corvus

A bunch of us Australian canine scientists wrote a paper about this that was published recently. http://www.journalvetbehavior.com/article/S1558-7878(11)00117-1/abstract I don't think the paper is available freely, but if anyone wanted a full copy they could imagine who to ask.

Right. Arguments based on a single dog are meaningless. Arguments based on what's "best", what "works", what is "effective", what was "necessary" are empty. There's no way to prove any of those things. It's all very subjective. At some point we have to make a decision, but definitive terms like those above are traps. Some hate method pushers? I hate claims that can't be supported. If you need reasons, find better ones than these. More defensible ones. Methods work. It's the application that fails if something fails. Taking 2 years to get a decent result is a failure of application. That may mean that it was a poor choice of method given the circumstances. It may mean a lack of trainer skill. It may mean a lack of handler consistency, or a deeper underlying problem that has not been treated. We all make decisions based on cost and benefit analysis. I think when making those decisions about another being who can't tell us how they feel, we have a responsibility to make sure we have a good defence for those decisions. One that will stand up to critical scrutiny. It's not good enough to me to say I did what I thought was best. That goes without saying. But did I adequately take into account the impact of my decision on my animal? How can I assess that objectively? What if it could have been done with a smaller impact on my animal? I will never know, but how would I feel if it were true? If I would feel crap about it, I should probably think twice before choosing something that does not represent the path of least impact on my animal. Fooling myself doesn't help anyone but me. I owe it to the animals in my care to be brutally honest.

Nonesense, you can tell easily at what level of character and temperament a dog has by working with the dog on leash. You missed my point. Fallout is not just shutting down or redirecting on the handler. Those are just the most obvious examples. The effects of punishment have the tendency to bleed. It makes perfect sense given negativity biases are adaptive. But how do you judge an acceptable level of bleeding? It's completely subjective, and you have no way of measuring the emotional effect on the dog. So 'fallout' is not a measurable thing. If it's not measurable, how can you identify how much is acceptable? How do you know it is always expressed in the same way? How do you know you are identifying all negative effects? How you define a negative effect may differ to how others define it. I think it is far more common than you think it is. So who is right? Either someone is making Type I errors or someone is making Type II errors. I know which I'd prefer to be making. I also know what I'd rather people screw up their timing on between rewards or punishments. Cosmolo made a very good point about that. If they don't have the skill to deliver rewards properly I don't think I'd want them trying to deliver punishments properly. Sensitivity changes from moment to moment. If someone skilled tells someone unskilled what punishment to use based on how the dog behaves in one circumstance, there is no guarantee that same punishment will be appropriate a few days later in a completely different circumstance. I think there is some buffering from these effects in using reinforcement. Crappy timing in reward delivery is pretty harmless. You can mess some things up if you're really awful at it, but if you're that bad your potential to do damage with punishments is huge. Punishments become non-contingent. That's a recipe for extreme stress. Your timing only has to be off by a second to make the association really hard for the dog to form.

That's not what I would call skilful application. Is that what you would call skilful application? Really? Then how can we say it's being used effectively if it doesn't work? We know that in some cases at least it does work, so if it doesn't, can we be certain it was applied skilfully? No, every species that is capable of some level of cognition responds to operant conditioning. They don't just respond to the quadrants that suit them. Pretty much anything with the ability to sense its surroundings responds to classical conditioning. Arguments about the effectiveness of quadrant-based methods are mostly pointless. They are all effective. It's a matter of the balance of reinforcers and punishers, the ability to control the environment, and what's driving the behaviour. You don't have to be a balanced trainer to be a good judge of these things, and many good trainers get by just fine with hundreds of difficult dogs without using things like prong collars. I'm sure it's a confronting thing to hear and it's more comfortable to shrug it off or come up with reasons to justify using tools others have decided they don't want any part of, but honestly, it is fact. There are plenty of people out there training all manner of big, powerful, reactive, aggressive dogs without prong collars or corrections and having great success. Are they better trainers than you? Many have done the prong collar thing once upon a time and don't anymore. It's not hard to find them. Are you game to look? Can you accept that it can and is being done? You could even learn how if you wanted. Arguments based on a single dog are also pointless. If you've been through a bunch of different methods there are a bunch of big fat question marks surrounding the whole thing. How skilfully were those other methods applied? Were they tried for long enough? To what extent did they affect the methods tried afterwards? How were other confounding factors like arousal and emotional state managed? Were they managed at all? How much practice did the dog get performing the undesired behaviour? Was the driving force correctly identified in the first place? Were the antecedents correctly identified? Was there conditioning involved? Oftentimes things work, but they don't always work for the reasons people think they work. I've seen dogs basically bludgeoned with the same awful training over and over and I wonder how on earth they actually managed to learn anything, let alone the desired behaviour. But they do. Dogs do stuff like that. They are so easy to train they are their own worst enemy.

There are two problems with this. 1) How do you judge what is "too much fallout"? How do you measure it? How do you predict it? 2) How do you tell what's 'best' for an individual dog? This is a statement that drives me crazy. There is NO WAY TO TELL. You can't compare methods on the one dog and unless you find dogs that are clones with exactly the same upbringing and training history, comparison between dogs is meaningless. And even if you could do that, can you take into account the skill of the trainer? There is no measure for trainer skill at this point. Success is not a measure of trainer skill. I find it very telling that some people on this thread seem to think there is just one way to apply, say, dicking around just under threshold doing watch me exercises. Er, it's a fair bit more nuanced and subtle than that, people. I love when folks are quick to cry ignorance when someone disses their favoured methods, but in the same breath show their ignorance by dissing other methods. D'ya think no one notices the hypocrisy? Most methods are effective to some degree. I expect all methods are effective if applied skilfully.

When I was having my ethical crisis I had to admit that there are an awful lot of people out there who also won't meet their potential for various reasons. When I thought about all the people stuck in retail and cleaning and menial labour jobs I kinda let the dog thing go. I know folks who have a job that doesn't get anywhere near meeting their needs for mental stimulation. If dogs are well cared for, have good food and shelter, and are loved, that's more than some people have.

How much training do you do now? How much are you anticipating you would have to do for a malinois? I'm not baiting or anything, just information seeking. I'm interested in what people's expectations are for active, high drive breeds.

It is? In what way? You only have to spend 20 minutes at a pound to see a whole truckload of wasted potential. And perhaps how it turned out in some cases. I had a dog in my study I was utterly in awe of. You could do anything with that dog. Its owners chose to leave it in the yard on its own most of the time and sometimes let it in to hang out with the family. I was warned it was 'crazy'. Nope, incredible, just lacking guidance. I had a massive ethical crisis about it at the time. At the end of the day, though, I had data on this dog that spoke for itself. The dog was fine where it was. I haven't seen any evidence that waste of potential is a very big ethical concern in the scheme of things. Guts me, who is in seventh heaven seeing just what my dogs can do, but that's my problem, not the dogs'.

If it helps, I listened to this out of context with no back story because I was directed to it externally. I did call ID of native animals for a few years when I was an environmental consultant. You get a keen ear for animal sounds when it's your job to identify them. I thought it was human. Koalas are more gurgly and husky, possums are more high-pitched and purry, foxes make some odd alarm or defence calls, but it's too long, really. I'd buy koala in a pinch if you lived in a koala area, and I'd buy possum or fox as a remote possibility with really abnormal sounds because they were mightily scared, but human seems far more likely just going on the scary sound all on its own out of context. Although I thought it was a freaking bizarre sound for a human as well. Honestly, scary sounds automatically sound 'bad', like there is evil intent behind them. I couldn't say how many call playbacks I did over the years, but every single time Masked Owl was on the list it made my skin crawl. I would listen to that and mutter "No wonder people are scared of the night." It sounds like something that's crawled straight out of hell. It's an owl. It does not have evil intent.

:laugh: Thanks, but it's not my theory. I'm not the first that has said tug might be play and I won't be the last, but I'm not standing on a soap box saying "Tug is a play behaviour. Because I said so." I'm just saying based on context in the form of behavioural sequences and the ease with which dogs can move from tug to other social behaviours or respond to social cues, and how they might move from tug to other predatory behaviours, tug makes more sense as a play behaviour. Anyway, there are always exceptions. For some dogs the lines are blurred. Incidentally, Weasels, many consider drive to be the extent to which a dog will persist in a goal-directed behaviour. How hard it is to distract them from it or put them off, what they will go through to obtain that goal. By that definition, a dog can appear quite calm and still be displaying high drive. My mum's lazy little dog once spent 2 days in the hated rain poking around a wood pile waiting for a rat he saw go in there come out. Same dog ripped a hole in the garage wall to get to a possum. I still can't believe a 10kg dog was able to do that. One is a low arousal thing and the other high, but both show high drive. An adrenalised state is not a pre-requisite. This is the definition I've encountered most outside of DOL. It's a little known fact (well, it's probably well known but few people put words to it) that high arousal achieves narrow focus, which combined looks like a dog that will go to the ends of the earth for the object of their desire and wouldn't notice most of the journey. Sounds like high drive. That's kinda the point of high arousal, though. It gets stuff done. If you work a dog in high arousal they may be much harder to distract and may be more persistent and more energetic. How do you tell the difference between that and high drive? If you're working a dog at high arousal and they do happen to get distracted, what happens? A lot of effective modern reactive dog treatments are aimed at lowering arousal. Why lower arousal if high arousal leads to narrow focus? If you're working a high drive dog at high arousal and they get distracted, what might happen? If you work them at moderate arousal can they still get the job done? Rhetorical questions. Just trying to give people something to think about.

Bwaha, the age-old question. I've been 'organising' behaviour as a side-project that seems to be slowly taking over my life. I'm in cahoots with an artificial intelligence professor who shall remain nameless because they're mine, all mine! Not sharing!! AI people are damn good at logical approaches to behaviour. I provide the ethological context and they tell me how to organise it. I'm yet to find a way to fit tug into predatory behaviour. It fits better into social bonding and play. Before anyone yells at me, I'm just organising on the basis of simple rules that seem to work for the majority of behaviour. It's not my fault those rules mean tug doesn't fit best where the training world says it fits best. Having the drive to do something and expressing that drive are two different things. All the pieces of the puzzle have to be there first. Just because some dogs need more pieces than others doesn't mean they don't have as much drive. It's not a waste of time on any account to explore what pieces your dog needs and how to supply them. Particularly if you buy into the idea that tug is a play behaviour. Play is one of the best indicators of positive emotional state we have in animals.

But it's not just the training process where you have to engage your dog. That's the key point that Cosmolo made, and I would really hate for it to get lost here because it's so important. You've got to take it on the road with you. If you do that much, how you deliver reinforcement or how excited you get isn't all that important. Otherwise my dogs wouldn't be so engaged with me seeing as I don't jackpot very often. Might help, but it's not the key issue. The trick is to circumvent them so they can't use the environment as context cues. The strongest signal to them that they are training needs to be that you just gave them a cue.

Corvus could you (or anyone else that knows) please explain what stimulus control is, and what default behaviours are? Stimulus control: Behaviour only occurs when cued, basically. Default behaviour: This is a term Leslie McDevitt uses, I think. She uses it to describe a behaviour that is so strongly conditioned in so many contexts that it bypasses thinking a lot of the time and often the circumstances are the cue. For example, Erik has a really nice default down. If he wants something, he usually downs. If he's not sure what I want him to do, he downs. One time he got in a blue with another dog and when I got the opportunity I grabbed his harness and he automatically downed. I think it was in response to the combination of being pretty upset and feeling pressure on his harness. He was surprisingly solid there, though. The other dog was still at large and trying to come in for another round, but E just stayed in his down while I tried to fend it off or catch it. Bedazzled, sometimes situations bleed into each other. Like I tell them to go play, they decide they'd rather hang around, then a few minutes later things change and I ask them to sit while someone else goes past or something like that. As far as they are concerned I just made it worth their while to disregard the go play release. I'm not that bothered, though. Kivi in particular is pretty spitzy in his temperament. If I just let him potter off and explore he's liable to lose track of me. He's also not a multi-tasker like Erik is. E can do three different things at once and still hear me when I call and he just about never loses track of where I am. Kivi's head gets lost in the clouds just doing one thing. K9, you're asking me to somehow distil everything my dogs do and everything I do while in a dynamic environment down to a series of simple rules. It's just not that simple! I do a lot of things, some a lot more than others. You're always asking me about exceptions, that's why my answers are often hard to follow. I try to give a representation of what usually happens and you ask me about what happens unusually. So yeah, contradictions! The thread is about getting a dog to hang around and pay attention while off leash in an exciting environment. I love my dogs' off leash control. It's at its best in exciting environments. In the scheme of things, I rarely have to try to get my dogs' attention. I just say their name and I've got them. I love that despite Erik being a touch emotionally reactive and Kivi having a pretty strong independent streak, I can take them pretty much anywhere and be confident that they will be fabulously responsive off leash. I have worked very hard to get this level of off leash control and it took quite a while. It's not perfect, but I can never quite call something done. I'm always improving it. The way I deliver my rewards is such a minor issue I can't believe anyone could get upset about it. I only brought it up because I think reward delivery in general is a side issue to the one of simply getting your dogs to be responsive in exciting environments. I just didn't communicate that very well. If people want responsive dogs, who cares about how you deliver rewards as long as you get in the habit of doing it. Any time, any place. My dogs are not fabulously responsive because I make a fuss when I reward them. They are fabulously responsive because when we take them out we do stuff with them. We play games, we learn new behaviours, we practise behaviours we're working on, we do exciting things, we practise being calm and doing quiet things, we use the environment as props and ways to test their problem-solving skills, their understanding of basic cues, and improve their body awareness, we work on safety behaviours like "leave it" and whiplash turns or u-turns (positive interruptor?), we practise getting their attention in the face of big distractions and holding it, we practise directional cues and even when we throw a ball for them it's part of training. We are very interesting to them because we engage them. It's not about how we deliver the reinforcement or even what reinforcement we use. It's about being with them, engaging them, and having a strong history of being a good bet for fun and rewarding activities.

I thought I gave you my answer right there. Of course we all need to practice recalls. And I don't always use jackpots for recalls. Only good recalls. And I do use them for other behaviours, but only when it was a damn good job. Or if I'm training something new and they suddenly get it. I just figure it's not a jackpot if you do it every time. That's your prerogative. I don't disagree. I just have a different approach. That doesn't mean I'm trying to have a go at you, you know. Oh, they respond to jackpots. Probably. I'm just wary of jumping to the conclusion that they are effective given there's not much support for their use. I'm not exactly sure what you mean by "no drive left for the exercise". My dogs don't seem to get tired of doing anything. I don't really drill them. We do a handful of reps, mix it up with some other things, then take a recess. I've trained for 40 minutes straight with no recesses and they still don't seem to get tired of anything. I'm careful with stays, though. Don't want to test it. No. Yeah, that's true and is the reason why stimulus control for behaviours is pretty useful. The exceptions are default behaviours. I like default behaviours. I find them worth living with uncued behaviours. I'm not a perfect trainer. Anything that doesn't get put under stimulus control usually turns into a request for training. Erik's latest is hopping on 3 feet. Evidently I should have put a cue on that some time ago. The conundrum is that on the one hand I don't want to be pestered to train and on the other I don't want to give the dogs a "seriously, no more reinforcement" cue in an environment where I may need to change my mind about that at any moment. I don't want them to disengage completely because they might not hear me when I need them to respond. If they always have an ear out they are really nice and responsive. It's just a safety thing, and makes life a fair bit easier. I brought it up because it illustrates the power of conditioning and a strong reinforcement history in a variety of contexts. You want to be more interesting to your dog? I'm so interesting to my dogs it's hard work to get them to leave me sometimes. If I had my time again I'd do the same thing. I still want responsiveness in any situation and I love the default behaviours. I secretly like dogs that are being as angelic as they know how in the hopes you'll reward it as well. Aww, they are cute. Annoying, but cute.

That is interesting. E sleeps during the day, he just doesn't sleep quite as much as Kivi does. The difference is only a couple of hours or so, though. He doesn't really sit around not sleeping. Either he's sleeping or he's looking for stuff to do. Currently he and Kivi are laying in the sun together. Kivi is sitting around not sleeping but Erik is chewing on a bit of bone. It's quite typical. Erik reminds me of some people I know who can't just sit there. They fiddle. Erik is a fiddler as well. There was a study recently that found that many dogs got the same rush of pleasurable brain chemistry when they ran on a treadmill as many humans get. I wonder if it is also a natural mood elevator for dogs like it is for us and whether that's something we could use.

Erik is usually passed out from about 9pm on. Or he might be having a chew on a bone. He settles fine at night unless there is something out of the ordinary. It has to be big out of the ordinary these days. He can cope with a party next door, but not a thunderstorm. He used to get agitated if his bedtime routine wasn't exactly the same every night, but I think it was an adolescent phase. He apparently grew out of it. He went through an intensely routine-driven phase around that time that made life quite difficult at times. We just kept taking him out and exposing him to new situations with support from us. We always had contingency plans if it proved too much for him, but we never had to use them. He got better each time we took him somewhere challenging and at about 14 months started to chill out a bit more and become more flexible. I swear his second fear period went for about 10 months.

They're dogs, not robots! Find me a person that doesn't think they need a recall and I'll show you someone who is courting disaster. Jackpots don't have much empirical support. I don't really use them much, so don't ask me. Bob Bailey says he only uses them for a brilliant leap forwards. I just know when I make a big fuss, and it's rarely. Doesn't seem to concern my dogs, and if I don't have to sit there having parties I won't. I'd far rather spend that time getting more reps and a ripping reward rate. Now there's something that makes dogs pay attention. I was talking to an assistance dog trainer on the weekend who told me one of the dogs I've had in my study who was struggling with the kennel environment had come forward in leaps and bounds when she started making a huge fuss when he got something right. I found the same thing with Kivi in the beginning, and I had another dog in my study that was similar. All three dogs seemed to be lacking in confidence, so there's certainly a precedent to use it more often, although I'd still make it contingent on good performance in those cases. Pretty arbitrary, though. Jackpots are thought to improve motivation, but not performance if I remember correctly. They're also associated with scalloping. You can use that to your advantage if you want temporary downtime for some reason.

Cosmolo has the right of it. I have the opposite problem. I can't get my dogs to leave me alone. I set out to teach them that training could happen any place, any time. I achieved this so well that they rarely want to be far from us in case someone gives them a training cue. I send them off on a recess to do what they want and they decide they want to hang out for more training, thanks. I reserve 'reinforcement experiences' for recalls, usually. If all your reinforcements are like that you lose the power of contrast and surprise. It took time to get my dogs to hang around me like a bad smell as a default, and a lot of mini training sessions. If my dog could only handle a 2-second sit in the environment they were in, then that was all I asked of him. The important thing is to release before the dog releases themselves. It's the same as everything. It takes practice. The more you do it, the better they get at it. I can now basically do anything in a busy dog park. I hardly train at home at all, and I don't really need to step up distractions because I teach behaviours in highly distracting environments in the first place. I don't think of it in terms of being more interesting. I think of it in terms of being a safe bet. Also I've found it gets to a point where the reward barely matters. My dogs will work happily for kibble no matter where we are. They didn't used to be that indiscriminate. Now they just really like training. The food is the icing on the cake.

Oh, it doesn't, quite. I mentioned the relaxation protocol. It's designed to teach dogs that being quiet and calm is a valid option for dealing with stuff. We found it quite effective for some things. For example, in new places Erik used to get impatient and bark at us like "What are we doing??" After the RP we didn't really see that anymore. He would just lie down quietly instead. He still seems to do that. I think the RP is very worthwhile, particularly for dogs who haven't realised doing nothing is actually possible and works. Erik definitely fell into this category. It's astonishing how hard some dogs find some of the RP exercises. We did Day 1 about 5 times before he could do the whole thing. I've heard of other people repeating it more times than that. And of course, when he was a puppy he got lots of "time to settle, now" conditioning. We'd pop him in his puppy pen when it was time to chill out. He also spent the nights in a crate. And later when we were having high-as-a-kite puppy for hours on end we started massage and it made a huge difference. In fact, it solved that particular problem.

I don't have to make a point about my knowledge to anyone, and nor should you. If it's sound knowledge, it'll stand on its own two feet regardless of who imparts it. You have said some very sensible things in the past IMO, and there have been times when I've taken on board what you've said, and even times when I have asked you serious questions. You might not remember them, but I do. If I've disagreed it's because I've had information or experiences that have led me to disagree. When you disagree I imagine it's for the same reasons. Who cares? Everyone comes to where they are via a different path. I'm happy to share where I get my information and usually do. People can judge based on that. In this case, though, I will gladly make the point that my knowledge of my dog and what I did and didn't try is far superior to yours. If I'm going to be credited for it I may as well say it where it is obviously the case. ;) Most of my information on my dog came from my dog, and I have shared the process of measuring baseline behaviour, making small changes, and measuring again that led me to compile that information. It's pretty objective and thorough all things considered. This is my dog's welfare we're talking about. I'm not content with a guess. I did get outside help. From more than one very good source. Everyone I spoke to assured me that I was well on the right track and already doing everything or just about everything they would suggest. Funnily enough "teach him to settle" was not one of them. But if you want to talk about this, we can. We did discuss tethering, but in the end I didn't really need it. I confine him rarely, but mostly I don't have to. If I want him to settle I tell him to come and lie down. Most of the time he will. If he won't he can usually be persuaded to by various means. And you're right, yelling doesn't do much. It buys me a break. Sometimes if he's playing Marco Polo it does shut him up and I don't really care. If a shout back achieves lasting quiet I am totally cool with shouting back. Often it cuts across the barking so I can tell him to do something else in a more normal voice. Like come over here and let's calm you down. I think I said a cuddle is like a quick and dirty Thundershirt. It seems to bring his arousal down quite effectively. Does it reinforce barking? I would say no, it does not. The barking goes down in frequency after a cuddle, not up. Recovery time goes down, and we get some nice prick ears and a soft grumble rather than a full alert. Uh oh, could it be the cuddle IS something that stops him? There's no way in hell I'm seriously punishing a behaviour that is so obviously born out of anxiety. Sheesh. There's a good way to either make it worse or shut the dog down. Want to know where I get that information? Experience, and pick your favourite world-renowned fear aggression specialist. We just had 3 days of this from Grisha Stewart. She's my favourite. Leslie McDevitt is another. The vastly popular Control Unleashed program was designed specifically to give people an alternative from doing more damage to their dogs this way. That's just two. If you pick Leerburg, CM, or Bark Busters, I reckon I could give you a page of names in return. If the barking was operant, then maybe I would. I know it isn't, though, because if it was it would have responded to other attempts to treat it operantly with reinforcement. Plenty of his barking is operant, like the Marco Polo barking and the "GIVE ME A FREAKING TRAINING CUE!" barking, which I was actually very close to punishing but opted for extinction/DRAB instead for two reasons. The extinction protocols are pretty heavy and not the kind of thing recommended by 'positive' trainers, but he's mightily robust in training mode. For the record, I'm not trying to extinguish barking. Or poking. Or any kind of investigative behaviour. That is all stuff I want in moderation. He's not doing anything in an anxious state that I want good and gone forever, and again, if I did, I wouldn't be using punishment because of the anxiety component. You can't punish away anxiety. It doesn't work like that. There are ways in which punishment appear to 'work', but it's usually broad behavioural suppression, learned helplessness in some cases. If you want to have a knowledge competition on this, be my guest. I'll just reference my own papers. ;) I think that covers the "teach him to settle" angle.

Yep, we stuff the normal red Kongs with mince and mashed vegies with a little yoghurt or cottage cheese, then freeze. It's just their raw mix. If you feed kibble you can soak it in water to soften it enough to stuff into Kongs and then freeze. Most days both my dogs come looking for me at about 4:30pm because they think it's time for their walk. Kivi's just as likely to be the one to get up and come over first than Erik is. They know when it's time for walks. Be careful not to confuse anticipation/frustration with boredom. Make sure you take into account the whole picture. Just to be clear, the aim with the exercise is not to wear the dogs out. It's enrichment more than anything. A chance for them to properly stretch their legs, have a play, do some training, and take in some new sights, sounds and smells. The comparison with WL dogs was not purely exercise, it was stimulation. If we're talking in terms of "drive satisfaction", Erik gets tonnes of that. That's pretty much the whole point of all the enrichment. Giving him outlets for all the 'drives' that otherwise get channelled into inappropriate behaviour.

Snook, you have really struck gold with your trainer!

Firstly, wow, I didn't actually think several people would ask for more information! Guess I'd better deliver! Along the same lines as what Aidan was saying, it's really important to record behaviour. If nothing else, have a short list of 'warning' or 'problem' behaviours you can use as indicators of whether you are doing a good job or not. I look for behaviours that tell me how my animals interpret signals in their environment. For example: * Alert barking - for Erik at least I track the kinds of things he alerts at. The important bit is the sounds that he sometimes alerts at and sometimes doesn't. If he's starting to alert to a large percentage of the things he only sometimes alerts to and he's doing it a large percentage of the time, I can assume he's not in a good place emotionally. * Recovery time - I've used this one and flight distance for my rabbits and doves as well. I'm always aiming for very short recovery times after a disturbance. So if Erik gets up to bark at something, I take note of how quickly he can settle again afterwards. And again, whether he fires up again soon after or if he's able to switch off. It ties into the alert barking. * "Where's the danger?" - animals that are worried keep a sharp eye on everything happening around them, looking for threats. They interpret neutral things as threats. BC Crazy will know all about this. When it gets bad like it did with Stella it's called hypervigilance. Erik went there for a short while, although not as bad. It's what prompted us to do something more than training and conditioning. He would be snoozing next to me on the couch when he'd hear a sound outside and he'd be on his feet barking and scrambling to the door before he was even properly awake. It's not a nice place to be when you can't even relax properly when you're snoozing. He'd have an ear still on listening for danger. One of my doves was here a few months ago due to some ongoing harassment from the other dove. Poor fella stopped training all together because he couldn't stop constantly checking where the other dove was. When I introduced a third dove to try to solve the problem, he was taking food from me again the next day and training again within 5 days. A couple of months down the track all three are still living in harmony. Monitoring. So you can see it can be brought on by different things. My dove's hypervigilance was happily solved by changing his environment, at least in the short term. I doubt Stella's would have been solved without medication. Erik's appears to have been solved by increased activity, but we added medication to the treatment because we were not sure what was going to work. Medication was not a last resort. It was part of a serious hit at a serious problem. Early this year we dropped Erik's morning walks and the hypervigilance crept back. * I have a few other indicators that are Erik-specific. Poking, whining, and circling are all things I saw go up a lot when he was in his hypervigilant period, so now if I am seeing them a bit I start looking for the problem. Sometimes whatever it was seems to get fixed on its own. It's ongoing monitoring. I do it with all my animals. I'm not sure that it's clear exactly what I mean by exercise. It's physical and mental. I just kinda toss them in together because I do them together. I take the dogs out for a run and play and give them some training as well. How much they get depends on how much they want and how much I feel like giving. Sometimes a tiny bit, sometimes most of the outing. By 'activity' I mean other stuff to do at home. Mostly it is chewing, but he also gets toys like Kong Wobbler sometimes. It was suggested to us that when an animal is showing inappropriate or abnormal behaviour centred around one body part we should try giving them more to do with that body part. So for a month before we started E on Clomicalm and daily chewing I recorded just about everything he did with his mouth so we had a baseline measurement. So, barking, chewing and licking. I recorded duration, how many times he did it, and for barking, what kind of barking. Then I started the Clomicalm and frozen Kongs and kept recording for the next month. There was indeed an improvement. It wasn't as much of an improvement as I would have liked. We gave the Clomicalm another month to make sure and then took him off it and kept monitoring. I think there was a slight increase in anxiety when we took him off and then he settled again over a couple of weeks. A while later in an effort to improve things again after unsuccessfully dumping some of the exercise, we doubled his daily chewing quota so now he gets all his food as bones or frozen Kongs. It amounted to about 2 hours of chewing a day at the time. Now he's better at frozen Kongs it takes him maybe an hour to 90 minutes to consume all his daily food in frozen Kongs. Minus the stuff for training. He gets that maybe 2-3 times a week and sometimes he only gets half his food that way. I'm not entirely sure this is enough because he seems to very slowly start building in the indicator behaviours over a few weeks if I don't give him a big rec bone. With a fairly consistent cycle of rec bones and the likes he seems steady. He's also maturing, so that has probably helped us. I think that after watching what he does when he has a giant rec bone to chew on and what he does when he is staying with my parents where he has access to a much bigger yard, my feeling is that he is just a more mentally alert dog than most. If he's not sleeping or snoozing he is looking for something to do. It doesn't have to be something active. Kivi will go "Okay, if we're not doing anything I'll go to sleep." Erik goes "Erik's bored." If I don't give him anything to do he will amuse himself for a while, then give up and go to sleep. But if that goes on for a few days he will get more and more restless, and be harder and harder to settle and we start heading towards anxiety again. It's pretty clear. The dog gets bored. Given he gets increasingly harder to convince to engage his off switch the more days of boredom he gets, it seems fair to me to just give him stuff to do. I'd rather be dead than bored. I get restless and agitated when I'm bored as well. So that's Erik. He's not the same as every dog with an anxiety problem, so what we did won't be specifically helpful to many with anxious dogs. The point of sharing is to help people drill down to find the cause of the anxiety if it's not obvious. We did a lot of tweaking one thing at a time and then observing the effects. The idea is to make a prediction and test it. If over-arousal is the problem, the behaviour should decrease if we can bring the arousal down. Generally I think if it's not making things worse it's fair to try something new for a month before you decide if it's worthwhile or not. I still go back to massage, the Thundershirt and rewarding quiet down-stays from time to time, using one or the other depending on what I think he needs at the time. I also yell at him when he's annoying me. If anyone thinks I can work through pesky barking without getting cross with my dog then they think I'm a better person than I am! Giving him a cuddle is vastly more effective than yelling at him, and improves my mood a lot as well. But I still yell at him. What can I say? I'm only human.

It's okay, PA. I haven't shared that much about what we've done with Erik here before and this is exactly why. I knew what I was getting into. Some people on this forum have repeatedly and consistently believed the worst of me despite not having enough information to make those judgements and sometimes in spite of information to the contrary, and will continue to do so because it suits them. We'll know who you are because you'll stupidly defend yourself with some cop out like calling it how you see it, not realising that I didn't actually accuse anyone in particular. Frankly, I can't be bothered with it. It's not worth my effort and emotional investment to defend myself and it won't make any difference anyway. The consequence is that I stop posting so much and go away, which suits this minority down to the ground. I'm certainly not the first one that has been taught to shut up and I won't be the last. This forum misses out on a lot of cutting edge information and knowledge because a small minority seems determined to preserve DOL as their own little world where they can dictate a reality that suits them better. Meanwhile, people are made to feel like it is all their fault that they have a dog who is a bit (or a lot) special needs. It is damaging in the extreme, both to the people and the dog. Some people medicate because they can't or won't change the dog's behaviour. Other people medicate because their dog's symptoms are clinical and the dog is suffering. They medicate because they care and they can see their dog is deeply unhappy. We decided to medicate because we were weren't sure that Erik was coping as well as he could be. We reasoned that hypervigilance wasn't very fun and if our little E did not have to experience that if he got some medical support, then simply trying some medical support to see would be worth it. This was based on advice from several qualified people with plenty of experience in this area. Some were quite impatient with me for deliberating so carefully. Anyway, as it happened, other things helped more, which is why he's not currently on medication. It is not off the cards. Early intervention with medication is widely encouraged. It can halt a problem in its tracks and improve the likelihood of a fast recovery and thus a minimal time on the medication in the first place. And minimal stress. It's not fair on dogs or dog owners to declare they are getting too little or too much or even just the right amount of exercise or activity based on some pre-conceived notion of what "Dogs" need or don't need. I only brought it up because I had my own pre-conceived notion that working line dogs were very very active and would obviously need more exercise than my Vallhund. Ask the freaking dog in question. That's our job. If anybody truly cares how I went about analysing Erik's behaviour and identifying makes it better and worse, I will happily explain it. I will happily describe how to objectively measure these things, what to measure, and what it means. If you're just here to take a cheap shot to make yourself feel big, I hope it's very satisfying for you. For myself, I'm very proud of my little bundle of energy and how far he has come from that wired puppy and I'm more than happy to share anything that might help others on a similar journey to the one we took. You can always PM me. I get e-mail notifications that I probably check once a week or so and no matter how busy I get with studies I've always got time to help others.

If it helps, Erik thrives on rules. Particularly at times he is not very comfortable. This is why Control Unleashed is so helpful. It sets up rule structures. I have the most problems with Erik when I try to disengage from the rule structure. E does everything he can to get me to keep feeding him directions. He has got better since Aidan told me to stop giving him so much direction and manage his reinforcement rate better. :p