corvus

Good to hear.

Maybe this is a bit off topic, but I'm wondering to what extent you have to be careful with giant breeds when doing this kind of thing with them? I remember someone on another forum with one of those big Swiss mountain dogs and he'd get sore if he did any kind of running at all. So they kept him quiet. I wonder if he really did need to be kept from running and jumping, or if he just didn't have the muscle tone to support his bulk when he was doing it, or maybe didn't have the structural stability he should have? Impossible to say for him in particular, but do you ease them into it to make sure they are going to be okay, or are they just okay regardless?

She's gorgeous! It's great to see a big dog doing this sort of stuff as well. I guess there's a perception that they are the kind of dog that just plods along beside you. Kind of like very small dogs are rarely exercised to the extent bigger dogs are, so there's a perception that they can't walk as far and so on. Someone was telling me about a Tibbie they had with a Golden Retriever. The GR was very active, so got walked for 2 hours a day. The Tibbie kept up no worries and was just a little ball of muscle. We were talking about whether I could get a very small breed and take it on some of the long and physically challenging hikes we do with our larger dogs. E is not big, but he's very strong and tough and copes well with the creek crossings and climbing up and down rocky outcrops.

Yes, but it's what happened when the vending machine got fixed that interests me. Suddenly they were whacking away at all the buttons rather than just the one that gives them the good stuff.

Not quite. The reward rate has been constant. The volume just went from base level to lower, then back up to base level again. The behaviour was maintained in one dog on the lower reward volume, but only semi-maintained in the other (about 50-90% response rate to cue). When the reward volume went back to the base level, both dogs started performing the behaviour when not cued as well. I'm wondering if learning theory can explain this, because I'm really excited about the alternative and I need someone less excited to be rational about it. My learning theory knowledge is just the basics, really. I never did psychology. There is a huge mountain of data about this stuff, but it's so hard to find anything specific in it!

Love Esky in the birdbath! We don't have any gorgeous big fallen trees like you do, Newfsie. Just big boulders, here. And walls. And log fences. And the cement blocks the world seems to be dotted with. This is how we did most of our rear end awareness work: It was really more body awareness in general and balance. Kivi learnt as well, as you can see by him pushing in and trying to show me his log tricks. :p

You're describing Erik! I just kinda pick whatever reward I think suits the type of training I want to do. I was reading about persistence in behaviour this week. There's a theory that animals that are particularly persistent may have more dopamine receptors, meaning they pay more attention to any signal that might relate to reward. Susan Garrett knows what she's doing! I know some other people that use tug and food that way as well.

I have a burning, burning learning theory question. If a behaviour appears to be under stimulus control, (for, say, approximately 90 trials over 3 days) can increasing the reward value (not frequency) cause the behaviour to drift and the stimulus control to slip? I.e., behaviour is no longer under stimulus control.

I have rules like this for Erik. I swear, that dog has short term memory a mile long. He loves cues and is good at training me to give them when he cues me to. I don't want to be presumptuous talking about stuff I don't have much direct experience with, but my guess is the reinforcement balance in this sort of scenario can be quite complex. We don't know how Elbie perceives an interruption to his run, but if it works, evidence would suggest he finds it aversive on the whole, all reinforcement interactions aside.

Just wanted to highlight that one so no one misses it and say "Exactly!" My boys love hand touches, too. It's one of those behaviours that I'm always finding new uses for. I agree that it's more about connecting with your dog than what exactly you're using to do that. Rewards have their own value, but IMO there's a lot more to reward delivery than just paying. There are layers to it, I think. Under the surface value there is conditioning going on, probably acting on several different things at once. We can use that. Today at the beach Kivi brought me a papery old piece of weathered stick. I took it from him, had a look, then played a quick game of "get it" with him. He won his piece of stick and trotted off to crunch it up. I didn't ask for anything for that interaction, but that's not to say it can't help my training.

Just for a different perspective, I think trainers should be skilled enough to be able to choose the rewards they want to use, not have to be constrained by their dogs' primary motivator. Often you hear "you don't choose the reward, your dog does", but honestly, you can make just about anything rewarding to your dog if you want to, so why wouldn't you if you want to?

Erik is part cat. It also started kind of with teaching hind end awareness. And balance. Things like the one in the video he won't do unless asked, usually. I didn't actually originally ask him to do that one. I asked Kivi and he got all outraged and insisted on doing it himself. Video proof was requested, so I went back and asked him to film it. He will quite happily jump onto boulders and logs and climb around. With very little encouragement he will scale up boulders over my head height. As long as they have a slight inward slope he can run up them. I did see him once jump from one boulder onto another with a nearly verticle face and just cling there like some kind of mountain goat. He gets all his weight on the lower set of legs and he is quite comfortable.

Source: Applied Animal Behaviour Science, Available online 12 September 2011 Factors affecting dog–dog interactions on walks with their owners[/size] Petr Řezáč, Petra Viziová, Michaela Dobešová, Zdeněk Havlíček, Dagmar Pospíšilová Little is known about factors influencing dyadic interactions between dogs in public places. This paper reports on the effect of dog age, gender and size, human gender and the use of a leash on the occurrence of body sniffing, scent-marking, playing games, showing a threat and biting in canine dyads on walks with their owners. Observations of 1870 interacting dogs were made in public places where owners frequently walked their dogs. Dogs off a leash sniffed one another more often than dogs on a leash (P < 0.001). Males sniffed females more often than vice versa (P < 0.05) and than when dogs of the same gender sniffed one another (P < 0.01). Males marked more often than females when they encountered the same gender (P < 0.05) as well as the opposite gender (P < 0.001). Puppies played together more than twice as often as adults (P < 0.001) and eleven times as often as seniors (P < 0.001). The occurrence of play was seen more often between dogs of opposite genders than between males (P < 0.01). Small, medium and large dogs played with dogs of the same size more often than with dogs of different sizes. Threat appeared twice as often between dogs on a leash as between dogs off a leash (P < 0.001). Dogs of the same genders showed a threat nearly three times more often than dogs of opposite genders (P < 0.01). Males (P < 0.05) and females (P < 0.01) bit dogs of the same gender more than five times more often than dogs of the opposite gender. Dogs showed a threat more often (P < 0.05) and they bit another dog more than four times more often (P < 0.05) when both owners were men than when they were women. In conclusion, the dog age, gender and size, human gender and the use of a leash had a marked effect on dyadic interactions between dogs on walks with their owners.

That is good news.

We don't like to call whatever animals feel the same thing as what we feel even if it looks the same because we're not sure if it is the same and there's no way to tell. But Panksepp got in trouble with fellow scientists for saying rats laugh. His defence was if something uses the same brain pathways and the same neurotransmitters and occurs in the same contexts of a particular human feeling, then what else is it going to be but the same thing? I don't think anyone especially disagreed with him, but it makes scientists uneasy.

He loves both, I just know that his favourite is food. If you saw him with a ball or with a tug, though - you would swear that he loved them more than anything! He tugs with a lot of intensity but food is his number #1 love. Drivey dogs in theory are meant to be drivey about a lot of things. Erik is like that. He'll throw everything he has into earning a food reward, and he'll throw everything he has into earning a tug. Sometimes I think the rewards are not nearly as good to him as the process of earning rewards. Kivi's favourite is food as well. He still tugs around food, though. A wee bit tough to teach him, but I just shaped it and we got there.

Thanks guys. Maybe Nelson Bay is a little farther to go than I was imagining, but I'll look into Redhead beach. We like large off leash areas. Love dog beaches that take a couple of hours to walk up and back (with stops for training).

Dogs generally won't unless you teach them. It's like changing tracks. It's not really natural for them to go from food to tug and back to food. The two use brain pathways that are thought to be antagonistic to one another. They have to learn how to do it and then it becomes easy for them same as anything they are taught how to do.

I have just finished my pilot study and feel like it might be nice to take a few hours off tomorrow to devote to my dogs instead of other people's. I'm currently in Morisset. I know about Horseshoe Beach in Newcastle, but wondering if there are other fun places I can take them for an off leash jaunt around about?

In my view, I don't want to change what my dogs value. I want to have more reinforcers. Tug is a good reinforcer because it is social, active, and engages my dog in play, which is associated with a positive emotional state. I can use play to put my dog in a state where they are bouncy and animated, which in turn is helpful in shaping behaviours that are more likely to occur or look the way I want them to look when my dog is more aroused than usual. I can do that with food if I use a snappy, high reward rate and structure my training session to include lots of easy, active behaviours, but usually I find play does the job better. I can also get the animation with food if I create anticipation for a food reward, and I do, but sometimes still find tug is better suited to it. I don't use tug for much at all. Mostly food, but sometimes they want tug more, so they get tug. Other times I just dot it around in there as part of developing a secondary reinforcer. Tug is also a useful reward because you can throw a tug toy and reward the dog away from you. What I don't understand is why you wouldn't want more reinforcers. Why limit yourself to one kind of reinforcer if you don't have to? Why wouldn't you have as many reinforcement options as you can be bothered establishing?

In my world, everyone is laughing with me, unless I'm laughing at them. :D

Fiercely sending "be strong" vibes to Mindy. Hang in there, girl.

Thinking of you both.

Well, huh? What are you saying? (not quite! no way! . . . or not-quite (adj) no-way (noun) . . . also: not-quite no-way what?) Wow, I'm as confused as you are! I don't even know what that was supposed to be, but I'm going with "Well, not quite, maybe". I have a very ugly but layperson-oriented website that kind of explains it here: http://www.dogoptimism.com/ Also have a Facebook page where I post all my favourite articles about detecting emotion in animals and that sort of thing:http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Dog-Optimism/232233783467933

Well, not quite no way. My Phd project looks at indicators of whether dogs are in a positive or negative emotional state.