corvus

I used to know a dog when I was a wee little tyke that always tried to greet people by shaking their hand with his paw. He was absolutely insistent about this. I was, what, 4 or 5 years old and I'd be trying to get to my friend's house to play and their dog would have me bailed up shaking my hand. As soon as he had my hand tied up in shaking he'd lean forward and lick my face. I hated it, but he was a sweetie. I don't know if that is necessarily a stereotypy. They are funny behaviours, in one sense they often get established during stressful situations, but because it makes them feel better it can turn into something that is just self-rewarding and it actually helps them be calm in new stressful situations. I guess the classic example of a stereotypy is the obsessive pacing that is common in zoo animals. Stereotypies are a big problem in zoos, and an indication that the animals are or have been stressed. My hare used to chew his litter tray as a stereotypy. It started when he was very stressed after I moved him to another house, but it continued long after the stress had abated. It was very difficult to break him of that habit.

Just pay it! It's so easy. Although I also was standing out there with an umbrella waiting for E to go so I could pay him. Erik doesn't mind the rain so much, it's the wet grass on his toeses that he hates. Anyway, he discovered that toileting in the rain wasn't so bad if he gets treats for doing it. I stood out with him until he went and it was annoying because it took about 10-20 minutes, but I only had to do it 2 or 3 times and then give him a treat when he went for him to catch on and it was all good after that. I get to stand on the deck in the dry and he takes himself out in the rain. He's quick about it. :p

Whenever Erik is remotely unsure of himself or in some way conflicted he pokes something with his nose. It's fascinating. He just can't do nothing, or just wait, or use some other common displacement behaviour like sniffing the ground. He has to let it out in some way, and the way he's settled on is to poke things with his nose. Example, he wants to go and bark outside, but he also knows to get a treat he needs to lie down on his bed. So he comes and gets on his bed and simultaneously pokes a box next to it with his nose. He only does it when he is overcoming a strong desire to do something else. When we're training, I know if he's not entirely sure of what he's doing because in the middle of an exercise he'll divert to poke something with his nose. It's started to show up in a lot of different situations. I guess I would classify it as a stereotypy, which is a behaviour that becomes repetitive and a fixed form of expression or response. Does your dog have any stereotypies? Things they do habitually or ritualistically?

Emmy is awesome! Way to do your mum proud, girl.

Yep, Dog Wash Cafe. Is that an Elkie?? I badly want to meet some Elkies! One time Kivi's collar got caught on the gate on the way out and came apart, leaving a collarless, just bathed doggie eager to get out of there free to run where he liked. Thank goodness for emergency recalls!

What, you can be busted for that?? I'm in trouble... The neighbours get to hear all manner of "Boys, do you think you can play quietly for a bit? Guys, too much barking! How about you come inside? Erik! Be nice to your brother! Erik! I said leave him alone. Come on, that's enough. Come inside. Kivi! Enough! You are both too noisy! Now inside with you. Good boys. That's right, inside. That means you too, Erik." Out and about we get smirks from people when we talk to the dogs and ask them to get off the path and then tell them what awesome, clever, special dogs they are and would they like a treat? Yes, I think that was a treat-worthy performance and so on. But we always smile at people that are talking to their dogs as well. It reminds us of the good fun we have with our guys.

Yes. Fur Fitness in Caringbah. It's just near Pet Care 2000, about a block towards Cronulla from Taren Point Rd and on Port Hacking Rd, I think. It costs about $25 for us to wash and dry Kivi ourselves, but we always take our own shampoo because they never give us enough in the hydrobath. They let us stay as long as we like, which is nice because it takes ages to dry Kivi. When we're pressed for time we just get him done at Pet Care 2000. It costs $20, but I'm always giving them about half a dozen specific instructions like "don't rub the towel on his belly because it matts his coat up" and so on. I like doing him myself better. He's more relaxed if it's me, and I know no one is doing anything crazy that is going to result in knots or something. Hey, how's things going, anyway? Haven't seen you in ages.

Erik had an odd problem... He started out doing lovely quiet sits while we prepared his meals, then one day he suddenly decided he was wild about meals and when he knew they were coming he just COULD NOT contain himself. Much hysterical barking. In the end we would prepare his meal and leave it on the benchtop until he was calm and then get him to do a down or sit and feed him. It worked very well. The first couple of days it took him an hour to settle down, but then it was all smooth sailing and we haven't had a problem since. Erik doesn't eat until he's told he can. OH tries to trick him and goes into another room, leaving him drooling over his bowl, or says things that sound like his release to try to trick him into releasing prematurely. It's pretty funny to watch him go to leap forward to eat and then freeze because he's just realised he heard "good log" rather than "good dog". That was dead easy to teach. Just taught him a leave it with doggy zen and applied the same method to meals. We phased out the leave it cue and now he just waits for the release. Kivi does too. They pick it up damn fast. I should probably mention that the behaviour when the meal is delievered and the behaviour during preparation are two different things. Even when Erik was at his worst he still did a quiet sit for his meals. It was the preparation phase that was difficult.

On my legs when I sit on the couch. Erik just likes it there. Kivi likes to be directly behind my office chair when I'm in the study. We have a warning system, now, after me running over him a couple of times. I say "Kivi, hey, move it" and he leaps to his feet before I can run over his elbow fluff and get it caught in my chair wheels or something.

Sounds like Erik has you pretty well trained. 'If I do this then I get these treats. If I don't get those treats I won't work.' I admit I have BC's who are wired a little differently, but I do have a VERY challenging and soft BC who is very manipulative and will 'shut down' if things aren't going his way. He doesn't "shut down", he just looks for the food reward. If it's not forthcoming he looks confused, slows down, starts getting distracted. I don't think it's an unwillingness to work so much as a suppressive aversive. He thought he was going to get one reward and when he doesn't he gets a downer. Same way as when he expects a certain reward and he gets it he gets very happy. What reward he expects depends on the cues he has been given. Where we are, the way I'm moving, what I've already rewarded him with, even how aroused he is or what he has an appetite for at that moment. Some cues override others, so if I always use food for one exercise he expects food, and then if I move to another exercise he's still expecting food because of what we've just done. I think we're getting into the realms of "at agility class I get food" and what I really want to do is try to derail that cue so that at agility class he gets food or toys and if he needs to know what to expect than he should pay attention to my cues rather than the environmental or situational cues... This is how Erik works. He always figures out how to know what's happening next. What everything means. But what do I know. I don't think he's manipulative and he's far from soft. He is just very discriminatory. Every little detail means something to him.

That's what I've observed, Staranais. Maybe it's like the way people can go to sleep with a tricky problem and wake up with a solution to it.

I wish I'd had DO's rundown when I was going through this with my old dog. I found it especially difficult to cope with because I'm young and couldn't imagine what she was going through, and she wasn't the dog I knew and loved. She was excessively snappy towards my younger dog, lost all patience with puppies, and yes, my attempts to teach her more acceptable behaviour fell flat. All I managed to teach her was that when I came towards her pointing to the door that was bad. She started cringing when she saw me coming, although her eyes weren't good so she was also prone to startling as I would appear out of the gloom to her. She did not "act up" because of any lack of training, discipline, or status concerns. She was just an old, pained, confused dog. I eventually realised my responsibility to her was to give her lots of attention, keep her warm, and try to make her as comfortable and safe as possible. My responsibility to my younger dog was to keep him safe and out of her way as much as I could. I got to know when she'd snap at him and changed the way I did things so those circumstances would not arise anymore. Eventually I sent my younger dog to my parents for a short holiday in my old girl's last week or so. I think you have to realise that there comes a point where the best you can do for them is try to manage. They don't know what they are doing anymore. My girl had bad hearing and sight as well. She would get "lost" where she would appear to forget where she was and if she wasn't close to any detectable cues to tell her where she was she would just sit there looking more and more frightened. I believe their sense of smell is also adversely affected, is that correct, DO? I'd be calling her from a couple of metres away, waving my arms, stamping my feet, and she wouldn't know I was there until I touched her and then she'd skitter and cower away from me.

SAD is a multi-faceted problem and the symptoms are the same for the different possible causes. I think it's a good idea to get a vet behaviourist to properly diagnose it and identify the underlying cause and then talk about a treatment catered to the dog. It's a difficult thing to treat, as if you don't get the causal factors right you will probably have limited success with behaviour modification. Sometimes drugs are required.

Me too. Often I give them a little rub down after training. I guess I see it as a bonding/calming exercise. Kivi especially adores his post-training cuddles. Not that he needs any calming. I totally buy the latent learning thing. I used to joke that Erik was getting on the internet to look up the things I'd been teaching him because he would always start a new session several steps beyond where he finished the last session. Leslie McDevitt suggests giving dogs a break after a few minutes of training for latent learning.

Really? How does that work? Steven Lindsay was saying that when a dog is expecting a particular reward, offering a different reward may actually be aversive. It makes sense that when a dog gets put into food mode they don't want to tug anymore. A friend of mine uses food to lower arousal in dogs that get seriously over the top. With Erik when I get to marking and popping treats he goes into clicker training mode and he only wants his food. The more aroused he gets the faster he wants to clicker train rather than opening up tug as a potential reward. I was having a crisis about this tugging thing this morning. After a play with Erik in the yard I convinced myself that his tug drive was not going to vanish after all and he would continue to find it loads of fun. He wil also continue to find clicker training loads of fun and if he's not ready to chase a toy over a jump in a few weeks he's not ready. No big deal. He's only a year old and the whole agility thing is all new to us both.

I always used parrafin oil with my old corgi, who was prone to this. Our vet pointed out that while it put a nice slick coating on the insides to help things move through, it didn't actually soften the stools. When my girl was old and having trouble even holding the position to poo we were giving her stool softeners. I can't remember the dose, but the vet said it was fine to get some from the chemist.

A little tri-ing Basenji girl. And a bigger block so there's room for her.

My northern breed would rather sleep on the concrete than a bed. He's got one, and he only lies on it to sulk if I've done something horrible to him, like bath him. He has a mat in the bedroom to sleep on and usually sleeps on the carpet next to it. I honestly think he's never felt cold in his life. He used to sleep in the rain as a puppy despite having a kennel. I gave up. I provide him with a bed just in case he ever wants it, but mostly I just get a big one for Erik so that they can share if he Kivi does want a bed. And I continually ask myself why I bother providing my dog with bedding when he doesn't use it.

Sure, MM. Go for it.

Well, I think it's a combination of being distracted, lots of learning, and using heaps of food, but mostly the latter. He gets into food mode and that's that. The more exercises we reward with food the less interested in tug he becomes because he's expecting food. I don't want to set him up to think agility is all about food if I could set him up to think it's about running around and playing? The foundation skills are great and I think I should use food for many of them, but for others the food just seems to confuse him because I'm suddenly feeding him for things he does anyway, like circle work. He's so short it's hard to deliver food when he's moving, so every time I treat we both stop. I am unsure of what I'm doing, and it does translate, but if I have a tug in my hand it shouldn't matter. He should want to tug as that's how it's gone down so far. I guess it sounds like I'm being a bit of a diva about it, but I don't want to risk undoing what little I have done with tugging. At the moment Kivi tugs more reliably than Erik! I kinda consider my dogs' willingness to play with me to be something to nurture and protect. I guess I just don't feel confident that I'm doing that with Erik at the moment. Maybe I need to relax about it and just get Erik used to the agility class environment before I worry about whether he'll tug there or not?

Not sure exactly where this should go, so I guess general will do. I had the good fortune of winning a 50% discount on a pet first aid course. Unfortunately, with being in my first year of a PhD and so being pressed for both time and money, I don't think I can use the discount. But I would like someone to, so if you're interested in doing a pet first aid course, I've checked with the good folks at Pet Tech and they are fine with me passing on the discount to someone else. I believe the courses are run in every capital city, and the discount would bring the cost down to about $70.

Agility people, I need some advice. Erik and I are doing a foundation agility class and we've just done week 3. I love the class and the instructors, but in the last two weeks Erik's tugging drive has plummeted. He's gone from swinging off tugs and barking and leaping at them to not even looking. It's so weird, because until now he's been a tugging fiend. We went through the 3 week relationship course and he was tugging the whole way, and he tugged on week 1 of foundation, and he hasn't tugged since. He will at home, but has trouble shifting from food rewards to tug. I'm a bit worried. I don't think he's ready for the kind of training we're doing. I think he needs at least another 6 months of tugging for free and getting comfortable with different environments and switching from food to tug and back. I wonder if it's doing anyone any good to be training him in agility skills when he's not tugging at class. I wonder if it's only setting us up for trouble. I'm considering taking a hiatus from classes until he's had a chance to mature a bit and I'm happy with his toy drive. It's kind of heartbreaking to see my tugging monster turning his nose up at a tug. It's never happened before. I don't want him to stop having fun. So what do people think? Should I stay with the foundation course to at least learn some skills as a handler and just let Erik take it at his own pace, or should I stop doing classes and work on rekindling his love of tug and getting him back to doing it anywhere anytime?

Most of the work that's been done on coping styles is about humans, but there's been a bit done on lab animals. The human stuff is probably at least a little bit relevant, but I don't think anyone knows exactly how relevant. There's this paper here that is not wildly difficult to follow and talks about the characteristics of two different coping styles (proactive and reactive). One is not better than the other, mind. Another group did a study with police dogs and claimed a third coping style, that of ambivalence. The dog can't decide whether to attack or retreat.

Ooo, that's a proactive coping style indicator. Thing with proactive coping styles is they aren't very flexible. The animal tends to have one way of dealing with anything that is out of the ordinary and one way only. Sound like Boh? My family briefly had a dog that dealt with everything remotely out of the ordinary by threatening to bite it if it didn't get out of his world this instant. It was just how he was. He was like that from 8 weeks old and only got worse as he got older. He was something else. Destructive was about the only thing he wasn't! When I got Erik I saw echoes of that dog in him, and Erik is also very sensitive about routines, but I think he sits somewhere closer to the middle of the avoidance-proactive coping styles continuum. He has a few things up his sleeve and he doesn't have the anxiety the other dog had, so he can cope with strange things much better. He is nowhere near as bad, but he certainly reminds me of the poor dog that thought he needed to attack anything that was not within his comfort zone.

If I'm out with my Lappie on a hot day people often go "awwww, he must really feel the heat". I have been asked why I didn't clip him for summer. Now, I'm pretty tolerant and I always smile and assure them that all that fur is good for keeping the heat out as well as the cold out, but by god, CLIP HIM???? I have also got the "Oh you must be so hot you poor thing" when out jogging with him at 8pm on a summer evening. It wasn't even a hot summer evening. Why do people see a fluffy dog and think he must be hot if the temp is above 25 degrees? There's another chap that thinks he's fat or something because of all that fur. He has a little crossbreed that must have Iggy in it it's so damn fast. Erik tries to catch him and never gets close. Sometimes Kivi joins the fun and the guy laughs and says "You'll have a heart attack if you try to keep up with him!" Well, Kivi might lumber a bit, but he can run around without having heart failure I should hope.