The Ups And Downs Of Dog Training.

[fuzzy_dragonfly]

Sui my staffy (X) is only 1.5 years old.

She's the type of dog that is super hypo and easily excited....not unlike many other staffy's I've met.

We're still working on trying to stop her from jumping up or lunging at other dogs when eye contact is made. She's never been aggressive but she can at times play a bit rough. She's OK with my OH's chihuahua's who have made it quite clear they will not tolerate her jumping LOL.

She IS improving slowly, I might be expecting a bit much from a pup who's only had 10 months of training, it can at times be extreemly fustrating!

Her stand for exam was heaps better than it had been previously. Her heeling is excellent, it's like I have a different dog. 10 months ago I would have lost an arm from her pulling LOL.

Her stays could use a little improving but for a change we weren't in the naughty corner last week :D, it was someone elses turn to play up.

This is my dog on our regular bushwalk.

Any helpful tips on helping me calm my dog?

I've been working on my tone of voice in correcting her. I keep her on a halti if I'm around people or other dogs.

Should I percevere with what I'm doing, progress is slow but it's definately there. Do you think it could be because she's still very young?

[Nekhbet]

I would start adding corrections and removing her from the other dog if she misbehaves. She's old enough to get them and if you're still having the problem after 10 months you need to try something different. This is a problem you fix in a few weeks not months. What does your dog school say?

[corvus]

Any helpful tips on helping me calm my dog?

I dunno, I guess if there is constant improvement you're at least getting somewhere, but when something is really working it usually works a lot quicker than that.

I think you need to really ask yourself specifically what you want your dog to do, not what you don't want her to do. Do you want her to be calm in general, or calm in particular situations? How calm? Do you want her to sit and look at you, for example? Or do you want her to stay in a heel? Dogs are great at detail, but not good at general stuff. Even if she responds well in one situation, a different situation might make that command completely new to her, so you've got to start thinking in specifics as well. Some dogs you tell them to stop something and they go lie down and are perfect angels. But some will just go find something even more annoying and disruptive to do. That's why I try to get in the habit of thinking "What would I like him to do?" and focus on getting him to do that instead. "Calm" is tricky, though. It's a very general sort of thing.

Leslie McDevitt of Control Unleashed likes to do massage work with easily excited dogs. She puts them on a mat and uses lots of calming signals like yawns and half-lidded eyes along with massage to tell the dog that now we're doing something relaxing and low energy. She encourages people to use a cue for this so that whenever you want your dog to calm down you can give them a cue to do so. If you condition it enough it does seem to work.

Another Control Unleashed exercise that sounds like it would help you is the Look At That game. The idea is to teach the dog to look at things that excite or bother them without going into a frenzied state or leaving you. You mark them when they look at the other dog and they look back to you at the mark, so then you pop them their treat. I've been doing this with Kivi as he gets quite intense about his desperate need to greet every dog he sees, and it works very well. One marker and he's like "Oh, we're training!" and he starts looking at the dog and looking back to me for his treat instead of dancing around barking and lunging. Loads of people have found it to be extremely effective.

If you can afford it, get the Control Unleashed book. It's very, very good for hyper dogs! It's good for all sorts of dogs.

Staffies are good fun, but yeah, they can be pretty full on. Erik is a little that way as well. Regular massage has really helped him along.

[Tilly]

With that innocent little face ... how could she possibly be anything other then a perfect little angel ... :D

[Purpley]

She is a 1.5yr old stafford - goodluck with the calming down. :D

[Nekhbet]

She is a 1.5yr old stafford - goodluck with the calming down.

I did it today for a client. Two staffs. Both achieved it. I think if you also have preconceived notions you tend to give up and allow a certain amount of behavior. One required correction, the other no correction just redirection of attention to achieve a calm, quiet dog.

[Purpley]

Oh yeah I know it can be done - it can be very tedious on the owner though. I was genuinely wishing the OP goodluck having been through it myself. I have a spring loaded stafford, so I completely empathise.

[fuzzy_dragonfly]

Thanks for the advice...bear in mind this is my first dog.

Don't forget there's a person on the other end of the lead who needs as much guidance and "positive reinforcement" as the dog in these matters!

There have been countless members of our club who have quit within a week or two, I'm still hanging in there.....give me SOME credit!

You do tend to get a lot of conflicting advice, this doesn't help in my dilemma.

It's extrodinarily fustrating when I'm acting on someones advice and the next person tells you it's wrong and they've been training for X years (excuse the sarcasm but .... whoopee) so was the person that gave me that advice!!! - who am I going to believe?

Even more fustrating when I have acted on experienced trainer's advice and here I am getting told improvement should be made in weeks, not months.

Nekhbet your more than welcome to come meet my cheeky bum and see if there is something I'm missing. Or if you know someone who can help me out I'd appreciate it.

Specifically what I'd like to see improvement on is:

1) Not lunging at other dogs when eye contact is made.

2) Calming down around new people. She gets very hypo and tends to jump up in anticpation of meeting a new friend.

LOL Tilly, I put her in a stand stay for the photo and a watch for the other.

She's not a stupid dog, I'm not a stupid owner, we just need help to understand each other.

[laeral]

Dont give up fuzzy_dragonfly. Sometimes these things take a little longer than it may for other people.

I have a GSD who is very energetic and was a lot like your dog. She was full of enthusiasm and exciteablilty around other dogs. I took her to obedience but that made her worse, it is only now with the help of a great trainer that I am getting some control over her. It has taken a LONG time. GSD's are supposed to be easy to train, and I used to get discouraged that I was finding difficult what others told me should be easy.

But today I took her for a walk in town, we encounted several dogs and Mica behaved, was calm and didnt pull on the leash!

I cant offer advice on how to tackle the issues that you are having with your dog, but hang in there and keep trying.

Good luck

[corvus]

Aww, don't get discouraged. Every dog is a learning experience. Everyone who's had a dog in their life is an expert on dogs, don't you know?

Seriously, if my copy of Control Unleashed wasn't currently being read by someone else, I'd lend it to you. It is designed for dogs with lots of energy that can be a bit on the reactive side! I don't know if you can get it in this country, but you can buy it online from the States.

It might just be my dogs, but I've found that if I don't see improvements with nearly every repetition once we're a week or so into trying something new, chances are I will never reach my goal, so I stop and have a good think about it and try something else. The trick is to find the right thing to reward or punish. If it's going a bit slowly consider whether you are being nice and consistent, and consider whether there is something else that is rewarding her when you are not. Also have a good look at your timing. Are you rewarding/punishing the moment the behaviour begins? I think that rewards are a little more forgiving with timing than punishments. If you're punishing, it should be as the dog is thinking about doing the wrong thing. If you punish after the behaviour, even if you do it right afterwards, it is often too late. The dog has already been rewarded first. This is why I just focus on rewards. I find it easier to get the timing right. I also find it very useful to record training sessions. When I look back on them I realise just how awfully inconsistent my signals and rewards are. My dogs get there anyway, but I'm sure it would be much faster if my signals were clearer.

Get even more specific with your goals. You don't want her to lunge when eye contact is made. Great! What do you want her to do? Sit in front of you and keep her eyes on you? Does it matter if she's sitting or standing as long as she's watching you? Can she look at the dog as long as she looks right back at you? Can she watch the dog in a sit and not look at you at all? The more specific you are the easier it is to train it.

Consider being calm around new people. Would you be happy with her running around madly as long as she didn't jump up? Would you prefer she sat beside you? Can she bark as long as she's in a down? Things like that. Once you define the specific criteria for the behaviour you want, you have both a clear and solid goal, and you will be giving your dog more guidance so she doesn't have to wonder what she should be doing. She'll know exactly what she should be doing. My pup, Erik, goes bananas when I get home, but he'll bounce into a down without being asked because I don't even reach for the key until he has. Having that really solid down is tremendously useful. Whenever he gets overly excited I can put him in a down. Even if he can only hold it for 5 seconds or so, it'll give me a chance to work out what I should do with him next so that I can get behaviour that I want to reward.

[fuzzy_dragonfly]

Hmm that's given me a lot to think about Corvus. You could be right, it's possible I'm correcting her a bit late.

We do dog passing dog really well, I power walk so she doesn't get the chance to make eye contact. She also watches very well as other dogs are passing us, only the occasional hiccup these days.

Usually by the time I've realised she's made eye contact with another dog I've already lost an arm. It happens so quickly, it doesn't always give me the chance to correct her while she's thinking about it. That could be part of my problem.

It's more common on walks and around the clubhouse.

Hmmmm.....it's pretty hard to get her attention off the other dog once she's started lunging, I usually correct her and try to walk the other way. Ideally I want her to be able to break eye contact and focus on me. I've tried recalling her on a few occasions with little success.

Does anybody have any ideas about how I could handle this problem?

Meeting new people or even guests is the most challenging one for me. I've tried correcting her and it doesn't help when people pat her without me saying it's OK! This problem has me completely stumped, beyond keeping her on halti I don't know what to do? On the rare occasion she doesn't jump I give her lots of praise but even then it doesn't seem to sink in.

BTW I know what you mean Laeral, I've seen some brilliant shepherds and some that just want to play all the time. It's a bit discouraging when people start judging your capabilities as a handler when you have a challenging dog. I must admit though, challenging dogs do make things a bit more interesting.

It's a bit sad when you see that the owners of the REALLY challenging dogs don't stay, some have real nasty problems like aggression. My problems are a spit in the ocean compared to the hurdles some owners face.

Unfortunalety, it doesn't make it any less fustrating .

[Nekhbet]

yes there is conflicting advice, but you do what works for the dog. If you are plugging away for months, OK time to rethink things. No, nothing is instant but something that DOES work will produce faster results

if you are in Vic I'm happy to come give you a session

As for the stays, or any behavior for that matter, I see people ask too much. Stay you start from one step back, move back to the dog then reward. Then increase in small increments. Too many people ask for things like 5 second stays off the bat and the dogs will not understand quickly, and owner frustration goes up

For her lunging get her into the habit of sitting before she starts the behavior... once she is off on her tangent your control decreases dramatically as does learning. Start at a further distance, make her sit and praise her. I think it is OK for a dog to look at another dog they should just show little/no excitement. Praise for good behavior. If your dog DOES get close and lunge, correct with something like a check chain, turn around and encourage her to follow you. Redirect the mind, calm it down then praise. No meeting dogs unless 1) we get permission and 2) we are well behaved.

[luvsdogs]

If you want to buy Control Unleashed I can PM you an Aussie site that sells it for $35.

[corvus]

We do dog passing dog really well, I power walk so she doesn't get the chance to make eye contact. She also watches very well as other dogs are passing us, only the occasional hiccup these days.

That's great! :p

Usually by the time I've realised she's made eye contact with another dog I've already lost an arm. It happens so quickly, it doesn't always give me the chance to correct her while she's thinking about it. That could be part of my problem.

It's more common on walks and around the clubhouse.

Hmmmm.....it's pretty hard to get her attention off the other dog once she's started lunging, I usually correct her and try to walk the other way. Ideally I want her to be able to break eye contact and focus on me. I've tried recalling her on a few occasions with little success.

Does anybody have any ideas about how I could handle this problem?

Ah yes, that situation seems familiar. ;) What it comes down to is conditioning. The more you practice things away from other dogs and reward the heck out of them, the better she'll get in more challenging situations. Like Nekhbet said, make sure you don't expect a lot from her all at once. It's hard with other dogs because you can't control the distance they are at or where they are going. Inevitably you will have a dog come close enough to trigger her before she's able to handle it. I'm sure people think this is madness, so feel free to ignore me, but I figure if I lose them there's no point in trying to train anything until they are back a few notches. I just wait it out. Sooner or later the other dog will be far enough away that they will calm down a bit and then you can get their attention and reward. Kivi used to do a bit of this when he saw other dogs (he's a social butterfly). At first I just stopped walking and waited for him to sit. He's been taught that if he wants something he should sit, so I only had to wait ten seconds or so. Once he was doing that, I'd usually be able to call him into a loose heel and reward that. At first his heel wasn't strong enough for him to be able to do it in this situation, so we practiced it a lot in all sorts of on leash and off leash situations for a bit. It didn't take long to get it strong enough for the command to penetrate when he was focused on another dog. We were doing pretty well with that method and he'd got to the point where he would keep his heel or at least not charge ahead to meet the other dog, but he'd still make this lunge at the last moment to touch noses. The Look At That game has very quickly taken care of that.

Here's a video of Look At That in action:

The idea is to reward the dog for looking at another dog. It sounds counter-intuitive, but as long as you practice it far enough away from another dog that your dog hasn't lost it, she'll turn to you when you mark her to get her treat. Pretty soon she's more focused on you than the other dog and only looking at the other dog at all because you tell her to. It was developed more for anxious dogs, but it still worked with Kivi, and he was excited about other dogs. You should read the book to get a good understanding of the exercise, but there are short descriptions on the internet.

Meeting new people or even guests is the most challenging one for me. I've tried correcting her and it doesn't help when people pat her without me saying it's OK! This problem has me completely stumped, beyond keeping her on halti I don't know what to do? On the rare occasion she doesn't jump I give her lots of praise but even then it doesn't seem to sink in.

I would tackle this with Look At That as well. It is such a useful exercise. It gets a bit boring gushing about Control Unleashed all the time, but I'm not the only one that raves about it. My dogs were manageable without CU, but a lot of the dogs the program has sorted out are barely manageable.

[kayla1]

Control Unleashed is a great book.

I ended up buying it twice - the dogs ate the first copy I bought. :p

[Kelpie-i]

If you want to buy Control Unleashed I can PM you an Aussie site that sells it for $35.

luvsdogs, could you PM me the details too!! It's been on my list of books to buy so figure..what the hey, there's no time like the present.

fuzzy_dragonfly, chances are your club is teaching you obedience work like sits, drops and heeling etc but may not be addressing problem behaviours like jumping, obnoxioussnes/excitement etc. If this is the case then it's no-one's fault and you simply have not been able to address the issues you mention. This is probably why in 10 months you have not seen any improvement with the problem behaviours....but I bet she sits and drops on a dime :p

A few things to consider:

- Most of the behaviour you are seeing has been reinforced and/or continues to be reinforced which is why it is occurring. Reinforcement can be inadvertent on your part or what we call a 'life rewards' which are things in and around the environment that you cannot control

- Excitable behaviour creates excitable behaviour. If your dog jumps and carries on with visitors etc, this is because this behaviour is being reinforced somehow, either by you or your visitors.

- Your answers lie in the clues you give:

We do dog passing dog really well, I power walk so she doesn't get the chance to make eye contact. She also watches very well as other dogs are passing us, only the occasional hiccup these days.

Usually by the time I've realised she's made eye contact with another dog I've already lost an arm. It happens so quickly, it doesn't always give me the chance to correct her while she's thinking about it. That could be part of my problem.

It's more common on walks and around the clubhouse.

Hmmmm.....it's pretty hard to get her attention off the other dog once she's started lunging, I usually correct her and try to walk the other way. Ideally I want her to be able to break eye contact and focus on me. I've tried recalling her on a few occasions with little success.

Going by the highighted parts, it seems you are reacting rather than being pro-active. Focus is wonderful but useless if you are not paying attention to everything around you and your dog.... and/or your dog has not been proofed correctly/enough.

I think some private sessions with a trainer who is able to show you some re-directive type training, proofing focus in all situations as well as some good solid leadership skills will help you. Proofing the focus is the only thing that should take you longer than the others to achieve, only because you have to set up and proof each new criterion for focus... but the others should not take too long at all.

Good luck

[fuzzy_dragonfly]

Thanks Corvus I'll give the "Look at that" game a go. It's worth a shot!

I walked with my friend this afternoon, she did really well. I also let me friend take the lead for some of the walk to see how she'd react. To my surprise she actually did really well! I was still using a halti but it was really good, she didn't jump up.

Maybe it's just me that's still a bit anxious in these situations .

We walked past a property where a very vocal and excitable bull arab lives. I used a squeeky toy to keep her attention on me. That wasn't too bad, she did express interest in playing with tha dog as we passed and pulled a little, but she didn't lunge.

I'm just trying a few new things now. I was even trying T-touch at one stage but I think I might have been doing it wrong, it's a bit hard to do it unless you get shown. I think that's why it didn't work for me.

Yes please luvsdogs, I'd love to get a copy. LOL one more to add to my pile of training books, never mind, you can never have too many books!

[fuzzy_dragonfly]

BUMP...any chance I can get details on where to buy Control Unleashed?

[pie]

Hi FD, here is one place:

http://www.wagschoolbooks.com.au/shop/book...ty/wsblmb1.html

Here's another

http://www.agilityclick.com/prod158.htm

Not sure which site was referred to earlier though.

I have this book and have never read past the first chapter Might have to read it after all these recommendations!

[corvus]

I meant to say before that I have a T Touch dvd. I only got it recently so I haven't seen it all yet, but it's definitely helpful to see it done by a pro. Kivi turns to putty in your hands with any kind of massage, but we're starting to see Erik staying still for it a bit more after watching the dvd. He loves the tarrantula pulling a plough. He even let me do his mouth ever so briefly last week. That's a big step for a pup that I had to teach to allow his teeth to be checked using lots and lots of treats.