corvus

I meant to say before that I have a T Touch dvd. I only got it recently so I haven't seen it all yet, but it's definitely helpful to see it done by a pro. Kivi turns to putty in your hands with any kind of massage, but we're starting to see Erik staying still for it a bit more after watching the dvd. He loves the tarrantula pulling a plough. He even let me do his mouth ever so briefly last week. That's a big step for a pup that I had to teach to allow his teeth to be checked using lots and lots of treats.

Ours get treats most of the time. They don't get Kongs anymore as Erik likes to hoard. I highly doubt we would ever have a fight break out because Kivi has no backbone and doesn't want anything in the world enough to fight about it, but it's not fair on him to have anything in there that Erik is willing to fight about because Erik will take it one way or another. So normally we give them a biscuit each or a pig's ear or a bit of beef tendon. I'm assuming they don't fight over the ears and tendon because Kivi will actually take them from us without cringing and Erik doesn't usually make more than one attempt to check out Kivi's before settling down with his. We use treats so dogs know that us leaving for the day = good. No troubles with them, then. We rarely give them anything if we're only going for a few hours and they don't make a scene, so our treat giving is probably not necessary, but given our neighbours hate barking dogs at 7:30am when we are leaving, seems the safest bet to just shove something in their mouths just in case.

The key to training isn't having loads of tools in your toolbox. Training tools are just the icing on the cake and quite frankly I'd avoid any club that indicated a reliance on tools, whether they be one tool or a whole plethora of different tools. The key to training is understanding what is motivating a dog to do what they are doing. I have no problem with people who choose to use a training tool to help them along the way, but geez, it's not rocket science. There was a time when we didn't have a lot of the tools we do now. When I was growing up just 15 years ago there was check chains... and there was check chains. It was the only tool you could get hold of. I'd pick a club with an emphasis on philosophies rather than tools. The tools they ban or espouse might be an indication of what methods they are most comfortable with. I have chosen not to go to the local club because they encourage correctional tools. I'm going to one that tells you to bring a tug toy to lessons instead. That decision was based on hoping against hope of finding some trainers that knew what "free shaping" meant.

I don't have any brags, sorry, but it was cool seeing Zara beginning her heel work. A couple of weeks ago I suddenly decided to teach Erik a formal heel just for the hell of it (I actually had to go and look up what the correct position was, that's how clueless I am). I've never taught one before, and because Erik is short he tends to swing out his rear end so he can look up at me better. I'd already taught him the pivot trick on a box earlier jsut for the hell of it, so I figured I'd just transfer it to a phonebook and walk a step out from the phonebook with him, turn, and the go back to it and use it to get him to swing around in the right position. I have no idea what I'm doing and was wondering if I was being a bit elaborate. He's making progress and I'm having to signal a pivot less and less, but after seeing Zara I think I should have got Erik pivoting off the phone book before going any further... Erik loves the pivot trick. If I put anything that looks remotely like a box or book on the ground I end up with Erik standing his front feet on it and trying to pivot into me. I was going to teach Kivi rear end awareness, but it seems I first have to teach him box awareness. He trips over it trying to get to me. So we've taken a hiatus on such things to learn some body targeting instead. He's hopping sideways quite nicely, now. Nearly ready to teach him paw and hip targeting.

Robert Stapler? I think that's his name. Saw a couple of my mother's dogs and was very good.

Oh, I see. I always forget about all those other harnesses. We have Ruff Wear harnesses, that can't be escaped from and fit close with no straps around the shoulders for things to get caught on. We've lost the breakaway collars three or four times in play, but never had a worrying moment with the harnesses. Clearly I have a warped view of harnesses. Even the accidents and near misses I've had with collars have been a bit weird and unrelated to escapes. Surely people would listen to PF's above arguments? Folks get hysterical about potential injuries to their dogs. Especially preventable ones.

Isn't a collar and leash also a "contraption"? Erik is starting agility in March, and to be honest, I'm not looking forward to using flat collars. I hate them. I hate having my only point of contact with my dog at the neck, although I think the head is even worse. It's not that my dogs wouldn't work fine on a flat collar or that I need a harness for control. Most of the time I train off leash, and usually somewhere quite distacting like the dog park. But I've had a few accidents and near misses with my dogs that have made me quite distrustful of collars. I don't really understand why people have to be weaned off these things, unless they need to for competition.

Kivi used to go to daycare two days a week. It was partly to give him something to do while he was in his super active teenage phase and partly to give our old dog a break. Not that they spent much time together anyway. We found twice a week was plenty. He'd need a day afterwards to recover! He had loads of fun and we thought it was great. He's a very social dog, though. We thought about putting Erik in to round out his socialisation a bit as he is royally obnoxious with Kivi, but the cost has gone up considerably since we used to put Kivi in and so we decided against it. Turns out Erik is only obnoxious to Kivi, anyway.

Erik loves fruit and vegies, too. Last night he ate frozen broccoli I accidentally dropped on the floor. He'll perform for carrot peel. It's a bit sad, really. Both Erik and Kivi have gorged on palm fruit back when we had palms. The palms came down almost a year ago and they still bring in old palm fruit fairly regularly. They love chewing on the seed. They'll munch on that for hours. Erik is also a big fan of ice cream. Kivi likes egg shells. Both of them are fiends for the rabbit pellets. It gives them the runs without fail, even if they only get a mouthful or two, but they just won't stay away from it. It's in a plastic storage container, and we have to leave an esky on the lid so they don't nudge it off and help themselves. I also had to put the wood-based litter in a plastic container because Erik figured they must be more rabbit food and was eating them.

People are constantly confusing Kivi for a girl. It doesn't help that you can't actually see his bits. He's got a pretty male look to his head and shoulders these days, but he totally acts like a girl. "I need a cuddle. Erik's being mean to me. Eeeww, water! I loves my toys." Plus he kisses Erik on the top of the head. I kid you not. Erik is a boy through and through. But he's still quite young and puppyish. My mum has a little Vallhund we all call a man dog. He tends to strut, amble, and when he says he wants Jill's meal he expects her to let him have it! He has a self-contained air to him that just seems very male.

Ohhh, I see. Sorry, I was getting the impression she was submissive all the time. This is much easier. Classical conditioning is your friend. You just have to work her up to it. There are some good videos on YouTube about desensitisation, but basically you just need to pop her treats when she's near the tie out. It's best if you start far enough away from it that she's not showing any overt signs of stress. Feed her a tiny bit at a time until she looks more relaxed, then take another step or two closer to the tie out. Repeat until you're next to the tie out, then when she's comfy with that, reach for it, or reward her for sniffing it or looking at it, and hold it, put it near her but not on her... you get the idea. It doesn't usually take very long. Depends on how strong she feels about the tie out. I think you need to address the stress before you go back to the ToT exercises. If it were me, I wouldn't try the ToT again until she's giving you happy grins around the tie out. Otherwise you risk taking backwards steps. It's not the end of the world if you do, but it's also not the way to build confidence. ETA Here's an easy to follow video on desensitising:

Eye contact is one of the most universal things I have ever encountered in vertebrates. You can see this in just about any animal. Nothing much more overtly threatening either within a species or between species than an intense stare. It makes sound evolutionary sense. A stare is no good for anyone being stared at. Usually it means they have come under someone's intense scrutiny, which means they are either being lined up for the next meal or they are being lined up for an attack for some reason. Some animals are very sensitive to eye contact and will be upset by a steady, curious gaze. If you want an animal to relax around you, the very first thing you do is look away from them and make sure you don't look at them for more than a casual glance. And relax your own muscles. That is crucial. Animals are far better at reading out body language than we are. Social animals tend to be more relaxed about eyes than other species, and predators tend to be more relaxed than prey animals (never stare at one of those highly social monkeys, though!). My dogs stare quite fixedly at me when we are training because they are engaged and very interested, but they don't really look directly into my eyes. Like me when I am very interested in what someone is saying, they look at a your whole face. You can tell how narrow their focus is. We are hard-wired to get this. Like Erny said, let your instincts guide you. A threatening stare can be surprisingly subtle. My last dog, Penny, was a master at getting her way with a glare. In these cases it is a serious threat of aggression if it is not heeded.

I am sure that's true, but Abrantes doesn't think it's a component of all drive, because he's talking about what gets an animal up and doing something for their own survival. You don't need to be adrenalised to go find some food. You do to catch the food once you've found it. Yes, but the same can not be said for, say, scavenging. I don't think he is saying it is a fleeting moment of emotion, and I don't think it's necessarily about preparing for action. I think he is saying it is what compels an animal to do something for their safety or their survival. He doesn't even really call it food drive or prey drive. He calls it self-preservation drive, which encompasses heading out to forage, flight or fight, and finding shelter or water. I have to admit I don't really like it. But at the same time, predatory aggression is what we are calling prey drive. It's not even aggression, but no one has a better term for it. It's not a drive in itself under this definition, but is covered under self-preservation drive. It works, but it really jars my mind and I think it's entirely too much of a shake-up to be of much use to trainers, for all that Abrantes gets very irritated about semantics and terms like "dominant-aggressive" and "defensive aggression" and "fear biter" and I can certainly sympathise with that.

A cowering dog that doesn't obey commands isn't stubborn. She's overly anxious. You've got to help her want to do it. She won't want to engage with you if she finds it so nerve-wracking that she'd act with extreme submission. You have to improve her confidence with you before you should expect her to do "known" commands. Maybe it's just me, but this would be a huge issue to me. You'll have trouble doing anything drivey with her in that state. You'll have trouble doing anything at all, as you're discovering. I wouldn't do any real training until she was comfortable looking at me at least. If it were me, I'd be spending the next 3 weeks marking and feeding her every time she makes eye contact. Encouraging her to follow you, keeping eye contact. Things like that. Easy easy stuff she can feel confident about getting right that makes working with you fun.

That is hilarious! My OH keeps telling Kivi to roll over in dirt, mud and water. He constantly walks Kivi into the river and then tells him to sit. I'm like, "His butt is now soaking wet. You realise he has to go back in the car like that?" But it's ever so funny.

That's great! :p Ah yes, that situation seems familiar. ;) What it comes down to is conditioning. The more you practice things away from other dogs and reward the heck out of them, the better she'll get in more challenging situations. Like Nekhbet said, make sure you don't expect a lot from her all at once. It's hard with other dogs because you can't control the distance they are at or where they are going. Inevitably you will have a dog come close enough to trigger her before she's able to handle it. I'm sure people think this is madness, so feel free to ignore me, but I figure if I lose them there's no point in trying to train anything until they are back a few notches. I just wait it out. Sooner or later the other dog will be far enough away that they will calm down a bit and then you can get their attention and reward. Kivi used to do a bit of this when he saw other dogs (he's a social butterfly). At first I just stopped walking and waited for him to sit. He's been taught that if he wants something he should sit, so I only had to wait ten seconds or so. Once he was doing that, I'd usually be able to call him into a loose heel and reward that. At first his heel wasn't strong enough for him to be able to do it in this situation, so we practiced it a lot in all sorts of on leash and off leash situations for a bit. It didn't take long to get it strong enough for the command to penetrate when he was focused on another dog. We were doing pretty well with that method and he'd got to the point where he would keep his heel or at least not charge ahead to meet the other dog, but he'd still make this lunge at the last moment to touch noses. The Look At That game has very quickly taken care of that. Here's a video of Look At That in action: The idea is to reward the dog for looking at another dog. It sounds counter-intuitive, but as long as you practice it far enough away from another dog that your dog hasn't lost it, she'll turn to you when you mark her to get her treat. Pretty soon she's more focused on you than the other dog and only looking at the other dog at all because you tell her to. It was developed more for anxious dogs, but it still worked with Kivi, and he was excited about other dogs. You should read the book to get a good understanding of the exercise, but there are short descriptions on the internet. I would tackle this with Look At That as well. It is such a useful exercise. It gets a bit boring gushing about Control Unleashed all the time, but I'm not the only one that raves about it. My dogs were manageable without CU, but a lot of the dogs the program has sorted out are barely manageable.

Has your body language changed? Do you look her in the eye or use a firm tone when asking her to sit or verbally marking/releasing her? Are you sure she knows what she's being marked for (aside from the sit)? My boy gets a little anxious if he doesn't understand what he has done to gain a reward. Sometimes he just doesn't make the connection because he's not aware of his actions and so getting a reward seems random to him. If this were my dog, I would stop right now and work on her confidence instead. Looking at the ground like that is big displacement behaviour stuff. Dogs do it when there is too much social tension for them. The last thing you want is your dog feeling tense around you. If it were me, I'd teach her something fun and easy like targeting the back of my hand. It keeps the focus and rewards coming from you, but hopefully takes out whatever stressful element has entered the equation and restore her confidence a bit.

Aww, don't get discouraged. Every dog is a learning experience. Everyone who's had a dog in their life is an expert on dogs, don't you know? Seriously, if my copy of Control Unleashed wasn't currently being read by someone else, I'd lend it to you. It is designed for dogs with lots of energy that can be a bit on the reactive side! I don't know if you can get it in this country, but you can buy it online from the States. It might just be my dogs, but I've found that if I don't see improvements with nearly every repetition once we're a week or so into trying something new, chances are I will never reach my goal, so I stop and have a good think about it and try something else. The trick is to find the right thing to reward or punish. If it's going a bit slowly consider whether you are being nice and consistent, and consider whether there is something else that is rewarding her when you are not. Also have a good look at your timing. Are you rewarding/punishing the moment the behaviour begins? I think that rewards are a little more forgiving with timing than punishments. If you're punishing, it should be as the dog is thinking about doing the wrong thing. If you punish after the behaviour, even if you do it right afterwards, it is often too late. The dog has already been rewarded first. This is why I just focus on rewards. I find it easier to get the timing right. I also find it very useful to record training sessions. When I look back on them I realise just how awfully inconsistent my signals and rewards are. My dogs get there anyway, but I'm sure it would be much faster if my signals were clearer. Get even more specific with your goals. You don't want her to lunge when eye contact is made. Great! What do you want her to do? Sit in front of you and keep her eyes on you? Does it matter if she's sitting or standing as long as she's watching you? Can she look at the dog as long as she looks right back at you? Can she watch the dog in a sit and not look at you at all? The more specific you are the easier it is to train it. Consider being calm around new people. Would you be happy with her running around madly as long as she didn't jump up? Would you prefer she sat beside you? Can she bark as long as she's in a down? Things like that. Once you define the specific criteria for the behaviour you want, you have both a clear and solid goal, and you will be giving your dog more guidance so she doesn't have to wonder what she should be doing. She'll know exactly what she should be doing. My pup, Erik, goes bananas when I get home, but he'll bounce into a down without being asked because I don't even reach for the key until he has. Having that really solid down is tremendously useful. Whenever he gets overly excited I can put him in a down. Even if he can only hold it for 5 seconds or so, it'll give me a chance to work out what I should do with him next so that I can get behaviour that I want to reward.

Our vet usually has kittens or other small animals in a cage in the corner. They rehome them. I've used them as training opportunities if they are all relaxed about dogs. The kitties certainly get well socialised. The kittens stay in the cage, though, and it gets wheeled into another room if there's trouble. For a while they had a resident cat, but I'm not sure if he's still there. He was usually in the cage during the day and came out at night to keep the night staff company. I always wished he'd be allowed out so I could pat him, but now I realise why he wasn't!

I figure it comes with the territory when you have something uncommon. I would fall over backwards if I said "Lapphund" or "Vallhund" and was met with anything other than blank looks, uncomfortable silences, or "A what?" Erik seems to really stump people. They always ask because they have no idea what he is. Not the faintest. They always say he looks like a German Shepherd, though. A few people have called him a "sawn-off shepherd". I don't mind, really. He's a very cute little dog and somehow gets more attention than the drop-dead gorgeous Lapphund teddy bear. We like the attention. :D

Wow, I'm getting confused. It's like there's Training in Drive, a particular method, and training a dog whilst it is in drive, not a particular method. I was talking about the latter. I've been trying to get at two things: what a dog in drive looks like and what people mean when they say they are training in drive. And I guess how the two come together. I know what I think it looks like, and everyone else knows what they think it looks like, but how do we all know that what we think it looks like is the same as what everyone else thinks it looks like? That's all. But hey, I was reading Roger Abrantes' "The Evolution of Canine Social Behaviour" last night and Abrantes uses "drive" and "motivation" and has quite simple and specific definitions for both. He goes on to categorise drive on exactly what basic need is being met by the activity. Eg. Fear drive, aggressive drive, sex drive, food drive. No adrenalin, no dopamine, no anticipation. Just an urge that gets them doing something until they fulfill that urge. Motivation is what prompts an animal to do something.

I think see what you're saying, Kavik. Different activities, different behaviour. There's no way you could take Erik clicker training and Erik playing tug, put them next to each other out of context, and say that they are the same. But you could say that there are several marked similarities in the body language, and you could say that the moments before clicker training or tug commences they look extremely similar. I was using that as a guide, just kind of thinking about anticipation and where it goes and what it looks like in different contexts. To be totally honest, I think this is more about a particular state than a particular activity, or even a particular way of working. I think that while you can probably tell that state through basic body language (ears, eyes, muscle tension, characteristic movements), you maybe can't tell it by the way it is used. That sounds like a contradiction of myself even to me, so bear with me a moment. The way I see it, "training in drive" is mostly about the state of the dog rather than the actual training. So how do you tell the state? You would have to forget the activity and concentrate on fairly characteristic body language. I really think it's there in the ears and the eyes and muscle tension and tail, but I see this is where it gets subjective like Angelsun was saying. It's difficult to argue a point about something that is subjective in the first place. So I respectfully disagree, but can totally see your perspective on this one. It does kind of matter to the discussion that there be a right and wrong, yet I don't think there is.

I'd be considering a Puli. I just like those cords flying when they jump. I think maybe temperament is more important. My little Vallhund, Erik, throws himself into everything he does and is troublingly intelligent. I'm planning to get him into agility because he's so easy to focus and so easy to train and so easy to do just about anything with because he's small and athletic and has plenty of get-up-and-go. But my mum has a Vallhund who is the complete opposite. Lazy as sin.

Books The Puppy Whisperer Control Unleashed Bones Would Rain From the Sky Zoomility Animals in Translation Dogs, A New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behaviour and Evolution The Evolution of Canine Social Behaviour Right on Target Kace Covers SATS Training Manual Cesar's Way Kicked, Bitten, Scratched DVDs Ted Turner Classics of Training Really Reliable Recall Unleash Your Dog's Potential (TTouch)

I dunno, I guess if there is constant improvement you're at least getting somewhere, but when something is really working it usually works a lot quicker than that. I think you need to really ask yourself specifically what you want your dog to do, not what you don't want her to do. Do you want her to be calm in general, or calm in particular situations? How calm? Do you want her to sit and look at you, for example? Or do you want her to stay in a heel? Dogs are great at detail, but not good at general stuff. Even if she responds well in one situation, a different situation might make that command completely new to her, so you've got to start thinking in specifics as well. Some dogs you tell them to stop something and they go lie down and are perfect angels. But some will just go find something even more annoying and disruptive to do. That's why I try to get in the habit of thinking "What would I like him to do?" and focus on getting him to do that instead. "Calm" is tricky, though. It's a very general sort of thing. Leslie McDevitt of Control Unleashed likes to do massage work with easily excited dogs. She puts them on a mat and uses lots of calming signals like yawns and half-lidded eyes along with massage to tell the dog that now we're doing something relaxing and low energy. She encourages people to use a cue for this so that whenever you want your dog to calm down you can give them a cue to do so. If you condition it enough it does seem to work. Another Control Unleashed exercise that sounds like it would help you is the Look At That game. The idea is to teach the dog to look at things that excite or bother them without going into a frenzied state or leaving you. You mark them when they look at the other dog and they look back to you at the mark, so then you pop them their treat. I've been doing this with Kivi as he gets quite intense about his desperate need to greet every dog he sees, and it works very well. One marker and he's like "Oh, we're training!" and he starts looking at the dog and looking back to me for his treat instead of dancing around barking and lunging. Loads of people have found it to be extremely effective. If you can afford it, get the Control Unleashed book. It's very, very good for hyper dogs! It's good for all sorts of dogs. Staffies are good fun, but yeah, they can be pretty full on. Erik is a little that way as well. Regular massage has really helped him along.