Pull up a chair and sit on the floor ...

People keep barking "sit" at me. I don't know what that means. Except when someone says it when they are looking down at me and holding food. THEN I know what to do. My 2lggd mom has been playing some kind of game where she sits in a chair, with pockets full of food. She says sit, and I stand there and stare at her. I need to train her better. She needs to learn to just offer up those biscuits.

At age 2, Bubba only understands "sit" in the context of someone standing over him, looking down, holding food. This video was session number three, where he is just beginning to get the point. I've spared you the boredom of sessions one and two. Bubba would just stand and stare at me, stare at the floor, stare at my hands, stare at my pocket. And then finally sit, just out of boredom.

The last time I taught "sit" I used a clicker to capture sits in an 8 week old puppy (Emma). It worked great; she was very quick, and began offering rapid-fire sits within the first session. Maybe that's because she had no expectation of "training" me.

With Bubba, I am trying to switch from clicker training to SATS (Syn Alia). The vocalization "X" takes the place of the click as the terminal bridge. The k-k-k-k-k-k- is the intermediate bridge. I'm not sure what would be the usual SATS way to teach sit, so I'm sort of adapting what I know from capturing sits with the clicker. At least I understand how that works, and it's worked well for me in the past. In the short run, it takes a long time, but in the long run, it takes less time (if that makes any sense). I guess what I'm saying is that it may take a while for the lightbulb to go on, but once it does, fluency in other settings is gained rather quickly.

In these sessions with Bubba, I used food with every terminal bridge, because it's an easy way to reposition him for the next sit. In true SATS training, food reward is only used about 1/3 of the terminal bridges. I'm having a hard time with the idea of the less than 1:1 reward ratio. There's an interesting article challenging the notion that it is OK to "click" and not "treat". It's by Eduardo J. Fernandez, Department of Psychology, Center for the Integrative Study of Animal Behavior, Indiana University. See Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies -- Animal Behavior.

I am finding the switch to SATS a little difficult to get my head around. If clicker training and SATS were juggling, clicker training would be juggling one ball, and SATS would be juggling three balls. I feel like I am learning to pat my head, rub my tummy, walk, and chew gum all at the same time.

The reason I feel it's worth trying is this: If SATS works on elephants and killer whales, porpoises and seal lions, parrots and iguanas, then it should work on Bubba. I think that clicker training is a great way to introduce pet owners to reward based training. Once the basic concepts are understood, it's very easy to implement in it's basic forms. But the addition of the intermediate bridge used in SATS appears to be an extremely powerful tool that enhances communication and the animal's understanding of the entire interaction.

Please, don't anyone take this video as some sort of a SATS how-to. My understanding of SATS is still very shaky. This is just documentation of my poor attempts to integrate SATS into my training program with Cub.

Here's a link to a good forum post explaining SATS, on a Pit Bull Forum:
SATS Bridges and Targets: Overview and Applications

Kathy, Bubba's 2lggd mom

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