Aidan

That's interesting, my dogs are very social, perhaps it's the older 'pack' members teaching and socialising youngsters, or the visitors to the house :D That would be a big factor, so would temperament.

This assumption tends to get in the way of good, clear dog training unfortunately. How do you know she knows exactly what you mean? Or, to put it a different way, where do you draw that line? Let's say we have a dog who has been taught to sit at home, and does this reliably. We take him somewhere new, a dog park. He gets out of the car, sees the other dogs, and off he goes. The owner figures the dog "knows" sit, so she calls "sit" repeatedly but the dog doesn't listen! Would you expect the dog to 'sit' in that example? I wouldn't. The owner eventually lures the dog back to the car, goes home with the resolve to work on 'sit' some more. She gets home, cues 'sit' and the dog sits. She cues 'sit' again but this time someone knocks on the door, and the dog rushes to the door barking instead! So where do you draw the line? A lot of the really good balanced trainers do draw a line, but I suspect they are well aware that it is not a line where "the dog knows" but rather where "the dog will figure it out". Their corrections are instructional. Regardless of whether you use time-outs, corrections, purely positive - whatever, the "let me explain this again making it easy for you" approach usually gets the job done. It's just something to keep in mind. Time-outs can be a great strategy in the right situation, but not usually as a way of punishing a dog because "they knew what I meant". Does that make sense?

I would certainly continue as you are in discouraging humping, but I wouldn't worry too much about any potential power struggle. If you are a responsible dog owner who trains, socialises and sets boundaries you won't have an issue. The problem of dominance is greatly overstated and widely misunderstood; you would be better served putting your efforts into building a great recall, taking her to the vet for weigh-ins, finding nice dogs for her to play with, encouraging her retrieval instincts, introducing her to children etc

You've had a lot of good suggestions, I just wanted to add that the good thing about this problem is that the set-up is EASY, i.e the environment and all the antecedents are easily controlled. It is always in the same place. So having friends over to help you train whatever you decide you want instead of OTT behaviour is made that much easier. One issue that I suspect with dogs who bark at the door is that subconsciously, the owners see benefit in it, and therefore don't take steps to remedy the problem. I know this is the case in my home, when my wife was heavily pregnant I trained my dogs not to bark when someone knocked at the door so that when our baby came home she wouldn't be disturbed during sleep. Training this took just a handful of sessions. It was easy for me to do, and easy for both of us to maintain. But we didn't maintain it... It took me a while to figure out why.

I can't see anything that would suggest a rank problem, and you seem to be dealing with whatever problems or potential problems you do have quite well. A bit of consistency on your OH's part will help, variable schedules of reinforcement make it very difficult to stop unwanted behaviours, including humping. Taking your OH with you to any training classes and involving him in training might benefit you all. Humping can be a 'displacement behaviour' - a response to stress. So if pup is a bit over-excited or anxious, it might be one of the behaviours she uses to make herself feel better. Having consistency in your responses and a routine may reduce the frequency of humping even further, but of course dogs do also need to learn to deal with inconsistency and breaks in routine appropriately. In my experience it makes no difference who eats first, it certainly doesn't matter in many wild populations of dogs or wolves.

The American Veterinary Society for Animal Behaviour now recommends that the risk of infection in normal populations (for their jurisdiction, in America) is lower than the risks associated with under-socialisation. You miss a critical period of development if you wait until after vaccinations.

Seeing as I train at VIP I quite often get their rolls of food (as prizes/thankyous/giveaways etc) & I find that as training treats their dog rolls crumble to bits . I guess if you only had a small amount in a bag it may be OK, but when you've got a treat bag full of cubes & you are putting your hand in there constantly to reward, by the time I get to about a third left most of it has become crumbs. The trick is to freeze them, then only thaw just enough to break the cubes apart (about 10 seconds in the microwave).

Interesting that your dog enjoys Gyuto monks, my golden does not. When I first played the CD he started growling, and my two cats disappeared into the spare room. One hid behind the piano until it was all over, the other kept peering out from behind the door then eventually got brave enough to go down into the living room and check the speakers out. I know longer have that CD, when we got our GSD puppy she destroyed it.

Yes, I guess though that this is the wrong thing to do. I just say "no crying" and wait for him to stop before opening the door. But I don't let him in at that point, I go outside too, then we come in together. When you ignore something, you have to ignore it fully. What we think might be instructional (e.g "no crying") is just attention for the pup. I have a protocol which is quite useful for problems like this, it enables you to work at the dog's level by not going very far at first. You can find it towards the end of this article: http://www.clickertraining.com/node/1556 I recommend that you use it exactly as written, the only difference being that you will go outside, then come back inside and shut the door for each trial (leaving pup outside the whole time you do this exercise).

I mostly use dog food. I like the VIP sausage-packed stuff, Mega Bite, Chicken & Rice etc Cut into cubes, bag up, then freeze. Microwave for about 10 seconds just to break the cubes up and you're good to go. In the last few years I've never had to go out of my way to find a "special" treat, and that includes with the reactive and aggressive dogs in my classes. If they don't eat this stuff, something else is probably the matter.

Working in prey (which is often enough for sport) is where the behaviours are built quite easily. Adding some threat increases fear which in turn increases aggression, if you get the first part right the dog will continue to play by the rules you built whilst working in prey.

No, different tests for the same issues. The behavioural problems can show up long before any test done here would pick up a problem with the thyroid, if ever. If your dog already had obvious physical symptoms the tests done here might pick it up, not always though.

I don't believe that. Do you think all prey drive related behaviour is fear based too, then? It all comes down to survival somewhere along the line. I can definitely see what Kelpie-i is saying, even in the context of high-drive working line GSDs, game-bred pitbulls, and small-white-fluffy-munching Borzoi. Fear is perhaps a too specific word though? It describes an emotional state in humans.

Love your avatar!

SAS, were the 2 dogs tested here in Oz or did the testing occur in the US? From what I have learned, there is a difference in levels and accuracy between the two. Tested here. If it were for skin I'd go to Jean Dodds if I were looking for tiny changes but for behaviour you'd think they'd be enough of a change to see on the standard Australian tests? Other way around. It's a different test, what Dodds considers to be abnormal shows up as "normal" on the local tests (at the time of writing).

Whilst there may be practical considerations for using an aversive in this sort of situation, it is not because some other reinforcer that the dog can acquire is better or stronger than any you can come up with. The question is "which behaviour is more probable?", and that is a function of conditioning. Unless you are talking about "bribery" - which is a different matter.

Hi Erny, I sent you a PM before I saw this, felt I should clarify here for the benefit of anyone else who may be wondering. That wasn't really my point. I was really only addressing the assertion that bears, dolphins etc were only trained in controlled, sterile environments which is not true. In fact, wild-caught dolphins have been trained to perform difficult tasks in hostile environments for long durations to a military standard of reliability in a short space of time in the open ocean using these methods. Whether that makes these methods appropriate for dogs in the home environment or not is not something I have commented on.

Good post I apologise for taking things off-topic above, what the Brelands and Baileys did was use a technique called "free operant shaping", using positive reinforcement to shape a behaviour by successive approximation. This forms a large part of what dog trainers call clicker training.

The primary role that dolphins play in the military today is to detect mines using sonar, where electronic sonar is not as effective (as I understand it). This is a life-saving operation and the dolphins become very valuable. They must work reliably, in a hostile environment, for long durations. I would suggest that the standards applicable are very high, making this quite a good model for the use of +R in dog training.

Well that was the very interesting part of the discussion with Bob Bailey on dolphins trained in open environments for the military - they had to perform very long duration behaviours, hard work. At any time they could hunt food, and maybe they even did, but they still came back to the boat for their reward. Maybe it was more than just the free fish? Bob regrets that he was never able to secure funding to look at why this was so. What's more, they could train WILD CAUGHT dolphins to be deployed, for the military, within 90 days. I'm pretty sure the military insists on better than 75% effectiveness. I would never suggest that a dog is a dolphin, but if you're looking at what can be done with +R (rather than what can't be done, which of course we should also investigate), then this is the sort of stuff to consider.

We have more options with dogs, that does not make the Brelands and Baileys a poor model for how to use positive reinforcement though. AusDog's argument that we can't use the training of bears, dolphins etc as a model because they are trained in sterile, controlled environments is invalid when you consider that they were also trained - to the satisfaction of the military - in open environments also.

You might be interested to hear that the Brelands and Baileys were training a wide range of species in open environments using +R; e.g dolphins in the open ocean, cats in urban environments. But as I recall they were also the ones that couldn't train a raccoon to pick up a coin and put it straight in a piggy bank, since their training methodology had no way of countering the racoon's instinctive drive to self reward by "washing" the coins first. That's right, in 1961 the Brelands wrote the classic paper "The Misbehavior of Organisms" which described instinctive drift and discussed the limitations of Operant Conditioning (at that time). To see that as a failure of their training methodology overall rather than an observation of a phenomena that had not been accounted for in the theory of Operant Conditioning in it's formative years is to miss the point somewhat. But no, they were not able to extinguish the coin "washing" behavior. Has any balanced trainer successfully attempted to do it since? I don't think it would be fair to suggest that they were not highly successful animal trainers, in both controlled and uncontrolled environments, able to teach extraordinarily complex behaviour chains with a large array of distractions, and overcoming a number of self-reinforcing behaviours in the animals along the way.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Secrets-of-Dog-T...g&id=201252

You might be interested to hear that the Brelands and Baileys were training a wide range of species in open environments using +R; e.g dolphins in the open ocean, cats in urban environments.

You've said this on more than one occasion, Aidan. Do you mean the "tide is turning" to the more positive side of things, or do you mean the "tide is turning" to the more balanced side of things. Turned, past tense. It doesn't really matter where to, but it has turned from the days where it was more normal to use force as your first or only option.