BarbedWire

Thankyou for drawing my attention to this blog. It looks really interesting and I have added it to my favourites.

Thankyou for these replies. Very interesting. Yes VM I think she may have been spooked or she has heard the baby cry and I know I find baby cries sound like cats fighting. :laugh: Sometimes I wonder if someone has looked over the fence and the head suddenly appearing has spooked her. I know once I had a dog at the vet and the receptionist who was behind a high bench peeped over to look at my dog which startled my dog who barked. It is interesting that colorbond fences stop dogs barking though which could be very useful. I guess that if dogs go for regular walks they are not being deprived, but some poor pooches probably spend their entire lives behind colorbond fencing which must make the outside world so scary when they are no longer wanted and end up at the local pound.

Thankyou kelpiecuddles. I am not really asking for advice about her behaviour which doesn't bother me that much. :) Rather I am asking whether anyone else has noticed a problem with these fences. I know I deliberately made my gate wooden pickets so that my dogs could see out. You do say that in your area colorbond fences are common, so presumably some dogs have them on all four sides. Does it bother them?

I have a colorbond fence on one side of my yard which is over two metres high. It worries my small anxious dog and she behaves as if something terrible is lurking on the other side. When I take her out at night time to do a wee before going to bed she often seems to think it's too dangerous because there is something on the other side of that fence and she won't do a wee but wants to come straight back inside again or she runs to me for comfort. I usually then entice her to the other side of the yard where she does her wee. Some thoughts: My other dog couldn't care less about the fence. The neighbours behind the colorbond fence have young children and I wonder if it is their noises that have disturbed her. She spends a lot of time during the day observing the neighbours at the back of the yard through the cracks in the paling fence. I did read somewhere that it is cruel to put dogs in a yard where they cannot see out which is what happens with colorbond fencing. Has anyone else had a problem with colorbond fencing?

I understand about the financial constraints. Personally thunder shirts have not worked for me. I have one here for a small dog that I am more than happy to send on if you can PM me an address. Also my small dogs have medium size crates which they are perfectly happy with, so perhaps you could lend her a bigger one to see how it goes. My crates are the soft ones that don't look like cages and look okay inside a house. My dogs go in their crates whenever young children visit. I think the training should be started yesterday. Instead of telling the dog to stop barking tell it to sit and then it can be rewarded. i.e. focus on telling it to do something rather than telling it not to do something. I do think she should persist with this dog. It is still young and has obviously had no training and they seem to have bonded already. I bet the previous owner decided to rehome it because it nipped one of the kids or one of their friends. Poor little dog.

I felt the segment was too rushed. It was all over in a few minutes and the concepts that were being discussed were actually quite complex.

This dog sounds very stressed. Try some basic training such as sit and drop and then reward it. Teach it to sit for pats and lots of walks, rewarding it when it is calm. Perhaps also get a crate and make it a safe place for the dog to retreat to when it is overwhelmed. If the barking persists teach it to bark on command then hopefully the barking will come under control.

Snook I hope you don't mind me coming in on this thread. You need to realise that you have got on top of his reactivity before and you can do it again. You did such a great job. If only the two bigger dogs had not lunged first. I wonder if when they lunged you were taken off guard and reacted tensely and Justice then responded to your stressed reaction. I know this is what happens to me. I have to calm down or my dog steps in to protect me. My dog responds to my reaction. It's easier said than done I know.

He was vaccinated August last year. He seems to be in good health although he sometimes wheezes and coughs. He had a full dental and some teeth extracted a few months ago and he came through that okay. I will speak to my vet about it. The nurse at the kennel, which is small and only takes elderly or unwell dogs, did insist that he had to be vaccinated.

Thankyou for your interest VM. The kennel is not optional. I will discuss the immunisation with my own vet when I take him next week. I will also ring the kennel again to see if I have any other options.

Thanks for letting me know. It sounds interesting. I would never have thought of dogs as being either optimistic or pessimistic.

Your dog sounds like quite a character. There's a really good book by Jean Donaldson titled Mine on resource guarding. I found it useful. I bought it online. Good luck with it.

Snook I am an outsider who has been reading this thread ever since it started and I have so admired your progress with Justice. Please do not give up or be hard on yourself. You have done a wonderful job and you have inspired me to work harder with my own reactive dog. Hopefully for you it will be one step backwards but two steps forwards. ETA Please do not let me stop this thread too.

This thread is interesting. I have an elderly dog (12) who is due for his vaccinations. He is also due to go into a kennel in December so I rang the kennel, which is run by a vet, to see if they would accept him without his vaccinations and I was told they would not. When I said I had heard they could be dangerous in an elderly dog the nurse scoffed and said the vaccinations were perfectly safe. She also said they could not accept a dog into the kennel who was not at least vaccinated against kennel cough and that it was illegal for them to do so. So I guess my boy will have to have his vaccination.

I used to talk or sing to my dogs all the time until one day I realised that it was making my reactive dog anxious. She would keep looking at me trying to understand my prattle. Now I only use words she already knows and she is much more relaxed. When we meet another dog we just keep walking as if it didn't exist and she no longer lunges and plunges at the end of her lead.

I do agree that people who have grown up around dogs or any other animals often have an instinctive ability to communicate with them, but I do have problems with labelling Millan's ability as an art that is so intricate or mystical that it cannot be easily transferred or understood. (I hope I have understood you here Sandgrubber). Much research has been done recently on dog body language and it is all interesting and Millan would seem to have a good understanding, but I think we, including Millan, have a lot more to learn about how dogs communicate. I think it is dangerous to accept Millan's theories without question. I think his 'alpha roll' is potentially tragic in the wrong hands. I also think his theory about energy is bizarre. In his book Cesar's Way he tells us that energy is a 'language of emotion' and then on the next page he is telling us that the earth has energy. I'm sorry I cannot accept that the earth has emotions. Just my opinion :)

I agree Edge that a lot of what Millan does is based on his observations of dog body language, as also did both Parelli and Monty Roberts with horses. I can't remember but one of those horse trainers was known as the 'horse whisperer' which is where Millan's 'dog whisperer' comes from. I do believe that animal training has changed significantly since the middle of last century when the work of Pavlov (stimulus and response and salivating dogs and bells) in the 1890s finally filtered through. Skinner (b 1935) popularised it by advocating operant conditioning for successful animal training. Prior to their work animals were trained by coercion and fear. I believe that Millan still uses fear in his training methods. How else could you describe his alpha roll?

Cesar Millan is so puffed up with his own ego and self-promotion that he has lost sight of reality. He promotes himself as a pack leader but he actually bullies dogs (his underlings) into submission and then hands them back to their owners, who may not be effective pack leaders, as cured. Sometimes his methods work, and sometimes they probably don't, and possibly one day with tragic consequences. We don't hear about his failures. That's not part of the marketing spiel. His methods remind me of the horse breakers from last century who rode a horse until it submitted out of exhaustion and then claimed it was broken in. Today we talk about schooling horses, not breaking their spirits.

Thanks Ranga and Yes I agree Mrs R B In response to the OP. Train hubby. Rewards based training might be best for the longevity of your marriage. :) Karen Pryor has a good chapter in Don't Shoot the Dog. Chapter 5. Reinforcement in the real world.

Why is it that so many handlers of off leash dogs blame the on leash dog when there is a problem? Is it something to do with being irresponsible? i.e. irresponsible to have your dog off leash if it's an on leash area, irresponsible to leave an off leash dog unsupervised even if it's an off leash area, and then irresponsible not to accept responsibility if your off leash dog hassles another dog. There my first post. Been reading for years.