corvus

With a clicker. We got bored of it, though. Erik is pretty short, so he kept swinging his butt out so he could look up at me. So I taught him to pivot his back end around with a box to put his front feet on. I did that for way too long, so it took me longer to get him to pivot on flat ground. I ended up having a folded blanket and a phonebook and heeled between them so he had something to pivot around when we turned. Learnt from the box and took them away as soon as he'd got the idea. It was about that point that we mutually decided competition heels were tedious and let's do some tricks instead. I still use heels as a "settle down and concentrate" kind of exercise for him, but have probably let the precision slip quite a bit from the far-from-perfect initial sloppyness. I never finish anything! The fun thing about pivots is it looks really cool. And sometimes I can get Erik to heel backwards, which I think is freaking awesome. If I were going to persist with the formal heeling I'd be clicking lots more and only when he's in good position and looking at me. You get what you reinforce. And I'd be generalising that position with lots of sideways steps and backwards and pivots. And I'd practice my footwork without him! Hmm... maybe I'll go back to heels and perfect the backwards and sideways heels. :D That sounds fun.

I think there's a lot more to selecting a training approach with a particular dog than just how stressful the approach is likely to be. More important, I think, is how the dog is able to cope with that stress. I can put Erik through stress in training and he'll work harder, or he'll slow himself down to get more control of his movements. I have to be more careful with Kivi. Also, you have to remember that just getting out of bed in the morning sets off a very small stress response. Here's the abstract from an interesting paper showing how stress can affect learning through shaping or classical conditioning:

I don't think so. I thought we were talking about physically placing the dog in the position we want. In SATS training you use targeting to place the dog in the exact position you want. It's extremely precise, but I wouldn't call it GSP. It's bridge and target. I don't think it's bad. I am just surprised it is still used. It's pretty low on the list of things I would try because I like it when the dogs can think something through. Plus I've had people try to teach me things that way before and found it annoying, frustrating, and difficult to grasp what I was meant to do. Even when I was told I was right I didn't quite believe it and wasn't sure what part of the position was important and what wasn't. Plus I try to resist the temptation to use my hands on my dogs when I want them to do something because I find it to be a pitfall for me and I think it unbalances them and takes control away from them, which isn't very fun. And if you use that method exclusively it tends to result in a tactile cue that is really difficult to wean them off. I do have a dog that is stressed by free shaping and isn't very creative or confident in training and that's why I switched to targeting. He thinks it's the best fun and gets very excited about it. It's adorable. I confess I tried GSP with him ever so briefly. I thought seeing as he was so tactile he might like it. He didn't. Then aren't you essentially teaching them more cues than they need and then letting several disappear by way of extinction? Why not just teach them the one they need to begin with? If I'm luring I try to pick a cue that will look like the lure and morph it real fast. Food comes out of the hand as soon as we can get, like, 3 correct reps in a row. Incidentally, Erik is a crazy cue discriminating nut and learns one cue in such minute detail that repeating the cue to his criteria is a hit and miss affair. That's what you get when you have a dog that learns from one mark and reward, apparently. If I hold off putting a cue to it until he's really good at the new behaviour then he is better able to learn the general cue with all its minute variations because it's more like a generalising exercise than reteaching the behaviour for a dozen natural variations to the cue.

My heart goes out to you and your family. We always want to find someone to blame when these things happen, and sometimes we can't find anyone, so it has to be ourselves. But you said it yourself, it doesn't bring her back. I think it is the sign of a responsible owner to want to take responsibility even for things that are just plain bad luck. I can appreciate what it must be like for your parents. A few years ago I was away in remote Mexico when my pet rabbit contracted Myxo while in the care of my mother. She had to be pts. I was devastated, but the worst of it was that I couldn't even talk to my mother on the phone and tell her that I didn't blame her and I know she did everything she could and I was just grateful that she saw it early so my Kat didn't suffer. My mum was wracked with guilt. I don't think it would have helped if I could have spoken to her, but it was distressing for me that my mum felt so guilty. I think it's part of the grieving process. At least you have your parents home, now, so you can share your grief. It is harder without that social support.

Get a vet behaviourist to see him. Anxiety is a really complex problem and the symptoms can be caused by different things. I think it pays to get it properly diagnosed and get a treatment program prepared especially for him.

Thanks Pippi! I'll add them in. I can always skip columns if it's not particularly relevant or I don't care for that one behaviour. I want to get a chicken to train.

Really? How come? The only thing I've ever changed when I up the distractions is the reward rate and the criteria. The method stays the same. I find reliability to be a function of reward history more than anything. I don't think I understand this idea of using two ways to train one behaviour. If you need two ways the first one didn't work? I think I'm going to go crawl back under the rock I have apparently been living under. This thread is doing my head in.

I trained for eye contact to begin with, but never put it on cue. I just used it as a foundation and built on it. If I need their attention I just say their name or something.

Pick me up off the floor and dust me off. I don't know why I'm so gob-smacked.

Well, I find it hard to get my head around. I'm yet to meet a dog that couldn't learn to target in one training session, for example. It must be about the easiest thing in the world to teach. If they can target you can lure them. Or you start off with clicking for eye contact and once they are doing that nicely you start backing away from them and clicking when they follow. It's just another short step to have them follow your hand, or your eyes, or a slight lean of your body. I have a short dog, and they are notorious for being difficult to lure into a down. Normally you can get them to do it if you sit on the ground and lure them under your leg. Or you put a hand in front of their back legs so they can't sidestep and lure it that way. Or just capture it. Dogs lie down naturally all the time, after all. This is a revelation to me. I honestly thought no one much used that method anymore. Consider me educated.

In addition to what the others suggested 'cause that's where I'd start, you could mix up your treat delivery a little by throwing the treat instead of handing it to him.

Massage is great. Love it. I think whatever you choose to use, your aim with the barking at moving objects thing is to interrupt her so you can then ask her to do something else that you can reward. There are lots of ways to interrupt behaviour. In this house, we use a bridge that we would normally use to mark behaviour we like to reward it. They hear the bridge and come over for their treat and then we can get them to do other things for us. We often just play the Look At That game, where we reward for just looking at the interesting things. That way we keep them under threshold more easily. You can get a long way with conditioning, too. We build our dogs up so they start out listening to us only in low distraction environments and then we gradually work up to big distractions.

Choking a dog out is downright cruel. It is abuse, plain and simple. I would run a mile if a trainer I was talking to even mentioned it as a valid training method, and then I'd call the RSPCA and notify them. Choking an animal is the worst thing you can do to them. It engages the panic mode. There is no place for the panic mode in training or behaviour modifictation. I often say about my hare that the only thing he can learn by going into panic mode is to go into panic mode the moment he perceives anything remotely related to the last time he went into panic mode. And maybe to be on high alert more often. It's so very damaging to anything I might be trying to achieve with an animal.

Well, I'm seriously considering going to Betty Fisher. I think Kamal is a bit too obedience-oriented for me. I struggle with obedience, so little wonder my dogs aren't wild about it either. We both get bored. Only problem is, my independent dog is my older one, but if I took him the younger one would be by himself all day, and he has meltdowns if he gets excluded from the pack. Maybe he'd be all right if I went on Sunday and OH stayed at home with him, but then OH would be grumpy about being abandoned on his one day off in the week... FF, if I wanted to go on the Sunday, maybe I could register for Saturday and we could swap? Can you do that?

I got off my butt (or on it, as it happens) and made an electronic training diary for Erik. It is a spreadsheet with date, behaviour, start criteria, end criteria, cues, and future direction where I can put the aim for next session. Anything else I need?

Do people still use GSP?? I thought that went out with check chains in teaching. It kinda strikes me as a hammer and anvil approach... I think even luring is a bit problematic, although I still use it. I'm transferring all my luring to targeting, now. I almost exclusively shape with Erik and don't use food or my hands to tell him where to be. He watches my face and gains clues and works it out on his own. I love this approach because if he learns it on his own he loves the new behaviour and retains it better than if I lure it. Plus I get a kick out of watching the wheels in his head turning as he thinks through the problem. Yesterday I started teaching him to weave between my legs and he got halfway there in under a minute with nothing more than my legs spread apart and an initial flick of my eyes towards the direction he should move. My other dog is really tactile and I sometimes give him tactile clues, like touching the body part I want him to move. I'm putting cues to all of it so he can understand what he's doing. He's a bit of a weird one. He isn't aware of a lot of things that go on around his body and gets so focused during training that it's hard to get him to notice things other than me. He gets frustrated if he is getting rewards he doesn't understand. I've had him throw himself on the ground in defeat despite a high reward rate because he doesn't know what he's doing to get the rewards. Touch seems to help him, but ultimately I want thim to be aware of what he's doing and know how to get the reward. I like the learning process to be nice and operant. I think the dogs enjoy it more, I enjoy it more, and it's a better mental workout for them, and they are more flexible if they have to think for themselves. And retention is better.

It's sad and a little bit frustrating to hear stories like that. I have quite a pushy, outspoken little dog that is 11 months old and I could count the times I've physically punished him on one hand. I certainly did "avoid" problems that I felt were likely to get me told off by a certain stroppy puppy. It's just working under threshold. Avoiding triggering a dog is fine as long as you work on the problem through more subtle means. I made the conscious decision when Erik was 9 weeks old that he wasn't a dog I would want to physically correct directly because he reminded me strongly of the 12 week old puppy that tried to have me when I did that. It's just not very smart with some dogs. But that doesn't mean your only other option is to let them do what they please. You just have to teach them to want to do what you want them to do. I find that with Erik at least, he has such drive to "win" that it's generally remarkably easy to gain his cooperation if you frame the situation as something he can win by doing what you want him to.

I don't know what we would do without dog parks. Our yard isn't big enough for the wild games our dogs like to play. With that in mind we socialised both of them to the madness of dog parks from an early age. They are used to it and are not bothered by the craziness. They know that not every dog is friendly and judge it better than I can. We pick our parks carefully and are always prepared to leave if we don't feel comfortable. I've only left twice.

I've always meant to keep a training diary, but never quite get around to it. It's getting to the point where it is necessary, though. I keep forgetting what tricks I'm up to with Erik. He's happiest when he gets to do a big variety of things, so I often start teaching him a trick to give him something new to do and then forget about it next training session. Erik is really easy on me because I think he remembers the criteria he's performing at better than I do, but I'm sure we'd do better if I'd written down somewhere what criteria he was last performing at so I can remember next time. His "front leg crossovers" I was having trouble seeing well enough to click have morphed into a sideways skip. Probably because he's short. I like it! Must remember that we're now clicking for skips rather than crossovers. Anyway, if you do keep a diary, what do you record? Do you plan training sessions? Grey Stafford says that everyone should have a training plan for every animal... and then be prepared to throw it out the window upon starting the session.

I wouldn't bother, Cosmolo. Some folks are all bark and no bite.

I didn't correct her when she was in position. I corrected her when she was leaving position. It's a shite method of teaching a heel that no one who knows anything about dogs uses anymore. I was 13 at the time, though. I didn't know any better. Nonetheless, the warning is still valid for any punishment, including those used in a much more sensible way. You have to be careful what else the dog might associate the punishment with. Clearly the method I was taught was too heavy on the corrections and too light on the rewards. Sadly, that method is still being taught in some dog training clubs.

It doesn't make sense when you think about it. Dogs generally can't make associations between events that happen more than a few seconds apart, and to make the connection that Person is eating before me, so therefore Person must be socially dominant over me is, I think, a case of transitive inference. I believe there have been studies that suggest dogs are capable of TI, but there are also studies that suggest what we thought was TI is actually associative generalisation. Anyway, to cut through all the psychology stuff, the bottom line is we don't really have solid evidence that dogs are even capable of inferring information about social status through isolated activities. On top of THAT, it's questionable that there even is a feeding order related to dominance status in wolves, which is where this idea came from. Probably in times when food is scarce, but generally it's a free-for-all and everyone feeds pups while they are eating themselves. So no, I don't think it matters if one eats before their dogs. :p

I'm changing Kivi Tarro's name to Kivi Tend-and-Befriend Tarro. Wherever a dog or human is in distress, Kivi is there, nuzzling and offering kisses. He is gentle and unassuming. His social intelligence has come in handy more than once. He's our doglomat.

I know someone who takes in geriatrics and trains them with essential oils. She uses one scent for the edges of steps, another scent for danger, makes trails for them and all that kind of thing. She swears by it. I think it helps to start when they can still see, though. I never did it with my old girl, who could not see or hear much at all at the end. I found she startled a lot if she saw me coming towards her or if she was looking lost and I touched her. I kept her on leash a lot and didn't move things around in the house. When dogs get dementia, unfortunately their sense of smell is affected. I think this happened with my girl as well. She had trouble finding dropped food on the floor and that kind of thing.

Off topic, but does anyone else notice an eerie similarity between BB, Diablo, and Rex? These types seem to come and go on dog forums.