Before Annie became a dog trainer, she assumed all dogs were trained using "commands" and cues were for... pool games and stage actors. In this episode, she talks about the difference between cues and commands, describes the process of adding a cue, noticing cues, changing cues, and more. 
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Notes: 
Find Annie's new MasterClass at http://anniegrossman.com/masterclass
A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur's Court https://amzn.to/2Yectpg
Episode 19: How To Train A Dog To Sit From Scratch
https://www.schoolforthedogs.com/podcasts/episode-19-how-to-train-a-dog-to-sit-from-scratch/
Episode 40: Teaching A Stellar Down With A Verbal Or Visual Cue
https://www.schoolforthedogs.com/podcasts/13927/
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Partial Transcript:
Annie:
Mark Twain, satirist of the 19th century, one of my favorite writers, wrote the book A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. And it’s a story about–it’s a time travel story about a guy who gets bonked on the head and wakes up and thinks at first that he’s in Bridgeport, Connecticut, but actually he’s gone back in time from the 1800s to King Arthur’s court and he’s in Camelot. He gets himself into trouble there, he’s going to be burned at the stake. And then he realizes that he had learned in school that in the year 528, the year that he’s found himself in, there was a solar eclipse. So he predicts this natural event, and he makes everyone believe that he caused it.
I think about this book sometimes when I’m thinking about the process of adding a cue to a behavior that we want our dogs to know. Now, before I first went to  dog trainer school, I referred to commands. You gave your dog a command and the dog followed the command or not. It would have never occurred to me to call it anything other than a command. Instead, I was encouraged to think about how we can cue a dog to do the thing we want. Now, at first I understood the reason as, like we don’t want to be coercing dogs and it is coercive if you’re commanding something, because it’s like, you’re saying do this, or else. There’s an implied or else. And you know, that made sense to me, but I also thought that, you know, it would be possible to command and then reward. So maybe it was just too narrow a reading of the word command.
But then I started to understand that the notion that we are commanding a dog to do something really gives us way too much credit. We are sometimes cueing a dog to do something perhaps on purpose, but perhaps not on purpose. And it would be funny to call that a command.  Dogs do things all the time because of things that we do that we might not have actually wanted our dog to do. You wouldn’t call that command, but it might be some kind of cue to your dog, if your dog is perceiving it.  What’s more, there are lots of cues that your dog is perceiving that have nothing to do with you. They are learning cues from the environment, all around them, from each other, from things we might not even be perceiving.
Full Transcript available at SchoolfortheDogs.com/Podcasts


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