Ziggy has learned various basic commands - sit, lie down, give (a retreived ball), offer a paw and he usually will do these on command (or after a couple of requests!). What I'm struggling with is we learned he chases the ball, brings it back, sits them gives it to me. But sometimes he comes back drops the ball, then looks expectant - where's the reward? So I ask him to sit first and he goes through a full repertoire of lying down and waving a paw all followed by an expectant look but not doing the thing I ask. How do I link the action back to the command? I don't reward him with food every time as I was concerned he was starting to do bad things so he would be asked to stop and get a reward when he did so. Sometimes he just gets a "good boy"
Hello there First, it is useful to think not of commands, but of cues. This is important because it's not about "telling" your dog what he should do, but that the sound you make "cues" him to carry out the behaviour you want. If that doesn't happen, it means you do not have the behaviour properly "on cue" - your dog does not sufficiently well link the sound you make to the behaviour you want. He might do this sometimes, in some places, but not in other situations. It just means he doesn't always understand the sound "sit" means he should "sit". So you just need to work on your cues to get them stronger. Given this, you really should not be fading out treats in favour of a "good boy" - if that is what you mean, I'm not sure. You can't start fading out rewards until your cues are getting to be really quite strong in most situations. On the specific example of dropping the ball, just work on him not dropping the ball (because he is carrying our a chain of behaviour here, and he won't necessarily know what he did wrong so his reward is witheld). So try to separate giving you the ball from the fetch to work on this. Just have him pick up a ball and put it in your hand. Mark and reward when the ball gets into your hand, don't if it doesn't.
Shadow sometimes does the same as Ziggy, throwing a load of behaviours at me and getting himself worked up. It means two things - one, he is confident to try new things to see if any one of those is what I'm after (a good thing) and, two, he has no idea what I'm after so I've moved too fast (a bad thing). You just have to go back a few steps, separate those behaviours into distinct actions and work on them individually, until they are strong, and only then start linking them together. When you're first starting training a certain behaviour, you can mark and reward for every approximation of it, but you gradually (and sometimes it has to be very gradually) sharpen up your requirements and only mark the better attempts, until he understands exactly what it is you're after. But, if he starts getting confused or frustrated, you've moved on too quickly and need to back up a bit. Fully agree with "cue" vs "command". It may be semantics to some people, but for me, there's a big distinction. If a dog doesn't respond to a "command" it's very easy to regard him as being disobedient. If he doesn't respond to a "cue", it's because he doesn't have that behaviour "on cue" and it's a lot easier to put the blame where it actually belongs - on the trainer's shoulders
