This page is part of the Fading portion of the Auxiliary Section of the
D.S. Dog Training Workshop, and an element of the Dog Science Network
Comprehensive Behavioral Conditioning for Dogs
The Six Forms of Fading You Can Use When Training Your Dog
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- Fading your tactile cues
The term tactile cues refers to anything you do, using your sense of touch, to control or communicate with your dog.When you are first teaching your dog to obey commands, after issuing him a given command, you will need to put your hands on the animal and guide him with such thoroughness that there is no possibility that he will able to perform that command incorrectly. Then, as he gets better and better and more and more reliable at executing any given command, you should begin to give him less and less physical guidance. However, the physical prompts must be maintained to whatever extent is needed to ensure that the dog's response to the command remains flawless.
For more info on fading your tactile cues see page four of the command training section
- Fading more challenging stimuli into your dog's training environment
When you first start working with your dog on any given command, you will want to conduct your training sessions in a place that is free from distraction of any kind.
However, after your dog is able to execute a particular command perfectly, you should begin to gradually introduce little potential distracters into his training environment.
Just be sure that you do not overwhelm your novice trainee by introducing distractions that are too intense or too numerous, too early in the game.
If you bring something into your dog's training environment that has the potential to distract him, and in fact, it does distract him from his training, then, you'll know that you introduced a distracter that was too intense, and/or you introduced the damn thing too soon, before he had a chance to build up his resistance.
The trick is to inoculate your canine novice trainee to distraction by gradually exposing him to more and more of it over time. However, your goal should be to introduce those extraneous factors so gradually that none of those potential distracters ever actually do succeed in distracting the animal. - Fading your dog into more challenging training environments
In the section immediately above, you read a description of how potential distracters can be introduced into your dog's training environment, in order to inoculate him against distraction.
The inverse of gradually changing the stimuli in your dogs training environment can be achieved in a progressive and incremental fashion, by slowly and gradually changing the environment in which you train your dog.
For example, you may first teach your dog some particular command in the den, where the two of you are the only living things in sight. Once he masters the task in that distraction-free environment, you could then take him into the living room and work with him until he masters that same command with a couple relatives sitting quietly in the corner. When he has mastered the execution of the command in the living room, then, take and train him in the playroom where things are rowdier. Then, when he has mastered the distractions there, drill him on the command out in the backyard where children are splashing wildly in the nearby pool.
The idea is to train your dog in settings in which, over time, each new environment is successively and incrementally more distracting, until you have a dog that has learned to stay calm, attentive, and focused on your instructions, even when all hell is breaking loose around you.
Even though we have listed it here at the bottom of the page on fading, in truth, when you process your dog through training environments that are successively more distracting, that is actually considered to be a form of shaping.
At the risk of splitting semantic hairs, the rule is as follows:
When you condition your subject's behavior by systematically and progressively introducing more challenging stimuli into his environment over time, you are using a fading procedure.
When you condition your subject's behavior by systematically processing him through a sequence of progressively more challenging environments, you are using shaping.
Hence, fading and shaping are the inverse of one another.