corvus

Erik is when he's in a cuddle mood. When he's not cuddling he rarely does it. Kivi does when he's in a relaxed, cuddly mood as well, but to a lesser extent. Erik would lick constantly when he was cuddling if you let him. We are tolerant to it, but we have our limits!

Much better this evening. Kept the distances shorter and rewarded in position and he was a happy boy. I think he had cottoned on anyway, but it certainly helped. No hesitations, nice, confident, instant downs. And plenty of happy grins. I'm very fond of him right now, the darling! ;)

Ask yourself what you want to know and what you will do with the information. One of my pet hates is collecting excess information.

Yeah, that'd be great! Some people say dogs need to experience a Thundershirt a few times before it starts to work, but I didn't find that with Erik. I'd say if you go with the massage, do it until Delta lies down on her side and then a little bit more for good measure. That's usually what I do. I got some tryptophan supplement for Erik, thinking I would give that a go if at any point it looked like he consistently needed more help than I could give him. I told OH what it looked like and where I was storing it and he said that was good to know, because if he accidentally gave some to Kivi he would probably explode from the sheer calmness, and flowers and fluffy bunnies would rain down on the entire neighbourhood.

I didn't even do anything this morning and he settled down to the calm level he was at with massage and the TS last week. How is it that two consecutive days of lowering arousal in the morning can have such a profound effect? I want to know if it's just Erik that is so responsive to it.

Maybe not a puppy, but not really an adult, either. He's just at that age when adult dogs are likely to be outrageously hard on him, and he probably does find self control difficult. But that doesn't mean he can't learn to reign himself in and regulate his excitement somewhat. ;)

Oh! I see. ;) Yes, he does currently want to take a step or two after the command is issued in some circumstancs. If he's right by me or heading towards me he doesn't do it much. I just figured once he was sure of himself it would go away or I could shape it away if it didn't go on its own. He's usually pretty fast when he knows what to do. He's used to downing at a distance from me from NILIF at doors and gates and so on.

My last dog lived in a very small yard with no grass, just garden beds, for about a year. At the end of the year we moved to a place with a big, grassy yard. She was sooo happy. She would go for a romp down the yard and she liked to spend time rolling in the grass. It's the simple things. She didn't give any indication she was missing anything when she was at the other place, but she sure was happy to have grass again.

Ah, that makes sense, thanks. For the purposes of the exercise, I don't think it matters if he comes to me for a reward when released, but he's a stickler for routines and what holds for one exercise often tends to get applied to others. I think it's better if he doesn't get into the habit of always expecting the reward to come directly from me. I'm currently taking great pains to try to undo all those reward rules he has been using so we can get back to agility. I had been rewarding in position, but had moved on from there. I'll go back to it until he's more sure of himself again.

I'm not sure, Ptolomy. I don't know very much about obedience. I just want him to drop whenever I tell him to regardless of what he's doing. He currently will in many circumstances, but generally not when he's going faster than a walk, or thinking about inviting himself to someone else's game of fetch at the park, for example. A bit easier, more repetitions. We'll see how that goes. He's a little trooper and he likes doing things fast, so I guess he just needs to be surer of himself. OH recently taught him to throw himself into a combat roll from a run. He has started doing it every time OH calls him over! It's very cute and makes me giggle. E likes it so much he has incorporated it into play. It turns out it's an excellent way to dodge a pursuer when they get too close. I wonder if my reward is contributing to the confusion at all? I've been cueing a down, then running ahead and releasing him, then rewarding with food when he gets to me. He likes releases, but do you think it's not clear enough?

I think yard size does matter if you have more than one dog and they play together. My boys don't need me to be there to start a game with each other. Usually I have to go out and break it up before the neighbours start yelling about the noise. Makes me sad that my dogs can't play whenever the mood takes them. I agree that they would need less formal exercise if they had a bigger yard. We'd take them out daily anyway because it's part of our lifestyle to get out and about with the dogs.

I thought this year I might try training an emergency down. I've been loving Erik's default down and have sworn I'm teaching one to every dog I get from now on, and given lots of people seem to love the emergency down as well, I thought, why not give it a try? Erik is already halfway there. I'm not entirely sure how one does it. I assume it's a matter of fluency, so I've been trying to trick Erik with his downs lately by asking for them out of usual contexts. It's quite fun trying to think of ways to challenge him. I recently got him holding a down while I walked out of sight with his dinner. That was hard for him, but he's got it, now. Downing facing away from me and his dinner was also hard, but he's got that one nailed now as well. So I started asking for them in motion. This has been met with mixed results. I think he is a little confused. He sometimes does quite well even at a jog when he's at my side, and I've been getting OH to call him and when I shout "down" OH signals it. I think that one might be jumping ahead a bit. So I tried getting him to down on his way to me instead. He is not bad at this one. But sometimes he just stops and looks at me uncertainly. He may or may not down a few moments after stopping. I guess I'm trying to figure out what the next step is, because I think I've taken several steps at once with all these things I've tried. He can do it, but perhaps asking for several new challenges at once has made him feel uncertain. I get the feeling he's not entirely happy. So where do I go? Down in motion or down coming towards me? Or something else?

That may be so, but I would not get another dog as long as we are on this block, and last time we picked a breed we went for a smaller one than what we really wanted specifically because we didn't consider our yard big enough to accommodate another medium-large dog. We take ours for an off leash run every day because our yard is just not big enough for them to stretch their legs. They do play out there, and they can get up to a run, but it's just not the same as an all out gallop in the park. If the park was closer I'd take them twice a day, but I don't like going on my own. I like having the OH as an extra pair of eyes and hands. Just makes transporting and managing around other dogs easier, and means I can train both dogs because he can work with one while I work with the other. The majority of the time our dogs are at home they don't need a lot of space, but there are those times when they have extra energy for some unknown reason and the sudden need to zoom around like maniacs takes them. I love it when they stay at my parents' house where the yard is about the size of our entire block. They get up and spontaneously play more often and when they do they have enough room to do it properly. For myself, it is one of my great joys to watch my dogs play, and for that reason the next place we get will have a yard big enough for it. We will still take them for an off leash run every day, but it would be nice if they could play properly whenever the feeling took them.

The beach in Bundeena is open to dogs in certain hours, and there's a dog beach in Kurnell where dogs are allowed off leash any time, but it's not very big. Easy for dogs to run and somehow end up on the road. We go to Wollongong for dog beaches. They are nicer and we can go any time of the day, any day of the week. The hours at Wanda have recently been changed so dogs can go on weekends after 4pm and before 10am.

I kinda use TTouch. Sort of. I started with TTouch and then found some things that he especially seemed responsive to, like quite firm circles on his haunches and long strokes down his back. Here's a video I made to show someone else: He wasn't in the mood for it, so lots of tongue flicks. It's a bit blurry because he poked the camera with his nose a minute earlier.

Haha, I see a lot of beagles running around dog parks cheerfully ignoring their owner, who is running after them calling their name. I know they are generally thought to be sociable, but we've met several that have been snappy. I would say don't take it for granted that they will be sociable. I'm guessing grumpy beagles are under-socialised?

My old girl moved house several times and always took it in her stride. The first time she got a bit anxious the first day I had to go to work, but she got over it pretty quickly. If you're worried and think he needs company, you could always try dogtree. You can find people on there with dogs that wouldn't mind taking an extra some days. I work from home most days and have social dogs, so it's no big deal for me, for example. I'd worry a bit about my neighbours, though. They don't like dog noise.

I use Erik licking me as an indicator that I'm on the right track when I massage him. It usually starts when he's close to lying down and just letting me do what I like with him.

You could PM deerhoundowner. She's been researching canine dementia for the last 3 years. She is a wealth of knowledge on the topic.

I remember being very upset when my first dog started to trip over things on walks when her eyesight first started to go. In the last year of her life I made a few friends locally from walking her. One lady in particular had a dog about 6 months older. We would walk along slowly together if we met when we were our walking our oldies. It was good to have someone to talk to about it. I got very anxious about my girl's deteriorating health. It helped to have a sympathetic ear. Current boys are young and it's hard to imagine them getting old, but it'll creep up on us and one day we'll get a bit panicky when we suddenly realise they aren't going to be with us forever. But it passes and if I'm as lucky with them as I was with my last dog, we'll have plenty of time to get used to the idea and adjust to their new needs as they move into old age.

Why would she? In dogdom, possession is 9/10 of the law. Anything that is outside the immediate sphere of influence of other dogs or people is up for grabs. It's hard work to make it otherwise. I think it takes a very high level of control and consistency. Every time the dog gives in to temptation the system is weakened. Having said that, some dogs are really easy to get along with and generalise these sorts of rules well. Others, not so much. Personally, I think it's easier to anticipate problems and avoid them before they appear. She can't be a bully if she's in a down or physically separated from the other dog.

This is all very interesting. Thanks guys! I do wonder about return to 'baseline' arousal, though. It seems to me that lowering Erik's arousal in the morning means that later in the day if he gets aroused he comes down quicker and to a lower level than if I do nothing. And repeating that for a few days results in the same thing without needing to do anything to directly lower his arousal. Just conditioning, I guess.

I never know what people mean when they say leadership or being a leader. I honestly think it's one of those abstract ideas that means different things to different people, which is why I don't really use the word or the concept myself. It's not dirty, just ambiguous.

Vallhunds are well known for being vocal, and I was prepared for this when I got Erik, I thought. I knew how to teach a dog to be quiet. What I didn't know was how to teach a 'nuisance' barker to be quiet. When I started working from home last year, I discovered Erik seemed to be running at higher arousal in general than he really needed to, which was why he was jumping up and barking at every minute sound he heard. I did some training with him and it helped, but sometimes he just wasn't in the mood to lie quietly on his bed and it was difficult for either of us to maintain. It was like fighting against a tide. Inevitably, he'd be up every few minutes to bark at something and it would take hours for him to settle enough to nap. One day I tried giving him a really good massage in the morning before I got to work, and to my shock he settled immediately and all day he ran at a more normal arousal level. He napped most of the day, ignored the majority of the sounds that usually set him off, and settled again quickly whenever he got up. Over the course of a week, I had him taking himself to bed at about 9am each morning and running at a normal arousal level all day. Then I went on holidays for a few weeks and when I came back he was back to being tightly wound all the time. Anyway, this week I thought I'd try repeat what I did the first time 'round, but I used a Thundershirt instead. I took it off after about an hour and again, he was calmer all day. Today I didn't use the Thundershirt, but went back to massage and just made sure that every time he got up to bark at something I called him back right away and took a few minutes to bring him down again. I did that about three times this morning and again, he's been calmer all day. I'm fascinated that doing something to lower arousal at the start of the day can apparently last for many hours. I wonder if it's possible to 'set' the arousal running level at the start of the day? Considering many problem behaviours occur when arousal is high, I can suddenly see the sense in Karen Overall's Relaxation Protocol as a matter of course before trying to modify problem behaviour. Steven Lindsay seems to be in favour of it as well, or his own version, which includes massage but a much more structured version than what I've been doing. I have found that if I leave Erik to be barky for, say, half a day and then do massage, it's not as effective, and same with the Thundershirt, although I think it varies. I'm wondering if I'm 'setting' his arousal level in the morning, or if I'm just bringing his arousal down from a lower level in the first place than if I did something halfway through the day. That probably wasn't very coherent. I'd like to hear what other people think about the role of manipulating arousal in behaviour modification.

I have made friends, learnt about target training, got help with my clicker training, got lots of tips about coat care, made some enemies, been shocked, excited, and insulted, but most of all, DOL motivated me to get into dog research. Actually, I think it was your fault, PF. I think I said I didn't want to do dog research because of the politics, and you told me it was only as political as I cared to make it. I started seriously thinking about it as a result. You were wrong as it turned out, but I don't care. I'm happier now than I have ever been, adore my project, and have had the delight of discovering a lot of dog-related literature. Ongoing delight. DOL gives me somewhere to air my enthusiasm, and it's motivated me to start a blog so I can air my enthusiasm with more freedom.