Staranais

No not for kennels or dog sports but I could not risk her catching parvo and this is where its all so confusing. Since the titre test "can mean no immunity" or just no "circulating antibodies" then would I not be taking a risk by not vaccinating her against it this year since I don't know which it is? I could titre test her again after the vaccination but then in a years time supposing it shows no antibodies again. Well, the titre test you did do shows that she developed a protective level of immunity against parvo from her first vaccines, so I'd guess that she's still very very likely to be immune even if the titre is low this time. Most of the actual studies that I've read suggest that once an adult dog has shown immunity against parvo once, there's limited or no benefit in re-vaccinating them again. No one has definitively shown this is true for every dog, but the evidence I've seen points that way. Whereas there is always a very small but still possible chance of a serious reaction from the vaccine, which is, after all, a medical procedure. But she's your dog, and your call, and you need to make the decision that you feel comfortable with - not one that someone else pushes you into making with internet scare tactics about parvovirus or about vaccine reactions. And to be honest, IMO, whether you decide to vaccinate or not this year, chances are your dog will be fine.

Thanks everyone! Good idea with the ladder, Diva, I've seen that done as agility pre-training. We don't have a ladder (scummy student flat!) but I might see if I can borrow one to play round with. We've started teaching "back up" today, and she's picking it up slowly, so perhaps I'll give the back feet-phone book trick a break while we get walking backwards down pat. She can already do the front feet-on-phonebook-while the back feet walk around trick, Terranik, but isn't terribly fluent yet so perhaps I should do more work on it - I didn't know it was called the elephant trick either! You learn something every day. Hey M-J, the cue at the moment is definitely targeting my hand, as that's how I'm getting her to do walk over the phone book! I was hoping that if I tried to be very precise in clicking the exact moment her foot hit the book as she walked over it, she would start to understand the concept, but she's not quite got it yet. I think she just finds it conceptually really difficult to think about her hind feet. I guess they normally just follow along behind her front ones... Thanks guys - I think we'll play round with walking backwards, the elephant trick, and see if we can borrow a ladder, then come back to hind feet on things in a few weeks.

A low titre result doesn't necessarily mean no immunity (although it can), it can also just mean that the dog has no circulating antibodies. If the dog hasn't come into contact with any parvovirus since the last time it was vaccinated, the circulating antibody level can fall so that the dog's immunity is then "invisible" to the serology (titre) test. I'd be pretty sure that after all those parvo shots, your girl probably has an adequate immunity to parvo if she's capable of getting one, even if this doesn't show up on the test. If you want to be sure, and have the budget for it, the best way is to titre a few weeks after you've given the parvo shot, to check that she's responded to it. If she has, you can be reasonably confident that she's immune to parvo for at least 3 years, and possibly indefinately. Edited to add: it's totally your choice, but if she titred fine last year, she's obviously responded to the vaccine. So if she were mine, I'd be happy not vaccinating her again for parvo for at least 3 years after her last vaccine - unless you have to get a titre report for kennels or dogsports, in which case you'll need to vaccinate to get her titre back up. Hope that makes sense.

My pharmacology lecturer reckons he thinks that those nutraceutical type compounds often do some good, though they're obviously not as potent as the drugs you've been prescribed. Although there are no/few clinical trials in animals to back him up he has a wealth of experience so I believe him. Not sure about Sasha's blend, but we talked about fish body oil, glucosamine, chondroitin, green lipped muscle extract, and MSM, and they're all supposed to do some good for many joint conditions. My pup is already on fish body oil and glucosamine/chondroitin as a preventative measure, cos I'm paranoid. I'm with Kelly Louise, they can't possibly do any harm, and may do some good.

Oh gosh ..... that paints all of us as suspect . T'wasn't me (Pro-K9). It wouldn't be Kelpie-i. Nor would it be Cosmolo. Nor K9 Force. She did say it was a franchise, Erny.

.Herding breeds rounding up and/or chasing people is not aggression, it's predatory drift... as is nipping ankles and stalking. Schutzhund dogs doing bite work are not aggressively "attacking" the decoy, they are capturing him/her to bring them down as they would prey. This is why the bite needs to be deep in the mouth and the dog usually holds onto one spot and shakes the 'victim', and this is why high drive (not highly aggressive) dogs are chosen for this field. Aggression, which is used to repel the threat and for self preservation is used when there is an element of fear (or anxiety...call it what you will). This behaviour is extremely different to what you may see in a herding trial and/or the Schutzhund ring. Then how does "fight drive" fit into this, Kelpie-i? I'm far from an expert in schutzhund or PP, I've never trained for either. But some of the schutzhund and security people I've talked to are adamant that adding some defence into the dog's training after they've been worked extensively in prey drive makes the fight "real" to the dog, no longer just a prey game, and makes the dog more trustworthy on the street as well as giving a better "performance" on the schuzhund field. Are these schutzhund and security dogs now displaying "true" aggression, in your opinion? Or are they still just "predatory"? I've myself seen the difference between predatory and "true" defensive aggression. But watch a dog who has learned to get prey drive satisfaction from biting his own species, or even humans, the same way that some dogs learn to attack stock. You'd still have a bugger of a time convincing most people that the dog isn't being aggressive, since to most people (and I think legally in most places) aggression is generally defined as any behaviour that involves attacking and biting, no matter if the motivation behind it is predatory or defensive. Get what I'm saying? Perhaps I'm not being particularly clear today. It's known to happen around exam time...

hidden sleeve love, hidden sleeve! I just had a picture of a decoy with balls of steel tackling a malinois with no protective equipment on Since Schutzhund requires sleeve bites most wont go using too many real world situations as you want the dog to properly target the area on the sleeve. Leg bites are a no no (and decoys usually wear protective equipment in case of accidental bites and scratches) You want a dog to be using prey drive - aggression usually makes for unpredictability and lack of control by the handler. Hence the BH test for nerves before being allowed to even try Sch1. Sorry, sorry... was just thinking of a conversation I had with a friend who used to train security dogs. According to him, the progression for them really was bite sleeve -> hidden sleeve -> bare arm. I can imagine that type of training could cause interesting issues in schutzhund for some dogs, since I've only every seen the decoys (in life or on screen) wear a bite sleeve on one arm, and I guess noone would be terribly impressed if the dog decided to bypass the sleeve and go for the bare arm...

Thanks both of you! No, we haven't done walking backwards yet. Perhaps we'll give that a try if I can't get the phonebook trick by itself in the next little while - I taught my last boy to walk backwards in heel position, so I'm sure Fledge could learn that easily. The idea about showing her what she's doing by popping her on her back sounds great except that little puppy and lying calmly on her back for more than two seconds at a time are also mutually exclusive events at the moment I'm afraid! Thanks for the link, Corvus! Have you read any of Kayce Cover's Synalia stuff? It seems very similar, and also seems like it might be right up your alley (not that I know you or anything, so sorry if I'm presuming).

For the last few weeks, on and off in my study breaks, I've been trying to teach little puppy (5 1/2 months old) a new trick with the clicker - putting her back feet (at least one of them) on a phonebook. She understand the clicker. She's already got putting her front feet on things on command down pat. And she can target her nose to things on command. But the hind feet are apparently really tricky. So far I've tried: getting her to walk forwards over the book and clicking when a back foot hits it getting her to stand in front of the book and gently pushing her backwards, then clicking when a back foot hits it gently picking her back feet up and placing them on the book, then clicking/marking the moment they hit She's keen to play my bizarre games, and is quite excited when she gets clicked, but hasn't yet got the foggiest idea what I want. Anyone got any clever hints to help me explain this one to her, or should I just persevere until the lightbulb goes on?

Natural? I'm not sure. I'm not an expert by any stretch, but my theory is that it's natural for dogs to have prey drive - to differing extents in different individuals and breeds, of course. But where the dog directs that drive to gain satisfaction, I would guess is a combination of genetics/breeding and learned behaviour. I have a theory that a lot of the "gameness" present in some bull breed dogs is just rewired predatory "aggression". The body language when some of these dogs fight seems very similar to what I see when my own dogs go after tugs or balls (I say some, since I'm aware that many bull breed dogs aren't dog aggressive at all, and some certainly can suffer from other types of aggression just like any type of dog). I know a lot of schutzhund trainers train primarily in prey drive - the desire to kill prey is transferred to be the desire to bite a toy then that is transferred to a bite sleeve worn by a human, then sometimes to a bare arm. I guess I wouldn't call it aggression either, having thought it through - but on the other hand, to the guy getting bitten, perhaps the semantic differences aren't that important? We use it in SAR training too. I've had a bugger of a time the last few months trying to persuade my little pup that the point is to find the person who has hidden, then come back to me for a prey drive reward (rather than cutting out the middle man, so to speak, and chomping the victim directly). She's just gotten the idea over the last few weeks, to the relief of my very patient search subjects! I think the line between prey drive and aggression is sometimes a very narrow one. Totally off topic, sorry to the OP, but still very interesting (to me anyway!)

I don't know Corvus, I don't see a predatory dog as being particularly insecure, either. I think it's merely aroused/stimulated and seeking reward. It's reactive, in that the dog isn't in prey drive before the cat or SWF comes into the yard, the dog is reacting to the presence of the other animal. But in this case it's reacting to an opportunity for reward, not to a threat. I don't know, I guess I'd buy that all aggression was caused by arousal, or by excitement of some kind, or by a strong desire to gain or escape something. But not that it's all based in fear, that just doesn't fit what I've personally observed. Ah, just see you've edited to say that you don't regard behaviour based in prey drive as "aggression". Even if it's between dogs, or between a dog and a child, or a dog and a person in a bite suit? I guess it depends whether you think of aggression as a set of behaviours (biting with the intent to kill or injure), or as the emotional/affective motivation for behaviour. I think you have a point in some ways, but I also think you might have a hard time convincing the owner of the other dog that your dog isn't being aggressive if it is displaying "aggressively" predatory behaviour towards their dog.

I don't believe that. Do you think all prey drive related behaviour is fear based too, then? Some dogs displaying aggressive behaviour (to other species but also other dogs and humans) appear to be motivated at least partially by prey drive. They don't appear at all fearful to me, any more than a dog chasing a ball looks fearful. I guess you could hypothesise that a predatory dog is always driven by "fear" of losing the prey item, but to me, that's such a broad use of the word fear that it is no longer useful. Fear is an emotion that I just do not see a predatory dog experiencing. The predatory dogs I've seen look driven by the adrenaline rush of the chase and the excitement of the capture. It's a positive experience for the dog, unlike feeling fear. I guess you could also hypothesise that a rank driven dog was fearful of losing status too, but I have seen a couple of apparently rank driven dogs that I don't believe were experiencing fear at all when they were aggressive. Noone can ask a dog what they feel, but if the dog's not displaying fearful body language, and if I wouldn't be feeling fearful in a similar situation (which I wouldn't be), then I think it's a reasonable call to make that the dog is also not feeling fearful. Excited, challenged, adrenalised, hopeful, confident, frustrated, who knows what the dog does or can feel? But in these two dogs, fear didn't look likely to me. IMO, saying "all aggression is based on fear" is as unhelpful as saying "all aggression is based on dominance". I've had trainers tell me both things when I was working with my last dog, but my own experience leads me to believe that neither doctrine is a useful way of looking at things.

In her crate in the living room. I'm a mean dog mummy. Plus I don't like being woken up at 3 in the morning by a mini malligator bouncing off the walls or chomping all my stuff. She shares a tent or back of the car when we go out camping, though.

Agree. If you get a strong working line dog, and don't socialise, train and manage him or her correctly, your family and friends can be in more danger from the dog than from whatever the dog is supposed to be protecting you against! It sounds to me like you just want to put on a show to deter potential burglars. Any large, confident, tough looking dog trained to bark could do that, and be a good pet at the same time.

That potentially can work with a dog that has no history of self reward. If the dog perceives the ingrained self reward higher then your super duper reward what do you do then? One "super' reliability I require in a good hard temperament high drive GSD is that it doesn't bite people, and the "self reward" of having an aggressive lunge and people back away in fear CANNOT be corrected with a reward high enough to stop the behaviour where a punishment with leash corrections and firmness to teaches the dog that the behaviour is NOT tolerated. Strong nerve GSD's are not sooky dogs and can take the pressure, but in all honesty, I don't know if this method works with all. I doubt it would work for all dogs showing similar issues. Many dogs (in my limited experience) that show that kind of aggressive behaviour do so out of fear, quite a different motivation to actually wanting the fight. Not all aggressive dogs are aggressive from fear, of course. Some are predatory. Some are rank driven. I'm not at all suggesting that your dog was fearful, Diablo. But for those aggressive dogs that are fearful, it seems safer to use mostly positive methods if you can. I've seen several fearful/fear aggressive dogs "fixed" or hugely improved using mostly positive methods - if you teach the dog that there is either nothing to fear, that the fear aggression no longer "works" to get rid of the threat, or that the handler can deal with any threats for them anyway, then there is no longer a reason for the dog to be fearful or aggressive. I'm not a professional trainer, and don't intend to become one. But I do intend to be a vet in a few years, and I expect to be (rightly or wrongly) first port of call for many clients with problem dogs, and if I can help it I won't be referring those clients to any one-size-fits-all trainers. I'd hate to refer a fearful dog to someone who was going to try to punish the aggression or "dominance" out of it, just like I'd hate to be responsible for referring a very stroppy dog to someone who refused to punish at all even if only-positive methods would take twenty times as long to get just the same result or would risk the behaviour escalating or just not really work at all. JM(non professional)O

According to my vet parasite lecturer, they're still not entirely sure which animals Neospora can affect, since they keep finding it in more and more animals. They used to think it was just cycling between dogs and cattle, but they've since found it in other ruminants, in horses, and they can give it to rodents and primates as well experimentally. It's mostly just a problem in cattle though, and to my knowledge not a terribly common one even there. Human quality meat is much much safer than "pet" quality meat but is still not 100% guaranteed to be free of this type of problem. The meat inspections at the works will pick up any obvious protozoan parasite issues with the meat, but can't 100% guarantee that some cysts won't slip through. However, I wouldn't want to personally base a raw diet on mostly chicken with little or no red meat. I'd worry that it was low in iron or zinc. Dogs aren't supposed to live on a mostly-bird diet, IMO. You should be fine feeding lamb or beef meat to your dog, especially if it's human quality meat, and if you want to be sure you can freeze it before feeding to your dogs (at least 7 days below 10 degrees C is supposed to kill the cysts). It's actually illegal in NZ to feed dogs raw offal or unfrozen sheep or goat meat, mostly due to the hydatids (Echinococcus) and sheep measles (Taenia) problems rather than Neospora, though. Not sure what the case is in Australia. As for feeding chicken livers instead of sheep or beef livers, the main nutritional difference I know of is that chicken livers are much much lower in copper than cow or sheep livers are, liver is where a raw fed dogs gets most of their copper from so I'm not sure if that could have a negative effect on a dog in the long term. I'd probably rather feed cooked beef liver than raw chicken livers, if it were me making that choice. (What I normally actually do is buy human quality liver and kidney and give it a good freezing then feed raw - a little bit naughty, but I've had no issues so far, nor heard of anyone else doing this having issues).

Thanks for that! I'll have a look into it (after exams though maybe - it's far too easy to procrastinate now!)

I think you misunderstand. The test out here in Australia is not as thorough as the one in the USA. Whether you are testing for thyroid due to skin issues or behaviour or some other symptom, the one in the USA is the more thorough and where the one in Australia might show negative that's not to say that thryoid is not an issue. The test in the USA is more likely to show it up if in fact thyroid is the issue. Could you post a good link explaining the differences between the tests, and how you go about getting the American tests done, if you have one handy, Erny? I'm interested, they haven't covered it in school (yet, anyway!) And I'm too lazy to google if I don't have to.

Or teach her to swap on command! My pup is gradually learning that "ta" means come over and I'll swap what you've got for something that might be even better (if I have nothing on hand then we usually trot off to the kitchen and have a poke in the fridge for something she might like to swap for). She gives me the item, if she hasn't already dropped it, and I give her the treat. Then I put the item out of reach. Getting her to swap things voluntarily was was a pretty essential thing for us to teach, given that a) my pup is already far faster than I am, and b) she is uncannily good at stealing cell phones... :p If she's insisting on chewing on something that I can't put out of reach, she gets a few warnings to "leave it", and I will offer her her own toys to chew on, then if she goes for it again she is put outside by herself for a while. She's 5 months old right now though, so I don't think that's unreasonable - whereas if your pup is much younger than this, I wouldn't expect her to develop much self control about chewing things yet. If your pup is only tiny, it's pretty much your job to supervise her whenever she's in the house, and immediately interrupt any naughty chewing by stuffing a more appropriate toy in her gob.

I agree.

You might be interested to hear that the Brelands and Baileys were training a wide range of species in open environments using +R; e.g dolphins in the open ocean, cats in urban environments. But as I recall they were also the ones that couldn't train a raccoon to pick up a coin and put it straight in a piggy bank, since their training methodology had no way of countering the racoon's instinctive drive to self reward by "washing" the coins first. That's right, in 1961 the Brelands wrote the classic paper "The Misbehavior of Organisms" which described instinctive drift and discussed the limitations of Operant Conditioning (at that time). To see that as a failure of their training methodology overall rather than an observation of a phenomena that had not been accounted for in the theory of Operant Conditioning in it's formative years is to miss the point somewhat. But no, they were not able to extinguish the coin "washing" behavior. Has any balanced trainer successfully attempted to do it since? I'm not sure if anyone could. I suppose it may be possible to get the desired performance using punishment, but I suspect since the behavour is very instinctual, it would take more punishment than I would personally be comfortable with - I like racoons more than I like TV commercials. However, unlike you I would call not being able to condition an animal to do something when the animal has a strong instinct to "disobey" a huge failure in training methodology. As an example, my dog has a very strong instinct to chase and bite things. I like that - I bought her because of it, because I can use that in her training. But I do need a training methodology that allows me to override that instinct when I need to do so. In our case so far, it's been mostly a "positive" training process (using drive training to attempt to provide a similar adrenaline and endorphin reward for doing what I want as she would get from chasing and biting other things). Hopefully this will be enough. However, I will not rule out using punishment in the future if necessary to proof her recall. I do not want a puppy who has been hit by a truck or put down for biting someone or something, or that has to be always kept on leash in some situations and "managed", since she can't be trained to overcome her instincts. I would never claim that the Brelands weren't superb trainers. But training is continually evolving. I think the tide is turning again - towards balanced training, with consideration for what each dog needs to achieve a reliable level of control along with a good relationship with their handler, and away from positive-only. Edited for sense!

You might be interested to hear that the Brelands and Baileys were training a wide range of species in open environments using +R; e.g dolphins in the open ocean, cats in urban environments. But as I recall they were also the ones that couldn't train a raccoon to pick up a coin and put it straight in a piggy bank, since their training methodology had no way of countering the racoon's instinctive drive to self reward by "washing" the coins first.

That's so funny, Corvus (not laughing at you, just the situation). When I had my last dog, I was so frustrated that there were no classes locally that would let me keep a pinch collar on my boy, or let me give any sort of collar pop on a check chain or martingale, and kept trying to stuff him into a headcollar (which he hated). The only class I could find that would let me use a pinch collar would not let me use toys or treats! They were very traditional and only used physical punishment and praise, which was even more unsuitable for my dog than the hands-off-dog-food-only class... I would love to have found a truly balanced class to attend with him. As it was, we did most of our training at home, and just went back to club to compete.

It's just a way of thinking about/talking about the "consequences" you give a dog when you're training them. If you add something to the situation, you call it positive. If you take something away from the situation, you call it negative. If the consequence makes the dog more likely to do the behaviour in question again, it's reinforcement. If the consequences makes it less likely that the dog repeats the behaviour, it's punishment. So if your dog loves food, then if she sits and you give her food, she'll probably be more likely to sit in the future. Hence you've positively reinforced the sitting behaviour (added something to the situation that makes it more likely she'll sit again). If your dog doesn't like being alone, and she chases the cat, and you immediately stick her in time out, and she chases the cat less often in future to avoid being put in time out, then you've negatively punished the behaviour of cat chasing. If you were to squirt her with a water pistol instead (assuming she doesn't like being squirted and will work to avoid it), then you've positively punished the behaviour of chasing the cat. It's hard to understand, since many people also mean "positive" in the sense of being nice, or being kind, and use "negative" in the sense of being mean, so discussions can get a bit confusing at times. And confusingly, if someone says they're a "positive trainer" then that usually means that they only use positive punishment and negative reinforcement when training (or at least, they try to use these more often than the other two quadrants). It doesn't mean that they like using positive punishment! Personally, I think the terminology can be sometimes useful when discussing things with other trainers, but I'm not sure how much use it is when actually training a dog. Dogs don't think in quadrants, IMO. They just think in terms of things being nice or nasty to dogs. Whether you punish a dog by taking away something she really wants, or by doing something to her she doesn't like, I'm not sure is a useful distinction most of the time. If it works well, without stressing the dog more than it has to be stressed, then IMO it works, no matter what "quadrant" it fits into. I've met some great amateur trainers who know nothing about quadrants or operant conditioning, but are still pretty amazing at handling and working their dogs. JMO, as always.

Hi Staranais Thanks for your kind words.... Yes I have also read your posts in my forum for specialist working dogs. I enjoy reading your posts there immensely. Cheers Mark Oh I didn't realise it was your forum over there! Silly me. Thanks for the kind words.