Hey there. It's Hannah Branigan here with this week's episode of drinking from the toilet,

talking about real dogs, real training, and real life.

I've been spending some time lately pondering on how my use of language has changed or even

evolved somewhat in the area of dog training.

And I know it sounds like splitting hairs, but I do think that the specific words that I use

to talk about my training or to my students to talk about their training makes a difference.

It changes how we think about things and how we perceive what we're talking about.

And one of those words that I've noticed cropping up a lot or not cropping up actually anymore

is my use of the word ignore.

And by ignore what we're talking about when we intentionally disregard some behavior,

some aspect of the behavior. We pay no attention to it and we ignore it. But that can sometimes

cause problems. Ignoring things can mean different things to different people. And ignoring a behavior

sometimes really hard to do. And I don't know about you, but a lot of times if I'm worried about something,

being told not to worry about it is often not at all helpful.

It's sort of like being told to calm down when I'm upset.

Ignoring behavior still has a place as a behavior management strategy,

but I've stopped using it for the most part to describe training choices

that I'm making within a shaping session.

So I used to use the word ignore when talking about ignoring an off-point error or an error that is not directly related to the focus of that training session.

When we're learning how to shape behavior, we're typically taught and correctly that we should

focus on only one criteria at a time. And when we're raising that criteria, we should temporarily

relax other criteria during that session. So while focusing on speed, we should ignore errors of

...