corvus

Reconcile is used a lot in separation anxiety, but can also be used any time a dog needs to learn to change a behaviour that is deeply ingrained, usually because it is linked to an emotional response. The Reconcile just makes it easier for them to break out of their habits. Sometimes behavioural problems can be a result of chemical imbalances with the dog. Reconcile helps where there is not enough serotonin doing its serotonin thing, which is kind of complicated but can be seen particularly in compulsive behaviour. Vets tend to prescribe Clomicalm because it is very safe, so it's a good place to start. The side-effects are almost non-existent. Reconcile is also used to treat sudden onset and very intense fear or panic where the trigger happens often or is unpredictable, making it difficult to treat with faster-acting tranquillisers. Even just experiencing thunderstorms where she doesn't feel panicked is a form of behaviour modification training. Whether it sticks or not, though, is anyone's guess. More information on Reconcile here: http://www.drugs.com/vet/reconcile.html If it was me, I would just give it a go. Sounds like her quality of life coming into storm season is unlikely to get much worse. If you decide it's not worth it, you don't have to do a long tapering off, because the drug has a long half-life in the body, so the effects kind of taper off on their own once you stop giving it to her anyway. Be aware of the possible side-effects. It's a good idea to keep a record of relevant behaviour now before she starts the drug and then record it as she goes onto it and that way you'll be able to see if there is an effect or not.

While we're on the topic of dogs in Nordic countries, can someone explain to me what is meant by a "working dog" in Sweden? It has been a source of confusion for me for a while. The context is dogs that are bred for working dog competitions. Do they mean Schutzhund? This is different to field trials for gundogs, herding trials, and earthdog trials.

A time out might work just as well, but be careful. If it's too aversive or if Buckley is easily frustrated, he might take it out on Abbie. If you are going to use timeouts, mark it with something like "Too bad" and be very quick about getting him and putting him in timeout. The quicker the better. Ideally you would have his timeout spot very close. The marker will tell him exactly what this is a consequence for. He must understand what he did to cause the timeout for it to work. Can you use attention as a reward instead of food?

Shaping is the best! :D There is nothing on this planet Erik would rather do than clicker training. Apart from eating a bone, perhaps. He's a freaking machine. He especially loves to learn active things to do with his body, like directed jumping and rolling and weaving through my legs. Aside from being fun and excellent mental stimulation, it's also really cool when your dog can do tricks. People are easily impressed. ;)

Would anyone like to donate use of their photos to my upcoming presentation? I'm looking for photos of bold, confident-looking dogs and dogs that are looking shy or cautious. In particular, I'm after a Rottweiler and a Maltese. Wikimedia Commons is all right, but would prefer most of the dog in the shot so we can see how big they are. I'd put a photo credit on the slide next to your photo.

Can you give him something to distract him from pestering her, like a bone or Kong? If you are really worried you can teach him to respect her signals more by providing a consequence. For example, say she looks away from him, carefully not making eye contact. You distract him away from her and reward him. Over time, you want to fade out distracting him so that when he sees her turn away from him, his response is to automatically turn away from her.

Erik has always been one for showing a big improvement in a behaviour he's been having trouble with after a break of a few hours at least. I don't know much about latent learning, but I understand that breaks help us consolidate what we've learnt, and sleep is important for reorganising new memories. The strangest thing has been happening with him lately. Last week he spontaneously grabbed a ball he found in the park and put it in my hand. I started teaching him a retrieve months ago. I did lots of practise getting him to pick an object up out of my hand and I had started shaping him to pick something up off the ground and put it in my hand, but it needed a lot more work. So perhaps you can imagine my surprise when I haven't done any work on it at all for over a month and suddenly Erik is picking up balls and putting them in my hand. I've tried it a few more times and he's especially good when I toss the ball to him and he catches it on the full, which is what we were playing around with last time I did some work on it. He's just magically improved a behaviour well beyond what I have taught him?? Then yesterday I started doing some work on a knee vault I had been teaching him and straight off the bat he was doing it better than he's ever managed before. It's been about a week since I last visited that behaviour with him. It's like he's finally got the whole point of knee vaults. I think with both this one and the retrieve I finished our last training session just when he had done one or two that were much closer to what I wanted. Maybe he's just retained the last version he got rewarded for? I have no idea. And then he did something else intriguing yesterday. I sent him to a little stand that people sit in that resembles wide stairs. I then cued him to back up the stairs, which he can do, but he wouldn't. I tried a few times and he wouldn't move. So I called him (and Kivi) off the stand. Erik came down, paused, then turned around and hopped up again, turned himself around so he was facing me and straight, and when I cue him to walk backwards he did a textbook step up onto the stair behind with his back feet. It was exceptional. He backed up several, just about did a handstand in the process as he hunted for the stairs with his back feet, then came down and backed up again. What's with that? Did he know what I was cueing before and just wasn't set up properly to do it? He was quite deliberate about how he set himself up the second time. He was very straight and forward on the stair so he had enough room to lift his back feet. So weird. Has anyone else experienced things like this? I don't really see it with Kivi. His tricks are much easier, so maybe that's why, but he just doesn't really do these big leaps in understanding that Erik seems to.

I feed raw. Dry food confuses and intimidates me. I needed to buy some for the Manners Minder and Buster Cube etc. and ended up going with Supercoat Sensitive Stomache. After reading the ingredients on dozens of packets of dog food it seemed like a good deal. Most of the ingredients were the same as the premium brands and it came in smaller bags. I don't think I even believe in premium dog food atm. Raw is premium. I mean, it's actually fresh meat. It's been suggested to me that I treat kibble as a supplement for obscure minerals and vitamins. So they get small amounts. I don't think they've ever had enough of it to have a noticeable reaction to it. My last dog was on Supercoat most of her life and when she was 9 her health went downhill rapidly. It picked up again miraculously when I put her on homecooked. It was astonishing.

I have a friend who is putting one Mini Poodle through UD and another is doing earlier obedience levels and both are tracking. They are doing quite well, but I gather it takes a bit of care with foundation work to avoid potential problems with too much pressure too soon.

Crime, Law and Social Change (2011) 55:391–403 DOI 10.1007/s10611-011-9293-6 Then they came for the dogs! Simon Hallsworth Published online: 15 April 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011 Abstract This paper examines the British state’s desire to liquidate the Pit Bull as a breed. It examines the moral panic that brought the Pit Bull Terrier to public attention and traces the government’s knee-jerk response that resulted in the Dangerous Dogs Act (1991), the legal instrument that mandated Britain’s first attempt at canine genocide. Though public protection was the stated justification of this exercise in state violence, there was and is no evidence to support the case for canine killing through the indiscriminate blanket medium of breed specific legislation. Far from conceiving the dog an aggressor and humans its victims, this paper precedes on the assumption that the dogs are the victims and humans the inhuman aggressor. The paper concludes by examining the factors that provoked the UK’s descent into mass dog killing. ETA link: http://www.springerlink.com/content/b0443t7441128441/

Sorry, but why does it matter if someone says crap about breeds that you don't want in the hands of any old Tom Dick or Harry anyway? Doesn't this kind of thing serve to do a lot of the weeding for breeders? I wouldn't recommend a LGD except in very special circumstances. I wouldn't be recommending APBT willy nilly, either. I do think a high pain threshold makes dogs 'safer', but any trait can be a double-edged sword. Safer as long as everything is going according to plan.

Read Coppinger. ;)

Interesting. I've recently been through this with Kivi. He started out throwing himself on the ground if he didn't understand what he was meant to be doing within about 5 seconds. Reward rate meant nothing to him if he didn't know what he was supposed to be doing. I started target training him, and that was very useful because it gave me a way to prompt behaviours and get the ball rolling. He knows he can always target and that will be right, which makes him more confident to try other new things. Before targeting, he was very reticent to try new behaviours, even though I'd done lots of free shaping and encouraging creativity from him when he was a puppy. More recently I've been more sensitive to him. If he gets distracted and isn't looking at me, chances are he is starting to feel frustrated. I manage reward rate carefully to avoid this, and only do a very small number of reps on something we are just starting on and far outweigh it with old things he knows and is confident with. I keep my criteria very easy until the rough behaviour is on cue and he is clear on that cue. It is imperative for him that he be confident with the behaviour before I start shaping it. As much as possible, I set up the environment so he is more likely to get the behaviour I want early and is more likely to perform it as close to the finished criteria as possible. Then I let him pester me and rewarded it. Heeling is his default behaviour to tell me he wants to train. I gradually increased my criteria for 'giving in' to his pestering me to train with heeling by cueing something and rewarding it. He must be offering a very nice heel with eye contact and in the sweet spot. He tried crowding me for a while to try to draw my attention to the fact that he was heeling. He still does that occasionally. Over time his heeling duration went up and up because I would always give in just when he was starting to wonder if he'd ever get rewarded, but before the behaviour suffered. You'd see the look in his eyes. His eyes get a little bright and his face tightens just a tiny bit, showing the anxiety. That's cutting it fine, but the relief when he gets rewarded a moment later is powerful. Then I started rewarding the offered heels with cues for other behaviours. I find the better he understands the behaviour, the more confident he is in performing it, and therefore the more persistent he is with it, which gives me the opportunity to shape and polish it. So I work on improving cue fluency a lot to help his confidence. Anyway, that's what I've been doing. I'm really happy with how Kivi has come along. He's a different dog, and training him is a lot easier. I have to live with an obsessive heeler who sometimes refuses to be dismissed, but it's a nice problem to have, I guess. I'm happy that Kivi is so happy.

Hmm... Try more distance. IME 'explosions' usually happen because there is too much pressure. I'm not sure if it would be the same for your fella, but I've experienced the thing where they seem fine and then suddenly flip out too fast to do anything about it, and reducing the pressure either with more distance or by going slower tends to slow them down and give you a chance to see what is going on. I've been surprised a few times at how reducing the pressure has made it much more obvious how unsettled the animal is. Suddenly I see lots of behaviours I didn't see before because it was all happening too fast. And they will respond in smaller increments, so instead of getting a sudden explosion you get, say, restlessness, fixations, whining, signs of agitation or distress, signs of uncertainty and hesitancy. That's when you jump in and cue LAT or something else, because they aren't sure what they should do and you've just told them, so they'll probably do it. For me, getting practise in real life in those early stages was the hardest bit because Erik was used to just firing up early. I had to really watch him so I could get in before he barked. I treated any silent looking as an offered LAT and rewarded it and then started cueing it once I had his attention. That was a turning point and I think it really helped me be clearer with what I wanted so he could deliver. It wasn't long from there before he started offering it in response to things in the environment. Leslie McDevitt stresses that LAT is a conversation between dog and handler. It's a way for your dog to tell you they are bothered by something without flipping out, and a way for you to warn them when there's something coming or tell them how to handle something if they are anxious about it. Glad you like my threads. ;) Tlc, yep, what Bronson does is exactly the kind of thing Erik does. Bronson doesn't have any herder in him, does he??

Wait, you can check a thread without your name coming up on the bottom??

Sometimes I think there are a bunch of different things you can be working on at once to address a single basic problem because you have several different triggers that you want the same general response to. I'm often surprised how things can come together all in a rush at the end. I think that they just become proficient at what you have been teaching them, so they are faster, have a better understanding, and grow more confident. They default to the new behaviour and start applying it to novel situations or to situations you haven't been dealing with directly. They have success with it and grow even more confident. On the weekend Kivi tried to jump onto a rock, fell off, tried to jump again, slipped again, then tackled it from a different angle and got up. All because he's had a few months of careful challenging and rewarding for getting outside his comfort zone. A few months ago he would not have even tried to get onto the rock. It's not just because we rewarded him for jumping on rocks. We did loads of body awareness exercises and taught him balance and encouraged him to just try, even if he didn't get there. It was an entire program, really. He was the same, and it came together in a rush as he suddenly realised he could do this kind of thing. Very much a generalised concept rather than a single behaviour. I don't think I'm communicating this very well. Does it ring a bell?

Today Erik literally turned around and ran 10m to me so he could 'tell' me about the huge number of dogs in the park playing ball using LAT. Sometimes he's fine with huge numbers of dogs playing ball, but sometimes they make him bark. Triggers are surprisingly complicated with him. I LOVE how I don't have to guess so much anymore. He tells me when something is over stimulating him. It's the second time in a week and a half that he's told me about something that is making him want to bark by initiating LAT. What's more, I can tell him when he can use LAT to cope with something he isn't sure about and it gives him that confidence to relax a little and accept it. The more Erik practises LAT, the more often I get surprised by how he uses it and what it tells me.

If anyone would like to read the paper in full, PM me. I've only skimmed it, but it seems like a pretty good read if you're into that kind of thing.

Puppy farms, by in large, are large scale commercial breeding establishments. That does NOT mean ALL commercial breeding establishments are puppy farms, nor does it say that neglect is the only way a large breeder can be a commercial success. Nor does it say that small scale guarantees adequate care. From the introduction: I quote it for the sake of clarity so everybody knows exactly what the authors of the paper studied. When recruiting participants they asked for dogs that were ex-breeding stock from "commercial breeding establishments ("puppy mills")" and they considered the terms synonomous. It's not my definition or the RSPCA's definition. It's theirs. ETA It's not really theirs, even. They seem to be following Merriam-Webster's definition. It's beside the point. I intended only to clarify facts before the discussion degenerated into a matter of semantics.

The paper stipulated the study was on ex-breeding stock from large scale commercial breeding estabishments. The RSPCA's definition of a puppy farm doesn't enter into it.

I've been trying to teach Erik to weave backwards through my legs. He does forwards well, and he can do forwards while I walk backwards, but backwards while I walk backwards has eluded us. I started following a method someone on YouTube used that started with teaching the dog to walk backwards in a semi-circle around you. Erik nailed that, but then I had a dog who would scoot back through my legs and right around until he was almost in front of me again. I was slowly pegging it back by with rewards and interrupting his circle, but was still having trouble setting him up so I could send him backwards through my legs the other way. Then a couple of days ago I saw another video of training the backwards weave that made a lot more intuitive sense to me. This afternoon I was jamming with E on the beach and it dawned on me as a result of the video that I could improve our success rate by moving my legs while I'm rewarding Erik for the first step to set myself up rather than him so he could go back through them again. Seems obvious, but I hadn't thought of it. In just a few reps Erik was 'seeking' the gap between my legs with his rear end in both directions and changing directions much more quickly and tightening up his movements to stay closer to my legs all on his own. Which just goes to show, I think, that when you get it right it all kind of falls into place. I had several different criteria go forwards in a big leap at once. That's not meant to happen in Behaviorism. I love that moment when there's a connection and we seem to understand each other much better all of a sudden. I love that it's just good communication, yet not always obvious. I love trick training because I have to figure out how to get behaviours that aren't particularly natural. I love training epiphanies. What training epiphanies have you had?

Well, from what I have seen and experienced it can be difficult to avoid the effects of punishment bleeding into other behaviours. That's a problem to me. Poisoning cues is not very helpful or a compromise I'm willing to accept. Having the effects of rewards spread to other behaviours is generally a good thing, though. What goes on with Erik and rewards is not typical. He's a wee bit manic and seems to have a short-term memory a mile long. I think that it's worthwhile differentiating between trainers and behaviourists, here. There are a few behaviourists I would trust to punish my dogs. They are the ones that I know are well versed in the many and varied uses of positive reinforcement, classical conditioning, and providing outlets for natural behaviours. There are no trainers I have met at this stage that I would trust to punish my dogs.

So does everyone? I thought I was the one trying to stop the silly circular discussions. You were saying the proverbial 'you' can't have a preference and suggested this was because training incorporates all of the quadrants depending on what is appropriate. I disagreed and said I have a favourite even though I use all of the quadrants depending on what is appropriate. The point I was making was hardly dependent on a large sample size. In fact, I made a point earlier that it's pointless bringing up individuals as 'evidence' for the superiority or efficacy or lack thereof of a training method. But let's keep those arguments separate so no one gets confused. To properly represent the reality of dog training takes a fair bit more than a 2 page brochure. Sometimes people ask me specific questions about dog behaviour because they know I'm studying it. The more I learn, the harder the questions are to answer because it's hard to distil what I do know into something small and useful. Most of the trainers and behaviourists I know just don't talk about punishments much because they have to work so hard to get people to stop using them inappropriately. If I had a dollar for every time I saw someone in the street inappropriately punish a dog and completely fail to even change the behaviour they are punishing, I'd be able to fund my own research. It's extremely common. It's always nice to have a realistic discussion with someone who's been in the game for a long time about ways to use some quadrants other than R+, but I can understand why they don't want to talk about that in public. They are terrified that if they explain it can be used humanely they will be taken out of context and used to justify misuse. I wholeheartedly believe that's what would happen. It happened here when Steven Lindsay visited last year. Anyway, I agree that the divide is stupid and inaccurate, but I think the overall message is more useful than a more balanced one. Incidentally, they reference good sources and in context. You don't have to look very hard to find an academic saying positive reinforcement is good and punishment can potentially make things worse. Most of them around the world seem happy to say it.

I think that puppies should be allowed to greet dogs on walks. I think it is natural for them and helps them learn to differentiate between dogs that are friendly and dogs that are not. Most puppies I have known have grown out of the desperate need to greet every dog they lay eyes on.

What about a Bouvier? They do have strong guarding tendencies so would need good socialisation and a sensible, no nonsense approach, but they are much more inherently obedient than a Sibe. Our next door neighbours during a weekend camping had one that I really, really liked. She was big and gentle and self-contained, but very conscious of rules. She did not like my corgi inviting herself into their tent for a snooze. She was not allowed in the tent, therefore, the little dog was not allowed in the tent and someone needed to tell her! It was the only time we saw her get grumpy. She lived with small children and was fine off leash around the campsite. Didn't stray and didn't get into any trouble. They have also been used for carting quite a bit.