corvus

Erik in my siggy wears an XS Webmaster and he is a small tank at 12kg. The harness fit him when he was about 6 months old and around 8kg. There is an XXS, I think.

What if you're making too much of this? I'm telling you, shape tug like you would any other behaviour with food rewards. It will reframe the whole thing for both of you. What's the worst that could happen? You don't ever get off the food rewards? You're a good enough trainer that it's not gonna happen. You don't get the enthusiasm you're hoping for because the dog is doing it in exchange for food? I taught both my boys that way and I didn't have that problem. They get into the swing of things in no time at all. Erik was a powerful tugger before and his tugging has returned to that level. He just does it more reliably, now, and switches to food effortlessly. Kivi does it much more reliably and more strongly now than he did before. What's not to like? Do I need to make a before and after video to convince you to try this?

I'm a diehard Webmaster fan. Once you have a handle you wonder how you ever lived without it. ;) A couple of weeks ago we safely got our 26kg reluctant Lapphund over a rock ledge a little more than 2m high. I'm not sure how you do that without something like a Webmaster.

There is a little scientific evidence to suggest that dogs may become more cautious/shy after castration. Never heard of them getting more playful, though, but anything is possible with behaviour. :p

Haha, if you're in Sydney, $150 is cheap as chips regardless of the quali! ETA There are no formal qualifications as it's an unregulated industry.

Awww, sorry SK. I didn't mean to offend you. Maybe the OP ought to decide if it's relevant to the topic or not. Just to make it clear, I'm opinionated but that doesn't make it personal. Except for Joe, who continues to butcher things I find beautifully, wonderfully complex and spend a lot of time admiring. ;)

I would say displacement. It may look sneaky because the dog is feeling stressed and doesn't want to draw attention to themselves. Erik is the king of displacement behaviours. I've never seen him do that one, but many others he do look like reaching for a security blanket. He looks calm when he's doing them because doing them is calming. If that makes sense? If he was my dog, I would work on the assumption that he is stressed about meeting other dogs and about being yelled at. Try this one for an experiment to test the theory: Next time he meets a dog, keep them both on leash, start with him a good 20m away, and see what he does. Does he look at the other dog? Stare? Sniff the ground? If he looks comfortable, take a step or two and see if he wants to go closer. Let him choose how fast and how close he wants to go.

I think they are nomadic, Monah. I used to see them sometimes in bird surveys in rainforest just above Wollongong, but they were rare. Easy to miss, though, because they can be very quiet and still in dense foliage. They are more common farther north, but still a bit hit and miss. I think they are beautiful, too.

Oh, please. Why is this so hard for you to grasp? It's not that I don't understand what you are talking about. You can tell me in a dozen different ways and I will just get cross because I already know all that. The fact that I disagree with you is not due to ignorance on my part. I disagree with you because what you are presenting is a gross simplification of what I have spent several months studying full time and collecting data on. You can bet my 1054 respondents that breed DOES matter. It is also a gross simplification of dog behaviour and inborn traits in general. Every time you wax lyrical about dogs with good nerve, you describe behaviour that both my dogs do. Yet often when you tch tch over dogs with weak nerve, you describe behaviour that both my dogs do. That tells me that this dichotomy in your world is not an all pervasive one, and that's assuming it exists in my breeds at all. There are GSDs working as police dogs that have "poor nerve" by your description. I can point you in the direction of the studies if you like. It is also established fact that the heritability of certain behaviour in GSDs is greater than the heritability of the same behaviours in, say, Labrador Retrievers. Breed does matter. And still, all of this is beside the point. You keep saying, no it's not, because I'm explaining why the OP's dog behaves the way they do. No, you are offering one possible reason the OP's dog behaves the way it does, based on your position as a working line GSD diehard, and no solutions. Who cares about Mindy's nerve? There are plenty of tried and true solutions to the problem the OP is experiencing with her. Nerve does not need to come into it, and if it does, it is pure speculation because we do not know her genetic background. I know this is difficult for you, but really, there are plenty of explanations for her behaviour that are based in learning theory, conditioning, and emotional states. Writing it off as poor nerve is a copout. It obscures the full picture. It's lumping, my friend.

Haha, I identified some photos almost exactly the same for my mum recently. Luckily her description of the size and the black edging I could see in the photo and the fact they were dropping things on her was enough. I like these guys. I don't see them much. Plus I'm a pigeon tragic for some reason.

What makes you think my idea of a fluent behaviour doesn't include precision? When I said 'proficiency' I meant very good at it in certain circumstances. IMO 'fluency' means proficiency in all situations. I am sure that my tower of ignorance will come crashing down if I ever get around to trialling, but in the meantime, I train with very precise criteria. The smaller the details in criteria, the more precise the behaviour, and the more reliable. It also looks prettier! The more I train the tighter my criteria get, regardless of the purpose of the behaviour. If something is worth doing it is worth doing well. I'm not sure who considers detailed criteria the cornerstone of good training, but it's very high on my list. Not that any of that matters to the current topic. I'm gonna go ask my friends that trial, though.

Well, it's just so easy, isn't it, to blame a problem on 'weak nerve'? This attitude peeves me no end. There are a myriad of reasons why a dog might not tug in different environments. For starters, try making sure your dog is actually 100% comfortable in the environment in the first place, and that includes being 100% comfortable with you! Claiming that a failure to achieve this is the dog's fault for having weak nerve is an advertisement of ignorance and poor training methods. Of course you can achieve it with a dog that has 'weak nerve'. People are doing it all over the world. By all means, if you need a dog with 'strong nerves' then one that tugs in all environments with no work is an excellent bet. Surprise surprise, though, not every dog in the world is born bold and obsessed with a piece of rag held by a human, and there is a damn good reason for that. In some breeds, this is GOOD BREEDING STOCK. OMG, what am I saying?? Not every breed is exactly the same as a GSD, bred for the same purposes, with the same heritability of traits??? It's okay, Joe, I have some smelling salts handy! These working line-centric views have no place in this conversation, as has already been pointed out. Yet you persist with trying to apply them to every dog situation that comes up, regardless of the breed and without knowing much at all about the dog's learning history or their relationship with the handler. And you tell me that I need practical experience!

Not anymore. He died late last week just shy of seven years old. Still kinda coming to terms with it. At any rate, it's not upsetting for a dog to kill prey animals. They are predators somewhere in there after all. You saw Kivi flip out over the rats at the Million Paws Walk. He's low energy, but happy to kill small rodents if he gets the chance. I know a dog that is very lazy most of the time, but will stand in the hated rain for two days waiting for a rat to come out of a wood pile, and he also tore a hole in the garage wall trying to get to a trapped possum. He's only a 10kg dog, so it's no small feat. His drive is high, but his energy level is low. He does not chase moving objects unless they are alive as a general rule. Kind of. Being motivated enough to look for food is something that's usually switched on by hunger. In wild animals if they are predators, that is all together likely to involve hunting. Dogs are opportunistic and don't especially need to be hungry to take advantage of an opportunity that presents itself, whether that be looking for scraps or chasing and killing something. The way that we use food in training animals, in particular dogs because they are so opportunistic, is always going to have some throwback to foraging for food, but we can create a lot of excitement and arousal for it in the way we reward, how often, and how we mark the event, even. There are dogs that don't care what the reward is, they are just really excited by opportunities to earn them. I would be surprised if this was not a dopamine sensitivity of some sort. There are probably studies that show it. Lots of recent work on different dopamine receptors and how emotionally reactive individuals are. I know a dog who won't play around most people because he's too scared he'll get yelled at. I bet he's got acres of drive in there somewhere, but he is immensely inhibited. Maybe a good trainer could coax it back to the fore, maybe not. We'll never know. I love watching it teach dogs. :D They all do something different. Some of them just can't get enough of it, others could not care less about it. They all go through the program a little differently. Most try to figure out how it works by watching me at first. Take the human element out of training and all these dogs just want to put it back in again!

I'm going to piss everyone off by replying! According to Jaak Panksepp of affective neuroscience fame, brain pathways. Play has its own mode and prey comes under SEEK (foraging) or RAGE (aggression) depending on the circumstances. According to some trainers, nothing. According to other trainers, play doesn't involve any of the behaviours in a predatory sequence whereas prey does. This is silly because play is actually defined by its inclusion of behaviours from all aspects of life jumbled together out of sequence. That might be a hint right there. I don't actually think there is any such thing as food drive. *bombshell* According to Panksepp there are no specific pathways for rewards. Food comes under SEEK. If you must, though, yes and no. Obsession IMO can originate in drive, but it can also be fostered by handling and reward schedule. I've been watching dogs become obsessed with my electronic dog trainer. It's not always the food obsessed ones that do, but it usually is. I think it's useful here to differentiate between drive, as in the willingness to persist with an activity for a long time through a lot of different obstacles and barriers, and arousal, which corresponds to physical activity. I recently worked with a dog that flitted from stimulus to stimulus in the environment and never managed to focus on much at all for more than 30 seconds. With the possible exception of play. That's debatable. If we're using the definition of drive from the previous question, people I have asked say you can encourage it when the dog is young and get a bit more, but ultimately you have to work with what you've got. If we go on the definition of drive from above, the dog will persist with activities even under pressure and around difficult obstacles and barriers. They look for that in working dog prospects. You can mess with its expression. Don't know if you can ruin it. Depends on what you mean by ruin and what you mean by drive. My guess is you are talking about arousal. Chasing doesn't say much about the type of drive IMO. Erik will chase just about anything that moves, but he gives up on it the moment it stops most of the time. It's a game to him. Kivi chases a prey animal seriously sometimes and it looks completely different. Play is suppressed by just about every other emotional state! Or perhaps she just needs more conditioning. I killed Erik's tugging quite profoundly at one point through conditioning. It took a few months to get it back, but he's back to leaping at any tug toy I wave at him again, now. I taught Kivi to tug with food and a marker. He is a better tugger now than he was as a puppy. I thought I wouldn't get the vigour by teaching it like a behaviour, but happily, I was wrong. Dogs sometimes need to be taught that food and chase games are compatible. Particularly if they chase as a game. The food kills their play mood. I got over it with both Kivi and Erik by shaping tug with food.

It is perfectly practical in short stints for practise. Kivi thinks it's practical for quite long stints. I'm not sure how he avoids tripping over, particularly given he's not the most graceful and nimble of dogs. My dogs get to walk for fun, but doszens of short training stints are part of that fun. If I don't make them happen the dogs usually try themselves. Sorry, I'm not trying to be inflammatory, I'm just genuinely intrigued by this "never" thing. I honestly look for situations where I have never asked for a behaviour and add it to the top of the list of places to next drop that particular cue. Because of aiming for fluency rather than proficiency. Fluent behaviours are more reliable, but more to the point, I love testing my dogs' understanding of a cue. It's my favourite bit of training. One time OH cued Erik to roll over while he was swimming and he actually tried to do it. He would have pulled it off if his method of rolling involved more twist in his body like Kivi's does. I freaking love that level of fluency. It's just good fun.

I am intrigued by this idea that animated behaviours can be dulled by overuse. It's not the first time I've heard it. Did you know it kind of runs against learning theory? Not that that means it can't happen, of course, for various reasons. I've only really seen my dogs get more animated performing a behaviour the more they practise it. For the purpose of behavioural fluency, I practise heeling and other behaviours anywhere and everywhere.

Seriously?? You don't ever practise a heel when actually out on a walk? It seems like an ideal situation to practise it to me. I call Kivi in regularly wherever we are for a little stint of heeling here and there. He loves it. That's assuming he has actually left heel in the first place. He seems to think he can make me cue a heel by wrapping himself around my left leg while we're walking until I'm tripping over him. I wonder how he got that idea? :p Plus, a heel is super useful out on walks when the footpath is crowded or a bike/pram is coming through. I have 'hang about' as well, which means come to my nearest side, but since we taught him heel we don't use it much anymore. We don't walk on leash much, but when we do my expectation is simply that they will remain as attentive as they are off leash and walk on a loose leash.

That may well be, but what bearing does it have on the current situation? Whether he has had to fight for food and whether he has been abused might have contributed to the problem, but you still have to deal with it the same way if his behaviour is driven by something else instead. IMO the best way to help Charlie is forget about the why and concentrate on giving him a sense of safety so he can begin to trust. If I were you, I would establish 'safe zones'for Charlie where Mickey doesn't go. Mickey should have one, too. Crates are good, but maybe Charlie might need a bigger buffer zone. Good that you are separating and the altercations are reducing. I know it can be hard to manage something that can be very unpredictable or infrequent. Perhaps you can teach them to go to their own mats and reinforce them staying there. I use this to get my dogs to leave me and the other dog alone when we are training. They love training and my younger dog will try to drive my older dog away from me if he wants to train bad enough. So his job is to stay on his mat when I'm training the other dog. He gets lots of good things for being there. Maybe it would help to identify the times where the risk of a fight is high (like you have already) and think of a job you want both dogs to do that would keep them busy at those times and give them direction. Do you need to be able to chastise him? Why not look for things he is doing that you like and reward them instead?

Gah! I'd be worried, too! The more dogs fight with each other the more they are likely to keep fighting with each other. Separate them and give them both their own space so they don't have to worry about constant flare-ups. I would think very seriously about whether you want to go down this path. It can be messy and very stressful and taxing, and if it goes on long enough, downright dangerous. If you do want to go down this path, I think you should get some professional advice. It's hard on the internet to know what the risk level is. I think it's better to get someone to see for themselves and give you an idea of what you're in for.

I think that's probably bang on the money. More reps at the earlier criteria builds more confidence in the behaviour, which means that when you raise the criteria the dog is more likely to persist. At that point you are quite likely to get harder, longer, or multiple touches in quick succession. Any of those can be rewarded as the next step in the shaping recipe. One of my dogs is very easily put off by no reward when he was expecting one. It can take some delicate work to shape him, but I have learnt that it can be done! Just stacks of patience and making sure he is very confident with the current criteria before I change them. He was my first clicker dog and I was pretty awful. I did some target training with him and that helped us both immensely. It helped me get the hang of clicker training and it helped him build up his confidence. He is much easier to shape, now. And I'm much better at it. ;)

Imagine that, people are interested! In my mind, the idea is to create in your dog a sense that you are a good bet. Any time you say their name or address them, there might be an opportunity to earn rewards. It doesn't really matter what kind of rewards, but I think as many as possible is a good idea! Really embrace nothing in life is free (NILIF). If you don't like the structure, think of it as endless opportunities to have your dog listen to you and reward them for it. The more you reward them, the more they start to see you as a good bet and the more they pay attention to you when you ask for it. I really think this is so important. There should not be times when you are a good bet and times when you are not. Remember that dogs are excellent discriminators. If there is a time when you do not often reward them, they will know about it and they'll be less attentive at those times. When my dogs were puppies, it was very easy for them to earn rewards. They just had to look when their name was called, check in on their own, hang around like a bad smell in interesting environments, and they got rewards for performing a lot of simple things they had been taught like sit or touch on cue. Any time they did something I like I paid it, whether I cued it or not. As they grew more attentive I asked for more before rewarding. It's partly building up a really strong reward history with you and therefore a big pile of pleasant associations, and partly getting them into the habit of looking for opportunities to earn rewards when they are around you. When they are not sure what activity is going to be the most fun, there we are with our history of reinforcement and that puts us ahead of the crowd right there. It doesn’t guarantee the dog will choose us, but it weighs in our favour. I think where most people trip up is they jump ahead and start trying to use food and other rewards out in very exciting places before they have built up that expectation for opportunities to earn good things at home. The trick is to weave very easy opportunities to earn food into new situations. If your dog’s mad sniffing has eased up for a moment and they lift their head, that’s when you call their name and reward when they turn around to look at you. They won’t pay attention until you have built up that reward history enough that they are starting to look for opportunities to earn rewards around the house. If you say their name, they should perk up and look hopeful and start skittering around or offering sits in the hopes that you will reward them. If you keep it very easy when you leave the yard at first, like just looking at you for a moment when you say their name, then you're more likely to have success and start moving forward. To me, one of the most useful things is to have a dog that hears their name (or some other word if you want to use that instead) and immediately assumes someone has something fantastic for them. Build it up at home a lot before you take it on the road, and just take small steps and be patient. It took me months to get Erik to train off leash in the dog park, but it's so useful when they have learnt to always have their ear out for you in case you give them a chance to earn rewards. If you can get their attention you're halfway there already.

A Catahoula is a bull type dog?

Try Sue Ailsby's Training Levels. It's free! http://www.sue-eh.ca/page24/page26/

This is just my opinion, but personally I think it has to start with a relationship where the dog actually can pay attention to you when you're out on walks. Sometimes that is hard won, but once you have it, you always have that foot in the door. Other problems will come up and they will be easier to get through because you will have that foundation to build on rather than be trying to start from scratch to solve every problem that comes about. Solving problems becomes a mere extension of the dog's skills. I'm not going to go into detail here because I don't have enough time to waste some on something no one cares about! Happy to go into more detail if someone does want to know, though.

Why does it have to be ANKC recognised? Are you going to show it?