corvus

Everyone suffers for their 'art'. But most of us don't think of monetary payment as compensation for that suffering, nor do we need the people who might benefit from our efforts to know how hard it was. The reward is in sharing something you love with others and through that act, enriching their lives.

You can see what works best for a particular dog quite easily where you really have only two types of "basic" reinforcement being aversive or motivational then a fine tuning of either collectively. My opinion it's no good to keep plugging away at motivational training with a dog who lacks genetic focus and drive where a couple of corrections and consequence for the wrong behaviour does the world of good for that particular dog.....on the other hand, it's no good leash cranking a dog that does have strong genetic focus and drive like the Jack Russell I saw a couple of weeks ago with failed check chain training......he was a little pocket rocket, took to reward based training like a duck to water, awesome little dog I was initally coached in check chain training in the days when you did what the instructor told you to do in that obedience club and the old check chain was "the" tool of the trade so to speak, but it wasn't until I owned a dog of my own with genuine high drive that put the clairty into motivational and reward based training, but it doesn't work the best on all dog types, but as far is whether you can see what works best, I believe you can in the matter of minutes how a dog naturally responds to some simple exercises yes? Not necessarily... Every person brings their own flavour to training, and people relate better to some dogs than others. I would be unsurprised if a person who just 'gets' a dog on a basic level where other people do not will have more success with that dog regardless of the method they use. WIthin reason. It's a dance after all. You are pretty much bombarding them with signals whenever you interact with them and they are flooding you with signals as well. I've had trainers from the same organisation disagree pretty dramatically on just one aspect of the personality of a dog they all train. I expect it's because that deviant's particular style just gels really nicely with that dog and they do much better as a team than the same dog with other trainers using the same methods.

To me a LIMA approach is more about erring on the side of caution than doing what might be someone's idea of best. My point was that I might say one thing is best and others may say another is best and there's no way we will ever know who had the best way for that dog. Those that do it one way will have success and continue to see what they expect to see and continue to miss what they are not looking for and continue to believe their way is best and so will those doing it another way. Without objective measures that is a hard cycle to break out of. In my view there are tonnes of dogs out there suffering needlessly because their trainers are locked into the confirmation bias vortex. You don't have to look hard to find them. I expect that's why there's a lot of back-stabbing and dissing other trainers and methods. Because talk is cheap and beliefs are expensive and most training approaches will have success with a significant proportion of the dog population. I think we can avoid getting sucked into the confirmation bias vortex by dealing in simple observations, frequencies and testable predictions. Leave behind ideas like 'best' that can't be defined or quantified and will always be subjective and instead concentrate on figuring out why things work or not so your next step is always an informed one. It's easy to be open-minded when you're always looking for more information. :)

People seem fond of saying things like no method works for every dog, and some methods aren't right for some dogs and so on... It leaves me wondering what they consider a method. Personally, I train based on operant conditioning and classical conditioning, mostly. I figure science-based training is a single method... If I have to troubleshoot it's usually because I haven't correctly identified what the problem is rather than because learning theory doesn't work. When I decide to switch quadrants it's because I've ascertained it's not a signaling problem or an emotional or arousal problem and made an assessment based on the balance of reinforcers and punishers and my ability to control them and the persistence of the animal I'm training. I don't hold with the apparent gold standard of doing what's "best" for the dog. There's no way to measure that. Nor do I consider that if it works, it's the best. A lot of things will work. Instead I hold to the principles of least invasive, minimally aversive. There is certainly a need to pick tools and approaches that the handler is capable of doing without constant guidance. But that's not to say tools that will probably be a permanent addition to the routine aren't valid. We have to acknowledge that sometimes management is all somebody wants, and that's okay.

MY point was to counter the tirade against psychoactive drugs in dogs. Yes, some people do perhaps over-use them or over-prescribe them, although I have never had a vet suggest drugs to me for behaviour except when I had a dog with canine cognitive dysfunction, and this story seems to be common. When I spoke to my vet about this she was able to recall only a couple of cases where she had been involved in prescribing drugs to treat behavioural problems, and they were under the guidance of a veterinary behaviourist. Other vets are not so careful. I think this is a line of discussion that may do more harm than good on this forum where there are people struggling with drug-related decisions and being made to feel like they are just not skilled enough or trying hard enough when in actual fact they are doing everything right and their dog genuinely needs drug support. I don't know of anyone on DOL who is drugging their dog without a thought or care in the world, and I think if there are, all they really need to hear is that it is not a magic bullet and should not occur in isolation of any training or behaviour modification. I think it is fair to ask people to be considerate both of those dogs that genuinely need drugs and those people who are trying to do the right thing by their dog in the face of this stupid stigma against medicating dogs for behavioural troubles that can't easily be managed with behaviour modification alone. The stigma doesn't need to be fed. The idea that drugs can help troubled dogs does. As to the rest of your post, Nekhbet... The more I learn the less I want to say. I hope that if people ever do find themselves with a troubled dog they do their own research on psychoactive drugs and look for good resources. I have a couple of dvds from Tawzer and the one from Karen Overall is particularly good. And she is considered the best. That's the kind of person I listen to. Someone who's learning is a whole lot of books and other people's studies and relevant formal tertiary courses, and her own research, AND a butt load of groundwork as well. It's a nice, rounded education, don't you think?

Medication is only a band aid when it is applied without the support of behaviour modification. It is supposed to be a foot in the door, not a cure all. I think it is irresponsible to suggest that because some people use it as a band aid it is over-used or it is ineffective, or it is problematic. The dog I mentioned was on medication and it was used as a band aid, but the owners didn't really have the skills to do any ongoing behavioural modification with him. Frankly, I wish they'd put him back on the medication. I think from dog sitting him that he was better off on it used as a band aid than off it wearing an e-collar, and it's his welfare I care about. I think it is irresponsible to suggest that because some people who take anti-depressants or whatever may find them the cause of more distress that dogs on drugs may be crying out inside their heads or something. There is no evidence for this that I know of, and the effect of these sorts of drugs on animals is reasonably well studied. There certainly are physiological and behavioural indicators we can use to get a pretty good picture of what is going on inside an animal. This is basically what my PhD is on. We don't know for certain and we don't know the details, but I think we know enough to be able to say with reasonable confidence whether an animal is in distress or not. It is hard enough for people to make these decisions for their pets as it is. Of all places, DOL is where the majority of people are going to be using medication as a foot in the door rather than a band aid. So don't make it harder for people to make humane decisions for their pets by continuing to stigmatise behavioural medication. It's not fair on those that are faced with this decision and not fair on the animals that may continue to suffer because someone said they thought drugs were making a dog unable to scream out for the help they needed and it sounded scary to people who love their animals. If you love your animals, consider medicating them when they are obviously in a state of chronic stress. There's no ifs or buts about it. It's not scary. The risks are well understood and will be managed. You won't have failed your pet, and you're not doing it because you like them a little quieter. You're doing it because you love them and you don't want them to suffer needlessly. There are four people in my family who have or still do take anti-depressants and thank heavens for that because they are more functional people for it and it is very distressing to me to see loved ones struggling to cope. There generally was some chopping and changing as they found the right drugs and the right dosage for them. This is to be expected given everyone's brain chemistry is a little different. It's the same for dogs. It's worth persisting if you really think your dog is having serious and ongoing troubles coping with the everyday world. And sometimes that means finding a better doctor.

I know a dog with SA who wears an anti-bark e-collar. It hasn't been formally diagnosed, but I've seen him in action and he exhibits most of the common symptoms. The e-collar has undoubtedly improved his behaviour in that he doesn't bark much anymore. I expect the barking was elevating his arousal and making him feel his situation more keenly. Without the barking his arousal stays lower, which is good for him. What is bad for him is that he's still clearly very anxious. It just manifests in less bothersome ways. He will mess in the house, he will whine and pace, he will spend a lot of his time at windows and doors looking for his attachment figure, he just doesn't annoy the neighbours. And he is on a knife edge as to what he can handle. If something unusual happens he pretty much loses it and barks in spite of the collar. It maybe gets the barking under control quicker. Who can say. I think it's the wrong tool for the benefits it bestows. There are plenty of other ways to lower arousal that do not add to an already negative emotional state. But they don't really help in the long run. They just mask what is going on. For example, there's a study that shows that dogs crated with SA do less barking and pacing and so on, but they do more drooling and whining. I would hazard a guess that the lower arousal dog is probably better off in that they are not feeding off their own activity, but they are not cured. They are still in a lot of distress. It is subtle stuff, the play between arousal, emotional state and behaviour. If you get it wrong it's not always easy to tell where and why. SA is also a multi-faceted condition described entirely by symptoms. The root causes vary. At any rate, it shits me no end that there is a stigma about medicating dogs that are clearly in emotional distress. It's the humane thing to do, people.

It's not a painful shot, but can have some weird side effects. A colleague of mine had one in the series of 3 and they decided not to give them the remaining 2 because of some strange side effects. Post-exposure shots are easy as if you've been vaccinated. I was bitten by a bat at work one time and just got another shot in the arm afterwards. The bat was not tested because they have to kill them and it was a threatened species! Most bats are reasonably docile, but when they bite it hurts. They have very sharp teeth. If you wear gloves when you handle one you should be fine, but if it's a small bat, it will be hard to know you are handling it safely. They are tiny and delicate, which is why I got bitten. I took the gloves off so I could handle it better. I wouldn't say where it occurred either, because it would cause unnecessary paranoia. ABL is all over the country as far as anyone knows. It doesn't matter where it happened. Affected bats may be on the ground and suffering from paralysis, so easy to pick up. They are rarely aggressive and bitey like rabid animals are, but it can happen. I've seen video! Lots of bat people get bitten countless times and aren't vaccinated, or if they are, they don't get post-exposure shots. There is some contention about how common it is. It's more common in fruit bats and horseshoe bats, I believe, but it's been found in all species where it has been looked for.

There are some posts about LAT on the forum if you look around. Try the reactive dogs thread? Here's a video: This person is marking for orienting to the handler, which is not really a purist's approach, which is to mark when the dog looks at the other dog (or whatever the trigger is). Later in the video they show using it on the road, but you can see the dog is quite stressed. I would not have used it there. I would have switched to classical conditioning and just fed and tried to get as much distance as possible, which is hard on a narrow path. This one also isn't bad: , although same comments apply. I have a video somewhere that shows Erik playing LAT with one of his triggers. I won't post it because inevitably someone who doesn't like me will attack it without having a clue what I'm doing and why. You can PM me if you want to see it. E is advanced, though, and I don't cue much in the video. He knows what to do and I switch from rewarding uncued LAT to rewarding an autodown to rewarding whatever else he's doing that is nice. He also has a history of winding up to get me to interact with him, so I ignore some things I wouldn't in another dog. Because I'm not marking anymore he gets a reward when he looks back at the end of the sequence. The LAT sequence should go dog looks at trigger->mark -> dog orients to handler -> reward. If the dog doesn't orient after the marker you're too close or they are too aroused. In my video E is riled about softball practice in the field. He hates ball games, particularly if they involve children. Last week we skirted the same field with the kids at softball practice and he barely looked at them. I didn't give him any reminders or tell him what to do. He was completely fine and I can be sure because he was happy to work on his most mentally challenging tricks. Sometimes dogs look comfortable with their surroundings when they are actually not. It pays to find ways to ask them if they are completely comfortable. If they can't concentrate, I doubt they are completely comfortable.

It's certainly normal in my area. I've never seen anyone messing with the dogs left tethered. People smile at them or ignore them. They don't let their kids pat them. Might not be a friendly dog, say the parents. I do it occasionally if I've been walking the boys and need to pick something up. It seems sensible to do it while I'm out rather than go home, get the car and drive back in. They are left on short leashes where they can't get in the way or get on the road. They are well socialised. They do not particularly care if there are lots of people around or other dogs pass them. I don't think the risks are as great as other people seem to think. Sometimes shit happens, and you don't know where or when it will be. I am anxious leaving them unattended and am quick to get back to them, but usually when I do get back to them they are fine. Often someone comments to me that they are lovely dogs and sometimes they ask if they can pat them. I've had some people do weird and stupid things around my dogs, but most people are pretty polite. I wouldn't leave them unattended in such a place if I didn't think they would be fine if someone did something weird or tried to pat them.

BC Crazy, what's happening with Stella's medication at the moment? Sounds like she could do with a temporary increase? Incidentally, counter-conditioning can be easier if you use a Thundershirt or some similar calming aid. We hit a milestone with counter-conditioning this week. Erik skirted softball practice without even needing any guidance or support or reminders of what he should do from me. He noticed and just didn't really care. WIN. He will undoubtedly have days where he will need help again, but this was a first and it's been months in the making. I hate CC. So tedious. But it's so important. And I should be grateful I can do it at all. It takes a lot of foundation work before you can counter-condition a hare. Desensitisation is even more slow and tedious. We currently have Erik on tryptophan supplements for a while to see if it helps him. He isn't bad at the moment, so it seemed like a good time to get him on it for a month or two and see if it turns him from a good dog into an angel at home. ;) We tried it before, but probably not for long enough to really see if it helped. He's doing me proud at the moment. He tries so hard and the work I've done with him is really visible. He still chases and drives the dogs at the river when they are playing fetch, but he comes back on his own and sits or downs in front of me to take a breather from being wildly aroused. This is so nice. His worst trigger is my mum's dog playing fetch. He just goes glassy-eyed and loses it. We are working backwards, starting with getting him nice and functional around strange dogs playing fetch and going towards the one who taught him to go ballistic when dogs are playing fetch in the first place.

Sounds like she's not comfortable with her surroundings, plus or perhaps leading to elevated arousal. My Erik went through this around the same age. For about 6 months he was a disaster whenever we took him somewhere new. Fortunately we had the positive interruptor, which we taught him when he was a puppy. He is generally nice and attentive now. Part of it was maturing and part of it ongoing habituation and training for self control and nice alternative behaviours. And teaching him to work any time, any place. Start small and easy, work up. Incidentally, it doesn't necessarily take a long time to sort a problem with triggers out using distance and rewards. It depends on how long it's been going on and how strong the reaction. Kivi used to lunge and bark when he saw another dog if he was on leash. Took me about 3 walks to get it well and truly under control using LAT from Control Unleashed. That was the end of that. Erik started when he was much younger, and he's more reactive and his arousal doesn't come down as fast as Kivi's. It took me about a week for him. Again, using LAT. Lots of people have quite fast success with LAT. And others don't. It depends on the nature of the problem and how bad it is and whether you need to do some more serious counter-conditioning or work on managing arousal first. If check chain corrections don't make an impact, then arousal is way too high. The dog is probably not capable of thinking very hard or making sensible choices. They are just reacting.

Erik can clicker train for 40 minutes quite happily. He will get little breaks while I work with Kivi, but in those breaks he's doing down-stays, so technically he's still working. Today at the beach I ran him through all the tricks we are currently working on. It took maybe 15-20 minutes, and he was begging for more when I ran out of things to practice. I have to dream up some new things to teach him because he's so hungry for new skills. Clicker training is his most favourite thing. It does wear him out faster than physical exercise, but he needs both. And clearly he has plenty of stamina for training. A long clicker session plus some play and running at the park over an hour or so and he will quite happily come back home and start making a nuisance of himself looking for more to do. WRT other dogs, I prefer to be the gatekeeper than a competitor. My dogs are both pretty social and like to greet, but they've been taught that if they are interacting with me, it pays to wait until I tell them to go for it, and if I call them away they usually come. It took a fair bit of work, but it sure makes life easier.

Erik is like one of those clever, slightly hyperactive kids that fiddle incessantly when they are bored. He goes: poke my chair, poke my leg rest, paw the battery charger, poke the pedestal fan, poke the other chair, poke the bike, scitter backwards and growl at the bike because it almost fell over, poke the bike sharply again, bark at it for moving suspiciously in response, grumble to himself about the untrustworthy nature of bikes, lift the ring handles on the sideboard and let them fall down so they make a tinkle noise, repeat for about a minute, walk into the kitchen and stand there barking at the general state of the world, ask halfheartedly to be let out, poke my chair... He also has a compulsion to knock over bottles. He cannot walk past a bottle, can, or cup standing upright on the ground without poking it over. Drives me crazy. This expands to poking everything I touch if I'm tidying. He follows me around the house and everything I set upright he knocks over and everything I put in place he adjusts with a few pokes. Kivi's special talent is standing diagonally across doorways and hallways so there is no way to get past him. He seems to like it if you push him. He also stops dead a half step in front of you on walks, and his other trick is to suddenly drop his shoulder and roll onto his back in the grass with no warning. The number of times I have frantically leapt over him in an effort not to trip over him... He also drives me crazy because he dillydallies getting into the car. He has to stick his head in the garden and look for skinks. Erik refuses to get into the car until he knows Kivi is getting in. He lies down and resists efforts to move him until Kivi has got his head out of the garden and got into the car.

The Thundershirt works on arousal more than anything IME. We use it when Erik is anxious but also when he is over-aroused and it is just as effective. When he's very anxious and barking it will bring his arousal down so that he stops barking, but he is just as anxious. I can feel his heart pounding. He looks a lot calmer, though, so you have to be careful you are interpreting the behaviour correctly. It's great for pairing with counter-conditioning. I don't know what Zig is like, but I truly believe Erik does not like being in a state of high excitement, even if it's good excitement. When he's that high he can't properly process what is happening around him and act appropriately. All his responses are too intense and he loses the flexibility to adjust his behaviour to a changing environment. This is especially challenging for him in mixing with strange dogs, because he can't respond appropriately to subtle changes in body language. He over-reacts and causes trouble for himself. If I decide he is too aroused for greeting another dog he actually seems quite relieved. I fancy he knows on some level that he is not really capable of appropriate behaviour at that moment. Once I cue LAT, which tells him he won't be interacting directly, he will cross to the far side of me and avoid looking at the other dog. It generally means we are too close. Farther away he will start LAT again. The exception is when he is training or playing tug or fetch. He gets high as a kite, but it's all right because he is only being asked to focus on one thing he knows well. I imagine this is why the frisbee works so well for Zig. But if something unexpected turns up he is liable to flip out purely because he is already so aroused. I can usually get him to hold a down-stay, but this is after I did a lot of work with him to get his arousal down and his off switch working during training sessions. Other dogs are not so aware of their surroundings or are more focused on one thing. So in summary, 1) don't assume the TS only works for anxiety or sound sensitivity and 2) high arousal can be stressful for dogs, particularly where they need to deal with unpredictable or ever-changing signals.

I can't speak for them. It wouldn't be fair given they are not here to correct me if I misinterpreted. I think a lot goes unsaid because it's delicate. And it's kinda complicated as well. They have to take into account their volunteers and employees as well as their public image and on top of that they do actually want what's best for dogs given their limited resources, but they also have to protect the community. They are doing the best they can and have a difficult job. My feeling is they would welcome anything that made it less arbitrary and subjective. The answer to your other questions is a matter of statistics. The short answer is depends on whether you're a frequentist or a Bayesian, but either way, very complex models. And as for gameness, lots of baseline data. There has certainly been talk about this in academic circles. Breed specific behaviour is one of those things we know exists but have trouble capturing due to sample sizes. That's all I have time for, sorry.

It's useful - to academics. If you think that such a test would be used wisely and or well, instead of the more likely scenario that Woof has posited, then you need to get out of the university. The real world, Corvus, is about what's easiest and cheapest. Validity and comparisons are useful to everyone. It's the cornerstone of being able to make informed decisions and reliable predictions. Sheridan, I have been dragged out of the university to speak to people in the industry who badly want standardised, objective testing. They don't want it because it would be easiest and cheapest, believe it or not. I think such a test could be used well if it were carefully formulated. It has been done before in other fields. Even in dogs to some extent. The Swedish DMA, for example, has been used to help collie breeders breed timidity out of the Swedish collie population. The DMA is not perfect, but there's enough science out there on it to support its use. It's geared towards working dogs, though, and may be too harsh for some dogs in the broader population. WnH, no one CAN standardise internal variables in dogs? There is plenty that we can do, though. We can observe and work backwards, for example. There are plenty of people working on indicators of internal states and predictors of future behaviour. This is my life at the moment. I haven't the time or inclination to try to convince people on a dog forum. I can just say I've been neck deep in this literature for 3 years and have spoken to a lot of people about it, both academics and people in industry. I watch a lot of dogs behaving. The particular problem of behaviour assessments has been a bone I've been gnawing on for months. You can consider I maybe have some idea what I'm talking about or not. I really am not bothered. I am bowing out because I don't have the spare time for this discussion. I should never have got involved. I think that this study sounds great, though, and would encourage people to get involved.

Well, no, it's not. It's about using a single approach so that there are limited external variables that may influence the results. Like I said before, a standardised test needn't ignore breed. It could mean the individual tests within a behaviour assessment are carried out in a way that doesn't vary from dog to dog. Breed can be accounted for in the statistical analysis afterwards if there is enough information to do so. A standardised approach would mean the same things are measured in the same way using the same scale so comparisons can be made. This does not mean comparisons between breeds would be assumed meaningful. That is something you find out later in analysing the results. Ideally a standardised test would be well supported by science before it was adopted, but this isn't always the case. Standardisation does not necessarily equal loss of information or smoothing over details. That's all in the design. It does mean the ability to make comparisons and test for validity. This is useful.

...Yes. Which means...? Consider the possibility that if you want bedlingtons to be treated differently to ceskies you might have to do a teeny bit of leg work and encourage those in rarer breeds to participate in scientific studies. We can only do so much ourselves. The more support we get the better our data and the less angsting about under-represented portions of the dog population. They are under-represented because it's hard to find them. You people in the breeds and breed groups themselves have better contacts than we do.

I found that even with over 1000 respondents with my survey data, I still didn't have the numbers to split most groups based on purpose. For example, my terrier group numbers were low and heavily biased towards a couple of breeds. I split by purpose in the herding and gundog group because they were the only groups where I had the numbers to do it. So Sheridan, I can't speak for Diana, but in general scientists need numbers. They can't make enough people participate that their data can be as detailed as DOLers and the likes want. It can be frustrating when you get damned for not having enough detail by the very people that didn't participate when they were invited to. Please participate! That's how you get really compelling data sets and the most accurate representations of dog populations. The better the data set, the more thorough the investigation, the more interesting findings you get, and the more weight they will carry. So please, DOLers, participate in scientific studies when you can, and pass the details on and encourage others in your breed to participate as well. There's a reason we know a lot more scientifically about Labradors than Bedlingtons.

Just to be clear, I don't think the folks in SA intend to force anyone to desex dogs based on a temperament test. The wording they used at the conference was "strongly encourage" desexing. I honestly think it was more to do with mixed breeds than purebred dogs, and I got the impression the temperament test would be completely voluntary and a way to essentially be exempt from whatever measures were being applied to encourage desexing. I'm guessing those measures would revolve around registration fees, which is already being used as incentive to desex dogs. Painting this as a black and white picture just isn't accurate. I think it is pertinent to point out that one doesn't really get to decide how research gets used and how it doesn't. Once the research is done it can be applied to all sorts of things. It might add fuel to one fire and quench another all together. If it sounds like it could help pounds, it probably could. But we don't get to refuse people interested in using it as leverage to encourage desexing access to it. It's the nature of the beast. Personally, I think we can't shy away from research because we are scared how it might be used. It's the only way forward.

I have a slow-ish dog and generally his performance is fast and reliable only when he's sure of himself. So we do lots of drilling, changing small things here and there, changing sequences, changing contexts. The aim is to get him very sure that when he hears/sees a cue he will know exactly how to respond. He needs a very big reinforcement history to build his confidence. If he is distractible or slow it is nearly always because he is not certain of himself. The environment is different or I'm taking him too close to a stranger and he wants to greet them but doesn't want to break the heel... That kind of thing. He is a very easy going dog, but that doesn't mean he's never disturbed by things. He just shows it very subtly. I usually up the reinforcement rate if he becomes hesitant. If I deal with it straight away it's usually not such a big deal. We still have problems weaving around other dogs in stability exercises at training, though. The trainers don't notice, but I know he's lagging because he's conflicted. He wants to acknowledge the other dogs and heel at the same time, but he has to choose. He chooses heeling, but he slows down and his head goes down. A sure sign that his mind isn't on the task. Incidentally, instructors at my training club regularly decide dogs are ready for things that they are actually not ready for, and as a result, the dogs fail, handlers get upset and frustrated, and the dogs practice blowing off their handlers. Drives me crazy.

There is more to the story in the link.... This came up at the AIAM conference a few months ago. A couple of weeks later I spoke to Tammy King about it at the APDT conference and unless I misunderstood, she had no idea people in SA animal management were kicking around amicability in relation to some kind of desexing policy. She was mystified and somewhat alarmed. Most of the information the people involved presented in their talk about it was only half the story. Meanwhile, there are a lot of people in animal management that want standardised temperament testing. The reasons why are kind of convoluted, but mostly I think they don't like making subjective decisions about a dog's future based on a test they don't entirely believe in. They know that dogs don't fit into little boxes, but they don't want these decisions to be arbitrary. A standardised temperament test does not have to ignore breed, it just involves a lot more background research than we have at the moment. I know there are a lot of ideas being kicked around about this at the moment and people in the industry want to make the process more scientifically rigorous. Some of the problem, though, is that the moment you bring people into the equation you have already introduced bias. Maybe the person testing thinks the dog has a cute face, or doesn't like the breed, or isn't fond of dogs that jump up. Dogs in shelters and kennels are largely starved for human interaction. There is no way none of those dogs are adjusting their behaviour in response to the body language of the assessor. Even if the assessment were to somehow exclude direct interaction with the assessor, if someone has to score responses, there will be bias unless you can reduce it down to counts. To me, this research is a step in the right direction. And no, researchers cannot mislead participants about the purpose of a study, unless there is a sound scientific reason to. Ethics committees can and sometimes do shut whole projects down if they get a whiff of a major breach of the ethics agreement.

Or a Swedish Vallhund. They are probably harder to train than a corgi in some ways, but easier in others. My Erik is phenomenal. The stuff he can do leaves me picking my jaw up off the ground. He is much more agile than my Pembroke corgi was, and in another ball park intelligence-wise. After spending the last two weeks with WL GSDs I think Vallhunds are the perfect toned down version of a working dog. Smaller, less intense, less active, slower, milder-mannered, but otherwise my little guy at least has got it all. :) If only they had longer legs so E could keep up with me on a run!

Steve, you are a bit of a heretic. I've always liked heretics. :) They are catalysts for change.