LEARNING IS ALWAYS DIMINISHING. Maintenance is KEY, to reliability! Maintenance is the stage in which people work to prevent relapse and consolidate the gains attained during action.

Training is a process of teaching and then maintaining desired responses.

If behaviors are not rehearsed, they will diminish. It is your responsibility to rehearse with your dog the behaviors you want until they become life long habits. If responses to cues start to slow down, immediately go back to an earlier step in the training and re-teach the exercise.

After completing an initial 7 to 8 week training series. What you and your dog learn will help them live with you in a cooperative and calm manner. At that point, some of the skills learned are name recognition, sit/maintain, to walk away from something while on leash, to come when called, to be lead by their collar, and to relax. Most importantly your dog learned to offer eye contact, which can be used to calm themselves down whenever they become frantic. Be prepared to use it whenever necessary.

This experience will teach you a skill set that can be used whenever you want to introduce a new behavior to your dog or review an old one. This method presents a cue to your dog, setting them up to volunteer the behavior you are looking for, and then reinforces the correct response. Patience while teaching allows your dog to decide what behavior to offer. You want a calm thinking puppy to grow up to be a calm thinking adult dog.

Verbal cues are added to a behavior using a "New Cue Followed by Old Cue" technique.

Reinforcement is used when your dog is asked to perform more challenging behaviors or to perform familiar behaviors under more challenging circumstances. Reinforcement is no longer used after your dog offers a behavior consistently and the behavior has become a "piece of cake" for them. Meaning it is a habit in context.

Management Options:
Owners/Guides may want to choose to either control the management plan when they feel like it, or make the necessary adjustments to just tolerate it.

Be aware that the dog will continue to offer the offending behavior unless he/she is managed. A dog is not capable of managing his own behavior and will never understand the concept that changing behavior will be “for his own good”. Owners must be willing to pay the price for their lack of commitment and never under any circumstance take out their frustration or impatience on the dog.
Management programs are only as effective as the owner’s commitment to implement them and follow them through completely.

LIFE REWARDS-Powerful Tools - Precise and Repetitive Rituals or Routines are avoided

It may be a very wise thing to begin any dog (puppy)/human relationship with the Name Game. This game is used to establish two necessary connections. One is that the pup's name predicts something wonderful is about to happen and the other is that an indicator sound or word predicts a reinforcer.

Once these connections are made, the first skill to teach a pup is eye contact. It is also wise to use every possible life-reward situation to accomplish this task. When following this formula, a pup or dog learns the eye contact skill very quickly and very reliably.

In other words, within a day or two, the canine is offering eye contact almost constantly when interacting with his owner. The presence of the owner becomes the "contextual cue" to make eye contact. Contextual cues are places, situations or circumstances that stimulate a dog to respond in a certain way because the response is always reinforced.

The next step is for the owner to begin proofing the eye contact response and then put it on a signal cue. A "signal cue" is either a gesture, such as the one used to initiate eye contact or a verbal cue such as "Watch". People initiated signal cues with the intent of stimulating a response rather than the dog's response resulting from a place, situation or circumstance. A signal cue will be necessary later on when the owner wants the dog to make eye contact and the dog is either distracted or in a new place, situation or circumstance that is out of normal context.

The owner also begins teaching additional skills such as sit/maintain, down/maintain, coming when called and relax.

From this point forward, the same skill is not repeatedly taught or proofed to earn anyone specific life reward. For example, a guide/owner must feed his/her dog at least once a day. Getting his/her dinner dish is a very desirable "life reward" for most dogs. A wise owner uses the dinnertime routine to teach or proof eye contact one day and then to teach or proof he down position the next day.

Changing the daily routine like this, results in two important training accomplishments. First, the ability to proof is increased. Other reinforcers besides releasing to the life reward are utilized during the proofing process.
As a result, the owner is able to keep the I/R sequence separate from the release. Remember this is necessary and desirable. In the case of proofing during the feeding process, a recommitment could be reinforced with a morsel from the dish rather than the dish being set down and the dog being released to consume the entire meal.

The second training accomplishment is that it teaches the dog to get in the habit of watching his/her guide/owner for a signal cue to indicate which response will be reinforced instead of the dog automatically or by "contextual cue" offering a response on-his/her own volition.

A few important points need to be made here.
One is that when a new response contingency such as "eye contact with owner results in receiving a reinforcer" is introduced to a pup, the response must be reinforced immediately and lavishly. This is called "setting the psych". As a result, the dog offers the response whenever the opportunity or "contextual cue" presents itself. For example, when the owner walks up to the pup with something in his hand, his puppy automatically makes eye contact. The contextual cue for eye contact is the presence of the owner. Part of the training process is that the pup learns contextual cues. This is both desirable and valuable because the pup is constantly offering the target behavior voluntarily.

However, the second point is that eventually the owner will want to be able to give the dog a signal cue to make eye contact when the dog is distracted by something in the environment. He will also need his dog to perform other skills on signal cue such as "Sit". Other times, he will want to cue responses that require his dog to stop making eye contact and turn away from him such as "Take it" or "Go to bed". There will also be times when the dog is responding in context such as making eye contact to get out a door, but the owner would need to cue a different response such as "back up" in order to open the door so the dog can be let out.

Constantly changing the requirements for a dog to earn a life reward keeps the dog attentive to the owner, listening for signal cues, and increasingly more skillful at performing on signal cue under many different circumstances.

Changing life reward requirements also accomplished one last feat. This feat is the most magical part of training THE THIRD WAY. Dogs actually become disappointed when released, even though the release is to something the dog initially desired. Consider the possibilities presented by the fact that a dog would rather respond to his guides/owner's cues then be free to go off on his own!

Here is how this is accomplished using life rewards THE THIRD WAY.

The proofing process is made as enjoyable for the owner and as reinforcing as possible for the dog while the process is happening. When the dog is finally released, it is with a very neutral "FREE", and the owner does not celebrate with the dog at all. The owner also presents the situation for the dog to leave the life reward and return to interacting with him/her.

If the guide/owner and the dog are enjoying the proofing process together, and the intermittent reinforcers are good ones, it is very possible that the dog could be psyched into staying and continuing to play the proofing game. The release would be a disappointment because the opportunity to problem solve and earn random reinforcers ended. The original intense reinforcement value of the life reward, which existed during the initial teaching phase, has become a much more of a "neutral" and less rewarding event than before!

Here is an example that has been tried many times and has resulted in the dog choosing to remain with the owner rather than go out the door.

The owner will use going out the door into the back yard as the "life reward" for teaching eye contact. The pup must really want to go out the door. To begin, the owner must immediately indicate and let the pup out the door as soon as he makes eye contact. Thus the pup quickly makes the connection that eye contact results in the door opening. This sequence is very important. But it will last only a very short time.

The pup will let the owner know when the eye contact response is a "piece of cake" because he will go to a door and immediately make eye contact to get out. The connection between contextual cue (owner at door), response (offer eye contact) and consequence (door is opened) has been made. The owner can advance to the proofing process. And this is where the fun should begin!

Now when the pup goes to the door and makes eye contact, the owner starts to introduce little challenges. Maybe he reaches for the door. The pup breaks eye contact so the owner freezes. The pup goes into momentary conflict and then recommits to eye contact. The owner reinforces lavishly with multiple tidbits. The pup consumes them and immediately recommits to eye contact. The owner keeps reaching for the door, and reinforcing recommitment until eye contact is a "piece of cake" in spite of the reach. Once this happens the pup is rewarded with chasing a ball instead of getting out the door.

Next time the guide/owner challenges the pup with something different. This time he/she looks up at the ceiling instead of looking at the pup. When the pup quietly and calmly maintains eye contact, the reward could be that the owner produces the pup's leash, attaches it and walks the pup to a different door to go and out take a walk.

Randomness or unpredictability will keep the dog attracted to the learning process.

It is easy to be unpredictable when a guide/owner has a wide variety of reinforcers. Keep in mind that anything that changes a dog's emotional state to a better one is a reinforcer. Things 1ike food and toys are good ones. But so is relief of social pressure, verbal and tactile techniques that are pleasing to the individual dog and familiar phrases that previously predicted wonderful events. Try saying "Do you want to go for a walk" to a dog and see if it perks the dog up. If it does, it has changed the dog's emotional state to a more excited one and is, therefore, a viable reinforcer. So when proofing, the clever owner uses as many different reinforcers as possible. As often as possible the owner sets up situations that promote neutral rather than celebrated releases. And when using life rewards, the owner remains as neutral as possible when the dog is released to a life reward.

Randomness is also accomplished by changing response requirements.

After teaching eye contact, the owner will never be concentrating on teaching and/or proofing only one skill. For example, while proofing eye contact, the owner will also is teaching sit/maintain the recall and relax. Therefore, when teaching and proofing different skills it becomes impossible for the pup to predict on his own what response will result in "life" and other rewards. The pup must be attentive for the signal cue from the owner. The pup actually develops the habit of waiting expectantly and even hopefully for the next signal cue so he can earn more reinforcers.

Lastly, when using life rewards, randomness can be attained by periodically releasing the pup to a different life reward. For example, instead of getting to go out the door as usual, the owner shows the pup his full dinner dish.

The use of neutral releases as often as possible and avoiding repetitive use of responses, routines, and reinforcers allows an owner to use the power and convenience of life rewards while at the same time minimizing their negative aspects.