corvus

I think you would find she has the piece(s) of paper AND has grown up around dogs and learned their behaviours. Which would, sorry to say, make her undeniably more educated than Mr Milan. I can only say what I believe, and that happens to be what scientists believe. The reason why I believe scientists over a man with a lifetime experience with dogs is that science is formally tested and peer-reviewed. There's still a lot of work to be done unravelling emotion and behaviour, but learning theory deliberately excludes emotion. Mostly because no one knew how to measure it. Or if it existed at all. When it comes down to it, everyone is free to believe what seems true to them. If you don't like the science because it doesn't gel with your world view, then that's your prerogative. I hope it continues to serve you well.

There are some good alternatives to pig's ears for puppies. Lamb ears are not hard to get hold of, and there's an ebay seller that sells cow ears. The ebay seller naturally dries all the ears and rawhide treats so they are not treated with chemicals and so forth. We like the cow ears. They are cheaper than pig ears and thinner, but bigger than lamb ears. Our dogs crunch through them in about ten seconds. We also have beef twists and dried tendons. The tendons are pretty hardcore, but nothing compares to the cow hooves we also got from ebay. One cow hoof lasts months around here. We put them up and then get them out whenever the dogs are in a chewing mood or need something to do.

McConnell isn't just one dog owner who has written a book. She has a doctorate in ethology. She studied human verbal communication towards domestic animals. She also practised as a behaviour consultant for many years. CM is just one dog owner who has written a book, I'm afraid. This is kind of complicated stuff, but the thing is you can't reinforce emotions. You reinforce behaviours. So it's possible for attention to result in something that looks like reinforcing fear and I'm not questioning what folks have experienced. But it's really not that simple. Behaviour can influence emotion and emotion can influence behaviour but they are not the same thing. When you reinforce a behaviour (or punish one) you are not automatically also reinforcing or punishing the emotion that drives the behaviour. And that is all assuming that the dog is in control of that behaviour in the first place. If they are just reacting they can't learn anything from reinforcement. This is why counter-conditioning works to decrease aggression towards something, for example. You can reward a dog WHILE they are being aggressive (if they'll accept the reward) and actually see a decrease in the aggression over time. The dog associates the trigger with rewards and so it no longer triggers an aggressive response. Steven Lindsay was talking about this when he was in Sydney as well. How can you be telling the dog it's okay to be scared and run to their owner to stop the bad noise if the bad noise does not actually stop?

Sure, that's your prerogative. As McConnell says in her blog, petting may or may not help them cope with it, but it certainly won't make it worse. As she points out, fear is so aversive in the first place that it's very hard to "reinforce" it with anything positive to make it something an animal would voluntarily repeat. McConnell's blog articles are in fact referenced where appropriate. There is science behind what she says. It's been researched. Kaz, McConnell also points out that one thing that certainly does lower cortisol levels in anxious dogs is the presence of other dogs. I would venture to suggest what you find so effective is a combination of positive distractions and a group of dogs that aren't bothered by storms. We tried that one on my last dog as well, and it didn't work. Nothing did. You could only make it slightly better for her so that she wasn't shaking quite as much. I read the paper about the anti-static cape she refers to (it has been published, now) and it didn't make any difference, but wearing a cape of any sort did. The dogs were still afraid, but panted less when they were wearing a close-fitting cape.

When did I say anything about mollycoddling? There is a distinct difference between coddling and offering reassurance. My girl was always better if she had someone to lie next to or close by. If she got very frightened I would sit next to her and put my hand on her. It helped. I never cuddled her or made baby noises at her or did those high-pitched noises people tend to do when they are being sympathetic. THOSE encourage fear. It's like saying to your dog "I'm scared, too. Definitely something to freak out about." But calm reassurance does not reinforce fearful behaviour. And the chief reason why is because you can't positively reinforce fear. It's a response to an aversive stimulus. Here's several blog entries by Patricia McConnell with her views on dogs and thunderstorms: http://www.theotherendoftheleash.com/categ...phobia-in-dogs/ Edited to fix links.

I don't find it very funny when dogs are that stressed out. I had a thunder and firework phobic dog and I stayed home every NYE so I could look after her. I always tried to be understanding of her and not brush her fear off. It's the least I could do considering I have a feeling I was the one that taught her to be afraid. I tried a lot of things to desensitise or counter-condition and nothing worked. If staying up with her all night helped her I would have gladly done it. I have for other things, including a sudden mite infestation that resulted in me getting massive mite welts.

You could try a harness. Sometimes dogs are less bothered by harnesses.

There's always a bit more than that. You can teach a dog to associate the reflex of shaking when wet with a command, but those operants (actually shaking) must be reinforced (by shedding water). True, but I meant "a bit more" in the sense that I think there are some essential components to the manipulation of drive that fall outside of associative learning. But maybe I'm making a distinction for drive training that exists in any training.

Oh boy, what fun. Maybe I'm just biased because I love Aidan's methods, but try looking a little more closely. Clicker training is often shaping order out of chaos. The high reward rate means your hand is in the food pouch most of the time, and the dog naturally watches your hand. As the reward rate lowers, IME the dog starts watching your face instead.

Thinking of you and your family, Jed.

It's a good question. I am totally hooked on having two dogs close in age. They are BFF. Their "arguments" remind me of slap fights between siblings. They make a lot of noise and push each other but that's about the extent of it. One day I want to get a third dog (don't tell OH), but I'm kind of confused about it. I definitely don't want to get number 3 and then number 4 a year later like I did with these two, but I kinda want number 3 to have the same shot at canine social bliss as number 1 and 2. I think when the time comes I would just get number 3 when it seemed like the right time. Might not be until we're down to 1 dog again (dread the day!). These boys are so attached we've already talked about what we do when (god forbid) one goes. "Get another dog pretty quickly" is the current answer. A friend recently lost her old Collie. Her younger Collie was beside himself and wouldn't eat for a week. She went and got another young Collie right away and he was fine, then. Sorry, a bit OT.

Oh, wrt the pigeon, I think the overall result might have been R+, but there were lots of behaviours the bird did that weren't reinforced in order to get the reinforcement. Assuming the bird had not solved this problem before, it solves it without much trial and error.

Yeah, the coat shaking wasn't quite CC. But it was pretty close in that to begin with I was giving the cue (stimulus) after the event and then praise right on top of it. Once she was doing it when I said it I praised afterwards and then it was R+. Some of it was good timing, though, and probably snuck in some OC in the learning phase. My caution with arousal in general is that it's a slippery thing and I don't think it's well understood. From what I can tell, arousal is thought to be affected by either exercise or emotional state. Emotional state currently sits outside of OC. Although it's important to note that it doesn't exist in isolation of associative learning. It's more like an added layer, or maybe OC is an added layer on emotional state. You can condition an animal to go into an emotional state on cue, but to me I think of it as a two-way street between behaviour and ES, not all the one thing. I dunno, I'm not explaining this very well. Whatever the case, when you teach a dog to go "in drive" on cue, by pairing the cue with the drive reward that results in the level of arousal/motivation you want, I think it's debatable that this is CC because I think that what you're essentially doing is using a setting effect, as in, "prepare for imminent crazy fun" (classically conditioned). That in turn switches on the anticipation and that feeds into emotional perception and that feeds into arousal. So I'm hesitant about just saying it's classical conditioning. To me, it's a bit more than that. Don't think I explained that very well, either.

My supervisor has a working line Kelpie who is on the cautious side. He pointed out to me that if you're a dog in the bush and you see a snake, it's probably a good thing at that moment to NOT be a novelty-seeking, highly confident individual. A bit of caution is healthy. Erik to me has a fair whack of caution and generally doesn't engage in risky doggy behaviour. He is one for sussing it out and then trying to figure out what it's for if it seems safe. I think he is quite creative, and I wonder if that relates at all to novelty-seeking. I think that he was much more creative as a young puppy than he is now, but he was more cautious as a puppy as well. Another thing in humans that is sometimes related to novelty-seeking is manic behaviour as a result of an over-sensitive reward system. Now this sounds like Erik. Very keen to get rewards and very sensitive to obstacles in the way of getting rewards. Aversives get quickly forgotten and rewards are remembered better than average. Erik is nutty about rewards. Any reward. And if I have inadvertently set up an expectation for a reward and don't deliver he can be very difficult. ETA He has come SO close to figuring out how to eject dvds. I'm glad he hasn't got there yet. He's turned the dvd player on, though. And he's well known for getting dvds off the shelves and opening the cases when he's bored. We had to do a sneaky switch-a-roo last week when he chewed on one of the dvd cases from the video store.

Free reign, but we have a "hold up" cue that acts as a reminder if they start pulling. It reminds them to ease up. We also have a "hang about" cue that is an informal heel. It doesn't matter which side they come to. Just the nearest one, where they should hang out until released with "okay". We use it mostly when we are sharing the path with someone. We have heavily practised and reinforced "hang about" so that it is quite reliable, but sometimes if they get distracted by something "hold up" and "hang about" falls on deaf ears. Then we call them or use "leave it", which tends to work. I think what is best is whatever enables you to enjoy a walk with your canine pal.

At the very end of the NDTF conference Steven Lindsay said he didn't think clicker training was really either OC or CC. He said clickers are a teensy bit startling and that's why they work abnormally well as a marker. He likened it to tracking, in which a dog is driven by an innate desire to gather information. The dog doesn't know what's at the end of the track it is following a lot of the time, so how can one say he's doing what he's doing for an expected reward? Rather, he's responding to the surprise of swinging his head around and finding the scent, then losing it, then surprise - there it is again! I think what he was getting at with clicker training is that the clicker adds a dimension that kind of mimics that inherent seeking of information, thus taking it beyond OC, although that's not to say OC is not fundamentally involved as well. Similarly, there are arguments that social learning falls outside of OC and CC. There's a paper somewhere that studies how puppies can learn a lot of the basic scent detection stuff from watching their dam working. I believe it's common practise to let future herders watch accomplished herders do their thing as well. At least in some circles. However, whether this can be of benefit to humans training dogs without doggy demonstrators is questionable. I read a paper recently that reported on a study in which human demonstrators basically meant nothing to a dog, while dog demonstrators sped up the training of some dogs (the submissive ones, as it turned out, but not the dominant ones). We do know that dogs tend to look at us for direction when they get stumped, whereas wolves don't. So maybe there's something that can be done with it. As far as CC goes, I taught my last dog to shake the water from her coat on cue using CC. I just said "have a shake" whenever she shook and in the end she'd do it when I said it. Always smart for a dog that likes to swim in the lake and then comes and stands right on top of you before having a shake. I taught obstacle avoidance on walks the same way ("this side" and "other side"). And directions (like "this way"). I suspect there were may have been very low level OC going on, but it was all very passive. I think that drive training is a case of Establishing Operations. We're talking about arousal and motivation levels. And possibly Fixed Action Patterns as opposed to classical conditioning. I always get flamed whenever I open my mouth about drive, so maybe I'll leave that one alone (OC all the way!).

We have a Dyson. And shagpile carpet. Nothing compares to that Dyson with the turbo head. It is incredibly effective. When we vacuum with that, all the hair gets picked up. When the cleaner uses her own vacuum cleaner we get furry shagpile.

;) Does anyone know what she needs/could do with? What an incomprehensible tragedy.

This is really difficult when they are that stressed anywhere near the bath area that they won't accept food!!! Then you just gotta start far enough away that they will accept food. I think CC fails when people move too fast. You have to keep feeding until they are quite comfortable with that step before taking another step.

Interesting. Kivi isn't keen on new things, although he accepts them quickly. I don't think he would ever look for novelty. He does like to explore, but he's happy to put it off until it's convenient. Erik is a funny one... He is easily bored and as soon as he gets bored he's walking around poking things with his nose. He'll be walking around the house just poking every object he comes across with his nose, presumably to see what happens? It's not uncommon for him to poke too hard and have something fall down on top of him, and then he barks at it and creeps over and pokes it again and then jumps back and barks at it again. I find in training he also gets bored easily and he loves nothing more than learning something new, whereas Kivi would be happy to stick with what he knows his whole life.

One of those primitive spitzes if I'm not mistaken.

That's what conditioned reinforcers are for. If you pair verbal praise with other rewards often enough you can get by in a pinch by using the verbal praise alone. Grey Stafford says a conditioned reinforcer is only as good as the last time you reinforced it with a primary reinforcer, though. I encourage anyone who cares to listen to me to give carrying food around a try. I never go anywhere with the dogs without my treat pouch and a tug toy (and a clicker) and I wouldn't have it any other way. We even ended up buying a second treat pouch so OH could have one as well. The thing is, once you are in the habit of having these big reinforcers on you, you automatically become more interesting to your dog by virtue of the fact that you reward them a lot, and thus you become less dependent on the very rewards you're carrying. But as long as you have them you tend to use them, and I think that is good because it's all money in the bank. It pays to be realistic about what your dog finds rewarding and USE it. It is SO much easier to handle distractions and rewards in the enviornment out of your control if you have a good reward history with your dog in the first place. I don't think it ever occurs to my dogs that I might not have anything worth their while on me. The odd times when I have forgotten to refill the treat pouch or don't have it on me have not resulted in all our training coming to nothing. Most of training is forming good habits. Habits don't die easily.

It's a bit more than being naturally curious. Novelty-seeking behaviour in humans is linked to thrill-seeking and high risk activities and often drug-taking. They are the folks for whom ordinary life is never quite enough. When looking at this in animals, though, an individual is normally considered novelty-seeking if they spend a lot of time racing around exploring things. Obviously, it exists on a continuum rather than either having it or not having it. In the wild, novelty-seeking animals might find new sources of food etc. more quickly, but expose themselves to higher risks of predation and other dangers at the same time.

Do you have a dog that particularly shows novelty-seeking and exploratory behaviour? I'm talking about not just willingness to try new things, but seeking out new things. Responding to novel objects by approaching them rather than hanging back or avoiding? If you do have a novelty-seeking dog, how do you find them to live with? Do they need a lot of mental stimulation? Are they drivey? Do they get easily bored?

Sounds good. Let us know how it goes. With the food... It can be a bit pointless to pop treats if the dog doesn't actually want them. You would have to first build up his interest in training in general so that it's a bigger reward than the food alone. That would take time as you sometimes have to start in low distraction environments and work up to the park. You could try very high value food rewards as a short cut. I like cooking up some of that cheap sizzle steak you can get in Coles. Or roast chicken is usually popular. Or even cheese or cabanossi. You could mix a few pieces in with his normal treats so he gets the odd surprise. I love the look on my dogs' faces when they were expecting a bit of dog food and get a little piece of steak. Another way to make it more interesting for him is to have a high reward rate. I don't know what you do now, but for example, if he's heeling pop him a treat every two steps. As mentioned, you can also use other things as a reward. Games like tug or fetch or even releasing him to run around and check things out. I think it's good to diversify with rewards.