corvus

Choking I found this one after Erik tried several times to swallow chicken wings whole, meeting with mixed success.

I'm not really sure how to go about this, but I thought it would be useful to have a sticky in General where it's easy to find that lists symptoms related to emergency conditions in our dogs. Things like snake bite, heat stroke, bloat and toxicity, and what to do in emergency situations like if your dog is choking or having a seizure etc. I haven't lived through any emergencies, so I don't think I'm the one to contribute information! Maybe if folks who have got through emergencies or are better prepared than I am can share their plans and experiences to benefit others and we can ask Troy to make it a sticky?

He's a demi-god to me! I was laughing because compared to the way my eyes light up when I hear Bob Bailey's name, your comment was so low key I was keenly aware of what a groupie I am. ;) I was just poking fun at myself. Awww, Nekhbet. And here I was thinking I might have a career in writing policy. But come on, be fair. I was limited to a single statement. And I kinda cheated by cramming several ideas into the one sentence. Sometimes big words just say it better. ;)

He's only the father of modern animal training. *twitches* Probably the first time I would agree with Erny about something methodology-related, but oh how I HATE misinformation. The article is full of misleading and non-factual information. It's like someone rubbing a balloon in my hair. I will: I'm always going to assess the cause of a behaviour based on what I perceive to be the balance of reinforcers and the emotional state of the dog, I will always formulate a method from there based on the ability of the handler to control those reinforcers and the degree to which I believe the associations the dog has with the stimuli in question drive the behaviour, and I will ALWAYS test my assumptions by measuring the change in frequency of the behaviour after treatment. Did I miss anything? :D

Well, it's not as simple as a dog submitting or not submitting IMO. My younger dog is pretty fiery, but he always tries to tell dogs politely first to stop doing something. He averts his eyes, turns away from them, puts his head and tail down and so on. To me it doesn't say "I submit" at all. It says "I'm not enjoying this". If the dog is polite and attentive, they will respect that and stop, regardless of where they think they might stand socially. If they are rude or inattentive and keep doing it, he tries to aggressively drive them off. He doesn't always do that. I suspect he doesn't do it to dogs he think will beat him up. He's not that big. I've seen him do it to an almost full grown Great Dane pup (successfully), but not to an adult Ridgeback in a similar situation. My point is, he changes his behaviour depending on the dog and how he reads the situation. My other dog always defaults to submissive signals, but he's very confident about it. He knows what he expects it to do. He expects it to get him out of trouble, normally trouble that he has got into by sticking his nose in where it's not wanted. I've seen him confronted with a dog it's not going to work on and he just avoids. I've also seen him defuse tense situations between other dogs quite confidently without submissive signals. He just gets in between them and diverts one, usually with play. He is brilliant to watch. So in summary, I think it comes down to strategies they have learnt more than their personality. If your dog doesn't use submissive signals, chances are he has another strategy that works just as well for him, like walking away. My dogs will both try walking away first. A lot of dogs do. I have seen a dog try to posture over them both and they just shrug it off and walk away. Works like a charm.

I'd reward the hell out of it if I were you. I did with Erik. Still gotta watch him, but it's really nice when he 'shouts' submissive signals, the dog leaves him alone, and he looks to me all like "I told him to please go away. Can I have a treat?" Hell yes! He was a bit soft on the signals to begin with and got ignored a few times. Now he does big, obvious signals. He still gets ignored sometimes, but usually it's obvious enough for me to notice as well even when I'm chatting to someone, and I can get in there and get him away before he takes the next step.

Gah! I only skimmed it, because I kept reading rants and wild assumptions. But Bob Bailey is freaking awesome. No one knows training like he does.

Totally normal and IMO thoroughly appropriate. If he thinks they are going to wallop him, he's only going to make it worse if he stands up straight and looks them in the eye. He is saying "I don't want any trouble", not "I am a weak doormat". IME it can defuse some very tense situations.

They pop up on US based lists fairly regularly with intense movement sensitivity considering they are not really a common breed. I would be careful to research breeders and lines.

*hands out one 'pat-on-the-back' voucher and one 'harsh judgement based on personal values' ticket. There, that ought to cover it.

My dogs get trained every day. It's really a fundamental part of spending time with our dogs for us. We take them to places we think they will have fun, but we want to be part of the fun as well, and there's a more serious aspect of what we do, which is to condition our dogs to be attentive in all environments. We teach them tricks and polish them. We work on duration, precision, and fluency of known behaviours. We challenge them and cheer when they successfully meet our challenges. We use Premack, R-, and loads of rewards. I'm currently working on whiplash turns and leave its in addition to the tricks.

Well, yes, but that's not to say dogs and other animals can't have something similar, like perhaps a sense of fairness and aversion to inequality. http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/12/dogenvy/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-ethical-dog ETA I have some interesting video of a dog I've been working on who at times behaves differently when she hears a water tone and touches the target and triggers water delivery than when she hears a probe tone and touches the target and triggers nothing. It's quite cool. When she triggers water she has to disengage and go and perform some displacement behaviours, but when she tries to trigger a probe tone that means nothing, she just kind of stares at it and wags her tail. A few of them get a little anxious about triggering water instead of milk.

Yeah, that's what Kivi is like. Makes it dead easy to change problem behaviour (which hardly ever occcurs because it's much easier to avoid in the first place), but he takes quite a bit of babying through if I'm shaping. I also find his behaviours need a lot of maintenance. That sounds kind of familiar, too! I have learnt to be so attentive to whatever Erik is doing. He's always learning, and if I don't take control of what he's learning he tends to learn to do things I really don't like very much. They are always difficult to shift and spontaneously reoccur on a regular basis when I do shift them, unless I punish it. And punishing comes with its own problems. He is SO wily. That sounds quite pleasant. Maybe one day I will get a normal dog. A while back I was talking on another list about proactive coping styles and long extinction curves and this fellow who apparently trained military dogs to do nutty things like jumping out of aeroplanes or something got all excited and said they find exactly that with their dogs. They are quick to respond with threats, form strong routines, and have long extinction curves. There are also physiological links, like possibly these animals have weaker stress responses. Well, it's more complicated than that, but that was the gross oversimplification. He was especially interested in that because he said he thought their dogs were unusually chilled about things like jumping out of aeroplanes.

I don't want to put words in BG's mouth, so I'll let her clarify what she meant. We all know that positive vs correctional training method debates are utterly pointless. There is always that one dog that was fixed with x method and another dog where x method was tried and failed and y method was successful. There are too many variables to make a valid comparison, which is why those discussions always go in vicious circles and are never resolved. I would not say I care more about methods than results, but I certainly care about methods, and that is because I have broad training goals that I use to guide many of my decisions. The way I want to manage my dogs and the things I am prepared to do have a huge impact on the methods I use, and I find ways to use the methods I want to use successfully. I decide when I can afford to make compromises and when I cannot. That is entirely a personal decision. The more I learn about learning theory the more I think arguments about methodology are fundamentally flawed. There are a lot of ways for a dog to learn something. If the dog learns it, the method is effective and we get the sought after result (assuming the behaviour is also maintained). There are so many ways and mostly their effectiveness comes down to how well they were applied. What kind of argument is that? As trainers, I think the best thing we can do is recognise that there are dozens of ways to achieve the desired result and select the one that is suitabed to our skills, our ability to manage the balance of reinforcers, and our assessment of the risk to ourselves, other animals, and the dog. If we are honest about those things and honest with ourselves about what would make us feel comfortable, there is no reason for methodology arguments to even enter into it. It's all much of a muchness. ETA Both my dogs walk on normal harnesses and they don't pull. They have both been on harnesses from the get-go and neither ever really pulled much.

No, I don't want to refer to a particular dog. It's a general, information-seeking question. You haven't mentioned your preference. Do you like dogs with short extinction curves or long extinction curves? Is there a point where it might be too long or too short? I side-tracked myself thinking about the adaptability of long extinction curves or lack thereof. It's really a side issue, but an interesting discussion nonetheless.

I took it to mean BG found the positive method she used was more effective than correctional methods she may have tried. Her sentiment that often the problem is the way she is training a behaviour is a hallmark of effective training in my view. All the best trainers in the world will harp on this again and again. If she finds it is clearer when she uses positive reinforcement, then it does work better. She wouldn't be the first one to find that, and she won't be the last.

A generalised variable reinforcement schedule? Don't we kind of do this anyway? Ride the extinction burst and then reward it to get duration and maybe effort? I have with Kivi. I think it is likely doing it with a lot of different things improved his persistence, but only with known behaviours. Not overall, I would say.

Tools are a bandaid in loose leash walking, but that doesn't mean they don't work or that they can't help you make a start. I know dogs that have been walked on head collars or front attach harnesses for the vast majority of their lives and they are happy and their owners are happy. Whatever works for you. I don't think people need feel guilty if they just want to permanently manage pulling with some kind of training tool assuming it keeps working indefinitely. Anyway, I like this page for some really great, simple tips for how to avoid rewarding pulling and what to reward instead: http://ahimsadogtraining.com/blog/leash-walking/ ETA Leashes and flat collars are tools as well. In my mind the aim is to have the leash there for emergencies, but we have a lot of 'emergencies' in day to day life. I don't see why, if I have to rely on leashes sometimes, other people shouldn't rely on head collars, correctional collars, or no-pull harnesses sometimes.

Nice one, Dju!

Dogs often learn to be gentle if they are allowed to play with different dogs. The ones that like it gentle will either cut a game short or snap at them if they are too rough. If they are gentle, the game continues. I watched Kivi teach a very rough SBT pup over the course of a couple of weeks to play more gently with nothing more than disengaging from her when she was too rough. The game never actually stopped, it just kind of got choppy as he kept shaking her off. She learnt that it was more fun and fluent if she didn't hang off his face by her teeth.

Yeah - but I'm making the suggestion that persistance of a behaviour in the presence of extinction (so to speak) isn't necessarily an indicator of a lack of adaptability/behavioural flexibility in response to your OP. However .... No, I think it's safe to say it's not. I was just wondering hypothetically if there might be a point where it is and what the implications of that might be. I read a paper over the weekend that suggested mice that are very persistent may well have a problem with serotonin uptake. A long extinction curve is generally considered maladaptive, but I was interested to ponder whether it was or not in dogs given they have quite different selection pressures on them. The simple answer is another question. To what extent is persistence valued in dogs? Depends on why the dog is persistent. If however you are asserting that in this hypothetical dog's instance its persistance is undoubtedly due to a lack of adaptability/behavioural flexibility, then I could imagine where new and novel experiences may be more difficult for the dog to adapt to. IMO What other reasons might there be for a dog to be persistent? I can imagine if they have a strong reward history, or the behaviour has been under a variable reinforcement schedule. But it ought to hold across all learnt behaviours to be a kind of a 'trait persistence' that I'm thinking of.

I don't want to derail the thread, but I'm still not convinced a muzzle does leave a dog worse off in a fight than not being muzzled. Chiefly because of two things: 1) If several dogs or even one dog intent on doing harm has a go at him he's likely to get hurt whether he has a muzzle on or not; 2) IME dog fights are at their scariest and most damaging when no one wins in the first few moments and when one bites seriously, frightening the other and provoking them to bite harder and it quickly escalates into something very violent. I'm not convinced a dog known to do damage is not going to make a fight worse if they are allowed to deliver uninhibited bites. But that's in my situation. I can't say what the risks are in your situation, but although "muzzle will leave him defenceless" sounds like it makes sense, I'm not so sure that it does, personally. We had this discussion recently and I don't think there's much evidence for or against. However, given you live in a small community and it's highly likely all the dogs know your boy, I don't think there's a need for management beyond leashing. Maybe they know better than to approach him. But that's your call as you know the situation better.

Depends on how you feel about him hurting other dogs? By the sounds of it you're not that fussed. In my mind if a dog has attacked another dog and injured it there's a good chance they will do it again in the future. That doesn't mean there's no hope for the dog or that they should be put down. It's just a matter of likelihood and how you wish to manage it. Around here, Pirate would be declared dangerous and possibly seized and destroyed, but the likelihood of him causing anguish here would be a lot higher than it is where you are. More people and dogs to encounter, different attitudes towards dogs and so on. The bitch in heat may have had something to do with it, desexing may resolve the problem, but then again, maybe not.

I was more suggesting that the persistance was an indicator of a lack of adaptability/behavioural flexibility, and the lack of adaptability is the source of stress rather than specific behaviours. For example, is a persistent dog also more likely to have difficulties coping with novelty?

At some point, is persistence a symptom of a lack of behavioural adaptability that may be a source of stress in the dog's life?