corvus

Kuma, naturally you are so sophisticated that the Sunrise Cash Cow feels you with rage. I understand.

I say Erik notices everything, which can be a double-edged sword. It makes him dead easy to train, but also means he picks up associations I never wanted him to! Kivi notices hardly anything, which is why he's so easy to live with. He doesn't react to much because he just doesn't notice much. We do have to be more creative with his training, though. He needs things to be very obvious.

Erik's in surgery today. With luck he will be home tonight, but probably he will have to come home tomorrow morning. Kivi was more upset about him leaving us than Erik was. :p

Kivi has never felt cold in his life, but Erik has been feeling it the past few days. Last night he went to bed curled up in a tight little ball pressed into Kivi's side. However, I know from experience that as warm as Kivi looks, it takes a while for his body heat to get through all the fur so that you can actually feel his warmth, and then I think it's mostly just his coat holding your body warmth like a blanket. Erik gave up waiting and jumped on the bed and curled up between me and OH. Neither of us had the heart to get him off.

Seriously, OH was lying in front of the heater snuggling with Kivi when I told him there were more baby Berner photos and he had to leap to his feet with a "Sorry Kivi, I have to look at a virtual dog" and scramble over here to giggle at him. He totally wants one.

It's an interesting question, Dju. Kivi was about 9 months old before he realised there even was a tv and only because it had a dog whining on it. He doesn't really watch it much. Erik has always been a tv watcher. But Erik watches everything. He's always been incredibly switched on to his surroundings. One day when I have research money I'm going to do a study on visual representations in dogs. Some scientists once taught pigeons to indicate anything that was human on a monitor. They obviously had a different way of categorising things in their world, because they identified anything man-made as human along with the humans themselves. I would love to know how dogs categorise the things they see and what they use to make those categorisations. Does Erik pay more attention to pictures of dogs with pointy ears than dogs with droopy ears? Is he more interested in people interacting with dogs than dogs interacting with dogs?

Not serious ones, but I do have breed filters that change my management practices sometimes. I'm wary of staffies as well. They have a really boisterous play style that Erik doesn't really enjoy with a dog he doesn't know that well and woe betide if he should tell them he's not having fun. One of his best pals is a SBT bitch that he lets barge him all over the place, but he's known her all his life. So I just kinda move the dogs on and don't let them linger with staffy types as a general rule. It's just better for everyone that way. I will admit that I'm wary of GSDs. Some of them, anyway. Some are fine, but others have this barely contained intensity I think is not a good idea to test with a small dog that looks like some kind of weasel when he runs. We've never had any problems, but I'm not big on waiting to see when I've got a glassy-eyed GSD watching Erik's every move.

Has he ever looked behind the tv for the animal? I love those stories! Erik sometimes pays a great deal of attention to what's on. Sometimes it's just people talking. He likes close-ups of faces. He's had a fascination for human faces since he was about 6 weeks old, I'm told. Funny that he really paid attention to the wolves when they came and got cuddles off the people in the shot.

I've never had one either, and I have 2 male dogs 18 months apart. Sometimes they get snarky with each other, but they basically act like kids. They have slap fights and scream at each other and usually I tell them to cut it out or they'll be sent to their rooms without any dinner. ;)

I switched over to Deadly 60 on ABC3 and it seems they are having a bit of a dog special. Erik has been watching intently. His favourite bits were when the police dog took the presenter down and when the team met a wolf pack. He was so interested in that police dog on the sleeve he was standing up with his front paws on the tv stand staring right into the screen. How funny. I'd love to know what was going through his head. The wolves were gorgeous and very interesting. Presenter got warned. :p

Our council has quite a good one with three sections, one for large dogs, one for small, and one for puppies. We don't use it much as it's a bit on the boring side for the boys and they aren't big on fetch. If they were big on fetch I'd probably use it more. Some sillyness goes on there with some dogs and owners, but it's not too bad if you can find an area to yourself.

I like Patricia McConnell's blog: theotherendoftheleash. Dog Star Daily is also often good. Dr Sophia Yin's blog is very accessible. I just recently started a blog.

Whoa there, Nellie. I said what now? Talk about putting words in my mouth. I thought this thread was about comparing wolves and dogs rather than training methods.

Erik and Kivi say GOOD! But only under supervision. We don't find that they are too hard. They make some good cracking sounds now and then, but mostly the boys soften them up just by chewing on them for a long time. But sometimes towards the end one of the dogs will get it stuck on the roof of their mouth between the top two rows of teeth. The dogs nearly always have access to one or two. They are just the thing for lying down after a meal and having a chew. Gives Erik something to munch on other than dvd cases. They do smell, though.

Yeah, poor little fella makes me sad when he has a sore eye. It's like half the Erik gets sucked out of him. We often ask him to be a little less Erik for a while, but what can I say, I really prefer him at maximum Erik. ;) Life suddenly seems very dull when there's less Erik in it.

Well, I've certainly been edumacated. :rolleyes:

We went to see Dr Smith at the ARH this afternoon. He very quickly figured out the problem and it was a cluster of little hairs on the inside of his eyelid. He didn't say which kind of hair, but I'm guessing the kind that regularly cause ulcers! The cluster of hairs lined up neatly with the problem area on his cornea. So I'm booking him in for surgery to get it sorted out sometime this week. Thanks everyone for your help and for encouraging me to get a referral. I'm glad we have an answer and a solution.

Do you think that wolves and dogs are a more meaningful comparison than, say, dingoes and dogs? Which one is the wild type? As far as I can tell they both are, but wolves and dingoes are different again. If you're going to compare dogs to an ancestral type for whatever reason, why pick wolves over dingoes, NGSD, Carolina Dog etc?

I think it's fairly obvious that if we all had wolves instead of dogs we'd have a disaster on our hands. We wouldn't be able to do most of the things we do with dogs. There are plenty of wild or near wild populations of dogs. I think we should be looking at those rather than wolves to further our understanding of dog behaviour and development.

I found with E that a really high reward rate helped a lot to begin with. I rewarded constantly for a couple of seconds and then released him. I did that until he sat on cue in the dog park off leash without hesitation. Then started slowly increasing the difficulty and duration and reducing the reward rate. Tiny baby steps. ETA I didn't even mark, actually. Just crammed about 5 treats one after the other into his mouth and release.

Just to be clear, I very carefully didn't dismiss it. But it is a pretty broad statement and I think the reality is probably a lot more complicated than that. Evolution operates on a surprisingly small scale and the most successful animals tend to be the most adaptable. I think that should make us cautious about accepting an idea that would ultimately reduce adaptability across an entire population, or indeed, species. I do not think that means the idea has no merit.

Yes, but there are other selection pressures on wolves aside from persecution. A bold wolf that does cross roads may well find a larger patch of habitat that has a lower frequency of human habitation and therefore less intense persecution. The population has gone through a bottleneck and it would be foolish to think that humankind has had no impact on the behaviour of wolves, but there are some serious benefits to be had from being bold. Some serious threats as well, but it seems most wild populations that we know of have a stable ratio of shy to bold animals, even in species where predation rate is very, very high. Not to ignore the fact that it is definitely possible for shy individuals to learn to be bold and bold individuals to learn to be shy if their environment favours one strategy over the other. We know that occurs in fish. Anyway, what I'm getting at is two things: 1) I don't quite buy that humans have been such a strong selection pressure on wolves that bold individuals have become genetically extinct and 2) even if we have an environment with a very high rate of predation, the moment we remove that pressure or even reduce it, I think we can expect bold individuals to appear very quickly, perhaps even from the current generation of 'shy' individuals. Coyotes have done fantastically well being bold around humans and it's not like they haven't been persecuted. I think it's fair to say they continue to be persecuted because of their boldness.

I think that is an excellent question and am also very interested in hearing breeders' viewpoints on it.

Sometimes the upheaval of going to a new home can upset a puppy's tummy and turn them off their food. It was at least a week before Erik showed much interest in food after I got him. At this age you can use attention as a reward instead. If you want him to be calm, reward him with slow strokes and massages and talk to him softly.

I was a GSD. OH has been pulling faces at it trying to get different dogs. It does work sometimes.