11/23/12

General Training Bits (Dunbar)

This post is part of the series in response to Dunbar’s 2012 Australian seminars. See index.

There are a lot of little training bits that Dunbar mentioned that don’t really go in any other post… Here they are for you:

In the ‘big wide world’, dog owners should always carry treats for classical conditioning. Always. For the life of the dog. You can perhaps relax a bit after the dog is 3 years old, but it certainly should go beyond 3-4 months of ‘puppyhood’.
We should aim to remove food lures (but this is not the same as classical conditioning, where we need food all the time).
A dog that will play fetch or tug are more reliable off lead, as they often seek people to engage in play.
Dunbar stated that he did not support using behaviour-ancedecent-consequence (that is, BAC) in training as he finds it ineffective. That is, as a dog sits, you say “sit”, and hope they associate the word with the behaviour. (In my personal experience, I have captured behaviours using this method and put them on cue in very few repetitions… I find it quite effective.)
Sit and lie down are great solutions to almost any problem – as long as you’re still there.
Fixes for humping:
- Tell the dog to do something else (e.g. sit, drop, fetch).
- Cue the dog to “off” and withdraw from the environment if the dog continues to hump.
- Along with ‘put your problem on cue’, put humping on cue! (Jean Donaldson did just that.)
- If your dog really likes humping, give your dog a ‘humpy cushion’ to reward them for good behaviour.
For teaching a dog to ‘take stuff’, then associate the cue with them taking good treats from your hand. The dog will form a habit, and will automatically take less-good-stuff when presented.
Tugging can be vamped as a secondary reinforcer.
Punishment is insufficient. Punishes inhibits behaviour only. Training is not just stopping undesirable behaviours, but also quickly getting back on track into more appropriate behaviours.
“Sorry behaviour” exists. Dunbar used the example of young horses who, when kicked out from a herd for a short time, return in an apologetic way. This can be a way to strengthen relationships.
Dunbar described ‘back chaining’ as “moving to a position of strength”, and used (people) learning poems as an example. That is, if a person was to learn the last bit of a poem first, and work their way back, they’re likely to learn it quicker.
Dunbar advocated teaching dogs that a gruff or loud tone of voice means “better treats”, which helps to protect against dogs running away or acting unfavourably in situations when their owner’s voice becomes tense.
Suggested putting running fast on cue, and using it in recalls and dog sports (like flyball).
As a safety behaviour, teaching dogs “not my daddy” when people go to open their crate: anti-theft training.
Training is:
- Changing the frequency of behaviours, and
- Putting behaviours or absence of behaviours on cue.
Dunbar advocated using a stern voice (as a punisher) to teach dog boundaries – particularly, not to go out the front door and not to go out the front gate.
Dunbar suggested that we are ‘hung up’ on etiology (work out why the dog is doing what it’s doing) instead of actually working to fix the program. In Dunbar’s words, “Just get on with it and train the dog!”
Mental exercise tires a dog quicker than physical exercise. Nosework is the ultimate in mental exercise.
For dogs that greet people in a problematic way, they should be taught ‘shush’ and ‘sit’, and people coming into the house should be schooled to cue these behaviours.
- Furthermore, these dogs can be taught that people arriving is a cue for quiet.
- In Dunbar’s opinion, ignoring and back turning doesn’t stop jumping up – but saying “sit” often does.
Dunbar’s summary (para-phrased) of dog training ‘these days’: There is a lot more food, and a lot more classical conditioning. Dogs are getting friendly and safer around people. But, dog-dog aggression is increasing because of lack of off leash training. Lots of people who begin clicker and luring training keep these tools forever.
Though lure-reward training or clicker training is a good place to start training behaviours, these behaviours need to be phased out.
He said, “If we phased out our reward tools, we’d blow punishment out of the water.”
As you move away from a dog, their comprehension of the cue decreases.
Flooding is only okay when the rewards are justifiable. Puppies can be flooded. Dogs that are human aggressive should not be flooded.
Rewards drive behaviour!
He likes the simplistic law of effect from Thorndike’s: Rewards increase frequency of behaviour, punishments decrease frequency. Really, Dunbar argues, this is all there is to training.

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11/21/12

Not Enough Milk

On day 4 of our puppies, I was woken by a crying puppy. This is not unusual. Puppies cry to voice their unhappiness at various times, and puppies often cry when they’re not touching mum or a sibling. However, the crying puppy on day 4 was different because this puppy was drinking and crying. To me, this was a frustrated cry because there was not enough milk available.

This is "Boomer", the worse offender of the crying!

The puppies have been gaining weight, but not as they should. It may be an ‘old wives tale’, but I was always told puppies should double their weight in the first week. These puppies haven’t come close.

This, along with the frustrated milk-sucking, made me conclude that Clover didn’t have enough milk for her big brood.

Immediately, I started feeding Clover fenugreek, which is supposed to increase milk production. It’s a herb/spice, and couldn’t hurt the situation.

I went and purchased Wombaroo (a dog milk substitute), baby bottles, and set on getting some milk formula into the puppies. Gee, that sounds a lot easier than the reality. There was no way I could get any puppy sucking the bottle.

A friend suggested a more time consuming method, of using a dropper to drop milk into the puppies’ mouths. The puppies were far more receptive to this method – but, of course, the two smallest puppies weren’t having a bar of it.

However, the good news is, these puppies are not on death’s door by any means. Except for their frustrated crying, they’re doing everything puppies should do. They look plump, they move around the whelping box easily, they cry when they’re unhappy, they twitch in their sleep. The good part of this story is that they’re not fat puppies, either. Border terrier babies have a habit of getting too fat to walk, so the fact that these puppies are slightly leaner is a good sign.

So, things are not ‘smooth sailing’, but things aren’t dire. We are managing.

11/19/12

The Week in Tweets (19th November)

Each week, I summarise postings from my Twitter account, and pick the best as the ‘Tweet of the Week’. Some colossal reading for those with a couple of hours on their hands.

Tweet of the Week

For something different, it’s not a doggy tweet of the week this week. Instead, it’s about a little bird called the fairy wren who has developed an incredible mechanism to avoid raising cuckoos. Fairy wrens sing a particular song to their eggs, and when their eggs hatch, their babies in turn sing this song. This reassures the parents that they are raising the right chicks. However, if a cuckoo was to lay its egg in the nest, they generally don’t spend enough time to learn the song. This means that, when a cuckoo hatches, it neglects to sign the ‘special song’, and the fairy wrens will abandon their nest, thereby not raising the introducer offspring. Pretty cool! Read more here: Fairy wrens teach secret passwords to their unborn chicks to tell them apart from cuckoo imposters.

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11/16/12

Research Finds: Hungry Dogs are Hungry

Some Thoughts About Dogs welcomes guest blogger Michael D Anderson from NerdWallet.

Photo © Ruthless Photos.

Biologists at the University of Vienna published a study last month about dogs’ temperament in relation to their owners. The study hypothesized that without their owners, dogs would be more likely to view ambiguous events as negative ones. This is a common feature of human cognition – you’ll often hear that depressed people “see the glass as half-empty.”

The abstract of the study is available here.

The Vienna researchers found that, unlike in humans, when presented with ambiguous stimuli, dogs don’t have a negative judgment bias when they’re in distress. This is a jargon-loaded, awkward way of generalizing on the following: These scientists found that, when hungry, dogs don’t become emotional if their owners are absent—they go right to the bowl of food because, following one of the experiment’s stipulations, these dogs hadn’t eaten in at least three hours.

Experimenters measured how long it took each of 24 dogs to approach a bowl—the study had initially included 32 animals, but the scientists decided to exclude dogs that had unusually extreme separation anxiety.

In training—before the two testing days—the biologists conditioned the dogs to identify one side of the testing room as positive—where a bowl had food—and the other side as negative—where a bowl was empty.

On testing days, they refreshed dog’s memories about the room, but then they changed up locations a bit. They established near-negative (i.e. closer to the original negative location), middle and near-positive locations. At the beginning of each test, they approached one of these new locations with a bowl.

The experimenters then tested for “latency,” or long it took the dogs to approach the bowl, when the owner was present and when he or she was absent. The owner, they said, had an effect. The dogs took longer to approach the near-negative location and shorter to approach the near-positive; in tests without the owner, they approached at the same rate to each respective location.

What I don’t understand is how the biologists so tightly connect dogs’ approach to food—which they measure as “latency”—to their mood. The idea, I think, was that dogs should take longer to approach a bowl—even if the location is near-positive—when the owner isn’t there. The idea is that the dog is distressed without the owner around—they’ll start barking, toileting, or whatever else instead of going right to the bowl.

But these dogs were hungry: as I mentioned at the beginning of this piece, owners were asked not to feed their dogs in the 3 hours before the study.

The whole premise of this experiment is odd. What they pose is that dogs are less temperamental than humans: emotional distress or not, they’ll logically discern where the food is. What I think they meant to ask is whether or not dogs behave any different after domestication: Are they still primal? The answer, I think, didn’t even require extensive experiments: yes, they’re hungry, owner be damned.

Puppies are here!

Clover had her puppies on Tuesday 6th of November 2012. Six puppies, 3 boys and 3 girls. All good weights, healthy, happy, strong, drinking well. They have been given temporary names, because I find calling puppies “1st boy” and “3rd born” and “last born” tedious. This post is just to show you some puppy pictures. Enjoy!

First born, “Alfalfa”, bitch.

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