I’m planning on getting a dog soon and would love some tips and tricks.
My tip is that when you take your dog for a walk, before crossing any street make them sit and wait for you to tell them to cross.
It helped when my dog got out a few times he would only walk around the block and never cross streets or run into traffic.
Positive reinforcement of the behaviour you want to see is way way better than punishing behaviour you don’t like. If you consistently redirect bad behaviours, and reward good ones, then you don’t need to be around for the dog to choose the better behaviour.
Actually, when trying to prevent “extinction” (which is a behaviorist term for when a learned behavior stops happening), ie when trying to get a new behavior to stick, randomly inconsistent reinforcement prevents extinction better than consistent reinforcement.
Consistent reinforcement is ideal for initial learning of a task, but to make the behavior stick when you’re not around, or when you don’t have treats in your pocket, you want to start slowly taking the reinforcement away.
Basically you follow a decaying probability curve of reinforcement, where at the end you’re only giving a treat once every five or ten times they do the behavior.
Pretty much anything that can move runs on intermittent reward vs consistent consequence. Intermittent reward because sometimes in the real would things don’t work every single time, and an inconsistent negative consequence is just a high risk (and therefore more enticing) reward. Negative consequences are great short term safety solutions (one of the few things I’ll yell at a dog for is trying to run into traffic), but you need to work on teaching and rewarding a replacement behavior ASAP, because its almost impossible to create the kind of consistency needed to create an effective long-term negative consequence.
It also helps to understand extinction bursts. You know when you press a button on your computer or phone and it doesn’t work and you suddenly get the urge to hit the button harder and faster to try to get it to work? Prefect illustration of an extinction burst: when an action that typically produces a reward fails to produce that reward, the organism tries the behavior more and with more intensity. It follows naturally from the concept of intermittent reward; you know that it usually works, but that sometimes it might not, and your brain is programed to accommodate for that by encouraging you to try harder. Just remember this when you need to switch things up to curb a specific behavior; it might actually get WORSE for a short time, even if you’re ultimately doing the right thing to get the behavior to stop.