corvus

We have the Brick as well, which we got from Wagsalot. (Ta!) Erik is a machine. He just loves that thing. Sometimes I use it as a reward. Kivi is our special one, but he's not bad at the Brick, either. He usually just sits there watching Erik and getting the odd treat Erik misses, or finding a quiet spot on the puzzle to work on while Erik is doing his tornado thing down the other end. It took him longer to learn, but he got there. I recently did a similar test to the bowl-covered-with-towel test. I had bowls covered with a cardboard sheet. It was easy for them to knock it off with their noses. Both learnt first go without any help from me. We used to hide food for them and give them lots of treat dispensing toys, so they are pretty good at finding food. Maybe Bubby just needs to be more motivated. He just wants the kisses and the lovin'. Kivi's not as dumb as he acts. He's just got some pretty low key priorities, and he's downright lazy. You should see him nutting out ways to make new friends. He's unbelievable. Or Bubby could be dumb. I knew someone with a Coonhound who would say her dog was not the brightest crayon in the box, but she liked that just fine because he was easy going and eays to predict.

Maybe there's something up with her? My mum's dog acts up when he gets itchy. He steals things, busts out of the yard, gets into bins, bags and cupboards and generally makes a nuisance of himself. He's better behaved when he's not itchy. My last dog just used to get a bit stir crazy. I'd go months without walking her because I was doing an honours project at the time and she lived in a large yard. Eventually she would start getting into things and ripping up papers and just acting uncharacteristically. A good long walk would solve the problem. You would think that a sudden change in behaviour would be associated with something?

Or a bit of TTouch might help. It did for our pup. He had been car sick a few times, but our old girl had also taken exception to him sharing the back seat with her and had let him know a few times. He was quite anxious in general about the car and that just seemed to make it worse. We set him up with a soft bed with sides and settled him into it with some massage. We did that for a few minutes before every trip and the problem evaporated. It was a pretty easy fix for him in the end, but he's an easy dog to calm. No idea if it would help any other dogs.

It's only a reward if the behaviour in question increases in frequency. In theory. Fear is an emotion, and a very negative one. R+ acts on behaviour, not emotion. Pairing a negative emotion with rewards won't result in the dog experiencing that emotion more. That's why counter conditioning tends to work.

Wow, they integrated cues into the music so well, and they were very considerate of the doggies.

I think most people don't actually really know. I never believe them if they say their dog is friendly. I believe the dog and I believe my dogs. I've had folks literally intervene when I've tried to move my pesky puppy away from their dog only to have the dog discipline my puppy and the owner look utterly astonished. So I don't believe anyone anymore.

I don't. And I'd be mad to! Yep, and I certainly wasn't suggesting books would, either. It's just stuff that may or may not be useful in general/in the meantime. I figured that's the way RockDog would have taken it.

I think you just have to be careful to be very consistent and make sure you are doing what you think you are doing. Are you punishing her or nagging her? If you're punishing her, are you punishing just the behaviour you want to suppress? I've had it go wrong because I didn't know exactly what I was doing and I wasn't just suppressing the behaviour I thought I was suppressing. I also managed to create an aversive association to walking on leash with me. I didn't really know what I'd done and so made no effort to fix it. It fixed itself in the end after I stopped correcting, but took years.

Do you have any calming exercises you do with him? My little firecracker goes up in arousal and can be hard to bring down again. He's still a bit socially (and emotionally?) immature and seems to benefit greatly from a bit of help every now and then to calm down again. I do a lot of TTouch and massage with him and pair it with a verbal cue "shh". It's interesting to see that sometimes a bit of that goes a looooong way. It's still a work in progress for us, and he doesn't always come down as fast or as far as would be ideal, but I'm impressed with how useful it's been all the same. It took a little while when he was quite young to get him appreciating it enough to sit still for it in the first place, and we did some practice revving him up a little and bringing him down again and clicking for tail down and sleepy eyes and that sort of thing as described in Control Unleashed. I think that helped as well, but not sure to what extent. I'm not sure why, but for my little guy, working on his hindquarters seems to be just the thing for calming him, followed by some long strokes down his back to calm him some more. He often comes back for more of that. My other dog turns to putty in your hands if you massage his chest. There's also Karen Overall's Protocol for Relaxation, which is a good (though somewhat tedious) exercise for teaching a dog to be calm. It can take a bit of work to condition an excitable dog to calm down on cue, but I think it's something quite useful to spend time on. Maybe that's just me, though. I think that it helps avert the practicing of behaviour seen when a dog is aroused when you don't want that aroused behaviour. Pretty glad you seem to have your head screwed on! Everyone on the internet is an expert, you know.

Goodness gracious, this thread gives me the willies. FYI, the pack structure thing is still poorly understood as far as I'm concerned. There are studies that have looked for it and not found it and studies that have looked for it and found it. The problem is, it's very open to interpretation. We assume that if a dog displays deference to another dog, the defering dog is subordinate. That is a big assumption if you ask me. How do we know that deference isn't used by dogs as a way to communicate their unwillingness to fight? Do we define a dominant animal by its willingness to fight? How then do we define an animal that doesn't need to fight because it gets what it wants through deference? Those who look for pack structure expecting to find it do so and those who look for pack structure expecting not to find it don't is what I can gather. However, I think one has to consider the most simple explanation as the most likely. In this case, we do not need pack structure to explain Rocky's behaviour. As Aidan pointed out, Spongey has basically trained Rocky to behave the way he does. There may or may not be pack structure involved, so it seems safer to me to assume there isn't until evidence that there is presents itself. As far as corrections go, there are certainly other ways to deal with these problems than all out P+. There are plenty of people out there doing it. I wouldn't make any assumptions about what methods are suitable for this particular dog. We don't know much about him and how he tends to behave. I have seen corrections go wrong, and frankly, I am extremely cautious about using them. It's so easy for aversive learning to bleed into other areas where it's not wanted, and quite easy to use the wrong level of punishment and make matters worse. If the handler isn't looking for the more subtle signs of things going awry, they won't see them. I'm not saying don't use corrections. I'm saying if you do, be brutally honest and very cautious about it and look for every tiny change. It royally sucks if you happen to realise some way down the track that you made a mistake and never fixed it. I have been there, and it's quite heart-breaking. So I will always be very cautious about punishments and really think hard about whether this is the right scenario for their use. I think the OP has already realised where they went wrong. It's helpful to intervene before these situations escalate. If I don't want something to happen I step in to stop it before it does. Rocky gave heaps of warning before he escalated his aggression, but when we are in these situations and watching, we don't always catch on right away that something is changing. I know I don't. I guess as Temple Grandin says, people are designed to find similarities and lump them together, where animals are designed to notice differences and discriminate.

Or maybe the puppy class provided treats. It's a good strategy for making sure there are no puppies in the class hanging around the owner with the steak instead of their owner with the kibble.

Isn't Kuma a bit under a year old? I'd be pretty concerned, because that's when they try things on and if it works it stays. I guess any time if something works it stays. Maybe I'm particularly wary of adolescence and social maturity stages for some reason. It's hard when people don't behave around your dog the way you want them to. When I leave Erik with my parents they get a lecture about all the things he is expected to sit or down for. They are pretty good anyway, but he's so exploitative. If I don't stay strict with the rules he will break them to get what he wants or get it quicker. I would worry about leaving him with anyone that wasn't dog savvy. When I was looking into Akitas before I got Kivi I didn't really want a dog that would need me to be strict with the rules. It sounded too regimental for my personality. But I actually find it quite rewarding living with Erik. He's pretty well behaved because I insist on it, and the only reason I insist on it is because I have to. He tries to trick me and I try to stay one step ahead of him. As long as we both think we are winning we get on famously. Seeing as Dupree isn't helping much, I would keep Kuma on leash around him while you're waiting to get some professional help. At least then he's not practising behaviour you don't want him doing.

Last puppy class I went to the puppies all got pig snouts to chew on while the instructor was talking. It made for very quiet and relaxed classes between exercises. They would chew them on a little rug each on leash and kept away from each other's snouts. Otherwise, I think the best you can do with a puppy is try to keep them engaged. Lots of rewards if they are doing the right thing. Some people take the puppy to time out for 30 seconds if they whinge. From what I saw of it it's a slow and tedious method for wee babies.

Good luck with it siks3. It is a gorgeous breed. Love them! I remember someone on another forum had one along with a Shiba. They were saying the Shikoku was very pack oriented, which I found interesting.

I don't see the purpose in saving a dog the experience of learning there are consequences to an action good and bad. Behaviour reinforced with positives is good, but behavior reinforced with positives and negatives IMHO is better and amounts to increased reliability. Fiona I assume we're talking about behaviour that is rewarded when performed on cue and punished when not performed on cue rather than a single behaviour that is reinforced with positives and negatives? What's the difference in reliability between rewarding a behaviour when it is cued and rewarding a behaviour when it is cued... and then punishing whatever behaviour the dog chooses instead of the original one when it is cued?

Hehe, I will stop confusing everyone with my unique way of looking at the world and just say, what Aidan said. I was using LAT as a shortcut. Before that I didn't have much in the way of an alternative response that was strong enough, so I was left with waiting for them to do some sort of default behaviour and then asking for a heel, which I had to strengthen as well. It was working fine as the dogs weren't wildly worked up. LAT was just faster.

I dont get it either corvus. In the scenario above how would a dog know its an interupter not a marker. Agro dog looking at the other dog just about to lunge and you click? That could be very dangerous marking the totally wrong behavious! That is my thinking as well. Click means mark, means treat. I am only going to mark what I want to reinforce and reward. I think to use it as an interruptor is a bit dangerous as to the dog, you could be marking and reinforcing something that could come back to bite you on the bum later. I wonder also if it will, over time, reduce the "power" of the clicker when rewarding what you do want? Probably not, but got me thinking. I think it would be better to read Leslie McDevitt's description of it, seeing as it's her method. The idea is you use it under threshold to mark a behaviour you're going to ask for again in a moment anyway, and then the dog automatically turns away from the object of interest to get the treat from you. You wouldn't click when the dog was lunging or carrying on. The only thing you are marking is looking, but it simultaneously interrupts that looking because the dog turns back to you for a treat. You're then rewarding them for attending to you, so the only behaviours you're likely to increase are looking at a trigger and then looking back to you. I am thoroughly confused by this thread. What actually are prong collars being used for? What does it do to teach impulse control?

I use it as an interruptor and a cue and a marker. It's good for short range. If I need longer range I have emergency recalls. The nice thing about clickers or markers is it doesn't take long to get a good conditioned response. It took about a year to get a good reliable recall through conditioning for Kivi. In contrast, I tried with the marker a couple of months after I introduced it in training and it was very effective then. I am sorry Corvus, but that sounds like a recipe for confusion for a dog. I just cannot fathom how using the clicker as three seperate things is conducive with training that is precise and clear to a dog. There are so many other things to use as a cue. For myself the clicker is a marker that is it. I do have a verbal "go on" signal but that is it. For a cue, such as "focus we are training" is a verbal word. Hey, the web is full of people that adore the Look At That game for how effective it has been. The proof is, as you say, in the pudding. A clicker acts as an interruptor even in clicker training shaping sessions. That's why the click marks the end of the behaviour. And the first time a clicker is heard for a while, it acts as a cue that training is now occurring, regardless of where you are or what your intention was, unless you are in the habit of only clicking once or twice and then putting the clicker away. The LAT game and other similar uses for the clicker are not changing the meaning of a click. They are just acknowledging and exploiting the various meanings a click already has.

And some of us don't even try to distract the dog any which way. I like it better when I had the chance to counter condition or have an incompatible behaviour conditioned properly so it works in those super distracting moments. I'm still catching on, though. But now I'm confused. I thought we were talking about recurring situations in which the dog is nearly over threshold?

I get that you think you could have "fixed" him with positive methods and maybe you could have - if you'd been around at the time I would have happily handed over his leash and let you try. As it is, I used a different method that worked quickly, effectively and without (IMO) negative repercussions. You've seen what he's like for yourself! Does he look unhappy to you? Is he afraid of me? Unless you're seeing something different to what I am, I'm inclined to think no. Nono, that's not the point I was making at all. I have no idea if anyone could have had the success with him using a different tool than you have had with the prong, and there's no sense in speculating because what was done worked. The point I was making was the method is sound. An interruptor isn't negative by nature. It's what happens after it that determines whether it's a positive interruptor or a negative interruptor. All it does is create a choice junction for the dog, allowing for a different behaviour. As I said in an earlier post, IMO you do what you have to in order to distract the dog. If I were using a prong as an interruptor and it suppressed behaviour, then it wouldn't be just an interruptor. It would be a punishment as well.

How do your dogs figure when you've decided to use it as an interrupter and not a marker? Easy, if they weren't paying attention to what they were doing when they got a click it was an interruptor. I use it as an interruptor when they aren't particularly operant. If they were operant I could give them a cue and reward that behaviour instead and I wouldn't need an interruptor. The key is in the reward delivery afterwards. When I interrupt them with a marker, they look at me and come over for their treat. So they get rewarded for coming over and paying attention. It's not my method, though. It's straight out of Control Unleashed. ETA The dogs still have to be under threshold. It's aimed for times when the dog is highly distracted but still under threshold. The structure of the game is elegant and pretty foolproof as long as the dog is under threshold IMO. Dog looks at exciting stimuli, dog gets clicked, dog goes "hey, training!" and comes over and gets rewarded for doing so, then dog gets clicked for looking back at the exciting stimuli and rewarded for looking back to the handler. So even if there is a bit of bleeding, it doesn't matter because ultimately you are marking and interrupting the same thing.

For the sake of argument, what really depends on the individual dog? What I'm getting at is a prong might be too strong for some dogs and just right for others, but what of the effectiveness of the aim behind using a prong, assuming it is to suppress behaviour? Suppressing behaviour is a sound approach if that's what is desired, and choosing to use a tool is no different to me deciding what reward I will use, except if I use a reward that is too hot it will be easier to fix than if I use a punishment that is too strong. If the prong is to be used as an interruptor, isn't the approach of interrupting the behaviour equally effective regardless of whether a prong is used or a clicker, for example?

I use it as an interruptor and a cue and a marker. It's good for short range. If I need longer range I have emergency recalls. The nice thing about clickers or markers is it doesn't take long to get a good conditioned response. It took about a year to get a good reliable recall through conditioning for Kivi. In contrast, I tried with the marker a couple of months after I introduced it in training and it was very effective then.

There is also Dogtree: http://www.dogtree.com.au/content.php?page=about