So you’ve got your shiny new behavior trained, and you’re ready to wow the world with your training skills! Except – your dog can only do it in your living room, at 7:51 on Tuesday mornings, when nobody else is around, and they know you have high value treats.
After your dog learns the mechanical skills of a new behavior – how to actually do it, and what it’s called – you need to start proofing it. Proofing is “leveling up” your behavior so that your dog can reliably execute the task in a variety of situations and at higher difficulty levels. If you need your dog to perform the behavior in real-world circumstances, it’s time to make sure it’s squirrel-proof, kid-proof, weather-proof, treat-proof – you get the gist.
You can think of proofing like “challenging” the behavior you’ve taught. Each time the behavior is challenged is one repetition, and a successful repetition happens when your dog overcomes the challenge. After each repetition, give your dog a short break and return to baseline.
Guidelines for Proofing
- Choose the right treats! If you’re distraction proofing, make sure the focus is on the proofing and not the distracting. Your treats should be high enough value to reward your dog – but not so high in value that your dog has tunnel vision and doesn’t actually process the distraction you’re working on.
- Keep things at the optimal difficulty. Your dog should feel challenged but capable of overcoming the challenge. At least 9/10 reps should be successful before increasing intensity.
- Meet your dog at their level, and work up from there. Start inside the house, with no distractions for you or your dog. Once they’ve got it, move to another room. Once they can do it in any room, head to the yard, then the sidewalk, then to a familiar park, then to an empty parking lot, then to the hardware store at off-hours, etc.
- Don’t always make things harder. Ease off on the pressure of added difficulty between reps. Working on distance? Practice returning to your dog before walking away again each time. If every session just gets harder and harder and harder without any breaks in difficulty – your dog is going to learn to quit, and quit early.
- Work methodically. Patterns can help dogs learn much more quickly. When you’re proofing, use a familiar pattern of behavior. After your dog is confident with the basics, you can reduce how much you rely on patterns to support them.
- Ex: Your dog is working on a down-stay. You take one step back, then return & treat. Take two steps back, then return & treat. Take three steps back, then return & treat. Take one step left, then return & treat. Take two steps left, then return & treat.
- Know what your goal is before you start. Are you working on distance? Distraction? Duration? What behavior did you want to practice? How do you define success today?
- One thing at a time. Don’t try adding distance, duration, and distraction at the same time. As you increase one, decrease another. Yesterday you progressed to a 10 second interval between treats without distraction, and today you want to be able to work around a squirrel – reduce your treat interval to compensate for the added challenge!
- Proof beyond the behavior you need! If your dog can hold a down-stay at a child’s birthday party while everyone does the Macarena around him, he can probably hold a down-stay while you order a coffee without batting an eye.
