corvus

You aren't provided she doesn't cotton on to "run off + return = treat". Some dogs never do. But if it were me I'd go after her and get her. In fact, if it were me she'd be on a long line until she was more reliable. It is dangerous, as you say. I've always let long lines trail and just used it as a backup. I don't use it as a tool in recall training. If the dog is on the long line same rules apply and I only call if I am sure they are gonna come. We all make mistakes and if you call and they don't come as you expected, I would go through the other steps with the "pup pup pup" and doing something unexpected or fast and exciting. I second RRR. It's awesome! OH was telling me this evening how he used Erik's recall to try to get him to come around and notice our house mouse running along the lounge room floor. Once OH had been severely reprimanded for deliberately setting Erik up to fail his recall and not even having anything to reward him with when he didn't fail, I took the time to be impressed that Erik was not in the slightest distracted from recalling by a fleeing mouse. Not bad. His recall reliability is VERY close to 100%. I can't think of a time he's blown it off. He beats Kivi back when we recall Kivi as well. Kivi's is about 95% provided he has been practising regularly. I have the RRR dvd that I hold very dear, but I could possibly lend it to you.

I don't think there is any such thing as "normal" dog play anymore. There are lots of different styles, and what they do with dogs they know is often completely different to what they do with dogs they don't know. Erik is thoroughly obnoxious in his play with Kivi. He bites his legs, barges his side, grabs the fur on his back as he's running and makes him crash, climbs onto his back to bite the back of his neck, and then there's the growly bitey face and crash tackles head-on. I've seen them kamakaze each other before. And Kivi mouths at Erik's back, holds his tail while they're running, bowls him over, and noms his belly. They don't do those sorts of things to dogs they don't know really well. They know each other's limits and are amazingly comfortable with each other. The only time I have to intervene is if a coveted object comes into play. I have a video from the dog park, but it's a bit long. http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=melsta...u/4/7iqVSn_Djwk

We have a mouse in our house at the moment, and I've been fascinated by the fact that my low drive dog is more interested in catching the mouse than my high drive dog. I came across this article talking about modal theory, which is pretty close to what Panksepp (and Steven Lindsay) talk about as well. It didn't really explain why I'm seeing the pattern I am, but it offered some hints and I thought it was interesting enough to share anyway.

Why go to the effort of forcing a pill down a dog's throat when you can just press it into a spoonful of peanut butter and the dog takes it willingly? Why bother even teaching them to take pills when you can have them eagerly lap it up? My last dog used to give me no end of troubles with pills. She was a master at spitting them out. Didn't seem to matter how far I pushed it down, how tightly I held her mouth shut afterwards, or what angle I went from. In her last few months she was on a lot of medication for arthritis and one in particular she just hated and she would starve herself rather than eat a meal that had those pills in there somewhere. It took buying some Pecks Paste to get her cooperation. Pate also worked. I have one dog now that can be trouble, but press it into anything pastey or sticky and it's all good. Peanut butter is his favourite, but it's a bit messy. Cream cheese also works.

Classic.

Yeah, some "well meaning soul" once threw cooked lamb bones over the fence. Some week of pain, several vet visits and a general anaesthetic later the bone shards were finally extracted from my dog's rectum. She was lucky they made it that far. ETA I once saw cockatoos picking up quite large bones left out for someone's dog and having a chew on them up in a tree. It's entirely possible that a bird dropped it in your yard and it originally came from someone else's yard.

The same you would do if the dog became aggressive. Whatever that may be. I said examination, which might just mean watching closely for any signs you might be missing and having a good objective think about it.

Okay, don't read anything into this as it's a completely neutral question, but if he gets more of anything, isn't that an indication that they are having some sort of significant impact on his life? I guess I mean to say that I take any change in behaviour to be an indication that something is not right. I treat changes to more sooky behaviour as a concern. I would obviously never put a dog down solely on the grounds that they were being sooky all of a sudden, but I do think it warrants examination as much as increasingly aggressive behaviour does. In the end I think the only one that has a right to make a judgement call are the people that love the animals and live with them. If you love them you make the right choice for them regardless of what that does to you.

Ever been trapped in a room because one of your animals is sleeping next to you or on you and you just can't bring yourself to disturb them? I'm actually quite hungry, but the boys are flaked out together on my study floor right behind my chair and if I get up they'll both wake up and come with me and there's just no need! As soon as I make lunch I'm coming back in here. I have this really strong desire to not have them get up needlessly. When I think about it, it's totally absurd. They obviously want to get up when I do because no one is making them. All the same... I'm still hungry and I'm still sitting here watching them snooze together as if they can't instantly go back to sleep the moment nothing interesting is happening.

That would make the situation worse. He would be being rewarded for barking and it would continue. I certainly wouldn't be happy getting up at 5am because the dog wanted attention. Well, not necessarily. Steven Lindsay made the point at the NDTF conference that you can't reinforce something a dog is doing using a reward other than that they were wanting. So if the dog wants food and you reward with play, you're not necessarily rewarding the food-seeking behaviour. HOWEVER, IMO you have to be careful not to then create a new expectation for whatever reward you do use instead. I think the trick with these things is to keep moving. Don't let the dog learn a new routine until it's the routine that you want. You have to keep changing what happens until you've got him where you want him. If this were me, I'd do the thing where you bring him in before he starts barking and feed him then and gradually move it forward every day as well, only I'd be inclined to give him something like a Kong with peanut butter in it or a pigs ear rather than his meal and then give him his meal later when you want him to have it right from the start and inch the Kong towards the meal time. I would also be inclined to phase the Kong out as fast as possible. Depending on how bad he is, maybe not even every day. You could try a Kong some days and just a cookie on others, for example. Or give him a cardboard roll with a bit of vegemite or something smeared on it so it's only just barely food, but something to chew on and keep him busy. I'd prepare these things the night before so he's not hanging around watching me make them at 5am and we can get back to bed asap. I think it's important when you are trying to break a habit to just do whatever needs to be done to prevent the habit being practised and then shape the behaviour you want. I'm more comfortable distracting and rewarding before the problem behaviour starts and then fixing up anything I might have accidentally rewarded later than punishing or ignoring.

Just out of interest, I found this paper today:

I said cuddly, just not especially clingy! Kivi is like a big soft toy. You can just go up to him whenever you like and give him a big squeeze and he's into that. Sometimes you get happy groans and sometimes you get kisses in return. But Erik takes cuddles to new heights. He's the "pick me up, pick me up!" sort of dog that then wraps his paws around your neck and rests his head on your shoulder and it's very hard to remember you have a dog and not a child in your arms. He also likes to put his paws on your leg and when you bend down to cuddle him he stretches up and puts his head on your shoulder again. And then there's the sneaking into bed to spoon with the OH of a morning, and snuggling up with OH on the couch of an evening, and asking to jump into my lap at random intervals throughout the day for a quick cuddle. It's like having a little kid. Until we got him we thought Kivi was the cuddliest dog ever, but Erik cuddles are insane. I think they should be outlawed. Nothing gets done in this house when Erik wants a cuddle. But enough about Erik. Seeing as you like the Lappies, here's a pic of Kivi being a cuddlebear. And one of the many nice things about Lappies is how gentle they are. Little Erik uses Kivi as his own personal chew toy, but Kivi likes to cuddle with Erik as well.

But that's the thing. IME even when I expect these things to happen they rarely do. I go a lot. And not just to one dog park. We spontaneously drive to different shires to take the dogs to new dog parks. We just haven't seen a need to worry much. We have made hundreds of visits and I still think they are safer than the streets. Dog parks aren't suitable for every dog and you have to be sensible. But if you want to use them it's not that big a deal. If we went only to one park at only one time we would see the same people and dogs every time with just the odd addition. That makes for a surprisingly stable socialisation experience. Erik has 6 dogs he has basically grown up meeting every few days at the dog park. They are well socialised dogs that self-handicap to accommodate Erik's size. That's something to be sought out rather than avoided like the plague. My only concern is that they don't meet ENOUGH dogs that don't want to talk to them. Overall, they have much more positive expectations for meeting strange dogs than my last dog who didn't go to dog parks.

My Lappie does have a lot of fur to shed, but I don't notice it nearly as much as my shorter-haired, smaller Vallhund. The Lappie's dropped fur gets caught up in the rest of his coat and so often doesn't make it to the ground until I brush it out. When it does it is in the form of a fluffy ball that is much easier to pick up. The Vallhund is mostly a cattle herding breed. That's why he's such a hardcore, game little thing at the dog park. They are bold and outgoing and just dive right on in.

I get cross when people make wild generalisations about the useless people at dog parks. I go to dog parks and off leash beaches all the time and you have to expect the unexpected. You have to assume that there will be dogs that will run up to your dogs. You have to assume the owners won't help you if their dog gets up to mischief. I treat them as a series of environmental variables. I concentrate on making sure my dogs have the skills and positive experiences to handle the hiccups and the tense moments. And I concentrate on making sensible judgment calls. Do I feed treats around that dog? Do I move to another part of the park rather than engage with that dog? Is this dog coming over going to pick a fight? I have to say in all the dog parks and dog beaches I've been to, I've only had a couple of moments that have worried me. I've had dozens from walking around on the streets and having territorial dogs come strutting out of their yards. Too many to count. We have a local dog park that is fenced with a small dog and large dog section. We don't go there as that is one where problems occur at a much higher rate. I swear, fenced dog parks are worth avoiding. The small dog/large dog separation causes problems for us as we have a small dog and a large dog. Last time we went (which was the last time we ever went) we went to the small dog section and kept our large dog on leash. You could get into the small dog yard without going through the big dog yard. If I'd realised that I wouldn't have found myself holding my dog over my head and trying to push this other dog off me!

I loooove black and white animals in general. If they are black and white and sleek I can't keep my eyes off them. I'd love to have a black and white Basenji one day. I really like striking contrast in colours. I don't think it's weird to seek things you find beautiful in animal companions, as long as it's not some kind of wild obsession. I'm pretty easy and not that fussed about temperaments. I know I'll love them no matter what, and I know whatever challenges their personality presents me with will be a valuable learning experience. So maybe I can afford to want particular colours. But in the end it doesn't matter that much. Kivi's litter had a brown and a sable domino puppy and I LOVE those colours, but Kivi was the only boy and he was black and tan. I wanted a boy. I never look at him and wish he were another colour. His colour is as much a part of him as everything else. I find myself thinking he's the best looking Lapphund around.

As the veteran of about half a dozen minor bowel blockages, when they are straining and nothing is coming out. You know about it when something isn't right. They cry when they try to go. And they keep trying, and keep whining, and it's pretty freaking obvious they are in pain.

Clearly you need to visit the Spitz Breed thread in the Breeds sub-forum! I'm obviously biased towards Lappies. :D They tend to fit in wherever they go. It's one of the things I love so much about Kivi. He's just so easy. I think Shelties would be a good choice as well, but they seem a bit more intense than Lappies to me. Lappies are about the most laid back working dog there is. At least that I've met. My mum has a Sheltie and I reckon the coat is a bit harder to care for than the Lappie's because it's finer, but the Lappie coat is thicker and there's more dog to brush. I adore my Lapphund, but he's definitely more spitz than my Vallhund. He has his moments of choosing to do his own thing rather than what you have just asked him. My mum's Sheltie is more like my Vallhund. She is bright and dead easy to train and doesn't have those moments of independent thinking. I like those independent moments, but not everyone does. Lappies are prettier, though. You get lots of comments. Most of them are along the lines of "Is that a Malamute?" but hey, you can forgive people for not being able to pick an uncommon breed.

First time I met Kivi I trod on him. The little guy just snuck up behind me and when I turned around I stepped on his toe. He cried and ran away, but he came back again a while later. He was 6 weeks old. Erik was flown to us. We hadn't met him beforehand. Our first site of him was him sitting in his crate at the airport looking completely lost and bewildered. I remember thinking he was considerably cuter than I had been anticipating. He came out of the crate with us and perked up right away. OH nursed him on the way home because I had nursed Kivi. Somehow OH ended up with the cuddly puppy that wanted to watch his face the whole time while I got the car sick one.

No, I don't think wolves are that far from dogs, but you have to be careful when assessing selection pressures. Behaviour winds its way through everything. You can't IMO assume that by applying selection pressure to a few select behaviours you aren't messing with a whole lot of other stuff you're not even aware exists. I don't think species entered into the argument? It sounds like Seyonova doesn't think dogs and wolves are the same species, but she doesn't say it as far as I have noticed. I got the sense we were talking about the difference between wolves as in the critters that live and hunt in groups versus pariah dogs, as in the critters that were wolves that started hanging around people and soon didn't look or act much like wolves anymore. ;) I put a link to that article if it is the one you're thinking of earlier in the thread.

Yeah, I realise that, but it's hard not to contradict yourself when talking about something as massively broad as domestic dogs in some sort of generalised terms. I do think that Semyonova realises that as well and has deliberately ignored the grey areas because it is not important to the argument of whether dogs should be treated like wolves or not. What I've been trying to do is acknowledge the broad, general trends and simultaneously agree that there are grey areas. Well, I think so, in the sense that some dogs that look like domestic dogs don't act like it, and normally that's because they have a bit or a lot of dingo or some other wild dog in them. There are wild dogs that survive quite comfortably without direct human help and then there are domestic dogs, some of which might survive well enough and some of which would certainly not survive. I mean it in an arbitrary way. Dingoes don't act like domestic dogs, even when brought up in a domestic setting. Dingoes aren't the only ones. These pariah dogs still exist in various forms and are all over the world. Again, Canaan Dogs are a good breed to look into. There still is a wild type and a more domestic type identified in discussions with CD enthusiasts, although even the domestic type does not behave like a normal domestic dog. More fearful, more subtle body language and less tolerance/acceptance towards novelty. Oh yes, I agree, but is it important in the argument of where dogs came from? If you want to distil it down to "wolves" or "pariah dogs", the grey areas aren't that important IMO. There would be grey areas between wolves and pariah dogs as well. There's grey areas everywhere. You just have to decide which ones to ignore. The author decided to ignore all of them. I think that's fair in the scheme of things, although it would be wrong if the author was trying to explain in detail how the domestication process occurred. But the author is just trying to explain why it's erroneous to treat dogs as wolves. Saying that there are some hunting dogs that would have bred with pariah dogs is almost certainly true, but less important than who most hunting dogs breed with. I agree with the author that most hunting dogs would breed with other hunting dogs rather than pariah dogs just by virtue of the fact they'd be more likely to run into a hunting dog than a pariah dog. This grey area where that is not the case is basically just the edge of the civilisation. It's not the whole hunting dog population.

About the same size as a BC, but a little heavier in build. Mine is a monster at 25kg. They cope pretty well with hot temperatures as long as they are out of the sun. My boy didn't enjoy Sydney's insanely humid summer just gone. The humidity was up in the high 80s right up to the high 90s for weeks on end. Kivi Tarro found that to be a bit tough, but trips to the river in the afternoon to dunk his feet in the water seemed to perk him up. And he seemed to feel better lying in front of the fan.

Finnish Lapphund IME are super social, but not especially clingy. My boy likes to come and glue his shoulder to my leg when we are walking, but he's got a stronger independent streak than my Vallhund. My Vallhund is very family-centric. He likes to be with his pack. The Lappie just loves everyone. Although there's nothing like cuddling a Lapphund. ;) We had to work a bit harder with him to convince him of the benefits of staying close to his people when off leash. The Vallhund never had to learn that. Mind you, our Lapphund is like the perfect family dog. He is pretty special. Actually, maybe Swedish Vallhunds would be good. They are a bit like corgis, but taller and not as long in the body. They have wolf colouring and are quite strong, outgoing little dogs. A man can walk a Vallhund without being embarassed. It's been suggested he's like a sawn-off German Shepherd. Very smart, very easy to train, total ridiculous cuddle monster, and surprisingly fast and agile. He thinks he's a big dog. He would take as much exercise as you care to throw at him, but can miss a day or two without going mental. He is very fun and addictive to train. He just does nothing by halves. He has been well socialised and is quite friendly to other dogs people, but he loves his own family best. I met a Tibetan Terrier a while ago. Quite a lot like Erik our Vallhund, actually. She was a super fun dog. I want one!

This evening Kivi discovered he can reach a target above his head by jumping! We don't have very mainstream aims, here. Kivi is so laid back and mellow I was honestly thinking he would never be motivated enough to jump for a target. There's about four things in the entire world that gets Kivi motivated and excited enough to jump. I'm feeling pretty chuffed with us for artificially creating something that makes the list. He's such a cutie, he is bopping up on his hind legs carefully enough to land his nose right on target. His hip targeting is also coming along still. He can now do the pivot exercise on good days with hip targeting. It's a nice enough alternative to the box version for a dog that was utterly oblivious to the box.

I noticed. I'm trying to temper the outrageous generalisations with more realistic generalisations. I've seen my share of dingoes on the outskirts of "civilisation" as well. And I've met a few "pets" that were more dingo than anything else and acted like it. But I don't really see what your point is. To me, you have the wild type and the domestic type of dog. There are certainly areas of overlap, but why do we still have a wild type and a domestic type if there isn't some sort of segregation at the genetic level going on? Your dogs out in Central Australia are the pariah dogs that domestic dogs are proposed to have come from. It doesn't take long for a reversion to the wild type once humans are out of the picture. And they tend to look like dingoes sooner or later, too. How many generic "yellow dogs" have you seen? I've seen countless. Some are pets and some are wild dogs. That situation with the wild dogs not far from towns and the camp dogs in the towns is pretty much exactly how domestication is proposed to have occurred by Semyonova, based on the Coppingers' work. Think of it as a Venn diagram. You have the wild type, and the domestic type, and that little grey area of both. The grey area is not really important to the argument - although I am not suggesting it isn't VITALLY important to understanding the origins of domestic dogs.