Dog Swordfighting - Lesson 8 - Sword Clash
- Christopher Tiller
- May 22
- 3 min read
Updated: May 22
We're juuuuust about there with this part of the sword trick. Just one tiny detail left!
As of right now, he's just swinging the sword. You need to actually hit things with a sword, otherwise you're just swinging around a fancy stick.
So let's work on it!
The process
The good news is that this should be really easy compared to everything else we've done so far. The skill can be broken down into:
Swing the sword (we already did this)
Hit something with the sword
***DO NOT DROP THE SWORD AFTER HITTING SOMETHING***
The difficulty comes into play when you realize I normally reward the instant the behavior occurs. Then he'd normally drop the sword and take the treat.
So to get past this, I'll just ask for a liiittle bit more.
Basically, instead of asking for just one sword slice, I'll vary up my requests. Sometimes I'll ask for one, two, three, seven, who knows? *
This is called using a different reinforcement schedule. Specifically, a variable ratio schedule of reinforcement.
Because we like our definitions:
On a variable ratio schedule of reinforcement (VR), the number of responses required for each reinforcer varies from one occasion to the next.
Source: Excel-erated learning, pg 61, "Ratio Schedules", Pamela J. Reid Ph.D.
The tl;dr here is we just vary the number of times he cuts to get rewarded, with the goal of making sure he doesn't just drop it immediately.
So let's try it!
Training Demos
First, upon making contact at all so he knows that it's worth doing:
Then twice:
Then three times:
And we're basically there! We have a dog that can find, pick up and "fight" with a sword.
The full thing looks kinda like this:
Wrap up
That's it for this week! If you haven't realized it yet, there's plenty of directions I can take this trick, and I'd like to hear from you! What would you like to see? What do you think would be cool or fun? Check out the poll and make yourself heard!
What would you like to see Missile learn next?
0%More sword moves
0%Dodges/evasive maneuvers
0%More types of weapons
0%Something else (leave a comment!)
You can vote for more than one answer.
Until then, thanks for sticking with us through this. I hope this was as enjoyable for you to read as it was for me to write. It's been a blast!
As always, Happy Training!
Shameless plug time
Hey hey, you made it this far, just indulge me for a minute! I've been mentioning it throughout this whole series, but if you're interested in training fun things like this, I'd love to drag you over to DogKatas! It's a gamified, community-based dog training app where you can learn and share your knowledge, through practice! ** The app contains numerous "Katas" ***, or short bite-sized exercises. You complete Katas to gain levels and increase your rank. It's a fun way to stay on top of your training!
Recently, in support of this blog series I've added "paths", which help you with working on a specific skill. So if, say, iunno... Some cool guy and his dog created a swordfighting trick, and some cool lovely reader wanted to follow along, they could in theory create a path that you could follow...
So yeah! Come take a gander. It's in beta and it's free on both Android and iOS, so what have you got to lose?
Shameless plug, OVER!
* Personally, I don't really like messing with different reinforcement schedules too much intentionally. They're really easy to get wrong, buuuuut I wasn't really able to think of another way to achieve this, so here we are!
** It's also my way of knowledge-dumping everything I know, so there's that.
*** Yes, it is heavily martial-arts themed. I saw a lot of Jackie Chan/Jet Li movies growing up, so sue me.