TRAINING TRICKS.

Waimate Daily Advertiser, Volume XXI, 11 August 1921, Page 6

TRAINING TRICKS.

HOW STAGE DOGS ARE TAUGHT. (By Basil Tozer.) Before the war, ;.i an official capacity which enabled me to investigate, i succeeded, not without difficulty, m discovering some of the methods employed by some ‘trainers of performing dogs. Dogs can be trained to perform only by making them associate cause with effect. Your own. dog sits up and “begs” because you have taught- him to connect the thought of sitting up with the thought of food—you give him things o after he has sat up. So with the dog trained by cruelty. You see the dog trainer on the stage pick up a little dog by its hind legs, allow the dog’s forepaw to rest on his hand, then he lets go th© hind legs and the dog remains balancing itself up righton its forelegs.

I discovered that the way a dog is taught to do that is this: He is hung by his hind tegs until they ache from the strain thus put upon them. Then the trainer comes along, talks to the ■dog, and presently allows the animal’s forepaws to rest on his hand, which at once relieves the pain in the hind legs. He then releases the hind legs, and if the dog fails to balance himself upright he is “rated,” and again hung. This is repeated day after day until presently the dog begins to associate th- . ,'ief f-bm pain in his hind legs v.-.th the act «> .-.icing hi. uprigh' on his fo-“-TMiv. . .. . of tryui. .o . aiauOe himsoil lie is petted and

made much of, and given things to eat. After that the training is soon completed, and the cruelty is at an end.

A performance which always creates amusement is when the door of a miniature house marked “Public House” opens, and a dog comes walking out on its hind legs, suddenly tumbles over as if~ it were drunk, gets up, walks along again, again tumbles over, and so on, and you hear people exclaim, “Isn’t it wonderful!” How do they teach it?”

That dog was trained by means of a collar with little spikes inside it like tin-tacks, attached to a long string held at the end by the trainer. As the dog walked out of the “public house” on its hind legs the trainer held up his hand or made some other sign, and at the same instant jerked the dog off its feet by giving the string a jerk. That was done again and again, and day after day, as before, and at length the dog came to connect the trainer’s signal with the sudden pain from the collar, and so began to tumble over of its own accord, to avoid the pain, directly it saw the. signal. When it came to do that ©very time the trainer made his sign, and not before, the string was taken off. The principle is the same in all dog training—the association of cause with effect.