corvus

Can you think with your hindbrain at all? I always thought that was just automatic stuff down there. Anyway, doesn't matter. Have you tried clicker training, Stitch? It's a good way to get animals thinking about what they are doing and understanding consequences. Nose targets are a great place to start because it's so easy they are certain to win and be getting treats every couple of seconds. They can't bark if they are mostly eating. I've heard of using something sticky like peanut butter on a spoon as a reward for noisy dogs as it gums up their mouth. My noisy little fella also goes pretty fast much of the time. I can only imagine what it would be like living with a dog that went at high speed all the time. At least Erik has a (slightly flakey) off switch and learnt pretty quickly how to think through his arousal. Sounds like you need to read Control Unleashed.

Thanks MrsD. It's good to know there's hope for Jill. It's the food bit that makes it hard. She just loses interest so fast. I think with practise she will get there, though. Jeanne, I love the MM, but it cost me an arm and a leg to get hold of one. No one will ship them directly to Aus due to some claim that the remotes don't work over here. I had to get mine sent to a US address via Bongo and then forwarded to Australia. I'm sorely tempted to take it apart to reverse engineer it for use in my optimism testing apparatus for my PhD. But I'm not very good at reverse engineering, tragically. I think it must have an infra-red thingy to tell it when a treat has been dispensed. It's super cool watching the disk that pushes the treats into the dispensing hole just keep turning until a treat comes out. I got it mostly for my hare, thinking it would be easier to train him if I wasn't having to overcome his anxiety about my presence as well. Unfortunately it's a bit noisy and we have lots of desensitising to do before he is likely to be comfortable with it.

Deprivation is the classic example of an establishing operation in psychology, which is something that increases the intensity of the consequence of a stimulus. I guess that it really only works for something the dog has an appetite for in the first place. Not like "I want it" things, but "I need it" things. But that doesn't mean that you can't be quite selective about what you deprive your dog of within the broad category of a "need". It just means you won't get as strong an effect. At least, that's the way I see it. You don't necessarily need a hungry dog to make food and eating seem better to them than usual. It's just the quickest and most effective route.

Hmm... By your description, it sounds like she has two problems, one being she is lacking in awareness of what she's being taught (maybe??) and the other being anticipating things she wants with a lot of excitement. I'm a little unclear if that's the case, because you also say she doesn't have a lot of concentration. I'm finding it hard to imagine a dog that both doesn't concentrate and anticipates everything. If she's anticipating everything, she must be picking up cues everywhere she goes? In which case, I wonder if she just isn't aware of what she's being rewarded for, because it seems that if she was she would be all over retaining what she had been taught? Anyway, I have one dog that barks a lot during training and is highly anticipatory and another dog that often doesn't grasp what he's being rewarded for and so takes a long time to train sometimes. I can reward him for doing the right thing all I like but until he understands what he did to get a reward he won't learn it. This has led to some intense brainstorming in how to make him aware of things his body is doing. My answer has been to target train him so that he learns to move whatever part of his body I indicate to a target. The other dog with his anticipation of things and his barking... I've found that the barking goes away on its own when he's really focused. It comes back the second he gets a teensy bit frustrated, but as long as he feels like he's getting somewhere and our reward rate is pretty high, he is quiet. He does have a bark and quiet command, but he also has a lot to say and saying it is sometimes more important to him than restraining himself for the sake of some other reward. The anticipation is also tricky because he does get very excited. There's a rule in our house that he doesn't get anything without first sitting or downing QUIETLY. He knows the drill, and if he decides to walk around barking instead he gets ignored. Even so, if he's really excited it's just a fact of life that he can't hold it in. He'll bring himself under control on his own a lot of the time, but there will always be noise. It helped to teach him that "Shh" meant not only shut your mouth, but lie down and give me some sleepy eyes and put that tail down a bit. He still anticipates, but at least he is not so noisy and crazy.

A Manners Minder is a remote controlled treat dispenser, Jeanne. It has a bay for the food, and when you want to reward you click the button on the remote and the MM makes a beep and dispenses a treat into a tray at the bottom of it.

It's a curly one IMO. I've been chatting to some friends about this very issue recently in light of some papers I read about the effect of social deprivation in particular on rats. Of course, the things they do to rats are pretty extreme most of the time. Currently, I don't really deprive my dogs of anything before training or on a day-to-day basis. I don't find that I need to. I've done training sessions mere moments after feeding them dinner and it makes no difference that I can see. Erik certainly gets pretty active in training, but it's never even occurred to me that he shouldn't train after a meal because of that. He's frequently very active. They can play with whoever they like within reason, they have access to toys all the time, I don't crate or pen them. They get treats daily. Oh, I do keep the special tug toys to myself unless we're training. I've always thought of it as restricted access, but maybe it can be considered deprivation. I do deprive my hare of treats. He gets nothing he particularly likes unless he takes it from my hand. I have found this to be necessary with him. He doesn't have high motivation to do any training in the first place, so I've found I really have to use everything I've got to manipulate his interest. It's a pain right now I would quite comfortably restrict access to any reward that my animals want, but don't need if I felt that their motivation needed a serious boot.

I think that Hendra is restricted to tropical climates in Australia.

To put a slightly off-topic spin on visual cues and olfactory cues, there's an Indian joint down the road from us that uses a toy dog to prop their door open. The first time Kivi saw it he was utterly convinced it was a real dog and play bowed to it and barked playfully at it, and danced around it poking it with his nose for a good ten seconds before he gave up. It took him about 4 encounters to learn that it wasn't a real dog, despite the fact it doesn't look that realistic and I doubt it smells like a dog. I've seen small children treat it like a real dog as well. So when we got Erik I couldn't wait to take him past it to see what he did. His hackles came up and he growled deep and menacing at it. He was only about 13 weeks at the time, so it surprised me. He has never acted that way to real dogs, so I guess he understood that it was not a real dog, but perhaps it was similar enough to upset him. It was kind of like he distrusted it on the basis it looked like a dog but obviously wasn't. For a while when working on birds we were using a dead male fairy-wren that had been sitting on a windowsill for a few months to try to lure live males into the nets. The birds knew instantly that the dead bird was not alive and didn't fly in at high speed to attack like we hoped they would, but without fail they would come in real close and just peer at him curiously. They were fascinated. Strange how animals react to unusual but slightly familiar visual cues.

Haha Aidan, that guy answer had already come to mind. :D I cooked liver brownies once. It didn't smell great, but it made so much I feel like I'll be slipping the dogs liver brownie for the rest of my life. And it didn't turn out to be recall worthy anyway. I use teensy cubes of 4Legs dog food rolls for clicker training and little dried bits and pieces that live in the treat pouch for walks. The 4Legs roll is awesome as it's not very slimy and holds its shape. Doesn't clog the Manners Minder, which was designed for kibble. I find it's just about right for clicker training, where the click is kind of more exciting than the reward that follows, but if I had a dog that was "meh" about food I think it's got to be roast meat or something similar. My dogs are luke warm about devon or frankfurt, and while they like cheese it's not going to get the kind of speedy recalls that cooked meat does. You should see them fly for an empty pizza box, though. ;) My mum has a dog that just isn't very interested in food at all. She hates offal and refuses to touch it. Red meat makes her throw up. She will work for food treats for a couple of minutes, maybe, but only if there's nothing else at all going on. She's really actually quite hard to train. Completely fetch mad, but that's not much help when her brain tends to switch off at the very sight of a toy. The latest idea is a ball on a rope. We'll see how that one goes. Kind of dependent on the rest of the family refraining from playing fetch with her for a while, though. Glad you found something that works, Grace. I think once you break through and show them how fun training is the reward becomes less important.

The only thing I found that helped remotely when we were having our problems last summer was lemon-scented teatree oil. I would put a few drops on a cloth and tie it around the collar of my old dog, who was suffering very badly. She loathed the smell, but I feel like it kept the fleas at a managable level between flea baths. She still had heaps, but without it she had more. I tried diatomeceous earth and it did crap all. I would never depend on the teatree oil, but when nothing else worked it seemed to help. Pennyroyal is supposed to be good, but I'm not game to use it. It's quite nasty stuff and I read somewhere that dogs can actually have a bad reaction to it being around. Like, breathing difficulties.

Wow, you lucky thing to never have had fleas before. We had the most heinous infestation last summer I was at my wits end. None of the flea treatments worked at all! And yes, my dogs were wandering around spreading fleas to other dogs. There was nothing I could do about it. I was bathing weekly but they'd be back in a day. Flea bombs knocked them down for a week. It all came to an end with Comfortis. It took 3 months for them to disappear. We are now flea free, which just makes life so much nicer. I am tossing up whether to keep them on it still. They missed the last month and still no fleas, but I am so scared of getting another infestation with Comfortis added to the list of treatments that don't work.

I guess Lyssavirus should be taken quite serious, although AFAIK there have been no confirmed infections of dogs or cats or any other non-bat aside from humans for that matter. If one of my dogs got bitten I'd be taking them to the vet and hoping for post-exposure rabies shots just in case. It's not something I'd want to mess around with or take risks with (says the girl who chose to handle bats without gloves and got bitten). I don't think a great deal is known about it, still. It's considered more or less host specific, but no one has looked very hard for antibodies in animals that aren't bats. And obviously humans can get it, although flying-foxes are descended from primates, so maybe that explains that. I'd be keeping the dogs in just to be on the safe side. At any rate, I think it's good practice to try to keep dogs away from wildlife in general. A possum might make a good go at taking a dog's face off, but possums are killed by dogs all the time. It's not a nice way to go.

How do you bake beef heart? Always looking for freaking delicious things for recall treats. Makes a big difference.

We haven't seen any here in the suburbs immediately around Sutherland. At the moment it looks like they haven't got further than Caringbah. It has been going on for a while. I don't think much is being done about it. NPWS would know. Unfortunately NPWS are too busy handing out parking tickets in the Royal. I would say if you're in the area look for toad eggs. I think everyone would get off their butts if it was found the toads were breeding. It's considered a bit cool for them down here, though.

In case there is anyone living in the eastern Sutherland Shire, there's an ongoing Cane Toad problem down at Taren Point. Last I heard they were getting a few reports from residents of Taren Point and Caringbah of Cane Toads each week. Someone nearly lost their cat to one. It is not known if they are breeding. Apparently they are coming in on car parts from QLD.

Really? I can't say I've found that. There are a bunch of ways my dogs can tell when we are about to do some training and they are generally already busting to get going by the time I'm ready. The exception would be those little ad hoc training sessions we do when we're doing another activity and toss some training in. All the same, Erik gets a click and it's game on for him. Kivi is a different kind of dog. I could write a whole post about that. It's taken me a bit to figure out what's best for him. I didn't mean "in drive". I meant aroused in the sense that arousal is a level of physiological and behavioural responsiveness in an animal, which tends to vary between sleep and full alertness, and aroused refers to some loose idea of higher than usual arousal. Assuming 'usual' is base level wakefulness like when you're walking from your house to the letterbox to pick up the junk mail, for example. That's as clear as I can make it, I think? You only need to touch Kivi's chest for a couple of seconds or give him a quick ear rub and he drops back to base level of arousal or lower after a training session. He's not a real worry in that sense. I don't really need to do anything for him to bring him down, but I find I usually give him a rub anyway. No purpose, just like the bonding. Erik is a different story all together. He has a lot of qualities that make him a very fun dog to work with, but he can't be an uber alert, hyper optimistic, intensely persistent, confident, insanely reward-sensitive dog without also being a touch on the easily aroused and not so easily settled side. :p Thankfully he's improving consistently. I do like doing something a bit calming after training, though. I hadn't realised I was doing it, but once I thought about it I realised that I usually do something, whether it's some quiet cuddles and massages or walking around or some free play or whatever. Just wondering if other people did it as well and if they had reasons for it. Thanks Staranais, that's what I was curious about.

I guess it depends on what you're looking for in a trainer. If I were after a mentor I'd be looking for someone with good animal instincts. I used to love watching Kelly Marks train horses on tv. She would talk a lot about rewarding and desensitising and taking things gently so as not to frighten the horses, but she knew instinctively when a horse just needed a shove or something. She wouldn't teach it, because I don't think you can. How do you teach when you know an animal you have been training very gently needs a firm hand? Ah, Barking Mad, you gave me so many hours of watching talented trainers.

No, since you ask. I have a couple of release cues. I have a "go play" temporary release cue and a "that's all" pack up and go home cue, but I just realised last night that I hardly ever leave it at "that's all". I usually sit down with them and give them rubs and massages until we're all relaxed and smiling at each other. Or maybe just a little low key game of fetch or something. Sure, as soon as someone sponsors me.

No reason. Just curious. By "aroused" I mean worked up, excited, drivey, revved, that kind of thing. Do you leave them revved or do something to calm them down? Why?

Hmm... companion dogs. Well, I'm biased because I have a Finnish Lapphund and I do believe he is pretty much the perfect companion dog. He's my gentle, mellow cuddlebear. But at least some of his suitability as a companion is just his personality. He's a very laid back dude, and just a real sweetie. I think Leonbergers are very cool because they were pretty much bred as companions. Newfoundlands are lovely as well. I'm not very into toys, but Tibetan Spaniels seem quite companionable to me. A toy without really acting much like a toy. They seem steady and sensible to me. I guess Cavs are similar. I think that the smaller herders tend to make good companions. Shelties and Corgis are just nice, generally easy little dogs that love being with their people. Easy to train, portable, quite adaptable with their exercise requirements. There are some other, less common small herders around like Polish Lowlands and Vallhunds as well. And there are a few nice hounds, too. Basset Fauves are real special, and Petit Basset Griffon Vendeen strike me as a really fun dog to have around. Some Beagles make really great companions, but some not so much. Depends on what you expect of them I guess. I met a Tibetan Terrier not long ago. I was really taken with her. What a fun, athletic little dog. Very outgoing but not very terrier-like.

I used to know a guy with a massive Mal. He wasn't a very big guy. I have a vivid memory of this Mal inside suddenly spotting pizza on the table and walking over to it with two people hanging off him trying to stop him. Luckily he was well-trained and stopped short of wolfing it down. I saw a dog once that looked like a giant Lappie up in the Blue Mountains. Still have no idea what he was. Looked exactly like one of the darker black and tan lappies, only about GSD sized. The right ears, curly tail, pointy nose, the works. A clever lappie look-alike.

How do you end training sessions? If your dog is pretty aroused from the sheer joy of training with you, do you do something to bring their arousal down, or do you leave them hanging?

I think maybe Greytmate was suggesting that mixing sexes is not a guarantee of no fights rather than that it doesn't work at all. I suspect that it comes down to the personalities of the dogs more than the sexes, but it would also be foolish to rule out sexes seeing as it seems quite well known that bitches for example can be uglier when they start fighting than mixed sexes or two dogs (in some breeds), as you seem to know yourself. Nothing is guaranteed, but there are tendencies we can observe, as you have. ETA My OH grew up in Bunbury. Yaaay Bunbury! Unfortunately he doesn't know any behaviourists over there, sorry.

Hmm, well if it can be a reflex thing in similar situations, but also a sign of stress or an appeasment gesture in other contexts, maybe she licks the air as a reflex and when you growl at her she does it more as appeasment/calming signal? Licking used to drive me nuts, and I taught my last dog a "don't lick" cue, but Erik somehow makes it less annoying. Slightly. When he gets a bit intense about his licking we encourage him to do one of those flip-flops onto his back he does to get a belly rub. At least then he's facing away from us so he has to make do with licking the air. He does flip-flops right off your lap sometimes. I've had to catch him before!

Do you have any further info on that? Like I said, AFAIK there are regulations that have to be adhered to, and free of parasites is one of them. If there are abbatoirs not sticking to the regulations maybe someone should dob them in. I think there might be complications with the bunny thing wrt land zoning? I'm sure I read about this one time. I guess a lot of reptile owners breed their own rats etc. There might be animal ethics issues as well.