corvus

Well, it's usually pretty obvious, I find. Friendly dogs are loose with tongues flapping around and ears back while they run. Unfriendly charging dogs have ears forward, tail stiff, hackles up, often teeth showing and growling or roaring. I think they carry their heads lower. I don't often see unfriendly dogs charging. Goodness me. If you can't read oncoming dogs, can you read your own? Does screaming like a banshee make your dog feel at ease? Maybe you should look at some books or dvds and learn a bit about dog body language so you don't have to be so scared when you're out walking your dog. Life is a lot more relaxing when you can read an oncoming dog. There's a Facebook group that looks at dog body language. Lots of photos and videos and everyone adds their interpretation. It's good practise identifying key signals, and informative.

I don't really know because I ended up getting a bunch of things collected by Bongo and forwarded together, so it was quite expensive. It was hard to find anyone that would ship to Australia. I'm not sure why I didn't know about Clean Run. Sounds like sharing a Clean Run order would be the way to go.

But what's the difference between a dog that tends to react aggressively and a dog that doesn't if anxiety drives the behaviour of both?

I got mine from the US and had it shipped over. At that stage I don't think anyone in Australia was selling them. There was some kind of claim that the remote wouldn't work in Australia, which I thought sounded like codswallop, so I ignored it and have not had any problems at all getting the remote to work. I really like it.

Spitze, apparently, although Spitzen is also used in the States, I hear.

I will qualify that statement by saying that dogs who are prone to reacting aggressively and are prone to biting (instead of a warning growl) should not be taken to dog parks. What about dogs that are prone to getting anxious around other dogs but do not react aggressively?

Not really, 'cause it sounds like it's probably pretty complicated. :p My guess is there are several separate problems that may or may not be a result of a the same root cause. The first step is to implement NILIF (nothing in life is free). I think it can be dangerous to abruptly introduce negative consequences for behaviour. It amounts to a challenge. Who knows how the dogs will react? Even NILIF I would introduce gradually rather than all at once. A history of deference towards the dog is a recipe for disaster. The fighting is probably a whole other thing and if they really are seriously injuring each other I'd take it VERY seriously. Every time they fight they are getting upset and frightening each other and themselves and learning that life with the other dog is dangerous and distressing. They become more on guard, are more likely to strike out just in case they need to get in first, and there's a good chance the fights will get more violent. This is something that has to be sorted out sooner rather than later. If nothing else, he has to keep them separated so they can't fight with each other. If he can't or is not willing to do that, he should do the dogs a favour and rehome one now before there's only one dog left. By separated, I mean they should not even be able to see each other. They can still intimidate each other if they can see each other.

I disagree. It if was abnormal, why are people always whinging about dogs running up to theirs? IME, dogs like to greet each other. They don't really want to play with strangers unless they are pups, but they like to know who is around. I have NEVER been asked to call my dog(s) away. Once I was asked to wait where I was with my dogs until the owners could get their dog out of the river and back on leash. I have had people look tense, and I take that to mean they and/or their dog are not entirely comfortable and act accordingly. I do not ask people if my dogs can approach theirs because if I do, people look at me like I'm a loony. Besides which, it's a waste of time. I have found that most of getting along with other dog park users is reading their body language and just being polite. I have seen aggressive dogs walked through the park on leash. If I see a dog on leash in the park, I tend to take that as a signal that the owner doesn't want their dog to interact with other dogs for whatever reasons. My dogs do not normally need to be told to leave them alone, but if they look like they are going to be optimistic about it, I call them away and I don't tend to have any troubles doing that. If for some inexplicable reason they did not come back, I would not run after them in case it upset the dog they were approaching or encouraged them to move faster. If they got to the leashed dog and were bitten, I'd put them back on leash and tell them they were idiots and this is why they should listen to me and apologise to the person with the leashed dog. I know people with dogs that don't respond well to being walked through the dog park that now walk them on the path outside the park. Seems sensible. I think it's reasonable to expect that if you take a dog into a dog park, it will be approached by off leash dogs. Right or wrong, that's what's going to happen. ETA Actually, dog going on leash when the owners see me coming is usually a signal for me to leash my dogs. Which causes confusion because no one knows why the dogs are on leash and which ones are aggressive. It usually turns out none of them are, and they just didn't want their dogs running off or being silly, and they are confused as to why I would want to prevent my dogs from running up to theirs and potentially upsetting them if my dogs are friendly. Go figure! The power of actions amongst strangers. Noisy arguments happen between dogs sometimes, and people don't tend to do much about it except break it up and deal with the fallout for their own dog. I don't think they tend to report trouble. There are dogs everyone knows as troublemakers, but in the end, the attitude is that we are sharing public space and should not cause trouble ourselves with each other. I imagine this is why people get offended when you ask them to keep their dogs away from yours. It's kind of weird and people wouldn't know how to take it, so they may take it as you being rude. Not saying you are, just trying to explain why people are 'stupid'. Oftentimes they are not. They just don't understand, it's outside their realm of experience, so they default to a human context where being asked to keep their dog away is kind of like being asked to keep themselves away, which is quite a strong thing to say to someone you don't know in a public place.

You can't. But you can get anticipation, which looks just about as nice and is pretty fun too, and you can train persistence and focus. ;)

This is why I love dog parks. So much goes on in them that is below the notice of most people, but it's really interesting when you start watching. Kivi has left me picking my jaw up off the ground several times because he handles tense social situations in quite complex ways with such success sometimes. I learn a lot from him.

It can be confusing, especially when dogs are too close to the other dog. They will tend to 'blow up' and attack even if what they really wanted to do all along was avoid. I can't stress enough how useful distance is. It slows everything down so you can better see what the dog wants to do, gives the dog space to be more calm, and that puts them in good state for getting acceptable alternative behaviours you can reward. There's a dog that goes to our dog park that has had a go at Erik a few times for no real reason except that Erik didn't get out of the way fast enough. E really hates him. If we are maybe 20m away from the dog, E will want to approach him barking. But if we are maybe 30m away, Erik will duck behind me so I'm between him and the dog and look away. It's not really obvious from his behaviour alone that he is scared of this dog and wants to avoid him until he has more distance and feels that is an option for him.

I don't bother asking anymore. IME it means nothing. Everyone I've ever asked has said yes and several of those dogs snapped anyway, which completely did not surprise me, although it surprised the owner. I just trusted the owner, who I somehow thought would know better than me. So now I trust my own judgement and ask out of politeness if I'm not sure if someone wants their dog to interact or not.

Sounds like a good plan. It's certainly not going to hurt to do some more coursework! Have you done much basic training with dogs? If not, that might be a good place to start to get used to training different dogs and see how you like it, then branch out from there.

Yes, you are quite right. Even the people I meet at the dog park outside of research interests are probably more interested than many people that own dogs. If they are out there walking their dog off leash every day they are more committed than the people with dogs I never see because they are always in the yard. Haha, sounds like a story I have heard several times in the last couple of years. I'm on my second vet honours student and have just about stopped being surprised about what they do and don't get taught. :p Sometimes it seems like an impossible task. But, there are a lot of people like you just quietly plugging away. I think they are making a difference. Just in small increments.

I wouldn't worry too much at this point. It's pretty common for puppies to be 'in your face'. They are babies and they believe everyone will love them. The best way for them to learn how to behave is experience. As they get older they typically grow out of the impossibly exuberant greetings and calm down a little. Kivi was about 10 months old when he started thinking twice about approaching every single dog and loving on them. Erik was about 14 months. I got pretty excited and proud of them when they started making sensible decisions about other dogs. It's a coming of age. Before that they will just approach every dog and they need you to keep an eye on them and hover over them and stop them from approaching some dogs that are giving them the eye and growling.

It's an unregulated industry in Australia. Robert Holmes has about 8 years of tertiary study. Steve Austin... not so much. His success is mostly built on experience. It's a good example, actually, of the different paths one can take. Robert Holmes has tonnes of experience as well, but went down the vet science route, which means he did a BVM and then a PhD on top of that. There's no way that Steve's experience can really compare to Robert's. They are very different. I was only being semi-facetious when I said a PhD in animal behaviour. I know a few behaviourists that have gone that route and they are exceptionally good. You're right, there is a LOT of theory. I did a BSc in zoology and am now doing a PhD in dog behaviour. I can pretty much guarantee you that your dog training course did not give you a good background in dog behaviour insofar as yes, it would have just scratched the surface. That's not to say it was useless, though. I think you have to ask yourself how deep you want to go. PhDs are very specialised, but I'm still learning stacks and it all gets applied. A science background also has a big influence on the way I approach problems. It's not just knowing theory, but the way I've been taught to think. To achieve your aim as stated above, I don't think you need a PhD or even a science degree. But I don't know that courses are going to be much help, either. I would start self-educating. There are loads of text books out there. Steven Lindsay's three volume series is a great place to start for dog-specific info and a lot of it is available online. He's not the best writer and I find the books a bit heavy going and frustratingly meandering, but there's no better collection and synthesis of dog-related science that I know of.

Well... I'll defend myself here. I think there are people on this forum that are essentially average dog owners, or at least the sort of average that is slightly more interested than average, which is why I asked this in general and not in the training forum. People new to dogs and people with a rescue dog or a dog that isn't as easy as other dogs have been and so on. Thanks for the support, though. ;) I'm just kicking ideas around at the moment. There's this PhD that seems to sap most of my creative energy... ETA Grisha Stewart is doing something like this in the US. I watched her organic socialisation dvd a while back and was really impressed. She is very good at distilling body language down to the most simple and useful bits.

Honestly I think it varies from dog to dog. My boys seem to think a butt sniff without first making eye contact and sniffing faces is quite uncivilised. But it's perfectly fine to do one afterwards. I think mostly 'rudeness' comes down to personal space. Some dogs are more sensitive to personal space than others. Erik seems to think it's quite rude to make contact with another dog he doesn't know very well in play (not uncommon with herders IME). Kivi will happily sideswipe, jostle, and bowl over a dog he's known for a total of 15 seconds. That's if he hasn't just thrown himself on the ground with the hope that they will come and wrestle with him. When you look at how differently they behave, it is unsurprising that there are misunderstandings amongst dogs that don't know each other. Some dogs will naturally tend to be more physical and some will naturally want less physical contact (or none at all). You just have to read the dogs involved. But it's not very easy. Lots of dogs aren't all that comfortable with greetings. Probably because they never quite know how it's going to pan out. They have all this history that comes out as soon as they see another dog. Some people don't let their dogs greet at all, and I can understand that. I think it's important for Kivi at least to greet, though. Sometimes Erik doesn't want to and sometimes he does. I let them decide most of the time, but I make sure they don't do a lot of crowding or sniff for more than a moment or two, which can be too intense for some dogs.

Yup if Steve was teaching it I would love to take my dogs along because he's brilliant with animal psychology. Sounds like you should ask him, then.

Some dogs have very waggy tails. I never noticed until recently how expressive those tails are. The wagging changes from moment to moment and sometimes I can't figure out why. I was watching this dog watch a little girl do cartwheels. His tail wagged, but stopped when she was upside-down, then started again with a moment of renewed vigour when her feet touched the ground again. I could not figure it out. My supervisor suggested an upside-down girl doesn't make sense to him, so when she was the right way up again he felt a little relieved, or the world made sense again so the tail went back to default wagging state. Similar to the way Erik flips out when someone jumps in the pool. Pool on its own he can deal with, but when people are in there he just does not know what to make of that.

Oh, I don't think it would be 100% dog behaviour stuff. Probably aimed at average dog owners doing puppy or basic manners classes, but with an emphasis on introducing the notion that dogs don't love everything we do to them but they will tell us when they don't love it and it's nice to listen to them. I dunno, I think that maybe if you give people some basic info and some rules of thumb to guide them out there in the world, perhaps they can muddle through better than if they'd been given no basic info or rules of thumb. Things like "is the tail loose or stiff?" and "if in doubt, move farther away" is stuff that's pretty easy to remember and get into the habit of doing and quite useful. What do you think? I wish that people could grasp that dogs don't think like people do, but that might be asking a bit much.

So which is it ? Those two aren't mutually exclusive. Obviously the earlier post was a general sort of statement and the later post a clarification.

Thanks.

There's no way a class can teach anyone how to read subtleties in individual dog behaviour, and no one has any business trying to teach that in a class. It's a one-on-one job. But imagine if no one ever gave advice on the meaning of body language because it was too easily misinterpreted. How do any of us learn? There are some things that are pretty universal. Something is, I think, better than nothing. The world is full of dogs acting up because no one noticed when they were pouring out tonnes of displacement and avoidance behaviours.

It'd be kind of a socialisation and early training class with a difference. Small classes, emphasis on foundation skills like building a reward history, knowing when your dog is a little (or a lot) uncomfortable, what to do about it, basic rules of thumb to help you get through hairy moments or times when your dog does something unexpected, and when and how to intervene.