corvus

My corgi used to growl and air snap at the hare if he was following her too close. He did not seem to appreciate what she was getting at. It would be fair to say he completely ignored it. Fortunately my corgi only got upset if he touched her and he hardly ever did that. She really wanted as little to do with him as possible after that day he tried to suckle from her. I'll never forget the look on her face when she walked into the room one day to find Kit reclining on her bed. She froze, looked at me, looked at the hare, then turned around and stalked out.

Fine, disagree. What does it matter? I didn't know what kind of behaviour you were talking about. My dogs know loads of cues, but most of them are just for fun and I haven't put any effort at all into making them fluent. Other cues I consider a fair bit more important that they are fluent. I take it you were talking about the latter (sit, down, recall and so on). It depends on why they didn't respond. An extra cue seems to take care of most of them. If it's Erik being a twerp it depends on what he's doing instead of responding to the cue. I don't know why this should be so controversial. Seriously, you try to enforce a behaviour with Erik. I don't have the patience for it. I've spent 10 minutes playing silly buggers with him before trying to just lay a finger on him so I can enforce it. Not only is it damn hard with him, but he becomes intensely suspicious of anything that might ultimately lead to me attempting to enforce something. That includes a cue for a known behaviour. Why don't I just shoot myself in the foot? This is stupid, she said to herself, I'm just going to reward him for doing what I want him to do instead. So I did, and now I have a dog who does what I ask him to do promptly and reliably. But wait, oh noes, this can't be true. You can't have an obedient dog if you don't enforce commands! F*** obedience. I don't want it. I want a dog that likes to do what I ask him to do and doesn't regularly frustrate me by not doing it. I don't need to make excuses for my dogs' behaviour, because when I want a high degree of reliability I train it in without ever enforcing it and I get the reliability I want. By far our most fluent behaviour is recalls. It's hard to enforce a blown off recall. By the time I get to them they will have forgotten they even got recalled. I'd put Kivi's recall at 98% reliable (it's actually got better, lately) and Erik's at 99% at least. If I can do that with as challenging a behaviour as recalling without enforcing it, then why enforce anything? Next most reliable behaviour is downs for Erik and sits for Kivi. Erik is probably about 98% reliable on downs and can do them in some very weird and demanding situations that really surprises me. I never thought I'd have a dog that would down from a run, or while balanced on a log, or when a dog he's just fought with is still running around thinking about having another go at him. I don't even remember the last time Kivi didn't respond to a sit cue. We haven't tested his sits as much as Erik's downs, but we know he'll sit in the river and he gets a bit confused about what to do with his front legs when they are on a log and he is given a sit cue, but he tries to do it anyway and manages to organise his limbs into something resembling a sit. I've never enforced a sit or a down with either of them. They choose to do it. I just foster their understanding of it and take care of their motivation. If 98% reliability is disobedient, then call my dogs disobedient. I'll call them 98% reliable and continue looking for the situations that make up that 2% so I can chase as close to perfect as a behaviour can be.

How would you go about training a dog to not do a behaviour, particularly a dangerous behaviour that the dog has practiced for the past 2 years? Like what? Is it a self-rewarding behaviour? How self-rewarding? Who is it dangerous to? What's the risk? How motivated is the dog? Can the behaviour be managed? Can the dog be supervised when the opportunity to engage in the behaviour is there? What degree of control is the dog under when performing the behaviour? It's too variable to make a blanket statement.

So if you have trained a behaviour (by your definition) and the dogs don't respond to a cue, what do you do? It really depends on the situation and how fluent the behaviour is. Mostly in clicker training the whole point is that they choose to do a behaviour. If they choose not to, then that's my problem, whether it's a problem with their understanding of the cue or a problem with the reward history or the reward type, that's my job to figure it out and adjust my training accordingly. Having said that, if there's a dog somewhere in the world that can find a loophole in a training system and exploit the hell out of it, it's Erik. He can be obstinate on occassion. He always wants something, though, and he can be as obstinate as he likes, but inevitably he realises he would rather just get what he wants, so he does the behaviour.

I have to agree, in a discussion on training that is intended to educate a novice it's important to get things right. Doing tricks is not the same as being obedient, and your quote above actually does outline a dog that is not obedient. If you don't care about obedience and enforcement then it doesn't matter, but you can't claim your methods have lead to obedient dogs because a lot of your posts tell stories that show your dogs aren't obedient. Obedience actually mean comply with the human's command at all times, not just when they choose to. Change Corvus' description to a dog that growls at children over a bone for example and it wouldn't be so easy to ignore the behaviour or make excuses for it. Not trying to catch you out Corvus, I just find it interesting to see the differences between people who train their own dogs, and the posts from people who train dogs in a commercial sense. Excuses can't be made when people expect results. Ah, I think I see where you're coming from. I give him a command and he decides he's not doing it and I am unable to enforce it, thus, disobedient. It's kind of a circular thing. My dogs are spitz breeds and aren't in the habit of doing anything they don't want to do. If I defined obedience as my dogs doing what they are told regardless of whether they want to do it or not, half the time I wouldn't even know if they were obedient because they have never not wanted to do what they are told. If I cue something when they are not keen on it, often they do it anyway because the response is conditioned or the reward history is so strong that it's almost a compulsion to obey. So I guess in those cases they are obedient. When I was calling Erik inside, and he decided he didn't want to do it, the response wasn't conditioned and didn't have a strong reward history, i.e. it wasn't really trained in the first place. When I tried to go after him to enforce something, he ran away and was disobedient. How am I to make him obedient if I can't actually catch the bugger? So I just taught him to go inside when cued and suddenly he always wants to do it when I cue it. So how do I tell now if he's disobedient? He always does it because he always wants to. In conclusion, I don't enforce things because I tend to find disobedience is a symptom of the behaviour not being properly trained in the first place rather than a behaviour in of itself to be punished or rewarded.

My dogs know tricks and are obedient. *worlds collide* Obedient? Or well managed? You just mentioned that you can't regularly enforce anything with one of your dogs.... Uh oh, someone's trying to catch me out! Wait, let me think.... Nope, they are definitely obedient. Turns out enforcing obedience isn't the only way to get obedience. Believe it or not. I'm quite happy walking to the train station instead of running these days. ;)

My dogs know tricks and are obedient. *worlds collide* I have to say I am mystified why you would place a dog so you can reward them when they haven't responded to a cue. If they didn't perform to criteria then they don't get a reward. Making them perform to criteria so you can reward them is kind of a backwards approach IMO. Why not work on your cue instead, seeing as that's where everything went wrong? Go back and gradually broaden their understanding of it. Find a place where they do understand it (as in, they respond to it correctly at least 80% of the time) and give them the cue a step to the left of them. Try it rotated 45 degrees away from them. Try it directly after various other cued behaviours. You'd be amazed in how many situations they don't know what that cue means. I don't know why it matters that the dog assumes the position one way or another if they didn't understand the cue in the first place. If your dog can respond correctly to the cue while you're facing away from them or they are 10m away from you, then you can start thinking about whether they do know it and are blowing you off, in which case you probably have a reinforcement problem rather than a cue problem. If they are responding well to other cues in the same session, then your problem is probably with the cue, not the consequence. Or place the dog and reward them. Why should it have to make sense to do the job?

Haha, he's not silly, he knows when it's game on. Your challenge is to show him that 'game on' can happen anywhere, anytime. Just don't try a little bit of everything. ;) It's best to pick a general approach and stick with it for a couple of weeks at least. Give it a chance to work. If you see a little change, then start to refine what you're doing and look for bigger changes. If you don't see any change, then try something else.

It's dead easy to counter-condition this kind of thing, and I would do it for safety's sake. Look up Sophia Yin on YouTube for a good video showing how to do it. One of my dogs is not very comfortable with a lot of handling. About a month ago he got a bad corneal ulcer. The first time the vet tried to look she spent 15 minutes trying to get him to hold still and he just wouldn't. They ended up sedating him. The ulcer was bad enough that he had to get dye checks every two days and eye ointment every 3 hours. At the vets they were very worried about how we were going to go with this. I shrugged and said "It's okay, we can train it." And we did. It took about 4 2-minute sessions, even with a very painful eye. I put eye exams on cue and 2 weeks later the vet that originally saw him was gob-smacked to see him lying on the exam table placidly while getting his eye dyed and scrutinised.

One of my dogs is too fast and wily to routinely enforce anything with. If I even look vaguely like I mean business, he runs and hides. He can get into places that I can't get him out of, and he will play endless games of "let's keep this obstacle squarely between us at all times". Invariably this happens when I have a train to catch. So I just rely on rewards. I don't 'command', I cue. A cue is a green light meaning if he performs this heavily reinforced behaviour now he may be rewarded. He likes cues. I discovered recently by accident that just saying his name is rewarding because it normally means I'm going to give him a cue. When he's pretty fluent in a behaviour I generally find he happily does it every time I give the cue. Usually with a great deal of enthusiasm. Not cueing anything you can't enforce is a good plan, but I got tired with Kivi getting up and enforcing things. I don't do it anymore and am much happier. The onus is on me to train the behaviour properly and set my dogs up for success. If I fail, I just backtrack and do some more work. As Steve White says, failure just tells you what you get to do more training on. Yay! Training!

Learning theory doesn't explain everything, but every animal that is capable of learning is subject to it. By definition, a dog has to care about rewards and punishments, or else they are not rewards and punishments.

I think sometimes time outs are a bit wishy washy because it's hard to time out a dog quickly enough to make the association clear. Having said that, if they are aversive to the dog and paired with a marker or can be used very quickly, there's no reason why they shouldn't work. The real huggey wuggey hands off method is to not even bother with a consequence if the dog doesn't comply. There's good reason to believe the dog doesn't actually know what you're asking them. In which case any consequence you provide is to doing whatever they are doing instead of complying with the command. Us huggey wuggey hands off trainers are more interested in finding things to reward than things to punish. If you look, you generally find it. If you want to use rewards, I think it helps to get into the habit of looking for things to reward. We had a dog here for a week that didn't take treats. It turned out he would work for boiled heart, so we started from there and just started rewarding him for doing things he would do anyway just because we liked them. Come inside when asked? Good boy! Here's your heart. Within a few days he had realised that in our house opportunities for reward come up all the time, and by the end of the week he was working for any food treat on offer, despite normally being a finicky eater and having his owners convinced he was not interested in treats. We did not have to withold any rewards from him. We just had to teach him that he CAN earn rewards, and give him lots of opportunities to do so. Once he was earning them several times a day he got a lot more interested in food.

Well, boy have you set me straight. Because I thought this thread is about a dog injuring another dog and what the responsibility of the owner of the dog that caused the injury was. I don't think anyone knows what this thread is about anymore.

Oh for heavens sake. Can this thread go any further off topic? Where do people get off judging others over a situation they didn't even see? I didn't see Leelaa ask for your opinion, SecretKei. Did you? Yes, yes, it's a public forum and if people don't want other people's opinions they shouldn't post. Whatever. Leelaa has a bit to learn, yet. For the record, my dogs have been rushed a few times and it's really no big deal. They get a scare and then they get over it. That's life.

OH once told Erik to roll over when he was balanced on a log. I was about to say "That's cruel!" when Erik did it anyway. Luckily it was a log partially buried in the ground, so Erik didn't fall far and still managed to complete the roll with half his body on the log. He's a keen bean, that one. OH taught him to do a "combat roll" by cueing roll over when he was running.

What trait? A "social aggression" trait? I've read a lot of dog personality papers and I've never seen such a trait identified. It wasn't for lack of looking on the researchers' part. People pay a lot of attention to aggression. The thing is, aggressive behaviour is not generally predictive of any personality trait, with the exception of stranger-directed aggression, which specifically relates to human strangers, not dog strangers. So I'm sorry, but I disagree. I do not think the dog has to have a "social aggression" trait in order to react the way it did with such devastating results. When I was a teenager my family had a Whippet cross rescue dog who behaved in a similar manner towards my corgi. The sure sign she was about to attack was a flash of very anxious body language. She was a very soft dog. She just didn't seem to realise there was such thing as ritualised aggression. Instead of reading the paper, would be good experience to ask police dog trainers to observe some training and reacting from dog with people who use the aggression for working and how the different temperaments on the dogs operating then you understand the traits properly and see in your own eyes whats happening. Joe Some of those papers are ABOUT police and military dogs, and the handlers and trainers participated heavily in describing their personalities and behaviour. There's a lot of money in trying to identify what makes a good working dog when so much money and time gets invested into them. I spoke to the fellow that does all the behaviour testing for NSW Police Dogs last year and we had a really good discussion about finding dogs that are right for it. I really enjoyed talking to him. He was saying there is an ideal, but there are also a lot of dogs that get through anyway. Which is why deciding what dogs to invest in is so hard. And the fact that you can't tell what they are going to be like when they are puppies. Everyone is always trying to find ways, but no one has, yet. Although hair whorls may end up being a good indicator. There's some cool genetics for you. You're still convinced that I'm ignorant or else I'd agree with you. Don't worry, it's human nature. I'd be doing the same thing if I actually thought this discussion was relevant.

What trait? A "social aggression" trait? I've read a lot of dog personality papers and I've never seen such a trait identified. It wasn't for lack of looking on the researchers' part. People pay a lot of attention to aggression. The thing is, aggressive behaviour is not generally predictive of any personality trait, with the exception of stranger-directed aggression, which specifically relates to human strangers, not dog strangers. So I'm sorry, but I disagree. I do not think the dog has to have a "social aggression" trait in order to react the way it did with such devastating results. When I was a teenager my family had a Whippet cross rescue dog who behaved in a similar manner towards my corgi. The sure sign she was about to attack was a flash of very anxious body language. She was a very soft dog. She just didn't seem to realise there was such thing as ritualised aggression.

I got Kivi at 8 weeks old when my other dog was an elderly corgi with arthritis. I spoke to a few breeders about this situation before I committed to a Lappie puppy and the general answer was all puppies could be rambunctious, but Lappie puppies tend to pay attention and adjust their behaviour accordingly. This is exactly what I got with Kivi and he was an absolute angel with my old girl. Even when she was nearly deaf and blind and very short-tempered he tried so hard to keep out of trouble with her. I was not terribly worried about bringing a small breed puppy into the household after Penny died. Erik took about 3 hours to decide Kivi was his personal interactive toy and they have been BFF ever since.

I wonder if you noticed that I wasn't attempting to explain the behaviour? I don't think I have enough information to do that. I don't think any of us do. And I don't think it matters. The topic asks whether the owner of the staffy mix should pay for the husky's vet bills. I don't think this is some sort of grey area depending on what kind of aggression was being displayed or what the individual personality of either of the dogs may or may not be. Your dog is your responsibility, and that means everything they do is your responsibility. Like K&P says, it is really quite simple. I think it's a stretch to label the dog as having a "social aggression" trait without knowing much about the dog. A lack of bite inhibition and a readiness to engage in a fight could be attributed to any number of personality elements or learning history. Aggression is, as you note yourself, a complex issue. But taking responsibility for your dog's aggressive behaviour is not.

If it were me I would go back to the beginning and increase the reward rate massively, and decrease the duration, until she was able to hold stays comfortably, then increase the duration gradually, making sure if you get to a point where she starts looking around, you take a step back and work a shorter duration more first. I guess it's possible she just doesn't like being away from you. I've seen dogs that get quite anxious when they are left behind, even if you're only 10 metres away. Erik is a bit like that. For Erik I needed a very, very high reward rate to begin with, and a very slow increase in distance between us. I'm doing relaxation protocol variations to get him more comfortable with it all. I don't know what Ava is like, but if Erik is being hypervigilant or restless, I can guarantee that it's the start of a bigger problem and I will regret it if I don't take the time to fix it asap. He's made me a huge believer in solid foundations. ;)

It's easy to assume that because I don't agree with you I am not privy to the information you are privy to, and if I seem reluctant to pay attention to what you're saying that I am not interested in learning what you know. It goes both ways, my friend. What is "normal" for one individual is not necessarily what is "normal" behaviour at the population level. I have no idea what is normal for this dog and why, so all I can do is compare what happened to what I typically see happen in similar situations with different dogs, and what makes evolutionary sense. And that is all I've done. I maintain that the staffy's behaviour was not normal dog behaviour. Whether it was normal for a small subset of dogs or not is not relevant to the point I was making.

Excessive vigilance may be a sign that she's not entirely comfortable with her surroundings. Does she look like she needs to relax, or is she bored?

Yes, Scottys rolls hold up as well as Four legs, without the bits of corn flying around. Woot! I hated that corn. I'm so converting to Scottys. The BARF meatballs are handy for carrying around and breaking off bits as you go, but they make my house smell like a burger joint, and sometimes I can't keep up with my own clicking. :p I guess sometimes I don't use a treat bag. Now that I think about it I do a fair bit of training at home without the treat bag that I had kind of forgotten about. And I reward with things other than food pretty regularly as well. Sometimes I manage to do the right thing by accident.

At the risk of flogging a dead horse, there's "aggressive" and then there's "dangerous". For the most part, aggressive behaviour in dogs is designed to avoid injury. Particularly in social situations where the only resource at stake is personal space. That's not what I am thinking of Corvus? My point is that I do know particluar dogs for some reason set off a more aggressive retaliation from a growling episode than others, have you not experienced that before? Sure, but my point is it shouldn't matter what kind of growl it was, because chasing the dog down and delivering multiple uninhibited bites is still a far cry from a 'normal' aggressive response. I can't believe there is so much discussion. Why does it matter why the staffy attacked or what it perceived? How could multiple uninhibited bites to a fleeing dog be considered anything other than wildly inappropriate and downright dangerous? There really are no excuses. I've seen a dog do something silly and threaten a dog that always takes threats seriously and deals with them very aggressively. Still, no one got hurt. It's not usual IME for dogs to get hurt no matter what kind of growl it was.

I think it's like a vaccine in that it prompts the immune system to attack a very specific aspect of the reproductive system, for example, the coating on an egg. It's unlikely to be permanent, although I can see how it could ruin things for a breeder if their dog was maliciously or accidentally vaccinated.