corvus

If she's still young and already well socialised, there's every chance she will learn to discriminate between dogs that can be approached and dogs that should be left alone. My last dog could, and the older of my two current dogs can as well. I've seen him pull up short several metres from a dog and turn around and walk away. I have seen the dog he avoided get into a fight with another dog a minute later. Little Erik is still a bit juvenile and I won't trust his judgement for a while yet. For the moment, I make the calls about who he approaches and who he doesn't. One of my great joys in visiting dog parks is watching the way Kivi behaves towards other dogs. I swear, he has a tailored strategy for every dog he meets.

Yeah, that doesn't seem to work for a dedicated barker. And why should it? If barking is rewarding, then making it more rewarding in certain circumstances is probably not going to make it less rewarding in the original circumstances. The only use I've found for teaching a bark on command is that it's easy to go from there to quiet on command, which at least gives you a means to tell your dog to be quiet if you're there. But if in their mind there is a good reason to bark, where's the incentive to obey? Based on that, I tried with Erik only asking for quiet when I was able to reward it big. That didn't work real well, either. I wasn't very dedicated to it and while it was useful for just random vocalising, his worst barking occurs when he gets aroused and it did nothing for that. He only has to be a little more aroused than usual to become very sensitive with alert barking. :D To date, I've had the best success trying to treat the arousal. Sometimes he just hasn't had enough exercise, so I go play with him and then we do a calming routine afterwards. That usually gets him relaxed for the rest of the day. Other times I give him some help calming down with massages and giving him a place to lie that he associates with quiet, calming activities. When I'm not at home he is inside. He can hold it for a full working day, although I don't often stay out that long at the moment. Good luck with the collar. Hope it works out.

As long as he's being intermittently rewarded for it he's likely to continue. He's essentially on a variable reward schedule, and we all know how attractive that is (pokies, anyone?). Kivi will fall into a heel with random strangers hoping for food as well, but is easily convinced to bet on us instead. He's not much of a gambler. He always goes for the surer bet. If my dogs are in food mode, they are just waiting for a signal that means they will get food. A bridge or conditioned reinforcer is perfect at this point. I haven't tested it for a while, but usually their recalls are actually best when someone else is handing them food, because I reward recalls with high value food. You could use the clicker as an interruptor for this problem a la the Look At That game from Control Unleashed. The clicker interrupts the behaviour and causes the dog to look at you, and then you pop them a treat. Because the treat comes when they are looking at you, you are rewarding that behaviour rather than the preceding behaviour. Once you have their attention you can leave it at that, or start clicking and treating for a glance in the direction of the person with food. If you keep at it, the sight of someone with a treat pouch can become a signal to look at you. This might become a problem in some environments! Pays to think about what behaviour you might want him to be doing instead before starting. :D There are lots of LAT variations depending on what people want from their dogs. You can still do set-ups, and it's only gonna help. However, if you can't control the environment so the behaviour is never being rewarded in the meantime, it could be an uphill battle, especially if you have a chronic gambler (Erik, I'm looking at you).

Well, purebreds haven't always been pure. They all started as deliberate cross breeds. I got my first dog from a BYB. She lived to 13 1/2 and was relatively healthy except for a degenerate disc in her back late in life and a proneness to bowel blockages. My two current boys came from registered breeders. My mother has a pet shop puppy who is now 6 years old. She is perfectly healthy and had no problems toilet training and no behavioural problems related to her time in a pet store. My mother also has a dog from a registered breeder that has been in poor health all his life. Her last dog came from a registered breeder she took more care in selecting and is lovely in temperament and healthy.

Swedish Vallhund. Smarter.

Exactly! Although technically only the one that behaves aggressively could be fear-aggressive. If fear-aggressive even exists. I learnt "Repulse Monkey" moves in Tai Chi last night. It's kind of offensive retreat. Seems a bit fear-aggressive to me.

Can it be both? I think so. Abrantes is an ethologist so he would have his own bias. Freud said sex and aggression were the two primary drivers of behaviour. Mind you he was talking about humans, and specifically the repressed, middle-class women who made up his clientele. Presumably they found hunger and thirst fairly easy to satisfy. Well, one would presume so, at least to Abrantes. Fear can certainly be both. My problem with accepting that is that aggression doesn't feel like the root of the behaviour. If I broke behaviour down into small enough units and ignored the precursors, I guess it could be a motivator, but then if I look at the sequence of behaviours, it seems like aggression is never really going to be at the start of everything the way that fear or frustration is. But that's just my obsession for hunting down the root of all causes coming out. If I hit "aggression" on my hunt, I would keep looking at what came before that. Somewhere, there's a driving force for the entire sequence. This is why I seem to spend a lot of time trying to understand things that are only vaguely relevant to what I'm researching.

And it gives them a term to Google. Incidentally, "reactive" is often used as a description of a coping style. In that context (which does apply to dogs), it is neither a good thing nor a bad thing particularly. It just describes how an individual tends to cope with stress. A reactive animal (or human) tends to do nothing until they have to. They react to their environment. The opposite is a proactive individual, which tends to act more independently of the environment. Different strategies are more useful in different situations.

Oh, I think he has. He says this about it: I said more about this in the reply that the internets ate, but the way I see it he's just breaking down the behaviour into smaller units. The dog can be fearful, but when it attacks it is being aggressive. It switches from one to the other, but isn't both. It's a good way to look at it if you're interested in the sequences of behaviour, which I think anyone who wants to predict behaviour should be. I bet as that dog bites, though, its little heart is still pounding in terror, and that's where it's hard to accept Abrantes' point of view. Here is a little bit more about him: http://www.ethology.eu/index.php?option=co...19&Itemid=7

Yeah, I agree. Abrantes has a lot of sensible things to say. He wrote a couple of books on canine behaviour and is very pedantic about his use of terms. I can see where he's coming from, but his reasoning really relies on aggression being a potential motivator, and to me it's a description of behaviour. He lumps fear into the same category, but it has its own meaning to me and if someone said they felt fear, I would understand that. If someone said they felt aggression, it's still valid, but you would assume there was some underlying emotion that provoked that aggression, like rage, for example. To me, fear can exist as an emotion independently. Well, as PF said, leashes are the perfect situation for that learning to occur. Or you might have a proactive dog that tends to respond to stress with aggression in the first place. I knew a little dog like this. Terrified of the world in general, but he wasn't about to sit back and let it have at him at its own leisure. He was going to get it before it could get him. He rarely looked scared unless you looked past the aggressive bluster. He was not a reactive dog at all.

Well, some might tell you that, but are they right? A presumably reputable police dog trainer recently told me that the aim in proofing was to trigger the dog into defence or fight drive, whatever you want to call it. I gathered it was a nice way of saying "the dog should be seriously concerned for its wellbeing", because in the line of duty that's exactly what may happen, and they have to know the dog will react in the way that they need it to react. I think we have to be careful not to mix up the emotion behind a behaviour and how the dog reacts to it. Erik is a moderately proactive dog, so when he feels a little pressured he may well behave aggressively, whereas Kivi might feel the same level of pressure and do nothing. That reaction is obviously wildly different between both dogs, but how do we know it's not driven by the same emotional disturbance in both dogs? Incidentally, I'm sure it was a Ted Turner dvd I was watching that had a nice little flow chart including states that led to aggression. Frustration and rage where in there, I believe. Neither of those are fear-based.

Boo. The internets ate my reply. Roger Abrantes says a dog can't be "fear aggressive" because fear is characterised by flight or passivity, and aggression is characterised by attack, therefore, if a dog is attacking it can't be simultaneously running away or freezing. He also says "dominance aggression" is a misleading label because it implies the dog attacks because it is aggressive, but dominance is about controlling another individual in a ritualistic way that does not involve injury or harm, so if a dog attacks, it didn't attack because it is dominant. Its behaviour was driven by aggression alone. I have trouble getting my head around the idea of aggression as a motivator in its own right, to be honest.

One time a little couch JRT who had never laid eyes on a rabbit before found my hare. She thought all her Christmases had come at once. Kit, who at the time was living with two dogs including a known sheep killer and was quite relaxed around them, knew he was in trouble. He was fortunately in his cage at the time and I had just gone into another room, so I could hear the sound of a hare mindlessly running in circles trying to escape this little dog that was everywhere he turned. I have no doubt that if I had not been handy she would have found a way to get to him sooner or later. The housemates got a little talk about making sure doors were properly latched and keeping the JRT in sight at all times while she was visiting.

It's a very subjective question by nature. I'm just interested to see what people come up with.

If it means anything, I have had two dogs that were the smallest in the litter. One stayed under-sized her whole life and the other grew into a giant. So... I think it doesn't necessarily mean anything what the size is at birth, although if one is considerably smaller it might never catch up.

It's always going to be subjective. For example, a Norwegian Elkhound might have insane prey drive.... for moose and bears. But that doesn't mean it'll be very interested in rats. But in my mind, if you see a dog go after a prey animal you get a pretty good idea of where they fall on a prey drive sort of scale. Haha, now we're getting into the type of discussion that usually makes me very unpopular. So for now I'll just say that I'm talking about actual hunting, as in, the dog sees/smells a prey animal (whatever it was bred to hunt) and goes after it. I'm talking about the speed and tenacity the dog will display in going after the prey animal. My little Vall shows a lot of speed and tenacity for a tug toy, but loses interest in the house mice that lurk around the rabbit food the moment they go out of sight. So for the purposes of the discussion, he would have rubbish prey drive.

What breed do you think has the strongest prey drive?

My previous dog was very much like me emotionally. We would get upset about the same sorts of things and were both very sensitive to each other. She picked me as a puppy, but often I think we weren't very well suited to each other. We were like leaves on the wind, kind of helpless to direct where we went together. We would feed off each other. If we were in a good place together, it was very good, but if we ever had conflicting desires or if I was feeling emotionally volatile, we would clash and wind each other up. After her, I wanted a dog that was more complimentary to my personality. One that I would react less to. I think a lot of it was me growing up and learning more about dogs and realising I needn't be reactive but I could be proactive, but my two current boys suit me better. I like steady, confident dogs, and my last dog was not really either of those things. Kivi is hugely steady and pleasantly confident. He is as sweet as can be and I don't think it's possible not to love him. He's just a very lovable dog. I get along with him pretty well because I appreciate his mellow outlook and I understand his independent streak. It took me over a year to really bond with him, though. He's a bit vague and I struggle to understand that and what it means. Erik is more intense, but I find that even though that was one of the things that jarred me with my last dog, with Erik it's more relaxed between us. His brain almost never stops ticking over. He is always taking things in. He has similar drive and motivation to me, and I just get him. When he decides he's damn well going to rip up the carpet and to hell with me and my physical barriers, I get it. It's exactly what I would do if I were a dog. So I find that a lot of his quirks and his tendency to get over-excited are easily offset by the satisfaction of recognising aspects of my own personality in him. He is not as emotionally sensitive as my last dog was, and he is a stronger personality. I do well with his strong personality. I challenge him and encourage him to be a tough little bugger, and he keeps me on my toes. He is not particularly my dog at this point, but I get him and I like that I get him. If you took me as a 5 year old and turned her into a dog, it would be quite a bit like Erik!

I answered in the training thread, but just wanted to add that I have never corrected if my dog has blown off a recall. It's not a situation that fits with the good use of punishment IMO. You can't guarantee that you can do it at the right time every time. We went after Kivi a few times in the early training phase, but mostly the idea is that you try very hard not to call them if they might not come until you are more sure they will come. We have managed that with long lines and being careful about where and when we let them off to begin with. We used to do long lines in the park, which is frankly dangerous to humans and dogs, but I found it hard to get away with not doing it a few times at some point. Preferably when it's quiet and the other dog park users are people you know. Anyway, we use high value rewards and reward for every successful recall. If they don't come right away they don't get the special recall treats, but we usually give them some opportunity to earn everyday treats anyway. It is an ongoing process! Kivi has been reliably recalling for over a year and we still practice several times a week and carry special recall treats to maintain his good recall and always will. Erik is easier because he panics if he can't find us, so you just kinda yell over your shoulder and walk off and he will be racing after you. He is highly motivated to stay with his group. We still practice his recall a few times a week, too. In hindsight, we should have picked a recall that didn't have names in it, but the boys generally recall to each other's recalls just as well as they do to their own.

Hmmm...... That sounds a bit like Erik and his proactive "rules" thing. I think that he uses just one or two cues to tell him what activity we are doing and won't be convinced otherwise. For example, he decided that agility training was all about working for food and once he'd decided that he refused to take any other reward. I was slow to pick it up and let it establish and start to spread to other training and now have my work cut out for me trying to undo it. Life with Erik sometimes seems like running on the spot just to keep from flying backwards. I have learnt to be very aware of the cues he may be picking up on so I can scramble them if he's getting ahead of me and forming a routine I don't want. It's hard work. He forms those routines so fast. I have learnt to be very careful about doing the same thing in the same way more than 3 times in succession. Actually, even that's pushing it! Hehe, sounds like Erik and his sit-stays. He just does not like them, no matter how heavily I reward it. Kivi will do sit-stays and heels all day, but with Erik it's more like a Premack thing. If you sit-stay I will come back and give you food and then we'll go for a run together or play some tug. He can still be resistant about sits and is easily distracted from it, but I find if I jackpot a bit he gets more interested in it. Erik's favourite kind of jackpot is if I let him have about a second to wolf down as much of the treat back contents as he can. He thinks it's a big win if he gets momentary unfettered access to the treat bag.

That's right, Staranais, we have used RRR with pretty good success. If you ignore last weekend's adventure into the swamp next to our dog park, which involved Kivi randomly deciding to cross the swamp after 2 years of avoiding getting his feet muddy in it. He fell into a channel and got out on the wrong side. When he was recalled he got as far as the channel and lost momentum. The beauty of dogs is that they do things like that. Well, spitz breeds do. They can walk past a distraction a hundred times and then one day for apparently no real reason they act completely out of character and succumb to it. With Kivi's recall training, we made some bad judgement calls a few times and recalled him around distractions he wasn't ready for yet when his recall wasn't adequately conditioned. It set us back a few months. It's not always easy to tell whether they will come back or not in that training phase. I would say the safest bet is to work them up. Try it on a quiet playing field, at the park when it's quiet, then pick ever more distracting scenarios to try it. You can keep them on a long line to boost your confidence if it helps. Start with smaller distances and work up to bigger distances, but when you go to a more distracting place, go back to smaller distances again. With the RRR method, what you are ultimately looking for is your dog whipping their head around and starting to move towards you as soon as you call. The idea is they don't get as far as thinking about whether to come or not. Hopefully they come at a run, because that way they will usually blow through obstacles that might otherwise distract them. For Erik I have a list of distracting things and places in order from least distracting to most distracting. It's worth noting that an environment that is highly distracting all on its own (e.g., for us, the vacant lot across the road that the dogs would like to thoroughly explore but never get the chance) can be more distracting than an easy environment with a usually hard distraction, like a playing field with a game of football going on.

Erik doesn't much like heeling, either. He likes the rear end awareness stuff, though. He's more enthusiastic about heeling if he gets to pivot and I was teaching him to heel backwards as well. Then we went on to agility circle work instead. He likes that because he's allowed to jump up to get his treat when I tell him to. Erik doesn't much like any activity that doesn't involve running, jumping, or some serious problem solving.

This is a stab in the dark, but given dogs can be aware of a huge range of cues that we are not aware of, it could be anything. If it were me, I would be trying to take her mind off the environment by running her through a routine of easy things she knows how to do. I would be considering that I don't necessarily have to sit around and "let" her indulge in her wariness. I could do something proactive to help her forget about whatever is making her wary. I would be trying to build a rule structure for her. Like, we come to this new place and we practice these easy things in this order and you get these rewards and then we sit on a mat and you get a massage, and then we do something fun. That kind of thing.

I thought it was a $30 000 fine, now. They used to let people with a magician's licence keep rabbits, but I think they made it much harder to get a magician's licence as a lot of people were doing it. It's utterly ridiculous and I wish they'd comprehend how rubbish pet rabbits are at living in the wild. My domestic bunny wouldn't last a day.

By "on cue" I mean when she's doing it reliably for a click, name it and use the name to prompt the lip licking and then only reward it if she does it when you tell her to. Kivi has his head in the clouds most of the time and when we are training he is intensely focused on me. I had a lot of troubles getting him to interact with things other than me because he wouldn't notice them and could not understand what he was being clicked for. It was very frustrating for him. I started target training him to make training easier and help him become more aware of his surroundings and his body. It has worked quite well. Erik is just more aware than Kivi. I can click something that he's not aware he's doing and eventually he will work out what I'm clicking or will just respond automatically. Another time I was clicking him for tipping one ear towards the cleaners in the other room that he was so upset about. I doubt he was ever aware of what I was clicking, but the ear tipping increased in frequency anyway. Or maybe he thought I was clicking something else that occurred with the ear tipping. Anyway, the point is, Erik will usually figure out what I'm clicking sooner or later, even if it's something he isn't entirely aware he is doing at first. But Kivi will often take so long to figure it out that he will get frustrated and give up on the whole thing before he figures it out. But targeting brings it to his attention. If I were clicking for no licking with him, I would expect him to assume I was clicking for something more obvious he was doing, like sitting. He's not very active during training, so he could be getting heaps of clicks in the same position and never realise it was the lack of licking I was marking.