Staranais

I didn't think there could actually be negative punishment without positive reinforcement. Because if there is no reward available to the dog for right behaviour, then you can't withold that reward for the wrong behaviour. So the two go hand in hand. At least that's my understanding of it all. Can I please ask, what do you mean that the "the 'greater' reward for the dog was complying to the commands"? How can complying with commands be a reward in itself?

That's what I meant, Erny just said it better.

My 18kg SBT has two crates. One is the recommended size for a staffy (just long enough for him to stretch out fully), and the other the biggest one the company stocked (great dane size!). He much prefers the big one. Then again, I've heard of dogs that really love their cosy little crates. Perhaps it's just a personal preference thing?

My answer's a little different, I think that it all depends on how you initially trained the exercise. If you trained the leave exercise using punishment ("you will leave the ball on the whistle or you will be corrected"), then it's both punishment and reward based. The dog leaves the ball to avoid punishment, but eventually gets rewarded by the break command. If you trained the leave exercise using reward only ("leaving the ball on the whistle is your best chance of achieving drive satisfaction") then it's a reward only based exercise. The dog is performing the entire time in order to maximise its chance of getting the reward. That's just IMO, and hopefully it will make sense to everyone else.

I've fed a few of her books and am definately not a fan. Her method is called "Amichien Bonding", which she claims she invented after watching lots of videos on how wild wolves interact. Basically, it's just a list of rules to follow when interacting with your dog - ignore it when you first come home from work, don't let it pull on the leash, always eat before your dog eats, etc. The idea is that your dog will then naturally recognise you as the alpha and respect you. IMO this method would probably be some use to owners whose dogs don't respect them, but on the other hand, the owner consistantly enforcing ANY rules would probably be beneficial in that circumstances. NILIF or TOT would do exactly the same thing. And getting your dog's "respect" isn't exactly the end all of dog training - you still need a way to actually teach him what you want, and motivate him to do it. Jan Fennel doesn't cover that at all in her books. It's like she thinks that if your dog respects you, your dog will somehow automatically know exactly what you want. JMO.

I get to be the first to recommend Steve from K9force! But I'm sure many other recommendations will follow mine. If I lived in Sydney and had an aggressive dog, Steve would be my first port of call. www.k9force.net

Will PM MarkS instead. To the OP, I agree with MarkS that the best course for your friend is to consult a behaviourist, instead of risking the cat's safety by experimenting with internet theories.

DeeLee, today I went into my vegetable garden to find that my staffy boy had carefully picked and eaten every single ripe strawberry in the patch (he quite considerately left me all the unripe ones). I guess it's just all part of the fun of living with a staffy.

I'd call myself a staffy person. About 4 years ago, I adopted a 5 year old staffy who pulled like a train. Going to obedience school unfortunately didn't help us. The most successful thing I tried was a pinch collar, along with the method described in the 3rd Steven R Lindsay book. Although I've only skimmed this thread, I think this method is similar to what MarkS is describing. If I ever adopt another adult dog with a severe pulling problem, I would happily consider using this tool and this method again (edited to add: after trying a flat collar, and putting the dog on a leadership-enhancing programme like TOT or NILIF, obviously). Incidentally, we never use our pinch anymore (I don't even know where it is right now) since my dog now no longer pulls. Just my 2 cents, since someone mentioned staffy people.

I've thought about this a lot, since I'll (hopefully!) graduate from vet school within the lifetime of my next dog. It's therefore really important to me that my next dog learns to be both confident and polite around strange people, dogs and livestock, so that I can take her to work with me (lots of vets do this, and just crate their dog when they're in surgery or consultations). My plan for socialising my next dog is to allow her to only interact with a dogs that are themselves very calm, very well mannered, and preferably quite"boring", until she's at least a year or two old. That way, I'm hoping she'll become adequately socialised to canines, without the risk of her learning bad habits from other puppies (and without risking her learning to put too high a value on other dogs, since that might interfere with her obedience). I know that idea might be a little too late for your problems though, sorry.

What, why doesn't obedience count? I have an 8-9ish year old staffy boy with arthritis in his front paws - since he can't jump, he can't do anything competitive except obedience. So we do obedience! We're still only competing in the lowest levels, but he won two competitions last year (and was I a proud mum or what! I think everyone I know got to see our two little shiny red ribbons). I've also done a bit of tracking with him - not for competition since in NZ competitive tracking includes jumps. He loved it, though he wasn't particularly talented. I still go out and run tracks with him sometimes, just for fun.

Maybe. When I adopted my current dog, he was predatory towards cats, and his last owner warned me that he'd killed a kitten by picking it up and shaking it. Four years on, he's now safe with my own cats, and pretty darn trustworthy around strange cats (although I will still always watch him closely around strange cats, just in case). But that's just my experience - I doubt all cat killing dogs could be rehabilitated that successfully. I had the advantage in that I started retraining my dog the very first day that I adopted him. He's never been allowed to engage in any form of predatory behaviour around any cats, even staring at them in a predatory manner, since he's lived with me. If your friend's dog has been allowed to chase cats in the past, I imagine her chances of success might be lower? If I were you, I'd tell her to try to find a good behaviourist, and ask for their help. They should be able to assess her likelihood of success, and give her a plan to follow. Perhaps someone on the forum can recommend one near you? Trying to cure this problem by herself might work, but it might also result in an injured or dead cat. Good luck.

It would probably be a disaster. My dog is too dog aggressive to make it worth the risk. (Although he displays aggressive behaviour far less often than when I first adopted him, and although I'm now way better at reading his body language and anticipating what he's going to do, it's still true that he's capable of quickly doing serious damage to another dog.) The only times I have had other dogs in the home, we've had a strict "crate and rotate" regime in place. Even with my dog's one doggy friend, they're never never left alone unsupervised. It's not a problem for me. I know my dog's boundaries, and I've arranged his life so that everyone is kept safe.

This is a typo, right? Because if you can house train a one week old puppy, I'll be really impressed. Just wanted to say, it will be way easier to train the puppies if you give them all separate training sessions away from the other puppies. It will be way harder if you're trying to train 2 or 3 puppies at once, or even trying to train one with the others in the room. Not sure which way you've been trying it so far. I also wouldn't expect too much out of a 12 week old puppy, all the 12 week old puppies I've met have had very short attention spans! And, if I were you, I'd get a new trainer, one that didn't consider my dog to be untrainable.

Read the links I posted, it explains it all pretty clearly. But FYI, pinch collars aren't even mentioned. The previous draft a few years back mentioned "spiked collars", and I emailed MAF asking about the legal status of (blunt pronged) pinch collars, saying why I thought they should not be banned - guess a few other people must have done something similar, since there's no mention of "spiked collars" or prong collars in this draft.

Ah, but I bet your poodle is much more agile (and probably way, way, smarter) than my little black brick!

What, you mean a dog like my 38cm SBT? Unfortuantely it's not just his small size holding us back in the ring. Though I agree that medium sized dogs do seem to be easier to compete with than the smaller or very big breeds.

If UK obedience is anything like NZ obedience, I'd say that the Border collies are favoured simply because they're so smart and biddible, that it's relatively easy to get them to do very precise obedience work (relative easy compared to getting, say, your average terrier or hound to do very accurate work). And there's no point even thinking about seriously competing in the top levels of obedience here unless you're scoring nearly perfect scores. Perhaps the UK is similar? (Don't know much about them). Strange if they don't get penalised for bumping into their dogs on the corners - over here that would definately cost you points, and probably the match at higher levels.

Heads up! MAF have put together a draft "Code of Welfare" for dogs. The NZ public can make submissions on this code until the first of November 2007 - after that, the code will become legislation. IMO most of the draft code is pretty much common sense and nothing to worry about, but some sections are debatable. If you're from NZ, I think that it's pretty important that you take a look at the draft and make a submission if there's anything you disagree with. You may be particularly interested in commenting on the draft if you would like to keep the right to do any of the following things: * Ever leave your dog unattended in a car * Keep your dog in working condition with easily palpable ribs ("thin") * Use remote trainers for basic training * Use anti-bark e-collars * Keep a dog entire even if you do not intend to breed it (e.g for working or showing purposes) * Own an older dog and don't get it vet checked every 6 months * Dock dogs tails All of these things will either banned or considered to be not "best practice" by the code. (Please note that although there is no legal requirement for a dog owner comply with "best practice", the code of welfare will be revised frequently, and that "best practices" from this draft of the code may become minimum legal standards in later versions of the code. So if you don't agree with the "best practice", now is a good time to tell MAF that!) The first link below is the code itself, the second is instructions on how to submit your views on it: http://www.biosecurity.govt.nz/files/strat...elfare-dogs.pdf http://www.biosecurity.govt.nz/files/strat...dogs-letter.pdf

I don't know anything about UK obedience tests, but I do know that the vast majority of serious high level NZ obedience competitiors do have border collies. If it's not the same in Oz, then I suspect that's because NZ obedience is a lot more competitive than Australian obedience. So I was wondering, perhaps UK obedience is really competitive too? I don't know much about how it works over there. Leopuppy, as for whether ruining a dog with force is worse than ruining a dog with food, I think that depends on exactly how ruined the dog becomes! I imagine that for some dogs, really poorly mishandled food training (e.g constantly reinforcing the wrong things) could lead to the dog becoming uncontrolling, domineering, and even aggressive - and therefore could result in the dog being abandoned or PTS if the owners decided that they just can't handle it anymore. Just a thought.

I'll have to be the dissenting voice here. My dog is pretty luke-warm about his kong. I've stuffed it with all sorts of different things, but he's just not that into it. He'll chew on it if you stuff it with something nice, but not with much tenacity. He much prefers to chew on marrow bones or pigs trotters, or even sticks of wood if I leave them in the yard. In the end I let a friend borrow the kong for his dog, and apparently she wasn't terribly interested in it either. So I won't be replacing it.

The sad fact is that lots of nice, well meaning obedience trainers really have no idea how to diagnose or treat dog aggression - even if they think they do. As someone who has owned an aggressive dog for years, I know that for a fact! And getting advice about canine aggression from someone who doesn't really know what they're talking about is a recipe for disaster. Hopefully someone who is from Melbourne can recommend a really good, qualified, experienced dog behaviourist to you, one that specialises in aggression. I think Erny might be in Melbourne, and she's a qualified dog trainer, so she might be a good person to PM. If she can't see your dog, she might be able to recommend other good local behaviourists to you. The benefit of seeing a good behaviourist is not just that your dog might be saved (although he might be quite salvageable - some aggression problems are way easier to manage and fix than you might think.) It's also that if your dog can't be saved, you'll have a clearer concience about putting him to sleep, since you will have done it on the professional opinion of a really good, qualified, experienced behaviourist (i.e, you won't be always thinking "perhaps I could have saved him..."). And the behaviourist might be able to give you some idea about what went wrong, so you know what to do differently next time you get a dog, which is always a really good thing. Good luck.

I'm only a very new ob trialler, since we've only been in the ring a few times. But what I've done has been to leave my dog in the car until immediately before we're due in the ring, then grab him out for a quick warm up and get directly into the ring. As soon as we're done, I reward him a short distance from the ring, then stick him straight back in the car. And then get him out for the awards announcements later. Leaving him in the car as long as possible means that when I grab him out he is really eager to work. He doesn't have time to get bored and lose focus on me - which is pretty essential for us, considering he can be dog aggressive. Also, leaving my dog in the car when I'm not working him means I don't need to worry about my dog or watch him like a hawk around all the other dogs. I can just go up to chat to other people, without worrying about how our dogs will react to each other. Makes the whole experience a lot more relaxing for me - and probably for my dog too. It's worked for us OK so far.

If not bones, then how about leaving them something else that's OK to chew? Kongs, or rawhides. Or treat balls? Or big cardboard boxes to play in and demolish? You see, I'm wondering whether they're chewing all your stuff up simply because it's fun. If you give them something else fun to do, they might stop wrecking your stuff. Apart from that, if you don't want to crate them, and don't want to give them more stuff to chew, all I can suggest is to maybe shut some doors to keep them in less fragile parts of the house? Confine them to the hallway and bathroom or something!

Wow, from the title of the thread I thought you were getting upset because your dog saw you naked, or something. I know nothing about training protection dogs, but I was wondering, why don't you just immediately stop the training session the minute that the dog starts to perve. Assuming the dog really wants the reward, he'll soon stop perving. (And if the dog doesn't want the reward more than he wants to perve, maybe you need to find a better reward?) & if your dog isn't reliable off leash, perhaps he should be on a long line until he is reliable? Good luck with the training.