Resolve Big Feelings About Shiny and Slippery Floors

1. Understanding the Baseline

I initially knew that Felix had some issues with shiny and slippery floors. Every once in a while he would slip and then scramble to recover but this didn’t happen often enough for me to think we actually needed to fix it. Until… He refused to enter 2 AKC excellent interior searches in a row because the floors were slippery, shiny, and the doorways were a little narrow.

Now that I have admitted we have a problem, I need to lay out our options and what we can do to break this down and make it simple for him. Option 1: quit and never do another interior search. Option 2: prevent slipping with boots to get him more comfortable with shiny slippery floors by removing the slip and trim paws to allow pads complete contact with the ground. Option 3: make the area of shininess smaller, and keep slip consistent.

I have promised to myself that I will never let myself get peer pressured into picking him up and carrying him into a search area even if there is carpet on the other side. This means that if we get to the NW2 on the 20th and he doesn’t want to go into a room we wont. I’ve already had AKC judges make comments when he didn’t want to play at his last 2 interior searches and I refuse to let it change my behavior. So for now we are just going to ignore trialing in AKC interiors until he’s feeling more confident.

2. Option 2: Removing the Slip

Boots Boots and More Boots

Felix has been wearing booties his entire life. We started bootie training the week he came home because I knew we were moving to New York and that the streets in the winter can be really nasty on puppy paws.

So all winter long, his first two years of life he wore boots so that we could have fun outside.

3. Option 3: Reduce the Big Feelings

Removal of spatial pressure But retained slippery floor

In the first video I place a sheet of foil on the floor and click him for any type of interaction. His body language was stiff and tentative with most of his weight on his back legs. This is an unbalanced way for him to be standing and not ideal. I wont move on from this exercise until he is confidently paw targeting the aluminum and moving across it with his head up. The slippery floor part doesn’t seem to be as big of an issue in this training session.

Reintroduction of spatial Pressure

Next I asked if he could do the same thing in the hallway I chose for this experiment. This hallway has some charged feelings for Felix. He is very suspicious of impending baths even though we never bathe him at home. This is the place inside our apartment where he is most likely going to slip because he often walks with claws out, very tentatively. We have a carpet in this hallway and I have removed it for this experiment. Just one baby piece of aluminum in the middle of the hall.

I can see here that he is feeling very tentative now that we’ve added walls into the picture. I can tell because he doesn’t turn around and instead backs up rather than maybe touching a wall. Also as soon as he completes the behavior he moves away from the hallway as fast as he can, and finally he looks up at me before making contact with the foil. The latency gap between where he knows that the goal is to paw target the foil and actually touching it is really telling to me that he is not comfortable in this space. In the next few reps he is able to turn around in the hallway a couple of times. By the end of this session he was still only touching it with 1 paw and then leaving rather than fully walking across it. As far as desensitizing him to the slippery floor, this has been working very well albeit slowly.

Day 2 Spatial Pressire

On the second day we increased the surface area of the shiny floor. He starts off a little uncertain again. He quickly moves through backing up, tentative luring, confident luring, and then cued behavior. From this video I can tell that he isn’t completely confident with me standing behind him. Keeping the rate of reinforcement high, really helped keep him from reaching panic scrambles when he is uncertain of the slippery floor.

Since he was really successful with flat foil, I decided to raise criteria slightly. I crunched up the foil which not only gave it a new texture, but also decreased the total surface area. In this video he gets to the place of doing cued behavior faster than the flat foil even. He still went through the steps of investigation, unconfident luring, tossed food, confident luring, and then cued behavior. Now that he’s feeling confident on a slick floor I can ask him a slightly more challenging question.

Finally Searching!

In this first search, the hide placement is intentionally very easy. I placed it slightly lower than head height on the shelf in the hallway. I can tell that while he’s walking into the bathroom that his body language is very tense. Most of his weight is loaded on his shoulders with his head low to the ground. As soon as he gets closer to sourcing the odor, I can see his weight shift backwards onto his haunches. He’s showing a lot less stress about the floor than he did at the beginning of the previous session.