He’s way upstate, but Gus could join the Harlem Globetrotters. His dunking-the-basketball trick is nearly perfect, with plenty of goofing around the net preceding a definitive swish.
Our progress was a bit delayed because Gus enjoys flapping the ball back and forth, scraping it on the arena floor, and bashing it into the backboard a good deal more than he enjoys dropping it into the hoop. To pinpoint the dunk as the sought-after behavior, I was clicking the instant the ball entered the net, because clicker-training rules clearly state that a click ends the behavior — that is, he should drop the ball immediately in order to get his treat. But in this case, Gus prefers to continue his fun for a few more seconds, which often means dropping the ball when it’s no longer in the net, which I don’t want to click for, but I’ve already clicked . . . aaargghhh!
Not to worry; it’s par for the course. To teach a dumbbell retrieve to dogs, the moment they take it into their mouths, you click, causing them to spit it out instantaneously in order to get the treat, so you look as if you’re training them to drop the dumbbell. Eventually, though, you can delay the click a teeny bit, and then a teeny bit longer and longer, to build the duration of the dumbbell hold. Refining and chaining all the steps into one trick is a messy process at first.
Interestingly, what greatly accelerated Gus’s learning the dunk was my introducing the occasional peppermint candy as a treat for extra-special success. Until now I never quite trusted that “higher-value” rewards would contrast with regular rewards in an animal’s mind during routine trick-training, but the first big, sweet peppermint made Gus’s ears and eyes pop visibly. And sure enough, after just a few more peppermint specials over a couple of days, now the dunk is executed, though still with much prefatory monkey business, far more reliably.
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