# Marker training and luring



## Samba (Apr 23, 2001)

I think one of the best skills I have learned to improve communication and to speed up learning in the dogs is marker training and luring. 

Here is a short vid of Michael Ellis working with a student on these skills. The "keep going" communication with "good" is an important concept too.


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## Jason L (Mar 20, 2009)

Michael has brought luring back in fashion


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## Samba (Apr 23, 2001)

I love luring. Of course, you have to move beyond it but it is one fast way to show the dog the behavior desired and to get the dog's body used to going through the motion. Next, gradual fade, fade, fade of help. It really can make learning quicker. Never had the patience for shaping and actually found it kinda strange... like withholding good information from your dog and insisting they "guess".


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## Andaka (Jun 29, 2003)

My first dog was trained with saltine crackers (and no leash) as that was the only food I could sneak out of the house. Back then, the theory was you couldn't train a show dog or it would ruin it! Boy, have i proved that wrong.


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## Samba (Apr 23, 2001)

Well, you can't get a "championship" in Germany without having an obedience, tracking and protection title, so I never bought that idea that you can't "multi" train a dog. The dogs showing for top conformation titles all have to have performance titles first. So much for the idea they can't do it all.

Saltines?! Good dog. I think Hogan would say, "you eat the crackers!"


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## Jason L (Mar 20, 2009)

I like luring too. I think if you have a driven dog, luring works a lot better than free shaping. The dogs want the reward, motivation/interest is not their problem ... so why not cut to the chase and show them what they need to do to get a reward. Besides, like Michael said, if you ask the dog to "down" on his own, 40 percent of the time he will do it in way that you want, 40% of the time he will do it the way he wants, 20% of the time he will do it in a way that makes no sense even to him. With luring, you teach him from the very beginning THIS is the way I want you to sit, down, stand, etc.


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## Cassidy's Mom (Mar 30, 2003)

Jason L said:


> Michael has brought luring back in fashion


In some circles it never went_ out_ of style.  I was introduced to luring and marker/reward training in Cassidy's first class November of 2000, nearly 10 years ago. Since the I've taken a total of 18 classes with 4 dogs, and every single one of them have used those techniques. It just makes so much sense to me to show my dogs what I WANT them to do than to correct them for NOT doing it when I'm training a new behavior.

Shaping doesn't necessarily take a long time, especially if you start by capturing behaviors that the dog is already offering up. It depends on what you're trying to train though, for many things I'd rather just lure, but I love this (unedited) video to show how well shaping can work:






Obviously, this is a clicker savvy dog, who is well acquainted with the concept of offering behaviors to see what works, but still - it's pretty impressive what can be accomplished in a single training session lasting about 3 minutes!


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## Hunther's Dad (Mar 13, 2010)

Luring can also be used to teach a dog commands through hand signals. I have used luring to train "fuss," "sitz," and "platz," then faded the hand signals and just used voice commands. After the dog gets really fluent with voice commands, I sometimes use the hand motions I used to lure them into a behavior. I find this useful when I'm out and about in public, where there might be a lot of noise or distractions.


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## Cassidy's Mom (Mar 30, 2003)

Hunter's Dad, I do the same thing, for simple behaviors like sit and down I usually only lure a few times, and then I get the food out of that hand and reward with the other hand so the dog isn't dependent on the sight of food to comply. The lure motion then becomes a hand signal, which can be faded into something smaller and less dramatic. 

In Halo's Puppy 2 class we worked on sit/down/sit, and stand/down/stand sequences using voice only and hand signals only to be sure that the dogs knew every position from every other position using either voice or hand signals as cues. She was, of course, the star! :wub:


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## Jason L (Mar 20, 2009)

Ike is trained 100% with luring and marker. Dottie, however, was an interesting case. When I adopted her last summer, she was completely nuts and untrained. 2 years old and she didn't even know how to sit. And luring did not work at all. I lured and lured for two weeks and I couldn't even get a sit from her. Every time I brought my hand up, Dots would jump up and try to grab the treat from my hand. Finally one day I decided to just stand there with a clicker and wait her out (more capturing than shaping). Caught her a couple of time doing sits and downs for no reason, click/reward. 10 minutes later she was offering sits and downs on her own for treats! So I am not against it. But if I had Dots as a puppy, I would definitely train her the same way I am doing with Ike: lure + marker.


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## Cassidy's Mom (Mar 30, 2003)

Jason, very good point - it depends on what you're training, but also WHO you're training, different methods work better for different dogs. Always good to be flexible and have a variety of tools in your training toolbox. I've had the luxury of starting from 9 or 10 weeks old with my two current and one previous dog, which does make things much easier.


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## Samba (Apr 23, 2001)

I agree it is amazing what can be shaped with offered behaviors from a dog who understands the game. I am afraid I don't teach mine anything very "fun" enough. It is a good thing to do though and I try to remind myself to teach them "tricks" and different things as any of that makes them a better learner and keeps training interesting.

I learned about clicker/marker training about 13 years ago from Gary Wilkes. It was amazing the behaviors he could get his little ACD to offer in a matter of minutes and then quickly shape some complex behaviors. I had a dog then who was raised in a kennel for the first two years of his life and just in the couple of days of the seminar he learned the name of several toys and got pretty proficient as several obedience behaviors. Prior to that the dog training I had been exposed was mostly compulsion and I couldn't get into it. I am still grateful to Gary W.


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## Liesje (Mar 4, 2007)

I don't think that marker training and luring have to go hand in hand. I do a TON of marker training, it is my preferred method by far and probably 85% of how I train, even tracking I am constantly marking with my voice. However I do try to _avoid_ luring whenever possible. I like to freeshape and I'd rather have a dog that is really "freed up" and knows to try new things without being lured or prompted. There are some behaviors I have trained with luring, usually behaviors that the dog can learn in just one or two sessions and then the lure is faded quite quickly. My older GSD was training almost exclusively with luring and marker training, and I find her far more difficult to motivate. She is very biddable and precise, but if I get her out to train, she will just stand there and stare at me. Whereas Nikon, who I try to lure as little as possible, will come out dancing around throwing random behaviors and tricks left and right. Now the ends might justify the means because both dogs can be competitive with their obedience, but I prefer training with freeshaping. A simple example would be when I taught Kenya to go over the A-frame, I led her over with food, then marked and gave her the food at the bottom. When I taught Nikon, I took him up to the A-frame and just stood there, and after a few seconds of sniffing the bottom, he ran up and over. As he was going over the top, I marked (marked as soon as I knew he was committed to going over and not jumping off or turning around) and tossed his ball over to the other side. I'm also training him weaves for agility using the 2x2 method, which is freeshaping, not luring, and I know a lot of people who have gone back with adult, titled agility dogs and re-taught their weaves using this method.

I think with the final product, like doing obedience trials or the SchH routines, it may not really matter whether the dog was lured or freeshaped, but just for me when I am working with the dogs, I like the attitude of the dog that is being freeshaped.

Now I've only trained two and a half dogs (Coke doesn't really count), but I've found so far that the lure training helps the dog learn the behavior very quickly and precisely, but can take a long time to fade the lure, whereas the dog being freeshaped might need more time to catch on initially, but then it just "clicks" and everything moves smoothly after that. I started training Nikon's heeling doing the whole ball-in-the-armpit thing, and it worked for a while but I began to see that he was not totally understanding the picture of "heel"/fuss so now we work heeling with the toy completely out of sight and often off my body (I drop it on the ground) and it looks better than it ever did, is more consistent, and I can do much longer periods of heeling without having to constantly present a reward or stop and play.


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## Cassidy's Mom (Mar 30, 2003)

Liesje said:


> ...I've found so far that the lure training helps the dog learn the behavior very quickly and precisely, but can take a long time to fade the lure...


I think where people get in trouble with luring is that they do it for longer than they really need to, and like you discovered with Nikon and the ball, the dog becomes dependent on seeing the lure - instead of just learning proper heel position he's also learning to follow his ball. So if you use the ball as a visual aid too long he may not know exactly what to do if it's not there anymore because it's been an additional cue for the behavior. 

There are threads on here all the time where people say their dogs don't comply unless there's food in their hand, and that's a direct result of not fading the lure early enough. I'm far from an expert in dog training, but I've discovered when working with a smart puppy (like a GSD!) I may need to only lure a couple of times with food and then move to an empty hand. At most, within the first or second short training session of a new behavior I've stopped actually using the lure. From there, it doesn't take that long for them to be reliable using a signal with an empty hand, and then to add the verbal cue right before the hand signal. If I start changing the picture by working in a more distracting area or introducing other variables, I may go back to luring a time or two as a reminder, and then immediately fade it out again. 

I do think it's a very useful skill to teach your dog to follow your hand, but I agree with you Lies, there's something really cool about watching a dog think and figure stuff out without having to always tell them what to do first. It takes some patience, but the payoff in enthusiasm is worth it.


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