I love watching dog videos on YouTube! Did you know, most dog training videos on the internet are of dogs in the generalization phase, not the acquisition phase? In other words, they're demo videos, not how-to videos! Why should you care? Because if you're like most people, you'll to try to teach your dog by mimicking what you see in a video... and chances are, it's not going to work very well.
If you want to learn how to train your dog from YouTube videos, be sure to watch videos of untrained dogs in the acquisition phase. Videos of dogs practicing what they've learned are super fun to watch, but they won't help you introduce new behaviors because they're in the generalization phase.
That said, it is totally possible to figure out how-to from a demo video. All you have to do is be able to answer these questions when you watch the video:
- Which training method was used to introduce the behavior in the acquisition phase? (There’s no tellIng!)
- If the command was SIT, why is the trainer marking the behavior 10 seconds after he sits down?
- What visual cues did the dog respond to in previous videos that have been faded and don't appear in this video?
- What undesirable behaviors should you anticipate when training this behavior and how should you respond to them?
- Why is the dog getting rewarded for some repetitions and not others?
- Is this a simple or a complex behavior? (Did you know FETCH is a chain of 6 behaviors? And did you know they are taught in reverse order?)
Basically, you have to be able to reverse engineer the video!
Here are a few quick demo videos to illustrate why studying a dog in the generalization phase of learning won’t always help you train a new behavior in the acquisition phase.