Chain, Chain, Chain: Make Linked Behaviors Work for You and Your Pup

All athletes know it takes lots of practice and conditioning to be at the top of their game. photo: AdobeStock

Do you ever wonder how the heck dogs learn to do the complex routines you see in most canine sports? 

The answer is twofold: cues and behavior chains. Cues are the things that tell the dog to do a specific behavior. Behavior chains are several individual behaviors combined into one long routine, and the links that connect them are the cues. 

If you have ever trained your dog to do anything (even running into the kitchen at the sound of crinkling plastic), you can train long, complex behavior chains. How? By training each behavior one at a time and then linking them together two at a time, three at a time, and so on. 

Think about leash training. Preparing for the walk, opening the door, walking to the street, walking in the street - these are all individual steps that can be trained one at a time and then chained together to result in an in-synch walk for you and your dog. 

Walking your dog is a behavior chain that is usually trained via a front chain. This means that we start with the first behavior and work our way through to the last one. Even if your leash-walking seems like a kite in a tornado, there is still a chain of behaviors being linked together by your pup, whether you’re aware of it or not. 

Though I outlined a front chain above, behavior chains are often best taught backwards, or using behaviors that can be worked on out of order. We have to walk our dogs so the sooner we start working on handler focus and fluent in synch forward motion via one-step-at-a-time, the better our results will be. But, in truth, walking is really trained via a zig-zagging chain. We start inside, suiting up with a leash and maybe a jacket. We may do some exercises to mimic what we want outside and to get the dog and ourselves focused. Then we are outside and we need to try to help our dog and ourselves learn how to walk in unison. But you can also work on any of the above behaviors inside. You can work on “wait” by itself as well and then weave that into your movement from inside to outside the house. 

The easiest way to do this is to outline the individual behaviors and to work on them whenever and wherever. The chain will start to link on its own just by repetition and habit, but you can also work on polishing the walking chain as you move through the individual behaviors from inside to outside. 

Back-chaining is the easiest chain to train. You start with the terminal behavior and that becomes the one with the strongest history of reinforcement. Then you move through the steps backwards and get to the first behavior in the chain. The dog will already be amped and excited to move through the steps to get to the last one. 

But why would a dog want to do an entire dance routine for one treat at the end? This is the mind blowing part: each individual behavior becomes a cue for the next behavior and reinforcement for the previous behavior! Scientists tell us this happens because endorphins are motivating and feel good but also because dopamine is making both the movements through the individual steps and the anticipation of the final behavior highly reinforcing to the dog. Think of runners getting the short-term runner’s high as well as the longer-term benefits of fitness. Both work together to motivate us to run and keep us in the game. Same for dogs!

 I am currently training two pugs in the following behavior chain: hear a sound, run to grab a toy, go to your mat, do a “down” on the mat, stay in the down and settle in playing with your toy. Last week, I realized that one pug, Finn, kept jumping up instead of staying down on the mat. I had not trained the dogs to do the chain if I am not looking at them, so Finn was waiting to see me looking out of the corner of my eye as part of the cue to stay down. Who says pugs don’t pay attention, right? Once I figured this out, I got a telescopic mirror and used that to look over my shoulder and around walls to check for precision, latency, and speed of the behavior so Finn could learn the chain without my eyes obviously on him. 

If you start to look for them, you will see chains everywhere and in everything your dog does. Once you’re aware of them, you can use chains to identify problems, work on new links, get rid of bad ones, and make your pup a ribbon winner in your heart and home!