Never Repeat a Command
If you’re a professional dog trainer, you’ve repeated “never repeat a command” countless times. Surely it’s one of life’s greatest ironies. I’ve said it myself many a time, and I’ve written about how hard it is to follow that advice. How easily the second “Sit” comes after the first one, yes? I’ve gotten pretty good at saying things just once, although that doesn’t mean I’m perfect. If I had five bucks for every time I’ve repeated “Lie Down” to my working Border collies I’d be a rich woman. But still, I’m better than most… and am the first to explain why it’s so important not to repeat a command. (If you want your dog to respond to a signal, then repeating it simply teaches him to not respond to the first time you say it and wait for the second.)
So answer me this: the man I call the “Tiger Woods of Herding,” Allisdair McRae, and the only woman who’s ever won the International Sheep Dog Trails, Julie Simpson-Hill, both repeat their commands, and do it on purpose. You can’t fault their success: between them they’ve won just about everything there is to win on the herding circuit. Their dogs are willing, brilliant and precise workers, who are as responsive as anyone’s in the world. And yet, if a dog doesn’t Lie Down when asked, their response is to say it again, but this time louder, as a correction (Do remember that we are talking about working dogs who can be 500 yards away from you, moving at a dead run, dancing on the line between herding and predation. This is NOT a time you can simply ignore behavior that is incorrect, honest.). This method does not lead to dogs who don’t lie down the first time that they are asked, it leads to dogs who are responsive and precise.
If this just resulted in winning trials, but with dogs who were cowed and fearful it’d be one thing, but that’s not the case. Allisdair and Julie can get into the head of a dog as well as anyone I know, and as far as I’ve seen, are relentlessly kind and thoughtful about working each and every dog.
Food for thought.
September 1st, 2008 at 8:06 pm
Hi, love the blog!
I especially love having these pearls of wisdom re-examined and discussed. So, here’s my take on this: in class we have a bunch of dogs that don’t *really* know the cue, for example, ‘sit’. (To a Brit in NZ it sounds like a custard convention – “set, set, SET!’) Repeating the cue does then teach the dog that the ‘real’ cue is five repetitions of the word or signal or to ignore us altogether.
However, for the highly trained dogs, the story may be a little different. We know that when beings are highly aroused or distracted they tend to not notice ‘irrelevant’ stimuli. Our verbal cues may well fall in to that category for an actively working sheepdog. Repeating the signal may just function to enhance its salience; to the dog it DID respond on the first cue because it never consciously heard the previous one.
Just my opinion - wish I had some data!
Cheers
Sarah
May 3rd, 2009 at 10:32 pm
I know this is really late, but I just found the blog and started reading it. I’m very excited about it! The method that works so well for Allisdair is very hard to translate to someone who is not already a brilliant dog handler. A couple of friends went to his clinic and started up with that method, and now their dogs have so completely lost any sense of “lie down” that it’s like the wind in their ears. They only got part of the method- saying the command more than once, not how exactly he does it that makes it work, which I don’t really know. I’ve watched his training videos, but that’s not really enough to know the whole method.
Another method, which I have picked up with some success, was told to me by a couple of handlers, which is to wait until your dog does something and then tell him to do it. So you wait until your pup is already running toward you and then say “pup, here”, or you wait until he’s tired and lies down, and as he does it you say “lie down” . I have tried this with a 2 year old Australian Shepherd I just got. I started working him on sheep, and he was very sensitive, and didn’t really have confidence or trust in me, so I didn’t want to push him around and make him do things. He generally did the right things with sheep, so I’d just put names on what he was doing.
This worked so well that he went from no lie down at all, not in the house or yard, to two weeks later he will lie down in the pen with the sheep, either before starting (and he will stay until I get set up) or during work if balanced up.