corvus

Not so much when someone else at the dog park widens their eyes and drops their jaw slightly when your dog throws himself into a combat roll mid-canter, but when your eyes widen and your jaw drops a little when he is cued to roll while he's trotting along the tops of the logs by a mischievous OH and he not only does it without hesitation, but manages to keep at least his front half on the logs the whole time.

I would say a mixture, as always. My boys have both been exposed to plenty of rude dogs where they have not become frightened or injured and both handle it very, very well. They are very different dogs. Kivi never corrects rude behaviour. He just deals with it and most of the time will go back for another try if things don't go so well. He has the tolerance of a saint. Erik is not socially mature yet, but while he will tolerate and easily avoid a lot of rude behaviour, he really hates dogs that bite or buffet his face in play. He won't correct them. He just keeps telling them he doesn't like it, louder every time. Perhaps Erik will come to correct dogs, but I'd rather he didn't and am managing the situation to try to avoid that from happening. I honour avoidance behaviour. If he's trying to avoid the dog we do everything in our power to allow him to avoid them, and reward him for doing so. He's not a dog I ever want taking the law into his own paws. He forms habits too readily. I am not sure if he will start skipping the avoidance behaviour as he grows older, but for now I'm glad he tries that first.

My mother has a dog that seems to have missed the fact that at some point she grew to be several times the size she was as a puppy. She still squeezes into places she found quite comfortable as a puppy. What is remarkable is that she can do it. She shoots under the stairs sometimes, and seriously, when you look at the gap she went through it is hard to believe she could get herself through it. She just has to twist sideway and slide in now. She also still tries to walk under your legs when you are sitting down. She doesn't fit, but she pushes in anyway. Peoples' legs can move off the ground to give her extra space. OH's old 40kg Boxer thought he was a lap dog. It was hard to breath when he was sitting on your lap.

Well, it can't be as bad as some things I've done. Like de-baiting quoll traps. The chicken wings would look innocuous enough on the outside, but as soon as you disturbed them, swarms of fat maggots would start squirming out of them and the smell would finally hit you. There was always someone on the team that would go a bit green and have to look away. But, you know, there's a reason why I opted for a career change away from field work. :D Now that I think about it, there are a lot of things about field work I won't miss. I'm in the civilised world of dogs, now. We don't get our fingers overly icky with raw mince.

See, I had that kind of thing (and the bruised thighs) happening with Erik, only, being Erik he took it one step further and started barking and trying to drive Kivi away from the gate to the training area. The neighbours don't like my keen dog. He is too noisy. The other day I was accompanying a tradie around the house with a treat stick in my hand to help Erik overcome his need to make a lot of noise. Every time I stopped, Kivi nudged his way into heel position and sat there gazing up at me, waiting for me to notice and reward him. Awww, he's so cute.

By "very high drive dogs", are we talking about dogs with a high capacity for arousal, that are also easily aroused and highly motivated towards most rewards? Do they tend to have a high baseline level of arousal?

As someone who found a way to motivate a wild hare to train, I honestly think sometimes it's just a matter of reward selection and how you present it. A hare doesn't need to look for food, so doesn't have the natural opportunism a dog does. They don't really play, they don't hunt, and are really only driven by the need to find safety. It took me a long time before I figured out how to get my hare to work reliably for food. If I can get a hare to work for food I think anyone can motivate their low drive dog. You just have to find the right reward and start conditioning. Not just behaviours you want to train, but the act of training itself. Start with really short sessions so the animal doesn't get the chance to get bored and build their desire to train from there. For my hare, it's still a lot of classical conditioning to get through his fears.

Oh, was I? I thought I was talking about this: E wasn't well trained at the time. As noted, he's pretty good with his sits, now, and shows good impulse control. It's much harder for him to hold in the face of a wiggly toy than it is for Kivi, though, and thus took a lot more work to train. Lots of things are inherently more distracting to Erik than they are to Kivi. I like Erik's enthusiasm; it's very fun. But I also like Kivi's natural focus. It makes my job a lot easier.

I don't know, the high drive dogs I've been around have always thrown themselves into any command they've been given if they know it will earn them their drive reward. I don't know if that's just them or the way they've been trained though. IMO when a behaviour is still being learned, "drive rewards" are not that much help. They are helpful if it's a very easy behaviour or active behaviour. This afternoon I shaped Erik to chase a ball he started out thoroughly ignoring using a chase-and-tug toy he badly wanted to play with instead, and he was pretty wildly aroused for that. But there's no way I could shape a stationary behaviour that way. Well, I wouldn't bother trying because it's completely counter-productive. I shape stationary behaviours with food or tactile. "Drive rewards" can come in later to build reliability. E's sitting for tug and chase games now and we're working on getting him to hold it when we tease him with the toys he wants. It took a long time to get his sits that solid, though. Kivi's sits are more solid and more reliable with much less work. He's just not as easily tempted as Erik. That natural tendency is what I was referring to.

Haha, that sounds pretty familiar. I used to laugh at what Erik can turn into a high energy training game. Pretty much anything. Including "sitting quietly in a gazebo trying to watch dogs in a conformation show". Sometimes you actually don't want to be playing a high energy training game. He turns into one of those pet parrots that knows all they have to do to get the attention they want is make enough noise. Sometimes it's incredibly difficult NOT to reward him.

Hmm, that's a good idea. I'm finding cutting up the 4Legs rolls annoyingly time consuming. Someone needs to invent a gadget that dices whatever you whack in it into little 5mm cubes. I am happy to use a bit of cheese, PF, but I'm also happy to use a bit of dog food roll. I'm just concerned about the large amount. I'm going through about 100g of treats for each dog a day at the moment. That's, like, nearly half of what Erik eats every day.

I find my high drive dog has difficulties with stationary behaviours and impulse control. Tell Kivi to sit and he's the happiest dog in the world. Tell Erik to sit and he will try to pretend he didn't hear the cue. It took heaps of work to get his sit-stays solid, and if he's having a bad day basically we are back to ridiculously high reward rates. He is extremely easy to train in general, but if he wants to drive forwards, it takes a lot of work to teach him not to. In contrast, Kivi is easy to teach duration behaviours. He's not bouncing all over the place all the time, so there are heaps of opportunities to reward and loads of leeway for timing.

Pfft. Drive isn't everything. What's in basic obedience that requires drive?

They are not fussy and hang out for their vegie off-cuts when I'm making lunch, but there's not a lot of nutritional value in it for them. It seems not ideal to me to cut back their nutritious meals so I can give them less nutritious treats. At any rate, they get some pretty tasty treats. I doubt they will think much of fruit and vegies as a standard treat. I use boiled heart for recall treats, but it's time consuming preparing it. I'm not sure that I want to give them that much rich stuff like heart or liver every day...

My dogs are currently eating A LOT every day in treats. I use 4Legs rolls cut up small. It's good because it holds its shape well. However, given they are getting so much of their daily intake in treats, I would prefer to be doling out something more like their usual diet. Their mince mix is way too messy, though, and bones are really not appropriate for treats. BARF patties are again too messy, but I'm wondering about some of the other rolls. What about Scottys, which is cooked? Has anyone found anything that fits the bill? What if I cooked some of the raw patties or rolls in teensy little meatballs or something? Dehydrated them in the microwave? Any ideas?

Aw, I love it! It shows how it's really not that hard!

or you could turn it around and say you failed the dog in your role of protecting him from being put in the postion that he needed to snap It amounts to the same thing. The best way to make sure non-aggressive coping behaviours work is to make sure my dogs get the space they want when they display them.

No. ETA, but did the dog become less tolerant as they matured, or did they learn to skip milder forms of communication due to lack of effectiveness? I don't know the difference, but I would bet the latter is more common than the former. We meet a lot of dogs with shite communication skills. The times Erik has snapped it's been because his playmate has missed several quite obvious signals. It's a bit of a worry when I can read a dog better than another dog can! My dogs are generally much better at reading strange dogs than I am. That's the way it should be IMO. As I said, I make sure they have success with non-aggressive behaviours. If they snap, I missed all the non-aggressive behaviours they tried first and let them go by unrewarded. Before my current dogs I had a very snappy corgi. She was not inherently that way. She learnt to be quick with the air snaps. I accepted that it was who she was at the time, but it wasn't. It was just how she learnt to handle dogs. My youngest dog is very tolerant of things that he hates from other dogs, but when he reaches his limits he switches quite profoundly and suddenly from avoidavoidavoid to not being content until the offending dog has been driven off. In my view, I don't want to continually expect him to tolerate something he obviously really dislikes, even if he will. If I were him, I would find my tolerance becoming ever less over time, or perhaps I would learn to just skip most of the nicer ways of saying "don't" because they don't work real well. I don't want my dog being the one to tell the young 'uns "seriously, DO NOT bite dogs' faces when you're parallel running with them!". However appropriate it may be, I would rather for him that someone listened when he said "I don't like that". I want him to continue to have faith in politeness, even if it's an artificially created and maintained faith. What's appropriate and what I want to reinforce are two entirely separate matters.

Start with SEEKING. It's the most important bit, anyway.

I wouldn't simply shrug it off as her growing up. Not if there were negative experiences involved. At any rate, I don't accept that because my dog doesn't like something, snapping is appropriate. To me, if he snaps it means I failed in my job of making sure non-aggressive behaviours work for him. So far it's happened twice and he's 18 months old. And we've managed to narrowly avoid it three or four times. It can be done.

OH says to me he doesn't know how breeders do it. He says if he was responsible for bringing puppies into the world he would worry too much about finding them good homes. He would worry about them for the rest of their lives, terrified that someone might decide they didn't want it anymore and rehome it, put it to sleep, or surrender it without telling him. My OH doesn't know much about breeding and has little care for standards. He just couldn't bear the responsibility of breeding. I agree with him. I don't know how they do it, either. I would like to try breeding one day, but not dogs. Nothing that I would need to find homes for some of the babies. Only if I could keep the offspring.

Shar pei for Purex.

I was doing some reading on motivation today for work and was struck by just how interesting it all is from a training perspective. Someone talk about it with me, dammit! I found the link to Panksepp's paper on emotional states that I mentioned recently to Mrs Rusty Bucket, so I thought I'd post it and hope someone might like to discuss it. It's really interesting! *esplodes* http://www.indin2007.org/enf/downloads/pan...nsciousness.pdf

It's kinda obvious, but is there any breed more universally lovable and loving than a Lapphund? Not in my eyes. Erik is the bigger cuddle monster, but a Lappie is the dog you love to love.

You started the exact thread I was going to start last week! I love collective nouns. I started calling a collection of Vallhunds a brace of Vallhunds for some reason. It seemed to suit. I brace myself as they pour across the ground towards me. I never came up with one for Lapphunds. I was idly thinking a diplomacy of Lapphunds, but maybe it's just my Lapphund that's so diplomatic. I think there's an argument for a welcome of Lapphunds. They are very friendly.