Steadiness: does your gundog have self-control, or are you just managing their behaviour?
“Steadiness is between the ears - it’s an attitude, an emotional response - it is not a behaviour.” - Jules Morgan, founder of Teach Your Gundog and co-founder of the Gundog Trainers Academy
One of the fundamental components of gundog training is that the dog must be steady and must not carry on hunting or go for a retrieve until they are cued to do so.
Teaching steadiness is something you will inevitably cover whether you want to participate in fun training classes with your pet gundog, are working through non-competitive assessments, want to enter working tests, or work your dog on a shoot.
If you ask a cross-section of gundog handlers what steadiness is, you will likely get answers like these:
- Doesn’t run in
- Doesn’t hunt on
- Doesn’t chase birds/rabbits/deer
- Walks steadily to heel (doesn’t fidget, surge forward, sniff ground)
- Doesn’t make noise
- Doesn’t swap dummies/birds
- Stops on the whistle/stops to flush
- Doesn’t run off or mess about between exercises
Quite a lot of these descriptions begin with the word ‘doesn’t’ and focus on things our dogs shouldn’t be doing.
In the pursuit of the desirable trait of steadiness, this gives very little information about what we want our dogs to be doing instead and often leads handlers to focus, not on teaching the dog self-control, but on managing and preventing them from being unsteady.
Before we rush off to look at how to go about the process of training and developing a steady gundog, it is important to identify what steadiness is and what it is not.
We’ll do exactly that in this blog before looking at why management is still crucial but not enough in the long term, and finally, how to assess if your gundog has self-control or whether their ‘steadiness’ is solely influenced by you.
What is steadiness in gundog training?
If you take time to consider this, you will see that steadiness is not a ‘behaviour’, ‘task’, or even a ‘skill’. It is a state of mind, an attitude, an emotional response.
Let us take a step back and look at this from a dog-learning perspective.
If you have an understanding of learning theory, you will know that the first stage of learning is ‘acquisition’, where new behaviours are taught (via shaping, luring, capturing, etc). These are then practised to their best quality and fluency and then put ‘on cue’.
The next step in learning is to ‘isolate the cue’. Many call this stage generalisation or proofing, and it is where the newly learned behaviour is taken ‘on the road’ to be taught and practised in a large variety of different environments, orientations, with distractions, etc.
Working through this process takes a lot of time to ensure that the ‘behaviour’ is fluent and of top quality in the majority of scenarios.
The correct behavioural term for the end result of this process is that the cue then comes under ‘stimulus control’, meaning the behaviour only happens when it is cued. It is also robust and resilient to distraction.
This is the crux of what “steadiness” is.
Our preferred phrase for describing steadiness, although long, encapsulates this concept:
“Steadiness is: when the dog remains focused on and completes the task regardless of any change, distraction or anomaly in the environment”.
The number one mistake gundog handlers make when training steadiness.
There is another perspective to consider that is far more important than just the steadiness training and practice drills.
The dog's personality and emotional state should be the priority in all aspects of training. This is even more relevant when we are looking at steadiness. And yet, this aspect is so often overlooked.
The biggest mistake gundog handlers make when training steadiness is trying to fix the behaviour without paying any attention to the emotion behind it.
Let’s say your dog runs in on dummies, with shot, in a walk-up scenario, with other dogs present. You may have taught a cue, gone through the ‘isolate the cue’ process, but your dog is still ‘unsteady’ in this circumstance.
At this point in the training, some handlers might try to physically manage the situation and stop the dog from running in or from making noises. Some of these strategies work temporarily, but in our experience, the unsteadiness and noise always return.
Noise, in particular, is a symptom of how the dog is feeling. Whether that is frustrated, conflicted, excited, anxious, etc. These are all emotions, and dogs, unlike humans, are not very good at hiding their emotions in public.
When it comes to running in too, you need to consider the temperament and personality of the dog.
Dogs that are highly competitive with other dogs present might be perfectly able to manage themselves when training alone, but run in when they are in company.
In these scenarios, you need to try and change the dog’s core emotions. There is little point in telling them to just stop doing what they’re doing or physically managing them over and over and over again.
What about arousal and steadiness?
Arousal is an emotion we often talk about.
We actually need to teach our gundogs to work in a state of arousal because that arousal is what keeps them motivated and energised.
Too much arousal, however, pushes them over the edge and into a state of mind where they are no longer able to think cognitively. We call this being ‘over-threshold’.
Arousal does not just impact steadiness. You might have noticed that your over excited dog is suddenly unable to sit, recall or perform other behaviours which they would normally do so reliably when not ‘over-threshold’.
When it comes to steadiness training, you need to factor this emotion into your training separately.
With your underpinning knowledge, empathy and understanding of your own dog, you need to work through your own personalised programme of ‘isolate the cue’ training to cover:
- Environment, distractions, distances, orientations, cue discrimination
- Temperament and personality of your dog
- Arousal levels, working through cues in low arousal increasing levels until you finally get that behaviour under ‘stimulus control’ and that equals steadiness.
Why managing steadiness is vital but not a long-term solution.
You might have been told that you need to manage your dog and prevent them from rewarding themselves for unwanted behaviours. This is still true and is important for steadiness training.
Indeed, it would be a very chaotic and unproductive group class if there were dogs running in on each other’s retrieves. And everyone would go home with a headache if dogs spent the hour whining and barking at the top of their lungs.
If you have a dog that runs in when it is in a group class scenario, you will want to keep it on the lead while other dogs are retrieving. If you have a dog that makes noise because it struggles to watch others retrieve or wait, you might want to walk away from the group when it’s not their turn.
These strategies will manage the situation, yes, but they will not deal with the emotion and will not help your dog to change their behaviour in the long term.
Here is a human example if you’re struggling to see the link between behaviour and emotion.
I might be feeling very anxious about an upcoming assignment, a meeting, or a hospital appointment, and have started frantically biting my nails as a consequence.
You could tell me to stop and physically prevent me from doing this behaviour by making me sit on my hands or putting gloves on me.
This would stop the nail biting, temporarily. But it would not stop me from feeling anxious. And it is highly likely that I would go back to biting my nails as soon as you left and I was physically able to do so.
To break my anxiety-induced ‘need’ to bite my nails, I need to learn how to manage myself (my emotions) in relation to the assignment, or meeting, or hospital appointment.
It is the same with steadiness. We need to focus on the emotion behind the dog’s ‘behaviour’ rather than the behaviour itself. There is no “one size fits all” answer to this but in the right hands, with the right trainer helping you, you can develop a strategy to help your dog get to the stage where they can manage themselves using what we know about learning and behaviour and how reinforcement works.
How to work out if your gundog understands steadiness as an emotion or if they are reliant on you to manage them.
Sometimes, it is very obvious to a handler whether their dog is able to manage their own impulses or if it is all down to training set-up, strategies, and restraints.
Other times, you might think that your dog understands the concept of self-control when, in fact, their steadiness is reliant on your cues, body language or pressure.
Remember, as we noted in the nail-biting example, even if we successfully stop our dog from being unsteady, it does not mean we have successfully dealt with the emotion and will not guarantee that our dog can practice self-control if we are not able to give the cue.
Before we can move on to teaching our dogs how to manage themselves, we need to work out what our dogs would do, of their own free will, if we did not touch or restrain them, or give cues such as wait, or leave, or sit etc.
To perform a baseline assessment, you will need to work through the following scenarios and make notes of the outcome. You might want to do these in a few locations, with and without distractions, to see if this changes the outcome.
With your dog by your side, no cues given, and no physical restraints or pressure from your body language being applied, ask yourself the following question: “Can my dog remain seated, or standing, beside me when….”
- We are both standing still
- With an empty food bowl 2 metres in front of us
- With food in the bowl 2 metres in front
- While food is being placed in the bowl by a helper
- When a dummy is placed 2 metres in front of us by a helper
- When a dummy is dropped 2 metres in front of us by a helper
- When a dummy is thrown 2 metres in front of us by a helper
If your dog is successful, you can reward them. Make sure that you vary the rewards so that sometimes it comes directly from you and sometimes they are released to the food or dummy.
If your dog is unsteady and runs in, there’s no need to do anything, as you did not ask them to do anything. Simply take this vital information that your steadiness is attached to a preventative cue or management strategy rather than your dog’s emotional ability to manage themselves.
If you are concerned about the impact this will have on your steadiness, remember that you should not be using any cues for this baseline assessment, and you do not need to do multiple repetitions to get the information you need. Whatever you normally say or do to achieve “steadiness” will, therefore not be poisoned or ruined and your dog should not have too many opportunities to self-reward.
You can take this information forward and begin the process of teaching your gundog about self-control and how to train the emotional state of steadiness.
Want to teach your gundog to steady themselves with self-control?
If you want to teach your dog the emotional state of steadiness and ability to control themselves, instead of an alternative behaviour like sit, or wait, or leave, or having to rely on a steady fob forever, we are hosting a special steadiness mini-course challenge.
You will be given written step-by-step recipe and supporting videos, to learn how to teach your gundog the essential skill of self-management using the “Get It, Don’t Get It” game which will become the backbone of all your steadiness training.
Those looking for personalised feedback from Helen and Jules can opt to be assessed on their performance and after passing the assessment can confidently move on to the next stages of their steadiness training.