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For the dog to respond properly to these commands, it takes some programming to be effective. The dog must, on the subconscious level, respond appropriately to the commands. Most of us are familiar with Pavlov's Law. Pavlov was a scientist in the 19th century |
whose great discovery was that of condition response learning. What he did was take a group of dogs, one at a time, and attach test tubes to their cheeks to measure the response of their salivating. He set up a situation where he would ring a bell (as the signal), then present a plate of food to the hungry dog (as the motivation), and the dog would salivate (as the behavior). The response was measured, then the dog would receive the food (as the reward). After a series of repetitions of this exercise, he found that the dog would respond with the same intensity of salivation even when the food was not presented. Which led to the conclusion that behaviors could in fact be triggered with a signal without the motivation or the dog thinking about performing the response or not. It became an automatic response when hearing the signal. This is the response we want when we say "Good" during the training of our dogs. We want to use our words rather than a bell, but you can use a bell or whistle to trigger the positive signal. Dolphin |