corvus

I think there needs to be more attempts to "describe" dog behaviour, as you put it, lilli. Because clearly there are a lot of dog caretakers/pack leaders/human dog parents or whatever they choose to call themselves that don't have a great understanding of dog behaviour. Understanding our animals helps us to improve their welfare. It is a fact that there are dogs that are mistreated in the name of dominance. Anyone who cares about dogs ought to be concerned about that. Equally, I think it highly likely that there are dogs that are suffering due to lack of structure in their lives, or the ignoring of social behaviour because of the pendulum swing away from dominance hierarchies. Anyone who cares about dogs ought to be concerned about that as well. So bring on the scientific descriptions. I for one would like to see this settled for the sake of all dogs. Dog welfare sure floats my boat.

The thing to remember is that possums in suburbia pretty much have back-to-back territories and the environment is at its carrying capacity. That means if you get rid of your resident sooner or later another possum will move in. I think putting up nest boxes for the possums is a good idea. If you get the access to your roof blocked and put the box up the possum should move into the box. Then everyone can live in harmony.

I feel your pain, Mrs T. For a while I was using Premack with my overly friendly lunger. Get yourself under control and sit and you get to move forwards. It worked as far as bringing him down from his threshold went, but then he started to anticipate the release from the sit. So I really worked on making his "hang about" informal heel nice and strong. That also helped, but then I read Control Unleashed and thought I'd give the Look At That game a go. It worked much faster and the problem basically dissolved. LAT is the same as Emma Parsons' exercise looking at the distraction then back at you, I think. Sounds like it, anyway. The only problem now is getting it reliable. People keep randomly reinforcing him by letting their dogs come over and say hi when he's not in a nice, calm sit. It's exasperating, but hey, that's life. If I got off my butt and actually did some work on it outside of our morning walks I'm sure we'd have it nailed in no time.

This one has been doing the rounds since it appeared last week. Not sure if anyone has posted it yet, so here it is just in case. http://www.theotherendoftheleash.com/the-c...d-as-dominance/ She has now expanded with a Part 2:http://www.theotherendoftheleash.com/the-d...nships-in-dogs/

Temple Grandin is one of my heroes. She's the one that said "The worst thing you can do to an animal is make it feel afraid." which instantly became my mantra for working with and around animals. Her website provided me with the final few pieces of the puzzle I needed to start training my hare. Without her descriptions of training antelopes and Bison I'd probably still be fumbling around trying to figure out how to reward my hare. I am currently reading her book "Animals in Translation" after it being on my "to buy" list for years. I find it simultaneously brilliant and irritating. I'm so not autistic, but I do notice most of the things she claims only autistic people notice. I notice them because I watch where animals are looking when their behaviour changes. I don't need to see the world like an animal to see where an animal is looking. I certainly do appreciate her insights, though. I really don't see the world the way she does, and I love having a radically different perspective. What I love even more is finding where the differences and parallels lie. I'm fascinated that I sometimes came to the same conclusion as her via a quite wildly different path. My workmate has met her in person twice and likes to taunt me with the fact that he was allowed to touch her the second time. Of course, I am insanely jealous.

Humping doesn't exist in isolation same as any dog body language doesn't exist in isolation. Pretty obvious what his hips were doing, but his ears and tail were saying "anxious" and there was a lot of flicking from anxious to interested and back that I would generally associate with uncertainty. It could have been a quick test of social status and the anxiety was linked to that instead of the other way around, but if it was it didn't work because it seems most puppies (and a few adult dogs as well) either ingnore it or don't even notice. At any rate, the anxiety-humping link disappeared on its own within a couple of weeks. No biggy. No intevention required. Good for you. If the dog was using humping as a displacement behaviour you can tell him in no uncertain terms to displace on something else. Should sort his stress right out, don't you think? ETA yes, I think it is entirely possible his excitement may have led to humping. When you use the loud "BAH" you're probably bringing him down a notch or two on the excitement front. If he were my dog, I'd start doing a little doggy zen training (or "dog's choice" game), and maybe start doing some massage and pair it with a "cool it" cue. To me, a dog that humps when excited is having a little trouble with self control. I think it's a good idea to gradually introduce self control games even if it's not a real problem now. That's just me, though.

How large is "large"? What size dog?

My workmate used to work for the RSPCA in a managerial position and they tell me there's no way Steve Austin could know if puppies from pet shops are coming into shelters from the microchip information as he claimed on national television. I'm told said information is quite probably years behind by now, and Steve Austin would know it. My workmate used to work in a large NSW shelter, and asserts that they got just as many pet shop puppies as anything else surrendered, if not more. Maybe someone ought to make Austin have to eat his words...

You know, humping is one of those behaviours that crops up for a few different reasons. The only time I've ever stopped a dog humping is if the dog (or person, or other animal) being humped really doesn't like it. My 11 week old puppy humped whenever he was unsure of himself for a couple of weeks. He stopped doing it on his own once he settled in and gained more confidence. Often these things are just a symptom of an emotional state. If you want them to go away you aim to change the emotional state rather than the symptom. Edited to make it clear I'm not the one that humps!

I get the sense this is boring to everyone else. Might continue via PM.

Calm down. I was drawing attention to the fact that despite the guy having obviously scrubbed his facility top to toe before they got out there to film it, and despite the fact he was trying to distance himself from other PF, the story still showed him in an unfavourable light. When that was perceived to have happened in the Catalyst PDE aftershock everyone decried it as biased.

Er... no. He is the president of PIAA after all. They have a policy on selling animals in pet stores and that is it's fine as long as the animals are in good health and well cared for. I'd be pretty peeved if I were that Banksia Park fellow. The spin on the segment certainly wasn't in his favour. Did anyone notice they showed his dogs while the animal rights lady was saying how cruel she thought it was and that they were all the same?

I think dogs are more sensitive to abnormal behaviour than poor character.

My argument (allowing me to take a position here) is that "doing what works" accounts for all the variability quite happily. Using the rugby analogy, you only throw in as many players as you need to secure your position or position yourself well for the next phase. Every player plays for their position because that is what works best; if you're fat you play in the forwards, if you're skinny and take care of yourself you play in the backs. Okay, makes sense.... What about the dogs that were equally likely to participate in an agonistic interaction with another group regardless of whether their group outnumbered the other group or not?

Our footpaths aren't very wide around here. :D We normally stop and step to the side when someone is passing anyway, so that's why Kivi sits in front. He's just orienting as he's been taught to do in general. If we ask for his attention on the move he falls into the heel position, but I find it easier to mark head movement if I'm not also trying to watch where I'm going, so I stop to play the game. Just personal preference.

I don't think it does account for anything at all, frankly! But that's what I find interesting. IME it's often hard to find patterns in animal behaviour. Lots of "noise", and coming from a wildlife perspective, it was usually impossible to know what the animals had learnt in their life. Even a little bit. I reckon you could model when dogs are likely to form quite cohesive groups and when they are not based on access to resources and the personalities of the dogs. Maybe that's a little ambitious, though. Perhaps I'll start with Rugby instead. :D In seriousness, though, if you only do what works for you, why all the variation within the one environment? I'm not saying that there should be just one evolutionarily stable way for dogs to live in social groups, but I'm wondering what drives the variation and if it is predictable. I think that dogs are wonderfully adaptable when it comes to being social, and trying to come up with simple rules about how or why they group is probably going to meet with limited success because it's not simple. I think that this paper hints at the wonderful complexity of sociality in dogs. Or maybe I've got stars in my eyes at the moment.

In addition to seeing the behaviourist, it might be worthwhile looking into Leslie McDevitt's Look At That game. We have found this tremendously useful for our friendly boy who used to try to get to other dogs to greet them when he was on leash. If he couldn't get to them because of the leash he'd start lunging or jumping up and down, barking. He now gets a marker and a treat every time he sees another dog he's not allowed to greet. Instead of lunging and carrying on, he sits in front of us and offers glances at the other dog for treats. He's starting to even come and sit in front of us as soon as he sees another dog when he's on leash without getting a marker. The applications for this game are very broad. Most people use it with dogs that are reacting out of fear/anxiety. It's quite cool that it works just as well with Mr Social Butterfly.

Did you get hold of the full paper, Aidan? That abstract isn't the clearest I've ever seen... The general gist of it all is that there is no simple reason why dogs cooperate with one another in conflicts with other packs. In bigger packs it seems like individuals are less likely to get involved in aggressive encounters when the other group is much smaller than theirs, maybe because the extra numbers aren't needed. Smaller packs where lots of social bonding behaviour goes on have individuals that are more likely to cooperate in any aggressive encounter with another pack. That may be because they are related, or maybe because all that bonding makes them more cohesive as a group. Dogs were given social status ranks, which sometimes predicted where a dog might be in an aggressive encounter (leading, participating near the front) but sometimes seemed a lot less important. I think it suggests that there's more to dog sociality than status or resource holding potential, and more to it than learning theory.

I found this study quite interesting: The most interesting finding to me was that dogs that received (or gave) a lot of affiliative attention such as muzzle licking and nosing were more likely to cooperate in any situation, but this was independent of social status. Hmmmmm ETA journal details.

Yes. As we all know every dog is different.

I don't want to diverge off topic too much, but "optimistic" in this sense doesn't require awareness of a range of possible future outcomes. Just a range of possible outcomes at any given moment. This translates to whether an animal is likely to try something new or stick with what it knows is a safe bet. That's the grossly simplified version. There are all sorts of things about depression and stress and environmental effects tied up in it. But what we do know is that some people are more prone to pessimism than others, and it appears that this may hold for other animals.

No kidding. I would never forgive myself if one of my dogs got to my pet rabbits and killed them. Their lives are my responsibility every bit as much as the lives of my dogs are. My rabbits have lived with a very prey driven dog successfully. The key is to account for human error. Two degrees of separation at all times. A cage and a closed door. If the rabbits are out of their cages, two closed doors. It saved my rabbits a few times when someone accidentally left a door open. I think that you can train it out of some dogs but it's hard work and realistically it ain't gonna happen in this home. And some dogs are REALLY prey driven. They just get so excited that it can be a real struggle no matter what method you use. Whatever method you would use it takes particularly good timing and body language awareness. I don't think it's fair on the bunnies and piggies to put their lives on the line. Separation is about a ten times easier and more reliable.

Steven Lindsay said for the military dog training program he was involved with years ago if they got a pup that retrieved naturally they were pretty excited. If he also dived into chasing a rag, they knew they had a great dog that would make it through the program. I found that quite interesting. Kivi did both those things... What happened?? Then again, Kivi did both those things at a leisurely amble whereas Erik has always been one to do these things as fast as he can, and then tug and shake the toy and start ripping bits off it. Kivi lacks alertness to my eyes. It's why we love him, but it's not surprising that he's a bit slow when he just doesn't notice things. He lives in a cloud, bless him. Erik is uber alert and latches onto anything that predicts things happening, whether good or bad. I've always thought of it as him being an especially opportunisitic dog. Kivi lets life happen to him, but Erik tries to manipulate everything to his benefit.

I use a clicker for Erik and "ping" for Kivi. I changed Kivi's from the clicker to "ping" when I started with Erik, mostly because I thought it would be easier to change Kivi's cue than Erik's. They will butt in on each other's training sessions if given the chance, but the ears only perk up for their specific bridges when we are out walking or at the park. I think it makes it easier to have two obviously different sounds, but that's just me.

Someone I greatly respect on another list suggested that dogs that "greet" with lunges find out very quickly how far this dog can be pushed and whether they are going to get flattened or not. They likened it to socially awkward people who lunge in with inappropriately intense leads into conversation or interaction purely because they are so nervous about interacting at all that on some subconscious level they just want to know fast whether this is going to turn out good or bad rather than agonising about it and living in horrible uncertainty. Not sure what I think of it or if it's any help, but just thought I'd throw that out there as a possible insight into the behaviour.