corvus

Kivi likes puppets. He's more of a wrestler than a tugger, but geez, his eyes light up for puppets. His favourite thing in the world is this giant, floppy-limbed, hairy orang-utan puppet that he pulled out of a pile of junk during a roadside cleanup. It even squeaks! He rarely gets to play with that puppet, but it has never failed to get him going yet. Erik pulled a leg off it recently and was so chuffed with himself he basically did victory laps and then sat underneath the shelf where I put the leg and barked at it for the next half an hour. I wanted to get one of those toys with all the bits attached with velcro, but I can't find them anywhere.

Well, I think there's a balance. Kivi was completely useless in puppy class if he was expected to not interact with the other puppies at all. I got quite frustrated about it, because there were other puppies in the class that wanted to play with him and they weren't allowed, so I would spend the whole class with a puppy that was turning himself inside out and barking and carrying on because he was in a state of such frustration. If he'd been allowed just ten minutes of supervised play and/or greeting with puppies that were up for it he would have been much easier to handle and much less disruptive the whole class. In that same situation Erik would have been quite happy. I don't think there is a cookie cutter approach to socialising puppies. You do what suits your puppy. Some puppies are born social butterflies and others need a more gentle approach. Whatever the case, I think they should just be allowed to go at their own pace, and if there are a couple of puppies that are around the same place and want to play, then let them play.

But you haven't met Kivi, Lyn. He was a pretty painfully cute puppy.

I did the same as Kavik for Erik. For Kivi I captured it with the clicker. Of course, I didn't practise it much so now both of them have practically forgotten it.

I think socialisation is an ongoing progress as well, Puppy_Sniffer. A lot of emphasis is put on that socialisation period, but that whole first two years is important if you ask me. I have taken a small, frightened puppy to an off leash dog park. It amazes me how many people do it and with far less care than I did and their dogs end up wonderfully appropriate anyway. I knew the dogs I was dealing with, and I knew they wouldn't hurt him even by accident and that they wouldn't chase him if he ran away, but I kept him on a short leash anyway. I think it's a must for puppies in parks at first. I always wince when people bring puppies in and just let them go. Still, most of them adjust. Just not the way I'd do it.

Thanks everyone. I think I'll just have to tether him shorter and put up with the inevitable barking when he wants to get up and can't. I'll try giving him a Kong on the long trip this week and see if that keeps him busy.

It was a bit abstract and badly explained even for me! I could find the paper, but I have a feeling it's probably harder to follow than I am. Stupid psychology papers. Maybe just forget about that. :D What you need is an establishing operation (she says, after telling you to forget about psychology). A cue that tells him "We're about to play tug and it's gonna be SO awesome." The tricky bit I guess is not ruining it by using it when he's actually not going to play tug, or when it won't be awesome. Eh, I'm going to shutup. I'm sure other people have ways of explaining it that are less confusing and have fewer analogies and visualisations (and psychology).

Also from what I've been reading there are two ways to increase arousal: physical exercise and heightened emotional state. You can put a dog in a heightened POSITIVE emotional state (which is obviously what you want rather than a negative emotional state) by teaching them to anticipate a reward.

At the risk of sounding like a nutter and making everyone go "That corvus has no freaking idea".... This fascinates me. What I have in my head is a bit of a branch diagram with behaviours branching off levels of arousal. It's not until the arousal branch lights up that you can get the behaviour on a branch below it. Arousal can feed arousal and it's possible to bind a behaviour with a level of arousal using a cue so that the cue lights up the arousal branch and then you get the behaviour... Yeah, it really does sound confusing and loopy. Anyway, the way I understand it is arousal is a strong predictor of what behaviours are likely to happen in the near future. Some only occur when arousal is at an elevated level. When I watch Kivi especially, there's a definite point where the right arousal level has been reached and all of a sudden he'll jump for a tug and try to catch things instead of ducking. There's a theory somewhere about thresholds that explains it better, I think, but it's like a waterwheel, or group decisions. When enough buckets are filled the whole thing suddenly kicks into motion. Or it's not until a critical number of animals in a group are doing something that the whole group will follow - that accounts for individuals that make bad choices. These days I don't try to tug with Kivi unless I can tell he already has enough arousal to want to do it. There's no point. I play with Erik first, who is much more easily aroused, and Kivi gets aroused watching us and comes out raring to go. If I then pair that with a cue, and provided I have played my cards right and don't use the cue until it's good and conditioned and end games before Kivi loses his motivation to play, and have generalised it well, I should find Kivi will get to that level of arousal he needs to tug if I cue it... The hiccup is that Kivi is very mellow and sometimes the cue is not enough to get him aroused. I see the same thing occasionally with Erik, usually when Erik is distracted by other things or if he is under the influence of a stronger cue, like that at 10am on a weekday if he's at home he's sleeping, for example. In my mind, to solve Erik's hiccups I should generalise the cue more. Lots of really quick games and dismiss before he can get distracted. To solve Kivi's... I dunno if I can. I can say with conditioning Kivi tugs much more reliably now than he ever has before, but I wouldn't depend on him tugging any time, and not for more than 30 seconds, necessarily.

It can be a bit of a balancing act. My family had a puppy at one stage that was terrified of puppy class and the class instructor insisted that he be put on the ground and expected to get over it. It was the worse thing for that puppy and the damage that was done was never overcome. I do believe he was always going to be particularly sharp, as he was very shy and had a very low bite threshold and a rigid, aggressive coping style from the day he got home at 8 weeks old, but he became outright dangerous to people and other dogs by the time he was 12 months old. A lot of work was done to try to overcome that early experience and get him on the right track with socialisation, but it was an exercise in futility. He was scared of everything new and his response was always aggression. It was impossible to control the environment to the extent that he needed it controlled. When I got Erik at 9 weeks, I saw in him echoes of this earlier pup. He was a little timid and there were indications that he wouldn't hesitate to use his teeth if pushed. So I never pushed him. He went to puppy school and didn't want to interact with the other dogs. I didn't make him. We stayed in a corner away from them and he was okay. In later weeks he gradually came out of his shell, but he never did play with any of the other puppies (although he roundly told off the Leonberger puppy for trying to take his pig snout). I took him to the dog park a lot and he didn't play with any of the dogs there either, and that was fine. It wasn't until he was 6 months old and had met my mum's Sheltie and had fun with her that he suddenly decided other dogs were fun. Now he's a year old today and he's very social, plays with any sized dog and behaves very appropriately all the time. I can safely push him a little bit, now, and I'm proud as punch at how far he has come and how well balanced he is. So to make a long story short, I think there are benefits to be had from being exposed to other dogs even if the puppy doesn't want to interact. It's good for them to learn that they don't have to interact. It's not necessarily a terrible thing to learn that some puppies are mean, as long as it's balanced with learning that most puppies and other dogs are not mean. If it were me, I would probably use it as an opportunity to teach my puppy that he needn't interact with any dogs he doesn't want to interact with and keep him on the periphery well within his comfort zone.

You could try training a "calm" cue. Pair it with massage and the likes at home. Erik used to get wound up and stay wound up for hours. It was like he was unable to calm down again after something exciting happened. I did impulse control and chill out exercises with him, where I taught him to get excited with a 20 second game of tug or something, then got him to down and said my calm cue and waited until his tail went down and he started blinking more, then I'd get him excited again. We practised going up and down in arousal. Giving him things to concentrate on when he was really aroused helped as well. If I ask him for something easy it often helps him focus. I'm pretty sure the massage regime saved our lives. He would get so wired when he was younger! The massage alone went a long way towards a more calm dog. If my dogs go over threshold on a walk I wait them out on the spot. We go nowhere until they can give me a sit or down. If they can do that they can give me a heel.

I've heard of people collecting rabbit poo and putting it in a container with holes and using that as a reward. Premack tends to work pretty well, but it takes time to build up the restraint long enough, and doesn't deal with the problem in the long run, just serves to control it. As long as there's a chance that the dog can bugger off and get rewarded it's probably going to be really hard to conquer. There was a case study like this in Control Unleashed with a Vizsla and horse poo. They used gates to fence the dog off from piles of horse poo and worked on building up basic skills close to the horse poo. The handler did more work on targeting and focus exercises and also brought peanut butter in as a reward, as the dog was nuts about it. Her dog would break off halfway through a sequence to race off and eat horse poo, so she only did half a sequence and gradually built the dog up to cope with working around poo.

I shortened his tether considerably today and he "rebelled" by diving over the hammock and then trying to squirm back onto the seat through the straps that attach the hammock to the headrests in front. It was only a 5 minute car trip, so presumably he wasn't feeling carsick. Just being a brat. I'm amazed that he could do it considering he didn't have enough length in the tether to get his front paws on the middle console where he likes to rest them. It occurs to me that we have a nice LATCH bar on the back of the seat and a seriously heavy duty ute tie out that has clips that open outwards instead of inwards. Maybe if I use that attached to the top of the seat he will have the freedom to sit up or lie down and change position but won't be able to dive over the hammock. I think it would help if the hammock was sturdier and didn't just fold underneath his weight... I'm not real keen on valium. The main problem is getting to training, which is nearly an hour's drive. I don't want him zonked out for training. I shall have a look around at airline crates. As though we need more crates in this house! ETA Good point, Kavik. Maybe it would only take a few weeks of crating him to get him out of the habit in the first place.

Hmm, that insert sounds like it might be a winner. I so don't have a crash safe crate. Thanks guys.

I'm sure our vet wrote that down for us somewhere... If I remember correctly, we were giving Penny half a tablet, although she only needed about a third. It's hard to cut a tablet into threes. She was about 10kg. I'll have a look around and see if I can find the dosage the vet recommended.

Thanks PF. I thought at first he might be feeling sick and let him stay down there. He lasted about 5 minutes and then came back up. Then went back down. Then came back up. Jury's out. He often gets sleepy in the car and will snooze for about an hour. It's when he wakes up after his snooze that he'll get restless and start messing around. He also tries to climb into the front and repeatedly jams his head under the driver's elbow, presumably trying to get leaverage to pull himself into the front. Also not cool at 110. He messes around for a while and then settles down again. I thought he might need to toilet, but apparently not. He usually travels well, likes to watch out the front windscreen. He never looks seedy the way Kivi used to when he was carsick. Sounds like he's going to have to be crated. Is there some way to secure a crate in a car so it's safe if there was a crash?

I have a slight problem. A certain spirited Vallhund likes to make his own fun in the car on longer trips. This often involves him wriggling over the backseat hammock and down behind the front seats. He is attached to a seatbelt at the time, so he'll end up dangling there, kicking the driver seat and squirming around. He has managed a couple of times to get the clip that attaches his harness to the seatbelt buckle stuck on the hammock and has subsequently got free. Kinda dangerous when going 110. So I attached him to one of the anchor points in the boot, and it took him all of 5 minutes to somehow get out of his harness and appear next to me in the front. Apparently he doesn't like being in the boot. So I double-clipped him on the back seat again and made sure everything was super tight and he had no freedom to even sit up, and that seemed to sort him out. At least, temporarily. I seem to remember last time I made the seatbelt attachment really short he was still able to reach the edge of the hammock and dive over it. So, at the moment he's going to be travelling in his crate when someone is driving him on their own. I do not know how this will go or if I will want to make that a permanent. I don't know if I trust its safety. I'd kinda prefer for him to be restrained by a seatbelt. And OH has paranoia about dogs in the boot after being rear-ended last year. The boot doesn't get much of a look-in when it comes to crash safety. He's infected me with his paranoia, now. My question is, if I got a heavier hammock like a Backseat Buddy, do you think he'd still be able to get over it to wriggle down between the hammock and the front seats?

Sometimes Erik gets hyper-vigilant when he's upset by something. He would get unsettled by a strange noise, then for hours afterwards he would jump up to bark at any noise he heard. The more he barked, the more sensitive he became. Giving him something to do when he feels this way that he can be rewarded for helped a lot. I'm amazed at the progress we've made in such a short time. Since I started the bark-then-bed routine, his hyper-vigilant bouts are all gone. He hates the cleaners coming and vacuuming his house, but now he can lie on his bed while they are here. Used to be he would bark the whole time and follow them around, but now he only barks when the guy with the vacuum cleaner comes close to the study. Used to be the cleaners visiting would mean he'd spend the rest of the day barking at anything at all. Now he settles as soon as they are gone. Huge progress. Wish I'd started sooner. I think you've got to stop these barking bouts before they take off and become self-perpetuating. I wouldn't let Erik bark for more than a couple of minutes without interrupting him. If he hasn't stopped in 2 minutes chances are it's just going to get worse.

It's a hard one! I can only say what I've found to work with my boy, who also barks a lot. My neighbours hate barking dogs, and I was getting royally sick of getting up every 5 minutes to tell him to shut up or bring him inside. I keep his bed next to my computer and some treats on my desk. When he would bark I would call him, he'd come inside and I'd tell him to lie on the bed and reward him. No clickers, as they make him too excited and I was trying to reward for calm behaviour. I would say nothing and just pop him lots of treats while I was working. Over time, he started to associate having a little bark with going to lie down and getting treats. He would outside to bark, bark for about ten seconds, then come inside on his own, lie down on his bed and waits for his treats. I started I think 2 or 3 weeks ago. I no longer have to call him back inside. He now barks for about 5 seconds and comes in on his own. Sometimes he doesn't settle and just keeps going out for a bark, then coming back in to lie down for a bit. I think that this happens when he is all active and has excess energy. Often giving him a massage and increasing the reward rate for a bit helps him to settle. Or I close the door and keep him inside for a while and he'll settle. At the moment, he gets about 3 treats when he comes to lie down and usually he goes to sleep not long after. It sure is making life at home more pleasant, and it gives him something positive to do when he gets worked up. It surprised me how little time it took. He was dramatically better within 3 days. I find that if I can figure out what I want him to do rather than what I don't want him to do, I'm more than halfway there. I thought, I don't want him to bark all the time, but what would I like him to be doing instead? I'd like him to be chilling in his bed in the study with me. So that's what I taught him to do. He still barks and I think he always will, but I rarely have to get up to do something about it, now. It doesn't impact on my study, which it really was before! I have very little tolerance for nuisance barking, so if it goes for a couple of minutes I get cross. Don't get cross with him much anymore.

I carried a stick everywhere when I was doing field work in Mexico. For the rabid foxes. I never did meet one, at least, not when I had the stick. Turns out rabid foxes are only dangerous for a very short period of time and I was lucky this one was not in that period. I doubt the stick would have done much, anyway. Foxes are fast and if you miss with the stick once you're in trouble. Then we found out there were rabid bobcats around as well. Glad I didn't meet one of those. Met a bear, but it was happy to leave me be. Anyway, I know someone that carried an electric cattle prod for a while. Supposedly citronella spray can help, but from what I've heard it's usually useless if the dog is actually attacking. I'd carry a spare leash. If you are unfortunate enough to meet it again and it goes for your dog, you can loop the leash around its waist and drag it to the nearest thing you can tie it to. Then you can get your dog free and you have the problem dog restrained so it can be picked up by the ranger.

You could try to set up a park with membership like they do in the States. Some of them have keycard entry. If someone's dog plays up they can always get their membership revoked. Incidentally, it's adaptive for people to have a negative judgement bias in these cases. I make mistakes where I think it won't be all right and then it is, but I have never judged it would be okay and it wasn't. I have learnt to watch my dogs. They have better judgement about other dogs than I do, because they are dogs. They have taught me that most of the time when I freak out actually nothing bad is going to happen. It's hard to trust them, and I won't until they are socially mature, but then it's worth it. I learn when to freak out and when not to. ETA there's a lady that brings 3 Chis to our dog park. They don't want to play with my dogs, but they will come over and greet. They seem to quite enjoy the park. It's big and unfenced, so if they don't want to interact with other dogs they generally don't have to. I doubt they will ever be confident playing with bigger dogs, but one of Erik's best pals is a little SWF that started out hating the dog park. He now tears around like a maniac and doesn't even mind if Kivi joins Erik in chasing him around at high speed. He gets rolled sometimes and just bounces to his feet and keeps going. I am in awe of him. He is the most confident little dog I've ever seen, and when his owners told me they got him from the pound and he started out terrified of other dogs my jaw dropped. I've known small dogs that were raised with large dogs that are quite confident with strange big dogs as well.

Here's Kivi watching tv: He was doing lots of cute head cocks because there was a dog crying on the show. That's the only time he's ever paid much attention to the tv. Although he went through an odd phase where he would leap up barking madly whenever there was a little electronic sound in a show. It was the bomb activator on the last Batman movie that started it all. Watching Torchwood or Dr Who became difficult! Erik on the other hand is frequently interested in what's on television. He especially dislikes bears, apparently. I often wonder if different breeds have instinctive fears.

Okay, I went to the pet store, got completely overwhelmed by all the kibble options (there's a kibble specifically for Shih Tzus??) and ended up opting for Nutro lamb and rice because it came in the smallest bag I could get. And there was a Nutro lady there who was all like "If they don't like it you can bring it back and get your money back." Although I asked her what percentage of it was actually dried meat and she could only tell me "Probably most seeing as it's the first ingredient." And then I made her open a sample packet so I could smell it and I always hated it when I worked in retail and customers made me do things like unroll a swag and then say "thanks" and walk off without buying anything. I couldn't find anything that was recommended on here in a small packet and I kinda needed it urgently. I'm definitely going to try them all eventually, though. Erik approves of the Nutro, but then, he was in the kind of mood that will see him jump up and down for a kind word, so I guess we'll see when we start using it in more trying situations. Thanks again everyone.

I think my dogs care more about how close we are than what exactly we do. I play tug with them, or toss toys in the air for them to catch, and lie on the ground with them and push them around. They climb on me and roll around on their backs for belly rubs. We have quiet times as well. Cuddles, brushing, massages. They love training best, though. Well, maybe tug best, but I like teaching them things as long as I'm rewarding them with something. Mine sleep all day, mostly. They get an off leash run in the park in the mornings before work and I often go to the gym in the afternoon after work, then come home and play with them or do some training. I used to jog with Kivi, but he's too lazy! I think Erik might be a good jogging companion once he's old enough, though.

Thanks guys. I got the MM from Amazon, but they don't ship them to Oz, so I had to get it sent to a Bongo address and forwarded over.