corvus

Thank you. :) A couple of weeks ago OH decided to take us on a walk he had put together from Google maps. He never thinks to check the terrain. His track degraded into a goat track up the side of a steep valley, more climbing with hands and feet than walking. The boys loved it, though. I hauled myself over the last boulders and helped E up, but it was too high for Kivi because he needs more momentum than Erik. So Erik and I wandered around on the ridge until we found Kivi and my OH a marginally more civilised path up. I was crouching there having a breather with the boys when OH got to us and snapped this photo on his phone. I love it. Chicken camp was great fun, despite our chickens being duds. Met some great people, most especially Wobbly. :) Terry Ryan knows everyone who is someone in animal training! She is a great teacher, and very easy on her students. If there's a chaining course next year I'll do it. I am just putting the last touches on my thesis. 245 pages and I'm currently waiting for the 707 references to be formatted. Thank the lord for referencing software. Erik and Kivi are telling me it is time to take them out somewhere. We took them to the beach yesterday and Erik was terrific. Best he's ever been. We even bumped into our retriever friends from the park, who he is completely nuts about chasing, and he managed to leave them be. Once he got the initial chasing frenzy out of his system, that is. We'll keep working on it. ETA Where in NSW are you, Raineth? Maybe we can find someone for you? Grisha Stewart has some kind of social network set up where people who want to do BAT setups can get in contact with other people wanting to do BAT setups. It seems to work well. I wonder if there are enough people here do set something like that up?

There is science behind Nekhbet's advice. Scott and Fuller nearly 50 years ago suggested the more alike two dogs were the more their competitive niche overlapped and therefore the more likely they were to come into conflict and fight. Although, it's probably not that straight forward with desexing. The survey I did a couple of years ago showed entire dogs of both sexes were bolder than desexed dogs. There were no correlations with age or gender, but boldness decreased with age. There are hints in the literature that desexing may alter emotional reactivity. It's all very mysterious to me. I think we understand the effects of desexing hardly at all. If I were going to keep them both I'd desex the least outgoing one.

Psst... H2O is a chemical.

I have read the paper and didn't find the data made a very strong case for purebred dogs being healthier than mixed breed dogs. I think it showed that mixed breed dogs also can have problems, but purebred dogs still seemed to have more.

Sometimes it can look like attachment but be something else. I almost never split Kivi and Erik up and they are BFF, but on the odd occasion they have necessarily been split up they both cope far better than either of them do being 'left out' of a training session. Erik is the one that stresses most being excluded, yet he seems to be fine about being separated. Kivi is pretty okay with being excluded, but may fret being separated. I think it's helpful to properly diagnose the problem. Is it the other dog, you, the fact she knows you're training without her, or the fact that the majority of her social group has left her? If you know the trigger you can desensitise or counter-condition. Because this is Stella we're talking about I would say it's safer being attentive and calming her than ignoring her and letting her work herself into a state. But neither is ideal IMO. We know her recovery time can be long and she is prone to over-arousal, anxiety and hypervigilance. I expect she is also very clever and capable of learning to manipulate you. So don't give her the impetus or the opportunity. Mat work is like anything. You have to build it up in baby steps and make it rewarding to stay put and gradually increase how intense the training with the other dog is so she can keep being successful while she is still learning.

Or "mat work". :) Don't need to train them apart or tie one up if they have a semi-decent stationing behaviour. It's dead easy to train and doesn't take long.

You don't have to use aversives to stop biting if you don't want to. I didn't. It probably takes longer and requires a little more tolerance, but I just redirected and redirected some more, mostly. I had a reasonably gentle but mouthy puppy and a not very gentle bitey puppy I did this with. I guess I was also very careful about not accidentally reinforcing it, which can be subtle. I have herding breeds, and both of them were biting to control movement, which means freezing when they started was reinforcing, and moving was exciting. Getting in before they started and redirecting then was quite effective. And rock solid sits meant I could stop them in their tracks before they got bitey and then reward the sit with a toy to bite instead.

Ummm.... I have no idea what I'll be wearing. I am braindead. My thesis is SO closed to finished and all I can think of is figure and table lists and remembering all those little things I still have to add. I look like this (minus raincoat and gumboots):

mmm, probably not. :) Although it might depend on exactly why she's doing it. I think context and why the dog is carrying on makes a difference, here. If you WANT your dog to be engaged with you, then yeah, move fast and be fun to be with. When I've encountered problems with my dogs it's usually when they are worried I'm NOT going to engage with them, which I'm not, because we're in downtime, or I'm talking to someone, or they are supposed to be in a stay or whatever. IMO, sooner or later the dog will have to sit still QUIETLY and be okay with it and not throw a tanty and so on. It's not unusual for dogs to find this difficult. That's why we have the Relaxation Protocol, which teaches dogs that no matter what is going on around them, they will be reinforced for just staying calm and not doing anything. RP is kind of tedious, but seriously, it is good. RP is here in mp3 format, and I think there are links to it in writing as well: http://championofmyheart.com/relaxation-protocol-mp3-files/ Erik had to do Day 1 five days in a row before he could get through it without getting up and pacing or barking or poking things. He was deeply troubled by doing nothing. Lots of working breeds are like that. We didn't do the whole thing because about 2/3 of the way through Erik got the gist and it became necessary to take it on the road to change the context. I should have kept on with Kivi, though, because Kivi was still showing signs that the increasing difficulty was relevant to him. Anyway, the other possibility is frustration, which I've already covered, and another possibility is arousal/anxiety. Dogs find it hard to sit still if they are aroused. RP should help with that as well, but if the dog is highly aroused it will probably be an uphill struggle no matter what you try. And doggie zen is just generally good. It fits nicely into RP and CU and so on. The levels used to be on the web, but Sue Ailsby now has a book out instead, so this was the best I could find aside from her checklist: http://www.brisbeethewhite.com/id37.htm Obedience classes can be tricky. I think the structure is often terrible. I balance Kivi, so that when he can do it successfully he is put in a stay while things are being explained or other dogs are taking their turns. As the classes progress and he gets restless I do some tricks with him, work on something a bit more engaging, and fewer stays. I think you have to take care of your dogs and make sure they know what they should be doing. Kivi can go sniff if I release him. Otherwise he's doing what I've told him to do. It's not about being regimental or controlling or strict. It's just about setting them up to succeed and making sure they are enjoying themselves. If he's working and it's something he can do successfully, he will be reinforced and he'll enjoy the class. It is hard when you get an instructor that doesn't approve, though.

Sounds like Kivi. He gets frustrated. If he's a little aroused and anticipating reinforcement he doesn't have great impulse control and whines or barks. The solution is kind of counter-intuitive. He's got to trust reinforcement will come sooner or later. So I wound the reinforcement rate up and tapered off again more slowly this time. I basically take it to mean I went too fast. Arguably the problem wouldn't occur at all if I'd put the foundation work in that I did with Erik. E's impulse control was pretty awful as a puppy, and he was so bold it was kind of worrying. I did heaps of doggie zen and off switch games and NILIF. You can get a doggie zen training guide from this site: http://www.sue-eh.ca/

I find it a bit of a copout. Not that I don't agree on some level, I am just cynical. It's very easy to have some kind of success with dogs one way or another. It's very difficult if not impossible to know when you're having the 'most' success you can with a dog. Kivi is a training machine at the moment and I have no idea why. About a month ago he just started getting really enthusiastic about it out of the blue. It was remarkable. I'm still waiting for it to plateau. Did I think he was doing just peachy a year ago? Hell yes.Evidently he had more to give and I just didn't know it.

I think it's a broad generalisation that controlling a dog "definitely" does not rein enthusiasm. How do you know? Have you tested it on every dog in every circumstance? Isn't half the point of 'control' to curb enthusiasm? That's why I use leashes, anyway. I often wonder how dogs might be changing as our training and management options and trends change. It's easy enough to say use the tool or method that suits the dog and use it correctly, but I would bet money on the percentage of time that is actually done being very low. Because it's got to be highly dependent on the skill of the trainer not only in applying various methods, but in assessing the dog in the first place. It's very easy to interpret a dog's behaviour incorrectly. What is a 'good' dog to one person may well be a dog that is resilient to their preferred training method rather than having good traits for the purpose they have been bred for. You could look at it the same way with anxious and reactive dogs. We have a lot more tolerance and ability to manage these dogs, now. Maybe some selection pressure has been removed.

IMHO there is one way to grossly simplify training a deceptively complex behaviour subject to vast individual and environmental variation.... ;)

Ha! Love it. :laugh: Painfully accurate? In ethology I don't think people really use the term 'drive' much in this sense. I guess we would usually say motivation instead. The short answer is no. Even the theory hasn't really been discussed much in academic circles. The closest we really have since Hull is Panksepp. His work is based mostly on laboratory rodents, but he makes the point that it's all the same structures and chemicals so it should extrapolate to any mammalian brain. Lots of people are talking about Panksepp at the moment. The affective neuroscience 7 emotions system is nicely applicable, but at this point we're not entirely sure how it translates to behaviour. The nature of the brain and emotions is that there is overlap, which makes it challenging for people to get their minds around. Incidentally, Panksepp doesn't really talk about where predatory behaviour comes into things. It would seem it's probably SEEKING, like any foraging, exploratory, or dopamine-related reward seeking behaviour, but there's probably a bit of this and that from other systems as well.

Ha! I think the TID program is aimed at pet dogs moreso than working dogs. But maybe it's equally adaptable. And maybe you're talking about drive compression rather than suppression. ;) ETA I didn't say I like everything SG does. :) In the past whenever I've tried to rank reinforcers I've ended up thinking it wasn't very useful because my dogs don't show a whole lot of preferences, really. And I think I'm being arbitrary. And what I think they should like inevitably starts to creep in. And once you decide your dog likes x more than y you kind of start closing the door on updating that assessment. At least, I do. I think it changes readily and needs to be updated a lot. I switch around usually to manipulate arousal or get the surprised "Holy crap, CHEESE! I was expecting kibble." look. Recall treats are slightly different, but really only for Kivi. E will come running for the hell of it.

So, what's genetic instinct? There was a great big discussion about this in General recently. Lots of different ideas. I like the way SG switches between reinforcers. I don't like ranking reinforcers. I'm leery of thinking myself into a box.

Can you define it without using the word "drive"? :)

I think this thread illustrates quite well where a lot of the confusion about training in drive comes from. There are only a handful of people who have put forth any kind of definition and at least two of them conflict quite a bit. Santo66 seems to be talking about motivation and reward selection and operant conditioning. Huski seems to be talking about building a dog's ability to remain cognisant and controlled under the influences of increasing arousal. There has also been some talk of building anticipation for a particular reinforcement. All of these come into a lot of different training paradigms where they are not called training in drive. If I asked 6 different people for a definition of training in drive, would I get 6 different definitions? If it's not clearly defined it will be confusing.

Heavy! Okay, I've tried to keep it short, but largely unsuccessfully. IMO this is kind of complicated but you're probably not far off. The first thing to consider is the balance between an emotionally driven behaviour and an operantly driven behaviour. I like to think of this as a continuum with a little slider. Bob Bailey describes it as Pavlov on one shoulder and Skinner on the other. They change size depending on how emotional the animal is. So when they are very emotional, Pavlov is big and Skinner is small, but as they calm and become less emotional, Pavlov shrinks and Skinner grows, but there is no point where one shrinks to nothing. At any moment when you have a dog in front of you behaving, that behaviour will be driven in parts by both emotion and operant conditioning, and your job is to figure out the balance and aim to make Skinner bigger (with classical conditioning and/or arousal management if Pavlov is big). The second consideration is one of the strength of the response to the stimuli in question. Predatory responses in domestic dogs are kind of messed up and hard to generalise about. Some dogs naturally respond very strongly and some moderately strongly and some barely at all. Layered on that is learning history. Dogs can absolutely learn stronger predatory responses. In the case of threatening stimuli, the strength of their response at the most basic level is directly related to how threatened they feel, but it is also layered with learning history and emotional state and their natural emotional reactivity. So Erik is naturally quite emotionally reactive in that when stuff happens, he notices and reacts to it, and when he does react he tends to react moderately strongly to very strongly. He often overreacts. If he is stressed he is more likely to interpret stimuli as threatening, whether they are or not, and if he is already aroused, his reaction will be to become more aroused again. Most animals have a negativity bias. They are geared to err on the side of caution and assume they are under threat because if they are not they have taken protective action for no reason and that is not such a big deal, but if they are and they didn't take action they could be hurt or worse. Protection and safety always is of paramount importance, and it's often pretty emotional because if you waste time thinking about how to get yourself safe you may not end up safe. So, Pavlov is big. I'm guessing that Hank's response to the birds was more moderate in the scheme of things (maybe Pavlov slightly bigger than Skinner?). The more aroused (in a positive way) dogs are about critters the harder it is to suppress their behaviour with punishment because their focus is narrow on the critter. They don't notice much else. That's why people use harsh corrections on aroused dogs. Because otherwise they won't notice it. But everyone in this thread knows there are more humane ways to lower arousal, and this is super important with an anxious dog because adding an aversive to a dog who already feels threatened is a bit rough and whatever else it does, it won't help them feel safe, which is what they are trying to achieve. One thing that isn't reflected in the Pavlov-Skinner continuum is the idea that operant conditioning can be very effective even when the behaviour is very emotional as long as the consequence is relevant to the animal's goals. If your dog wants to feel safer, they will learn through negative reinforcement as long as the reinforcement is a reduction in threat. This is what BAT and functional rewards is all about.

I should have been a bit more explicit. When I said "drive chase", I meant a cattle driving behaviour as opposed to a fun chasing the moving thing behaviour, which you may or may not have figured out from my vagueness. In the literature there is a small distinction between motivation and arousal. Motivation is usually considered goal-directed behaviour. It gets hazy with humans, who can be motivated by all sorts of complex things, but with animals it's usually towards goals that satisfy basic and important needs. So yes, in that sense, I tend to think of arousal as the general up and down of alertness and motivation as the effort an animal is willing to put in to attain a particular goal. DOL is honestly the only group I know of that uses the term 'drive' as it's used here. It's like their own little language. The rest of the dog world generally uses 'drive' to refer to how much effort a dog will put in to attain a particular goal, and that may or may not encompass arousal, but is certainly not dependent on a high level of arousal. I don't really like labelling drives, particularly when they probably all run through the same emotional system. I kinda translate to Panksepp and consider most useful working drives as SEEKING and leave it at that. It shouldn't matter much to dogs very motivated to seek reinforcements what kind of reinforcements they are seeking. Literature suggests they will have favourites, but if they can't access those they will easily switch to something else and keep at it with much the same intensity. There are exceptions. It annoys the hell out of me when people say drive when they mean arousal. :) Because I get misinformation rage. About 90% of my purpose in life is to investigate the truth and communicate it. It really offends me when people insist on spreading stuff that is not true and on top of that, doing it with really poor communication so that it muddies the waters for anyone who might want to go looking for the truth. It's like they are directly opposing me and everything I stand for! :laugh: I have learnt to not take it so personally and keep my mouth shut, mostly, but self-control is difficult when you're very passionate. People are sensitive about their beliefs. I should be more compassionate and patient.

That's probably a transition behaviour. :) Some (maybe many??) displacement behaviours double as transition behaviours - which is a behaviour that comes out when an animal is shifting from one kind of activity to another. It kind of hints at the broader meaning of these little behaviours like lip licking. Lip licking is probably quite predictive in that sense. My brain seems to think it's predictive after spending many many hours watching dogs in minute detail and recording everything they do. I'm not really comfortable with the term "calming signal", either. Sometimes it looks like the dogs are deliberately using these signals, but I personally think it's rare. Which is not to say they don't serve that purpose in some contexts, but maybe more passively than actively. For example if the dog is experiencing some sense of conflict in that they don't quite know what they are going to need to do in response to another dog approaching them, that may come out in their behaviour and be interpreted by the other dog as tension and possible volatility and if that dog wants none of that, they may respond conservatively with more submission or signals of no threat. The first dog wasn't sending a specific signal to the second dog to please be calm, but instead basically wearing their internal state for interpretation by the second dog. Here's an old video of my Erik being massaged when he was young. He is almost constantly licking his lips at first, and he tries to leave, I held him in place, but then the moment passed and a short while later he lay down and yawned. When I filmed it he wasn't in the mood for being massaged, so he had a lot of calming down to do, and it shows in the frequency and intensity of his 'calming signals'. I doubt he's deliberately signalling to anyone. More likely, the lip licking and so on is an outward sign of his internal state shifting.

Is that a bit of a gundog thing? Most gundogs I've met seem to be capable of phenomenal focus. Possibly? My dog is the same during work, even boring stuff, as long as the reward is worth it. Training/work is perfectly possible in very distracting circumstances with my dog as long as I concentrate. If my concentration goes.. Well.. That is not the dog's fault lol Thanks BJ, that is interesting. I'm not much of a gundog person, but I had some cool gundogs in my study with not much relevant training history but an amazing work ethic. Once they got down to business they were very solid workers. It was a real treat to watch them. Huski, either we're saying nearly exactly the same thing using different words or we're not even on the same planet. Nearly everything you say about drive makes me think "Yeah, that's arousal." The Yerkes-Dodson law is about optimum arousal for a given task. It's more subtle than being at the right level or the wrong level, because arousal is malleable and there's a lot of conditioning that comes into it as well. When I say conflict I don't mean something unresolvable or even necessarily bad. I mean the arousal and the activity don't perfectly match from an ethological perspective. From a training perspective, sometimes you want that. I had some pretty high drive dogs in my study and enjoyed watching the professional security people training them. No idea if it was anything like what you say every day. I mostly enjoyed working with them as well, although what I wanted them to do was very different to what their trainers wanted them to do. I had a very high exclusion rate. I spoke to an accomplished ex-military dog trainer about it, which was very helpful and enlightening.

Is that a bit of a gundog thing? Most gundogs I've met seem to be capable of phenomenal focus.

I'm not really sure what the argument is, exactly. Maybe it would help if Steve came along and explained this drive compression concept. Do you mean self-control at high arousal? You say that you're asking the dog to work at high arousal, but this is difficult for it, right? Because it still needs precision? I'm saying it's difficult BECAUSE you're asking the dog to work at high arousal. And that's where the conflict is. The dog's arousal is suitable for running about gaily, but you're asking them to walk in a super-controlled fashion. Essentially you're asking them to do a moderate arousal behaviour at high arousal. It's like when you were a kid and your mum kept yelling at you to stop running in the house (probably because she knew everyone was too excitable and any moment someone would get hurt). It was really hard! That's why it's hard for them. If you asked them to work at moderate arousal it would be much easier for them, but you wouldn't get the nice, flashy heeling. Unless you trained it in operantly. My point was that they don't need to learn to think through arousal in order to heel. They only need to learn to think through arousal if you want them to heel at very high arousal. I'm not sure how drive comes into this. Are you referring to how high their arousal peaks? Or how aroused they can get before they lose it? Or their impulsivity? I can't comment on protection work, only the relationship between arousal and performance. There are two possibilities: they need to be less aroused than their most aroused, or it's not as hard as you say it is.

I think it would be more accurate to call them signs of conflict. Conflict could be as simple as she needs to bring her arousal down to lay still and enjoy the cuddles. If you're ever in doubt just stop and see if she tries to reinitiate contact.