The 2Rs and the 3Rs
Of all the differing opinions about puppy training between the many different trainers I’ve sampled and studied, and other owners, I want to share a revelation I had about the entire subject, all of it, every jot and tittle of every aspect of the subject.
After everything is said and done, after every technique is fleshed out and refined to its most bare essential ingredients, I’ve gotten it all down to one set of initials as rules … well, actually two, but they’re similar.
The first of these is a training initialism: The 2Rs. The2Rs stand for reward and repeat. Isn’t that what positive reinforcement training is? You guide your puppy to perform an action, and then you reward that action with a treat or a toy or praise. Then you get your dog to repeat that desired action, and then you reward it again, then repeat it again, then reward it again. Then, after a while, you possibly change the reward to something less rigid than a treat, but sometimes not. Sometimes, or with some dogs, you need to persist over an extended length of time in that R and R routine, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
An example of how I have to constantly apply this with Jocko is that he frequently picks things up to eat off of the side of the roads we walk along. I don’t like this. And so far, my drop it / leave it command training hasn’t taken hold. (I’ll pick up on all that at another time) My solution is that since I always have some small treats in my pocket anyway, when he picks up a piece of, let’s say, mulch, I offer a treat instead. Sometimes he drops the mulch and takes the treat. I then grab the mulch and remove it. Mission accomplished. But then, sometimes he refuses the treat and doesn’t drop the mulch. That just tells me I need to do a better job of training. So be it.
Reward — Repeat. Reward — Repeat. Reward — Repeat.
The other initial set that I use as a prompt is for discipline issues. It’s the 3Rs: Remove, Restrain, and Redirect. Taken one by one, they cover most of the discipline issues that come up.
Remove, the first R, is when he’s having a tantrum of some kind. The simplest solution is to just remove him from the situation. Get him out of there. My sons can tell you that I’ve done this many, many, many times when I raised them. When we went grocery shopping and they wanted a toy in the store, or candy, or a comic, they’d sometimes decide that their best tactic was to just drop on the floor and have a hissy-fit. This was not okay by any stretch.
It always baffled me that there were sometimes child rearing experts who said that the correct way to correct this kind of behavior was to let them sit where they are until they cried themselves out and stopped on their own. Baloney. That’s horribly unfair to others and it was my experience that it made matters worse. My solution was to leave my shopping cart where it was and take them out to the car. Oh, they cried and cried, but they soon learned that crying wasn’t effective since there was no audience to aggravate that might motivate me to change my behavior out of embarrassment. So the first R is to remove a misbehaving dog — or crying child — from the situation until the storm has passed.
The second R is restrain. Sometimes I have had to take a bit more action when Jocko goes off. There needed to be some fair to moderate restraint imposed on him. One way I’m always prepared is that Jocko always has a leash on — always, even when he’s in the house he wears a short thin little leash, a house lead, just as something to hold onto. One example of how I use this house lead is that most days, when he’s tired in the afternoon, he’ll grab onto my arm and pull it into his mouth. He won’t bite on it but will teeth it not overly hard or aggressively. We call it his Dr. Jocko and Mr. Hyde moment. The whole action comes off as a display of frustration about being tired. I grab onto the house lead and gently pull him away from my arm and hold him still — restrain him — in a position. He’ll fuss a little, then give up after a minute, plop on the floor where he stood, and fall asleep.
The third R is Redirect. This is where I attempt to divert or distract him from his misbehavior by offering a toy or a treat or anything that works. I try to replace whatever is jazzing him up with something else. And when he was younger with his tiny razor sharp puppy teeth, that sometimes meant having some kind of replacement for my hands, arms, or shins handy. One of his favorite kinds of replacements were narrow, heavy duty cardboard cores. If he was mouthy and he wanted to sink his teeth into me, I held a core out and let him attack it. No blood, no foul.
Of course, all of this activity became framed in our training. He now sits relatively calmly when another dog passes by us during our walk. He’s grown out of his bittiness, and I’ve learned when the best times are to put him into new and challenging situations.
That is how I’ve filtered down all the instructions by trainers, into The Two Rs: reward and repeat, and The Three Rs: remove, restrain, and redirect.