Canine Conversations

In this episode of K9 Conservationists, Kayla talks about mistakes, failure, and errors. This week’s science highlight: You Are Not My Handler! Impact of Changing Handlers on Dogs’ Behaviours and Detection Performance. Everything is just data; it’s just information Now we have all sorts of interesting questions to dig into - was it search conditions? Target odor? Study design? Time of year? Training sample quality? Dog-project fit? Criteria? Splitting? Timing? Stress or exhaustion? Handler interference? While applied behavior analysis isn’t always the answer to all training issues, it’s a great place to start. Remember the ABCs of applied behavior analysis: antecedent, behavior, consequence. If you’re seeing behavior in your dog that you consider an error, there’s likely an antecedent or a consequence that’s cueing or reinforcing the behavior somehow. There are so many ways to frame the concept of failure, errors, mistakes. As much as possible, strive to set your dogs up in training