corvus

I suppose I should comment seeing as I apparently inadvertently prompted this thread. :laugh: It's going to be long, though, and I'm not arguing about it or defending myself. Think what you will. You don't have to live with him! I didn't want to say any more in the other thread because it was getting pretty far off topic and this is not a simple discussion. The little journey we went through with Erik has been very enlightening. When he was about 5 months old we really had no idea what was going on. He would get wound up for some reason and he'd be completely wired for hours. He looked like he was on amphetamines. He literally could not sit still for more than 5 seconds. Everything he heard would prompt him to get up to investigate and often led to him barking. I remember watching him sit next to me on the couch high as a kite for no reason I could tell and just going "What is up with this puppy??" At that stage it was not really anxiety afaik. He was fine on walks. We realised he needed help winding down and started using massage and pig ears and kongs to get him back down to normal arousal levels and stay there for a while. It worked really well. As he got older and I went back to working from home I had troubles with his alert barking. Just way too much of it. He'd bark at one thing and before he could settle down he'd hear something else and bark at that and it would just build up and build up until he finally settled down to sleep at about midday. I have very little tolerance for barking. Particularly when I'm trying to work. I had moderate success addressing this with the following: * Massage in the mornings set him up with low arousal and it tended to stay that way for the whole day. * Thundershirt had much the same effect. * Let him bark with one volley then call him back to lie on his bed. * Rewarding for laying on his bed until he fell asleep. * Relaxation protocol. * Practice calming down after getting aroused and practice with impulse control. They all did the job in the short term, but nothing stuck for longer than a few months. He would slide back to this same high arousal sooner or later like a rubber band. I accepted that maybe we needed to give more exercise a try. There was some improvement. I sought advice and was told we were well and truly on the right track. It was suggested we try him on Clomicalm and start giving him something to chew on every day. We tried this. We dropped the Clomicalm after 2 months as its effects were very small. But the chewing seemed to be good stuff, so we doubled the amount of chewing he got in a day. All his food was from frozen kongs or bones. He improved more. At some point we dropped the morning walk because we had a feeling it was just getting him aroused and feeding the problem. In the short-term it helped, but in the long-term he went backwards. We went back to 2 walks a day and he went back to where he was before we dropped the morning walk. So the management at the moment is that he gets a morning walk most weekdays. It will have at least some off leash time for play and exploring. We keep training to a minimal. Stays and basic stuff. No tricks! Erik f***ing loves tricks. Back home I usually give him some time on the couch with me to cuddle before I do my morning chores and start working. He sleeps most of the day, and when he wakes up and starts poking around I give him a frozen kong or two. Once a week or fortnight he gets a rec bone. He always has access to cow hooves or something similar. The afternoon walk is about an hour and has at least some off leash play and training. The rec bones were the really telling thing to me. I gave him a huge leg bone one day and he spent 4 hours chewing on it that day. The next day he spent 3 hours chewing it, and a further 1 1/2 hours chewing on frozen kongs. The next few days it was 1-2 hours a day he spent on that bone. While he had that bone his reactivity on walks practically disappeared. He was calm at home and there was barely a peep out of him. I was like "Huh, I have a normal dog!" If he misses out on a walk for a couple of days or if he has a few days where he gets less chewing to do, his reactivity and anxiety go up. They go down again with a nice long walk and some dedicated chewing. I can't really argue with that. We have tinkered enough over the last 3 years that we have a pretty good idea what makes him tick these days. The bottom line is he is very mentally active and he lives in a very stimulus poor environment with our boxy suburban house and small yard. I think the physical exercise is secondary to just getting stimuli to process. It's certainly still important to give him a run and play and he can go all day, but what he really needs is stuff to do. Without something to do he just bounces off the environment. Every sound becomes something to do. There's a lot more to it than keeping him physically and mentally content, but we have found that those two things are pretty important to his wellbeing all the same. There's a lot of training and conditioning, but not being frustrated and suffering from chronic elevated arousal goes a long way to making the training part more effective and fun.

People use them because they offer leverage. Some dogs are very strong and not very well trained/may be prone to over-reacting. Dealing with a strong dog without much training on a check chain is pretty hard work and doesn't really yield nice clear signals if that's all you've got to work with. On a martingale it's worse. And worse again on a flat collar. So people use prongs because strong dogs are generally more responsive to them. Signals are clearer and it's not as hard work, or so I'm led to believe. Personally, I don't like tools that give automatic corrections. Sometimes I don't want to add any punishments to the mix, thanks. Plenty of trainers and behaviourists out there never use prongs but opt to manage the dog with a head collar. Before people cry out that it's not a tool for dogs who lunge or are reactive, there are ways to deal with that kind of thing pretty safely on head collars. Walking up the leash, for example. Using short leashes. Double leash with one attachment point at a harness or flat collar. And I'm sure there are others. Plenty of average people out there are doing it successfully. The advantage of head collars is that they offer control of the bitey end of the dog so you can steer it away from things it might hurt. Also obviously the eyes, which you can steer away from things the dog wants to stare at and get themselves all worked up about. With a second attachment point you have more control over what the dog experiences as well, which is peace of mind to some. If the problem is simply pulling, there are heaps of tools out there to choose from. Hope that helps.

The precedent set was allowing these areas to be developed in the first place. It was irresponsible planning. They approved it before they had done proper EIAs. I saw it over and over again when I was consulting. This is not a case of "Oh, developments are fine as long as we ban dogs." It's a case of "Holy crap, we are in a lot of trouble. If we try to stop this development we are going to make very powerful enemies who are going to sue the pants off us and send us broke, and if we don't do something to protect the Koalas there will quite possibly be an international outcry or we'll have to purchase compensatory habitat or something." Do not get me started on compensatory habitat. Banning dogs is part of a compromise. I don't think anyone in conservation really thinks it is a solution. All sorts of awful compromises have been going on. Basically it comes down to the development will go ahead one way or another so what can we do to preserve as much of the Koala population as possible. It's typical conservation. There's a reason why I quit environmental consulting. It's very hard to make a difference, and a lot of the time you are standing by bitterly just trying to make the best of a bad situation for the wildlife while knowing it probably will delay the inevitable at best. That's the reality of it. The developments go ahead. They are very hard to stop. You really need an EPBC listed species and you'd better be able to prove the development will have a significant impact on it because you'll find yourself in court arguing it. It's notoriously hard to prove. Even then, there will probably be compromises made so everyone gets a piece of the pie. The dog thing is a very small part of the bigger picture. Very, very small. I say let the conservationists do their job and pay the price for poor planning and greed without complaint. I doubt anyone is going to feel the impacts of the development more than the conservationists do. You might be upset that some people who probably don't want dogs won't be able to easily change their minds, but they have been desperately trying to stop something they love dying and have had to settle for amelioration measures. Suck it up, people. It's the price you pay and be grateful it's so small. Others are paying much more dearly. The Koala populations on the eastern seaboard have recently been listed on the EPBC Act, thank heavens, but it won't make it impossible to develop in those areas.

Koalas can actually live in some pretty shite habitat. As long as there are feed trees, they have all they need. Ostensibly, at least. They are beset with a host of health problems that may well be associated with populations in general under stress, but being chased by dogs is certainly not going to help that. A few years ago I heard from the mouth of one of the top koala researchers in the country that dogs kill a lot of koalas and represent a significant threat to them. He had statistics to back up that assertion. I mentioned it here on DOL at the time. The conference organisers promised to put presentations on their web site, but never did. Here's the abstract of a relatively recent paper that examined the effect of dog attack on koala populations, though. http://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;dn=802254931050429;res=IELHSS Dan Lunney says habitat loss forces koalas to spend more time on the ground or in the open where they are vulnerable to dog attack. Either accept it or don't. Dogs kill koalas. There was a good segment on 4 Corners a few months back that showed how complex the issue is and how the koalas are really between a rock and a hard place and it shows in their population numbers. Here's an article and transcript of the segment: http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/stories/2012/08/16/3569231.htm. For a lot of people it's not that they don't like dogs, they just aren't bothered by the idea of not having one. Who cares? There's strata managed housing all over the place where residents are not allowed to have pets. It's not really any different. ETA notice in the 4 Corners transcript it's pointed out several times that a lot of these developments had been approved before they realised there were koala populations there. The councils are going to get sued if they try to stop the developments. Rotten planning, but now everyone is just trying to find solutions to the sh** they put themselves in.

Also be careful not to confuse lower arousal with less anxiety. I've had times when I have put a Thundershirt on Erik and while the barking and pacing stops, his heart is still pounding like he's running a race and he's panting. He looks outwardly much more relaxed, but it hasn't improved his emotional state at all, really. Just kind of short-circuited the arousal feedback system. I figure that medication should always be considered carefully and be administered along with a behavioural modification program of some sort, but sometimes making it a last resort is just prolonging the dog's suffering. If they can't relax in their own home, or are regularly completely flipping out and getting hysterical, that is a really big deal. I would say don't mess around and just go straight to medication. Who cares if it could have been solved by something else? Maybe it wouldn't have been. Sometimes it's in the dog's best interests to make it a priority to bring their anxiety down as soon and as quickly as possible, and nothing much is going to do that better than medication. It's generally very safe. There's no reason to pussyfoot around.

Well, it might be if you are smart about releases and can accept that you win some and lose some and sometimes the best training outcome is to know when to cut your losses and move on. I have had to do all my training, or the majority of it, in dog parks and on the beach and have only recently been going to a club as well. When I started training this way it was very difficult, but using pretty much nothing but strategic releases, I got my dogs to the point where they will generally work through another dog coming and sticking its nose in my treat bag, for example. We just work around them, usually. If they get intense I shut the treat bag, release my dogs, and walk away. Training etiquette or lack thereof becomes a moot point. Either your dog can work through it or you cut the training session short and walk away. Erik isn't the easiest dog to handle and certainly can be reactive, but it doesn't really make any difference. It still boils down to whether he can work through something or not. I have never had someone follow me after I've moved away or explained (politely) that I have to move my dog away because he doesn't really like theirs. They don't seem to take it personally. We certainly have been pestered. Just last week Erik eventually "had words" with a dog that was deliberately blocking his access to me and growled at him a few times when he tried to come close. There was not much I could do given it wasn't my dog and I couldn't figure out who owned him. Erik was not especially anxious, just really peeved. His response was appropriate and controlled and afterwards he ignored the offending dog as long as it stayed away. At times I've had to just use LAT or something to get us through, or my dog just loses it anyway. It happens, and it's not always because someone else was being discourteous or ignorant. Sometimes a flock of birds will land in the area, or an errant breeze will alert the boys to a carcass nearby, or a rogue wave threatens to get my precious Nordic boys wet. Whatever the case, it's not a problem. Ultimately my dogs' critical distances are my responsibility to manage, not anyone else's, and their ability to work through distractions is a product of the foundation work I've put in and continue to put in. BTW, Canine Coach, might I have seen some of your dogs a month or two back at the poodle specialty at KCC? I was there learning about stays, tracking, and heeling. For science! :D Poodle specialties seem like a good place to learn about such things.

This study sounds very interesting. Have you posted some threads on it that I have missed? Not since I started it a couple of years ago, I think. I'm not entirely comfortable talking about it here. It's like dog parks. Too many crazies. ;) Kidding. Mostly. Look at the language in this thread. Suddenly people are defending themselves against charges of cruelty that were never made. Sometimes I think people are so scared to look the truth right in the eyes and accept it that they build these outrageous straw man arguments to rail against instead. Good work! Must feel good to have established that you're not being cruel to your animals. Even though no one said you in particular were... And even though all anyone on the web can do is take your word for it or not anyway... Why can't we have the courage to think about this really critically and honestly? Welfare is a continuum, not black and white states. Providing imperfect welfare is not a disaster... unless you refuse to admit it and therefore never have any motivation to attempt to improve it. Sometimes we have to make compromises, and that's not the same as being cruel or irresponsible. It's just being realistic.

It's easy to assume that what we've always done or what we do now is good for our dogs and it's what they want because that's what we want. No one asks the dog. I've been 'asking the dog' in my research and the results so far have disturbed me. I don't have the numbers to draw any conclusions, but honestly, I don't think the way we keep suburban dogs is necessarily very dog friendly. This includes my dogs. They will be noisy in our yard if left there unsupervised for long periods, and they get 90 minutes of exercise and training a day and most of their food in frozen Kongs, bones, and treat dispensing toys. I work from home and they are with me most of the time, but are they happy? Were they happy when I worked in the city and they were cooped up indoors all day every day? I couldn't say. In some Scandinavian countries, it's not really socially acceptable to have dogs if you work full time. It's considered kind of cruel. Wrong? I couldn't say. It makes me very uneasy. Not just because I badly want dogs and full time work, but because so many people here do that it's not on the agenda. What if those northerners are onto something? How can we tell if we won't even consider it? Maybe if we had the data we could petition more businesses to allow dogs to accompany owners to work.

There is a lot more to play than practice for fighting and hunting. You only need to watch the way they adapt to different playmates to see that. There are clues everywhere. My Erik considers putting teeth on dogs strictly for close friends only. This is especially so for faces. It's not hard to imagine why given there is a lot of important stuff on faces with not a lot of protection. Trust is paramount. My boys bite each other a lot everywhere and seem to know exactly how hard they can bite before they will cause pain. When you think about it, this is a really important thing for them to know. They can use their teeth for gentle, tender allogrooming, or they can use them for rough and tumble play, or they can use them to say "Quit it!" or they can use them to say "I really meant that!" or they can use them to say "This will end now". They can do all of that without causing injury, which is amazing when you think about their capacity to cause injury with their mouths. My two will often start jaw sparring as a kind of "slap fight" where there isn't enough room to run out the tension. One will be trying to exclude the other from something and they will bite at each other's face and it turns into play as a way for them to sort out their differences and release frustration safely without damaging their relationship. Play can be used to defuse tense situations. ETA the sneezing is an arousal-reducing thing, usually, or a transition behaviour if they are winding down play to do something else. Play usually follows a natural wave as arousal fluctuates. They will bring themselves down periodically. Watch what happens if they don't. The play gets more intense, dogs get more aroused, and it's more likely to turn serious.

If it's so simple, one has to wonder why it's not really a part of conventional treatment protocols as recommended by people who make a living treating anxious dogs. From the horse's mouth: http://www.dcavm.org/09nov.html Maybe you should open up shop, itsadogslife? Seeing as you know something the rest of academia and practicing veterinary behaviourists worldwide do not. Obedience training can indeed have knock-on effects to varying degrees, and there are even papers around that show this. Tracking and agility training as well. But at the end of the day, the dog really has to be in a positive emotional state in the first place to reap the benefits. An anxiety-related problem is likely to severely compromise that side of things. Karen Overall has long pushed for early drug intervention. She's been in the business for a very long time and is considered the best worldwide. Maybe you should give her a buzz and tell her she's barking up the wrong tree.

After having trouble with rotten meat from Cliff and Bully Beef in Menai, we now get all our meat from a meat market in Lansvale. I can't remember the name, but it's on the Hume Highway near McDonalds and is Ash-something. Ashfield or Ashford or something like that. It's a bit of a hike for us, but we buy in bulk. The quality is always good and it's very cheap. We usually get lamb brisket, chicken mince, beef offcuts or brisket, marrow bones, lamb shanks, pork bones and/or pig trotters, and usually some turkey wings and chicken livers/giblets/hearts. They also have pig heads, turkey tails, frozen fish, small whole chickens very cheap, goat, quail or duck if you want to get something fancy... They do really big orders if you call ahead and cut things into smaller pieces for you for free. Haven't found anywhere cheaper.

The known versus the unknown? :) Sounds like you have an optimistic dog. One of my dogs seems to assume that the unknown treat from a stranger is probably better than what he knows I have. It almost never is because I carry some pretty good treats, but he is very optimistic. I had a very, very picky eater here for a week who had been randomly punished for taking food so was very nervous about treats and generally wouldn't take them. He would sit for a tiny piece of boiled lamb heart, though. The boiled lamb heart speaks to most dogs. ;) I view it as a foot in the door. By the end of the week our picky eater would take any treat in the house and was even starting to look for opportunities to earn treats.

Er... The dog is guarding sticks and rocks. I would worry! That is not normal behaviour AFAIK. If the resource guarding goes on when the resource is no longer there, then something peculiar is going on. The whole point of resource guarding is to protect a resource, after all. The owner has already tried all the obvious solutions. I find it disturbing that it's not dependent on access to the magic spots, or the presence of the treats, and it's apparently going on for many hours. Resource guarding can get a bit loopy in an anxious dog, incidentally. There are a lot of questions I'd want to ask about this JRT cross before I was content to shrug it off. I would get a vet behaviourist to check it out. They will ask all the questions that need to be asked and if it is a compulsive behaviour they can treat it with medication, which will probably give you the best shot at changing things. I would want to change things, because what kind of life is that for the dog? They are spending stacks of their time warning everyone off something they never even eat. It's entirely possible she's not eating it because she's too stressed. It happens. Resource guarding is not a game for dogs, and a dog spending hours doing it is something to worry about IMO.

I think there is some confusion about the role arousal and emotional state play in the effectiveness of operant conditioning... And I just almost stated the title of a paper I'm submitting next week if the reviewer it's with gets the final check done. I spent about the last year thinking about this and working out conceptual models of it. The thing is, having a good handle on how to reinforce or punish behaviour is not so useful if arousal and emotional state have got the reigns rather than operant conditioning. You've got to remember that most reactive behaviour is distance increasing behaviour. In other words, the dog wants the trigger to go away. It's actually quite difficult to positively reinforce distance increasing behaviour. Think about a human example. Does screaming at someone to get that freaking spider away from your face make you feel good? Will popping a chocolate in your mouth between screams make you scream more? This stuff is complicated. You really need to understand both the operant conditioning side and the emotional/arousal state side simultaneously to properly identify what the triggers are and why the dog is behaving the way they are. If you aren't confident you can figure that out on your own, I think you should try to find a professional who can do it. Just to be safe. These things can get worse if they are not well understood.

Oh really? Holy crap, apart from the fact that as far as I can make out, this is a fairly big misrepresentation of study findings, the three points at the bottom have massive holes you can drive a truck through. Looks like pseudo-science to me. The stuff the OP posted before was not even pseudo-science, but outright quackery IMO. Dunno who Dr Becker is, but if they reference the studies mentioned I would check them out and see if they really do say what Dr Becker says they say. I check all my references. Even scientists are prone to attributing some odd things to other scientists for whatever reasons.

I'm not rusty on dog cognition research. :laugh: I'm in my third year of a PhD on dog cognition and affective state. I'm not real interested in the "which emotions" business, though. I don't think it's an especially pivotal question, and studies that have tried to find higher order emotions if that's what you want to call them in dogs have AFAIK found no evidence. It can be a tricky thing to investigate, though. It's difficult to prove when there are usually alternative explanations of behaviour based on better understood processes, like learning theory. I think if you're interested in this kind of thing you should take a look at Marc Bekoff's blog on Psychology Today. He is a pretty touchy feely scientist, but he collects anecdotes about animal emotions and has written books on it. I heard him speak at a conference recently and really enjoyed it. He's much more considered in front of a scientific audience!

Weasels, where are you? You have links to post! All right, fine. I'll do it. Here is a blog post by a dog scientist that has some nice basic (and uber well-informed) points about humping as well as a bunch of links to the most recent discussions (also uber well-informed) on this topic. http://doyoubelieveindog.blogspot.com.au/2012/09/a-moment-for-humping.html

Actually, trick training sets you up with all the skills you need. The only difference between 'trick training' and 'behaviour modification' is you might have to pay more attention to emotional state and lean more on classical conditioning in the latter. And behaviour modification can get delightfully complex if you have to figure out the balance of reinforcers and punishers maintaining a behaviour. 'Non-compliance' is not a behaviour, therefore, you can't punish it. The dog is doing something when they didn't do what you asked them to, and that's what you are punishing. You may also be working a lot in classical conditioning if the dog is anxious, which means you are probably going to make them more anxious about whatever they were aware of when you punished them. I don't bother correcting non-compliance for a bunch of reasons. Apart from the fact it's just not necessary if you are capable of proofing by setting the dog up to succeed, it's flashing the wrong currency. Punishment suppresses behaviour and you just asked for the dog to perform a behaviour. What do you want? More behaviour or less?? These things have knock-on effects beyond the specific behaviour they act on. A strong reinforcement history with your dog in a broad range of situations is phenomenally useful and the single best thing anyone with a reactive dog can do. My dogs have never been 'proofed' with punishment and yet are impressively attentive in most stressful situations. One of them is drivey, crazy smart, a touch reactive, and for the first 6 months of his life had a "Why should I?" attitude to everything we asked of him. I've had him turn around and run 10m back to me at the dog park to start a game of LAT with me because he saw something he really wasn't cool with. I didn't cue anything and gave him no signals. Hey, it's just a trick. But it sure is useful when the environment isn't cooperating with you. It's worth mentioning that a lot of distance-increasing behaviour looks a hell of a lot like chasing or approach behaviour. If you mistake what your dog actually wants you can make a real mess of it. And it's hard to tell, even if you know what you're looking for. I use BAT (Behaviour Adjustment Therapy) as a bit of a diagnosis tool. It's well worth reading up on.

What? Bayview?? Get yourselves down to Greenhills Beach in Cronulla pronto. The dog section is about 2km long. It's clean, big, and there are no roads nearby so the dogs can't get themselves into trouble very easily. It's got time restrictions: before 10am and after 4pm every day. It gets busy on warm days on the weekend, but it's almost deserted in the winter. We went to Bayview once and thought it was an anticlimax. Greenhills is way more interesting and roomy. And the parking is free. And it only takes us 20 minutes to get there rather than 70 minutes. :p If we want to take the boys to the beach during the day we usually run them down to Wollongong. They have an abundance of excellent dog beaches down there. It's well worth the 40 minute drive from the southern suburbs. If you're on the northern side of Sydney, the Central Coast has good dog beaches as well. Sydney beaches open to dogs during the day aren't worth bothering with.

Here's a review of research on guilt in dogs: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/2012/05/31/do-dogs-feel-guilty/ It includes the "I came home and he looked guilty before I even found the mess" anecdotes.

Corvus actually made no conclusions. Corvus saw an interesting trend in her data that hadn't even been properly analysed, but piqued her curiosity and so she asked 'the source' like breeders are always lamenting scientists never do. Corvus phrased her question very carefully and provided minimum information deliberately and as a result, for once actually got what she wanted out of the discussion, which was a few ideas she hadn't thought of. Corvus felt it was probably the single most successful discussion she has ever had on DOL, but it still pissed off a lot of breeders. See how hard it is to win? The thing about science is that it's really hard to do everything at once. Breeds, dog origin, socialisation, training... on and on. You need MASSIVE numbers. Thousands of dogs. When I can get those sort of numbers I'll be asking those sort of questions. Surveys are usually validated these days.

When people resort bullying and ridicule to shut down what they don't want to hear discussion is pointless. Sorry Corvus,hope you get some good ideas. I'm very interested to know what came of that, given that I have four breeds of Sighthound. From memory the majority of owners who responded to Corvus in the first instance were those who had ex race dogs and I also produced a few of those. "From memory"? Crimony, I don't even know what the majority of sighthound owners who responded had. You guys decided they were all ex race Greyhounds. I have no idea. That data wasn't collected and I said that at the time. You know why it wasn't collected? Because there's no point. The numbers will be too low to see any meaningful pattern in them. If we got about ten times more respondents, then we'd be able to ask some really interesting questions about dog origin. In answer to your question, it's on the cusp of being submitted for publication and I recently presented the breed and breed group findings at an international conference. If you filled it out and left your contact details you'll hear about it when it gets published. If not, maybe someone who did will be kind enough to share the details with you. Really, my supervisor isn't trying to get rid of pedigree dogs. He likes pedigree dogs. Most dog scientists do. Many of them own pedigree dogs. They have delicious piles of data associated with them, and reduced gene pools with huge phenotypical variations, and conveniently specific genetic diseases. They are being eyed off as excellent models for all sorts of human diseases and conditions. I mention pedigrees to my stats advisor and his eyes light up. He's just sad it's so hard to get breed clubs to share their data. He and his colleagues know how to get all manner of fascinating things out of it. He doesn't care about the politics. He just wants to see what's hiding in the data waiting to be discovered. It's like a treasure hunt. Unfortunately, if nothing else scientists are obliged to publish their findings, and objectivity can be a liability if you think you've got something you might want to hide. It's short-sighted to not look for fear of what you'll find, though.

I suspect you just said a lot more about yourself than Paul McGreevy. :laugh: I promise you, he's not interested in ending pedigree dogs. He's VERY interested in the long-term health of pedigree dogs. He doesn't think that necessarily means ending them. I hope you don't! He has the desire and the means to be a big help. Propagating hatred towards him in pedigree dog circles is probably at best unnecessary and at worst counter-productive. But hey, what would I know? I've only hung out with him talking dogs for the last 2 1/2 years.

I think everyone knows Paul McGreevy is my PhD supervisor. As such, I doubt anyone here knows him nearly as well as I do. I imagine it will make no difference to the hate, but seeing as he's not here to defend himself, I'm happy to vouch for him. His research is driven by an 'agenda' as much as any research is. He's passionate about animal welfare. That's his agenda. It's not really much more complicated than that. He's not the threat some people seem to think he is. He's open-minded and very approachable and reasonable and while he's a bit of an optimist about what science can achieve and what animal owners and trainers can be convinced to do, he is pretty grounded in reality. He's really not an extremist. He stirs up trouble throwing rocks at accepted practices he doesn't think should be accepted. He sees problems with purebreed dogs, but not insurmountable ones. I have absolute faith that he knows what he's on about. He's proven that to me over and over. I think the haters if they ever put their hate aside and spoke to him personally and gave him a sporting chance would be pleasantly surprised. I personally love working with him and would be happy to collaborate with him well into the future. As for the breeds thing, guys, if you want pedigrees to be treated separately study participation has to go way up. It's as simple as that. I had over a hundred breeds in my survey results and only about 1500 responses. Most breeds I couldn't treat separately because there weren't the numbers, let alone treating pedigree dogs separately. Time and again DOLers have been asked to participate in studies and they take it upon themselves to rip into the study, knowing nothing of how it has been designed and why and how it will be analysed. You are getting the chance to participate. If you choose not to, it's pretty hypocritical to then turn around and complain that studies are not representing your pedigree dogs accurately enough. We can only work with what data we get.

Honestly, dogs do not think like that. Well... a reinforcement is a reinforcement. My Erik has done some pretty astonishing things in order to get me to call him over. Like picking fights with my other dog, for example. And that's not even the worst of it. I know what the reinforcer is because if I stop supplying it the behaviour escalates like a classic extinction curve. Erik's extinction curves are typically so long that I have rarely waited one out all the way to the end. If I cut the unwanted behaviour off before it starts and reward with the same reinforcer, the behaviour disappears all together and he starts orienting to me when he would normally start the problem behaviour. As far as cuddling triggering it goes... It's not unheard of. In fact, it would fit right in with "virtual separation anxiety". Erik is good at that one, too. He knows when I am unavailable to him. Walk into the bathroom, Erik starts barking. I'm not as responsive to him when I'm in there. He also gets barky when I'm doing chores in the kitchen, and when I'm on the phone. It's not like he thinks "She's on the phone, she's not paying enough attention to me, need to act up to get attention again." It's more like "She's disconnected from me. What if I need her? Anything could happen! What's that noise??" These difficult dogs need a pretty sharp handler. I can't imagine what a horror Erik would be living with an average family.