It’s a little-known fact that dogs will naturally migrate to where food or rewards occur. Many trainers don’t take advantage of this tendency, which is unusual, especially considering it’s so simple and easy to achieve quick results with appropriate food placement.
Taking advantage of food placement is particularly relevant when teaching distance behaviours. If you want your dog to perform behaviours at a distance, then your rewards should also take place at a distance.
While I plan to blog in more detail about food placement in training at a later date, I have created a video which illustrates the process in teaching a distance drop with the food placement method alone, using my girl Myrtle.
For those who have read my about me page, you won’t be surprised to learn that I have always been into dogs and their training. As a student at school, I always tried to make my assignments about dogs where possible.
I remember doing Stage 2 Psychology in school, and how immensely easy learning theory was. I was doing this already when I was training dogs! We had an oral presentation on three aspects of learning (classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and modelling), and I chose to base mine on dogs.
While classical conditinoinng and operant conditioning was easy to talk about, I had difficulty finding examples of modelling in dogs. To this day, I still struggle to find examples.
That’s probably why I was so excited to find this video (shared by PuppyTales – thanks!). It shows a young puppy who is hesitant to go down a small flight of steps. An adult dog walks past a number of times and the puppy eventually follows suit and descends the steps himself:
This video is getting a lot of publicity for the cute factor, but I am more interested in how the puppy demonstrates an understanding of the adult dog’s behaviour, and how it relates to their own. Obviously, there are other factors in play for this puppy descending the steps, as well, but at least part of the puppy’s success is related to the adult dog’s descent.
So, I want to ask, when have you seen a dog model behaviour of another dog? Do you use modelling to train dogs? I look forward to your responses!
We are very happy to introduce Myrtle, our newest resident. Myrtle is 6 weeks old and is the daughter of my Clover, out of a dog in Victoria. She was born a singleton puppy, and we were lucky enough to find two 9-day-old puppies that have been her siblings. Myrtle is 3 days younger than her foster-siblings.
This mating has been a long time in the making, and so far, we are quite happy with the result.
So here is a video of Myrtle, at 6 weeks (and 1 day) old doing some training. It is mostly fun – we are playing tug. I was going to edit out the minute where she goes and entertains herself but that, in itself, is quite amusing. She pretty much knows ‘sit’ and ‘touch’, but and in this video we practice ‘give’ (the tug toy back) and ‘drop’.
I was happy with this training session. We both had fun, and that’s all I really want at this stage.
Today I found an interesting documentary on dog fighting, called “Off the Chain” (you can watch the first part here on YouTube, and follow the links through to the other 5 parts. Please be aware that some footage is quite graphic).
For me, I always like to get alternative viewpoints on issues. This documentary achieved this. There are plenty of segments that educate us on the evils and tragedy of dog fighting, but this documentary actually allowed us to hear people from the other side – people who fight dogs themselves. I have never heard this viewpoint before, so I was very happy to get this perspective.
The major issue this documentary brings up to me is that dog fighters cannot seek medical treatment or humane euthanasia of their animals because of the fear of prosecution. I wonder if there was more protection of dog fighters and their privacy if less animals would suffer. (It is like drug users – when a person overdoses, we don’t then charge them for the use of an illicit substance.)
This documentary also covers the inefficiency of breed specific legislation, and brought up many points I agree with.
Another area of interest was that the rules for dog fighting was also covered. They explained the procedures for a dog fight, and how winners are determined, etc. This was very educational to me – I never knew of these rules and, actually, they seemed reasonably fair despite the questionable context.
Overall, I recommend anyone who can withstand some gore to view this documentary and see if it challenges your current thoughts about the dog fighting scene.
