corvus

I haven't had Foxtel in years, but I used to watch Barking Mad when I lived in the States. That was such a great show. I learnt heaps from it! ETA Whatever happened to Jeff Corwin? I loved that guy. He always shared the really interesting things about animals he found. A lot of the docos leave out the best bits! It's very frustrating to watch as a zoologist.

That is good to hear! Here's hoping he continues his recovery.

Look At That is the game for any occasion. I use it and love it. It is extremely effective. :D

I did that trying to prevent a fight the other day. It worked, but I was lucky the dog wasn't going in to do damage. He was just making a point. I did end up with his mouth on my hand and got to learn how inhibited his bites are when he's passionate about something. I will undoubtedly do it again. When I see something about to happen I tend to just grab first and think later. It's worked so many times for me that it'll take a serious chomp or two to teach my amygdala to talk to my cortex about it first.

Could she be recognising the context as a training situation and therefore particularly want to be with you because you reward her a lot in training situations when she's with you? Or it could just be that she hasn't generalised away from you=okay in every scenario.

She gives me sad eyes if do that, but thats all. Given the chance though, she follows me from room to room. She is not a velcro dog ie. she doesn't have to sit right beside me, but she does like to have me in her sights. It might just be a matter of reward history, then. If she thinks you're training and she can't physically get to you to train, that might be quite upsetting to her. What if you were to tie her up somewhere off your property and duck out of sight, but where you could still see her?

It's not too bad for me because I have two rare breeds. One of the reasons I like rare breeds is because it's much easier to find a breeder I like. I find it daunting if there's a list of, like, over a hundred breeders. I don't know where to start. I just want a dog that will be healthy and fit in with my lifestyle and suit my personality. An answer to a fairly important question for me like "I don't know, should be all right" doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. I'll find a breeder that can give me a more confident answer, thanks.

I think sometimes you being there but not with the dog is wildly upsetting to some dogs. Erik is like this. He just goes nuts if the pack splits up and he can see where the others are going but can't get to them. I have practised getting him walking on a loose leash in these scenarios when they come up. While he can now actually do it whereas before he'd be so over threshold we basically just had to pick him up and carry him, he still finds it really hard and I suspect he always will. Mostly because I don't have the motivation to do the work required. In my mind, to fix it I would need to start small before he starts getting anxious and get him doing easy exercises, then increase the distance between him and the other dog and person. And once I was happy with it I would need to switch handlers and do it again. And then I would have to get a new handler and do it again. I would also be doing Karen Overall's Protocol for Relaxation and probably Aidan's Calming Yo-yo exercise. How does she react if you go into another room and shut the door to prevent her following? Or if you go outside without her?

My dad made an enclosure for my hare. It is purpose made and plenty sturdy enough while still being possible to take it apart if we ever have to move it. It's about 4m long, 2m wide, and 2m tall. He has a crate for when the weather gets miserable, a bench he can sit on to see what's going on or hide underneath, and a shell pool that's full of soil for him to dig in. He apparently doesn't think much of digging and instead just likes to eat his hay in it. We put corrugated iron along most of the bottom, but left it off on one corner and the door so that he can see out. He likes to see what's happening, but doesn't like to see it from all sides. He's happiest if he can watch and feel hidden at the same time. It cost about $400 in materials and took my dad about two weekends to make it. I love that we can take it with us when we leave this block. Not doggy stuff, but I did consider putting my puppy in it when it was sitting there unused while the final touches were put on. It was a lot bigger and safer than his puppy pen!

If you happen to be buying something from Amazon, stock up on i-clicks in the process. :rolleyes: I bought a pack of 5 last time and a year in I even know where 3 of them are!

Get a PhD scholarship and find a supervisor who also works from home! Although, before that I used to work from home as I worked for a couple of very small consulting businesses. They had home offices and room for me, but I did one or two days a week at the office and the rest at home. They let me take my dogs to their offices if I wanted to, but I usually found it a bit distracting watching two young hooligans rampaging around someone else's property. They would eventually settle down and come and sleep by my feet, but excited by the new surroundings. It didn't work as well at home, either, because I didn't enjoy the work so much. It was hard to engage and concentrate. It's much easier now that I love what I'm doing, but I'm also the only one taking responsibility for it and I'm a bit more committed to quality.

I work at home, too. It's awesome. If I need a break I can just go play with the dogs for a bit. It's very soothing to have them sleeping around my feet while I work, they supervise all my movements around the house, and I get to spend more time with them. I really love working from home!

What's the DD name for that mix??

Oh, there are differences, just mostly to do with reinforcement histories. We don't treat them exactly the same as each other. Interesting. I don't think I've ever seen that. Unless it can occur in a cat?? My family has a cat that 'chose' my youngest brother. She is with him almost 24/7 and rides around the house on his shoulder. He can do anything to her and if she can't find him she roams around the house calling until he calls back and then she runs to him and he puts her back on his shoulder. It's quite remarkable. I've never seen a cat so bonded to someone. How do you tell that apart from resource guarding? Dogs like this can gravitate towards what they find the most stable, consistent authority figuire in their lives. This doesnt necessarily mean the 'kindest' or 'nicest' but the one they see as most worthy of trust and obedience which can be a separate issue to gender. I get it too when I train some dogs and then off lead they bolt to me over their owners and wont listen to them O_o I'm not training my minion army, truely i'm not. This situation is not like the intrapack 'pairing' some dogs do, this comes down to the fact they stick to the person who makes them feel most comfortable. He's not the 'nicest'! Whenever this dog stays with us he transfers this neediness to me, which I detest. I'm not the nicest, either! But he still periodically stands on the couch and looks out the window whining. I'm just a placeholder. I spend more time with him.

Yes. I dunno, though. The dog doesn't seem to have a favourite. I don't have any girl dogs to compare, but I don't think either of my boy dogs behave markedly different towards me than towards my OH. Well, maybe Kivi is a bit of a mummy's boy. He doesn't exactly have a preference for spending time with me, but if he wants a cuddle he more often comes to me than my partner. My parents' dogs all treat my mum and dad much the same, with the exception that my dad doesn't do much with the dogs and so they hardly ever listen to him regardless of their gender. The male dog we are babysitting at the moment definitely has a preference for OH's dad over his mum. They share the care equally. He is mostly untrained but very anxious. Would this be something unlikely to occur with an anxious dog, or does it not matter? I always thought the differences were more to do with whether a dog was the kind prone to developing a bond to one person or a whole family unit.

But this actually sounds more intelligent- they expend the least effort in order to get what they want. Why bother solving something yourself when you can get someone else to do it for you? Very manipulative if you ask me. It's no good expending minimal energy if you then die of thirst as a result! My rabbit had the same problem with her bottle at the same time. There was no indication from her that there was a problem at all. She was just going to go thirsty. And she would have for some time if the hare hadn't brought my attention to his water problem, thus leading me to check hers. The same thing happened while we were on holidays and the rabbit's water bottle broke. The pet sitter replaced it with a new one, but it didn't work. Two days later we get home to find a parched bunny. The only indication was she paid more attention to me reaching towards the water bottle than usual. Dogs are well known for giving up on a problem and looking for a human to solve it for them. I think that this is not as intelligent as it sounds. It's a generalised kind of response. If they could solve it themselves they would, as evidenced by several studies where breeds like Beagles or Basenjis solved the problem while more dependent breeds appealed to the human. Relying on a human is dicey. Some are better at divining a problem than others. If I were an animal I'd rather solve it myself. At least then I know I am actually going to get what I'm after. Case in point, today I dropped a treat on the deck and it fell through the cracks. Later on, Erik located it through smell from above, then nonchalantly hopped off the deck, went underneath, rummaged around for a bit, then came back out licking his lips and munching. I assume he found the treat. He could have looked at me and whined about it, but it's unlikely it would have got him anywhere. I will point out treats he hasn't found yet for him, but I'm not about to crawl under the deck looking for one, or give him a fresh one just because he can smell one. I think that the fact dogs will happily solve a simple problem without seeking human intervention indicates that when they do seek human intervention it is because they are finding the problem hard rather than that they are conserving energy.

Sometimes it might reduce tension. E.g. "top dog" is given access first, which means they are not subjected to any frustration that might have provoked them into starting something. However, if the assigned "top dog" is not the one that typically starts altercations, it seems like it might get worse before it gets better. I guess that in a sense it's conditioning the dogs that they each get their turn and the non-"top dog" gets to learn some self control. As long as the "leader" dog is used to deferring to humans I don't think there is a high likelihood of them turning on their owner.

had a feeling it was. Male dog with a female owner perhaps? Why do you say that?

Opposite sex.

Food for thought: Assuming the point of dominant behaviour is to control resources, including possibly the behaviour of others, then it would follow that a dog that is "pack leader" even temporarily for whatever reason ought to feel confident seeing as they are in control of everything that matters. Therefore a dog that is not confident as "pack leader" couldn't feel in control and therefore is not "pack leader".

I generally fall over backwards if anyone gets either of my breeds right. It's especially shocking when it's someone that you see often. I had one person at the park say once "How old is your Vallhund, now?" Just like that! Never spoken to her before, but seen her with her dogs plenty of times. She was from the UK. They are usually from the UK. Another dog park semi-regular one day said "He's a Finnish Lapphund, isn't he?" Turned out his sister was a Lapphund breeder in Sweden or somewhere similar. I don't mind answering all the questions. We do have awesome dogs and of course people want to know what they are. I shocked someone walking two Beddlingtons once by asking if they were Beddlingtons. They hadn't had a haircut in a while and were very hairy. Otherwise I wouldn't have had to ask!

We had this Boxer come through the pilot study who was greatly interested in the training apparatus, but never actually got past the very first training step (touch target with nose to trigger a reward). She triggered it several times, and watched with fascination, cocking her head and staaaaaaring at where the milk was coming out, but she just never made the connection. She accumulated close to 20 touches over a few training sessions, but every single one was accidental and we never saw the sudden increase in triggering that would signal a dog had figured it out. It was truly bizarre. Another Boxer came through and did quite well, although didn't have time to finish the training. Erik tries a lot of things out. He walks around the house poking things with his nose and swiping them with his paw. Anything that moves is irresistable. The Playstation controllers are very attractive to him, and the drum pedal from the Guitar Hero drum set gets pressed all the time. He is just convinced that it does something and he just has to figure out what. He learns very quickly, but mostly just through relentless trial and error. My mother's Vallhund is known for licking the BBQ plate. Naturally, the first time he tried this he burnt both his paws and his tongue. But, he went back 10 minutes later and tried again a little more carefully and learnt that things that are hot don't stay hot forever. These days he has a good sense of how long to wait and a safe method of testing. He's a pro. I think wild animals are much better at problem solving than domestic animals as a rule. My hare is nowhere near as smart as my dogs, but he has shocked me a couple of times. One time he had a Lassie moment communicating to me through much pantomime that his water bottle was not working. He had to go through a few steps to get my attention and draw it to the problem and it took some novel behaviour. My domestic animals don't think of trying to tell me about a problem they have. They just give up on it, or make general noises or signals of discontent.

How would you tell the difference between this: ... and this: Say you isolated possible rewarding or punishing behaviour from the people and get them to stop one at a time to see what happens, but if there's no effect it could be either none of them were related or the behaviour is now habitual and no longer needs maintenance from the people. The human behaviour that reinforces or punishes could be quite subtle and habitual as well. I know I have knee jerk reactions I don't even know I'm doing half the time. If someone asked me to stop doing them, I'd be hard-pressed.

Or they felt on edge with the change in routine?

The scenario is: dog lives with two people, treats them both the same, the people share the care of the dog, but when one person is with the dog at home it alert barks a lot, but when the other person is with the dog at home it doesn't alert bark much. The obvious answer is one person is rewarding barking somehow or the other person is punishing it somehow, but I wonder if there are other possible reasons outside of operant conditioning?