corvus

Good question. Dogs do what is rewarding. If you don't want your dog to pick up bad habits, make sure your pup doesn't ever find them rewarding. So if he jumps up and down to get your attention, make sure you don't give him your attention. Easy. What's hard is when not all members of the family are on the same page. It's very difficult to teach a dog that something is not rewarding when someone else is teaching him that it is. You might have to have a chat with your mum about how you would like to bring your puppy up and how she can help. Remember that if you're having trouble because other people are rewarding your pup for bad behaviour, the best way to combat that is reward them for NOT practising that bad behaviour. And reward them really well, with lots of attention and treats and games. As an example, if your pup is jumping on you, reward him heaps for sitting and then ask for a sit when he wants to jump. He can't jump and sit at the same time, so as long as sitting is more rewarding than jumping, he'll sit.

I take anything L. David Mech says on wolves as law. He has spent most of his life studying them in the wild. He has some of his papers free on his website in an attempt to shake the alpha wolf/dominance hierarchy thing. ETA linky: http://www.mnforsustain.org/wolf_mech_domi...lpha_status.htm He explains where dominance occurs in wolves and why.

Woo hoo! What a great achievement.

Holy cow! Lucky you haven't received an uninhibited bite yet, hey llceaser? My mother was unfortunate enough to have a serious dog fight break out with her in the middle one day. Both dogs were small-medium and both were dogs I'd expect would run away if directly threatened, but one of them got her finger in the confusion and made a right mess of it. When dogs want to do damage they do. If you deliberately provoke inhibited bites, sooner or later a dog is going to do you some real harm. I heard a horror story once about an ACD that bit a little girl's hand and took one and a half fingers clean off. I believed it. Dogs have the power in their jaws to crunch small bones. I wouldn't mess around with that and depend on inhibited bites! Once again, a thread about breeds with guarding tendencies has degenerated into an argument about whether an individual dog will run away if seriously threatened. I don't have any dogs I think for a moment would protect me, and never have. I think that many breeds would be likely to defend their owners if they thought there was a threat. I don't think these dogs would necessarily do it EVERY time. I would hope there wouldn't be many times. Some individual dogs need to be taught what is a threatening situation and what is not. It is my belief that some dogs know this instinctively. Some go on previous experience. I don't agree with expecting any individual dog that hasn't been protection trained to protect you, but there's a lot to be said for getting a big guard breed with protection instincts. A lot of herding dogs can be quite surprising when put on the spot as well. I think it's a topic that is hard to make generalisations about.

"So Your Dog's Not Lassie" is great. I know a few people that went to a seminar by the Control Unleashed lady and the take home message was no shortcuts! If you use the program, you have to do it to the letter. I've heard great things about it. The life rewards idea comes from the Premack principle. Google it for more info. The basic premise is an animal will do something less desirable in order to be allowed to do something more desirable. The activity becomes the reward. It's supposed to be good for drivey dogs, but it works on anything. If Kivi is trying to get to something on leash and I'm holding him back, he'll offer a sit because in the past I've let him go do what he wants to do once he's taken the tension off the leash and shown some restraint by sitting. The nice thing about it is that it tells me he's thinking rather than reacting. If he's actually thought of sitting to get what he wants, then if I let him off leash, for example, there is a very high chance that he will be easily recalled. That's him, though. He's a pretty mellow dude.

And that (and the rest of what Willow said) was the point I was trying to make. I understood where Erny was coming from. I'd find it damn hard to believe that some tools are ever the best because of the way I see the world and the way I relate to animals. Doesn't mean they don't work, or that if someone else thinks they are the best for their own reasons that they are wrong. It just means you do what you as an individual believes is the best, and for most of us here on DOL, that means whatever we think is best for the dog.

Rubbish. Everyone on this board does what they think is best. It has already been stated that the head collar is the best tool for this particular dog and its owners. I might always try rewarding what I want before punishing what I don't want, and that's because I think it is "best", just as an example. There are some things I would never do because I don't think it's "best" for the dog. Someone else might think it is exactly what that dog needs. We can only do what we think is best, and that is habitually the things we like. The things we dislike tend to be things we don't think works "best". I don't know about Willow or anyone else, but the methods I think are "best" are defined by what has worked "best" for me in the past.

I'll suggest the umbilical cord. She's already on raw, so solid waste is probably at a minimum already. I think if she could be taught to toilet on command she would do so already. Mum's other two dogs do, and like I said, she hasn't made the connection between rewards and toileting. I'm not really sure why not, seeing as that's OC at it's most basic and she's a pretty quick-witted dog. Maybe it's not consistent enough.

My mother is in an unfortunate position. Last year she wanted a third dog and decided to get an older Sheltie puppy from a registered breeder. The pup was about 4 months old when my mum took her home. She was kind of assuming Shani would be mostly toilet trained by that stage, but it soon became apparent that something had gone awry. She wasn't in the least bit toilet trained, but worse, she had no problem messing her bed or her crate. She doesn't whine if she needs to go, she just goes. So, she is now over a year old and my mum says she would like to think she is making progress with toilet training, but in reality she thinks she is just succeeding in having Shani outside more often. She has a pretty full schedule and doesn't really have time to take her out every couple of hours, which is why she got an older puppy in the first place. When she catches Shani going outside, she rewards like hell. Shani is delighted with this, but doesn't seem to have made the connection. If she needs to go and she is inside, she doesn't just go anywhere, she goes on her bed. My mum says if she puts Shani's food bowl in her crate with her, she displays a small amount of restraint and can last the night, but it's one of those things that she's loathe to play around with much because if Shani does one day go with her food bowl in the crate, what then? And she would, I think, with very little provocation. Does anyone have anything to suggest?

Laffi has just shown me what happens when your reward rate is really high. They suddenly find you very interesting! One of the ways to a really reliable recall is to break a large treat of high quality up into tiny bits and feed one tiny piece at a time, gooing over your dog and how clever they are as you go. Same sort of principle.

Maybe you could try a crate or a pen? Our pup only took a couple of nights to figure out that once he goes in the crate, he stays there all night unless he needs to toilet. He wakes up when our alarm goes off, and even sleeps in on a weekend. Our pup also has a pen, and when he's running around like a maniac and we've had enough, he gets popped in the pen with something like a pig's ear or piece of dried beef tendon to chew on and he settles right down. Usually goes to sleep when he's had enough chewing. Chewing is a great way to occupy an active puppy.

Sounds great, BCPuppy. My pup flatly refused to eat kibble from the moment he had his first meal in my house. As soon as he discovered raw was on offer, he would suck all the raw off the kibble and spit the kibble out. Luckily the breeder gave me a bag when I picked him up, so I wasn't out of pocket. Tried using it as training treats and he treated it with distrust. I didn't bother with this latest puppy. He just went straight onto raw.

Scary! I'd call the vet for advice today. Groggy animals ring alarm bells for me. It's the first sign of something wrong.

I use "off" for getting off the furniture, but use it so infrequently I don't think Kivi knows what it means anymore. He knows where he's allowed to be and when and rarely oversteps the boundaries. Funny thing, I've always used "down" for a lie down command because my reasoning has been that I use "drop" to ask them to drop an object. Only, with Kivi I used "give" to ask him to drop something, and now drop isn't in use at all, except by OH who has been using it instead of "down" since Kivi was a puppy. I told him it was going to be confusing and we had a protracted battle of wills over it, which ultimately resulted in Kivi learning "down" and "drop" to mean the same thing. I think consistency makes life easier with dogs, but considering how differently OH and I use our voices and our hand signals let alone the word we actually say, it's a good thing dogs are pretty good at figuring us out. For Kivi, hand signals were way more important than whatever word we used, and even now he doesn't always cotton on when you say something without the signal. But our new puppy Erik is very focused on voice and is already sitting reliably without a hand signal. Different dogs, different strengths and weaknesses. Best to get everyone in the family practising commands, though. That way they learn to generalise it a little so it means the same no matter who says it.

In this example withholding the treat is not -P. Nothing was taken away, the dog didn't have the treat. You might take away a conditioned reinforcer, which may be a punishing consequence, but that was not described in this example. Not all extinction procedures involve extinctions bursts, spontaneous recovery, or for that matter even a reduction in the behaviour! It is an extinction procedure for the simple fact that a response which has previously resulted in a reinforcer is no longer producing that reinforcer. (This is another reason why extinction does not belong in the quadrants, in my opinion). Ah, I see. A question, though: If you took away a conditioned reinforcer - something that predicted rewards - before any reinforcement was given, and you saw a resultant decrease in the behaviour usually displayed before taking away the conditioned reinforcer, how would you know if you were seeing an extinction process or if taking away the conditioned reinforcer was punishing?

Interesting, alpha bet. My last dog was a bit on the food obsessive side and was allowed to clean other dogs' bowls once they had left them. I ended up putting a stop to it when she started to get super obsessive about it and wouldn't go outside until she had licked every other bowl in the house. It was very silly, but once I'd broken the habit I got slack and let it happen again and it never got that obsessive again so I just let it continue and it never caused a problem. Kivi learnt to eat very fast and learnt that if Penny wasn't feeling very hungry he wasn't welcome to her bowl until she'd walked away from it. I honestly could not imagine Kivi getting snarky about anything. He's 17 months old, now, and still hasn't ever growled. It could happen, though, and if it were going to it would probably be over food.

The dog has to have prior learning and hence expectations of the reward. So are you saying the expectation of a reward is the same thing as a reward? To me, expectation is more related to an establishing operation (a term I learnt yesterday - woo!). Maybe I'm wrong, though! I can see how you could think of failing to live up to an expectation as P-. My main beef with the idea is that I feel like you have to take something away for it to be considered P-. I'm not convinced that taking away a high likelihood of reward is actually taking something away. Or taking away something that predicts rewards is the same as taking away something rewarding. Although... Okay, hopefully Aidan can clear that up. I don't know what you mean by this. I mean it doesn't make much difference in the scheme of things whether you call it extinction or P-. And you may find that the behaviour very quickly returns due to spontaneous recovery. You also might find that P- isn't sufficient enough (even if you did apply it in your methodology). Much would depend on how much of an aversive the dog perceived your P- as a punishment. True. But if it wasn't aversive enough to see a decrease in the behaviour, can we really call it a punishment? Maybe that's a different discussion.

Or the dog needs to not be reinforced by anything. It might be there are several potential reinforcers involved. Right? You could accidentally reinforce something with anything rewarding without having the dog actually reach its goal. But isn't the nature of working with animals that you will never really know for certain? You can make some very educated guesses, though, and if you didn't make those you may as well not bother. Okay, I thought that withholding a reward is not P-, because how can you "take away" something that the dog doesn't even have yet? To me, just because I intend to give the dog a reward doesn't mean the dog already has it before I give it to them. Say I'm shaping and hold off rewarding for a second while my dog looks away and then reward when the dog looks back. The dog doesn't go through an extinction burst of looking away. Looking away just drops out because it wasn't rewarded. Have I got this right? I may be quite off the mark, but I see where Aidan is coming from in that extinction vs P- is a harmless mistake in the scheme of things. But still, I don't know about anyone else, but I like to have things right rather than wrong. It ultimately doesn't matter for me as a layman whether my method is working because I'm using P- or setting up an extinction process, but it matters to me as a scientist interested in animal behaviour! I imagine it might matter to me if I were trying to nail a behaviour quickly with a dog by teaching it what gets rewarded and what results in punishment, seeing as taking something away to decrease behaviour is a form of punishment. If I set up an extinction process instead of the P-, the result might be the same in the end, but it might be slower as I haven't taught the dog what is behaviour that is a bad idea so much as what is behaviour that won't be rewarded.

Ah, thanks Aidan. That clears that up. Kivi's recalls are typically at a run. I think it's the odd delay that is where we can put work in. It does seem that as Erny says, when he is running he is pretty hard to distract. One time he broke away from a game with his best canine pal to recall, and she intercepted him. He dodged her, then shook her off when she got him anyway, made a substantial detour to run around her, and then ran even faster than usual once he had a clear path. We were pretty impressed. It sounds like we need to keep on practising with different distractions.

My old dog was bitten by a bullant on her foot. It swelled up slightly and she wouldn't walk on it for for the next half an hour, but otherwise she was fine.

This is true also for Nelson's method. She teaches you call once, if they don't come you do something that looks or sounds exciting, and if they still don't come you go and get them. I had Kivi on a long line for a few months while his recall was still pretty unreliable. We made a few mistakes, but recovered pretty well in the end. Just took longer. Nelson encourages you to give them off leash time while the recall is still in training. I've never really understood this, and know one avid Nelson supporter who still doesn't do this. Her dogs stay on long lines until the recall is as good as she wants it to be. Here's a video of Kivi's recall a few months ago: He was still on the long line in that video due to him being totally in dog obsession mode that day. I think we should have used the long line a little more heavily in earlier stages. I will do so with Erik.

I don't, it's just what we normally get. It does make me very happy, though! I can't say why, but it is just very satisfying to have your dog gallop towards you when you call them. I think he just likes the recall a lot. My old dog went deaf, but by then her eyesight wasn't sharp enough for signals, either. I found sharp sounds worked best, but eventually she couldn't be let off leash at all. Vickie, what is your recall based on if not entirely rewards?

Not that I can see. If we can make the assumption that scratching at the crate door was being maintained by the approach of the person or the food then I would say that was an extinction procedure. No wonder it's confusing. Oh well, I think I've got it, now, and next time someone tries to confuse me with another example of extinction instead of P- I won't be so confused.

That's not quite correct. Variable Schedules of Reinforcement build behaviours that are more resistant to extinction. I love having you around. I was reading Grey Stafford's book and he uses a Least Reinforcing Scenario in which he just waits for a few seconds, then either asks something different, asks the same thing again, or ends the training session depending on what he thinks would be best at the time. I think my confusion mostly lies in not knowing whether a slow recall is worth reinforcing because I'm meant to be reinforcing every recall to get a conditioned recall, or if because my dog is capable of and usually performs a beautiful recall at a dead run, we should consider a slow recall not a recall? That's almost the same thing. The only difference is it doesn't matter where Kivi ends up for his ER as long as it is in a good position for receiving the goodies. A lot of Nelson's students use "come" or "here" as their ER, just put their dog's name in front to get their attention. We only opted for something else because we are both as bad as each other when it comes to talking to the dogs and we just needed something we didn't say in regular conversation. I should have been clearer about that, yes. I do use Kivi's name in all of those situations, but I'm careful to make sure it sounds different to him if I expect him to respond in a particular way to it.

IMO you are creating confusion by doing this. Either you want the dog to respond EVERY time you use a command (in this case the dog's name) or you don't want them to respond. I DO want my dogs to respond to their name when I say, so I do not just talk to them using their name when I don't want a response. Okay, sorry, but that is rubbish and here's why: the ER is his name three times in quick succession at a high pitch. What matters is the pitch and the repetition of the "e" sounds. I can call the same pitch and just say his name once and he doesn't think it's his ER unless he reckons I'm going to use it at any moment and is waiting for it, in which case he'd come running if I used his regular recall, which is his name once. Sorry, should have pointed that out. His ER sounds nothing like the way you would say his name to get his attention, but it's still his name. He does respond to the ER EVERY time. I have said that it's a very good recall. So obviously if it created confusion it wouldn't have worked so well. If you want your dogs to respond to their name every time, then you don't need an ER, do you? I can't help talking to them. It just comes out. No point in me denying my basic nature for the sake of my dog when it's so easy to just split them all up. Kelpie-i, I am a little confused. You said why not just use the dog's name, but then you said you teach people to use a nickname for "everyday" things and the dog's full name for a request for attention? And I am assuming that the name recognition then encompasses the recall? That sounds like just a variation on what Nelson teaches to me. What's the difference between having an "everyday" name and a "pay attention" name and having an everyday recall and an emergency recall?