the blistering uncertainty of life for times when it’s actually kind of delicious, like part way into an excellent thriller or part way into a new recipe or part way into that new series on your fave streaming service. When it’s fine to let yourself feel a bit…over-tightened. Say, about two point three five hours before the next dose.
Photo: Sutashiku | © Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images
Cover photo: Mellie430 | © Dreamstime Stock Photos & Stock Free Images