Tag Archives: dr dunbar

12/10/12

The Dunbar Index

We have concluded the Dunbar series. I thought it’d be useful for us to create an index for those that wanted to quickly revisit Dunbar stuff at any point.

 

Training Philosophies

The #@*$ing Four Quadrants

Schedules of Reinforcement

Dog training doesn’t happen in a laboratory!

Reward Training Techniques

We have lost the words from dog training.

On Classical Conditioning

On Punishment

 

Training and Behavioural Strategies

Lure Reward Training

Separation Anxiety

Food in Dog Training

Praise Kongs!

Repetitive Reinstruction

Put Your Problem on Cue

Solving Problem Barking

Seven Steps to Off Leash Reliability

Fearful Dogs

Dog-Dog Aggression

Messages for Dog Trainers

Other Training Comments

 

Puppies

Dog breeders: Don’t produce lemon puppies

Puppy Socialisation

Bringing Home a New Puppy

Puppyhood: The Time to Rescue Shelter Dogs

Puppy Classes

Long Term Confinement Area for Puppies

 

Other Dunbar Stuff

Open Paw (A Dunbar Project)

The Importance of Bite Inhibition

Other Dunbar Comments (that didn’t fit anywhere else)

12/2/12

Dunbar Leftovers

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

Dunbar talks a lot.  He’s a great speaker to listen to, because he has no hesitation in going off topic or talking about relevant experiences that are clearly not in his notes.  However, this means I have a lot of good little bits that don’t really belong in my other posts!  So let’s talk about some of them briefly.

 

  • Dogs should be integrated into society as much as possible, and dogs need good temperaments to do this.
     
  • Vets don’t know enough about dog behaviour and socialization.
     
  • We don’t really know if off leash play between dogs is beneficial.  It’s hard to measure, and no evidence exists.  Dunbar suggested that off lead play may even be beneficial for people.
     
  • The APDT foundation funds research into dog training.
     
  • Dunbar talked about teat appropriation in puppies. By 10 days of age, some puppies have started to ‘claim’ certain teats and hierarchies have begun to develop.  The bigger ‘brutish’ puppies push their way to their favourite teats.  The smaller puppies have to use their brains and think about how to get a feed, and normally move to another teat.  The bigger puppies are normally less intelligent than the smaller puppies, who had to use their brains from an early age.
     
  • Dunbar described dog sex as a “massive temperament test”.  That is, dogs who can’t mate naturally because they are aggressive, disinterested, or just unskilled, shouldn’t be bred from as they have poor temperaments that aren’t worth replicating in their offspring.
     
  • Dunbar said “no male dog is worth more puppies than a bitch can have in her lifetime”.  That is, a dog shouldn’t have more than about 6 litters in their lifetime.
     
  • He advocated waiting for 10 years before using a dog at stud.  A dog that is a ‘good dog’, structurally and temperament wise, at 10, is a dog worth breeding from.  (Personal comment: While I agree with this in principle, unfortunately many dogs will become sterile before 10 if they are not used.  There is a bit of a ‘use it or lose it’ case for dog fertility.)
     
  • Apparently, someone called “Thelma” (a scientisit, name suggestions welcome!) theorized that dogs would eat human faeces and that’s the source of their domestication.
     
  • Dunbar suggested that breeders, when screening puppy buyers, should ask, “Why problem behaviours to you expect to see in your puppy?” (as breeds have typical behaviours that are often problematic).  From there, the next question should be, “How are you going to stop these problems occurring?”  This is a means of testing the buyer’s knowledge of the breed, and also ascertaining the risk of the puppy ending up in a shelter at a later point.
     

 

Then questions that I thought as I listened:

  • Dunbar talks about his dog Doon, and how his dog will never fight another dog.  Dunbar described a number of scenarios where Doon ignored aggression from other dogs.  While I think it’s nice to have a pacificist dog, it also brings a degree of responsibility that an owner must have to protect the dog from aggressors.  The stories Dunbar told made me doubt Dunbar’s proactive prevention of Doon being the subject of other dog’s aggression.
     

Thank-you for working through our Dunbar series! I will soon summarise all the posts to help you navigate through the mass of content from three days with Dunbar.

09/3/12

Food in Dog Training (Dunbar)

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

Food is very useful in dog training.

My notes are a little brief in this section, but I think (!) that Dunbar described four principle roles of food in dog training:

 

Brindle crossbreed dogs eyes off rawhide treat.

Photograph copyright Ravyk Photography.

1. Lure
Food can be used to lure desirable behaviours.  This is very effective for pet owners, who often do need food to make up for deficiencies in other areas (e.g. poor training, poor vocal control, etc).  Read more about lure-reward training.

2. Reward
Food can be used to reward desirable behaviours.

3. Classical conditioning
Classical conditioning is associating something good with something else.  For example, feeding dogs every time they see another dog means that the dog is more likely to associate other dogs with good things.

4. Distraction
Otherwise known as ‘proofing’ in training, food can be used as a distraction in training exercises.

 

What if the dog doesn’t like food?

If a dog doesn’t like food, they should be trained to like food!  Feed the dog by hand instead of from a bowl, or turn food into a secondary reinforce – “you have to eat the kibble for you do be allowed to do fun things”. Food is too useful to not have in your toolbox for behaviour modification.

 

08/31/12

Solving Problem Barking (Dunbar)

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

Dunbar advocates putting problem behaviours on cue.  That goes for barking, too.  The idea is to teach your dog to bark on cue (through lure-reward training) and then teaching your dog to be quiet on cue (again, through lure-reward).  For example, you could use the sound of the doorbell or teasing the dog with a treat to elicit a bark and act as a lure.  For the opposite, you could simply present a treat to a dog (they normally start sniffing and they can’t bark and sniff at the same time) and you have lured the silent behaviour.

Young border collie puppy barking.

The idea is, firstly, you can tell your dog to quiet if it is barking inappropriate.  Secondly, by putting ‘bark’ on cue and rewarding it, when the dog barks of its own accord, and doesn’t get rewarded, it may realize that is not a desirable option (i.e. negative punishment, the removal of a good reward).  Finally, by having barking on cue, it means you can sometimes give your dog permission to bark!  It is unfair to expect dogs to never bark, but allowing them appropriate venues to bark (when cued) means that you are not denying your dog its natural desire to bark.

Though Dunbar believes dogs should be taught bark/shush as a matter of course, he believes that Kongs are one of the simplest and easier solution to preventing and treating problem barking.  For someone who ‘doesn’t have time’ to teach cues for barking/non-barking, they can easily throw a stuffed Kong to their dogs.

That being said, Dunbar admits that it is difficult to teach an alarm or ballistic barker to quiet.  As always, he advocates prevention through attentive puppy training, rather than trying to remedy a problem barker.

08/29/12

Put your Problem on Cue (Dunbar)

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

Dunbar advocates putting the 8 big behavioural problems on cue, and then training the opposite.  The idea is that you can cue the ‘opposite’ (non-problematic) behaviour when the dog is displaying the problem behaviour.  The problem behaviour should be taught first, as he thinks dogs are more likely to display ‘the most recently taught’ behaviour.  These 8 behaviour problems, and their opposites, are:

 

Large white and brindle wire haired cross breed sleeping

“Settle down” – a useful behaviour to cue dogs to perform when they’re jazzed up or over enthused.

1. Jazz Up / Settle Down

Often dogs can be over excited, over stimulated, or generally ‘worked up’ and this can be problematic for owners.  For this reason it is useful to have a ‘settle down’ cue, but Dunbar of course suggests that you teach the opposite, too – a ‘jazz up’ cue.  You could turn this into a class game where the winner is the person who settles down their dog the fastest, or meets a 3 second deadline.  Teaching a dog to ‘jazz up’ is also easy, and often inspires and motivates class members to train.

‘Settle down’ is useful when trying to prevent problematic behaviours, such as excitement at the front door, or fence-fighting behaviour.  ‘Jazz up’ could also, potentially, be useful reward in the obedience ring.  Diane Baumann, in her traditional training book Beyond Basic Obedience, encourages owners to have an exciting cue (like ‘jazz up’) to mean an exercise is finished.

 

2. Woof / Shush Continue reading →