sidoney

I did that years ago with my cattle dog bitch. However in later life she had to have three operations for removal of mammary tumours, that would have been avoided had the ovaries been removed. I will not do it again. My desexed bitches now are fully desexed. I currently have 2 desexed bitches, one that was desexed at about a year and the other at 6 after three litters, and an entire bitch that I have plans to breed one more time, to keep my next generation (her second litter). I have been able to compare entire to desexed and I don't see that I gained anything by keeping the ovaries.

How often I train depends on where I am at the time. If I need to train something new, more often. If I am maintaining training, less often. I only train for a few minutes at a time. If I want to do more, then it'll be short sessions 2 or 3 times a day. I aim for intensity. Actually there are no days I DON'T train something since every time you do something with your dog can be a training moment. Darn it that I can't change my vote, voted without properly thinking it through.

Border collie wouldn't take long to figure out to herd the chooks away from that, if you are planning it as a respite gate. I never had my chooks and dogs together, since the chooks dug the gardens - I always chucked greens in to them. So I can't help you with knowledge about running them together. I have experience of keeping chooks adjacent to working dogs, in a 'burban backyard.

You may want to put a barrier, like a bit of distance (e.g. second fence), and/or a visual barrier, between the chooks and the pup, as I can vouch that a herding bred dog can become obsessed with chooks even if they are locked up. I ended up rehoming my chooks. If I'd started earlier with the second fence and visual barrier I may not have had to.

I've contacted Deb about my attendance and "alles in ordnung"! It should be super!

I don't know about pay on the day. I'm hoping that I'll be able to be flexible coz of my circumstances but will have to find out. I would not think of just turning up. I'll be contacting Deb to check. Times are usually around 8.30 or 9 but contact Deb about the seminar and you'll get all the info.

I'm planning to, for at least as much as I can manage, as I've been looking forward to this for ages ... I will have to cadge a lift from someone as I can't drive post op for a while. I'll just pay day by day and see how I go.

As an auditor you won't need to run your dog anyway and there are always ideas and concepts accessible to novices at these seminars. And you get tremendously motivated. Plus you get to see that you don't need to be an expert to attend them, there are always people at various places in their training. As Vickie said, always good to see the best early on, then you won't get led astray in your early stage training when otherwise you may not realise that you should or should not be doing something.

LOL that would be funny. A bow was part of the "trick" training for flyball intro recently, but I decided to not do that part, as I didn't want any hesitation in the downs for agility. I didn't want the dog having to spend any time thinking, do I bow or down.

Ultimately you can chain behaviours where the cue to come becomes a reinforcer for the drop that precedes it, but I would not start out this way and I wouldn't regularly do it this way either.

Definitely definitely. Either throw the reward to the dog or go to the dog and reward it in place. Otherwise you are not reinforcing the drop at the distance, so the dog can't see why it should drop and then come to you for a reward, the drop is not being rewarded, just the come to you. So why drop? I used to reward mostly with food and would run out to the dog and reward it right there, praise it up, and so on. "Placement of reward" is very, very important. Timing and placement. Your timing sounds like you are actually rewarding the come. And the placement is with you. Give the dog verbal reinforcement as soon as it drops - a reward marker but not an "end of behaviour" reward marker - and reward it in the place you want it to be, i.e. in the drop away from you. Dunno if CTD does this, but if I was throwing the reward behind the dog, I'd be doing it with a release word or "end of behaviour" marker. And build up duration by delaying the release/marker.

Sounds a bit like you had an issue with getting her onto a variable reinforcement ratio. Problem being, the food had to be present for the behaviour to occur.

Remember when training to get the reward to the dog where it drops ... position of reward is important. With my dogs, we gradually got further and further away until they would drop anywhere. For teaching the drop on recall, usually I'd get the reward to the dog, and sometimes call them to me for a reward. Does your dog look at you on its name or some other cue? If you are worried about it missing the signal, you need a cue to get it to check in with you, that is not also a cue to come to you.

I taught my dogs to drop wherever they were, stationary and moving, in the middle of a game or whatever. Then dropping on a recall was (comparatively) easy.

1. I'm another that doesn't fit the profile of "look at the first four ingredients" and so I'd need more information before choosing. 2. I've worked my way up from the less expensive but reasonable dry foods to a more mid range one (as contrasted to super-premium), they are doing fine on it. So if the cheaper one was a reasonable sort I might try that first and see how they go. If it was a cheap-and-nasty I would not try it. 3. I feed a combination of raw and good quality dry. Which means protein in dry food, while important, is not so critical. All the rest of the ingredients are very important. How the dogs do is the most important factor. That includes how they like it, how they look, how they behave, and the waste that they leave.

This really depends on the dog. Some dogs WILL be affected ... you can see the difference. Other dogs, you may not see a difference, but I have to wonder if there is fallout that is not seen. I think you have to have balance. Any time you don't reward the dog and it thinks you will (or might?), there is an effect. Some of the effect is to make the dog try harder, at least for a bit, hence being able to shape. Too much though, and the dog will stop trying. If you put a verbal to it, that's another layer. And since the dog (hopefully) has a connection to the handler, it potentially can be a layer that will have a greater effect than withholding a reward. It may affect the relationship in some way. When I first learned about NRMs I thought they made a lot of sense. I had only Vizslas in those days. (My current 10yo girl obtained her CD at about 14months with 4/4 passes, 3 wins, fully clicker trained, one of the first in Australia - of course it's progressed a lot since then, in numbers doing it and in sophistication of techniques.) I learned that there was only so much NRM they could take. Also there is a danger (and a mistake that I made) of giving an NRM instead of creatively thinking, "how can I give the dog more information about what it SHOULD be doing, or set up the conditions differently, so that it can get it right?" Recently I was training my fosters in the V weaves, with a restrained start and driving through them to a baited plate at the end, and the NRM I gave was to pick up the food the moment they popped out of the weaves (if they did). I decided no verbal NRM, particularly since one of them, while fast, is very soft. The greater information for success I gave was to draw the food down the centre of the poles for at least part of the way, to show the path. And if they repeated the mistake, widen the poles or change the environment in some other way in order for them to succeed. Now I'm not rewriting the training manuals there, but just describing a situation where I could have had a verbal NRM, but went for something more low key. We know of the 80/20 rule - i.e. aim for an 80% success rate. Although I think some dogs may do better with say 90/10. This refers to balance as mentioned above. Know your dog would be the maxim. Now a more hard or driven dog might be less affected by an NRM. The only dog I ever had like that was my cattle dog long before I did any dog training. So I can't comment from personal experience. But I would question whether there is a possibility of unnoticed fallout if the balance veers away from positive reinforcement and towards negative punishment.

That's our next move!

Rabbit fur covered one has got all the dogs interested, and helped with the desire to tug. It's not designed for hard tuggers and I've not used it with my hard tuggers. Sheepskin one I've not used all that much yet, as the rabbit fur one has been such a hit. Have a look at the site, there are a lot of motivational toys listed there, some for hard tuggers. Some of the things you can get equivalents of in Aussie, but some I've only found O.S. BTW if you do agility you can subscibe to the Clean Run magazine in electronic format for only 20USD per annum - began at the start of this year, you can do it retrospectively. BTW (again) the dog would not be "chewing" on a tug, it would be gripping it and tugging, but not chewing ... I don't leave mine for the dogs to chew!!! If I did the rabbit fur would be in little tiny pieces ... I've had three of my ugg boots disembowelled when I've forgotten to put them out of reach. Got a bit OT here, back to the main event? ...

Got it from Clean Run. Do the shopping cart thing and stop before you get to the payment bit ... that'll tell you the postage. I generally get more than one thing at a time, I got the two handled sheepy tug and the two handled rabbit fur covered tug as well, and a second Treat and Train, although the T&T is coming separately.

Regular vacuuming helps with my carpet too ... such a difference since I got my Dyson. Picks up the little bits of hair and skin and things that can hold odour.

NRM if used in its correct technical sense is a marker for "no reward", i.e. negative punishment, taking away something it wants, or not giving something it was expecting. Some dogs cope better with this than others. They can be demotivating for some dogs. IMO if they are effective they would be providing the dog with an incentive to NOT repeat behaviour, which would mean that in some way to the dog it is aversive. They want to avoid it. If the dog doesn't care then it's not effective. Another thing to mention with punishment is that it says "don't do that" but in itself it does not say "do this". The Susan Garrett book mentions this with Buzz - that tug for him meant that he got another chance to go do agility again. My thoughts exactly - and believe me it works tongue.gif. I use it for 'trick' training also when my dog just gets so carried away and excited that he no longer thinks and starts barking at me and trying to do all tricks at once IMO one of the effects of this is that the dog also has a chance to reduce its level of stimulation/excitement and get back into the learning zone ... K9 describes this very effectively. NRMs can turn 6/10 dogs to 1 or 0/10 dogs (seen it, done it , don't want to go there again), potentially could turn a 10/10 dog into an 8/10 dog ...

Toys on sticks: I recently bought one of these. I had made previously make one with a lunge pole (too long) and a buggy whip (too breakable). Got all my dogs turned on pretty well.

I recently read Susan Garrett's "Shaping Success" and she addresses tugging or not tugging, taking food or not taking food, but not in terms of motivating for agility, but for training. She describes the way her dog Buzz became so motivated by agility that he stopped taking rewards. The problem she saw with this is that you then are unable to distinguish between wanted and unwanted performance without an aversive. For example, dog doesn't stick a contact. If the dog is rewarded by doing agility and you ask it to do the obstacle again, it's being rewarded for coming off the contact. If tug or food rewards the dog, then that can distinguish to the dog which is the desired performance. Susan describes how she got Buzz tugging again by only allowing him to do more agility if he tugged, and that she would move further and further away from the training field until he would take the tug, and then go back to do more agility as the reward. Eventually he would take the tug whenever she presented it. She did the same with food but it was more difficult and took longer. Premack principle. Premack is what is working for me with Xia and tugging in different environments. The more likely behaviour rewards the less likely behaviour. Xia loves tug at home but tended to not tug when out. However, Xia is likely to eat delicious food in most environments. I got her used to tugging for food at home, and now am able to take that out of home - this weekend we spectated at an agility trial and she was not keen to tug for tug, but did tug for food, not too shabbily. We've been continuing to work on that. At first she would take the tug and spit it out ASAP to get the food. Lately though, I notice that she is now tugging enthusiastically, growling and shaking the tug, and enjoying the tug before the food, not just doing it in order to get it over with and eat the food. In fact this morning she was starting to get slow to release the tug to get the food. Who knows, I may end up having to have her eat food to get the tug. <grin> I want her to take tug or food rewards for agility for the training issues mentioned above. Again, Premack gives a possible explanation for this behaviour. "Transfer of value". Doing agility brings reward, becomes more valued in its own right, becomes self rewarding. I read an interesting post on an email list a while back. Edit: pretty sure it was a post by Helix Fairweather, she of the "cyber-agility" training site and a regular poster on the early email clicker lists. She described that she trained her dogs to sit on low platforms while waiting for their turn to train agility. Sitting on the platform was rewarded by coming off it to train. The value transferred and sitting on the platform became more rewarding, with the dogs then doing the training in order to earn the reward of sitting on the platform. The highest value (training or sitting on the platform) flip flopped between the two.

I remember reading a book that had been written quite some time back, it may have been Kaleski's "Barkers and Biters", although I'm not sure of that. Anyway the author said he used to take in dogs that had eating problems. "Pampered pooches". He would put them in a yard with other dogs. If they didn't eat, the other dogs got it. He described how the dogs learned that they had to get some food and eat it before the other dogs got it, and that they became keen eaters. It was much more entertaining than my description, but basically the "eat it when you have it or miss out" approach.

If you know he wants to do something, ask him to do something for you first. Say, a sit, then release him to go sniff. It's called the "nothing in life is free" programme - NILIF. He wants something from you, he does something for you. Easy really. He gets to do his stuff but when you say he can. This means you are the leader. Also check the triangle of temptation thread, pinned on the top of this forum. ToT and NILIF are likely all you need to be his leader.