corvus

They are total ferals! In a good way. A Puli might be a slightly toned down and less obsessive version, but the coat is a big deal unless you keep them clipped short, but then, it's still a big deal to begin with. I think you want a TT. The clipped one I saw appealed to me more in looks than the fully coated ones do. They left the hair on her feet long so she had slippers. It was adorable!

Yes. I don't like OH's parents' Min Pin. I feel sorry for him sometimes, but he is needy, excessively nervous, chronically anxious, he is unpleasant to have on your lap where he thinks he should always be, he whines a lot and in the car he yips and whines in near hysterics and it seriously never ends. We took him for a 2 hour drive one time thinking he would surely calm down sooner or later, but no. He didn't. Barked the whole way. We were like, what if we ever have a dog that turns out to be like Alex?? I met a dog at the shelter last week that I just do not like. He has the attention span of a flea and he chases his tail a lot and chews his leg and licks his paws and every little sound grabs his full attention. I swear he must have some kind of anxiety disorder. I can't bring myself to see past it. And there was that 3-legged Boxer that lived a few doors down from my parents. It could jump a 6 foot fence and if it caught you near its house it would run out and chase you. It was fast, it would catch you, and then it would jump on you and bite you. It never did anyone any damage, but scared the crap out of me. Can't like a dog that puts the fear in you.

First (and last) time I got bitten by a dog was a little terrier thing that "looked friendly". It wasn't. I am overly careful, now.

I thought there might be Pumis in the country, but it seems like probably not. They are not much to look at, but man, when they run they really run. I think they aren't wildly friendly, though.

I think possibly two at least. Not all the breeders are listed on DOL.

Yes! But I think mostly by hunters, who breed some pretty serious dogs. I think there's a breeder in NSW that possibly shows, though? They have a litter advertised on DOL atm.

The TT I met was taller than Erik, but lighter. She was clipped short and they keep her that way. Ohohoh, if you wanna train in prey drive, German Hunting Terrier ought to be fun. Hardcore!

Oh, also, PWDs can be born with a wavy coat. I think they can't be shown, but the coat is easier to care for. Someone on idog has a wavy PWD. Are there any Pumis in Australia?

What about a Tibetan Terrier? They are, from what I believe, very fast and agile, outgoing, and just that little bit challenging to deal with. Not a real terrier. I met one and totally fell in love. Ace little dog. Had a good chat to the owners and I reckon they'd be good sports dogs. Huski doesn't like the look of Valls. Plus they are a wee bit quirky and tend to suit folks that are kind of quirky.

Ian Dunbar has a bite severity scale that I think uses photos of the bite to help inform decisions about what should be done with the dog. Behaviourists I have heard talking about it have put a lot of weight on whether the bite was inhibited and to what extent. It is generally considered that an inhibited bite is worth working with, but an uninhibited bite is a huge concern. But then, everyone is different in what they will work with and what they won't, and what they see in the dog when they view it. In general, a behaviour that occurs once is always lurking in the background as a behaviour that can occur again. It can be inhibited, or the trigger dealt with, but it's always still a possibility.

I'd stick with a herder as well. I think they tend to do well together as they all have comparable play styles. Except my Lapphund, who doesn't always realise he's a herder. My Vallhund is tough as old boots, strong, and fast. He wrestles with my Lapphund, who is twice his size, and often manages to drag him to the ground. He doesn't like wrestling with dogs he doesn't know so well, though. He prefers to play chase games. My last dog was a corgi. Also tough and strong and played with big dogs quite happily. She spent most of her time outside and did fine. I remember her insisting on sleeping outside in Canberra on one of the coldest nights we had that winter. I kept waking up during the night thinking I heard her at the door, but she was fine. Come morning the place was covered in frost and she emerged cheerily from her kennel, apparently oblivious of it.

Indeedy. He has taken to it like a duck to water. I very much like watching him work. It's pure delight. He's a thinker. Yesterday he was caught on the wrong side of the apparatus when the tone sounded and he just leaned over the top of it to set it off from behind, then came 'round for his reward. Clever cookie! He doesn't just learn the task.

Hey, incidentally, the star of the standard training methodology so far is a sighthound. He does the cutest 7 second touches, staring at the target and straining even his ears forward when he thinks the machine is broken and didn't register the first touch. He's gorgeous and is ripping through it with steady competence. He'd give Erik a run for his money.

I found cleaning up my criteria has been helpful in general. My targeting cue is two fingers held out. My targeting dog is expected to press his nose into the little circle of palm below the two fingers, bordered by my thumb on the inside. It's a smaller target, the fingers give him a guide, and once he realised that that's what targeting means he would hold it for longer and press harder, giving me something good to mark. A wee bit of frustration seems to often result in a harder touch. My dog can also get a bit excited about targeting. Sometimes I just want him to get it together. I crouch down and give him some easy touches and a bit of a chest rub to help him calm down and he usually gets nice and focused again. For him at least the excitement is mostly "OMG, target cue, food, quick!" and he gets frustrated if I he didn't meet criteria a couple of times in a row. Ken Ramirez at the APDT conference said your animal has to trust that their primary reinforcer will come. That one little sentence was quite profound to me, and made me look at my training in a new way. I have to make sure my animals trust that they will get their reward. Sometimes I get caught up looking for criteria my animal isn't aware I'm looking for. I try to stick to a rule with my targeting dog that if he didn't get it twice in a row we do something easier to build him up to it again.

Good question. There was a time I considered going with foot targeting, but when I thought about it from an ethological perspective I thought it was more likely for a dog to explore an interesting scent or object with their nose rather than their foot. I'm always seeing dogs doing stupid things with their noses, like checking out an animal that is potentially dangerous. You'd think it would be safer to do that with a foot, but the only time I've seen dogs do it is if they are frustrated or trying to play with something. Anyway, given she's a Boxer she might be much more likely to use a foot than a nose. Maybe that's what happened, but I'm more inclined to think if her behaviour can be explained by any past human interaction it was just people doing everything for her so she didn't have to think. She doesn't seem nervous at all. No sign of aversion or inhibition about nosing. We have a little dog that flinches every time a hand comes near him. That's pretty telling. This girl's a big cuddle muffin, though. Not in the least bit cautious around hands and more than happy to stick her nose in my lap/armpit/face/hands.

It depends on what you're interested in, though. If I were to take a sample from one kennel, all I'm learning about is that one kennel. If I were interested in something inherited, that would be a good idea, maybe. But if I want to know what the general level of optimism is in dogs, I should be aiming for a sample that is representative of the general dog population. I was originally thinking shelter dogs would not be representative of the general population, but I now think they are more representative than I was imagining. Most of the dogs are just typical dogs. The basket cases get PTS before we get our hands on them. Of the dogs left the worst they have displayed is timidity or a lack of training. I think if anything I'll end up with a bias towards optimistic dogs. Anyway, I'm still considering balancing my pilot study numbers with dogs from the public. We'll see what we end up with from the shelter. Aidan, I think you're right, I think we do have some dogs not hungry enough. We already have one we are dropping because she works for about a minute, then just lies down. I've seen her at it and I am quite sure she would reach criteria if she ever worked for a whole training block, but she just doesn't want puppy milk that much. She's working for the hell of it, which really only sustains her for a couple of minutes max.

We do 15 minute training sessions broken up into 3 lots of 3 minutes on and 2 minutes off. Up to 2 sessions a day, an hour apart, and this dog did 4 sessions over 3 days, I think. Impeded learning is a bit different to no learning. She may well have been stressed, but if she's still interested in a bit of puppy milk my guess is she's not so stressed her learning would be so significantly affected as to put her so far behind other dogs. She was a bit nervous about the marker tone to begin with, and she's the only dog we've had that has startled from the tone and then got over it. I wasn't going to say she had a learning disability, I just wondered if it was possible. Possibly I'm making a false distinction between her and some of the other dogs we've had problems with, but there's no way for me to tell, really. She makes me wonder and I wondered out loud in public to see what other folks may have experienced.

No. The ITI comes in once the dog is touching on cue and we introduce a different signal for the discrimination training. I originally had it for the second phase, which involves training a cue for touching, but I ended up cutting it down to just a 15s pause because Erik was walking away. If he walks away from a training exercise, I know I've got problems! Bringing it in for the third training phase is causing a bit of worry as well, though, as suddenly the reward rate drops and dogs are waiting around a bit between trials. So far those that have made it to phase 3 are coping with the frustration, but it makes me a bit nervous to see frustrated dogs, even if they get over it on their own.

IME that technique can make it harder for a dog to learn what it is that s/he did that triggered the treat. For all the dog knows and is thinking s/he simply ate the treat rather than being aware of contact with the target being a major component of the exercise. We did that after trying to let her auto shape it like all the other dogs. That wasn't working, so we tried treats just to see if there was some way we could get her to do it so if there's a way to tweak the study design later on to exclude fewer dogs I would know how. I'd love to video this. It's freaking fascinating. Never seen a dog look so much like they are getting it without actually getting it. The light is certainly on, but I don't think there's anyone at home. I imagine she would get there in the end, but I'm amazed and fascinated that she is so slow in comparison to the other dogs. Generally, they either pick it up in the first couple of sessions, or they don't interact with it at all. Nope. All the dog has to do is break a beam of infrared light. There are any number of ways they can do that. The target is just a visual stimulus to help them make the association.

Fair enough but you'd have to watch your conclusions.. Most trainers would probably say the training methodology is flawed before concluding that there's something wrong with the dog. "one size fits all" style trainers don't tend to be very effective. Forgive me if I sound irritated. Designing this study has pretty much consumed my life for the past few months and I have looked at it from so many angles and taken in so many possibilities, but in the end the best I can do is try to guess what is most likely, design it for that scenario, and then just try it and see what happens. That's what I'm doing. Most trainers have to understand that scientific studies have to have a standardised method. That's why we exclude dogs. Because it's unreasonable to expect that all dogs will make it through a standard training program, but we can't go around changing it for each dog so that it does get through or we won't be able to compare the results. The training methodology will, in that case, always be flawed. But there's nothing you can do about it. Even if you categorised dogs prior to training as needing one thing or another different, and did that for all those dogs in that category, you still wouldn't be able to compare dogs in different categories. I was having this discussion with OH yesterday, who feels that excluding dogs from the study diminishes its use quite considerably because ultimately what we are doing doesn't work on all dogs. Yes, that is true, what we are doing won't work on all dogs. But the very nature of behaviour is that it is extremely varied. We can only ever try to capture a majority. If I get 80% of the dogs I see through the training, I will be very chuffed with my methodology indeed. As for using shelter dogs, is it really so different to using any random population of pet dogs? It is very difficult to know what their history is and what they have learnt in the past. For the pilot study, it doesn't really matter what their history was. They pass criteria or they don't, regardless of what they have experienced in the past. We can't draw any conclusions about their past because we don't know anything about it, so all we can do is ignore it. Once I've finished the pilot study and made any changes to the methodology, I'm moving on to starting with puppies and following them through for a couple of years. We are hoping this might help us figure out to what extent it is affected by history, but it still won't answer that question. Just offer possible insights is all. Yes, and we did that after we'd decided we should exclude her. I was still kinda wondering if we could use her if she was getting there with treats seeing as painting the target with Bonox to encourage self-shaping is part of the protocol, but we have decided it is too much tinkering.

Unfortunately we can't change the method for one dog seeing as it's a scientific study.

No idea, as she's a shelter dog. "Not at all" comes to mind. I may be misinterpreting. We have dogs that don't know how to offer behaviours, and it looks different to me. They don't show any interest in the apparatus until you build up a decent reward history with it. This dog is interested, but you're right, she doesn't try much. She licks the tray. That's about it. She licks it a lot. But the reward doesn't come out when she's doing that. I wonder if the reward isn't close enough to the target for her. She has to turn her head aside from it slightly to get to the reward tray. Maybe she's making associations with the reward tray because that's what she interacts with when she's consuming the reward. Yet, all the same, it's unusual for a dog to not pick up what it did to make the reward come out. I don't think so. Not at the shelter, anyway. They are pretty dog friendly trainers. We've had her take treats from directly in front of the target so that she's touching it to get the treat. For a moment yesterday she got a few touches in a short period by trying to get a treat in front of the target and triggering the marker. She'd leave the treat to go to the reward tray then come back for the treat and trigger it again. But then she stopped again. Nope. She stands there wagging her tail, but she moves around a bit. She's a darling, but I dunno what we do with her! This is the easiest part of the training. She still has to learn to only touch on cue and then to discriminate between two signals. If it's taken this long on the easiest bit and she's still not getting it I think we'll have to drop her from the study. Hopefully whoever adopts her just wants a goofy love muffin, 'cause she's good at that.

Incidentally, there are some things that I have given up teaching Kivi as well. He is not very body aware. I can click all I like for something, but if he's not aware of what I'm clicking he tends to throw himself on the ground and whine in short order. He's not very patient when it comes to training. He likes to know how to win the game practically instantly, as opposed to Erik who just seems to love figuring out how to win the game. I always insist he is not stupid. He just doesn't notice much. It's what makes him such an easy dog to live with at other times. He doesn't often get scared or upset by changes, he doesn't make associations about things that lead up to good or bad stuff happening, and he doesn't get easily distracted. He gives amazing focus and he is very reliable when he knows a behaviour. Things like stand are kinda hard for dogs like Kivi, because it's hard for him to tell exactly what he did to get the mark. For him, he was doing nothing. It's better if I can mark a change in behaviour towards what I want rather than exactly what I want.

The only really short-nosed breed. We have another Boxer to start, but haven't got her going yet. The staffies don't have any trouble. They technically don't have to touch anything to trigger the reward as the trigger is crossing a photointerruptor, so invisible line about 5cm in front of the target. I guess it's possible she doesn't like her jowls brushing against the small shelf in front of the target, but she doesn't show any inhibition. Well, none that I have noticed. It would be interesting to know if she's slow learning other things. I've always thought it doesn't get much easier than touch, but maybe it does for her. I expect she at least knows sit on cue. I guess my thought is that if she liked the reward the touches would increase. A lack of interest in the reward would be shown by her disengaging with the apparatus, which she doesn't really do. But she isn't touching more. So somewhere in the Antecedent-Behaviour-Consequence sequence there is a breakdown. My guess is antecedent, but I don't know how to make a better antecedent to prompt the behaviour than a piece of food right in front of the target. My hare is nowhere near as smart as a dog in operant conditioning, but even he picks up associations in 2 or 3 reps. My rabbit is not as bright as the hare and she will pick up an association in about 5 reps. Kivi has his head in the clouds and generally takes a long time to teach, but he learnt touch in a few reps. We have a couple of gorgeous dogs that have picked up this association in 1 or 2, and some easily distracted dogs that picked it up in about 5. 20 and still going is a bit of an outlier! Either she's got a short-circuit or something in the training sequence is not working for her, I think.

Well, I dunno. The association is just touch target with nose = marker/reward. No handlers and we have some food rewards carefully placed to get the ball rolling. There have been a couple of dogs that don't seem to realise they CAN do something to get a reward. There was one dog that was a bit stressed and didn't care for the reward offered. There were a few dogs that were too anxious to get very far, and there are a couple that are very easily distracted or get bored after a couple of minutes. We have been able to cope with those. This dog is something else, though. She acts eager all the way through sessions and beyond, happily devours the reward, cocks her head when she triggers a marker and staaaares at where the reward comes into the tray EVERY time, but just cannot seem to make the connection between her action and the reward. I don't really understand what is happening. To me, it defies learning theory. I'm not a learning theory fanatic and I know about all the alternatives, but none of them match to me. I'm pretty sure she's not bored by the repetition. We have dogs that are and they work steadily for a couple of minutes then go lie down. She is yet to work steadily for even half a minute. It's like every mark/reward is independent to her. She seems happy enough to just stand by the mysterious machine and wait for it to produce the goods. What amazes me is how she can pay so much attention to the sequence touch-marker-reward, appear to want the reward, and yet not increase her touching behaviour. This staring at the reward as it appears thing is characteristic of other dogs we have that have been breezing through the training. I was really surprised when I saw her doing it again and again and yet she still didn't catch on. In all other respects she is a perfectly normal dog.