corvus

Then go do a PhD on rehabilitating dogs. That's what the Constructional Aggression Treatment folks did.

Yes I know, and yes it's a little late for the bringing a baby home course. I'm hoping she called one (or all) of the people I told her to try and managed to get in with someone straight away. We can live in hope.

I probably should keep my mouth shut.

Thanks, I did end up recommending her. It's a bit more serious than I first thought. The dog is trying to prevent mum from going to pick up her baby when she's set him down somewhere. Apparently this is an established behaviour they have always just lived with, but obviously they can't this time. I haven't heard back from my friend. I don't know if that's good news or bad news.

You can get loads of experience with animals at uni. I actually found the opportunities to be had there for practical experience were excellent. I did four seasons in the field with various bird species and a bit on some invertebrates and mammals before I went out into the real world. I'm currently gearing up to collect data on a couple of hundred dogs (in my dreams). I will not be spending much of the next two years in a library.

I thought to call themselves a vet behaviourist they needed to have a BVM and a PhD in animal behaviour. Really? I tried just last week and didn't get any. I suspect the people I ended up suggesting my friend get in touch with have waiting lists a mile long. It's kind of an urgent problem. If it doesn't get sorted very quickly my guess is the dog in question will be in dire straits. :D

Does it not depend on what you promised the person when you started working with their dog? Do behaviourists have a contract or anything like that? Even our pet sitter writes out somewhere what her responsibilities will be while we're away each time, even though they are usually the same.

Behaviour analysis is an applied science, kind of like engineering. I did a degree in traditional science. Applying what you have learnt to novel situations is, IME, quite a different ball game. Behavioural ecology was a bit like that. Mostly people either find it easy or very hard, but in behavioural ecology you can get away with not being very good at it if you know someone who is good at it. Anyway, if someone had done a PhD, but hadn't done it in an applied science on animals, it would mean less to me than if they had. Like Diva mentioned, a PhD on its own can mean something or nothing much at all depending on what it was done on or what you're looking for. If they had done a bachelor degree but not a PhD it would mean very little when it came to picking a behaviourist because the likelihood that they are good at applying what they know is by my reckoning no better than anyone else.

I suspect that maybe people don't realise why I place any value at all on degrees and think I'm just being a snob because I have one. IME a degree doesn't teach you anything specific. In most cases, they are not meant to teach you how to do a particular job. They teach you some very broad skills that are more to be built on than to be a complete education. But I know from my experiences in research that there is an expectation that you can justify just about all your decisions based on the literature. I find it very tedious, but oddly satisfying in the end when you know there's a factual reason that's been revealed through studies why the decision you are making is a good one. It's naive to assume that means it is a good one, and we're taught early not to do that. It's just likely that it's a good one and the next step is to see if that's true. We can't just make subjective observations and reckon we know what's going on, treat it, then reckon it looks like it worked. All the rules that get drummed into me while I'm learning at uni bleed into other things I do. That's what gives me more faith in someone with a degree or two than someone with a certificate or two. I don't think they know better, or assume because they have a degree they must know what they are doing. I don't think that what you learn through degrees can only be learnt through degrees. I just want someone to approach the problem systematically and be able to justify what they are doing and how it works. I want objectivity and some way to measure success other than "looks like it's working". I do actually want them to know their theory. Otherwise I could end up with a Cesar Millan.

So as not to derail the other thread, I thought I'd start another one. It bothers me how you are meant to choose a good trainer or behaviourist. Personal recommendations are fine, if they come from someone who can tell the difference between something that is working and something that is not and is honest about whether they followed what was prescribed to the letter, but what if you have no personal recommendations to go off? How do you figure out who is a good bet? What if the recommendation is for someone that is out of the price range or waiting period of the person who wants recommendations? What I've been getting at with PhDs and degrees and so on is not so much that I think they are better, but I don't know how else to decide who to bet on. If I'm given a choice between a lot of people with a certificate in dog training, and a couple of people with an academic history in animal behaviour, I am at a bit of a loss. Maybe I only need someone good with a certificate, but I have met a few with the certificates and they have been terrible. I've met others without even a certificate that have been wonderful. So... I could risk the certificate or risk the academic history. I'm inclined to bet on the academic history because it seems safer to me as I've met a few of them as well and they have all struck me as very knowledgeable, not just book smarts, but they are really expensive. Lots of people can't afford it. So if you had no recommendations to go on, how would you choose?

Well, they are neotenous, aren't they. That's pretty loopy, don't you think? But that's just a subspecies, not an entire species. Nothing loopy about Canis lupus.

I'm reading Volume 3 again tonight. Sometimes I think he gets a bit carried away with the theory. I'm pretty sure some of the things he states about dogs have never actually been tested. How come I get in trouble for contrasting hares and dogs but he's allowed to apply what science says about people to dogs and no one says a word? *ker-pout*

Blarg. That's what I was trying to say.

I thought there was a Kindle format? I've got a pdf version of one of them.

I think you are missing my point. They are not the same thing. I'm not saying a behaviourist is always better than a trainer if they have a PhD. I'm talking in terms of judging who is worth getting in and who could just make it worse. If I have to make a bet on someone, do I make it on someone who may or may not be dog savvy or on someone who presumably spent 3 years studying the literature on dogs and planning and carrying out a scientific study or two? They are two completely different measures of someone's worth. I'm not saying one is better than the other; I'm saying one is more measurable than the other.

But that's beside the point, isn't it? We're not talking about the experience or "savvyness" of the person. We're talking about differentiating between a behaviourist and a trainer. If you can't differentiate in some way, then why do we recommend "professional behaviourists" and not "professional trainers"? I know of tons of professional trainers I wouldn't trust with a behavioural problem, but if we only count behaviourists as someone with a PhD in animal behaviour, I don't know any that I wouldn't trust with a behavioural problem. It's got less to do with practical experience and more to do with the ability to find the root of a problem rather than treating symptoms. When you pay for someone with 7+ years of tertiary education as opposed to someone with 7+ years of training experience, you are paying for two very different things. I don't think it's as simple as saying "well, I'd go with the one with the most practical experience who is dog savvy". Can that person do what a behaviourist can do? Maybe, but how would you know they could if they have much the same education as a lot of rubbish trainers that can't do what a behaviourist with a PhD can do? Do you see what I'm saying? It doesn't matter whether the trainer is more experienced, or if the behaviourist hasn't got natural training ability. It matters how they themselves have been trained and what is appropriate for the problem at hand. ETA Okay, I ammend that. I don't know anyone with a PhD in DOG behaviour that I wouldn't trust with a behavioural problem in a dog. The principles carry across species, but dogs are a bit loopy in their behaviour if you ask me. I think they are at least ten times easier to read than most animals I've ever tried to read, but they have subtleties to their communication that other animals don't seem to have, and they don't always make it obvious that they are distressed. Mess up with a wild animal and you bloody well know about it.

Like when I was reading the newspaper and this guy had been busted with a number of dope plants and his reason for having so many was that he was a geneticist and was developing a "strain" , it didn't work Gold!

Actually, I'm not sure I buy that. I don't know of any law or etc that means that only people with certain qualifications can describe themselves as a behaviourist. Please fill me in. There are no laws, but that's where all the problems start. If anyone with a certificate in dog training is a "qualified behaviourist", then how do we know the difference between the ones that actually know about the scientific method and therefore have some idea exactly what they are doing, how it is likely to affect behaviour, and how to monitor it so they can tell if it's working from the folks that know some training techniques? Not to belittle the talent of some dog trainers that have brilliant training instincts, but to me the whole point of getting a "behaviourist" and not a "trainer" is that you'll have a reasonable expectation that the "behaviourist" will be able to fix a problem a trainer may not know how to fix, or may easily misinterpret and potentially even make worse. If we're going to differentiate, we should actually differentiate based on something other than testimonials.

I love the content. I quite like flipping through textbooks and things that academics have written. Lindsay's books are full of interesting tidbits and theories I didn't know existed but end up being very useful. I just don't like the way it's presented. It feels like wading through treacle. I did find having read some helped at the NDTF conference, though. Your life's work can be translating Lindsay's life's work for the average person, Aidan. I think it's a shame it's not a bit more user-friendly. I wonder if it won't reach nearly the audience it should purely because it's a pain to read. It is entirely possible to talk about that stuff without giving yourself and everyone else a massive headache.

If you do make a misstep and the dog escalates, you could be in big trouble very quickly. Do not risk teaching this dog to bite for real by leaving him no other option!

Steve White did a talk on targets. I was the one that tried (very badly) to explain to the room how I'd taught my dog to hip target. Speaking of communication...

That is almost exactly what I said to my friend whose dog has been occasionally guarding her newborn baby from her. I also think the crate and a vet check is a good place to start. Hypothetically, I'd be inclined to look at the dog's sense of safety. It seems like over-sensitivity, which would maybe suggest that the dog either can't accurately predict what's going to happen next or it predicts what will happen next is going to be bad. There could be a bunch of reasons why either might be occurring, and to me many of those reasons would have slightly different treatments. For example, say the dog has a negative bias and is expecting bad things to happen. Is that because bad things do happen, or is it because the dog is distressed for an entirely different reason and this is affecting how they see other situations as well? Without knowing the reason, how would we treat it? It might be a good idea to just assume that the dog has learnt to behave this way and treat the behaviour, but a better idea to me would be to attempt to work out just what is going on right at the heart of the matter. It could be anything!

I read out a sentence of Volume 1 at random to my partner the other day and he started screaming halfway through it. I really wish he wouldn't use almost exclusively words with 3 syllables or more! I used to have a lecturer that would talk like that and it drove me crazy. It would take a few seconds to gather what he was talking about and by then you'd missed half of the next thing he was saying. Right on Target is by Mandy Book and Cheryl Smith. It's only about target training, but I love how easy it is to follow. Target training can be the basis of so many behaviours, so if you can get that down, the sky is the limit. This book makes it possible for anyone who can read to get the basics of target training down. Even teaches the more difficult targets, like hip targeting.

Don't be so sure it was your fault. This is a panic thing, according to Steven Lindsay. I was reading about it just last night. Essentially the dog doesn't feel safe. That could just be that he doesn't trust you will come back to him because he hasn't ever been taught that you will in this particular circumstance. Add a physical barrier that prevents him going after you and you could have a dog that is also frustrated, which heightens arousal and just perpetuates the emotional anxiety. Have you seen Karen Overall's Protocol for Relaxation? It's on the web if you do a Google search. It teaches dogs to accept a lot of things that they often find very exciting or stimulating in a calm manner. I think it would help a lot to teach your dog to accept tethering calmly. You could do the whole protocol with him tethered.

I've been reading Steven Lindsay's books lately, and while I am tremendously grateful that someone basically did a literature review on dogs, learning, emotion, drives, and many subtle aspects of animal behaviour, I have to say I find his writing really painful. I do not find it easy to follow or understand. Sometimes I'm halfway through a section before I start to realise where he's going with it and have to go back a few paragraphs to re-read all the stuff that didn't make sense to me before. I think his work is very valuable, but how valuable is it, really, if it's difficult to take in? Have other people here got a lot out of it? I know maybe two or three people that ever even mention some of the major concepts he bases most of his methods on. In contrast, I have a book called "Right on Target" that is so simple a child could follow it. I doubt anyone could summarise all the theory Lindsay does in a way that children could understand, but I wonder which book is really more useful to dog trainers and owners in the end? I wonder how useful all Lindsay's hard work is in the scheme of things.