corvus

Depends on the dog and the style of the class. I have taken both Kivi and Erik to different puppy classes and think that it was very beneficial for them, especially Erik, who came to me feeling a bit leery of new things and just really needed some early, gentle socialisation. On the other hand, my mother took a very fearful puppy to a class that insisted puppies should play with each other and it really set him on the road to disaster. The class I took Erik to encouraged owners with shy puppies to let their pups stay back and interact with the other dogs on their own. Even this would have been too much for my mother's fearful puppy (who, incidentally, ended up being human and dog aggressive). I don't think the puppy class was soley to blame for what happened by any stretch, but it didn't help.

Kivi Tarro used to run for the hills when another dog barked. It lasted for about a month or so, I think, but resolved itself as he gained confidence. Being a Lapphund raised with barky adult dogs, he had certainly heard dogs barking before. He just found it scary with new people in new surroundings. I reckon just make sure you have him on leash in unfamiliar surroundings until he settles in better. Things like that can pop up when you think they are gone but puppy is just in a new or slightly threatening situation. Kivi is now just over 18 months old and is thoroughly comfortable with other dogs barking. He does a lot of barking himself!

Is there anything he really likes that he would work for? A good method a DOL member recently showed me was to have your hand just in front of the back legs on their belly and with some food in your hand, pass it just over their nose and back towards their tail. To get it, they need to fall back into a down. Just have to make sure they don't step backwards. How about using his dinner or something?

With Kivi I had him in a pen outside attached to his kennel as a puppy. With Erik I had him in the pen inside, but I've only just gone back to full-time work and Erik is 5 months. I've put Erik and Kivi together now as they do get on pretty well. With Kivi I put him with my older dog for a little while, but she wasn't keen and so I split them up again. I never reunited them and we put her to sleep when Kivi was about 16 months.

Oh, I'm sure Erik thinks he's got me very well trained. Whenever he wants something he sits or downs and waits for it to be delivered. Kivi has trained me to rub his chest when he paws me. I resist, but much like my old dog had this bark that made you reflexively pat her, being pawed by a cuddly Lapphund who is sitting 5cm away from you and trying to sneak the odd kiss in under your ear makes you reflexively rub his chest. Sometimes I manage to stop myself, but it's way too late for it to make any difference. He also pokes me with his nose to get my attention. And he thinks that he has me pretty well trained to give him food when he comes and glues himself to my thigh.

Not all dogs are born loving being stroked. I have a puppy that loves being scratched as long as he doesn't have anything more pressing to do! He has come a long way just through picking him up a lot and handling him gently. He sounds like a more confident puppy than yours, but with him I aimed to push him just a little, always holding him a moment longer than he wanted to be held but before he got grumpy. With a less confident puppy, I might aim not to push but to desensitise without making them feel uncomfortable. If it helps, I have met a puppy that I would call aggressive and he didn't growl much. He did about a second's worth of growling before he went all out with snarls and hard bites. You sure knew about it when you pissed him off. Writhing puppy snarling and nailing anything he can get his teeth on.

Kivi has to be kept inside when we are out because he barks. But in his defence, there's a few good reasons why he hates our backyard. When he stays with my parents in a normal backyard where the door to the house opens onto the backyard, he's fine and makes very little noise. Usually lets the other dogs do the alerting. I find that he's harder to stop barking than Erik, because he wasn't very noisy as a puppy and I never taught him to stop making noise. He barks annoyingly when he is feeling in need of attention and is not getting any. Otherwise, he doesn't make much noise. Compared to, say, Erik, who just spent the last 30 minutes barking at us because he wanted us to go and get his food for him. He has stopped for the moment, but he will start again before anyone gets the chance to give him his dinner.

What level of arousal do you aim for with the rewards you choose? With Kivi it's always been pretty easy to just sort of manipulate him into the level of excitement that is most helpful to what I'm trying to teach him just with my body language and how I talk to him and reward with much the same things. He's harder to rev up than calm down. Erik is the opposite. It seems he's always very excited about training, which is nice, but not very helpful for when I'm trying to teach him something that really works better with much lower energy, like letting me do his nails, for example. He slaps his paw into my hand and waits like a coiled spring for me to reward him. I've started using massage alone instead. At least that way I can get him relaxed about it. Conversely, some rewards are way too hot for him. If you have a hot reward, how do you use it to the best of your advantage? Do you work them up to it? Or use it sparingly as a jackpot? Or something else?

I think this kind of thing is often related to a sense of frustration in the dog because they know when on leash they don't have the freedom to follow their impulses, and so it kind of turns into a big feedback loop and they make themselves more and more worked up. Google leash reactivity or impulse control. There are a few good websites out there that might give you some ideas.

Sometimes I wonder if stress displacement behaviours can double as tension release. Like, I remember watching my old dog yawn when she was actually quite excited. It was as if she was regulating herself a bit and bringing herself down a notch or two. But sounds like in your example it's stress displacement.

Depends on the size and age difference. I separated my two boys until recently, as the younger boy was a fair bit smaller and my other dog is still young himself. Sometimes he gets a little silly, although he's the sweetest, gentlest dog I know. I just went back to full-time work and felt like I should separate them still (younger one is 5 months), but in the end I decided not to. I'd just spent several months working from home with them and I felt their pleasure in spending downtime together well outweighed the risk of something going wrong. But I think that's something you would know for yourself best. When I had an old small dog and a young larger dog, they were separated most of the time. The older dog didn't want to spend much time with the younger dog. I do not think there was much risk of her hurting him, or even him hurting her accidentally, but there's no point in my mind forcing them in together if one doesn't want to be with the other all day.

Ummm.... I hate to say this, but apparently no one else is. That is an incredibly over-simplified interpretation. There are a myriad of reasons why a dog wouldn't come when called, and most of them truly have nothing to do with dominance. You are making a few huge assumptions with that statement, such as that the dog has actually been trained to come when called, and that he/she was not so aroused that they didn't even hear you. I'd hate for someone who doesn't know much about dogs to come on here and be given incorrect advice... To the OP, one of the worst things I have ever witnessed was my dog dangling from the jaws of our other dog. It's not something to mess around with, but ritualised aggression between dogs is quite normal. I'm glad you read the article Aidan posted, because it's a good guide to what is normal aggression and what is not. I wasn't actually giving advice, just sharing my experiences.

Another one! Holy moly.

I like the waist belt. I don't often walk my two dogs alone as OH usually comes and takes one, but if I do take them both I usually put my older one who has good leash manners on the leash that attaches to the waist belt and then I can concentrate on my younger dog, who is still kind of in training, although he walks on a loose leash as well. He just needs more reminders and rewards at the moment. They rarely get tangled up as the waist belt rotates around your waist if the dog on it decides to go to the other side. Another thing I really like is voice directions. It's incredibly useful to be able to call the dogs in close and get them to pass an obstacle on your side of it and get them to stop at curbs and so forth just with your voice. I spent about 6 months classically conditioning voice directions with Kivi and it was totally worth it. It's not taking as long with Erik, though, because he's quicker, and I'm not doing it just classically this time.

Very true, SSM, and I don't doubt that this trainer was reading the whole dog, not just whether the tail was above the spine or below. It's a bit frustrating to me, though. When she's telling all her clients that it's that easy and that dogs with tails up are dominant, she's perpetuating the massive oversimplification of dog behaviour. I dunno what you do, though. Is it unreasonable to want people to at least understand that there are a lot of contextual aspects to interpreting dog behaviour?

I know! I could see what she was saying, but she wasn't real clear about it. This was at a playgroup session and Erik was doing a lot of running around barking at other dogs. She was saying that he does that because he wants to control them, which I agree with. I don't quite agree that doing that is a dominant behaviour. I think it's more of a wannabe dominant behaviour, and I think that's what she was getting at with Kivi. Kivi is a pretty confident dog, but he's not an alpha wannabe by any stretch. He is well socialised, but also very social by nature, so when tails come up in dogs that are trying to be controlling towards him, his tail goes down and they stop. But his tail comes up when dogs are trying to control other dogs nearby. She said if he was a little bit more pushy, she wouldn't need another trainer at playgroup sessions with him around. Kivi uses a lot of submissive and calming signals with other dogs, but he's very confident about it. The way I see it, he is not reacting to feeling insecure like Erik is when Erik acts submissively, but rather he's deliberately acting submissively to ease social tension. I can kinda sympathise with her because I think she was interpreting it correctly, just not explaining that very well. I'm pretty shite at explaining why I interpret things the way I do as well. Erik would like to be the boss of everyone, I guess because he's OVER-confident and his nature is to look for ways he can affect what happens to him. I kinda like that spunk, and it makes him very enthused about free-shaping because he came to me at 10 weeks already trying to figure out how everything works and how he could swing it his way. Kivi just lets life happen to him.

Like I said, I call it arousal. :rolleyes:

*yawn* Bored tonight, are we jdavis? FYI, you have misunderstood what I meant by control. As a primatologist I would have thought you'd have a reasonable understanding of dominance and its purpose, which is essentially about controlling resources, is it not? Not much to do with good recalls in dogs, although I have a video of my dog's recall and have posted it if you need proof that he is quite capable of coming when called. Alas, I do not have any videos of him coming away from other dogs because it's not an easy one to set up. As if whether I can recall my dog or not even has anything to do with this topic. I was posting in support of the article Aidan posted. If you have a problem with the advice in the article, why don't you contribute to the discussion in a useful manner by outlining that problem and what you would do instead? If I had my time again, I would have done the second point sooner rather than later. ETA Like I said Nekhbet, either you take my word for it or you don't. But it seems you would also like to ignore half of what I said as well as not taking my word for it. It wasn't throwing a fit of bad behaviour. I saw no decrease in the behaviour I was trying to reduce after several months and I saw evidence to suggest my dog knew what the consequences of this behaviour would be. So I concluded the method wasn't working and changed tactics. I never rewarded her bad behaviour with more attention. I added it in when she was being good and saw less bad behaviour. I thought it was fair, seeing as I'd been giving her less attention with the new puppy around.

A trainer told me today that Erik's tail was up when we were training because he thought he was in control and dominant and was only working because he thought he could get something out of it. I was like, er, yeah.... why else would he work? I love that Erik's tail is always up and wagging. When it stops wagging I know it's getting hard for him. His tail is nearly always up, though. It's either right up high or right down low. It doesn't seem to go in between anywhere. Kivi's is low when training, but he often holds it low when interacting with us. The same trainer thought that it was also a sign of his dominance that he was uncurling his tail and holding it low when other dogs were raising theirs. Like a "no need to get aroused" kind of sign, and an indication that he was confident enough that he didn't feel a need to throw his weight around at all. She said sometimes the laid back dogs were the most dominant. Anyway, I think she was probably right, but not convinced that Erik's tail would go down if he were less full of himself. She was taking other things into account as well, and pointed out how another dog's tail lowered when her owner took her aside to do some heel work with her. I kind of thought it was more like her arousal level lowered than her sense of dominance. I guess it's just semantics.

Nor would I, Nekhbet, and if that was the impression I gave then I would like to make it clear that it was not the impression I meant to give. But if you want to address the problem at its source you have to fulfill your dog's needs. If your dog feels like they need extra attention to feel secure, then you have three choices. You can ignore it and correct the resulting aggression. You can treat the symptom and give your dog more attention, or you can follow from symptom to symptom until you find the root cause of the problem. Aggression is just what's on the surface. My dogs always think they want what the other dog is getting, but that doesn't mean they get it or a fight breaks out. Given that Kivi doesn't fight a fight never breaks out, but we manage situations where contest may occur so that even if one dog gets it into his head that he can harass the other until he gets what he wants, he can't because he can't physically get to that dog. We have two of everything here. Once they realise it's all the same they concentrate on what they have. Sorry hun but the more I read your posts the more I see your dogs rule you. They are dogs. Dont like it, tough. Of course they will offer resilience but instead of sticking it out you gave in at the first hint of confrontation. You own a predator with an intrinsic need to control or be controlled. The only time one can say that a dog is ruling a person is if that dog controls that person. My dogs don't get to dictate to me, and people on this forum will just have to either take my word for it or not. Avoiding confrontations doesn't make someone permissive. At the time, my older dog could rail all she liked on the other side of the baby gate and I ignored it, but the behaviour never got better. In fact it got worse. I kept up time outs for months thinking that I just needed to be more consistent or quicker in removing her. I tried verbal corrections. I tried body blocking. I gave up the day my dog saw me coming after she'd snapped at Kivi and ran away. I realised I'd been battling this for so long with methods that if they did anything it made the matter worse. Not just as a one off, but over months. I tried just giving her more one-on-one time and it resulted instantly in less snapping. :rolleyes: Wish I'd figured it out faster. Otherwise, I agree with most of what you have said.

Just curious. When you train with your dog, is their tail up above their spine or hanging below?

Cesar Millan would probably tell you to correct the terrier. IME, correcting dogs that have ALREADY had a go at another dog is completely ineffective. The only thing it does is make your dog run away from you right after they've snapped. If you are going to be successful with correcting it you have to interrupt it before it happens every single time. I think that you have to try to treat these problems at their source. If I had followed the second point in the article Aidan posted when I started having problems with my older dog going at my pup right from the start, it would have been a lot better for all of us. Instead I tried to use time outs and it made things worse. Any kind of aversive towards my older dog made it worse. Giving her extra attention made it better. Our problems were creeping towards the last scenario in that article, but I think mostly because my older dog was nearly deaf and blind and was going senile. She was in pain and not acting like herself anymore. I wonder if she even knew our younger dog was trying so deperately to avoid confrontations with her. I think separating at meal times is a sensible first step. You might be lucky and have that resolve the issue. I try to minimise situations that might produce contest as much as possible between my two dogs. It's much better to avoid making your dogs feel like they are competing for something in the first place if you can.

Thanks Pulilover. How often do you need to bath them? Do they shed?

I was showing OH Erik's new trick and it was kind of more like showing him my new trick. Erik knows what his signal to spin is, but I gotta do it right! OH tried and couldn't get the right hip movement. OH has taught Kivi to die when he says "BANG". Being Kivi, it takes him about half a minute of moaning and talking and throwing his head around before he finally lies down and dies. It's all very dramatic. Kivi responds to OH's signals better than mine, usually, because he does fairly abrupt, clear signals, whereas I tend to do smaller, slower signals.

How much time a week would you spend separating cords in an adult dog? Are there tools you would use to remove debris, or is it all done by hand? I've seen pictures of these guys with cords flying and they are spectacular!