corvus

But off leash reliability is something different again. You can have a dog that is perfectly reliable off leash but still pulls on leash.

Well... I don't disagree, but a lot of people never stop using a tool and I don't see why they should, particularly. I mean, a leash and flat collar are tools. My mother walks two of her three dogs on head collars. At one point she tried the older one without the head collar and she started pulling again in a couple of days, unsurprisingly. She is quite happy to just keep them on the head collars indefinitely. They are habituated to them and don't try to paw them off. In fact, they associate them with walkies and will happily shove their heads into them impatiently if you pick them up. So from her perspective, there's no reason to wean them off. They are just pet dogs and are not ever going to be in competition. The tools are not impacting at all on the health or welfare of the dogs and enable pleasant, loose leash walking. I would be reticent to resort to a similar tool in the first place and would definitely aim to wean them off, but that's me and my priorities.

Does he know how to target? I am currently using a nose target to coax Erik into aggreeing to have his harness put on every morning. For some unknown reason he utterly loathes the process of it being put on and hides under the bed, although once it's on he's fine. So I get the tastiest treat we have and get him to target my finger through the harness so he puts his head through voluntarily. Then he gets some cooked steak as a reward. I'm all for counter-conditioning in fear periods. Sometimes you can just ignore it and it'll go away, but sometimes they need a little help.

What if you put the 5/8" collar on the dog at the same time as the body harness, but attached the leash to the harness? Or the 3/4" collar for that matter, presuming they both fit on at the same time. If the dog had "back-chained" and reaslied that getting the 5/8" collar put on led to those rules, could he generalise just from that action?

Habits in themselves are reinforcing IMO. Habits are safe and comfortable/rewarding, or they would never have become habits. If you take away the reward that encouraged the habit you still haven't taken away the feeling of safety of the behaviour. In a sense the habitual behaviour could act as a setting effect, or establishing operation.

My dogs are absolutely fine about being left alone inside, but are absolutely not fine being left alone outside. My older one was fine outside for 9 months, then one day started barking and didn't stop until I came home. Very mysterious. He now panics if someone shuts that gate in the rear yard while he's in it. Happy to snooze all day indoors, though, so that's what he does. I think if I had to I could gradually get him comfortable with being in the yard again, but given they both spend so much time indoors with us anyway, they often find outdoor noises something to bark at anyway. So they stay in and the neighbours are happy.

So true. Whenever I have watched wolves interacting with each other on documentaries, or seen photos, I've always been struck by the complexity of their body language compared to dogs. It seems to me that there are layers of subtlety that just don't exist in dogs. Or at least, they don't seem to exist in most dogs, even the very well socialised ones. At around the time I was thinking this, it occurred to me that my hare was talking "baby-talk" to me because it was the only thing I was capable of understanding. He had taken to using really obvious, exaggerated body language whenever he wanted something. So then I get to talking to this Canaan Dog breeder and I was asking how they get along with other dogs. They have a reputation for dog aggression. She said most are never going to be social butterflies, but the problem is often that they "whisper", meaning they use very subtle signals and other dogs rarely notice and then get nailed because they didn't back off. That really struck a chord with me, and I wondered if the average dog speaks "baby" wolf, and the traits we see in natural breeds like dog aggression, territoriality, and whispering are traits of a dog grown up?

I haven't read it, so I'm not sure. I thought it was that group that did it, though, so I looked again and found this paper: That looks like the one I was thinking of. This goup in Hungary have been criticised and especially by Coppinger. But then, Coppinger has been criticised by a lot of scientists as well. That's not to say the Coppingers' theory on dog domesitication doesn't have a lot of merit, though. I think maybe Ray Coppinger's missing the point with his criticisms of Csanyi's group... if I understand correctly. I was under the impression that he thought they were setting up experiments to prove a point, which was that dogs are very smart. IMO, it doesn't really make any difference in this particular case. They were testing whether socialised dogs and socialised wolves behave the same way towards humans when faced with an unsolvable problem and the answer was no, they don't. Dogs look back at humans more. I guess it's worth considering that this idea of dogs being able to understand human communications better than wolves doesn't sit well with the Coppingers' pariah dog theory of dog evolution. I find most of the Csanyi group's papers to be pretty sound and with convincing conclusions, but maybe that's just me.

And this one shows that fox kits selectively bred for 45 years for fearless and non-aggressive behaviour towards humans match dog puppies in their ability to read human communicative gestures, and are better at it than fox kits that haven't been selectively bred. http://www.cell.com/current-biology/retrie...960982205000928

Here's another similar one: http://scienceonline.org/cgi/content/abstr...i;298/5598/1634

I do believe the study with the wolf cubs vs puppies did have hand-raised wolf cubs in it. Well, I think there has been a few. This one is the one I was thinking of: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=A...157066edf268788

Those JRTs are clever! Erik has been known to use stairs and ramps to build up momentum for slamming into Kivi. We don't have many stairs in this place but there is a short flight in my parents' house. The first time he stayed there he climbed to the top of the stairs, then ran down and crunched into Kivi at the bottom. Then he turned around and climbed to the top and did it again, only faster. On the third or fourth go Kivi got tired of being rammed and finally moved, putting an end to that game. I still don't think Erik is a brilliant problem-solver, though. He tries a lot of things out and is pretty creative and very persistent. I don't know whether creativity and problem-solving especially go hand-in-hand. I guess the best problem-solvers are creative, but in this case we're talking about problems that don't require a great deal of creativity, just a higher level of cognition.

Kivi used to sleep in the rain when he was a pup. I sometimes think he likes the cold weather, but perhaps he doesn't actually feel it. He's been doing a lot of rolling around on cold, wet grass lately. And standing in puddles. And we have been having some particularly boisterous games of late. Yesterday the pair of them had such a rough game of chase and wrestle going on in the dog park that no dog was game to approach them. They were knocking each other flying and crashed into me at one point. I was quick and didn't end up on the ground, but I did scream.

I get them on the couch, sit on a chair behind them with a notepad, then ask them about their parents... It soon comes out. I daresay it becomes apparent they all have an Oedipus complex, too.

I think ideally you would have a balance, but it just doesn't work like that for any dog. Kivi and Erik have been raised much the same way, but where Erik will try a dozen different ways to get what he wants (he just ran through about 4 different nuisance behaviours to try to magic the door open so he could go to the toilet in the yard), Kivi wants human help and guidance in most things. He's not creative and he just stares at something and presumably hopes someone will come along and fix it for him. The other day he was poking in the garden after coming back from the park and we went into the yard without him. He didn't come when called, and I could see him, so I went to investigate and he had walked into a vine that was across his chest. He figured he was stuck and didn't even try to get himself free. Just waited for me to come and get the vine out of the way. Pathetic. But he did heaps of free shaping as a youngster same as Erik. He's just a passive dog. He accepts things. He has had all the training that should have made a problem solver out of him, but it didn't.

But see, the thing is I don't think they do know to look to humans to solve their problems for any particular reason. They do it because they are hard-wired to do it. I can't remember who said it, now, but some researcher was looking at the differences between wolves and dogs and they said the difference is puppies look at people, and wolf cubs don't. Boiling it down to fundamentals, obviously. Puppies look at people in situations where wolf cubs don't. I do think that we can teach our dogs to be good problem solvers, but I don't think we can change that fundamental propensity to look at us, and I don't think we would want to. We've spent thousands of years breeding that into dogs. Furthermore, I don't think we can teach a wild animal to be helplessly dependent the way we can teach domestic animals to be helplessly dependent on us. I have provided everything for my hare since I got him at about a week old and he doesn't just wait around for things to appear. He is proactive about having his needs met. He gets my attention. That simple little action seems like it's not so different to what dogs do, but IMO when my dogs need or want something they might give me signs, but it's rare for them to actively seek me out and try to communicate what they need. The closest I've seen is Erik bringing his empty water container to me and kicking it around. But I couldn't say that he didn't just find the water container was empty and start playing with it and haphazardly end up doing that near me because of his innate attraction to hanging out with people. I would consider a dog good at shaping a good problem solver, but not on the same level as a wild animal. My mum has a very smart dog that is a great problem solver. He climbs onto the bbq to lick the plate afterwards. First time he did it he burnt his paws and his tongue. You'd think that would have deterred him, but he just went up a while later and tested it first. So now he will test the heat of the plate very carefully before he commits. If it's too hot he comes back 10 minutes later and tries again. This blew me away, because most dogs I know if they get fed a sausage that is too hot they leave it and never try to eat it even when it's cold. It's like they think if it was hot once it will always be hot.

If you learn yourself how to do a basic exam and you know what is normal you can by pass the vet visit as long as if you do pick something up which is out of whack you take em off for a check up. I don't vaccinate anything past its first year booster - which I give them myself. This was the recomendation from my girls breeder, they don't vaccinate past the 12 month booster. Sorry for the hijack, but am i right in assuming that after they get a vaccination at 1 year old, they don't need another vacc for the rest of their life? If so, how many people here does it? Everybody that's well informed about vaccinations I would say. Whoa, hold on, speak for yourself. Just because I don't follow the same vaccination schedule as you doesn't mean I'm not well informed about vaccinations. I've read all the info available and spoken to my vet about it and made my choice. It was an informed choice.

Here's a nice report on a journal article about how dogs' problem solving skills compare to Dingoes'. http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/201...tm#artBookmarks I love this because for ages I wanted my hare in dog form. It took a while for me to realise that a lot of the things my hare can do that I love so much and find so amazing are things he can only do because he's a wild animal. He is not a smart animal the way a dog is smart, but I've often said he has a kind of animal genius to him when it comes to problem solving. For a not very bright, solitary prey animal it blows me away what he can do. Erik is one of the smartest dogs I've met, but when he has a problem he looks for a human to solve it for him. Or he just defaults to thwacking it with his paw and jabbing it with his nose. If he pokes and thwacks enough, usually something will happen sooner or later. Kivi is not a problem solver. He has no motivation for it. Life just happens to him. If he stares at it long enough someone will probably come and sort it out for him. I know there was a study done on the problem solving skills of different breeds. I seem to remember the Basenjis and Beagles kicked ass over the working breeds when it came to working out problems without human help. How does your breed go with problem solving? Edited for heinous grammar.

We go in for annual checkups. Sometimes more often if there are any minor concerns. We do annual vaccinations anyway, but even if we didn't we would take them in at least yearly for a checkup.

And keep the reward rate really high. You should find he's more interested in training if he's getting a treat every couple of seconds. I like to have a dismiss cue so I can tell them to go and do what they like. That way when they're training they're always nice and focused on it because I dismiss them before their attention wavers. You can increase the time you ask for his attention when he's ready.

I have heard the same, that not all dogs are affected, but that it causes renal failure in those that are. When Kivi was young he ate half a packet of Neurofen (I have no idea where he got them from). I was away from home and just had OH on the phone telling me he was throwing up but was otherwise acting fine. He didn't know about the Neurofen. He took Kivi to the vets and he stayed overnight, but they didn't think anything was seriously amiss. I got home 2 days later and found a chewed up packet of Neurofen in the bedroom. Called the vets, trained it into the city to pick up the car from OH, raced back, took Kivi to the vet and he had tests of kidney function done. They hospitalised him and aggressively hydrated him for the next 24 hours until his kidney function was back to normal. They said no permanent damage, and he may have recovered fully without the treatment, but it was better to not risk it and treat it aggressively as it wasn't going to hurt him if they did.

What would be evidence that someone did secretly like it? For a while I wondered if I did and I wasn't sure. But then, I was a teenager at the time and wasn't very sure of anything emotionally.

But equally, sometimes you can very much want to change the dog's possessive behaviour and it's just not that easy. I spent 13 years with my old girl trying everything I could think of to stop the possessiveness. I did not like that I couldn't talk to the other dogs or my cat without her getting snarky at them. I'd get up and leave as soon as she did it and she'd go and sulk. We would simmer at each other and it never did a scrap of good. I tried teaching her she could indeed get a pat at the same time as one of the other animals, but she'd forget about that the next time she was feeling possessive. I often heard the "you secretly like it" line and I did some soul searching and really, no, I didn't like it. Not anywhere deep in the darkness of my soul. There was no grain of truth to it. I never sanctioned it or did anything to encourage it. I spent years rousing on her or sending her away the moment she so much as stiffened when another animal was approaching. It wasn't until my last year with her that I finally tried giving her some alone time with me before she got snarky that I started to make some headway. I found it stressful to be so important to a dog, and it was probably a big factor in driving me towards independent breeds. I have no doubt that some people do like it. I remember this dog the neighbours had when we were kids. She wandered the streets and was taught by the kids to "sick" other dogs. It being about the only thing they ever tried to teach her, it became the default behaviour around other dogs to just fly at them. It was so sad, because she was the sweetest-natured thing and she certainly didn't start out that way. When the kids moved away she got worse, until you would have to chase her away if she came near you when you had your dogs with you. Eventually someone else in the neighbourhood took her in, but she never did stop picking fights with other dogs. But I feel bad for people that genuinely don't like it when their dog behaves jealously or possessive of them and end up with folk that suggest they secretly like it deep down. It doesn't especially bother me, but I think it would if someone had ever said it to my face. It's a bit rough to struggle with a problem and then have it suggested that you secretly like it and that's why you can't fix it.

Lots of folk take the path of least resistance. There's nothing wrong with it. If it really matters to her more than avoiding conflict, then it's up to her to do something about it.

This sounds really interesting, Corvus. Could you expand a little? I could try. I'm doing a literature review on anxiety in dogs at the moment, and Maintenance Stimuli came up in one paper related to separation anxiety. The general gist of it is a dog comes to associate a set of stimuli with comfort and security. This is how they know that everything is normal and they are safe. In some cases of hyperattachment, the dog comes to depend on one person as the big thing in their MS set. So when the person leaves them alone they become anxious and can't feel safe and secure. Obviously, there are degrees to which this would be expressed, thought to be dependent on how broad the MS set is. A very broad MS set makes for a balanced dog that doesn't get upset if one thing from the set is removed. In the paper I was reading about this, several approaches to reducing the potency of one person's presence were suggested, such as ignoring attention-seeking behaviour, dividing tasks so that other people are doing some of the feeding and walking and so forth, encouraging independent activities (like tackling Kongs) and increasing tolerance of separation by practising moving around without the dog following. That's the basics, but this kind of thing is quite complicated with a lot of different factors. It's also necessary to identify and remove other things the dog associates with not having their person around, and setting up things they can learn to associate with their person that they can have when the person leaves them. That's an attempt to broaden the MS set. You mentioned that in this scenario the special person might have been away for a long time. My previous dog grew to become very needy and snappy when I returned from long absences. I was at uni and would only visit in the holidays. She became very clued in to cues that told her I was leaving and would start getting anxious. She was fine a day or two after I left, but when I came back again she'd go through another period of being clingy and snapping at any animal that came too close. I think it was hard on her to have me leave often and for long periods. I think it's important to consider the effect anticipation is having on the behaviour and arousal. It's potent stuff, but not terribly hard to derail IME if you muddle the cues the dog is using. I have a dog that is very alert and can get totally out of control if he comes to anticipate big rewards. It helps to give him a routine of calm behaviour in NILIF. I lean heavily on downs, which he can do when he's highly aroused, but often have a calming effect on him.