Once you’ve trained your puppy to perform a behavior in your training room and the puppy understands the verbal cue you’ve paired with the behavior, you must generalize the behavior. Generalization is the process of applying learned skills to similar situations rather than being limited to performing the behavior in only the originally learned context.
Generalization does not come naturally for dogs. If I teach a puppy to sit in my training room and then ask him to sit in my kitchen, almost none of them will understand what I am asking for until it is retaught in the new location. The dog must learn to perform the behavior in various locations and environments until there is understanding that a behavior should be performed the same way no matter the context.
Teaching the behavior in the second place will be considerably easier than teaching it in the first location and teaching the behavior in the third will be even easier. The learning becomes easier and easier until the dog understands that the same cue applies to the same behavior no matter where he is. At this point, we can say that the dog has generalized the behavior.
This same principle holds true whether the context is a different place or simply a different situation. Learning a cue inside may not immediately generalize to understanding that same cue when given outside. It could be that a dog learns a behavior when no one is watching him. He’ll need to re-learn it when he has an audience. The dog might might learn the wait cue when set up prior to starting an agility run. He’ll have to re-learn the cue if you want him to learn to wait for a release before running out your front door. These are all examples of different situations and contexts for learning that might need generalizing.
Some behaviors generalize faster than others. Some dogs generalize most behaviors faster than other dogs.
Unless you want a behavior to remain specific to specific locations or situations or contexts, all behaviors must be generalized before they are considered to be learned. This is why we train all of our exercises in a variety of locations and types of environments.
Partial Generalization
There are times when it is advantageous to generalize one aspect of an exercise and leave other parts of the exercise where the dog performs it differently depending on the context of the situation. I’ll give several examples here.
I generalize the cue “sit” to mean to the dog that their butt is to be put on the ground and their chest is not to be on the ground (as in the down position). I teach this early and then re-teach it in various rooms in the house. Then, I teach it away from home in many different locations and types of environments. The end result of the “sit” is always the same. The dog’s butt is on the ground and his chest is not on the ground. Therefore the “sit” is generalized with regard to the end result.
However, for competitive obedience dogs, I want the dog to perform differently depending on the context of the situation in terms of how the dog gets into the sit. A dog can move from a stand to a sit in either of two ways. He can move his back end forward or he can move his front end backwards. Either way, the front and back legs end up closer together for a sit than a stand. If a dog is heeling, I want him to get into the sit one way and for the dog who is working away from his handler, I want him to get into position another. I won’t get into the details as to why in this book. Suffice it to say that it is beneficial for the dog to be able to perform the same cue differently when working in different contexts. Therefore, the dog is taught to get into the sit differently depending on the context of the situation.
Another example of a behavior that I generalize in one sense and at the same time expect the dog to read the context in another sense is when training the “left” and “right” cues. I teach my dog that “left” means to turn their head and body to the left and “right” means to turn their head and body to the right no matter the context of the situation. However, how they turn to the left or right and to what extent they turn is left to context.
My dogs that do both agility and rally understand that “left” when doing rally means to spin left while remaining on my left side. Their understanding of the cue “left” in agility means to turn left after taking a jump or doing another obstacle. I don’t want my dogs to think that I want them spinning left as they do in rally in the middle of an agility course. Neither do I want my dogs running to a jump when I say left when we are doing rally. The dogs know that the context determines how they perform the “left” or “right” cues.
There are many other times when I use the same word to cue similar behaviors depending on context. Some trainers will use different verbal cues for slightly different behaviors. However, I’ve found that learning goes quicker and is more solid when fewer cues are used and the dog learns to differentiate between slight differences based on context. The one cue becomes stronger and the dog experiences less confusion.
As you move through this program, you will need to generalize most of what you’re teaching. However, if you choose to use this program to build a strong foundation for more advanced work, you will need to determine at some point if you want to use separate words for variations of specific skills or if you want to use fewer words and teach your dog to perform slightly differently based on context. Some trainers train one way. Others train another. Either will work. For me, I think it’s easier to train fewer individual cues and to make those few words strong in terms of understanding by the dog.
