corvus

This is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about. This is actually not an established fact as far as I'm aware. Unless you have some numbers no one else seems to have. These arguments can't be settled without it because obviously there are deviations and diseases and health issues in both pedigree dogs and non-pedigree dogs. Where there are people saying they have only seen problems in non-pedigree dogs there are others saying they've only seen problems in pedigree dogs. And those who have seen a lot of problems have seen them in both. I think it's irresponsible to make statements with such certainty when they are in reality uncertain.

LAT, teekay. :D It's teh awesome. Erik sounds a lot worse than he is as well. Today we were at the dog park and a puppy zoomed between him and me while we were doing some trick training. Erik was only about 40cm away from me, so the gap was too small and pup clipped him, possibly on the nose as he was in a down. He went awol and exploded at said pup, chased it off, lots of noise, came back when called, then turned and chased pup again as it zoomed past, returned when called again, then a third time made some noise and a rush before I was finally able to get a down out of him and move him away. Kivi went into formal obedience mode and had been waiting politely in a sit in heel for me to move. He's a funny thing. He seems to think dog being mean = formal obedience will make it all better. I taught him this accidentally, but I can't say I'm sorry. It's extremely useful to have a dog who responds to dog aggression by happily trotting into heel position and waiting for you to escort him away. It's just a tiny bit nerve wracking if you're not sure he'll be safe there. The puppy had already provoked three other dogs to snap at her, but it was Erik that everyone got concerned about because he was the most conspicuous about it. Poor E. He really doesn't have much tolerance for puppies. He's generally quite good with other dogs, though.

Stay away from Hanrob. I think lecturing is not really useful. Mostly people have to be brought around gently. I think if you say bluntly that it's probably not the solution that's the best you can do and the rest is steering them away from the worst places as you say. I'd consider Veronica and Bruno Grutzner in south-west Sydney.

They cross the dogs chest and shoulders, but as Aidan said, they are loose unless the dog pulls. I've been watching them and wondering about the restricted movement. They kind of have to walk slow anyway, which I expect also alters their gait and may not be entirely natural. As long as they are walking by your side or on a loose leash their movement seems free to me. As for raising puppies, I am not sure why they make the decisions they have about it, but I think a lot of the point is to keep the dogs out of kennels as much as possible. They are a charity and just don't have the resources to raise puppies themselves. They have recently partnered with a training and pet sitting company and are hopeful this will result in some dogs that can at least walk on a leash. They do train puppy raisers, but that doesn't mean the puppy raisers will retain any of the information or be good at applying it. They downgrade dogs almost automatically if they come in pulling a lot because it takes too long to retrain them and it eats into their service dog skills training, so it's a source of enormous frustration. I'm sure it's not an easy problem to solve or they would have solved it by now.

FWIW, the service dog organisation I've been working with have made it a blanket rule that every dog is walked in a front attach harness pretty much everywhere they go (except greyhounds) unless they are in a training session. And even then they are usually wearing them at least. This has been brought in recently because they get 12-18 month old dogs in who have been raised by volunteers and most of them pull to some extent. Some of them pull to a very large extent. I quite like the front attach harnesses. They are more effective as a signal to the dog that they are pulling than a martingale. The dogs are being trained at the same time, obviously, but the harnesses are there for backup. Many are strong dogs and if they get into pulling mode they can drag you a few steps on a martingale before you can dig in and stop. It's easier to stop them on the front attach harnesses. They don't cure the problem, but are treated as a training aid and in that role work pretty well. No sideways walking dogs.

The original post irked me same way it irked teekay. I didn't really get what the point of it was. I guess you were just sharing in a moment of frustration. I'm sorry I took it the wrong way.

Agreed, but we have to be careful not to turn it into fact by the way we talk about it. It's just fair is all. There's actually funding for a project on this kind of thing, to commence next year I think. I don't know exactly what they plan to do, and I promised myself I wouldn't post it here!

That isn't an argument! How do you calculate 'luck'? I do it with probabilities, because it's the scientific way. You need to know whether dogs are affected to calculate the probability of a dog being luckily healthy. I actually wasn't trying to argue anything. I was just saying and still am that making claims about an entire population without numbers to back it up is not very convincing and it's kind of unfair to that population as well. When people do that about registered breeders everybody here gets very upset about it. I am suggesting perhaps it's hypocritical to then turn around and do the same thing about another group? Whether it's justified or not is unknown, so it seems fairer to at least modulate language so it's clear what is being said is someone's opinion, not established fact. I love that now it's my job to collect the data because I said it would be good to have some. I don't think it would be hard as you are saying, but I guess we'll never know if no one does it. I guess it's much easier to just be opinionated about something without having to find out if it's true or not.

Right, exactly. So why do you do it? I think that is getting to the crux of it, really. I've always figured breeders price their animals at what they think they are worth. Which presumably takes into account the time and effort they put into them, but not, one would hope, on an hourly basis. What I'm getting at is that it's not a business. Which is to say the purpose of your breeding is not to make a living. You have every right to charge what you wish for your puppies, but I think justifying the price with the pain and hardship you live through in bringing puppies into the world is a hard sell. If it's so terrible for you, don't do it. No one is making you. Plenty of people go through similar hardships in all walks of life, in paid work as well as volunteer work and in hobbies. They don't generally need acknowledgement or payment for doing something their moral and ethical standards demand they do, or for going above and beyond because their commitment to quality requires it. I expect you don't spend stacks of time and effort in breeding so you can charge premium price for puppies. I am imagining it is much much more than that. Most of the time I think few people realise how much of themselves you and others in a similar situation put into what they are doing, and I think that is understandable. You have to live with someone to see all of it. But I also think it's okay that the rest of the world don't know. Because you're not doing it for affirmation from them, are you?

If they have no idea and don't health test, the question still remains whether the resultant dogs are affected. If you could show it with figures and statistics it would be very powerful. You could change attitudes with that.

What are you charging per hour for your time? I don't think I could ever afford a puppy from someone who charges for the time they spend on them as well as covering inputs and overheads. The point is not to break even or make a profit, right? Then it's different to hairdressing.

The next questions are a) how representative is your sample population? and b) what proportion of BYB puppies from parents that haven't been health tested have heritable diseases that can be tested for? and c) Is this number significantly different from the proportion of pedigree puppies that have heritable diseases that could be tested for? And finally, what is the probability of getting a puppy from a BYB that ends up with a heritable disease that can be tested for? What if there really was no need??? Can you show there is a need? Do you have data? I can analyse data!

Show it to me? Show me evidence that shows that anyone who is not an ANKC registered breeder that is breeding dogs is doing it in a completely random manner. I find that one in particular very hard to believe. They are at least picking the breeds they want to use most of the time. Show me the evidence that none of them health test. Or consider structure or temperament. Show me the evidence that all registered breeders are making better decisions. I'm not trying to promote backyard or mixed breeding or put down registered breeders. I'm trying to encourage people to think about how they know what they think is so obvious that they can't believe other people can't seem to grasp it. If other people can't seem to grasp it, maybe it's not that black and white. Maybe those people aren't irresponsible or thoughtless idiots. Maybe they have had different experiences, different upbringing, and different beliefs and education. How many random bred dogs does someone have to buy before they run out of luck? How many pedigree dogs? Rhetorical questions.

Guess what? Sometimes completely irresponsible people sell puppies for next to nothing and they turn out to be fabulous dogs. and it's more by sheer luck than science. If you're going to make claims like this, let's do it properly. How do you know? Where's your evidence? I'd love to see some, because as far as I can make out there isn't any.

Guess what? Sometimes completely irresponsible people sell puppies for next to nothing and they turn out to be fabulous dogs. Sorry if that offends you on some level, but it happens. In contrast, my family has a discounted purebreed from a registered breeder that is riddled with health problems and has appalling structure. Go figure. And people wonder why the public isn't convinced it's worth the money to buy from a registered breeder... ETA Dogs are all things being equal a very infrequent purchase. It only takes one good experience or one bad experience to sway opinions.

It's relative. People know how much stuff costs. Where there's little variation in price (iPad) they won't quibble it, but where they know they can get it cheaper they will grumble. Case in point, a good pair of jeans is commonly $90 or more (I think). Most people pay it because the price doesn't vary much. Cheap jeans are a different product for most. I buy my jeans online and rarely pay more than $60 for jeans that are comfortable and good quality. To me, $90 seems over-priced and I probably won't pay it. Before you argue about what you're getting for your money with a pedigree puppy, it's not that simple. I'm sure some would argue that my $60 jeans are nowhere near as good as their Levis or whatever. It's all in the perception. If someone has in their past had an awesome dog they got for $100, are you really that surprised that they would feel $1500 is kinda steep?

I think you have to consider changing demands. Registration through ANKC is not dropping for all breeds. In some breeds it is pretty healthy. It's not hard to guess which breeds, because we see them everywhere. They are popular. There are a lot of breeds that are obscure or specialised and fading into obscurity. It's not the fault of puppy farmers that people are not seeking out these breeds. People just don't want a dog that has a high maintenance coat or is difficult to train (excepting huskies - I have no idea why people still want huskies so bad). I live in the suburbs and often ask people at the dog park or the beach where they got their dog or why they chose the mixed breed that they did. A lot of these people are not making impulsive decisions. They are researching, picking a mix that they think will suit them, finding a breeder, sometimes interstate, that they like and getting a dog that turns out to be everything they wanted. No health issues, no behavioural issues, just a nice family dog. Others are getting dogs from the pound and more power to them. There are plenty of dogs there that need homes. The bottom line is it's not hard for most people to find a good dog. Contrary to what folks on here insist, there are stacks of healthy mixed breed dogs out there with nice temperaments. The average person doesn't need to seek out registered breeders and absolutely can pick up a dog for a few hundred dollars that meets all their needs. For those who are looking for a purebred of a specific breed, they are usually going for one of a handful of popular breeds for which there are still plenty of registered breeders. I think looking at the stats in more detail will make this issue clearer. I am sometimes bewildered about what the purebred dog fancy actually wants. Do you want everyone to have a pedigree dog? Because the supply isn't there. Do you want 'more' people to have pedigree dogs? Why? As soon as a breed gets popular there are problems. Whether the problems are with registered or backyard breeders is a moot point, because dedicated devotees are still competing with breeders that are simply meeting a demand. IMO registration numbers for many breeds are falling because interest in dogs is changing. I would be surprised if breeders could stop this. Interest is changing because lifestyles are changing. It's not a simple, single-faceted issue.

I've been reading Affective Neuroscience lately (again) and just yesterday read the discussion about the neural substrate for predatory behaviour compared to that of aggression. It was quite a fascinating read and talked about the differences between so-called predatory aggression, rage, and dominance aggression. It's nicely summarised and made a bit easier to read here: http://mybrainnotes.com/brain-rage-violence.html It's mostly about rats and cats and people, but half the point of affective neuroscience is that it's applicable to all mammals as far as anyone knows. Anyway, the first time I read about this stuff I was left thinking maybe there was no such thing as prey drive. I guess from a neurological point of view there probably isn't. But from a behavioural point of view it pays to know the stimuli that push the magic button. I think an important consideration is what the dog was socialised to in early life. One doesn't generally prey upon other social objects. It also seems there is a genetic imprinting component. Like dogs bred to hunt large animals are more likely to be switched on by large animals whereas dogs bred to hunt small animals are switched on by small animals and not so much larger animals. I think there's a study on social facilitation of predatory behaviour that talks about this. Which I guess is actually another factor that should be taken into consideration. Of course, there can be aberrations, like in all things.

Hang in there, BC Crazy. You are far from a failure. I hope that the Kalma helps Stella. It is so hard when they are chronically unhappy and you can see they are suffering.

I'd hope so! I wrote a paper on this last year and am currently revising it after peer review. It's been one of those projects that somehow end up bigger than you are and threatening to eat you. It's been received well so far, but I think that's what makes me so anxious about it. My supervisor is raving about it to all and sundry and I have several people lined up waiting for me to tell them the moment it gets published. I think I taught the toaster move just with food lures. Erik was pretty leery at first because it put him uncomfortably close to me for a little herder, but it quickly became a favourite. I turned it into a "your feet on mine" trick. It's in this recent video of some of his tricks somewhere: Near the end, like about 2 minute mark.BAT is Behaviour Adjustment Therapy. It is based on using functional rewards, which is usually more distance from the scary thing, to reinforce more appropriate behaviours. I think I posted a video on this thread a few months ago of Erik doing LAT.

Theoretically, counter-conditioning and desensitisation are the go-to for changing emotional state, and for good reason. They are usually very effective. But if Jake is sensitising instead of desensitising it's unlikely he will benefit from more attempts to CC and so forth without changing something in the protocol. Usually we consider sensitisation occurs when the stimulus is still too strong to be overcome by positive things like food. Emotion has two main components, which are valence (the negative -> positive continuum) and arousal (how excited they are). So you can have a dog that is in a negative state with high arousal or negative with low arousal and a dog that is positive with high arousal and positive with low arousal. Each condition is associated with different types of behaviour. If the dog is in a negative state and high arousal, they will have very active, negative responses like barking, lunging, running away. If a dog is in a negative state and low arousal they will be inactive and mopey and may seem depressed. Theory at the moment assumes that arousal and valence are independent, which in practical terms means that a dog can easily slide from positive to negative while arousal stays high, and they can slide from high to low arousal while, say, still being in a positive state. I bring this up because this is why I often use a Thundershirt with Erik when I'm counter-conditioning if I have the opportunity. He gets excited by the stimulus, then gets excited by the food, and being in high arousal all the time means that whenever his emotional state fluctuates he reacts in a big, active way. And that means it takes more time to get him back to a calm place where we can do positive work again, and it means trigger-stacking can easily tip him over threshold where making any headway is pretty much useless but going backwards is pretty likely. The Thundershirt is kind of a compensation for when it's hard to moderate the intensity of the stimulus I'm counter-conditioning to either through distance or with volume if it's sounds. The purist approach to counter-conditioning is to always keep them far enough away or the volume quiet enough that the dog is not getting excited in the first place. Although Erik still gets excited about treats, which makes handling him challenging at times. So ideally if we want to change emotional state our best bet is to keep arousal low and get lots of positive input to overshadow the negative input. But it's important to realise that animals have a natural negativity bias (as do people). They pay more attention to bad things than good things because that's what saves them from trouble in the future, which is more important than finding good things in the future. So it can take a fair bit of positive to outweigh the negative. Jake's problem is a real worry. I'm not sure how intense his interactions with Chili are, but it sounds like they are too intense for him. I can imagine this is very disheartening when it can't get much less intense or more controlled than it is with Chili. I do think Vicki is right and this is an extreme case. If an extreme case is not a good candidate for medication then I don't know what is. There is a study that trained safety signals with an e collar to treat aggressive dogs, but it's old and I think there are more humane ways to train safety signals. Grisha Stewart's BAT may be one example, where the dog learns behaviours that make the scary thing go away. I did this with my hare prior to counter-conditioning because you can't hand feed a hare treats if he won't let you near him. I know someone who did the same thing with a horse who was very afraid of humans and we both had success with it. I guess that to me the advantage of R- is it may help a dog (or other animal) find new behaviours to cope with stress and you can give them clear signals when it's safe, but my caveat would be it's delicate work and probably easy to mess up. If you can't keep a troublesome stimulus at low enough intensity to successfully counter-condition I would be very wary of trying anything more operant. It might work, but I would try medication combined with CC from a looooong way off and wearing a Thundershirt first.

I should probably have said that Erik's toaster story was supposed to dovetail with chuckandsteve's experiences at dog training. I never really appreciated how easily upset Erik was until I taught him things like LAT and the toaster. Suddenly he was able to tell me clearly when he was upset and it was pretty frequent. Knowing made a huge difference to us. With his new power to tell me when he was bothered, I was able to act on it early and give him coping strategies and mind our distance and help him manage his arousal so he had fewer outbursts. As a result, he grew less easily bothered because I was so much more responsive to him now. I concentrated on making it his job to tell me when he saw something that bothered him with a quiet look rather than a noisy rush. This made an even bigger difference. So it's still Erik's job to tell me when he's noticed something he doesn't really like the looks of. I reward it to maintain it and while he's a vocal dog and tends to talk about things loudly, he at least is under pretty good voice control and doesn't do much rushing. The trick is knowing the difference between what he can do and what he should do. He's very responsive, but that doesn't mean he is comfortable doing what I've asked of him.

That's rough, hankdog. Poor Jake. Is he on medication at the moment? I would seriously consider it if not. If he's sensitising to a passive dog in spite of treats and backchaining to signals predicting meeting that dog, that's got to be indicating a serious inability to adapt. That might be treatable with medication. Reconcile is supposed to help brains make new connections. As far as emotions go, the current way of thinking is to think of them as the foundations of behaviour. So when Jake sees you preparing food for a training session with Vicki, he anticipates being anxious about dogs, and this sets his emotional state as pretty negative. He probably feels almost as bad as he does when he sees a dog, depending on how strong the signals relate to seeing dogs, because he is reliving it as he anticipates it. The surer he is it is coming the more intense his anxiety would be. So you're already off on a bad foot, because you have to combat a negative emotional state before you even get to the dog. This is pretty classic sensitisation, and I really feel for you both. It's not a good sign. Anyway, when he's in a negative emotional state he is more likely to see bad things. He is more likely to feel threatened, more likely to feel in danger, and he pays more attention to things that might signal danger. So he's all primed and ready to deal with danger. Little wonder he starts seeing it everywhere. People do the exact same thing. And this will bias all his behaviour towards protective purposes, because his behaviour here is geared towards helping him combat whatever threats his emotions are telling him are coming his way. So it follows that the key to changing his behaviour is to change the emotions driving it. If he were in a positive or neutral emotional state, he would be looking opportunities for reward, he would be exploring, and for him the world would be full of possibilities instead of threats. This means he is more likely to ignore things he might while in a negative emotional state consider threatening, and more likely to think good things will happen to him rather than threatening things, and so his behaviour is geared towards approach and exploration and he might even take some chances. Things that looked threatening before now look non-threatening or even promising. When he is in this more exploratory state, he is in a perfect place to learn the traditional way - through rewards and punishments. He is looking for associations, he is calm, safe, balanced, and he is not so caught up in trying to find the danger that he can't see when something good might happen. On the simplest level, you want to change his emotional side from "Where's the danger??" to "Where's the reward?" These emotional states are built on experiences. The more they experience negative things the more trapped in the negative spiral they get. But the more they experience positive things, the more they are looking for more positive things. You could think of Jake getting sucked into the negative spiral whenever dogs are involved. He can't get out on his own because all he can see is danger and he has to protect himself. Things like LAT are just so useful. Erik has lately become 'toaster happy'. I may have mentioned that I taught him to walk between my legs with me when he needs to feel protected from something. I call it the toaster. I may have reinforced it a little too much because he's currently nuzzling his way in there at the drop of a hat. It, like LAT, really shows how easily unsettled he is, though. His cue to toaster it up is when he feels threatened. On the weekend we were at the beach and two small dogs ran up to both the dogs and barked aggressively in their faces. One of them snapped at Erik and got his cheek. I doubt it hurt, but the confrontation upset both dogs. It was really inappropriate, like a stranger running up to you and screaming abuse in your face. Kivi fell into his 'safe spot' which is a formal heel. Don't ask. It was his idea. Turns out it's really hard to poison Kivi's heel. Erik nuzzled into the toaster. While Kivi got a treat and went on his way, Erik spent the next 20 minutes insisting he needed to be in the toaster. I'd let him in, then send him on his way and a minute later he'd be trying to get in again. I ended up having to walk with my legs super close together so he couldn't get his nose in because it's awkward walking down the beach with a Vallhund between your legs. We may need some toaster rules. Erik is kinda reliant. I don't think he needs me as much as he seems to think he does, but perhaps I'm a bit of a micromanager and give him too much feedback and direction and feed it a bit. Sorry everyone, it's a novel tonight. I just got back from the RSPCA scientific seminar and have a head full of positive emotions and welfare.

I don't think this is the case at all. Believe it or not, whatever suits you. If it were a good indicator I expect everyone who invests thousands of dollars in training dogs for jobs wouldn't still be looking for indicators of which dogs they should train. As they have been since they started doing it. It's not a problem that has been solved by lots of selective breeding, or lots of research. There are some aspects of personality that are more stable than others. Everyone knows broadly what they are looking for, but it's beyond the broad that is so elusive. But hey, don't take my word for it. There's a wealth of dog personality research out there and lots of it is free if you look on Google Scholar. A paper came out on a meta-analysis of dog personality research just this week. http://www.plosone.org/article/info%253Adoi%252F10.1371%252Fjournal.pone.0054907 Here's another of interest: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159197000932 Another: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0168159199000386 And another: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016815919490068X More:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/016815918690095X You get the picture. I remember going through all of this when I started my project 3 years ago. I was like "Pfft, you can totally predict adult behaviour from puppy behaviour." :) The more you learn the less you realise you know. Better folks than you and I have been there and done that already. There is research on this from 50 years ago.

A dog can certainly learn to be dog aggressive, or human aggressive. Genes basically give a potential range of behaviour/temperament. The dog's environment and learning history say where within that range the dog sits. There's a diagram on a blog somewhere that shows this. If we have a continuum of shy and bold, for example, the genetic component gives a section that may be small or large on that continuum that represents the dog's potential. Nurture takes over from there, and that could be the difference between a dog that is outright dog aggressive and a dog that with low tolerance for certain antics from other dogs. Or a dog that is 'iffy' and a dog that is totally fine with other dogs. Also, puppy behaviour is a fairly poor indicator of future adult behaviour.