Staranais

Sounds pretty sensible to me. Let us know how you go with the tracking in drive - I do something similar with my mally as part of her SAR training. Didn't know you could do KNPV in Aussie, though?

You both get the rights you agreed to when you signed the contract. That's how contracts work. If you didn't like the terms, you shouldn't have signed the contract. No one was holding a gun to your head (I hope!)

Started it as a baby with my current girl, and will do the same with my next pup.

I think that you should have thought about this before you signed the contract.

While I'm on their grounds I am, and I therefore followed their rules while on their grounds. Still had no desire to participate in their classes, though.

That's what I have done and have recommended to clients. I even suggest taking a membership with the club, seeing as you're benefiting from their services, but there is certainly no obligation. Yes, I agree, I've joined two clubs before with no intention of doing any of their classes, since both were kind enough to let me enter the club grounds to do my own thing in the background when classes were going on. I don't feel any obligation to pay if I'm well outside the club grounds, though, especially if I'm only there occasionally.

I doubt you'll be able to educate these people, but good luck trying. Like I said I think allowing check chains and disallowing pinch collars is silly, but they have the right to set the rules for their own classes. So, it seems to me you have a couple of options in the meantime. You can stay in the class, and use the tools they approve. That might work out just fine for you if you stay on the periphery of the class, well under threshold, and work on desensitisation and handler engagement. (Have you seen Michael Ellis's videos on engagement? They're pretty good). Or, I reckon that your other option is to go as close to their class as you can while remaining on public land, and train however you like. I have often done this with obedience & agility classes - lingering well outside the class means I can train for as long as I like, using the methods I like, reward when I want, etc, but still use the dogs in the class as a distraction. They have no business telling you what to do if you're on public land, and if you are considerate and careful not to disrupt their class, they'll have no reason to get upset either. To be honest, if they are an ANKC club, they're probably not going to have the same goals as you, they won't use the same terminology, tools or reward system as you, and the majority of the instructors simply won't be used to handling a dog like yours. I don't know how much you'd get out of training with them anyway. Like Kavik says, if you want to join a club, Schutzhund might be more your style?

Really, Tentapride? That's very interesting - could you please quote the relevant section since I'm not very up with Aussie law?

Oh that makes sense then, thanks.

Your spot on. They are and she is a little prey monster food is the motivation, and that is what I was attempting to do..... And I do take advice thankyou. Good, I'm glad you weren't offended! I've been through the baby malinois crazy months too, I remember they weren't all that much fun. But I think you're on the right track, heaps and heaps of motivation plus absolute consistency (and the occasional consequence for really appalling behaviour) got us through in one piece.

Kavik has a great idea, IMO - Schutzhund clubs are the only clubs I know that are happy with pinch collar use. In my experience, they're also often quite sophisticated with their use of drive and rewards, and can be experienced with malinois. Having said that, I personally wouldn't correct a 6 month old malinois pup (or allow her to correct herself) on a pinch collar for inappropriate behaviour towards other dogs or humans. I'm not sure if that is what you're doing - if you're just working her at quite a distance using the other dogs as a distraction, and correcting gently for not obeying well known commands, then perhaps that is different. Although I'd personally still want to be working a pup with reward-only at that age. Yes, I know you didn't ask for my advice. ;)

IMO it's uneducated and illogical of them to dis-allow prongs or ecollars but allow check chains and head collars (if that is what they are doing). But, it is their club, and I think you will find that they are allowed to set the rules that way if they care to do so. Just like some clubs don't allow clickers, or squeaky toys, or bitches in heat, or check chains, at training - it's their club, so I think they're allowed to set their own rules. ETA, I do agree that the rules they make should be written down properly, so that new members know what they are!

I would be curious to hear how you train with this concept, Bedazzled. Sounds like you are using in a sophisticated way what our dogs do automatically. e.g. with my own dog (working not trialling), her ultimate drive reward is to play tug with a search subject, so everything she has learned that leads up to that event has become significantly valuable to her. I can therefore control her behaviour by not allowing her to progress to the next "step" on the chain if her behaviour is not satisfactory. However, we do things in approximately the same order each time (off the top of my head, I would list the steps she recognises as = me getting my gear, us driving to search area, me preparing her to search, me releasing her to search, her following my directions while on a search, her finding & following scent cone or ground scent, her barking at subject. She knows that she must display appropriate behaviour at each stage in order to be permitted to go onto the next stage). I would be interested to hear how you use this concept in trialling, as I understand obedience exercises and agility obstacles do not always occur in a predictable order and therefore cannot be purely backchained? (e.g., dog cannot think "oh good I am released from retrieve, that means I will get to do the jump and I am therefore one step closer to reward!") Hope that question made sense, I'm a bit tired today!

I'm very sorry to hear about your loss. Just wanted to add that I have never seen or done a postmortem of a dog with mesenteric torsion, but in sheep the condition is usually fairly obvious on PM & hard to miss.

Yes, I agree 100%. I'm not clear from your question whether you're doing one of Steve's programs, or whether you're just asking a general question about the concept of drive. If it's the latter, then disregard what I'm going to say. But if it's the former, I'd say that since you're paying the money to learn about a training system from a good trainer (and IMO, Steve is a very good trainer), then you might as well get your money's worth and ask him your questions directly. On a forum you'll get people giving you lots of different answers based on their experiences, on their level of understanding, and even on their own interpretation of the words you use. You can get good advice on here, but it can also be very hard to sort out the wheat from the chaff, especially when you are only just starting to learn about a particular system yourself.

K9: Yep we have them! Brilliant! I actually just emailed you guys about this, but clearly dogzonline is a faster way to contact you. They're not on the website that I can find, though? I'll email you about it. ETA - also, thanks Lollipup!

Does anyone know where I can order these from? So far I can only find collars with tips. Whereas, I just want to buy the tips for a collar I already have.

See I would think the most harm a prong could do would be superficial skin wounds? Where as constant pressure from a flat/check/martingale could damage the internal structures? Well fitted, yes, I'd agree with you 100%. But poorly (loose) fitted and used by an abusive moron, I'd imagine they could potentially do more than surface damage. That's only supposition, though, and could be dead wrong (and I don't think it's a good argument to ban the collar, either. Lots of things can do damage when improperly or abusively used). I haven't seen any injuries from a prong collar myself, but I guess it might not be fair to read much into that since they're pretty uncommon around here. Injuries from any collar type appear to be a pretty uncommon thing to see in practice, however. The only cases I've seen myself have been where the owner has been clearly negligent and left a collar on far too long, letting it erode into the animal's neck. Not pretty. I agree with your point though that a collar that can constrict indefinitely is probably a lot less safe than one which cannot. Check chains for example have apparently been suspected to cause Horner's syndrome, although I don't know if there are any actual substantiated case reports out there, or just a high index of suspicion.

well said staranais *Nods head vigorously* That said our breeder tells us allergies are not in his family... They are now.

Has anyone said a prong collar can't cause harm (genuine question)? I certainly think they could cause harm, e.g. if the handler really cranked and yanked on them, especially if they'd fit it incorrectly too. But, I think a more relevant question is, can they cause more harm than any of the other legal correction collars? I'm not sure about that. I'd hate to see the result of a head collar misfitted then really yanked and cranked, for example. Even a flat collar could cause harm in that situation.

No it wasn't redirected aggression, the dog was not aggressing, just wanting to go for a walk, when the mild correction was applied the dog swung around and bit him. I believe the dog was worried. The dog was far less stimulated than I had seen on many occasions before and after (including aggression) that didn't end with the owner copping a bite after him giving a correction. Unless I'm somehow reading this wrong, how is a dog biting someone NOT aggression? I think m-j is saying it's not redirection (frustration or displacement) aggression. I'd be interested though, if the dog reacted with a handler bite to a mild pinch collar correction, I'm thinking that it could potentially have reacted exactly the same way to something else surprising and unpleasant that happened? e.g. someone stepping on it's toe? Still doesn't make it sensible to use a pinch collar on such a dog, of course (at least not without teaching it what the correction means).

That's what I was thinking too.

Thanks Jeff!

Hmmm, noone yet who supports a ban, which makes the whole poll fairly meaningless. Perhaps this is the wrong forum for the question. I'm sure if I went into a general news forum & asked the same thing, I'd get more people supporting a ban (and probably far less people who'd tried or even seen a prong). Also though, I tried to make the poll anonymous so that people wouldn't be afraid to vote even if they felt they had an unpopular opinion - can someone confirm that it is actually anonymous to vote?

Allergies are very, very common in dogs (and lots of other animals too). We are taught that flea allergy dermatitis is the most common by far, followed by atopy, then food allergies, then contact allergies. This has been borne out by what I've seen so far in practice. But it's also true that dogs with one type of allergy are much more likely than your average dog to suffer from a second type of allergy. I've seen intradermal skin testing done on lots of dogs, and in almost every case the dog was inappropriately reactive to multiple substances, not just one. I think there is rarely a valid reason to breed a dog with allergies. They often, if not always, have a heritable component, and they're not a minor problem - allergies cause owners a whole lot of expense and cause dogs a whole lot of discomfort.