Flickers - A Tool To Help With Training Deaf Dogs

 

Curt here! For those of you who follow Vicki's blog I'm Rogue's other parent, commonly referred to as “the hubby” 
For those of you who haven't read her stuff go do it and come back. It will give you a frame of reference and she's a better writer than me anyways. And better looking.

 Rogue hears no evil - Vicki's blog

I'm rather surprised, and flattered by how much interest my little design has gotten, though I expect that only about four people will read this so that will make sure I don't get an ego :)

My story:

I'm a professional, no force based trainer, and I love the technical and science side of training. (Note: this is why I don't get much airtime on her blog, Vicki hates technical stuff.) The hows and whys fascinate me, and allow me to understand behaviors and situations that I may not have run across. So, this post will probably be heavier on the aforementioned hows and whys. Why the flicker works, why I came up with it, and how I did it. In no way do I claim I came up with the techniques and theories. What's the phrase? Dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants? I just took what was out there and came up with something simple that helped my wife and I train our puppy. Heck, even the term flicker was from somewhere else.

SHORT VERSION! (AKA tl;dr): I put a ping pong ball on a LED squeeze light to help train a deaf dog and not run into OCD-type behaviors. Pics are below.

Long wordy 'splainin version:

As I mentioned I'm a professional trainer, and I have trained several deaf dogs. With almost all of them the simple “thumbs up” sign worked just fine to train them and they are wonderful family dogs. 

Umm...

Well, I knew Rogue wasn't going to be a good family dog... err wait, I meant “just” a good family dog. Totally no Freudian slip there. Anyways, I was going to be doing more with her, like disc dog, agility, free style, and also things like therapy work. So I wanted to make sure I had a wide selection of tools to use in her training. I don't need the flicker. I also don't need treats. Sure makes things easier and faster though. That's probably why I'm going to get a vibration collar, too. Need it? No. But I bet I can do more with it.
Like Vicki in her blog, I'm not going to go into clickers and clicker based training. Better people than me have written better articles than I could do :) Chances are if you are here you already know it anyways.

( Karen Pryor's Clicker training site )

The Trouble With Clicker Training a Deaf Dog

So, for a deaf dog, we use a light based “clicker” or marker signal, in addition to a classic deaf dog hand signal - “thumbs up”. With the light however, it's possible to get obsessive-compulsive disorders from strong spots of light, and lasers.

Seriously? Dogs OCD? Yes. Well, no. Okay, let's go for sort of. 

Simply put, obsessive compulsive disorders in humans include frequent obsessive thoughts that cause the urge to do ritual behaviors. Canine Compulsive Disorder (CCD) differ in that dogs don't have the same type of thoughts that we do, but instead they have compulsive behaviors that they can't help engaging in when exposed to a certain stimuli, or a level of stress and anxiety. Common ones include tail chasing, flank sucking, fly snapping, and others. What we are concerned with is shadow and light chasing.

 Canine Compulsive Disorder

My theory is that it's Classical conditioning along with instinct, where the laser is the conditioned stimulus that activates the unconditioned stimulus of the dog's biological hunting instinct, leading to the unconditioned response of chasing the light as if it were prey. This is commonly known as “Dogs like to chase stuff” (Okay, yes, I just swiped the big words from the wiki to make myself look good. The chase stuff bit was all mine though. ) However, since they are never able to catch the spot of light, the anxiety of not resolving those strong survival based hunting instincts builds and results in the CCD behavior of having to catch (chase) the light whenever they see it, or something like it, or their instincts say they will starve to death, since the hunt is always a failure. Stupid instincts.

Right! Wait what? 

Dog thinks laser is prey, dog has to catch prey to eat, dog can't catch prey so no eat and die, so dog has to make sure to catch that prey, but can't catch prey, anxiety from unable to resolve instinctive paradox causes compulsive chase behavior.
But hey, that's just the theory of some guy who never went to college. And that last sentence was because I confused myself. If anyone actually knows I would love to hear it.

Ok, great. Theory. Got it. What's the reality? And when do we get to the ping pong balls?

No seriously, it can suck

The reality is I have seen it happen. A client with a hearing dog used a laser to run their new dog around, despite my warnings. The class was six weeks long, and unfortunately by the end of the course the sight of a laser caused the dog to react so strongly that it went way beyond threshold, completely ignoring anything else, even high value food items, and just barked at the last point where the laser was. A parent of a deaf dog also used a laser to make the dog come to them, but what happened was the dog would freak out (that's a technical term) as soon as the laser turned off at my their feet and then dash off to find it, actually making the situation worse.

Also other possible side effects:

Hah crotch shot! 

 Yeah, but did you see that the puppy didn't even notice it was a human underneath?

I even had a much more personal experience with it. A foster dog we had also had shadow and light chasing CCD behaviors from people with good intentions, but unaware of the possible end result. Chloe would freak out and bite and bark at the wall, or suddenly dash off to another room. We found out that it was from a flash of sunlight from the face of our watch or light flashing off silverware, etc. You also couldn't pick up a metal pen, laser, or flashlight without her running to you and barking incessantly, and not in a “play with me” way, but in a "I can't stop myself" way. It was heartbreaking. She's the real reason I made these. I didn't even want the chance of that happening to our puppy.

Because of you, Chloe, I won't let that happen again

Ok, you made it painstakingly clear that light based CCD is bad, but a clear marker signal is good for training. So now with the ping pong balls already?

My Solution

Truth be told, I really enjoy making things, coming up with possible solutions, and then experimenting with them. So, in the weeks of anticipation before we got our lovable new puppy, I had to do something to pass the time, and applied some of that to solving an issue that despite everything posted above, realistically wasn't that likely. Actually, it was mostly so I could tell the wife I was “working on training stuff” and not have to clean. Don't worry, she doesn't read my stuff anyways, so my secret is safe.

My thought was to make something that would diffuse the light of the small LED squeeze lights often used in deaf dog training.

I do want to point out that Roxanne Tapaninen trained her beautiful Belle just using a basic one of these without anything fancy and has done amazing things with her. I also want to point out that Roxanne has dainty ladylike hands. I don't. My big sausage fingers covered the entire damn light.

I know they work great for a lot of folks! ...who have small hands

 

OK kids, it's time for “Let's experiment with stuff we make!”

First, the lights – Several were bought and tested. Several were lost. I went with the theory if I could lose it that easily I didn't want that one anyways. That was my excuse and I'm sticking to it. Here's what we ended up with:

Not pictured: the ones I lost. Yes I checked in the couch.

I chose the carabiner light because it fit my hand better. Also, looked cooler.

Ok now the diffusers. We tried several different ones. Colored tape over the bulb, colored paint, christmas lights epoxied on (guess what time of year it was) and the ones I had envisioned from the start, yes, the ping pong balls 

Hmm, this had less impact than I thought it might.

Quick experimentation showed that tape and paint had no effect at all. So the Christmas light coverings were epoxied on relatively quickly.

The ping pong balls presented a bit of a problem though, namely, how to cut the appropriate hole without
A) destroying the ball, and/or
B) accidentally jabbing the knife all the way through another damn fragile plastic ball, narrowly missing my fingers and hoping my wife didn't notice.
The solution turned out to be a dremel with a cutting disc on it. It was an even better solution since I could cut straight lines to fit the lights better. Ping pong ball cut, glued on, done!

Christmas light vs. ping pong ball

I tried all of them two at a time in a dark area before conditioning Rogue to them. Every single time Rogue looked to the ping pong ball first. We had our winner! Threw on a wrist strap and that became flicker version 1.

We used it throughout Roxanne's class, despite little problems like the fact I click behind my back when training so dogs don't focus on the clicker hand. Apparently, this habit doesn't work well with the vision based flicker. Who knew?  Another problem was the fact that Rogue had to be looking at us for it to work, 240 degree field of vision or not. Roxanne told us that a spot of light on the floor can also be used as the marker. (If you are wondering about the whole CCD light issue, since the light didn't move, it wouldn't be chased which is what causes the CCD behavior. I think.)
This led to flicker version 2, with a hole cut in the top. Ping pong ball still lights up, and a spot on the floor can be used as a marker also. The floor spot is a separate marker though, and has to be conditioned as one.

Version 2 to the left.

  Flicker version 3 is in the works. I need to figure out how to keep the ping pong ball from being crushed, and some way to make them cheaper than the $5 a light from the hardware store. Also, prettier, and more comfortable in my big hands.
So there ya go. A whole long post of gluing a ping pong ball to a light. I hope it helps!

Oh yeah.... don't let the puppy get a hold of it.