corvus

Just as a contrast to that, Midol, rabbits are said to base their social hierarchies on age. The top bunny is the one that has been a rabbit the longest. Rabbits fight like demons when they don't get along, so perhaps hierarchies can only really occur when they are of compatible personalities in the first place. I guess the point was that puppies are always automatically at the bottom. They might get away with murder a lot of the time, but they are just babies and so are given some leeway by tolerant individuals. L. David Mech's description was that young wolves often stay with their parents for up to 3 years and thus see younger generations coming in. Even as they are sitting there on their parents' territory as adults, they still follow their parents, but puppies are taught to respect them. The older offspring leave the pack before challenging a parent for dominance, so it never actually happens. They meander off and hook up with another youngster and start a new pack. Mech also describes the situation in Yellowstone where there are a lot of resources and wolf packs have multiple breeders. I think there is evolutionary basis for a hierarchy based on age because when you think about it, an older animal has had years to accumulate some serious wisdom. Animals learn from experience, and if an individual has experienced a lot of things and has lived through them all, then chances are they will know how to live through a lot of things a younger animal hasn't experienced yet, so therefore it would be a good idea to follow their lead. In the wild, older animals generally die before they become a liability to a group due to being slow etc. Elephant herds are another one that is led by the oldest female, but she is normally the mother of all the others. In fact, the majority of social animals are very closely related within the group, so perhaps it is a problematic distinction.

I was reading this little article http://www.wolf.org/wolves/news/iwmag/2008...r/alphawolf.pdf written by L. David Mech talking about his attempts to change the terminology when talking about dominant wolves to drop the term "alpha". It is an interesting article and brings me to wonder what it means for domestic dogs. On the one hand, dogs are generally tossed in with strangers and expected to get along. Those conditions for wolves create a dominance hierarchy. But on the other hand, dogs are a good deal less territorial and a good deal more amiable to strangers than wolves, and they also never really grow up in behaviour and act like wolf puppies their whole lives. In view of the Non-linear Dog Theory I posted once before, I wonder how this can all be assimilated into something resembling the truth. The way I see it, in some cases dogs may mix together quite peacefully if they are of compatible personalities. Perhaps they communicate well and are laid back and conflict never really arises. But then, looking at my mother's two older dogs, Pyry, the smaller boy has pretty much trained Jill, the larger girl as well as Penny and Kivi and my mother's latest dog to respect his every whim. He is a stubborn creature and when he wants something he sets out with utter commitment to get it. He is not concerned if this leads to aggression or violence, although he tries everything else first. To me, it seems that he has built up a history with other dogs so that they know he will always resort to aggression if they don't give in to him. Over time, arguments become very rare because he only has to look at one of the other dogs for them to know they are in for it if they don't give in or find a way to remove themselves. This strategy has worked for him because he isn't obsessed with controlling the other dogs and only bothers to do anything when he really wants something, but when he does do something, he is not bluffing. I am thinking that in a sense he has created a dominance hierarchy, but my thought is it has not formed naturally so much as that he has trained it like we train our dogs to pay close attention to us. He has only once that I know of tried his method on a human and that was over a lizard he found that he desperately wanted to keep and was prepared to fight to the death for if need be. He didn't get to keep it and no one was hurt, but he was incredibly worked up over it. Anyway, this is just a thought provoking thing rather than an outright question, but some people (no one in particular) often like to say that dominance hierarchies occur in dogs because they occur naturally in the wild, and then we had this conversation recently about whether dogs see the humans they live with as part of their families. How do you see this all tying in with alphas and hierarchies if wolf hierarchies are normally related to age and parenthood?

I honestly think the door thing is about personal space more than anything. I've mentioned before that my corgi never cared about doors until she started going blind, then suddenly she's nervous in any tight space with another dog, and if she is in the doorway first, she will tell other dogs to stay back until she is well clear. If the other dog went through first she doesn't really care. She is just nervous of being jostled or trodden on. If there is any degree of tension over personal space between two dogs, a doorway forces them to be closer to one another than they are comfortable with. Little wonder some dogs get snarky around doors.

The way I see it, it behooves a dog to pay attention to where you are when they are on leash regardless of how they might view themselves in the social order in relation to the one on the other end of the leash, at least as long as they are wearing any kind of corrective device or get leash corrections on a flat collar. Or, it behooves them to pay attention because you have taught them that when the leash goes taut they go nowhere. Neither of those things are leadership at all. My dogs don't always just fall in and walk beside me. Sometimes they stop for a sniff or Kivi walks on a 5m longline a lot of the time and he decides to go explore someone's yard. I just talk to them and they generally come back. Not because I display good leadership - half the time they get to do whatever the hell they like - but perhaps more because of just pure classical conditioning. I spent months teaching Kivi verbal suggestions and he knows the routine, now. Funnily enough, it's "hold up" that is the least reliable and that's the one I started first, but it's also the one we have been the least consistent with. I still think the vast majority of training and building a relationship with an animal is classical conditioning and forming habits and routine.

Wouldn't want to agree with me too much, huski. I am way unbalanced!

Oh god, the alpha roll. So many lost hours arguing that one back and forth! I want them back! When you watch dogs settling an intense argument, often one dog goes down and gets "pinned" by the other. But if you look really closely at the shift in body weight between the two dogs, the one that goes down always goes down voluntarily. Unless, as someone else said, someone wants to kill! I do actually think most if not all the time CM does it the dogs go down voluntarily. My dog has done that once for me and it was when she nearly accidentally bit me. She was on her back looking mortified before I registered what had happened. I pity anyone who feels a need to encourage that look of abject fear/misery in their dog's eyes directed at them. It is a stupid notion and even the Monks of New Skete who first invented the bloody thing publicly denounce it, now. I don't even know why people want to try to imitate dogs when they are talking to dogs anyway. Do they think dogs are that stupid they don't read the subtle signals a person isn't even aware they are making?? I agree with huski. Us humans are the smart ones, so one would think we would know a better way to get what we want than outright confronting an animal with strong teeth and jaws. It amazes me that as the pathetically non-athletic and weak creatures we are, there are still so many of us that rely on physical force.

petmezz, you'd be amazed how good pain can feel when you are driven and your body is full of happy chemicals! You know you're going to regret it when you stop, but as long as you have the energy to keep putting one foot in front of the other the pain can feel pretty good. Within reason.

I should hire Kivi's social services out. :D We have met a few iffy dogs lately that Kivi has brought round with some smooches. He has this way of looking extremely non-threatening and most dogs seem to tolerate his kisses. We just need to teach him how to be non-threatening with dogs smaller than him and we will be onto something! Last time we were at the vets he was licking every dog that came out looking miserable. There was one in particular that kept coming back for another Lappie smooch. She clearly felt like crap after surgery and just needed a little affection.

We made some progress tonight using a bit of luring. What I'm trying to do with the more and less is teach him two different signals, one for a small movement and one for more movement and then sort of generalise it. He wasn't really getting it going sideways last night, but tonight he was getting there with lifting his paw. I managed to get him to do a tiny one by having him do it from a down, using a signal right on the ground with my hand and clicking for the smaller ones, then even smaller as the theory goes. I was clumsy, but he got the gist of it. Making it into a bigger movement was easier because he already knows "paw" so I just changed the signal so it was more like the one for a small movement, only higher and more enthusiastic. I don't really know what we have achieved, but it would be pretty cool if he was able to generalise the concept of more and less by the "bigness" of the signal. It has gotten me thinking... My partner gets a very enthusiastic drop out of him with a very enthusiastic hand signal. It's just one more step to get a subdued response from a subdued hand signal... Of course, now he's climbing the walls again because it was all so exciting. It occurs to me that I don't give him enough big hugs and treats when he does what I was looking for. :D

Laffi, you and I need to get together! We live in Jannali as well. :D Also, you promised me a frisbee demo. I don't think we have much planned this weekend if you are free. I think what I'm asking him is a bit much for him as well, but I guess we have to start somewhere. It seemed easier to me to aim to shape a small, simple movement. Unfortunately, he doesn't do very many small movements and if he does he isn't really aware of them, so he doesn't seem to know what I'm clicking.

I've been practising shaping with Kivi lately because he's a nutter and has way too much energy and I was looking for something to get him focused. I'm pretty new at clicker training and I was wondering if anyone has any exercises or suggestions for getting Kivi to think smaller. I've been teaching him to lift each front foot when I indicate them with my foot (no reason why, just something to do). He gets it and does it pretty reliably, but I want to try to refine it a bit and get him to lift his feet less. I was trying to teach him the concept of more movement and less movement last night with getting him to go from side to side, but I think it was a bit of a fluke when he got it and he didn't really understand what he was doing. I tried clicking the moment he lifted a foot, but again, he didn't seem to get it because he would just keep lifting the foot even after I'd clicked. And if I held off clicking he'd lift it MORE because he thought it wasn't working and needed to be more obvious.

Wow! That is crazy, anita. You learn something everyday.

Humans can tell another human with a different immune system by smell as well. I have never smelt a sweaty shirt that I like the smell of, but I would agree that some sweat smells much worse to me than other sweat. Supposedly the more noxious someone's BO smells to you, the more similar their immune system to your own. Sir Robert Winton covered it in one of his documentaries, and his work mate came to our university once and gave a talk about something unrelated, but mentioned that the US department of defence is funding their human pheremone work with the view to "sniff out" criminals. I have always found it intriguing that my mother's dogs welcome me like a family member even when I only saw them a couple of times during their puppyhood. I figured that my smell must hang around the house, but perhaps I just smell like family.

True, Kelpie-i! Some dogs that haven't a drop of sledding blood in them have a pretty mean oppositional reflex. Or at least like to pull. There are also breeds that are used for carting to take into account.

Depends on the species, tkay, but I think that some social animals are able to recognise close siblings by smell. Not dogs, it would seem. Most social systems are set up so that one sex or the other typically leaves home so inbreeding won't occur, but I guess if they don't disperse very far it might still be useful.

I agree that it just feels good. My dogs often run just for the hell of it. They are not hunting. I guage their happiness by how willing they are to run a lot of the time. IMO running is not always about prey drive. Parts of prey drive are expressed in chasing, tug, herding, sniffing and the full-blown pounce, kill and consume, but mucking around with another canine pal is often about being social rather than developing hunting behaviours. And hanging out with a person on a walk is about natural canine curiosity for the most part. Swimming is not something done for prey but for fun, just as a dog can decide to run around just because it's fun to do so. People run around for the hell of it as well. As do cats. Running feels good. The oppositional reflex is, I believe, mostly about balance, not necessarily survival. If you fall over in the wild you are not dead meat instantly. Good thing, because baby birds fall and crash-land all the time. But if someone applies STEADY pressure to you, you don't just keep giving, you oppose that pressure to steady yourself. Even Kivi will oppose it and he's a big ball of wussyness. I have heard of people using the oppositional reflex to aid in training a good stay. I think it is all together likely that sledding breeds were selectively bred for a strong oppositional reflex among other things.

Nice post, Staranais! The only problem I see is what about dogs that join a family as adults? They often become protective of their new family anyway despite not being raised with them. Hence my thought that the system has been tampered with during selective breeding. One thing I find interesting about some of the older breeds with a strong guarding instinct is that they don't always cope well with being rehomed. It is said that Canaan Dogs often take a long time to become comfortable in a new family and sometimes refuse to eat or drink for days because they miss their old family. I have heard that Akitas are also difficult to rehome sometimes. As opposed to a Lapphund who will happily go with absolutely anyone that gives them a cuddle.

I don't think altruism exists anywhere. :p That's just cynical old me, though. I do a lot of generous things, but it makes me feel good to do so, and no doubt I'm setting myslf up to receive generosity from others, so how can I say I'm serving others before myself when it is clearly beneficial to me to do that? There's a very good book called "The Selfish Gene" that explains all that stuff in an entertaining and clear manner. I've only read a bit of it, but others tell me it was a great read and really gave them some insights into how population genetics work.

I've heard some shockers. It was a vet that convinced me to try homecooked with Penny in the first place, which consequently solved all her health problems, turned the clock back on her arthritis and made her into a much happier dog. Imagine my surprise when a vet nurse gave my mother a lot of crap for deciding to change from a premium kibble sold at her vets to raw. And then a vet told me that I should raise my puppy on Science Diet because although a diet of raw mince, mashed vegies and chicken wings and lamb bones sounded like it had a lot of bones in it, it was actually very low in calcium. I just raised my eyebrows and said nothing. Kivi is unusually tall for his breed, but he didn't have any problems at all and still eats raw. Interestingly, he never had an upset tummy after coming home and going onto the raw diet. He hardly ever has an upset tummy. Nonetheless, some dogs don't do so well on raw. You could try homecooked, which is normally gentler on their tummies.

It's stories like that one, Erny, that prompted me to say I believe it has been tampered with in domestic dogs. There has been a heap of work done on this in various species in an attempt to find a truly altruistic species, or to prove that altruism doesn't exist. At any rate, the closest anyone has found that I'm aware of is Vampire Bats, who share meals with unrelated individuals back at the roost, but this has turned out to be a tit for tat arragement and bats generally only share with bats that have shared with them in the past, although obviously someone has to be generous for the tit for tat to begin. I can try to hunt down some papers, but it will have to wait as I'm tired and busy. It is not quite as cut and dried as a half sib, but there is a formula for working out when an individual will take a risk for another individual and when they won't based on the cost to the individual that takes the risk. The "good of the pack" theory is still a bit of a leaky bucket in domestic companion animals for me. It bothers me because it is not very consistent, and I think that breed can have a lot to do with whether those traits are expressed or not. Wild canids typically hang out in pairs or family groups and defend territories, as we all know. I do not think it's a very big stretch to transfer these strong instincts in dogs to a social group the dog lives with. It's like those pictures of birds trying to feed goldfish because the stimulus of a big open mouth is so strong, although obviously this is a pretty simplified analogy. Anyway, I am still working out in my head how wild animals and domestic animals differ. Haven't got to packing instinct yet, as it's only relevant to dogs and I like things that are common to other domestic animals when comparing domestic and wild. One thing I've noticed, though, is the ease with which domestic animals bond to unrelated individuals. I wonder if it is as strong as a bond between related animals and it seems likely to me that it is.

I will hijack Midol's thread to discuss rank aggression and fear aggression with you, Kelpie-i..... Wait, better not. :p

Survival? Perhaps in a sense as wild animals couldn't give a stuff what someone else tells them to do if they think it's dangerous. This is because selfish genes always win and thus get fixed in a population practically instantly (on an evolutionary time scale). To me independence in domestic dogs is more a factor of selective breeding. Breeding an animal that WILL do whatever you say even if it's dangerous is surely much harder than breeding an animal that has retained some of its wild independence, and as most dogs actually won't do something they think is dangerous even if you ask them to, I question to what degree you can breed dependence on direction into a dog in the first place. I expect dogs are probably better at keeping themselves alive than humans are at keeping dogs alive in trying conditions. About the idea of protecting the pack from danger, this condition doesn't really exist in nature unless the "pack" is very closely related, as in, no more distant than a half-sibling. Then it is called kin selection. I can't say how many times it's been drummed into me that no individual does anything for the good of anyone but themselves. I don't know to what extent this has been tampered with in dogs, but it seems to me that it has been tampered with, but I doubt that dogs are able to anticipate potential danger. They just see and react on the spot. More often than not I suspect they react with themselves in mind rather than their social group. As for training, yes, I think this is likely to be involved. They should learn from each other when in harness.

Well I did say given infinite time and that sometimes it wasn't practical to use no aversives. What I was arguing against was the notion that it simply can't be done. Can't be contained, though? If a Dingo can be contained surely any dog can be contained. Surely some dogss would blow right through any aversive you could throw at them to chase something anyway. Isn't that why they say you should never let some breeds off leash? My mother's boxer kelpie cross got out one time and went and chased roos in the bush for a few hours. She came back covered in cuts and scratches and staggering sideways in exhaustion. I don't think all that blood on her made much of an impression on the fun of the chase. Someone with some kind of big pig dog type (Boerboel?) in America was having trouble with him chasing coyotes. He'd dive into the cacti after the coyote and come back with spines and prickles all over his balls! Didn't phase him a bit.

Really? How would you propose to stop a dog performing a highly self rewarding behaviour like stock or wildlife chasing without the use of aversives? I'm not talking about simply managing it but actually eliminating the desire to do it. I've heard the PP trainers tell people that the handler simply has to make the dog returning to the handler "more rewarding" than the chasing. Lots of luck I say. I don't think it's any coincidence that many of the behaviours people find the hardest to modify in their dogs are self rewarding ones, do you? Well, I don't know if it's possible as I've never tried, but you could sit down and spend 12 months conditioning a recall, then tackle it from the other end and start drive training to try to get the dog to come to you for satisfaction instead of running after the wildlife. Some people I know have used chasing wildlife as a reward to call off wildlife. Dog knows they get to chase sometimes if they come back when called. Some people say it works, but I don't know to what extent. I did speak to a fellow called Lee Charles Kelley who taught his dog (a Dalmation if I remember correctly) to run to him for some tug whenever he saw a squirrel. This person fully believes you can teach any dog to do this and is a professional trainer and has used the method with success every time (so he says - he was certainly one to blow his own horn). I think it's at least worth a try, as you are right in that the hardest things to modify are things the dog finds self-rewarding. Thus, rewards work like a charm if you can find the right one. I'll try it with the next dog I get (which will be something prey driven) and let you know how I go.

Now that kind of attitude is self-fulfilling. Surely anything is possible with infinite time and patience? I think it's rather a matter of some behaviours are not practical to modify without the use of aversives. The thing about the quadrants is that half the time even when speaking to other people who know the short hand there is confusion for the reason I mentioned earlier. It's a matter of forcing a continuum into discrete boxes. And whether a dog is changing his behaviour because he's trying to avoid something or because he wants something is, I reckon, a matter of perspective sometimes. I got no patience for something designed to communicate with other knowledgeble people when it fails at doing just that rather frequently. At least when I said "gentes" to cuckoo people there was never any confusion as to just what degree of gentes I was talking about, although degrees of host mimicry certainly occur. They are just not important to the central concept. Yep, the quadrants are a concept, but not a training concept. Sorry, quadrant rant over. Sure Midol, but how many people can actually read their dogs very well? I could count the number I've met in person on one hand. I thought I could read dogs pretty well. Then I spent months on end trying to find bird nests. Then I met a hare. Suddenly I realised how woefully little attention I paid to my dog's hundreds of signals because it just plum didn't matter when she did what she was told and still appeared to adore me. Nothing like an animal that communicates a lot less clearly than a dog to make you appreciate what you have been missing.