corvus

Boots and a garden hose are a fair bit different to bullets, don't you think?

Dr Joanne Righetti from Pet Problem Solved is in the Northern Beaches, I think. I like her. She's held in high regard by anyone I know that has had anything to do with her.

Assuming they could hurt your dog and shooting them are two different things IMO. ETA I would judge the risk of predatory drift in this scenario to be high, especially given the noises that Beagle was making. Again, doesn't mean it's necessary to shoot the dogs. It's not a matter of choosing which dogs get hurt. If there's a way that no dogs get hurt it's kind of obvious that is the preferred way to handle it. It's all speculation, but I've seen that kind of behaviour at the dog park every now and then and I wouldn't consider it risky for me to intervene. I might get an inhibited bite, but I'm unlikely to get mauled. I think how the behaviour is interpreted is beside the point. It's not acceptable to shoot a dog on a misunderstanding.

I found that quite shocking. If I had those dogs in my yard I'd just walk out nice and casual, probably with some food, put some leashes on them and tie them to the nearest anchor point. They don't look very threatening to me. Erik would do that if someone pushed a rake at him as well. Defensive is not the same as 'attacking'. The Beagle was obviously petrified, poor thing, but I don't think it was necessary to shoot the dogs. Pretty sure it didn't help the Beagle's sense of psychological trauma.

Me either.

Sometimes it's not so much the dog doesn't think you have the right to interact with another dog, but that they are frustrated by being excluded. Erik behaves the same way if a dog plays with Kivi and ignores him. The biggest risk in my mind is the arousal that comes with frustration. The more aroused he gets the more likely he is to do something aggressive or at least outrageously rude. He is generally sensibly inhibited around other dogs, but why risk it? To me, it has little to do with my relationship with my dog and more to do with my dog's personality and how he copes with frustration. My previous dog resource guarded me when she had been deprived of me for a few weeks or months. That was more about what she valued. Then again, if you are in the habit of deferring to your dog (which I doubt you are!) it may well be that the dog is trying to control your behaviour to best suit her and refusing to let that work may encourage a serious challenge. If she's that kind of dog, though, I imagine she will have tried that by now over something else and learnt whether it works or not. Erik tried it a couple of times before he was 6 months old and had a good solid NILIF structure established.

I do peanut butter and/or cheese spread with a sprinkling of dried treats, usually. Incidentally, I have some Kong stuffing I used in my pilot study back in December. Dogs love it. It's mostly just cheese extract. I don't use it because it's really expensive and kind of difficult to get it where you want it, but I have no doubt my dogs would think it incredible.

Erik doesn't like it when I talk to another dog and give them all my attention. God forbid I should make baby noises at them. He will bark at the dog. I have no concern that it will escalate because I just put him in a down and he's happy to do that. But in a sense I'm reinforcing his behaviour every time I cue a down. He loves doing downs and he loves training. I just did exactly what he wanted me to do. So I try to be proactive and cue it before he gets as far as barking. Problem solved. I knew a dog when I was growing up that didn't appear to have an aggressive bone in her body until a kid in her family taught her "sick it" and started setting her on other dogs as a game. I think it only really worked because she already got a little bit guardy of her people around other dogs and so there was something there to encourage in the first place. This behaviour got worse, even when the kid grew out of that kind of thing and left home. This dog roamed the streets and you couldn't afford to give her any attention if you had your own dogs around or she'd go for them. When all the kids left home she had no one to look after her and no one in the neighbourhood could take her because she wasn't good around other dogs. Eventually someone without dogs took her in and her last few years at least were lived in comfort and happiness. I guess the moral of the story is that if a dog is in any way rewarded for aggressive behaviour it is likely to escalate. Even though your dog isn't behaving aggressively and is not directing her frustration at the other dog, it seems sensible to just make sure you know what's reinforcing to her at those moments and make damn sure you don't accidentally reinforce it unless you know where you're going with it.

When I got my first puppy as a teenager, it was a Pembroke Corgi. Mum had a tail and we were like "Oh... isn't that lovely? It would have been nice if my puppy had a tail." That was 10 years before the tail docking legislation was on the radar, and we certainly were 'the general public' at that point. People did ask me why I got my dog's tail docked before the legislation came in and I answered I didn't have the choice. It was docked before I met the puppies. I have a breed now with a natural bob as well as flag tail and full tail and mine has a full tail. I don't really mind. I think they look cute with no tails and long tails. Not a huge fan of the flag, but don't see many of those. I like the full tails on traditionally docked breeds.

Our dogs go to bed when the last person up does, which is usually me. They started out sleeping in our room in a crate as puppies and graduated to being able to choose where they wanted to sleep once we felt they were trustworthy in the house. Both tried very hard to choose the bed to sleep on, but we have some fairly convoluted rules about when dogs are allowed on the bed. They are not allowed to settle there for the night. They have both found all the loopholes, though. Kivi sneaks up in the dead of the night and I wake up with him in my arms giving me kisses without any recollection of how he got there. Erik figures the bed is a possibility any time someone has gotten up and then gone back to bed. So if OH gets up to go to the toilet at 4am, as far as Erik is concerned he's allowed to get on the bed.

I've never met a Swedish Vallhund that doesn't go weak at the knees when you brush them. My family loves to get Erik and their Vall, Pyry side by side and scratch their butts. They instantly get the exact same look on their face as they arch their backs and go weak at the knees. They aren't over-sensitive but I've always found it interesting that as a breed they tend to be touch sensitive. I hear Greyhounds are similar.

I had a silky bantam hen called Watermelon when I was a teenager. This was in protest of the fact that I wanted to call our white hen Pineapple and I got outvoted and she got called Snow instead. When I got my grey silky bantam I could call her whatever I liked, so Watermelon it was. The second rabbit I got was called Kat so I had Kit the hare as well, thus, Kit Kat. I used to name a lot of the temporary animals at our school farm. One lamb got called Lamington and one year my friends and I trained a steer called Freddo. Another steer got called Sir Loin by some other kids. Last year I met a dog at the shelter called Noodle. He was completely neurotic and probably the most irritating dog I've ever met. I swear he had some kind of neurological disorder.

I have a lazy couch potato and a little tornado as well. They get along famously. My lazy dog is very social, though, and loves to play. The little fella keeps him more active than I think he would otherwise be, but when he gets tired of playing the little guy leaves him be. They are only 18 months apart in age, so I think that this helps them get along. The lazy dog is not very committed to holding resources and getting what he wants, so we generally find that there are very few arguments. 90% of the time Kivi lets Erik have his own way. The other 10% of the time Erik barks at Kivi and Kivi ignores him. Erik seems to know when he's not going to win and doesn't push the matter. We have a very harmonious household. A lot of the pestering Erik did as a puppy gradually disappeared on its own as he grew closer to Kivi.

Incidentally, the relaxation protocol has been under discussion on the CU yahoo list in the last couple of days and a few people who learnt the protocol directly from Karen Overall have said it's supposed to be extremely flexible and when Overall describes telling the dog to sit, she doesn't actually mean give the dog a sit command. She means that people should talk gently to their dogs throughout the protocol. It reads like giving the dog known cues to people from a training background, but it shouldn't be practised like a training exercise, and they try to keep all markers and other indications to the dog that they are training out of it.

I am so appropriating that. :D

I tried whispering on my dog, once. He stuck his tongue in my mouth. I never did that again.

Kivi would always drag us into daycare, then abandon us and throw himself on the ground where about four dogs would pile on top of him. The daycare fellow said one time "I used to get them all off him, but he'd just lie back down again and wait for them to come back." I said "Yeah, I think it's his natural state to be on the ground with a pile of dogs on top of him." He is still like that! Anyway, the daycare we went to had a webcam and they would send us photos of him sometimes. He was never especially excited to see me when I came to pick him up and would plod back to the car and fall asleep for the rest of the afternoon/evening.

There are certainly times when humans live in the 'now'. Like when they are focused on something else and something distracts them. My OH has a powerful startle response. Any loud noise will make him orient to the sound while simultaneously ducking. He sure is living in the 'now' when he does that. I have a weaker startle response and a loud noise doesn't make me react, but if I'm 100% focused on one task I am doing and someone breaks my concentration, it doesn't matter how 'gently' they do it, my response tends to be aggressive. I'm like "What! I'm busy!" I am entirely living in the 'now' when I make that response, or else I would be more understanding. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume different dogs display similar variation in the way they respond to a physical distraction. I often nudge Kivi to remind him I exist and he seems entirely comfortable with that. Erik I don't touch. If I can't get his attention with sound then I won't get it with any touch I'm prepared to do. He is quite touch sensitive and he can live in the 'now' all he likes, but it won't make him less likely to associate an aversive physical stimulus with other stimuli he is paying a lot of suspicious attention to at the time. A 'tap' is all fine and dandy if it's a neutral stimulus and serves only to break focus. But IMO you're walking on thin ice if you are relying on a stimulus that could easily have an aversive edge to it. It doesn't have to hurt to be aversive. And a dog living in the 'now' is as susceptible to unwanted associations with aversives as a human, probably more so as they can't rationalise what happened.

I do TTouch, sort of. Like this: Sometimes dogs that haven't had massage before need to be convinced to hold still for it. With Erik we would hold him for maybe ten seconds max while we massaged and just kept doing that a lot and pretty soon he was coming back for more after we let him go. There was a thread in General a few months ago on Thundershirts.

We are thinking about going, but haven't decided whether to do the Sydney one or the Wollongong one.

Here's a video from Leslie McDevitt that says a bit about LAT. If you can keep up with the scrolling! http://www.youtube.com/user/LeslieMcDevitt#p/u/6/POprQmrJ2Bc

And some days OH doesn't come home with us and I make his breakfast, so it's not waiting for him when we get back. I do think he is slightly more excited when we get home on those days than when OH does come home with us, but it's still nothing compared to when OH doesn't come home with us and Erik's breakfast is waiting. And one time OH made his breakfast up and then came home with us afterwards anyway and he was very excited again. But not quite as excited as when OH isn't there and his breakfast is waiting. I'm more inclined to think the OH absence is a secondary clue for him. There must be something else. I thought maybe he could smell it through the closed up car and the closed up house, but I'm not entirely convinced about that one. He starts whining and jumping about just before we pull into the driveway, usually, but sometimes starts much earlier.

Assuming this is long-term memory of some sort, what triggers its recall? What makes him remember that his breakfast is waiting for him? When my long-term memory is triggered, normally either I am trying to recall something that is relevant to the moment, or the memory returned unbidden due to some sight or smell or collection of stimuli that reminds me of a former experience. Memories don't just pop into my head without some kind of prompting. Given we don't follow this routine every day, it can't be just where he is and that it's morning after our trip to the dog park. Or that he's anticipating something he can reliably predict. I thought maybe he was responding to the absence of OH, who normally gets him out of the car while I get Kivi out, but he starts whining before the car stops moving. My mum's dog used to think I could produce wildlife out of thin air because I appeared to do so a couple of times. It fascinated me that we could be walking along and all of a sudden out of the blue he would become utterly convinced that I had a bird somewhere. He would duck behind me, check anything I was carrying, want to look into my hands, and even if he couldn't find anything he would prance next to me with his ears up and forward, the picture of anticipation. I never did figure out what would trigger this, but perhaps he would smell birds and that got him going? ETA One of our dog park friends has a dog that is similarly obsessed with a single tree in the park. I think the story goes one day she saw a possum or a duck in it and every single day since she has stood underneath it and peered up into the branches wagging her tail excitedly. She goes back and forth to make sure she has viewed the holy spot from every angle and then gives up and leaves it.

Episodic memory is kind of like reliving something that happened once. The where, when, what and everything else linked to it. It's pretty much impossible to test for in animals because technically the animal has to be consciously recalling the memory and we don't know how to tell if an animal is doing that. There are some caching birds that selectively recover perishable items they have hidden over non-perishable depending on how much time has passed since they hid them, suggesting that they remember what they hid, where they put it, and how long it's been there. That's scrub jays, though. Jays break all sorts of animal cognition rules. I just threw it in there 'cause I'm a headliner.

Erik has a "did I do good??" look when I get upset that he is chewing something to pieces he's not meant to have. He gets up and looks into my face and wags his tail slow and loose. No way does it look guilty, or upset, but you can see he knows something out of the ordinary is taking place. He looks to connect with me. I'm not sure if he's seeking reassurance or information or what, but if I don't give him attention he grows more and more anxious. It fascinates me that he gets like that. Kivi doesn't. Erik needs a cuddle when he's upset me, though. It's good for us both. Me in particular. I can't be angry with him if he's all like "I need cuddles". It doesn't serve anyone for me to be angry with him.