Rewarding Rant

[Wobbly]

O yay Jigsaw! I am really looking forward to it, and Denise's seminar too!

Haha Corvus, yeah, I find know alls very suspect, there's an awful lot of Dunning Kruger effect about I feel, especially in a field like animal behaviour science, where new evidence based understandings are accruing so quickly.

I read the article and would love to learn more! I am hoping to bring my friend who is a horse trainer, so all of this is of great interest to her as well.

The staffy types are really easy to train within a reward based methodology - they can be motivated by just about everything - very easily amused creatures. For interactive rewards, pretty much anything goes if I can keep it moving, make some noise and it'll fit in her mouth, we play with bits of fluff and stray cotton strands even. But of course for every silver lining there is a cloud - anything moving super fast and looking like it might fit in her mouth is potentially at risk. I think this issue is perhaps 2 sides of the same coin, the very traits that make a bully dog so fun, so easy to train, are indivisibly entwined with the traits that can make some a real problem in the community.

I don't want to propound too much on my half baked ideas here, because I am going on a case study of only one dog, who may or may not be representative, depending on the time of day you ask her and what other potentially interesting things might be going on around her. There's also a political side to the issue which makes me even more hesitant to air my thoughts, half formed as they are right now. I will say though that I find predatory based behaviours simple to manage (even I can do it) some common sense does wonders. I needed a behavioural program to follow, but I think that was more about Jarrah as an individual (pound sourced as an adolescent with a very low arousal threshold) and me as an individual (no dog training experience, so a definite commonsense deficit in regards to dog management) than directly attributable to specific breed.

And Muhaha Mrs Rusty Bucket - in the first few days I got Jarrah, I had a random Malamute owner on the street I was talking to say much the same thing to me: "She's calmed down, give her a treat!", which I wouldn't have known to do at the time without that prompt. I'm really grateful to that lady, after that I started to apply the "She's chill, reward now!" concept pretty liberally and it was really helpful for me at that point. Sometimes, just sometimes if you can channel that rant exactly where and when it's needed, people may benefit.

Edited June 26, 2013 by Wobbly

[hankdog]

I think the thing to realise is that when we implement training we are working at specific one dog level whereas theories are formulated at general, middle of the bell curve level. Depending on where your individual dog sits on that bell curve for that trait you're trying to modify the theory may be bang on or irrelevant.

Lots of misunderstandings occur and lots of dogs get mistreated because handlers have one theory and apply it across the board irrespective of the dogs individual personality. Enter method peddlers who decide a dog is untrainable because it didn't respond to their method.

Corvus are there tests for dogs that score them on traits the same way there are for humans. Would be useful if they were tied to some of the theories, so that theory x applies to dogs that are high in need for social contact, low in prey drive and have no tolerance for loud noises, as a fictitious example?

ETA: this is a response to Wobbly saying she had made "mistakes" and the general feeling if so many theories seeming to conflict. I don't think you've made mistakes, I'd say your needs have evolved and had moved on the bell curve to a different position, so now needs different input.

Make any sense? Feel it's making less the more I type, so now I'll stop typing.

Edited June 27, 2013 by hankdog

[corvus]

Lots of misunderstandings occur and lots of dogs get mistreated because handlers have one theory and apply it across the board irrespective of the dogs individual personality. Enter method peddlers who decide a dog is untrainable because it didn't respond to their method.

There's some good rant fodder there!

Corvus are there tests for dogs that score them on traits the same way there are for humans. Would be useful if they were tied to some of the theories, so that theory x applies to dogs that are high in need for social contact, low in prey drive and have no tolerance for loud noises, as a fictitious example?

Depends who you ask. :) Lots of people think they have the answers, but science doesn't AFAIK, so I doubt they know as much as they think they do. Then again, it's very tricky to quantify what experienced people know in their gut. It's a pet project of my supervisor's. He's even managed to hook a student or two to work on it recently. There are tests for traits that are predictive to some degree of future behaviour, but at this point it's a bit ugly IMO. Hopefully in years to come we can clean it up and make it quicker and more reliable, but people have been doing this for a long time and haven't made tremendous inroads yet.

[PAX]

I puppy sat a 5 month old BC puppy, super puppy:) while I would make her dinner she would launch at me, on the benches, whatever, a real chow hound. I quickly and suprisingly easy rewarded her to sit on a chair patiently, she learnt it in about two sessions.

When the owners returned, I proudly showed them her clever new meal time behaviour.....they were so disappointed that I had taught her to sit on a chair:( I wanted to steal the puppy or cry:( I know they are just going to dumb that smart puppy down.