corvus

Maybe this would help... http://www.caninehorizons.com/Body_Targets.html I've been wanting to teach all of my animals to body target and have just today been trying to work out how to do this. The above website seemed helpful. I've been wanting especially to try this with my hare in an attempt to get him more accustomed to things around his body. I never know if anything will work with him, but hey, it's worth a try. I've also been keen to try it with Kivi, as he's not wildly into free shaping. I have high hopes for Erik's free shaping, though. We'll see.

Pedatory behaviour towards other dogs or humans is certainly not to be shrugged off as just what dogs do. But nor do I think it's natural for a dog to see a small person or small dog and want to take chunks out of them just because they are running. I'd be inclined to call it predatory drift rather than aggression, but it doesn't really matter because whatever I call it it's really not on and has to stop one way or another. Kivi gets silly with small dogs sometimes and tries to stop them from running with his mouth. He does not seem to hurt them, but I have more trouble convincing people to just hold their dog for a moment so I can get my ratbag back on leash than convincing them that he's not hurting them or going to hurt them. I've been thinking of teaching him to hold something in his mouth while he's playing with smaller dogs. I don't know how long that would last, though. He is such a mouthy dog. He can't do anything without involving his mouth.

In a grossly simplified view, I've come to see dog aggression more as a reactive versus proactive thing. If the aggression is reactive, it's probably closely tied to fear, but if it's proactive, it's probably closely tied to control. The way I see it, a dog that wants to control is feeling insecure in some way. Insecurity and fear are closely related at a basic level, but reactive and proactive aggression are the symptoms displayed at the surface and are not really all that closely related. I don't think that even made sense to me. Whether punishments will be the MOST effective method depends on what you want to achieve and how sensitive the dog is to punishments. It also depends on what you're prepared to pay and whether speed is your main focus or caution. Which is my wishy-washy way of saying I think there's a need to be more cautious with punishments than with rewards. ETA I don't see prey drive as aggression. Chasing-biting-shaking are not in the same ballpark as lunging-snapping-fighting, IMO. I don't think dogs are being aggressive to rabbits when they kill them anymore than I think rabbits are being aggressive towards grass when they rip it out and chew it up.

Sounds like you've really thought it through! With the cats, I would put the cat in a crate or cat cage if you have one. I don't know what your cat is like, but I like bars between potential prey animals and dogs to begin with. Just that added safety. I think the important thing is to not let your puppy chase cats or chickens. If he gets a chance to learn that it's fun, you'll have a lot of trouble convincing him it's not! If they were my chickens, I'd stick to at least one physical barrier between dog and chickens at all times. For toilet training at night, he will probably wake you up when he needs to go. Both my puppies started sleeping through the night quite early (by about 10 weeks). If you don't anticipate any problems with your current dog, I would introduce them with puppy in my arms so he feels safe while the adult dog can come and sniff him. Lots of supervision to begin with. Make sure you're handy to rescue pup if he gets frightened. We put up baby gates when we got our last puppy 18 months ago and we just left them up. Really makes life easy. If I were you, I would write down the things I'd like my dog to learn, especially life skills stuff. Then you've got a bit of a training plan. Puppy preschool is good, but doesn't involve much training. I like being a step ahead of the class, but that's just because I like my training methods and I think it's hard for puppies to learn in such a distracting environment. That's all I've got. Good luck.

It's the knowing the right level of punishment that is the one that is increasingly bothering me. I find it is less resilient to mood fluctuations than rewards. With rewards, you can't really reward too much, and if you reward too little you just increase the rewards and no harm done. Unless you consistently under reward. With punishments you have to hit that window between too much and not enough. I used too much punishment with my last dog and never recovered the trust I had lost with her. I used not enough rewards with Kivi and recovered in two weeks to find whole new heights of untapped ability in him. For all that I'd been saying it was harder to go wrong with rewards for years, there was still a part of me that was thinking when you go wrong there's a point where you can't recover the last little bits of your relationship. It took seeing it for myself to really make me realise how easy it is to correct your own mistakes with rewards compared to punishments. And it took trying it without punishments to appreciate what I had lost by being a little too heavy on the punishments.

I've seen punishment make a fearful dog worse. Sometimes it's hard to tell if they are fearful or not. I've seen a few dogs that really bull in very confidently when they are being aggressive, but if you watch them before they get to that point, they spend a bit of time trying to AVOID whatever they end up attacking. They don't want to, but when they feel there's no other choice, they commit to it 100%. I grew up with a dog that was not even that obvious. She'd be barking at something she didn't like and if she was punished at that point, her aggression would escalate and she would become convinced that what she'd been barking at was the devil and she'd become completely obsessed with nailing it. Scary stuff.

Generally they blow their coat twice a year. Kivi is, I think, just about to do his second coat blow. The last one went for about a month. In between coat blows Kivi hardly sheds at all, and most of it gets caught up in his coat so it doesn't come out until I brush him.

You've seen the fish using this stuff on YouTube? I was just yesterday watching a video of someone training a fish to go through a hoop on Karen Pryor's website. The person was using a red light or a laser pointer to mark and there was a little bay at the top of the tank where she'd put food. It was quite interesting. I understand it took a lot of time and patience, but they got there in the end. It's good practice for marker training to work with an animal inherently more difficult to train than a dog. If I were you I'd make my own. But by all mean give it a go. It can be done and I know I always gain a new appreciation for my dogs after working within the limitations of a harder animal.

Uh huh, same thing worked with my hare. It worked with my hare because he's good at picking up patterns. He learnt that every time he went near certain objects I'd say "Oi!" and get up and shoo him away. In time he developed new habits that did not involve eating my things. It didn't work with Kivi, though. Kivi doesn't care if I told him to leave it alone. If he likes it enough, he'll be back again and again and sooner or later he'll get access when I'm not around or not paying attention and then that tiny bit of reward is all he needs! I haven't bothered to try with Erik. It seems quicker, easier, and more reliable to me to just put things up and if he gets something he's not meant to have, trade it with something else he can have. If he can't be supervised EVERYTHING is up that we don't want him to chew.

Our Wattlebirds raised a Koel chick last year. I was ready to shoot that thing. It begged from sun up to sun down without stopping. I'm hoping they don't get nailed again this year. Someone else can have the Koel baby in their yard.

Sure, pee on it. I don't buy the whole "this is mine" deal. It's never worked with any of my dogs, and is usually pretty dependent on you actually being there to enforce it. Better to remove temptation all together. To a dog, if no one has it in their mouth or under their paw, it's up for grabs. The only exception is when you have a tyrant running the pack who will come down on the other dogs like a tonne of bricks if they so much as look sideways at something that isn't theirs. My mother has a dog that is a couple of steps down from a tyrant, but if he's left a bone unattended, it goes to whoever is quick enough to get it and sneaky enough to hide away with it where he won't find them when he comes out looking for it.

I did my honours project on cuckoos. Sort of. They are very cool, although there's something deeply disturbing about a chick not 3 hours old heaving eggs out of the nest. Interestingly, Channel-billed Cuckoos don't do that. Their baby usually outcompetes the host babies, though, and they die of starvation. Maybe heaving eggs out of the nest is not so bad after all. Another interesting thing, Australian Koels are parasitic, but Asian Koels are not. Well, I think that's interesting. Pheasant Coucals are in the cuckoo family, but they are the only non-parasitic member in Australia. Roadrunners are also a cuckoo (non-parasitic). My honours supervisor found that fairy-wrens can tell when they have a cuckoo baby in the nest and abandon the nest to let the baby cuckoo starve. Sometimes they will build a new nest a metre away from the old one with the cuckoo still begging inside! There's this really neat cuckoo species that parasitises ground-nesting birds in alpine fields in some other country. Predation is so high in this environment that chicks must be silent. The chick of this cuckoo species has pretend gapes.. in its armpits, I think. When the host parents come to the nest, it opens up its mouth and then spreads its wings slightly and the parent sees three gapes instead of one and this leads to the hosts bringing more food to the cuckoo. Cuckoo-host interactions are some of the most fascinating evolutionary arms races in nature.

I think it depends on the dog. When Erik's focus wanders, it's because he's bored of what we are practising and so I get down with him and we do something else that he likes more, and then maybe I'll teach him something new. But we are just training for fun. With Kivi, I think that he loses focus usually because he's not very excited and thus he needs more pay to keep going. Or he thinks it's too hard. I might try revving him up a bit, or I might ask for something else, or I might just increase his reward rate. Usually it's the last one that works best. But whatever happens, if he's not really into it I keep the session very short and easy.

That's so funny, Corvus (not laughing at you, just the situation). When I had my last dog, I was so frustrated that there were no classes locally that would let me keep a pinch collar on my boy, or let me give any sort of collar pop on a check chain or martingale, and kept trying to stuff him into a headcollar (which he hated). I guess the problem is inflexible trainers across the board, no matter what methods they use. I think that a lot of people are very committed to their method of choice and genuinely believe it is working even when it is not. My experience with trainers so far has been that they are all like this (although I believe that they are not all like this). Not only are they married to their method of choice, but they don't understand it very well, so they apply it like a sledgehammer and it will usually work after a fashion at least and it will reinforce their commitment to their method. Meanwhile, you have a dog that has been essentially brutalised because it doesn't understand what it is expected to do, whether because it is overly intimidated or because the rewards aren't right or the communication just isn't clear enough. Having said all that, I honestly believe that trainers that don't understand their own methods very well are at the root of all the bad feelings that make people want to slander each other and and slam methods using emotive language. I am happy to admit that I'm in love with my methods of choice. I'm finding every time I try something new it works pretty brilliantly and it's very exciting and makes training much more fun for me than it's ever been before. But you have to be able to tell when something is awry and admit it. Normally it's just a matter of fine tuning, but at times I realise I was misinterpreting what was driving a behaviour in the first place, and then it pays to stop and try a whole new approach. I don't call that balanced, either. I just call it flexibility. An open mind is all well and good, but I have my favourite ways to tackle something and I have my limits to what I will do. I don't think that ignoring your own nature makes you a better trainer, but I do think embracing it does.

That potentially can work with a dog that has no history of self reward. If the dog perceives the ingrained self reward higher then your super duper reward what do you do then? Bold added so I don't have to retype it. That's where planning came in, one would hope. There's a lot to be said for anticipating where the pitfalls might be and training with the assumption you will hit them. If you don't, sweet. If you do, you're prepared. I know what I want to be super reliable the moment I bring my puppy home and set about working them up to it. Self-rewarding does happen, and it happened to me with Kivi's recall. I just went back to the beginning and started over. It was much quicker the second time. Having said that, Kivi is pretty easy. My hare was chewing up his litter tray for a while. I was worried he was going to end up with a belly full of plastic. I bought a new litter tray that was harder for him to get his teeth into, then I sprayed it with bitter spray, and then I made sure he had acceptable chew items in his cage at all times. I needed the bitter spray because I couldn't very well isolate him from his litter tray. It worked a treat. I swear, 99% of training is forming habits. If your animal is practising self-rewarding habits, you have to find a way to stop them, and if at all possible, offer an acceptable alternative. I have found physical barriers to be the best way to go, but as above, environmental punishments can also be a key component of breaking a very rewarding habit, although with dogs, asking for an incompatible behaviour you have rewarded heavily is quickly shooting to the top of my list of things to try.

Management. The best way to stop a bad habit from forming is to physically prevent your dog from doing it in the first place. If I don't want it chewed or stolen, it's got to be out of puppy's reach. We have loose bits of carpet in some rooms that our puppy loves ripping up. It's coming up anyway, but no need to let him learn how fun it is to rip up carpet. We put things on the loose patches so he can't get at them. If he keeps ripping up other bits I figure he needs something legal to rip up, so he gets a cardboard box or some junk mail to turn into confetti. You could try putting dog droppings in the holes your dog digs. Our yard is just full of holes. Kivi had a sand pit for a while as a puppy, but he preferred digging up the lawn. He's a northern breed and tends to like to dig depressions to sleep in.

Plans are good, but flexibility is better, IMHO. I'm currently training my wild hare to target an extendable metal stick. Considering his temperament and what drives him, it HAS to be positive or he will never do it. Anything I do with him I have planned quite carefully in terms of what I want as the end product, what I should use as rewards, how long my training sessions should be, how far apart they should be, and how I should go about shaping the behaviour I want over time. All that pretty much goes out the window the moment I step into his cage. What I do all depends on his mood and how he is interacting with me right now. If he is running around the cage, I leave without doing any training at all. If he is hiding in his box and doesn't even peak out within ten seconds of me getting there, I leave without training. I could list a dozen ways his behaviour influences what I do next. It has to be that way because he's such a flighty animal. In my mind, a plan is vital because it guides my actions so that I am thinking rather than reacting. HOWEVER, being flexible is a great way to get the best out of your animal. The more you listen to them and allow them to teach you, the better you both understand each other. I think that people here are forgetting that not every dog is a working breed. I know someone who does agility with Basenjis. In her opinion (and the opinion of many other Basenji owners), you have to use positive methods with them because they are like cats. If you punish them, they will want no truck with you and your training. This person I know does very well with her Basenjis, or at least, one in particular who has a good temperament for agility. All the same, some days her Basenjis get into the ring and embarass the hell out of her. What can she do? She can't punish them or they will decide they want no truck with agility rings. It probably won't damage their relationship with her, but it will damage their enthusiasm for agility. All she can do is come back another day. Just like all I can do when my hare is hiding is come back another day. If there is something I need to be super reliable, I don't mess around with punishing consequences. I make sure my dog is set for success and reward the hell out of it every single time. Often that will have to mean starting in a near sterile environment and gradually adding distractions. Not every dog takes kindly to punishing consequences for non-compliance. Who could blame them? Some dogs you can't punish during training at all or they shut down and do nothing.

Well, I am frustrated that there are still only two clicker classes in the whole of Sydney that I've been able to find out about and they are both over an hour's drive from me. I am relieved that not all trainers I meet automatically put a check chain on dogs and start yanking them around, but disturbed that there are still trainers like this out there teaching people how to train dogs using collar pops. I was talking to a local today about our shire's dog training club and how we were both scared of taking our dogs there due to stories we had heard of their crank and yank style training methods. I also find it sad that even when you think you've found a trainer that uses methods you are comfortable with, two weeks into training you discover they had a different idea of what "positive" means than you do. Somehow. Can I just point out that I haven't said even my idea of balanced training is bad. I was just under the impression folks thought it was important and I was feeling like I was doing better being UNbalanced. Incidentally, I don't care at all if people think I'm an unbalanced trainer. I think by my definition of the word I am. And I'm comfortable with that.

Does it matter? Well, that's the debatable bit! I think that the methods you choose for training your dog tends to evolve over time. I will be most alarmed if I ever STOP refining what I'm doing and trying out new things. I would say if you're not real interested in it, stick with what you're doing. If you are interested, it's all based around operant conditioning, which is the way that all animals learn. In its most basic sense, animals will work to get good things to happen to them and work to avoid bad things happening to them. Positive training focuses on training with rewards. I don't think there is "negative" training as such, but traditional methods typically lean on physical punishments, which, by definition, are unpleasant to dogs. Whether something is rewarding or punishing to your OWN dog depends on that dog. A punishment is generally something that will result in a decrease of the behaviour immediately before the punishment was administered, and rewards are something that result in an increase of the behaviour immediately before the reward. The tricky thing is timing. Whether you are rewarding or punishing, you have to do it as instantaneously as you can. It's best to do it AS the dog is doing something you want to encourage or discourage.

Kivi used to go twice a week when we were both working full time. Now I'm usually at home, so he doesn't go at all.

Perhaps I am a balanced trainer then, because I take that approach quite often! I think it can be kind and effective. I just sometimes feel that telling my girl what she's not allowed to do, then letting her do anything else and tell her she's good, is kinder than telling her what to do (reinforcing an incompatible behaviour), since it gives her more freedom. I think I understand, because what you describe is pretty much exactly the path I chose with Kivi. He is a sweet and happy dog and I think he trusts me a lot. He has fun free shaping, although I think he prefers luring, but that's his personality. When I tell him not to do something with my conditioned punisher, he stops doing it. We get on very well and I don't by any means sit here every day thinking "I've let him down" like I did with Penny (well, not everyday, but on a regular basis). I couldn't say whether a balanced trainer like I've described above really does communicate better with their dog. I think it depends on the trainer. However, I can say I'm much happier without the conditioned punisher. And I think I personally communicate better with my dog when I concentrate on just one thing rather than trying to give feedback on everything. I'm not a great trainer, but I can usually stack up pretty well against the average person in the street with a dog that is tolerably well behaved. So at the moment I'm like, why do I need to tell my dog what not to do when I can tell him what to do? I always used the conditioned punisher before as a "you can do anything but that" signal, and I wondered how I was going to cope without it. With Erik I've been using positive interruptors. I'm liking it better purely because I'm less lazy about maintaining it. I don't think a conditioned punisher in itself is a bad thing.

I should probably explain that part of my doubt about balanced approaches (meaning using both rewards and punishments to train behaviour - let's simplify it to R+ and P+) came from reading Gray Stafford's book. He made a wishy washy statement that you couldn't be looking for things to reward and looking for things to punish at the same time, and then went on with the usual arguments about relationships and animals scared to offer any behaviour at all. It was an unsatisfactory argument to me, and no matter how much I wanted to believe it, at the time I wasn't convinced that this could be right for dogs. For wild animals, yes, but even there, you can punish a wild animal every now and then and get away with it. Most animals are a little forgiving if you have a strong relationship based on trust and rewards. But dogs are different. They have been selectively bred by us for thousands of years and they bounce back after we punish them like no other animal does. It's one of the few times I've said, ah, but this is where dogs are different from every other animal. Anyway, I'm still not convinced that you can't reward and punish without causing your moral integrity to implode, nor that punishing a dog is as dire as punishing, say, a killer whale. However, then I got Erik and cut out a few more punishments I had been leaning on and gave up on negative interruptors, even, and I've been experimenting with keeping the punishments as few and far between as I can whilst remaining sane and protecting the sanity of everyone else in the house (including the rabbit and the hare and Kivi). I found that with all this concentrating on rewarding, I quite forgot about punishing and I didn't even have to consciously remind myself to try something else. So perhaps there's a grain of truth in the first part, although I don't know that it's particularly important in training dogs.

Well, I think you are and it's very annoying to have to say that. The problem is, everyone draws their line at a different place. I'm happy to call myself a rewards-based trainer and hope that people understand that means I start with rewards but will deviate from rewards if I need to. Other people on this forum seem to get offended that anyone should call themselves a reward-based trainer when they would rather say they use mostly rewards but some punishments and suddenly they think the person calling themselves reward-based thinks they are more ethical than they are, and they'll be damned if they change what they are calling themselves because they've picked a label that sounds right to them, so instead they argue about it. To me, "reward-based" is fundamentally the same as "positive". Positive has just become a no-no word because of this stupid "purely positive" thing that everyone is so hung up and hateful about. A 'balanced' approach, though? It seems that every time I've heard that term it's come from a trainer that approaches dogs with a "Bad dog, stop doing that.... oh, good dog, you're doing the right thing now" kind of method. Some of them are not balanced by my understanding of the word and are more aversive than positive, but I was ignoring them and assuming 'balanced' meant a little from column A and a little from column B rather than most from one column or another. ETA, I see I was misinterpreting based on my previous experiences. I'm inclined to think harmony is a cop out because it means nothing concrete, but I can understand the idea of compromising. Kind of.

Like I said to you last time you tried to point the finger with that one, I can't sum up everything I do in one sentence and I can't be held accountable for the way I react when I'm in pain. I do not deny that scruffing is a punishment, but I can't say I use it as a training or behaviour modification method if I've only done it when I'm in pain and have never applied it with the intention of modifying behaviour. I've never met any of the problems I've so far had with Erik by punishing every time it happened as well as rewarding. If I were to say I used punishment in training Erik based on the scruffing, then I could say it hasn't worked very well, and then you could all say "That's because you haven't used it properly" and you would be right. So that's why I don't consider scruffing Erik a couple of times a training method I have used on him. It just wasn't. I know people on other forums that have trained sports dogs and have done so with mostly rewards. They haven't claimed to be purely positive, but they certainly don't call themselves balanced. I wouldn't call anyone that uses mostly rewards 'balanced', whether they are comfortable with the odd correction or not. I think that 'balanced' should mean about 50:50 rewards and punishment. Like that "No!... Good dog." stuff that goes down. There is one person I know that trains sheepdogs. She is what I would call 'balanced' with her herders. She mostly uses pressure to teach the dogs to back down fast. It's very interesting, and considering she has tried training herders with clickers and no punishments and then decided it created a herding dog with not enough discipline around sheep, I absolutely believe her and hold her opinion on the matter in the highest of regards. She is very aware that this is something she would not do with every dog. I'm thinking about my two pet dogs learning to be good companions, though. Me and my ilk make up the majority of dog owners. Do we need to be 'balanced'? I just kind of feel that if people are going to make generalisations about using 'balanced' trainers, me and my dogs are the kinds of people they are directing those generalisations to.

Kivi doesn't use both. He ignores behaviour he doesn't like, or he walks away. He is more even-tempered than I am! He gets a long way without aggression or warnings. I wouldn't like to be quite as helpless as he is, but given I have opposable thumbs, access to unlimited resources, and the power of foresight, there's no reason why I should be as helpless as he is while still not resorting to punishment. I guess I don't really care if it's faster. Erik learns so fast with just rewards that it makes my head spin. I haven't tried using punishment to help extinguish behaviour yet because asking for a heavily rewarded incompatible behaviour and then rewarding that again works faster than anything else I've ever tried. I don't know if this is just Erik, though. What kind of behaviours can't be modified with rewards alone? ETA I don't think there are many people on this board that wouldn't consider punishments. But that's not really the topic. I want to know why "balanced" is apparently so important. Actually PF, I ain't gonna be convincing myself because I'm biased and I'm not going to take up a dog sport just so I can answer a question the collective brain of DOL might be able to answer for me with a more "balanced" viewpoint than mine. Where's that ironic emoticon?