Cat And Bat Resources?

[corvus]

Does anyone know someone in Australia that has experience in Constructional Aggression Treatment or Behavior Adjustment Training? Or maybe just a book would do seeing as I don't want it for aggressive dog behaviour.

[Aidan]

What did you want to know?

[corvus]

It's not really dog related. I have been working on re-taming my hare since he got into this habit of hiding whenever I came by. I've got the safety signal, which has helped hugely in getting him to where he's at now. He will come out of hiding when I come into the cage, and he's not in a panic, and he will stay out of hiding sometimes, but he still won't approach me. I feel like I'm so close! He is watching me and he seems really interested and he's listening for my "coming in" and "leaving" signals and I think if I could just have some kind of structured way to approach and retreat based on his behaviour I would get through this last barrier. I'm just kind of doing it by guesswork when the opportunity presents itself. Like last night as I was coming in he jumped into the centre of his cage and stopped, so I stopped, and leaned back a bit, but I didn't know where to go from there. He turned away from me and retreated and I went in. I was just thinking, I could probably have managed that better. He is doing a lot of pausing in the open, which is about as ripe for operant conditioning as he ever gets. I feel like I'm blowing a lot of my opportunities because I don't have a structured approach.

[Aidan]

I would speak to Andrea Bratt-Frick, apart from being very experienced with functional -R procedures she also trains a lot of rabbits.

[corvus]

Thanks Aidan.

Incidentally, I've been thinking about this kind of thing as an approach to raising dogs lately. Why should I sit by and let my dogs learn ways of coping that I don't want them to learn? The environments we spend lots of time in are dynamic and hard to control, but the more time I spend there the more opportunities I see for allowing my dogs to have success with coping strategies I like, and the more that happens, the more persistent they become in those coping strategies, so I have time to manage the environment before they try a different coping strategy if the ones I like aren't working for them. But my dogs are pretty social and naturally into non-aggressive coping strategies anyway. What if they weren't? Is there a way to raise dogs with lower aggression thresholds than mine so that they get lots of success with non-aggressive coping strategies?

[Aidan]

Is there a way to raise dogs with lower aggression thresholds than mine so that they get lots of success with non-aggressive coping strategies?

Yes, but of course the more propensity towards aggression the more care you need to take which probably accounts for some of the widely varying opinions on things like dog parks (different people have different experiences with different dogs that they own and different dogs that they meet).

With the benefit of hindsight I can see some of the things I had done wrong with my GSD girl, a couple of things in particular. Those are the sort of mistakes I would not make again, whether or not things might turn out differently I can't really say for sure, probably not.

You mentioned safety signals before. It is amazing that more research hasn't been done on those, we've known about conditioned inhibitors since Pavlov noticed them in 1929. The data we do have supports the hypothesis that "high anxious" individuals aren't more anxious about things that should cause fear or anxiety, but have deficiencies in learning safety signals - i.e they respond inappropriately to stuff that shouldn't, rationally, frighten them. This can be learned (e.g veterans with PTSD) or innate (or both).

It is very difficult to teach those populations an explicit safety signal, and if you do, it is less likely to generalise to other stimuli. So for those who are innately "high anxious", you could be pushing it uphill no matter how much you control the environment.

Whether that results in aggression or not depends on other innate factors, and I think it is possible to take an innately anxious and aggressive temperament and not end up with a dog who resorts to aggression. My GSD does not resort to aggression in most situations, I have been able to condition her to find other coping mechanisms, and she has never hurt another dog (traumatised them permanently, yes, actually caused damage, no). She is both innately anxious and innately aggressive.

[corvus]

That is all very interesting. I remember way back when my hare was about 18 months old he lived for a few months in my parents' hallway. I watched in fascination as he learnt to override his instinctive "flee blindly" response to being frightened because he was in a tight space not suited to fleeing blindly. Instead of fleeing blindly he learnt to dash just a few steps, then stop to get his bearings. From there, he learnt to dash back to his cage, and soon cut out the middle step. I couldn't believe an animal hard-wired to run blindly very fast whenever frightened could learn in just a week or so to override that instinct. Although maybe I'm giving him a little more credit than he deserves. Hares don't always run blindly. They have great camouflage and do a lot of freezing as well. I guess for them the trick is deciding when to run and when to freeze. On top of that, Kit had been raised indoors and already had a bit of experience with tight spaces. Maybe it's not a huge leap to decide where to run when freezing isn't a sensible strategy.

I guess with a dog that's more prone to anxiety or aggression I'd make more mistakes and wouldn't have the leeway I do with my dogs when I do make mistakes. I reckon it's worth a shot, though.

[Aidan]

Given your sensitivity to your hare I think you would be able to use "access to his nesting box" as a reinforcer. So you might teach him to do something specific (nose target and holding would be good beginnings for other husbandry behaviours), then mark it and open the door. Working in very small increments where he is always succeeding I don't think there would be any ethical concerns to controlling access to his nesting box.