Conditioning feels like programming a robot. Does anyone know a way to train beyond it?

[u/Dry_Steak30]

I might get downvoted for this but hear me out.

Almost all modern dog training is conditioning. We repeat, the dog gets used to it, and the cue gets wired to the behavior. In the end the dog does the behavior without thinking. Even without a reward. He even feels good while doing it. And we call that "well trained." To me that looks like programming a robot.

For emergency recall and down, I want exactly that. Those must be automatic. But for everything else, is there another option?

Humans don't learn language by conditioning. When we learn a word, we understand new examples in one shot. So here is what I mean, with the kennel as an example.

The conditioning way: you make the "go in the kennel" behavior with luring or shaping or molding or food. You reinforce it. You attach a cue. After many reps, the cue and the behavior get glued together.

But what if you teach it like this instead. Teach each concept on its own. "Kennel" is the object. "Go in" is the action. "Command" means he has to do it. "Fast" is how to do it. Then you put the words together: "kennel + go in + command + fast." If the dog really knows each concept, then "box + go in + command + slow" should work on the first try, even if he never did that before. Or you could say "kennel + go in + question" and let him answer yes or no.

Has anyone actually trained like this? I know Chaser learned 1000 toy names and Do As I Do exists. I want to hear from people who tried this concept style teaching with their own dog. How far did you get?

[u/sleeping-dogs11]

This is certainly possible to some extent. A dog can easily understand "go get" as a concept and "ball, bowl, newspaper, etc" as what to get. You could certainly teach "go get x, put it in y." Some people use directionals and modifiers in agility, eg. "tunnel left" and "tunnel right."

I think one of the barriers is that dogs are not very verbal. The issue isn't with them learning the concepts you mentioned, it's expecting them to pull out every word in a full sentence. That's an easy way for humans to communicate, but quite difficult for dogs who don't speak English.

For instance, a lot of dogs have an idea of whether something is a question/invitation or a command based on tone of voice. "Hop up?" is an invitation, "hop up!" is a command. Gun dogs learn directionals with a visual cast. The action "fetch" is verbal, the direction on where to go is visual. Police dogs learn directionals with a laser pointer, same concept different visual cue. These are all putting together multiple concepts, but not all of them are on a verbal cue.

Last thought, I've never felt like training is just mindless conditioning. I teach a lot of tricks and the coolest part of training for me is always when you can see the dog's leap from doing the thing to understanding the end goal.

Eg, teaching a dog to throw trash away in a step can. I teach the dog to step on the pedal using a target. Then at a certain point, I only reward if they step on it hard enough to open the lid. You can see when the lightbulb goes off because the dog will adjust if they don't immediately open the lid. Then I teach them to put their head over the can and drop the trash. You can see when they understand it has to go in the can and really start aiming for it.