Can Anyone Figure Out How He Managed These Elaborate Tricks?

[kcmetric]

http://animal.discovery.com/tv-shows/other/videos/pet-star-coral-reef.htm

The first tricks where he's asking Coral Reef to go to the person with dark pants, no sleeves, etc., I'm assuming he has a very discrete cue with his body in order to get the dog over to the right person...? And then the last trick, I mean, I guess it'd be like teaching your dog to get a drink from the fridge but it just seems so much more elaborate... what do you think?

 

[kassidybc]

My guess is this dog is talented, but not as talented as his owner is making him out to be. The owner probably has some secret cue (such as an eye motion or something) to signal the dog as to which person to pick. He told the dog to find the people by their names, which the dog had no way of knowing, so he must be cueing the dog secretly. My guess with the thing when he told the dog to do a bunch of things in a row, he probably taught the dog that "execute" means a certain chain of tricks, sort of like you said with the getting a drink from the fridge. The dog probably wasn't paying attention to what the man was telling him to do, he just knew what execute means. He probably could have told that dog to do something completely different, then said execute, and the dog would have done what he did in the video (what he was trained to do). This may not be right, but it's my guess.

 

[running_dog]

Has anyone else trained or tried to teach their dog a delayed response to enable it to run though a list of tricks all cued before an "execute" command?

I thought of introducing a "when I tell you" delaying cue followed by a known active cue (eg spin or turn) while holding the dog's collar and not releasing it to fulfil the command until after an execute cue. If this was repeated with a range of 3-4 known commands in the same session it should help stop the dog assuming that "execute" means any particular one of the known commands.

Once the dog understood a delayed response I could start to give a sequence of commands.

 

[running_dog]

I'm finding teaching the delayed response really hard but Zac finds this aspect of "Do as I do" really hard too so that is no surprise.

I'm also working on using the word "twice" so Zac doubles what ever cue I told him to do (eg/"spin twice"). I've found that Zac does respond to conversational cues (eg/"Zac, would you sit for me for me please.") as well as commands ("sit").