corvus

Weirdest - Erik likes to eat dried seaweed and the odd dried blue bottle off the beach. Kivi eats mud, and sometimes crunches on a mouthful of sand. Both eat bird seed if they get the chance. Kivi eats tissues provided they are used. Kivi found a seahorse on the beach a couple of weeks ago, and seemed willing to give that one a try. Most dangerous - Kivi ended up in hospital after eating an unknown number of Neurofen pills. I don't even know where he found them. Erik ended up in hospital after swallowing a fish hook attached to 3m of fishing twine. That one was not even a week after he had a broken tooth extracted. It was an expensive week.

I haven't done this one, but I have done a back stall, which is similar in a lot of ways. It took months to get it, and most of that time was either convincing my dog that I seriously really and truly did actually want him to jump ON MY BACK like some kind of freak, and trying to reward in place, which was very challenging when he was mostly just popping off again right away and I couldn't see what he was doing. I think it would help to break it down into skills your dog needs. He has the required balancing skill. He also needs to be able to grasp the concept of putting all four feet on you. If he hasn't done that before, I would maybe try a position with your shins as the contact point instead of your feet, or even start with front feet on your knees and back feet on the tops of your feet on the ground and slowly start lifting your feet. It will be easier to reward in position and teach him the general concept of four feet on you (which seemed to freak my dog out a fair bit). I would avoid a board on you because of stability issues. They have to learn what it feels like and how to balance themselves, and a board on flesh or shoes is way different to flesh or shoes. A target or "up" cue would be helpful to tell the dog where you want them to go. I used our "up" cue that means to jump onto an object and a hand target as best I could, while making myself low to the ground. It took ages for him to join the dots between "up" "target" and "human platform". If my partner cued him "up" onto my back, he went right up first go because it was a context he understood, but signalling from a strange position in a strange, ambiguous way, and sending him behind me was hard for him to put together. On top of balancing skills and four feet on human concept, he also needed to understand me signalling a target behind me that he would never be able to reach, and "up" without the usual additional cues of face and pointing. It was a deceptively complicated trick for something that is so simple and easy now that he knows what the behaviour is. The only reason I haven't tried the foot one is because I don't think my core is strong enough! And I don't especially want a 13kg ball of muscle falling onto my stomach, which is almost certainly going to happen, because my dog is over-eager and isn't always responsive to the "settle down and think about what you're doing, please" coaching from me.

Hand targeting, used very consistently! Gets their focus up and away from your centre of gravity, and it can turn into a fun recall game. If you present a hand target at arm's length every time he comes towards you, you will condition him to veer to the side, especially if you use the same hand each time. Keep it low to discourage exuberant launches that result in wrist bruises. Also, tossing treats on the ground a short distance from you as he approaches. Best to start on a hard surface so he can hear them hit the ground and see them roll.

Maybe he is insecure, and maybe she's rewarding the behaviour, or maybe she's not. Even if the behaviour is becoming more frequent, it's not necessarily because the owner is reinforcing it. This is why trainers and behaviourists should do functional analyses for problem behaviours. IMO a good functional analysis involves some experimentation if possible. I'm a pretty good guesser, but why guess when you can test? You can develop very specific and effective training plans if you know the function of a behaviour, and you don't need emotionally-laden words. Just objective observations.

I'm just about to start Volatile Dogs classes for dogs that are over-aroused or anxious around other dogs. They start in a couple of weeks if all goes according to plan. Setups are helpful IME. It gives you a controlled environment where you can be sure the dogs won't be pushed beyond what they can cope with. I set up the classes to give people an affordable and structured way to work on coping skills and desensitisation with my supervision and in a venue where we won't get interrupted by other dogs coming through out setups. There is another trainer that was running reactive dogs classes at Farmer Dave's. I'm not sure if she is still doing it there, but she is running them on the North Shore, I believe. ETA Volly Dogs classes will be in the Sutherland Shire.

Having watched a lot of dogs autonomously learn (or try to learn) the same task during my studies, I would say success is dependent on several things. Fastest dogs to learn a discrimination task in my study was my Swedish Vallhund and a labrador, both of which are crazy smart. Like, too smart to make good pets because if you're not on the ball all the time, they will get ahead of you. I had BCs that came nowhere near matching those two dogs, but I know BCs that would. Training dogs like my vall is completely addictive, but I don't think I could ever recommend one of the clever and persistent ones to anyone who isn't a keen trainer. They don't just switch off the smarts when you are not telling them what to do with them. If you don't manage them carefully, they end up with a myriad of problematic behaviours that are really hard to get on top of because they are happy to just find new ways to get what they want, or keep trying even on a very thin reinforcement schedule. My vall's breeder has a boy like mine who lasted a short time in a normal home before he had the whole household firmly under his paw. If anyone wants a dog that will really test their training skills, I think he's still looking for a home. These dogs will find and mercilessly exploit every hole and weak link in your training.

Yes! It's possible you might need a US address, though. Amazon is weird and arbitrary about these things. Clean Run has some Control Unleashed things on VOD, too. E.g. Leave it - http://www.cleanrun.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&product_ID=2714&ParentCat=497

Ha. I have no clue why. You can e-mail Jen on contactus @ jensdts.com (take out the spaces). There is also Positive Paws: http://www.positivepawsdt.com.au/ And Pawprint, who I am told are also good: http://www.pawprintdogtraining.com.au/

My lapphund would not have the faintest idea when someone is not pleased with him, and if he did grok, he likely wouldn't care. It's hard to be angry with him when he's so gleefully unrepentant. So, we don't depend on him knowing or caring when we are displeased. He is what he is, and that means we have to work a little harder to make him want to do the things we most want him to do. Leslie McDevitt's Whiplash Turn and Leave It from Control Unleashed are definitely other good places to start. Also, someone just told me RRR is now available as video on demand through Amazon. As of, this week, I take it, because I checked last week! http://www.amazon.com/Really-Reliable-Recall-Unavailable/dp/B00TE8X13M/ref=sr_1_1?s=instant-video&ie=UTF8&qid=1430215536&sr=1-1&keywords=really+reliable+recall

Try Jen Zazu: http://www.jensdts.com.au/

Here's a semi-decent one of Kivi the naughty spitz recalling at the beach some years ago. That was pretty typical at the time, but he has got faster and more enthusiastic about everything in the last couple of years, including recalls. I also found this one from a trip where we had the GoPro on Erik's back. If you don't get seasick. You can't see Kivi because Erik is too busy racing him back, but you can see Kivi enjoying his artisan sourdough at the end. Er, I meant to say it took about 12 months to get it pretty strong with Kivi, but he's hard. Erik I never actually did proper recall training with. He has always been pretty happy to recall.

I was trying to find a good video of what the RRR looks like when it's in a finished or near finished state. It's impressive. Unfortunately, all of mine are of pups still learning, so they are a bit slow. I usually expect to see mine whirl on the spot when recalled and canter directly back to me with a fair bit of enthusiasm. The spitz boy often rears back when he whirls, and does a big exaggerated bound to get him started, and usually has a huge grin on his face. He is a joyous dog, and recalls are just another thing to be joyous about, 98% of the time. He made it a hobby for a while to try to provoke emergency recalls, because he doesn't seem like the brightest crayon in the box, but he's hiding a significant intellect behind the vacantly happy looks. We were able to railroad that by recalling him before he could get that evil twinkle in his eye, but you still have to watch him sometimes. He gets mischievous. Which is why we like spitz dogs.

I'd be more interested in what method huski is using to train recalls than whether or not it works on greyhounds. My dogs have been trained with the RRR method, which I encourage my clients to use as well, because I think it is easy and generally very effective. The hardest bit is knowing when not to recall your dogs. I expect that some dogs are a serious challenge for a fully conditioned recall. I seem to be perpetually chasing that last 2% with my spitz boy. We have just had a rabbit warren establish in a convenient location. Maybe I will finally get that last 2%. ;) Here's a little video taster for RRR:

I am in the Shire. http://www.creatureteacher.com.au

We have used Allendell in Darkes Forest. It is run by a no-nonsense woman that has been doing it for a long time. The police dogs go there when their kennels are full. It's pretty standard, and they don't get much one-on-one care, and it is just wire between the kennels, but if we get stuck, that's where ours will go in future as well. They were clean and she has a good reputation and runs a tight ship. Kennels in general are not exactly ideal, but options are limited sometimes. Ask on the Everything Sutherland Shire Facebook group if you're on FB. It comes up pretty regularly.

Autonomy benefits any animal. And engaging in species-specific behaviours is a cornerstone of good animal welfare. If it's safe and no one objects, let the dogs do their thing. Both my dogs seem to think it's polite to acknowledge any dog that comes within, say, 5m of them with a quick greeting. That is usually all they want, and many dogs respond in kind and then everyone moves on. I am also often bewildered that other people say they can't tell if an approaching dog is friendly or not. I can. My dogs can. Between us, we don't make many mistakes. My dogs have never been hurt by other dogs in a dog park, unless you count that time we had a shoulder injury from a wrestling session. Fights that break out in dog parks are often a matter of two dogs not understanding each other, or arousal getting out of control. The more practiced they are in their social encounters, the better their ability to defuse or dodge problems so they are non-events.

There are no board and train places in Sydney I would trust. I'm a private trainer/behaviourist in southern Sydney. Look me up (Creature Teacher). Depending on the problem. I am kind of specialised in behavioural problems with some complexity. I refer basic training to other trainers. If you let me know where in Sydney, I can give you some suggestions for who I and others I know refer to.

Sorry, bit late on this one, as officially I don't post here anymore. I was browsing through. I have successfully dealt with this with one of my dogs, who would bark at me incessantly during training sessions, and currently teaching the other, whose motivation has recently gone through the roof and he had never been taught the self control to handle it in the past because it wasn't a problem! I have a client with a similar problem. 1. Don't train barking dogs. That's the rule. If you're game, turn your back on them. But only if you're 100% sure they won't bite you. 2. The instant you get a quiet sit or down, whichever is preferred, face the dog and give them a treat. If they want to be trained, they need to know how to 'ask' for it. I use default sits and downs. Down is better IMO. If they don't already know to offer a behaviour when they want something, you will have to prompt them with a cue. The sooner you can stop giving the cue, the better. They should do it automatically. 3. Work in very short bouts at first. 3 or 4 reps, then release them. They won't want to leave you and will pester you to keep training them. They will probably start barking. Ignore them until they offer their default behaviour, or until you can't take it anymore and then prompt them with a cue. 4. Slowly increase the time you train, and start rewarding for staying in the default position so you can increase quiet downtime as well. 5. Look after your dog's arousal. If he starts throwing behaviours left right and center, stop. Sit on the ground with him and get him to lie down. Work on some quiet things he can do from a down. Finding which hand has the treat, paw targets, nose/chin/forehead targets. Go from quiet behaviours to slightly more active behaviours until you are back to doing exciting things, then trade back down again, trading for less active behaviours. 6. Read Control Unleashed. 7. If training two dogs, the trick is to make waiting a job. So, pay them for waiting quietly as often or near to as you are paying your other dog for working. My training fiend now folds into a down when my attention shifts from him to the other dog, so I don't even have to tell him. It's the coolest thing ever, particularly considering how badly he loves to train and how much he was yelling at me during training sessions before I did this. He waits quietly until I call him over. As far as he's concerned, he's still working while he's waiting in a quiet down. Here's a video of a trick training session with my guys early last year. A few times you can see me treat the non-working dog for holding the position they are in quietly. But you can see that Erik in particular waits with his tail up and attention on me. He's still working. I didn't cue any of his downs, though. He takes his cue from where my eyes are, and sometimes how he feels. He uses the quiet down to ask for direction.

Yes, that was my research. :) There was a lot to cram into a small segment, and some things I would have liked to have gone in got cut, like one of my volunteers that was pretty excited about being on television. But I had no control over it at all, and it is a credit to Jonica Newby and the Catalyst team that they put together a segment I was pretty happy with anyway, and they do that for a lot of scientists and still manage to keep most of them onside. It's a big deal to trust a journalist with what was your heart and soul for 3 1/2 years. There is a paper currently in review with PLoS ONE, and it's in the final stages (I hope! I've been saying that for months) and should be out soon. It will be open access for anyone that wants the full, dry, academic version. My blog has a series on risk aversion (pessimism) for people interested in the practical side. http://blog.creatureteacher.com.au/2014/01/risk-aversion-or-pessimism-in-dogs-1.html

Hi everyone, Just a quick message from me. I have just started a "support and advice" group on Facebook for owners of "volatile" or reactive dogs. There are already over a hundred members and it's only 24 hours old. There will be lots of practical tips and techniques as well as just chat with other people working hard for their difficult dogs. Would love to see some of you there. https://www.facebook.com/groups/volatiledogs/

Aggression is complicated. The end. Seriously, this is one of those areas of behaviour where it's particularly critical to understand the function of the behaviour, and that also means considering emotional state and arousal and how they influence how a dog interprets signals and how they are likely to respond to them. As it happens, I wrote an article about that one as well: http://www.creatureteacher.com.au/Click!%20Article.pdf. There is fair argument in the literature to consider emotional state as inherently tied to how close an animal is coming to their goals. If they are getting closer to obtaining their goals, they are happier, and if they are getting farther, they are unhappier. The emphasis is on knowing what the animal's goals are. If they want the scary thing to go away, anything that seems to achieve that will make them feel better. There are all sorts of problems surrounding this. One is that they learn making a big song and dance and aggressive display usually works, but it gets them all worked up and upset and if it doesn't work they basically think they are going to die. So even just making them stick it out until they realise it doesn't work is problematic. Their stress response is likely to be enormous, and even if they do habituate like Zoe did, that doesn't mean they are 'okay' in that they are not stressed or frightened or behaviourally suppressed. They are just coping the best they can. Sometimes that means a successful habituation where they truly can relax and sometimes it just means they are stuck in this terrible place where they don't know how to behave to obtain their goals. The two look pretty similar, at least if you only look short-term in one context. Even if we can use some kind of exposure or flooding to cut arousal down, it doesn't necessarily mean we also handle the fear. Possibly we just teach the dog that there are some problems in life they can't fix, and that is damaging to future training. Anyway, LAT works fine with the vast majority of dogs. It's cool like that. You don't need handler focus, because you are shaping it in anyway. If it's not working it's because arousal is way too high and you are setting the dog up with a powerful conflict: Attend to me or attend to the extremely arousing, attention-demanding thing. The point of LAT is to try to eliminate or at least greatly reduce that conflict by allowing them to do both, and thereby getting your foot in the door with your dog and shaping a really sensible coping behaviour, but it depends on the arousing thing being not so arousing that it demands their undivided attention. You'll see with a dog that is practiced at LAT that they will zip back and forth at a much faster rate the more aroused they get, so you kind of get an inbuilt meter of arousal. It tells you how demanding the arousing stimulus is for them and therefore how conflicted they are controlling their behaviour around it. FWIW, when I was having troubles with my hare, I couldn't DS because he would already be too aroused as soon as he even saw me. He did not calm down. He sure as hell would not eat. There's no way I would have flooded him. It would have made the problem worse if anything. I taught him a safety signal linked to my departure. It presumably inhibited his fear enough that I could get some DS done. It took a LONG time. Months. If I had an animal that needed to be handled in that time it would really throw a spanner in the works with a DS/CC protocol. I know people that have used negative reinforcement in similar cases to give a dog control over their exposure and it has worked all right, but with dogs that already had good relationships with their owner.

Well, we would expect that if they are frequently getting scared or upset they are probably not in a great place emotionally and will be expecting more bad things to happen to them and less good things. I wouldn't take risks if I expected things to turn out poorly, and I guess they wouldn't either. On the other hand, if they are the kind of dog that is inherently risk averse, maybe highly emotionally reactive, and not skilled at solving problems, then it's like a whole lot of things are conspiring against them, really. I am not surprised that clicker training with Jake has been so positive for him. A while ago I wrote a series on risk aversion in dogs for the blog I linked to earlier. The third instalment has some hints for helping dogs learn to be more persistent, resilient, confident, and optimistic. Sorry, I'm not sticking around. :) Just wandering through the ether and just happened to see something I know a bit about.

You hit the nail on the head when you mentioned safety and avoidance. It baffled scientists for a while that animals kept on performing an avoidance behaviour after a signal linked to an aversive even when the signal no longer predicted that aversive. A fellow called Mowrer came up with the two-factor theory, which said that the animals would come to avoid the signal rather than the aversive experience itself, but eventually it was shown that the same thing could be seen without a signal at all, so the animal couldn't be avoiding the signal itself. The current view is that there is no prediction error. The animal never learns the avoidance behaviour is not necessary because they always do it and always get the expected result: successful avoidance. There is also some recent work on safety as positive reinforcement. I just wrote an article about all this kind of thing after several discussions with some 'force free' trainers that seem to have got it in their heads that avoidance (negative reinforcement) is BAD and teaching dogs successful and appropriate avoidance behaviours is therefore unethical. http://blog.creatureteacher.com.au/ This is quite relevant at the moment as the Australian APDT has decided they are not comfortable with negative reinforcement, which means they may not support some new methods for tackling fear-related problem behaviours such as BAT and CAT (incidentally, CAT is supposed to be done under-threshold like BAT is, so the dog shouldn't be so close they are barking and lunging). The APDT are still deciding whether it contravenes their ethics policy or not. Aaaanyway, your question was broader than avoidance behaviours. I think the answer is probably in the Brelands' article "The Misbehavior of Organisms", which talks about how animals are more likely to do some behaviours than others despite the best application of operant conditioning techniques. Animals have a suite of usually species-specific behaviours they will tend to fall back on in all sorts of situations. For example, dogs bark (and dig, and chase, and mouth), birds peck, cats scratch and so on. These behaviours come naturally and serve a purpose. It is hard to convince an animal that what comes naturally does not get them as close to their goals as something else that does not come naturally. And some of those behaviours just inherently feel good because they are so critical for finding food. But it can be done, and shouldn't take years. You just need consistency and the right conditions. The latter is the big problem for reactive dogs, of course, and the reason why people do end up working on it for many years. There's a second part to the article I wrote that talks about training safety behaviours for dogs. You probably already have a couple with Jake. I think they are wonderful, but kind of depend on being able to get that arousal down pretty fast and having your dog aware that they have just entered the 'safety zone', which also means they have to truly believe they are safe. You can teach them a signal that means they are safe, but they won't believe it if they are highly aroused. In fact, high arousal will sink many (not all) attempts at training with operant conditioning. That's a whole other discussion, though. :)

Hi folks, I'm leaving DOL for good this time. The break I took last year was good for me, and when I came back I thought I could make it work. Unfortunately, I have come to the conclusion this place creates more angst for me than it's worth. I value my professional integrity and it has become clear to me that if I stay here I will have to choose between keeping my mouth shut when I know I have information that could help and being regularly pressed to defend my professional integrity. No one should be above question and I would happily justify what I'm doing and why except that in this case it won't achieve anything in the long run. My history here is too long and bitter and it is no longer about my professional integrity. Probably never was. I just wanted to drop in and say it's because of you guys on this thread that I ever thought I could enjoy DOL again, and I am sorry it wasn't enough. I wish all of you all the very best in your journeys. If you ever want to catch up or have questions, you can find me on Facebook. I am just in the process of kicking off my behaviour consulting business and have a FB page for the business here: https://www.facebook.com/creatureteacher.com.au. Still a few days off getting the website up, but there will be some good content to share on FB. Love you guys, and I'll miss you if you don't come see me on FB.

*shrug* A lot of people think they are being extra special gentle but they are not being quite sensitive enough. When I was first learning this stuff I was surprised how far you have to go before you have an animal teetering between doing something and not doing anything. It's very easy to teeter a little too close to the doing something side and then you won't see what you're looking for because when the animal acts it is too fast. The nervier the animal, the quicker the micro-behaviours stack up and the less chance you have to grab the right one, reinforce it, and simultaneously break the chain before things get carried away. But hey, don't take my word for it. Lots of people are using these techniques with great success with dogs. They don't seem to mind about the time it takes. I don't think it's really that long for most dogs. It's long for a flighty prey animal.