Hey guys.

This is Hannah Branigan, back to bring you another fascinating episode of drinking from

the toilet, the podcast where we get

real nerdy about teaching and training with positive reinforcement.

This episode is sponsored by the Karen Pryor Academy for Animal Training and Behavior, which

offers awesome online dog training classes and a gold standard professional dog trainer

certification program at Karen Pryor Academy.com.

If you want to check it out, make sure to use the

special link, Karen Pryoracademy.com slash toilet, to find some special deals just for you guys.

This week, we're going to talk about what is maybe simultaneously the boringest and

interestingest topic in dog training, training for duration. So like many trainers, particularly clicker trainers,

I tend to get excited. I can be a little distractible. And I apparently enjoy having something like

300 different partially trained behaviors, none of them under any kind of particular stimulus

control. And many of them performed in a sort of fast and furious, potentially frantic sort of manner,

which, of course, is not a good habit to be in, but that's the situation I frequently find myself

in. And eventually, if I'm going to do anything practical with my training, I need to finish

at least a couple of those behaviors. And so in addition to getting stimulus control on the

behaviors, the other element that

is often missing that I will often overlook from a lot of these projects is duration.

I tend to skip it for a lot of behaviors if left to my own devices.

So I have to sometimes motivate myself and make a deliberate plan to build duration on the

behaviors where it's relevant. And of course, there are a whole lot of

...