corvus

Aww, poor thing. Maybe something bit him. My old dog was terrified of march flies. She'd bolt if she heard one buzzing around. I don't blame her; I'm terrified of them as well! I still think hurting so much when you bite someone is maladaptive for a bloodsucker. Anyway, have you tried starting from a good distance from the door and feeding him? There must be some distance at which he is reasonably comfortable. I'd focus on very gradually shortening that distance.

Certainly none that I met in Mexico were, but they were running in quite large packs with lots of other dogs and dog aggressive dogs didn't exist as far as I could see. There was a guy on one of the ranches I stayed at that took in every stray dog that turned up. There were easily 30 dogs at that place.

With my two? When one has tried to end the game non-violently and the other is not taking the hint. Otherwise, I let them do their thing. Kivi squeals sometimes, but I have a sneaking suspicion he does it when he wants to bite Erik and can't because Erik has him by the neck. Basically, Kivi is a whiner and will lie on the ground on his back and whine but make no effort to actually get up and out of the way. He's twice Erik's size, so it's not like he's helpless. Mostly, they are very considerate of each other and what I think looks painful is just good fun to them. I've seen Erik halt a very wild game of chase with Kivi when he's had enough. He just turns around and faces him and just like that Kivi's glassy-eyed look vanishes and they have a few tension-relieving shakes.

This seems like such a common problem. Jeanne's ideas are great. I found for Erik I just put tug games on cue. He gets revved and ready to tug anywhere when I use the cue. The trick is that if he's very distracted he'll only tug for a moment and then take off. So to build him up to playing for longer I use better toys. Things he goes really wild for. And I take the toy away really fast and tell him to go play. The moment he heads back towards me it's game on again for a few seconds, then dismiss. He tends to be back sooner and I can get him to play for longer this way. No cue and no play unless I'm sure he'll be really into it. I also incorporated downs and releases into the tug games really early. Erik knows he's got to do a down or sit before he gets to play with the tug. It does seem to put him in the right zone.

I saw a few on the ranches in Mexico when I was visiting a few years back. They are quite popular, there. So are Australian Cattle Dogs, actually. I think of the two as kindred spirits. It's hard to say what they're like from that, though. Ranch dogs always have heaps to do. I think they were used mostly as cattle dogs over there, although it looked like there were plenty in the kennels of hunting dogs as well. They are a bit of a multi-purpose dog. I like 'em.

Our dogs are in whatever room we are. You should see them when we are in different rooms. They don't know what to do with themselves. I think that Kivi should go outside, as it's a bit cooler and he's not enjoying the heat today, but he won't. Force of habit, I think.

My mum has a dog that often throws up when she eats red meat, but she is fine on raw chicken. You can safely refreeze meat for human or animal consumption as long as it was thawed in the fridge. If I'm going to thaw something, break it up and refreeze, it thaws in the fridge. Usually takes about 24 hours for it to get thawed enough to break up.

I have a dremel and use it on my long-coated breed. Just have to carefully hold all the hair back. I think the key is to be very very gentle. They are quite sensitive around their feet. My pup is still being counter-conditioned to the dremel. I keep forgetting to work on it. He's fine right up until it goes on. He doesn't like the noise it makes. Actually, he's fine if it's on and I'm lightly rubbing the base over his body and holding a paw, but he's very unsure about it getting near his feet when it's on. He was doing quite well with the food earlier, but then he was starting to slap his paw into my hand and wait like a coiled spring for the reward. It was a little bit too energetic, so I down-graded to pats and scratches for rewards. Takes longer, but at least he's not slamming his paw into my hand then slamming it again and again and generally just getting excited about it all.

I think that if a puppy is breaking the skin all bets are off and you are justified in doing whatever you need to do to protect yourself. Erik only broke the skin a couple of times, and no blood although we got the odd bruise. He certainly knew about it when he had bitten that hard. Kivi did it once only. I howled in pain and he never did it again. I know someone who battled for many months with a very bitey Flat-coated Retriever that would routinely leave bruises. She ended up getting a trainer in to help. She found that quiet voices and commands worked best, as her dog got very excited by loud, sharp noises. She also taught the dog the names of her toys as a redirection technique. When the dog got fresh she'd tell her to find one of her toys and reward with some rough play with it. Another thing that seemed to help was rewarding the dog for trying methods to get attention that did not involve biting. We went this way with Erik and his barking and it worked like a charm. One day he tried gazing up at me for attention instead of just barking at me and I rewarded the hell out of it. Didn't take him long to start doing that instead of barking. Erik was a dreadful biter as a puppy. I found boring, slow walking combined with redirecting to a toy and using rock solid sits to all be very helpful. I still train just about exclusively with a clicker and don't use punishments. If it doesn't work, often people like to change to punishments. I've found that it is generally not necessary. Often if it is not working it's because of inconsistencies or mis-judgements in what is the rewarding aspect of an undesirable behaviour. For example, I spent a long time freezing whenever Kivi tried to bite my legs when I was running when he was younger. I eventually realised that me stopping hit all the right buttons for him as a herding dog. I started carrying a toy and when I ran he would run with me and hold onto the toy. Problem solved. I just hadn't realised that I was rewarding the behaviour instead of interrupting it.

I video everything I do these days, except with the hare because I work with him in the dark. It will certainly be interesting to see if my plans for the MM come to fruition. I'll be sure to post some videos if I manage to achieve anything remotely interesting. Videos of abject failure are interesting as well, though. I've been meaning to put up a video of my abject failure to get Kivi to notice a mat just because it's a great example of troubleshooting with clicker training. Troubleshooting is at least as useful as success. It'd be nice to have successful mat noticing at the end, though.

Thanks, ness. That's exactly what I was thinking. Erik has tricks he does for the hell of it without rewards. I'd still reward periodically, but they are easy behaviours to maintain because he likes doing them. Just this morning at the river he blew off my partner to come and do reverse circles around my leg. I didn't even call him! He had just done a few and decided he'd rather do more than try to devine what my partner wanted him to do. ETA and m-j.

That's a great question! And just what I was hoping someone who might have done it would answer. But no one has, so we're stuck with my half-baked ideas. My visualisation is you use a bit of tossing around of targets or something similar (reward after every touch) as a setting effect. As in, a way to get them revved and excited. Then get them to do something and reward with another bout of quick touches and rewards, rapid fire style, or with some chasing of the target, then the cycle repeats. Pretty much exactly the same as what you would do with food if you weren't using a target. I just bought a Manners Minder with almost exactly that second scenario in mind. And training a hare who doesn't like to approach me sometimes. Have people that have built drive for targeting ever used it for anything other than getting a dog to move to where you want them to be? Thanks for your comment, Aidan, although it seems to have been overlooked along with McDevitt's applications of targeting in drive.

Well... I know an intensely prey driven dog that couldn't give a stuff about balls. He only chases things that are alive. And then, only if he thinks he has a good chance of catching them.

Oh yes. Good on you. Everyone has different boundaries with animals. I'm a "look but don't touch" kind of girl if I can be, but sometimes the best thing you can do for them is move them. I'm useless at getting lizards off the road with my minimal impact methods.

I'm scared, too. But it's not my idea, it's Abrantes', so we can just both agree with him. I would have loved to have been able to teach bite inhibition to an adult dog. Then we might have been able to help that rescue dog we had with no bite inhibition. But you can't ever test it. If you failed it would be disastrous! Part of this dog's problem was not understanding social situations. To her, every spat was dead serious. It was absolutely horrifying to watch. The stakes are way too high to ever try something out. I am sure I have read something about what can only be developed at a young age... I'm not sure if it was relevant or not, though. Must try to remember where I read it...

I'm an ecologist and have met a few fellow ecologists in the past that just can't leave an animal alone. Snakes and lizards really cop it because they are easy to catch (relatively). I hate seeing an animal in distress. If you leave them be, they will make their own way to safety. Although I have had trouble once getting a frog back in its rock crevice. It just wouldn't go! We had to find it another rock. Can't leave amphians exposed, but snakes are good at finding cover.

Clearly I've confused everyone with an ill use of the word "reward". I probably should have said using a target as a secondary reinforcer. We know that secondary reinforcers are only as good as the last time you reinforced them with a primary reinforcer. No doubt people use secondary reinforcers in drive training all the time, but I was wondering if anyone had taken the time to build drive for targets, or even incorporated targets into building drive in general and then using targeting as a game to put a dog in drive. My mistake. The reason why I asked about targets and not just any random behaviour, bridge, or marker is the wide application of targets and the fact that it lends itself well to drive games. I hardly think you can achieve all your aims in drive training with just targets alone. Who uses just one kind of reward anyway? IME any animal loves an easy win, and targeting is both an easy win and an activity that can be quite energetic and tap into the same chase stuff that other drive-building games do. For example, you could throw a target. Just thought it would be good to be prepared, PF. This stuff ain't outrageous, dangerous, or obviously wrong, but then again, I have a knack for turning the most innocuous things into stupidly argumentative topics in the training section. I don't understand why people feel they need to understand where I'm going with the question. Just answer it. ETA It would be very amusing and tricksy of me to deliberately use the word drive in a way that no one else was using it, but as much as I love amusing and tricksy activities, I am actually using the word drive in the sense of high anticipation, intent stare, ears forward, tension in body kind of thing. Whether you can get drive for targeting or not is not a question I think needs answering, because I know for a fact you can. Like I said, works well for McDevitt. But just to repeat myself again, yes, you absolutely need to add a primary reinforcer as well. Unless you have a frisbee mad dog and start using a frisbee as a target, perhaps. :p

Well, I think they are all independent. I've seen fearful dogs with very low bite thresholds and fearful dogs with very high bite thresholds. I knew a fearful dog with a moderately high bite threshold and a complete lack of bite inhibition, but with humans her bite threshold was far higher than it was with other dogs. I also knew a fearful dog with a very low bite threshold, but reasonable bite inhibition. The tricky thing is, if a dog is very frightened/aroused, they may not inhibit their bites. So in the case of the fearful dog with low bite threshold and good bite inhibition, there were times when he did bite seriously when he was very aroused. Incidentally, there are good arguments that the majority of bite inhibition is taught by a pup's litter mates and mother. Roger Abrantes says that bite inhibition is a result of sibling punishment. Puppy bites sibling too hard, sibling yelps, puppy keeps biting too hard, sibling bites hard back. The puppy gets hurt and learns to pay attention to yelps and ease off the bite pressure when they hear it. By the time they are 8 weeks old they should already have a decent bite inhibition and what we teach them is just building on that foundation.

Aww, that's one pissed off snakle. Leave him alone.

I'm pretty sure there has been at least one study on this where they trained puppies some with voice, some with hand signals and voice, and some with hand signals alone. If I remember correctly, the voice alone pups lagged significantly behind the rest of them. I use both, but only bring the verbal cue in later. How strong is Tully's stay? Pretty strong as in rock solid, or pretty strong as in reliable except in exciting situations? IME, if you reward something enough it becomes a strongly conditioned response and can override instinct. Having said that, I know a dog that goes over threshold every time you throw a toy, and some dogs have such strong chase responses that they don't actually hear a command once they are in the zone. I reckon put her in a stay and start by throwing it just a half a metre or something in front of her and see if she can hold a stay for that. Surely there's a point where she can hold a stay, even if you just do a lollipop throw of 20cm. Less movement equals less arousal.

Yes, that is what I'm getting at. But we know that you can then incorporate crates into other activities because they already have drive to go into the crate. It's the same principle with Leslie McDevitt's mat training. She builds drive for the mat and then uses the mat for all sorts of things, including a target during agility training. This ain't new. I'm not pretending incorporating targets into drive work is a brand new idea by any means, just asking if anyone has done it. I was also wondering how far they went with it, but one step at a time. Yeah, same with clicker training, same with anything.

I said use the target as a reward because when you build anticipation for the reward that follows targeting the reward itself is kind of a second thought. The anticipation is a bigger reward than the wee little taste of meat that comes after. If there were no anticipation you wouldn't get that drive to get to the target that you'd be trying to create and subsequently use. You could use drive games as the reward for targeting if you wanted to. It doesn't really matter. It's basically the difference between luring and targeting. If you can get a dog in drive by playing "catch-the-hand" sorts of games with food, why not with target games and get the added bonus of being able to incorporate it into distance work and also having a behaviour that is useful in a lot of different situations? I'm thinking along the lines of Crate Games and that sort of thing.

Both my dogs have been on long lines at the dog park when they were still in training. I'm waiting for Erik's adolescent moments to kick in and he will go back on the long line! Although, he's 8 months old, almost, and has a better recall than my 2 year old dog. I've never seen any dog behave differently towards one of my dogs because they were on leash or on a long line. But I have once or twice had dogs pick up a trailing long line, and that's a world of trouble if you don't do something fast! The last thing you want is a pup still in training getting dragged through the park by a dog on the other end of the long line. Well, the last thing short of an adult dog coming up to them and spontaneously picking a fight.

The latter. Bite inhibition to me doesn't mean that they won't bite hard, just that if they do they bloody well meant to and intended to hurt or do physical damage. The power in a dog's jaws is quite impressive, but I routinely witness my dogs playing very rough games with a lot of biting and I know from accidentally copping one meant for the dog that they are biting very softly. I think that a dog with good bite inhibition retains that inhibition even when quite aroused. My last dog had wonderful bite inhibition, knowing exactly where she wanted her teeth to be and how much perssure and rarely even making contact. She once got into a serious, life-and-death kind of fight and almost certainly shed blood. Makes sense. Curbs her bite considerably in social situations, even when behaving threateningly, but when it turned serious there was no holding back.

I think that the social aspect of play is something that warrants a lot of consideration in our human-dog bonds.