corvus

Haha, Vickie, I'm reminded of the time Erik managed to pull a leg off his most wildly favourite toy while playing tug. He was so excited he shook the blazes out of that leg and when I put it up on a shelf he spent the next 30 minutes sitting underneath it looking up at it and barking. I've been thinking of sewing it on with a few weak stitches so he can get it off again. Or maybe making a velcro or press stud attachment. In reality I couldn't sew to save my life, so I doubt it will happen.

Staranais, I think you are using a different definition of deprivation to me. In psychology I guess most things are defined by the effect that they have. So I'm defining deprivation by the effect of increasing appetite and therefore motivation. If I delay a reward, it's pretty debatable whether my dog feels that "loss" particularly keenly or not. He might if he were in an emotional state that made him more sensitive to a sense of having lost a reward, but most of the time he would not even react except to try to do something else that will get him the reward. There'll be no detectable change in his body language that might indicate a change of emotional state, for example. If there's no increase in motivation or anticipatory behaviour I would assume it is not deprivation in the sense that the term would be used in motivational theory and so on - which is what we would presumably be trying to achieve in dog training. I'm a believer in allowing an animal access to resources that matter to them. When my hare is waiting for his next meal he still has hay to chew on if he gets desperate. When my dogs are not training they still have access to lots of tug and chew toys. Mostly because if I let them have the toys I train with Erik would rip them into tiny little pieces. So I do not view this practice as a form of deprivation, because the means are there for them to fulfil their needs without me. What makes training toys so awesome is not that I deprive them of them when we are not training, but that I pair them with super awesome fun, so they become an establishing operation in themselves. If I let them sit down and rip bits off whenever they wanted to I'd be disrupting that conditioned EO and that's why they would become less motivated to work for them, not because they were sated all the time. At least, that's my view. One of Erik's favourite toys is not a toy I habitually put up when I'm not working with him. He does like to rip bits off it, but he'll get tired of it and leave it on the floor and ignore it for days, then come back to it and so forth, but the moment I pick it up, it's game on and he'll do anything for the chance to tug on it with me. For him, me picking up a toy has become a signal for imminent super awesome fun. His enjoyment of tug with that toy is not in the least diminished for having near constant access to it. Bub, I would think that asking for work in exchange for goodies that have previously been free is probably deprivation. I did this with my hare the first time I was trying to get him to work for food. He still got all the food he wanted, but he only got yummies directly from my hand. It turned out he wanted some yummies in his diet enough to work for them, but I had to use truly amazing hare lollies to convince him he wanted my yummies. I started giving him yummies for free again and that's where all the current problems of refusing to have anything to do with me started. It's multi-faceted, though, and the treats are only one aspect of the problem.

The purpose of deprivation in training is (has to be) to increase the appetite for the reward on offer. Deprivation is the classic example of an unconditioned establishing operation. EOs work to increase the effect of a stimulus. So in the case of food deprivation as an example, the dog is hungry, therefore they become more motivated to gain a food reward and the food reward makes them feel better than it does when they aren't hungry. What's more, they suddenly increase the frequency of behaviours that in the past have been associated with food rewards. There is a paper freely available about it here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P...n00026-0061.pdf The reason why I make the "sweeping generalisation" that I do not think deprivation is necessary in training the average dog is that there are other ways to develop an EO than deprivation. One can play around with cues and anticipation and create a very strong anticipatory response with a conditioned EO. Drive trainers already do this. It is my view that if you're clever enough about it you don't need to deprive, and that is not based on my own experiences alone, but also those of people that do compete with dogs of varying drive levels. I wouldn't do it unless I felt I had to and that's my ethical standing on it. A "hunger" for something is, in general, an aversive state and that's why it works. Furthermore, I have not found it to have a very large effect at the level I would be comfortable using it. Having said that, there is a time and place for it. They use it extensively in the military to gain a level of reliability that would otherwise be impossible. The level to which they do it is outright cruel if you ask me. The nature of an EO is that you get a temporary effect, as in, once the dog is sated the effect fades. So to use this method to get a constant effect it is necessary to keep the dogs constantly hungry, and that's what they do. They have to use an essential resource because the stress created in this working environment would kill off any desire for a non-essential resource (e.g. a tug toy). And besides which, the work being asked of the dog is very active and strenuous and they are going to get sated for game or bite rewards very early. You can't deprive them much if you're using it as a reward daily. As I have said before, I do use deprivation for my hare. He is not a naturally opportunistic animal and he is so easily frightened that it's very difficult to create anticipation for anything good. I have found it to be necessary to motivate him to get him to even want to work for food in the first place. Having said that, I don't give him less food. I just give it to him in smaller portions so that he gets a little hungry just before I feed him.

I confess I have played the catch game with Kivi around. I taught Erik to catch with Kivi free to run around and get in the way. It's very sloppy as I normally would split them up for, like, a dozen different reasons. Nonetheless, I don't think he's keeping it away from Kivi in the slightest. Haven't done anything to reward it. Prepare for some potentially controversial (and posibly wrong) theorising. When he was learning to catch he was really insanely driven to nail it. Every time he missed it and it got away from him he'd do his little annoyed "Rrr!" noise and immediately get back into position and wait for the next throw. It's kinda weird and anthropomorphic to say it, but I think he just so badly wanted to catch that damn ball that when he finally did he couldn't quite bring himself to just turn around and give it up. He went to do it, then veered away. This is how Erik works. If something is a little bit challenging and then he nails it he can become a bit of a fiend about it. So if I pick up a ball his arousal immediately soars and he really switches on. That's all fine and dandy except that his anticipation is so high that when he gets the ball it's like an anti-climax. The reward doesn't quite match the level of arousal, so he naturally wants to hold onto it. The way I see it, I have two choices if I want to teach him to retrieve the ball. I can lower his arousal, or I can condition a response to overcome it. Ideally, I'd like to do the latter, but we need to work up to the ball. That's fine, as we've got tug toys that he will bring back quite happily if I throw them to him to catch. Or I could just leave the catch as is and use it as a jackpot. There's merit in that, I think, particularly if it gets him going like nothing else does. Obviously, tethers are another option, but that's a management option that I prefer to avoid where it is safe to do so. That's just me and the way I do things with Erik.

Thanks Vickie, that was very comprehensive!

Anytime. Come jump on the spitz thread in the breeds sub-forum if you haven't already. ;)

He doesn't find food more rewarding than play. He obviously finds the catch and victory lap highly rewarding or he wouldn't do it so much. I can teach him with pretty much any reward as he's pretty nutty about rewards in general, so I have the luxury of being able to pick and choose. I see what you're saying about the toy only being fun when you're involved, Star, and I'm not dismissing that by any means. In fact, I'm trying to align more with that philosophy with catch in making it about facing me and waiting for the signal and then bringing it back as opposed to running off to play with it on his own. If I hadn't spent the last year playing tug with him to the exclusion of all else to the point where if cued to tug he won't even look for where the toy is and just spins and jumps on me, then I don't think I'd be using catch with him at all. Sometimes it's good for him to be rewarded away from me (with my input/cue/mark) so he doesn't automatically run back to me every time I mark him. I don't want him to be self-rewarding, but I don't need him to be coming to me every time I mark him, either. He likes parading more than catching and tugging, but he doesn't parade a tug toy, only the ball. So I'm teaching him to retrieve a tug toy with the plan to put it on cue and generalise it to the ball and anything else as well. Reframing the exercise, kinda.

I have a thing against "yes" as a marker word. That s on the end makes it all drawn out and whispery. Especially if you have a lisp! I like hard, short sounds that you don't use in everyday talk much. Kivi gets "ping", and I'm starting Erik on a marker word of his own. I decided even ping was kinda too long and am trying to figure out a shorter, more sudden sound. I'm thinking "pip" or "dip" or "tick".

I wanted to use the ball catch as a reward. It's not a chase after the ball and stop it thing, it's a come here and catch this ball I'm going to toss you thing. I don't really mind that he wants to parade it except that as long as he's parading it I can't do anything else with him. And sooner or later he'll drop the ball and then I'll have to go get it! Better in my mind that he bring it back when cued. Then he can parade if he likes and if I want to get on with things I can cue him to bring it back already. He tugs plenty and I think there's leeway for a "play jackpot" that doesn't involve direct physical interaction with me. I like how quick the ball toss is. Even a super short tug requires a few seconds of commitment. I can reward him with a ball toss almost instantly and move on right away.

I'm saving up for Patricia McConnell. :cool: Besides which, I don't think I really belong at training seminars at this point. Behaviour seminars I am all over, though!

No it's not. In this context deprivation is an establishing operation. It increases appetite for the reward. Delaying a reward does not IME increase appetite. It could arguably create a bit of frustration which might result in increased arousal which may manifest itself in the form of greater physical activity and/or motivation. That's a different system afaik, though. Thanks for the comments. Kivi has already surprised me plenty, and I'm sure he will continue to surprise me. He's always getting more aroused about training, more reliable and enthusiastic about tugging, and more confident about shaping. He just can't do it on his own like Erik can. Erik's my point and shoot dog. He's fun, but Kivi teaches me more. My expectations of him are my expectations of my own training skills. I'm not instantly good! I think it's unfair to expect Kivi to be a drivey maniac when he's stuck with a trainer that has a whole 12 months of experience and he's a dog that can only be as good as his trainer. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be proud of how far we have come, which is from a dog like Satchmo who has to think about whether he wants to get up for his meals let alone training to Mr "pleaseplease can you cue me a high target so I can jump!". To get the "is that all" response is pretty crushingly discouraging. I guess I'll just have to be my own cheerleader.

I keep a training diary as of a few weeks ago. :D I find I'm not very good at keeping track of what I did in a session, though, so I video it as well. I love videoing it because I can look and see things that I didn't notice when I was training because I wasn't looking or wasn't conscious of what I was doing. I usually have a plan of attack for something new, but we do some spontaneous free shaping as well that sometimes we work on the next session. If it works, I wanna know why. If it didn't, I wanna know why. If it worked a little, I wanna know why. I cannot rest if I don't have a good idea of what I'm doing and why. I talk to other dog people about it to see if they think my understanding rings true. It's not good enough to think I'm right. I've got to "baptise" it, as Steven Lindsay calls it. Put it out there and see what others think.

It's not that I think long lines are too aversive, just prefer to give him a chance to figure out what he needs to do on his own. He usually gets there. I tried with a tug toy last night and he was bringing it back for a tug without a hint of a parade. I was clicking and rewarding with a tug, but I think I'll shape him to put it right in my hand and then put it on cue and then introduce the ball again once he's ready to generalise it. Thanks folks. :D

Why not just attach the leash to your waist? You don't need to hold it if you're clicker training. You just need to stop her bolting.

I agree with AD. I think it was good for my training skills to persist with Kivi, but what's more, it's very rewarding to see Kivi just getting happier and happier about training. It's lovely to see him blossom and exceed my expectations for him. I don't know if he could ever be a flyball or frisbee monster, though. He makes a good cuddle monster. I wouldn't mind giving him a go at agility to see how right/wrong I am about him, but I would have to actually learn what the hell I'm doing, first. I wouldn't expect him to ever actually do well in competition. He's not very fast, even when he's trying to be. Anyway, it doesn't matter what he is good at and what he isn't. I'm sure he'd be perfectly happy without the extra training, but he's perfectly happy with it as well, and as long as I'm getting a lot out of it it makes sense to do it.

I know loads of people that do really well in competition with dogs of all sorts of drives without depriving them of anything. So no, I do not believe it is necessary. Not based on my experience with Kivi, but based on the experiences of many people. I do think it is necessary with my hare, so it's not like I don't understand what deprivation does. If Bub doesn't want to deprive her dog I'm saying she doesn't have to in order to still have a dog that loves to train. That's where Kivi is a lovely example. He loves to train and I didn't deprive him of anything. This ain't a thread about creating a competition dog out of a mellow teddy bear.

You have it with one of your dogs, as I see it. The other one is just for fun. Although why is beyond me, considering you claim he has high prey drive and you're always saying you want a drivey dog to work with in prey drive. You apparently haven't done anything about his DA? That's not what I would want with my dog. I guess not everyone has the same priorities. For me, drive be damned. I'm looking for a happy dog that really wants to train. I have 100% focus from Kivi (which is all that's numerically possible, as it happens) and I didn't need drive to get it. He's never gonna be a prancer or a tail wagger, even. But when he looks at me with his eyes bright and his tail up and bouncing, I can't help but feel it doesn't get much better than that. He has a different way of expressing his joy and excitement to, say, Erik. But that doesn't mean he's not feeling it. Catching a toy like he did in that video, believe it or not he only does that when he's so excited he can barely contain himself. Any other time and he'll duck. And jumping up? I had to have him sitting right on threshold -as in it was questionable if he could have even done a sit in that state- to teach him that at all, because that's the only time he'll jump. It took months of trying before I found something that could get him excited enough to do it, and it sure as hell wasn't food, or a little deprivation. And it's not something I can use whenever I like because Kivi can't sustain that level of arousal for long. For Kivi, jumping is about the equivalent of Erik breaking a down before being released to leap at the toy in my hand because he's got too aroused to contain himself properly. Understanding Kivi is the hardest thing about training him. I accept that he's never going to be a performance dog, but that doesn't mean he can't find training the funnest thing in the world. It just means he won't look like a dog "in drive" when he does. Who cares? He gets as excited about training as he does about anything in life. I think that's beautiful and I can't wipe the grin off my face when we train together. I think if that's all I want from him, it is the world, and he's given it to me. There's nothing more to ask for and I feel honoured. Bub, I was pretty amazed at how Kivi's motivation increased with a very high reward rate and some jack-potting. It wasn't the treat that mattered, it was how easy the training was and how often he was rewarded.

'Course you did. Did you try a flirt pole as well? My friend says a flirt pole is to test if a dog is alive, but Kivi was afraid of it for the first 2 months. :D

Hah, I thought there'd been a beagle study on it, but I thought maybe I'd made that up. I imagine this is the study Paul was referencing: http://muskrat.middlebury.edu/lt/cr/facult...0NBA%202005.pdf ETA Here's a different one: http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal...=1&SRETRY=0

Meh, I never did that. I don't think it's necessary. Says the woman who is currently deliberately making her hare hungry so he'll be motivated to come out and talk to her... Okay, amend that, I don't think it's necessary for just working with a pet dog unless the dog is in a bad place emotionally and needs motivation to even interact with you. My hare is naturally sort of in that state. He's a herbivore and so doesn't have much motivation to work for food. He knows it'll be there when he's ready for it. For Kivi, all I had to do was make it really easy for him to win treats. I didn't even use amazing treats. Just a very high reward rate for very easy things and built from there. I taught him to target because it's the least stressful way I know to tell him what he needs to do to get a treat. He likes it when it's very easy. The easier it is the more he likes it. When he knows he can win he likes to play the game. Here's a recent video of a little targeting and some tug: There's a bit near the end where the tug kinda hits him on the face and then it's behind him and he has this look on his face that says "....Huh?" Cracks me up. That's my Kivi. He doesn't know what's going on half the time. :D I would hazard a guess that "enriched" means opportunities to perform natural behaviours. It's pretty moderate stuff in the literature. Things to chew on, a more natural substrate if the dog is lucky, being housed with another dog... That sort of thing. Social deprivation in particular can have long-term effects on a social animal's tendency to be anxious.

You don't have to have a routine for your dog to have one. For example, we don't feed our dogs at the same time every morning or evening, but Erik knows all the little signs that lead up to getting fed. That's a routine to him. We go to bed at different times every evening, but before I go to bed I take the dogs outside and let them toilet, then come in and clean my teeth and go to bed. When Erik was younger we had him refuse to go to bed one night because I had a headache and went to bed early, so OH came to bed after me and Erik felt this must mean it wasn't bedtime. I had to literally get up an hour later and do a fake version of my bedtime routine, and then he settled. He learnt that the bedtime routine doesn't have to be performed by me and now he's okay with whoever goes to bed first. In a more relevant example, Erik has a routine for greeting dogs he doesn't know. Kivi also has a routine for this. Erik's routine is moderately flexible. Kivi's is very flexible. Kivi greets strange dogs depending on what he predicts they will do. He has about a half dozen different ways of greeting a strange dog. Erik is still young, so it will be interesting to see if this changes, but he has basically two ways of greeting a strange dog. Recently we had a situation in which Erik's way of talking to a strange dog was not working out very well for him. It upset him. In the same situation, Kivi changed his behaviour and hit on something that did work well for both him and the strange dog. It doesn't upset him much when something that usually works doesn't. He adapts. I'm sure that everyone's dogs fit somewhere on the shy-bold continuum. Routine is just one possible indicator for where they fit.

I would agree with that. It doesn't mean you should spend more time training Bubby and improving his motivation, or that you need to, but the hard dogs teach you things the training nuts can't. I definitely spend more time on Erik than I do on Kivi, but the difference is mostly in what Erik needs to learn that Kivi does naturally. So I spend extra time teaching Erik to lie quietly and that kind of thing, but obviously Kivi can do that very well anyway and doesn't need the training. But when it comes to tricks and fun skills, I spend about the same amount of time with them. Getting Kivi to the point where he really wanted to train took a long time. He was always happy to participate, but it took many months and improving my clicker training skills considerably to get him to really want it. He now sits in the kitchen when I'm training Erik and barks because he wants his turn. He refuses to leave the training area when I tell him it's Erik's turn again. I have to physically push him out and throw treats on the kitchen floor to try to add at least some incentive/reward. He is always ready to train, now, and he always brings all the enthusiasm he's got to a training session. It's not a lot, but it's the best he can do and so I am proud of him. He gets very excited and forgets what to do and I have to baby him along and be patient. I learnt a whole new method of training just to make it less frustrating and therefore more enjoyable for him. I learnt things I have decided to teach Erik as well. Erik can do way more than Kivi can, learns it in a fraction of the time, and does it with a lot more energy. Erik is dead easy to shape, he's creative, persistent, and I kind of wish I'd got him first because he's much easier to clicker train. He gives me lots of things to click and doesn't get frustrated as easily. But Erik is no credit to me as a trainer. He's easy. I'd have to be a particularly bad trainer to not get a lot of Erik. But Kivi I am truly proud of. Training him is hard, and getting enthusiasm out of him even harder. That's how I learn. Overcoming difficulties.

I'm researching coping styles and personality in animals. What surprised me was that pro-active animals that are bold and aggressive are actually not very flexible about coping with changes in their environment. They have one way of dealing with things. In contrast, a shy animal is usually cautious and slow to approach new things, but tend to be quite creative and flexible about coping with changes. Bold animals form rigid routines and shy animals don't so much. For a while I've been trying to figure out just by guessing where my dogs sit on this shy-bold continuum. I had Kivi definitely down on the shy end, although he's quite confident in general. He is not the pro-active or aggressive type. He lets things happen to him and tends to be easily discouraged. I call him an oxytocin fiend, because he likes a lot of social contact and whenever he's worried or unsettled he looks for social contact. He tends and befriends like a woman. ;) I wasn't sure about Erik, though. He can be a bit reactive and easily unsettled. He doesn't approach every novel thing pro-actively, but he doesn't take anything lying down. He has to explore and try to control and make things happen. I wouldn't describe him as having a rigid coping style, but then again, he's very sensitive about his routines. The slightest detail out and he gets all upset. He is improving as he gets older and learns that when a detail is different it's not a whole new situation. So at the moment I'm putting him on the bold end, but not right up in the bold end. Somewhere just above average in boldness. So the question is, is your dog a creature of routine? Do they get particularly upset if their routine is disrupted? And how would you describe their coping style?

Ha, I never even thought of a long line! I do have a couple lying around somewhere. I'd rather get his active cooperation, but we'll see how forthcoming he is with that. Usually he wants to butt into everything I might be doing with the other dog, so the other day when he was doing his victory lap I went and played catch with Kivi, thinking for sure he'd want to be in on that. Nope. He lay on the ground to snuggle and chew his ball. So much for knowing my dog. I think he won't need loads of shaping and motivation. He's a good, social player usually. And he's very clever. Just gotta find the right way to ask. I am sure it would be perfectly easy with food, but I like using play rewards to teach play rules. It just kinda makes sense. Thanks everyone.

Maybe you could do a toy on a rope. That way you can incorporate throwing the toy with tug afterwards.