Pushing all my buttons: dogs with communication buttons (2023)

Summary: Communication buttons are increasingly popular among dog trainers, especially on social media. This article examines what these buttons can be used successfully for and where they might be less useful. It centers on a story about how the author's clients used operant conditioning to allow their beagle to communicate its needs.

There have been a lot of videos on the internet lately of dogs using buttons to ask for things. Dogs ask to go out, to the park, dinner, anything. First it was a dog or two, and now there's a whole industry of buttons you can buy to record words and dogs with dozens of vocabulary words.

I read a book years agomonster dogs lifeby Kristen Bakis. In it, a mad scientist learns to connect his hands where his paws should be and alters a dog's larynx so that it speaks human language. Unsurprisingly, the scientist was cruel to the dogs, which he traded until they turned on him, killed him, and moved to New York. (As someone who moved to New York as soon as I had the chance, that part is totally believable to me!) Every time I see a dog with a frame full of buttons and hear the conversations people have to guide them, I'm thinking about this book.

It's fuel for the imagination and the heart. Button communication is the next step for dogs to understand words spoken to them. Chaser was the border collie who could identify over 1000 toys and even knew that a new word would match a toy he didn't have a word for yet. Learning to respond to spoken words is pretty impressive for a dog, but learning to communicate your desires through words is a game changer.

My dog ​​currently suffers from Canine Cognitive Dysfunction, which makes it impossible for him to settle down and sleep in my apartment. I had to send it to friends until I figured out how to help him. How much easier would it be if you had a special wired voice box or series of buttons?

As a foreign dog trainer I have questions. I have taught dogs to use their behavior to ask for things, communicate needs, and for their own amusement and that of their owners. ThisesFun and not too difficult at first, but you really need to break things down into small pieces of information and be extremely clear so that both species really know what they are saying and what is being said to them.

In some of the videos, guards gave their dogs buttons with larger conceptual words like "love" and "later." I have a hard time believing that a dog would understand communication of the "after" concept. When a guard presses a series of buttons to indicate that he is going to the "beach" "later", I cannot understand how the dog could have learned this concept. Doesn't the dog lose faith that the button really means he's going to the beach? Also, when you leave the house, get in the car, drive, maybe stop for gas and then have to go to the beach, does the dog know that one of those buttons means "beach" or does he think it means "beach"? 🇧🇷 drive" or even "off"?

A dog named Fleet took the stage.

Fleet is a beagle/hound mix that was rescued in the southeastern United States and placed in a foster home in suburban Long Island. During a rescue operation at a local pet store, a young Brooklyn couple, John and Jennie, fell in love and adopted him.

Fleet has been reported to love playing with dogs, being housebroken, enjoying people, having been exposed to children with no noticeable reaction, and generally being good company. He was very energetic and liked to sniff, but that was normal for a 7 month old puppy who had gone through so many changes in such a short time. Realizing they had work to do, John and Jennie put Fleet in the backseat of their car and headed back to the bustling neighborhood of Brooklyn.

I met them a few weeks later when they were looking for a trainer to help them with Fleet's unresponsiveness, his stalking of his two older cats, and most surprisingly, his inability to pee or urinate outside of his poop.

While we're here to talk about buttons, I'll give you a brief background on the next two years of training with the Fleet.

Fleet doesn't like to smell. His sense of smell is so good that he can follow the scent of a single bird for a city block until he can track where it has flown. Recently, he sniffed a runway on a street in Brooklyn and someone started a jackhammer next to him and he didn't react. When Fleet is faced with all the olfactory information in an urban environment, Fleet's other senses can completely shut down.

We start with classical conditioning and desensitization. Jennie's bag of treats became a legendary example of carrying treats with different values ​​for each possible stimulus. Added some Behavioral Adaptation Training (BAT) skills. Jennie took online courses on olfactory research and began collaborating with him. Jennie and John found a mix of dog play in the park, daycare, food puzzles, relaxation conditioning, and forced rest that made living happily with Fleet possible. However, when they didn't find the right balance, things turned sour.

When Fleet was overexcited, he still chased the cats, buried himself in the sofa, bit his ankles, buzzed around, and worst of all, if it happened outside, he bit Jennie. It was clearly a cry for help because he was overwhelmed, but it was painful and dangerous for both of them. So we trained Fleet to enjoy being muzzled, and after much thought, we consulted a regular vet and a behavioral vet to get the right behavioral medication.

At one point, as I was working to bring more choice and control into Fleet's life, I suggested that we skip the food puzzles so Fleet could choose his own. Jennie was rightfully skeptical. She already spent most of her Sundays preparing riddles for the week and was afraid he would solve them all in one day. We both even imagined the worst case scenario where he could do that in an hour. He's daring and has a high tolerance for risk, so he trusted me and gave it a try. He left plastic containers full of food puzzles all over the apartment and left. Fleet ate a lot of riddles in the first few weeks. Then he slowed down. He became more selective.

At this point, she left a few out, but kept most of the pre-made toys in a closet. Eventually, Fleet and his nose began to approach the closet, requesting puzzles with short beagle barks. At first Jennie walked over and gave her one, but soon learned to open the door and let her choose hers. He loved it! Well, he loved it, except when, after a few requests, Jennie told him the kitchen was closed and she wouldn't open the door anymore.

Jennie has helped with the classes I teach at PumpkinPups Dog Training and we often teach our clients to sculpt, giving the dogs buttons and table bells and working to get the dogs to skate them. So he bought a button and taught Fleet to press it for fun. He then placed it next to the food puzzle cabinet and asked him to push it before opening the door. When he got good at it, she let go even though she wasn't there and Fleet could squeeze him and she would come from wherever she was and open the door for him to choose his puzzle. If she didn't want to leave a mystery, she took the button.

There's the clarity my trainer brain craves for this button work. If the button is available, the button press sequence is available. If he kept the button pressed all the time, but didn't always press it, it might lose meaning to Fleet and would certainly undermine her trust in her.

There's a button video online that encourages a cute puppy to push a button that says "Couch." The human in the video praises her and gently leads her to the sofa. However, the dog does not jump straight onto the sofa. The dog faces the human and the camera, displays body language that appears fearful and shy, and with just a few more physical and verbal cues, the dog pulls up on the couch. Well, I don't know about this family or how they trained those buttons, but just from that video it seems to me that sometimes the dog pushes that button and can't stay on the couch. Even if I'm wrong about what exactly happened, the dog lacks clarity.

In the midst of this final practice work with the puzzles, John and Jennie found that they could take him to their room when Fleet was particularly out of control in the house (a small fenced area under the stairs, about the size of a box). - think Harry Potter for dogs) and he calmed down relatively quickly and even looked relieved. After a few weeks of Fleet arriving at witching hour and being led downstairs, they realized that when they got up to go upstairs, Fleet was walking ahead of them. Soon he ran to his small room and waited inside until the door closed behind him.

Since she bought a pack of three buttons, Jennie decided to design the next button with "Go to your room". She recorded herself on the button saying that phrase, used shapes to teach Fleet how to press the button, and set to work matching the button to her room entrance. She was very careful because she didn't want him not to like coming into her room. A safe place for Fleet to calm down was critical to her daily comfort with him. He placed the button outside his room and asked him to press it, prompting him to go inside and close the door. She released him immediately and did only a few reps at a time, and Fleet learned the trick from her in just a few reps.

The next step was to place the button near the living room, where witchcraft misbehavior usually began. Before long, Fleet would be pressing the button to ask to go to bed instead of digging into the couch, clutching at his clothes, or barking incessantly.

Still, Jennie was careful. He was worried that Fleet didn't like being locked in her room and wanted the freedom to get out. If that happened, all of your space button training would be wasted and your box/space training could be poisoned. She needed to be able to enjoy her safe space. Then one day Fleet pressed the button and Jennie went downstairs to her room. He went in and she left the door open and went back upstairs. Fleet came after him and pressed the button again. So he took it downstairs, locked it and fell asleep. He learned that closing the door was part of the deal, part of what that button meant, Fleet said.

Since the stuffed Kongs were kept in the freezer and not the puzzle cupboard, Jennie turned the third button into a Kong button. The three were soon available to Starfleet at different times of the day, but especially during the witching hour. Jennie and John began to notice that Fleet was asking about different things at different times.

Sometimes they would open the closet door and Fleet would smell each puzzle very carefully until he found the exact puzzle he was looking for. When he couldn't get to that puzzle, he would watch them until they moved a box or cube until he could reach what he wanted. He would occasionally sniff and walk away without a puzzle. Nothing seemed to please him. On one notable occasion, he sniffed out all the offerings, then turned and looked at an empty pizza box on the counter. So Jennie made a puzzle out of the pizza box and offered it to Fleet, who took it and ran off to work on it.

Jennie and John knew Fleet was asking for things based on what they really needed at the time. If he wanted to tear something apart, or chew and lick something, or lie down and rest, he had a chance to ask. He didn't just play around and wait while people offered him things that might or might not meet his specific needs at the time. Some nights he would ask about riddles, a Kong and his room and still couldn't come to an agreement. Apparently, he was still occasionally overstimulated and needed more help.

After much observation, Jennie thought that part of his behavior suggested interacting with her and John. He likes to play tag, so that was the next agenda. The first time Fleet successfully used his fire button, I got three videos of Fleet and John dancing around the room on a 15-foot rope, playing fools. Both are shaky and happy and Jennie's laughter is the only thing on the audio. It was a great success!

However, while we were all focused on the shooting button, Fleet had other challenges in mind.

John gives Fleet his last pee before bed. Fleet's little room is near the front door. Fleet sleeps in her room or on a dog bed or couch, depending on her preferences and behavior. One night, Fleet pressed her room button. Jennie took him to her room, but he didn't want to go in. He went back upstairs and stopped in the bathroom where he had a direct line of sight to where John was sitting and looked over at him.

Jennie walked back into the living room and sat down. Fleet pressed the room key. Rinse and repeat, do not go into his room and go upstairs to stand on the dog bed and look at John. John took Fleet out for a walk and Fleet went straight to bed when they got back.

This behavior continued until our weekly training call. I laughed and cheered when Jennie told me about Fleet's new use of the bedroom button. Jennie was less pleased. He didn't like the lack of clarity. It's when you know you've trained a client well when they are more disciplined in their training than you are.

Jennie doesn't like that the room button means two things. It's not clear to Fleet and it's not clear to her and John. There's a lot of room for error in a puppy that we're still figuring out at 3 years old. Then he orders another pack of buds and the next one is out.

What I find fascinating is that the Fleet has been communicating all along. We knew it. We knew that biting Jennie, digging up the couch, and running around in circles was communication. However, it was not clear. It was a very general request for help and we couldn't respond adequately because it was highly unlikely that whatever we offered was exactly the right thing at the right time. There were many variables. To be clear, Jennie and John Fleet really get to where he is with what he needs in the best possible way. This skill develops.

That kind of communication works for Fleet, sure, but it also works for Jennie and John. It's exhausting to live with a dog that plays most of the day because he doesn't know what to do with himself or doesn't have access to what he needs.

From the videos we see online, I'm not sure the buds meet the dog's needs. People like that and dogs do sometimes, but I don't know if that counts as communication. If the button sequence is vague, I don't understand how the dog perceives it. For example, if my dog ​​pressed a button with my name on it, how would he react? When I look at my dog, does this button mean KIZZ or LOOK AT ME? There is nothing wrong with my name meaning "look at me". We teach our dogs that their names mean "search me for more information" but I want to be clear that when my dog ​​learns something like this it means an action and not a concept by a human named Kizz. They are two very different buttons and I only know how to train one of them.

To be clear, I love it when people try to communicate with their dogs, and I love it even more when people give their dogs the choice and control to ask for things. I feel a little greedy. Now that we've made the concept relative to the mainstream, I want more. This means we need to do a lot more experiments with a lot more dogs to learn more about what our dogs want or need. This must be great!

In my opinion, to really understand, we need to be very clear about our training and care for our dogs. I don't want this communication to be frustrating for them. To that end, here's a primer on how to teach your dog to communicate with a button:

• Choose a consequence for the button. Make it tangible and something you can quickly hand over, like throwing a tennis ball or pulling a toy. Make sure it's something your dog likes.
• Teach your dog to press a button through freeforming (a process that rewards successive approaches to an end goal).
• If your dog happily pushes the button in exchange for treats, you can add your chosen consequence right after the treats.
• After a day or two of practicing with the combo, you should be able to remove the treats and increase your button presses with just your chosen sequence.
• Every time your dog presses the button, you provide the fun consequence.
• If you can't handle the consequences, put the button away so your dog can't press it.
• If you leave the button on a normal day, will your dog press it? Gather some facts and let me know!

Elizabeth H. "Kizz" Robinson, CDBC, CPDT-KA, has been training dogs since 2014. She and her terrier mix Eddie live in Brooklyn, N.Y. She serves private clients through her own business,2B dog training, and teaches as part of the teamPumpkinPups dog training.