corvus

"Correction", yes (coming to hate that word), but punisher and reinforcer have fairly specific definitions in psychology. I hate psychology as well , but I like words that have specific definitions. You can spend a lot of time arguing about whether something is punishing or positively or negatively reinforcing, but in the end there's only one right answer. Behaviourism is not the be all and end all, but it's a damn good start. I'm fine with additional terms. Go right ahead. I just don't see them used much, and to be honest, a lot of them are used interchangeably. But that's a whole other debate and one we've already had. Yes it does, and I mostly agree, only, Erik seriously gets just as razzed up if I pick up a clicker and a bag of treats and say "come on, Erik" than if I pick up a tug toy and say "ready?" He gets razzed up really easily. He does different things once he is razzed up, but that's a matter of conditioning. He's been conditioned to give a down when I say "ready" and so that's what he does. But I haven't conditioned him to do anything before clicker training, so he tends to dance around and bark and jump on me until I give him some kind of cue to tell him what we're going to be doing. I really think maybe it's more about the reward and the activity. Actually, now that I think about it, Erik's changing all the time. He gets more razzed for toys, now, but he gets as razzed for clicker training as he did for toys, say, a couple of months ago. But both are ever increasing. It's just a matter of what we've been doing more lately. The more I read about stress hormones and the effects of stress on the body the more I think drive and outright bad stress are perilously close together (the same thing if we use drive as an umbrella term!) and the more I want to be careful how I go with my dogs. Incidentally, the book I'm reading emphasises that dopamine is the hormone that is responsible for stress that feels good. It comes into play only for crazy, intense, passionate pleasure, and while adrenalin may or may not appear, dopamine determines if it will be a good adrenalin rush or a bad one. Everyday pleasure involves different chemicals all together. Sapolsky also says the stress response is beautifully linear and tightly associated with how stressful a stressor is. So it's not just are you adrenalised or are you not. You can be a little adrenalised, or a lot adrenalised, or very stressed but not adrenalised at all, or any number of individual variations. Each stressor someone experiences has its own stress response signature, in that it produces a particular cocktail of chemicals that are the same each time. There are a few tricky exceptions, but for the most part it's all very, very specific. Interesting stuff! I'm not sure if you meant to agree with me, Angelsun, but yeah, that's pretty much what I've been thinking. :D

This is because it is what I have been trained to do. Make a statement, seek evidence to back it up. When someone questions it, seek more evidence. Evidence can come from all sorts of places. The beauty of psychology is that the basic principles apply in a lot of different species, especially when we are talking about something as universal as stress responses and anticipatory states. Most of the stuff we know about body chemistry was found out from doing heinous things to rats and mice. And dogs, as it happens. The reason why this awesome book on stress I'm reading is called "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" is because it examines first the similarities we have with other animals and then the differences (then the similarities again). You should read it. It's very easy to understand. :p Guess what? I'm going one better. I'm gonna do both! I start my dog behaviour PhD at the end of March. K9: There are moments of drive but your letting (in this clip) the dog decide if it is in drive or not, this will suffer in reliablity I would suggest based on hunger. First of all, I have no idea what you meant by the bolded section. Second of all, ah, so my suggestion that my dog clicker training looks much like other dogs "in drive" in this thread, which you said was just because I didn't know enough about it all, is actually kind of accurate after all? And thirdly, the dog is incapable of "deciding" to be in drive. It's a chemistry thing. Some people say they can only respond to a stimulus in these cases. I prefer to think their emotions trigger their behaviour (in so much as they experience them). Whatever the case, Erik's level of "drive" during clicker training is dependant on how well he knows the exercise. He's only been doing the mat exercise for... I think we must have done about four or five sessions of around 5 minutes max each. The box exercise he's been doing for much longer. Take the box away and his anticipation lessens because his confidence lessens. This is a new situation for him, now. Anticipation comes through "mastery, confidence, and expectation" to quote Sapolsky. It's not just "oh, I might get a reward", but "I know this! I'm definitely getting a reward!". It's easy to create the anticipatory state seen in the box exercise, and all you need is practice and a strong reward history. The stronger it gets, the more anticipation you see. You could view the mat exercise as a drive building exercise. The more I reward, the higher the anticipation associated with the exercise, and the more excited Erik gets when he sees me put the mat on the ground. Thus, he doesn't "decide" when he's going to be in drive. His reward history does, and I'm the one that controls that. Reliability is just sufficient conditioning. K9: Ok what makes you expect that? It also means there will be some noise, but it isnt a contributing factor. Because dogs "in drive" display body language that is consistent with dogs that are anticipating something good and dogs that are adrenalised. I'm picturing a Venn diagram. We know from the suffering (and euphoria) of rats and other creatures that dopamine is key to finding something as stressful as anticipation enjoyable, and we know that an adrenalised state, by definition, requires adrenaline. ;) Are you saying that internal chemistry is not a contributing factor to behaviour? Dare I ask what the difference between Daisy training: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7mqImDNPRI and Erik training: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=melsta...u/0/7ecVdvYcaA4 is?

No, I'm not redefining anything yet. I'm just trying to get to the bottom of it. What I think is that drive probably has both anticipation and adrenaline, but I reckon it's more useful in training to aim for an anticipatory state. If you have that much, you can build on it. If you just have adrenaline, it could be utterly useless to you. The Control Unleashed program was basically invented for all the dogs out there with drive to spare and no self control, thus turning them into loose cannons. I don't. Anticipation can exist at low levels, but this is what I was getting at in starting this topic. Some people seemed to be calling anticipation alone drive and some people seemed to be calling adrenaline alone drive. If you're going to train "in drive", that presents a communication problem. If drive is so all-encompassing, saying that you're "training in drive" is such a broad statement as to be next to useless as a descriptive term. I mean, negative drive? What's a dog about to bite you out of fear driven by? Do we have fear drive, now? Even that could go several different ways. Anticipation has the same problems. As you say, a dog can be anticipating something without being terribly excited. Furthermore, anticipation of a punishment can heighten the effect of a punishment as much as anticipating a reward can heighten the effect of the reward. You could argue about the details until the cows came home and everyone would probably be right. But what use is that to training? If you have anticipation AND adrenaline, you're getting more specific. Specific enough to be more useful, anyway. I am assuming the difference between a dog about to flee and a dog about to leap at a toy is obvious enough for it to not warrant any discussion at all. I'm happy to accept that drive does encompass all these varying things the same way that "stress" encompasses a whole suite of very different behaviours, but the thing is that all those different behaviours get names as well. The reason is because "stress" is such a broad term that encompasses so many different things that you inevitably need to be more specific. There's nothing more annoying than being told that your chronic headaches or whatever are caused by "stress". The only time you use that term is either when you're talking about all the states that come under the umbrella of "stress" at once or if you don't actually know what exactly caused the whole thing. So I wonder why we use the term "drive" so specifically when it is such a broad term and for the purposes of training we are talking about a very specific behaviour under the "drive" umbrella.

Just curious to know how you arrived at that conclusion? I've been watching Ted Turner seminars and he made the point that the longer the time between the behaviour and the reinforcer the more weak the link between behaviour and reinforcement. Obviously, bridging is a way to close that gap so it's always nice and close. Why would you want to condition it to be farther away again? It's just as easy to use a release word when you need it. I only feed the position when my dog is still learning the behaviour. Once they have it I don't need to do it anymore. Furthermore, what happens when you want to rapid fire treats? Does that erode the expectation of a pause between make and reward? Incidentally, Ted Turner is a "feed the position" trainer as well. I'm yet to read or watch any material from a trainer that has worked with exotics that doesn't heavily use reward placement in teaching behaviours. I think that if you click enough your dog comes to anticipate the click more than the treat. When my dogs really get going they often don't notice treats that fall on the ground during delivery. They just keep focused on you and skip to the next click. When they get like that it doesn't matter much what they do after the click. The click is the end of the behaviour. I think ideally that's the state you want when teaching something new. It's a high reward rate thing. If you're shaping something and it's going slower, though, then it might matter more.

I'm arguing that drive is a high level anticipation for a reward. I expect that includes adrenaline AND dopamine. I am also arguing that a low drive dog can be taught to anticipate a reward so much that the signal for the imminent delivery of that reward stimulates that dog to otherwise unseen levels of arousal. Lee Charles Kelley tells me any dog has that in them somewhere, and he's found it in any number of unlikely candidates. I didn't believe it for ages, but he kept saying it and adding more and more examples and the more I learn about drive the more likely it seems. I haven't met a dog yet that doesn't get drivey about something in the world. If it gets drivey about something I don't see why you wouldn't be able to build that drive, link it to a cue, and get a nice, anticipatory state Although, it might be more trouble than it's worth. And it might be that while you get a very high level of anticipation you don't get adrenaline. I'm not entirely convinced about the adrenaline. I was before, but the more I think about it the more it bothers me on some level... I think it's the establishing operations thing. I am really starting to dislike the whole concept of EOs. It seems unnecessarily complicated and kind of missing the point. I think anticipation is the point. If drive is an EO, and an EO is about anticipation rather than adrenaline, then does drive need adrenaline to be called drive? I'm getting all tangled up in terminology and whether things always go hand-in-hand or whether they are mutually exclusive or only haphazardly related in the first place. For that matter, EOs aren't really about anticipation. That's just my simplification of it.

Yep, tried it and it didn't work. It offered minor, very temporary relief and made dog's coat feel overly dry. I wouldn't bother if I were you. What did work was lemon-scented myrtle essential oil. I dabbed some on some cloth and tied it on the dog's collar. She hated the smell, but it definitely made a difference. This was last summer before Comfortis when flea bombing the entire house only kept the fleas down for a week and none of the spot-on treatments worked anymore.

Kivi Tarro: Moving sideways as a lead up to targeting with his hip. Stationary targeting with his nose. Leslie McDevitt's Look At That! game. Erik: I'm working him from pivoting on a box to pivoting on flat ground so I can bring him into a nice heel position. No plans to get a perfect heel, but seemed like good practice for both of us. Go to the mat (or "bugger off" as is the cue for Erik) Rolling something with his foot (he's so cute with this one!) Allowing someone to look at his teeth (he still hates it, but he'll put up with it without grumbling, fighting, or growling so that's all right) Theoretically we're working on "leave it", but I don't have much patience for these boring yet vitally important ones. And his recall. Just conditioning and more conditioning.

The problem with that is that it assumes a dog without natural drive can't be taught to anticipate a reward. You don't need drive to be tickled (by the right person). You just need the tickler to be someone you know and trust, the tickling to be unexpected and uncontrollable, and a hefty dash of anticipation of being tickled. Science has very thoroughly and elegantly proven this. There's a paper about using tickling as an establishing operation for mentally disabled children. A bit of tickling before a lesson and all the kiddies learnt better. But what I thought was much cooler was the spike of dopamine an animal gets when they anticipate a reward coming their way. It explains beautifully why my low drive dog gets so excited about recalls, and why he gets so excited about clicker training (until he can't work out why he's winning). iMovie finally decided to acknowledge my latest uploads, so here is a short video of Erik clicker training: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=melsta...u/0/7ecVdvYcaA4 You guys tell me if he's "in drive" and why or why not. Apologies for the quality. The still camera doesn't like indoor light. The video camera is back in action, thankfully.

I very much like this attitude and try to follow it wherever practical. Where it's not practical and I'm shaping duration I use a different bridge "good boy" and a release word to signal when he can break the position to collect his reward. IME most of the time you mark and your animal will wait for several seconds doing nothing but watching your hand (or face) as you reach (or fumble) for a treat. However, I have had moments where one of the dogs has done something else as I was feeding the treat and then that becomes a behaviour chain. It usually goes away in time if you keep marking the right behaviour, but IME it goes away a good deal quicker if you feed the position. So now I just feed the position rather than waiting for something to crop up that needs fixing. It's just easier that way.

You were the one that told me to judge the result, not the action. I've heard people talk about using corrections to bring about a drive shift and using them to increase drive. At first I thought the former was a punishment, but watched some videos and changed my mind. Looks more like an interruptor or fairly neutral signal to me, because the dog barely registers. Did it decrease the behaviour that was corrected? In time, yes, but was it punished or not maintained? Does that correction inhibit the behaviour or tell the dog he's not gonna get a bite? Tricky. I suspect it depends heavily on the dog and the trainer. As for the latter, what behaviour decreases when drive increases? I experienced an intriguing thing with Erik not long ago. I didn't want him to do something, so I created barriers to physically stop him. They were tough, but conquerable. Erik's "drive" to do that thing I didn't want him to do definitely increased significantly and quickly and I had an obsession on my hands. It was utterly fascinating, but an important lesson for me in what can happen when a drivey animal is offered resistance he can defeat. So now you take a toy away from Erik when he's very worked up and he doubles his effort to get it because in the past, his unexpected leaps at the toy have resulted in success. Woo! If he was a hunting dog and his prey had just spun around and bit him, there's a good chance he'd fly at it with renewed vigour. It's important stuff for predators. :p Note: again, I'm talking about corrections as a punishment. There's a chapter in the book about stress I'm reading at the moment that deals with situations that would normally be stressful but are highly pleasurable instead. What's with that? the author says quite eloquently. He then goes on to describe what we know about tickling, which is that it's only fun in safe surroundings and is out of your control, and that it's the most fun when it's anticipated. Furthermore, scientists have proven that it's the anticipation that releases dopamine, which travels along our pleasure pathways, nowhere else. In the author's words it's about mastery, confidence and expectation. When the animal anticipates a reward, they get all juiced up on dopamine, more so than when actually partaking of the reward. This is so marked that psychologists have named it the "appetitive" state and the actual reward as the "consummatory" state. Man, I'm so excited I can hardly type. Soooo, according to Robert M. Sapolsky's synthesis of scary complicated psychology (I totally love this guy), normally stressful conditions such as being surprised or lacking control can be a good deal of fun in a benign context (e.g. rollercoasters). It's fun on it's own, but add some anticipation of the fun and your dopamine levels spike before you even get on the rollercoaster. Now, bringing this back to dogs and drive training, tickling has been described as an establishing operation by psychologists, which is what you told me drive was. And this is the really exciting bit. If we know how to make a tickle totally awesome (which we do), then logic follows that seeing as most of this is just neurochemistry and works equally well in rats and primates, we can apply the same principles to drive training. That is, the reward should be highly anticipated ("I know this, I just do that and then I get to play tug. This is gonna be so great!"), it should be a little unpredictable (dog doesn't know when he's going to get to play tug) and the dog should be in surroundings he perceives as safe as houses, so to speak. Sapolsky also talks about the optimum level of dopamine to maximise pleasure, and that is it should increase gently and be of short duration. There are all sorts of bad stress chemicals contributing to the whole shebang, so if it is too prolonged or too sudden, the dopamine doesn't get released but all the bad stuff does, or else the dopamine runs away and the bad stuff reigns i.e. stress. Phew. People should read this book. It makes everything I've been struggling with in psychology papers lately so simple and straight-forward. "Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers" by Robert M. Sapolsky, who I'm going to marry because he's a scientist AND has a sense of humour AND can explain complex concepts so that anyone can understand them.

I'm sure you would know if you were punishing your dog, Huski. It's hard to punish Erik in that way when he's "in drive". He tends to blow right through it. That's an adrenalised dog for you, I guess. Gonna withdraw my toy? We'll see about that, he says. Ignore him and he'll just zip around behind you and leap up to pinch the toy. It's a sure sign he's right on the edge and I need to bring him down a notch or two if I want to keep doing anything useful with him. If I'm smart, I don't ask him to do things he won't be able to. If he knows it, he will do it for the toy.

Sorry, I know I said I had bowed out, but here I am again. I question whether you can train "in drive" with corrections. Everyone I've ever spoken to about it has said that corrections suppress drive. Furthermore, I strongly suspect that a "correction" to a dog in drive is not actually punishing to that dog at that moment. Someone was telling me their GSD needed corrections at high levels of drive to make sure it didn't go over the edge and do the wrong thing when in such a state that someone could get hurt. I find it difficult to believe that they mean anything to him other than a no reward marker. Or an interruptor, maybe. It doesn't slow him down in the least. Punishments inhibit drivey behaviour. People like to cite dogs that run through barbed wire fences. I seriously doubt that barbed wire is much of a punishment at that moment. I've been reading a book about the biological effects of stress. It's very interesting, but essentially the body barely feels pain when under extreme physical stress. A lion chasing a zebra across the savanna is considered to be under extreme physical stress in this context. Here's my mother's Boxer/Kelpie cross barely in control as she performs a sit for a toss of the toy. She is a complete nutter. She'll work for praise or fetch. Nothing else! She responds to rewards by becoming overly excited and goofy. It is very difficult to teach her anything new. My mum "discovered" drive training in a desperate attempt to teach this dog... something. Anything. She calls it reward training. ETA by "corrections" I mean something that is perceived by the human to be a punishment for the dog.

You could try practicing a swap game... Perhaps if you had two balls and practiced in the yard throwing the second when she returns with the first. Or would she hold onto the first rather than spitting it out and end up standing over the second with the first in her mouth? What if she misses the point with the ball and thinks you end the game when she brings the ball back? Or maybe you could try a sheepy tug or something similar. She might like that better than the ball. Especially if you start acting like it's better. I know dogs pick their own rewards for the most part, but you can sometimes influence them, especially those herding breeds.

I used to run with Kivi Tarro, but he became increasingly resistant to it. He is a lazy ass and would prefer to walk. I would end up towing him up the hills. When he had accepted that we were definitely running, not walking, he kept pace beautifully. I even taught him "this side" to make sure he woudn't pass poles on the wrong side, and "stop" for roads. Only problem was he would sometimes trot a half pace behind me and once or twice I forgot to tell him "this side" and he strung us up. I jogged him on a leash that attaches to a waist belt, so having a 23kg dog run on one side of the pole and me on the other would result in us both coming to a violent halt and exchanging the same bewildered/shocked/hurt looks. That's why I like harnesses over collars. I'm having trouble finding time for jogs at the moment, but I think Erik will make a good jogging companion when he's old enough. He can go forever.

Kivi's been doing it from 6 months old. He can go 13 hours without any trouble. We currently have a dog walker visiting daily to let them out because Erik is borderline. He's just over 6 months old and he can go 7-8 hours reliably, but 10 hours is a hit and miss affair. I'm planning on giving him another month before seeing how he goes holding it all day again. When he was smaller I was working from home about 60% of the time, but the rest of the time Erik was inside in a pen for longer than he could hold it. I don't feel it has impacted on his toilet training. Maybe extended it a little. He doesn't have accidents now unless he can't get outside, and he has a "need to go out" bark he will often try if the door is closed. I'd love to give them the run of the yard and the house, but the setup of our house means it's not currently possible without giving them unfettered access to the swimming pool as well. Would like to fix that. They have a yard fenced off from the pool, but Kivi hates it because it's too far from the house.

That's an interesting point in light of recent posts about what an adrenalised dog looks like. It seems there is no straight answer. I just think there should be when it's a term used in such a specific context. Otherwise, what's the point? I could say my dog is in drive and everyone would just have to take my word for it. If it doesn't mean something specific to training, what's the use of it in training jargon? In the same physical characteristics... sure, in some aspects. But not so much in others. I'm assuming we can all tell the difference between a dog on the attack and a dog fleeing. Anyway, it doesn't matter. It's the anticipation that matters, because I do believe that is what we're seeing and why it is the same for all different rewards. It's that high level of anticipation that goes hand in hand with an adrenalised state. Dog knows it's getting a top reward very soon. Much excitement and arousal ensues. Same way I bounce around when someone promises to take me to San Churros for a Spanish hot chocolate. I'm bowing out at this point. I feel I've learnt heaps and had a little epiphany along the way. Thanks to everyone that participated.

It doesn't matter what words you use as long as you're consistent about what it means. I use a clicker and a verbal marker for Erik and just use them interchangeably. If I need all my hands I go to the verbal marker "good boy", but the clicker is always paired with food, whereas "good boy" tends to get used when I don't have food as well, so the click is much stronger and more exciting to him. For Kivi, I just use one verbal marker "ping". I use different markers for different dogs to make it nice and clear who I'm training. I have to say I like "ping" better than the clicker. Sometimes I forget my clicker. For Kivi, "ping" signals a good job and the end of the behaviour, like a clicker does for Erik. It's not a big deal, but sometimes you have to be careful when you mark. Example, when teaching stay it's easier to hold off marking until you're back to your dog so you can reward them in the position. It's always good to reward in the right position if you have that option. Erik also has a release word purely because I thought I'd try it out and see how I liked it. I do like it better, but don't use it when I'm clicker training because the clicker is the release. Mostly I just lean on it to help me train duration or install a nice moment of calm downing in a very stimulating situation.

Corvus it most certainly doesn't look like the video you posted. Just to make it abundantly clear, the video I posted was not in my eyes a dog "in drive", which was why I posted it.

I'm the first to put up my hand and say I know nothing about Shutzhund or any kind of competetive dog sports. But I have two dogs that go pretty much everywhere with us and spend a lot of time off leash in unfenced areas full of exciting stuff. They've got to at the least recall reliably. And they can, even off a chase. They can also do anything else we have taught them in any situation we ask them to do those things. We have done crap all proofing with those dogs, and training has been haphazard, yet they are more reliable than I ever set out to make them. It doesn't matter where we are or what is happening around them, if we ask for their attention we get it. I never set out to achieve that, but it happened on its own. The correction thing didn't work out so well with our last dog. You could tell what she'd been taught with corrections and what she'd been taught with rewards and what she'd been taught with classical conditioning by how reliable they were. The things she'd learnt with corrections were unreliable, frankly. I didn't do them very well, but I did them the way I was taught by a trainer. If a trainer can get it so wrong, a layman certainly can.

But that can hold equally for fear. I've seen a dog's pupils dilate the moment before it made an aggressive move. Because a dog displaying aggression can be in drive too, just a 'negative' one. Sorry, kind of failed to make a valid point in that one... It's a bit of a big deal if you're using signals that can be present in both a positive state of mind and a negative state to tell you that you are training in drive. I'm not suggesting that you wouldn't know the difference, just that it's not specific enough for the purposes of training. If you linked it with the other things I mentioned earlier, though, you might be onto a winner. The ears change orientation when a dog is aggressive or fearful, and that's not all that changes. This thread is getting jumbled at every turn. I was attempting to get to the bottom of what a dog training "in drive" looked like, but it seems people are resistant to the idea that it can look like anything in particular. This is my exact issue with the terminology. Obviously there are lots of situations in which a dog can be adrenalised, or "in drive", some of them good and some of them bad, some of them a lower level and some of them so high the dog can't even think anymore. Yet I get the impression that when people talk about training "in drive" they are not just talking about an adrenalised dog. They are talking about a specific level of arousal. That's what I was trying to get at in the beginning. The large variation in what people have posted as a dog "in drive" really 'drives' home just how this term can be interpreted in a myriad of ways. Until someone can define exactly what is meant by "in drive" from a training perspective, there will be endless communication problems.

Humping can, I think, actually be a sign that your puppy is uncertain of themselves. If the pup has only just gone to a new home, this is totally understandable. If it were me, I'd ignore it or gently distract the pup with something fun like a game to build their confidence. Erik humped a little at an early age and it vanished when he settled in and found his self-confidence again. If it doesn't go away in the next few weeks, then reassess. The other dog won't tell the puppy off most likely because it is too young to know any better. The tolerance will most likely fade in time. I swear humping is one of the most poorly understood dog behaviours. People just can't help being freaked out by it. Just ignore it.

Normal for Stafford pups, maybe. My Vallhund pup, Erik, does this as well. Rather than discouraging it, use it as an opportunity to practice an off leash heel. Oftentimes when you give an excited dog something to do with their energy they are super happy. You ask your dog to heel and reward him with attention. He's out from under your feet, has something constructive to do with his excitement, and is practicing a skill that is handy in many situations. ETA Snap, SBT.

But that can hold equally for fear. I've seen a dog's pupils dilate the moment before it made an aggressive move.

Plenty, if that last paragraph is anything to go by. It always surprises me how my dogs become more and more capable of hearing me in highly distracting situations the more I practice. It's like they become attuned to cues they have been heavily rewarded for taking notice of.

Changed my mind.