Joey Houdini

I thought you might like to see how Joey Houdini went out for Halloween. Susan sent me these. Joey is doing great. And that's his friend, Dante. I'd give them a treat for that. Joey is here now, and he's being as good as gold. No more amazing death defying feats.

Bite Inhibition

Puppies teach puppies bite inhibition, but say your puppy was an only puppy. Or maybe the puppy was removed from the whelping pen too early, before he learned that it hurts when he bites. Or maybe you're a puppy with an adrenaline problem, and biting things makes you feel safer, or more comfortable; or if you get scared, you gnash the air and just bite at whatever is in the way.

Dogs that have any unacceptable bite history ought to be muzzle trained. I use the "puncture" rule. Any dog that has punctured any pet or person needs to be wearing a muzzle anywhere he could possibly make that mistake again. But they also need to be taught bite inhibition, and you don't do that with the muzzle on. So, I play with Ginger's teeth and tongue and gums, helping her become more aware of what her teeth are doing. And then, "tether the camel" by using the muzzle in EVERY situation where the dog might possibly attempt to "bite."

One way you can tell a dog didn't learn good bite inhibition, is they bite hard enough to do damage. But it's also sometimes visible before a dog makes his first bite in dogs who, when they get excited, grab at clothing or hands with teeth, or jump face up towards face, or attempt to nip the handler in the butt! Muzzle training means, teach the dog to love and trust and feel comfortable in the muzzle. If you see the dog attempting to remove the muzzle, it means either you went too fast, or you didn't reinforce it enough, or both. Scroll down in this blog for video clips of Ginger's first introduction to the muzzle. Only if you reinforce the muzzle generously, can it become a great tool that will allow you to safely socialize dogs without good bite inhibition.

I've had several people say , when they hear tales of canine aggressive behaviors, you've just got to teach that dog who's boss. But meeting aggression with aggression (even subtle threatening) is a bad idea with any dog. If you act aggressive towards your dog, it increases your dog's anxiety and fear, and canine fear and aggression go together. Ironically, although some people would say that Ginger is a "dominant" dog, my goal in training her is to build up her confidence. Until now, she hasn't been confident regarding what she is supposed to do. The environment that I create for Ginger, which includes a citronella collar when she's in her private playyard, puts certain behaviors off-limits so that I don't even need to say "no." My goal is to take on the role of Ginger's guru, not her boss. I want to help Ginger feel safe and trust in my leadership while she is here. Dominating her, bossing her around, will not do that trick.

Hand targeting is another game that helps dogs develop bite inhibition. You should make sure that your dogs never second guess your hands. They should know that those hands are safe places ALWAYS. You want your dog to trust you, trust your hands, trust your cues, and follow your leadership because they believe in you. That means you need to be very generous in meeting the dog's needs, but it doesn't mean letting your dog boss your around. I put Ginger where I want her, in the living room, on the porch, in one of the kennels, in her crate, leashed, tethered, and she has little rules about barking or sitting or not pulling on leash that she needs to follow to get the things that she wants. Outside in her playyard kennel, if she demand barks, she'll have to wear the collar that sprays perfume if she barks, so she just chews bones and plays with toys instead of barking. But unlike the video clips I've seen of Cesar Millan working with a dog aggressive dog, we never have any need to hiss, yank, choke, hang, terrify nor knock a dog nearly unconscious and exhausted to the floor. In contrast with Cesar Millan's technique, I guess my method must seem a bit boring!

I'm playing a lot with her teeth. I stick my fingers in her mouth every day, with food in my hands, and I am teaching her to bite onto tugs toys, and giving her an outlet and understanding for when it's okay to clamp down with her teeth, and when it isn't. She is seeing other dogs and eating a lot of dog bones. She is learning to relax and feel safe in a crowd. She's a good dog.

Do you sleep with your dog?

My dogs sleep in my bed. Well, I should add, usually. Often. Sometimes I kick them out, and other times if I can't sleep I call the dogs and one or two will volunteer to snore in my ear. There is nothing that helps me sleep quite so soundly as the sound of a dog snoring in my ear. Personally, I don't think I'd bother with owning dogs if I wasn't ever allowed to sleep with them! It's one of life's little luxuries, a clean cuddly dog in the bed. When we travel, we all sleep together in the boat or tent or the hotel or the van, and it's a nice safe feeling. I conk out, and Charlie keeps one ear up all night long.

But I don't think every dog should be allowed in every bed. This is not a one size fits all situation. One rule I have is that if there is EVER even the slightest hint of a growl in the bed, that dog is banned forever from the bed. It's really not a place where you'd ever want to have a dog fight, and so if any dogs are competitive or if they might think it is THEIR bed, then forget it. Out. It's your bed and that goes unquestioned. If the dog starts thinking, "this is my bed" or "my chair" you can't let the dog in the bed. Another rule I have is only my personal dogs are allowed in my bed. Guests dogs are NEVER allowed to join our casual crowd. That's just not safe.

But in my house, my dogs know the bed is definitely the human's bed. They know it is an incredible privilege to be in the bed, and they sigh as though they have died and gone to heaven when then jump up and snuggle into my arms. It's kinda cold here in Maine, and sometimes they join me because they are chilly (Charlie has very short fur, and Tigerlily gets clipped), and usually when they are chilly, I am chilly. Sharing the bed for us is a win-win situation.

But if your dog has perhaps gotten into ticks today, or has fleas or sheds or just hasn't had a bath, then you don't want ticks in your bed, you need to have another sleeping alternative trained and in place! But I learn a lot from sleeping with my dogs. They seem to want to get in the bed more often when they are newly adopted, like little kids, and they slowly outgrow it. Charlie sleeps with us more than Tigerlily now (she's 4 and he's 2), and he whispers little things before he goes to sleep. He used to lay his cheek on my cheek, and sigh, and flubber his lips. I wouldn't have missed that for the world. And we're all fairly sensitive animals here, sleeping together helps us unwind. But when I really am trying to get high levels of performance for an agility or freestyle event, I have the dogs sleep in their crates. My dogs never argue, they've been trained to sleep quietly happily in their crates, but they wake up a bit more desperate to please, and they perform with more zip. And regularly, like if they are hogging the covers, or if my husband and I want a bit of private time, I make sure they stay in practice with sleeping elsewhere. Sharing the bed feels nice and right for us, but maybe that's because my dogs are smallish. Charlie is 50lbs, the others are less than half that. I never let my old St. Bernard in the bed. So, what do you think? Do YOU let your dog sleep with you in your bed?

Boundaries, frustration and healing canine aggression

Some dogs, like my Charlie, and even more so, Tigerlily when she was little, bark or hoot, whine, make noises at other dogs. I call this "talking." Tigerlily was usually saying "stay away from me you big hairy idiot!" Not very nice or polite, but it wasn't dangerous and it didn't mean I am a horrible trainer because I couldn't gag her. Charlie says things like "um, ah, you better just leave me alone? You better not be troublesome? Because I'd kind of like to meet you? Should we sniff?!" Again, it's kind of stupid commentary, but dog talk is perfectly fine and natural, especially when dogs are young. There is a person on the Peaks Island ferry who sneers angrily every time he sees two-year old Charlie making his slightly nervous little funny noises, and so I assume this happens to lots of people. Ignore those arrogrant people with silent boring dogs! Maybe someday, they'll get a more typical dog and learn something.

Contrast the "social talkers" with a dog like Ginger, who barks insanely for exercise, or to demand something of the humans, but she doesn't have anything to say to dogs in social situations. She thinks dogs are just vermin. If a dog gets too close, she just might suddenly flail and gnash her teeth. An inexperienced trainer could easily make a very big mistake with Ginger, because she is a cuddly sweet labrador retriever one moment, exactly the sort of dog people say, "she'd never bite," but she would. Bites happen when dogs build up adrenaline and they don't know what to do with it. Ginger needs careful management while she learns how to control her adrenaline.

There is a dog tied out across the street from the Peaks Island store who displays a perfect example of a "boundary aggression." Dogs on tie-outs often build up adrenaline and excitement when something tantalizes or provokes them, just out of reach. Bad things happen when the chain suddenly breaks. On Peaks Island several years ago, a dog on that same tie-out broke the chain, raced across the street and ripped a bichon out of her owners' arms and killed it. Dogs on tie-outs, especially in stimulating situations, frequently develop a dangerous adrenaline habit. You see that in leashed aggression or dogs who fence fight. They get tantalized and teased by things passing by, their adrenaline mounts like a narcotic high. No trainer is there to tell the dog to use the adrenaline to run the agility course, or to maintain a perfect heeling pattern, but the dog needs to release the adrenaline somehow. Dogs don't feel pain when they have adrenaline coursing through their veins. Adrenaline feels good, so when these dogs get frustrated, they just conjure up more adrenaline to kill the pain. And that is dangerous.

So, Ginger is getting lots of safe opportunities to release any frustrated energy. I take her for several off-leash walks in our extensive fenced training yards every day. And she is wearing a muzzle whenever she is anywhere but in her secure crate or kennel. It's slightly inconvenient to have to put it on and take it off, but it means, she can't make a big mistake. On a little island like this one, certain people are bound to talk or panic at the sight of a muzzled dog, but get used to it. Muzzle-trained dogs are perfectly safe. (The audio on my camera is broken! Rats! Sorry about that! This clip was Ginger's very first "walk" around loose dogs while on a muzzle. She no longer even notices that she has it on.)

Ginger and muzzle training

Ginger never got to see too much of the world, for two very important reasons. One, she was miserable to take for a walk! She'd pull your arm right out of the socket. But if that wasn't bad enough, she also found it entertaining to get into fights with other dogs. This wasn't just "talking" with other dogs. She is big and strong, and she would lunge after them and bite them if given the chance. So, the owners intelligently decided, they wouldn't give her the chance.

My goal is to change Ginger's life, and that starts by making it easier to take her for a walk. For a dog like Ginger, the only safe way to take her anywhere is to muzzle train her.

When I muzzle train a dog, I teach the dog to LOVE the muzzle. A guest was here yesterday, laughing at how much Ginger already loves the muzzle. I hold out the muzzle, she stuffs her nose inside and keeps it there. And just now I muzzled her and took her for a walk around the grounds. At this point, I want her to learn that every-time we go for a walk, she wears a muzzle. Muzzle equals walk. This will help me ensure that she LOVES seeing the muzzle.

Wearing a muzzle is sort of like wearing eyeglasses or a hearing aid. It takes a little bit of time to get used to it, but then you don't even notice it. Dogs wearing wire basket muzzles can eat, drink play and do anything that other dogs can do, except bite. In a world where off-leash or out-of-control dogs often approach without an invitation, the muzzle means Ginger won't be able to bite strangers. Instead, the new concern will be to make sure that no strange dog gets a chance to bite Ginger. This video clip was taken the very first time I showed Ginger the muzzle, five days ago. My camera battery died, but I will post new clips as soon as I can.

The Truth about Dominance

I just had a reader ask me to write a post with this title, and since Tigerlily had a "breakthrough" this weekend, I thought I'd try to put a response in that context. Look at this video of our performance at All Dog's Gym "All Pet Expo" on Sunday.


There are lots of articles now on the web and in print that explain why "dominance theory" (or, that theory that there is a hierarchy in wolf community in which the "top dog" rules the roost) is wrong from an ethological perspective, as wolves are more into cooperation than competition. So, you can read about that elsewhere. I have never used "dominance" theory in training, even when I re-train dogs who are aggressive, so I don't know much about dominance. All I can share is why cooperation (operant conditioning and classical conditioning) works better for me.

If you look at the video, what makes it nice is that Tigerlily is having fun. She's performing because she WANTS to. What you can't see is all the work that was required to get her to this point. Tigerlily was a very shy nervous puppy. As many old-fashioned hunting dogs are, she was extremely reactive (fearful, barking, lunging, snapping) with other dogs, even hats, umbrellas, shiny things, masks freaked her out, and she'd shut down, and want to hide. Other times, her prey-chase drive made us both crazy, and she'd point, quiver and scream in frustration at the end of her leash. But look at her confidence and balanced energy now! No leash, no collar, and there were a half dozen dogs right out of range of this camera, llamas chewing cud right around the corner and a lady holding a ferret had just walked by. This was the "All Pet" expo at All Dog's Gym in Manchester NH, and there were all kinds of small pets in cages, kids, dogs, people, and Tigerlily was cheerfully, patiently ignoring them all.

Why? Because she trusts me. She's my partner. Trust doesn't happen overnight, and trust never happens when domination is involved. Trust grows organically between partners, over time and life experience, bit by bit. I think this is the first time that she really "got" what all our preparation is about. She put together our pet therapy work (we've volunteered at Spring Harbor Hospital now for 3 years) and the freestyle practice and she had an "aha!" moment. Now four plus years old, she was regal with the other dogs, performed like a pro, schmoozed and kissed children afterward. When I brought her home she kept staring at me, it was *really* weird, sitting directly across from me on the ottoman, very alert, silently staring at me with love in her eyes. Then she'd climb into my lap and lick my face. It was as though she was telling me, "I loved it. Now I know what you've been trying to teach me all this time, okay, yes, I like the job. I agree. I think we should take it."

Tigerlily helps me and I help Tigerlily. It's a two-way relationship, but let's face it, she knows more than I do about lots of stuff. Plus, she is a much better dancer than I am! I love the things she teaches me. She teaches me to have patience, to give learning all the time it needs, to surrender, to love, to trust. If I were to try to dominate her, she'd never be able to teach me anything.

Dog Owners Survey

I want to thank all the people who have been responding to the Dog Owner's survey. The results are going to be very valuable, as we are getting some real numbers that can give us an idea of how people feel about training, what is working and what is difficult about owning a dog.

Right now we've got over 400 responses. If you're curious about the responses, please post a link to the survey on your homepage (one-shot blog posts or social media posts don't count). All the responses, the entire collected data, will be shared with those who recognize the value of the surveyed responses enough to commit to collecting reponses via their homepage.

But if you're more interested in the general results, and not the raw data, if you are supportive at the level of re-tweeting or facebooking or blogging, thank you so much! Once we have shared the data with other principle collectors, all the collectors will be posting their own analyses! If you'd like to help analyze the raw data, then do post a link to the survey on your homepage, and we'll be happy to share the responses, once we hit 1000 responses. This gives us a chance to have a large enough sample to glean meaningful results.

Here's the weak point of the survey in my mind, though I anticipated this issue from the start: Only a very small portion of reponses describe dogs where the respondant has considered (or managed) ending the "dog owner" relationship. This result was anticipated, as people naturally are considering dogs that they've kept, and forgetting or "not counting" the dog they had to give away, who didn't wind up truly joining the family.

So instead of including all dogs, this survey is painting a picture of the dogs who, for better and sometimes for worse, aren't the worst case scenario. These are the dogs who aren't homeless, they aren't in shelters, they aren't euthanized. Survey respondents are describing "the keepers," and challenges that are part of keeping dogs.

Getting to know Ginger

I'm developing a training plan with Ginger, and it includes plenty of de-stressing activities. Daily I let her explore off-leash in a fenced in quarter acre woodland, and then I take her on a leashed walk around the rest of the grounds. Ginger decides which way we go, and I follow her around where-ever she wants, as long as she doesn't pull. When she's got the leash taught, I freeze, but she is learning how she can lead me around. This isn't just a neat-o way of teaching a dog to walk on a loose leash, I also learn about Ginger by seeing where it is that she wants to go. It also reinforces Ginger for being near me, a nice result that I don't get if I just let her run around off-leash while I was indoors for example.

She wants to be with her family, and she began by leading me around in an effort to find them. She stared into the cabin where her guardians had stayed, and so I opened the door to show her. Nope. They weren't there. She walked me down to the driveway and stared. What the heck happened to their car? You could see this information dawning clear as a bell in Ginger's head. Oh my God. Their van is gone.

Ginger's had some surprises in the past few months, as her family recovers from a house fire and Ginger has to cope with weird new living arrangements which include, ugh, other DOGS! But she has an unusual sort of intelligence, and she is coping intelligently. Today, she again wanted to search the cabin. Yesterday, she wasn't making eye contact with me, but in front of the cabin, she suddenly looked up and right into my eyes, as though she was saying, "You know where they are, I know you do." And then she walked me down to the driveway again.

I'd taken a drive with Joey Houdini earlier, and at the finish, driven the van into the training yard so I can vaccuum it out (hahaha, not because he's shedding, that all falls out in easy-cleaning clumps fortunately, but because it's time ), and Ginger looked at the van as though she was thinking, "Could that be my family's van? What happened to it?" And she brought me to search the van. It's white, like her family's van. She sniffed and sniffed and sniffed, and led me all around the van. We slowly circled it four time, Ginger inspecting intently, sniffing under each wheel rim, at every door frame, four times! I finally had to open the door. She jumped in, searched it, then got into the back seat and sat down, staring straight ahead, her chin resolute. She was saying, in very clear dog language, "Get in and drive me to them." I had to laugh.

The other first thing we're working on (besides loose leash walking, and stress reduction) is getting her to respond to her name. "Name" is really the first thing I teach that will eventually have a verbal cue. As always, we start by getting the behavior and later we'll add the cue. Without going into the exercise, I'm basically clicking and treating her for making eye contact. Yesterday, she couldn't come anywhere near eye contact, so I just clicked and treated glances in my general direction (at my feet was what she was doing mostly). Today, she has been making direct glances into my eyes, and she also started playing with a ball, retrieving it right into my hand, like the retriever she is.

So, that's the game plan for this week: teach her name, loose leash walking, and get her playing. Next week, we will start conditioning her to LOVE a muzzle, like a teenager loves a nose-ring. Muzzle, yee-haw! Fun! Freedom! I also notice that she wants to mouth me a lot, so I'll be working with that a lot, playing with her lips and tongue and teeth and getting her used to having my hands in her mouth without biting me. In other camper news, Joey doesn't mind hanging out in the kennel. He doesn't bark, he doesn't try to escape, he's just happy everywhere (but he especially loves the van! All the dogs love their van. It's their idea of a castle.

Ginger, Houdini and the gang

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Ginger and Joey Houdini both arrived over the weekend. This is Ginger's first visit, but she will be here for a long time. Houdini spent six weeks here this summer.

Joey Houdini, or Joseph as we often call him now, and we all buff our nails over this, is doing great. He's just perfect. Loving, soft, kind, gentle, and he's been coming when called, making no effort to escape, just a few gleeful runs and no barking, happy where-ever we put him, even in the crate. No kidding. Susan isn't going to believe this. But he just goes in the crate, eats his meal, and Joey smiles a lot. He is such a beautiful dog. (ummm. He sheds though! )

Ginger is back at the sort of stage Joey (who had been in and out of rescues for years) was in when we met him. Her family had a house fire three months ago, and insurance put them into an apartment that doesn't accept dogs. Ginger was basically living in the yard by herself. At nine years old, she had been pretty much been a yard dog, and so this adventure in a car to Peaks Island Maine is more adventure than she has ever known. We are almost more people and dogs altogether than she has ever seen.

Ginger eyed us warily when we all met, but warmed up to deliver the ocassional lick. If you take her by the collar, sometimes she'll stop and drop her body to the ground. But she seemed to be tolerating handling pretty well, but her owner told us she was bad with other dogs. So I tethered her in the kitchen. She wasn't reacting to the dogs she could see through the door, and I thought I'd let Charlie enter the room. The idea being, as a former street dog, Charlie is super dog smart, can read her body language, and he won't go near her if she doesn't appear safe.

Dumb move. Charlie walked right past her completely nonchalant, I should have warned him, but Ginger seemed fine for maybe 90 seconds, and right about the time I was thinking, "maybe you're getting a bit too close to her," Ginger lunged on top of Charlie. I took Ginger's collar, and her head whipped around and she redirected a bite onto my wrist. Ouch. That's my first dog bite. I guess there's a first for everything.

But Charlie was just fine fortunately, so that says something. Ginger could have hurt him if she'd really wanted to, and my bite isn't bad, just a tooth mark and a scratch that isn't deep. So, okay, now we know. Ginger really needs some help.



Until we can get her muzzle trained, we will tether her and surround her with 2 x-pens out of traffic in the living room, and the other dogs are kept well out of her way. She will learn at first to tolerate the dogs from a distance, so that by the time the wire basket muzzle arrives, she'll maybe be ready for closer socialization.

But all this new social life can overwhelm a dog. On arrival, Ginger was panting, very high energy, and not interested in food. It's three days today, and now she's been eating and gnawing bones. I've been talking her for off-leash walks, just me and her, in the fenced in woodland, and that is like medicine for her. She is generally relaxing quietly on the porch and on her tether, though I haven't been able to get her to stay in the kennel without barking, and she barked last night in the crate till I put on some music. I just keep moving the dogs from one area to another. I let her explore the fenced woodland while I moved brush this morming, then I let her take me for this leashed walk, while starting to show her how a leash walks, and that I only walk when the leash is loose. As soon as she loosens the leash, I start moving my feet. The instant she tugs it tight, I freeze. She's barking now. Beginnings are often a bit challenging. Joey is quite a comfort and reassurance to us all. We shall overcome...

Working with 3 Dogs at Once

I am trying to get so I can work my dogs altogether, and so I videotaped a little session so I can see what I'm doing right, and what I'm doing wrong. When you're busy training multiple dogs, you can hardly know what you're doing, because your brain is so busy concentrating on at least three things at once. It's easy to simply not see something that happens.

My basic training plan here was to reinforce the off-duty dogs for not interrupting whatever I was doing with the active dog. This has been difficult for them, so I have already been working on this by reinforcing the inactive dog for putting up with me asking for very little movement from the "active" . Here, Charlie especially was showing excellent progress, letting Tigerlily move quite a lot without trying to interrupt her (but he didn't want her running around the cones, and she knew this). This was recorded yesterday, and today I did a similar practice and they seemed to do even better. Tigerlily felt far more confident to run around the cones, enthusiastically, while the other two dogs were laying in the center.

Video tape of a belly shaping session

[This video is posted on www.jennyruthyasi.blogspot.com (for my feed followers) ]and it shows a "shaping" session with Charlie. Charlie adopted us a year ago last February, when he was about one year old and dying on a beach in Puerto Rico. Dogs like him don't like to expose their belly much, they tend to lay down with belly safely on the floor, so I have been training him to get him to expose his belly. In Freestyle, I want him to do lots of rolling around on the ground someday, but also, I think teaching a dog to roll over helps him practice confident attitude, relaxation, it helps him flex and strengthen his body, and it helps him learn how to think, and follow the "click" too. So, you can see how easy it is even for a formerly feral dog to learn how to follow my reinforcement marker signal.

You can see he starts out by laying "down," and then he puts his "head down" and then he lays "flat" on his side. These are all behaviors I've shaped over the past year and put on cue, but I'm not cueing them here, I am just letting him offer them, and I'm marking them for reinforcement (with a tongue click), then next time he offers it, I withhold the click, so he pushed the behavior further, trying to get me to click. That's how I shape a behavior, but you'll probably get more out of watching the video than out of reading this, as I'm in a hurry and not in a writing mood.

He's so cute and I was having too much fun, so I went on too long in this session. I preer my shaping sessions to be under three minutes. A little bit of progress each day is all you need. Immediately afterwards I gave him a rub down, because that was like doing the twist, he was feeling some burn in his side muscles!! Another thing I saw when I watched this clip was that I probably should put something soft on the floor. He's more likely to lift his back legs enough to roll onto his back if the surface is softer. Tomorrow I'll do this shaping exercise with him on the bed or on the couch, to make it easier for him. I love to video tape training, as I can improve my method a great deal by watching afterwards, when you notice things that you might miss at the time. Let me know if it's helpful or interesting or if you have any questions. I'm not luring him, because I want him to learn to follow the "click" not the food.

Dog Owner's Survey

I've put up a Dog Owner's survey, and I hope you will take it. It's just twelve multiple choice questions, with room to comment on every question, and I'm getting a lot of fascinating information back already. Please fill out the survey and share the link with your friends. I ask people to fill it out for every dog you've ever owned, but at least, don't forget the dog you had to give away opr euthanize. I want to know about the times dog-owner bonds fail as well as the times they succeed.

Take a look at the survey. http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=5T254FK1D13exD1NEEPlJg_3d_3d Are you curious about the results? Like, wanna know how people answered the question with Cesar Millan in it? Post a link to the survey on your website, then send me your website link, and once I have over a thousand results, I'll start sharing them with you! We can get a lot of important information out of this survey if we work together, send the link around, and get lots and lots of responses.

Behavior Science

It makes me crazy when people who know next to nothing about modern day behavior science spout misconceptions about so-called "behaviorism." My advice to you is, if you want to know how modern-day behavior science works, don't take the word of someone who doesn't study it. Ask a behavior scientist. Or better yet, read up on it yourself at the Cambridge Center for Behavior Studies, or through the Journal for Applied Behavior Analysis, or the Journal for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior. You should also go back in the history and read some Skinner and Watson, but don't neglect the newer researchers and writers. It's a fascinating field of study.

Dog training is a lot like religion. We get our various gurus, and all these different churches trying to gather followers , but just because someone has a new word for gravity doesn't mean that gravity doesn't really make apples fall from the tree. There are still people who believe the earth is flat, and they would be happy to mis-educate you. Similarly, there are still people who misunderstand behavior, and they're eager to confuse you as they cling to misunderstandings in the hope of increasing the market for their own ideas.

Bizarre behavior

I just received this email:

Hello Dear,
How are you today? Moneta Bianco, i am 42 yrs old. I use to work in England as a pet sitter 7 yrs ago before i relocated with my family to Milano, Italy where i now work as a caregiver, I have lots of happy clients here in italy.

I have a client Miss Eliska Kovarova a model here in italy. She will be coming to the U.S in 3 weeks time for a photo shoot job and will be residing in Maine temporarily until the neccesary arrangement for her job has been made before she leaves, She has one 11months old teacup Maltese Puppy and would be needing a Dog trainner to train the Puppy while she is out on her photo shoot.
I have been looking for a dog trainner for over two weeks now, till i met an old friend Ms. jennifer moore, She use to live in America before she relocated with her family to Milano where she works now. I met her at Cosmetic Surgery and Beauty Conference that was held over the weekend in Florence I spoke with her about my client and was referred to you. She gave me your referral, So i decided to contact you to know if you will be able to train her Puppy.

Miss Eliska asked me to come with her to the US but i told her i would not be able to go with her to the US as i have a course i will be going for in a week time and i do not know much about trainning a dog. So i promised to help her get a good dog trainner in your Area. Pls tell me a little more about your self, how long have you been a dog trainner? and would you be able to train her Puppy from the 12th of next month to the 20th of November, 1hr individual training session twice a week for for 5 weeks?

Pls i need you to get back to me with the amount you charge per her and also let me know if she can pay you via US money orders?

Do send your reply to my personal email address ( monetcare@yahoo.it ) for a quick response as i do not check this email often.


Thank you very much and do have a nice day.


Moneta Bianco
21 Via Merkato ,
1,20121
Milano Italy


************

So, I have to wonder. WHAT is someone fishing for here? This email is an example of bizarre behavior, but what it means, I don't know!

Freestyle Bar-B-Que

Here's some video of Dandylion and Tigerlily performing for freestyle bar-b-que. I was pleased with Tigerlily's solo performance, with only the next cue as reinforcement. When she barks at me, sometimes she's asking me. "who are all these new people and dogs and why are they sitting here watching me?" and other times she's saying, "Hey, isn't it about time you food reinforced me or something?" But I think this shows some pretty darn good progress. Video tape is an excellent way for identifying the things we need to work on. My plan, after watching this, is to build the heeling precision by building it as a behavior chain. !

Hurricane Bill

The weather and our moods seem to work together. This weekend has felt like some sort of a hurricane to me, a hurricane of behavioral energy, winds swirling together, as behavior always is. 

I mean to say that behavior doesn't happen in a vacuum. As trainers, we have ultimate responsibility for our dog's behavior, but we aren't the only thing in the environment that influences the dog's behavior. Truth is, when Tigerlily chased the golf cart, when the driver stopped, her chasing stopped. I should have had her leashed, and she wouldn't have gotten away, but once she DID get away, I couldn't stop her behavior. Only the guy in the golf cart could do that.

That information isn't all that much use to me as a dog trainer, but great if you train joggers, cyclists, golf cart drivers, or skateboarders! Teach them to STOP when movement triggers a dog to chase!  Stopping movement entirely not only stops dogs from chasing, it gives owners a chance to leash the dog!

Tigerlily has a new training plan: all meals will be taken --on a long line --around feral cats, or squirrels. This is the area where she ran off the Greenwood Garden stage and got a taste of flying through the air off-leash chasing those critters.  The idea of "breaking free to chase"   is only possible because she is figuring, she can always have fun with me later, but this chase is a special opportunity, and she needs to take advantage of it while she can.

So I am taking a two-prong approach to correcting this behavior.  Now for as long as I can do it I am going to Greenwood gardens with Tigerlily at least twice everyday, and Deering Oaks Park once a week, long-line training and feeding her ONLY when she is there in these high prey area. I can't really change her behavior until I can change the meaning of the cue that she is already responding to. The thing that is "cuing" out-of-control behavior is the prey. So, I need "prey" to cue something else. I want her to detect "prey" and think, "OH! This is my special opportunity to get Yasi to play with me and feed me! I better take advantage of it!" 

But, in order for her to decide that, she has to find out that I am really not going to play with her and feed her anyplace else! So far, she is still pretty quick to stare longingly out to cat, and think she isn't all that interested in my chicken. She still thinks she'll get another chance later.

I am doing this same exercise with Charlie, (feeding him at Greenwood Gardens) and he figured it out instantly. Though he has been very reactive to running cats in the past, he was early to eat every drop of his chicken and kibble mix. This is not such big challenge for him, but it is really an excellent exercise.  I'll post some video if this program will let me. I've been having a problem with it lately...

Breeding & behavior

I am going through a second phase of disillusionment with my four year old waterdog, Tigerlily. Accepting her as she is, who she is, isn't easy. 

The first phase was when she was a puppy. I saw right away that she was shy and nervous (she was 1/3 the size of her littermates) but I had been waiting three years for her, so I took her anyway. For the next several years I had to work with her reactivity to anything that moved, and her particular dread of dogs. 

We made great progress. She isn't so scared of everything. In fact, she can come across as rather confident, and she is just exactly the right type of friendly when we work in the pediatric psychiatric units of Spring Harbor Hospital, providing pet assisted therapy.  She is no longer barking and shrieking at dogs, in fact she ignores them usually, and no long attempting to take off after every single moving thing. Not EVERY moving thing. 

But she has been going after feral cats around Greenwood Gardens, and so I have been working with that. What I WANT is to be able to get her to behave herself reliably off-leash, but the reality is, she is too unpredictable. I can't really work her off-leash anywhere where she could possibly react to one of her distractions. And her distractions are everywhere.

I have only been feeding her on our walks, and so this morning, I loaded up with chicken and took her for a walk through the woods. The plan was to exhaust her, and walk all the way to Greenwood Gardens, arriving at the hot part of the day when she would not be as inclined to chase and then really feed her there. The idea being, I wanted her to choose me over cats. 

But we never got that far. She had been doing GREAT, ignoring joggers and dogs and cars and deer. We were on the last leg of our walk, and a golf cart with a grouchy old man and his wife driving it came by. Tigerlily sat, I fed her, the cart drove on by, we resumed our walk, and then Tigerlily took off like a shot after the golf cart, herding it like a sheep, running in front of it to cut it off. 

The driver hesitated briefly, spilling his coffee to avoid running her over, and then continued on, calling back over his should to me something understandably angry, while Tigerlily was deciding she hadn't stopped this sheep quite well enough, and she was barking and nipping at the moving vehicle, getting more excited the more determined the guy was to speed off. I screamed "stop stop STOP!" at the top of my lungs as I ran, but the driver  wouldn't stop to let me catch the dog until Tigerlily actually jumped up and nipped him in the leg. The nip drew blood. 

As soon as he stopped the cart, Tigerlily stopped reacting and just stood there looking sort of stupid. I caught up, leashed her, apologized profusely, like a fool I gave the guy my name and the name of my business and  then went and sat down in the woods and cried. I want Tigerlily to be a dog that she can never be. I got home and the old man had gone to the police station, and the police called me to fill out a report of a dog bite. I can't turn Tigerlily into the dog I want her to be. I have to recognize her for the dog she is.  This is where I have to face again the choice that I made when I took  home a shy reactive puppy. 

Conditioning a head halter, loose leash walking

We've had Charlie over a year now, so he first learned to hand target while on a regular leash. And he knows the loose leash rules, so he walks on a loose leash with a regular harness or collar perfectly MOST of the time. But sometimes, he wigs out. Usually it has to do with a kitty, or sometimes he likes to impress other dogs, and he hears a loud something and he  jumps and makes funny noises, and yes, that is embarrassing to a professional dog trainer!  Professional dog trainers are supposed to have perfect dogs ALL the time!  So, I am conditioning him to walk nicely on a "Gentle Leader," or head harness. 

A head harness is used much like reins are used on a horse. It is extremely important to keep the nose loop LOOSE. The only time it should tighten is when the dog leaps around like a bouncing ball. That tightens the nose strap. Your job is to make sure the dog understands that the only time the head halter is ever a problem, is when he is bouncing around out of control. In general, you want the dog to LOVE his head halter. So, this is a clip from a mid-way point in head halter training.  Complete beginning, middle and end information on working around BIG distractions(including conditioning a head halter, and transitioning to off-leash around BIG distractions) will be available for downloading at www.wholedogcamp.com in September.  

Prey/chase drive

If my dog and I were living in a more natural environment, if she were out there hunting squirrels pretty much as often as she felt like it, maybe squirrel chasing wouldn't be as fun. She'd get home after a long, mosquito-filled night, hungry, with burrs in her coat and thorns in her paws, having been lost in the dark for a few hours, and perhaps the next day, she wouldn't be in such a big mood to chase squirrels. 

But what happened is, during the talent show, Tigerlily leapt off the stage after Dandylion joined us, ran out of the building and ran all around it while I stood in mid cue, wondering where she'd gone.  The second night, I thought (stupidly) to station kids at the door, and after offering just a few very enthusiastic flips and whirls, she took off even faster. 

So a couple of days later, I went down to that area with Tigerlily on a long line, and she got away from me again! She's fast when she wants to be!!  So, I haven't really been able to do Susan Garrett's intelligent protocol, as outlined in Ruff Love, with Tigerlily. I can't seem to keep her on a long line or leashed around distractions that are higher than a 2 on a scale of 1-10, because being on a long line has turned distractions which used to be about a "2" into 10s. The frustration of being leashed is increasing her escape drive.   So, I don't want the leash to be a cue. I want her to be in control when she is completely off leash and off collar, so I am sorta going back to scratch, and working her self control off-leash. 

So, she's fine off leash until a delectable distraction goes by, and then she explodes off with the impulse. So, I want her to learn that the impulse she feels, that feeling her gut that says "run" has a bad consequence. It's a really serious misbehavior. it could really result in her getting herself killed. So I need a really serious negative consequence, yet one which won't kill her. I want her to figure out that exploding out of control means, going hungry.  So first she has to learn that distractions mean "feeding time." The only place I am feeding her now  is in response to her self control, off leash, off harness, around the feral cat colony. That's the job, and that's where I pay. That's it. 

So, she had no breakfast and no supp er. I brought her to the beach first, where off-leash control is far easier for her, doing water retrieves, thinking I'd burn off her steam, and make it easier for her to focus on food around the cats. I do offer a couple of pieces of kibble , moistened with hot water and tuna fish, which she ate around lesser distractions.   Then she started to bring a ball "out of bounds" so I just walked off the beach without looking at her. She trudged behind me and was beside me when I got to the truck. I drove her  to the area where the feral cats have colonized, opened the door and offered Tigerlily a bite of her tuna kibble. She sniffed it, ptooeey, wasn't interested. I got back in the truck and drove her home. Just as she can make a choice about whether or not she chases the cats, I have a choice about when and where I'm available to dish out supper.  Today I did the cat exercise again, and she got out of the truck, focused on me,  ate her supper, and I put her back in the truck and ended the supper when she started glancing around for cats.  But as you can see, I did give her a couple of bites of treat when she got out of the truck and entered the training yard off-leash at home.  Trying to give her the idea of how this is going to work.  Today when I tried the same exercise, I was able to feed her a pretty good breakfast off leash, off collar, sitting outside of the truck beside the feral cat colony. I ended breakfast and put her back in the truck when she started glancing around with a bit more interest in the cats than in my food.  

 Joey has gone home, and I am really looking forward to hearing how it is going. We left the training plan that Joey doesn't have to spend every night in his crate, as long as he plays this crate game, that is, lay in the crate in exchange for keeping the gate open, during movie time. To reward this sort of mellow, he can be released with an "okay" to sleep on the floor, but if he starts pacing around and acting silly, he gets meds, goes back to the crate games. 

It's sad to see older rescue dogs like Joey, who if he had been properly conditioned to love the crate from puppyhood, if he had simply had a guardian who was committed to learning more about dog training and management, would never would have had to suffer so many anxieties and rehomings. Joey is an example of what happens to wonderful dogs who are horribly misunderstood. They become what in humans we might think of as mentally ill.  

Now he knows how to calm himself down in a crate, in order to get a greater degree of freedom. Even a tiny increment of freedom, is the most powerful reinforcer at our disposal. Even when Joey didn't want to eat, didn't care for toys, petting or praise, he works very hard to keep the door of his crate open. 

Joey during bad weather

Here are some clips of what might happen during a storm with a dog like Joey. What he used to do was go crazy, out windows, and attack to destroy his crate. It does absolutely no good to get angry or frustrated, he is trying as hard as he possibly can to be good, so always be friendly and kind, never show anger or frustration with him when he is freaking out. Don't go crazy trying to comfort him either, just be fairly neutral, like an emergency room nurse perhaps. So now he has learned that if he wants me to open the door to his crate, he needs to lay down and stay down. This is a great reinforcer, that helps me control his behavior during a storm in a nice peaceful calming way, but it doesn't help me get much sleep!  If Joey continues to deal with his storm freak-outs this way, (laying down in his open crate during a storm, plus taking a Xanax to help him feel better) slowly over time his ability to calm himself WILL get easier. He won't bother reacting to storms as often as he figures out that the only freaky behavior available is just to lay there.

I'll put two clips here, as a reference for Joey's owner. In  the first clip, I have just taken him out to toilet and given him a Xanax, and I put him in the crate rather assertively. This is not the time to train crate entry (though I did spend lots of time doing that during good weather. Scroll down in this blog to see the whole process). Don't let him hesitate or think about whether he will or won't go into crate. If he is having a freakout,  you just have to put him in there as quick as you can with no question about it. If he gets away from the crate as he did there at the end, just go and get him pronto, and cheerfully yet firmly as possible put him immediately back in the crate, wait for the down, feed him if possible through the bars, or reinforce with opening door. Later, he wakes up in the middle of the night and starts his panting or crate destroying hysteria, or he starts slamming around in the crate, put on music and or movie, and watch him till he lays down. Reward that calmer behavior by opening the door, but not by letting him out. Give him another Xanax if that seems necessary and sit with him till he seems mellow, then close the crate. Leaving the movie going while the crate door closed helps him .  If he goes back to freaking out, and can't calm himself with the crate door closed after a couple of minutes, you might need to give him a second Xanax, and go through the whole "down opens the door" process again. 

Playing and Learning

I'm showing you this clip of  Tigerlily and Charlie playing, because that's what they had been doing the entire time I was doing the crate training exercise with Joey, below. Their playing perhaps made it a bit harder for Joey, who is showing us that he no longer thinks the only way to get out of his crate is to bash or destroy it.  This clip of Joey was taken several sessions ago, and he has advanced incredibly since then. Tomorrow I'll post again, but this clip shows a privotal moment, as he is really "getting" it, that barking, whining or pawing at the gate isn't a good solution, but laying down and being cute IS.  He is trusting me, trusting that he can communicate with me, trusting that he is not powerless, but that he can shape his environment with his behavior. 

 

Last night we had a fabulous session, too dark to tape, where he learned laying down and relaxing in the crate increased the amount of time the door stayed open. He lulled himself nearly to sleep that way, and when I closed the latch for the last time of the night, it didn't bother him at all. He's so good. No medication, clear weather, but we are watching the weather reports. 

Joey's favorite "toy"

I had to post this clip of Joey. When I was a kid I really loved Jane Goodall, and any books really that dealt with behavioral observations of lions, gorillas, wild horses, wolves, goats. So, it's natural that I love the "ethology" portion of dog training --  observing natural behaviors.  You learn a lot from just observing animals. This is Joey with his favorite "toy". Having a really big pillow to move around in his kennel is very comforting for Joey. He plays with it daily. We take him out of the crate at night, so in the morning, he hurries back to see his pillow is still there. We put it back on the porch, to give him this project to do.  

Joey gets crate trained

Here's a clip from a few minutes ago. 

 At night, if Joey enters his crate and sits, he sometimes tends to wind up, pant more and more intensely and then start attacking the crate. On the other hand, once he decides to lay down in the crate during the evening, he tends to quickly go to sleep for the night. So, here I am beginning to build reinforcement him  being in the "down" position in the crate. Two weeks ago, it was difficult for him to enter the crate for just a second,  so this is showing real progress. I hope to build a lot of reinforcement for this position in the crate, so that at night if he starts to freak, Susan and I will hopefully be able to cue him to lay down. When he is upset in the evening, he far more difficult to reinforce, so we need to prepare him by practicing and really reinforcing this during the day, while he isn't especially anxious.

Joey makes a choice

Here are some clips of Joey's crate training, working backwards. This one was from this morning.    As you can see, removing the leash helps Joey relax. When he finds out that no force is involved, he has a bit of fun. Near the end, wait, Joey re-enters the scene. 

Here is another clip from yesterday morning, where I left him crated long enough to elicit an example of his undesirable crate behaviors, and how I handle them. (to clarify,  ordinarily, during the daytime I  am able release him before he starts this sort of nonsense. But I know sometimes, we miss that perfect moment, so I wanted to record an example of what to do if Joey starts fussing when you are trying to get ready to let him out).  If Joey starts making noise, and acting pushy, back away. Don't walk towards him when he starts fussing, walk away. Walk towards him as he quiets down (view the video for example). Notice: If I put my hand to the crate latch, and Joey also touches the latch, I don't open (back my hand away from) the gate. I  open the door when he has backed off the gate and is sitting (or when he is relaxing rather than winding up). Don't open the gate if Joey is urging you to do so. Make "you've got freedom" a reward for "Good boy, you relaxed in the crate!" 

Joey is learning this as fast as he can.  Tonight, we had thunder, so I cranked up music, put him in the crate, and he sat there and quietly panted for about ten minutes. Good boy! I let him out when he settled down, then cleaned the inside of the crate with enzyme cleaner. Cleaning nervous saliva out of the crate is kind of like changing the sheets on the sickbed. It makes the patient feel better.  That way when Joey goes back into the crate for the whole night, the crate will smell fresh. 

If I (or anyone else) make the crate an ordeal for him, he won't learn to relax. We have to be careful to both set limits, and set expectations at a level where he can succeed. So during the day, I let him out pretty quickly once he's calm. His habit of nighttime crating helps me to increase daytime duration slowly, for those times when he needs to be crated to help him settle down. I'll post clips of his newer practices soon. He is making fast steady progress.  I expect that in 3 weeks, he will be sleeping through the night no problem, and resting in the crate during thunderstorms without a lot of fussing (though you'll want to have music playing!). 

Cesar Millan: Why isn't this reported?

Please review the video and commentary in my last post. Am I missing something? Why are viewers tolerating this blatantly misleading show? All his success stories share a theme, that they are "successful" from the point of view of the owner, while in this case, we don't even know if Jack was euthanized, rehomed or what.  

Cesar Millan's mastery of illusion

The Dog Whisperer is an amazing entertainer. Like old animal trainer's a big part of his act is illusion. He's one part magician, amazing people. Check out this video, where he amazes us by, um, lying to us. This is a family update to see how this family is doing a year or so after working with Millan. But check out what is really going on here, that Millan has edited out. The family actually got rid of their problem dog, a black and white Jack Russell terrier mix named Jack, and replaced him with this mellow pitbull, shown only in the opening clips. 

Also notice where the Tatoo man says, "It only took him 2 seconds." It didn't take Millan two seconds to change the dogs, it took him two seconds to change the dog's environment. Dogs are very situational. Put some little fighting dogs into an unfamiliar environment surrounded with unfamiliar dogs who could kill them easily if provoked, it is understandable that any tough guy bravado they share amongst themselves is immediately subdued. But this family couldn't very well move Millan's pack into their living room, so,  apparently they got rid of Jack and got this pitbull. I wonder why they don't just say that in this video? I wonder whatever happened to Jack? 

Addiction, Freedom, and Letting Go

Joey spent his second peaceful night in his crate last night. I crated him at 10:30 pm, and his initial panting/worrying behavior was very brief, just a very few minutes. I've learned that if I blow gently in his kennel when he starts to hyperventilate, this interrupts the behavior and he settles down. Then he sat and quietly stared (quiet breathing) for maybe 15 minutes (I stayed beside him on the couch, completely ignoring him, which was easy, as I am engrossed in James Hayman's book, "The Cutting") then he went to sleep. He wiggled around a little bit at 3:15 am, went back to sleep, and he was sound sound asleep when I opened his crate door at 4:45 am. He emerged from the crate very calm and sleepy head, and after breakfast (my whole family has just taken our little boat out into the fog and rain to get a guest to the airport on time) he went into "his" chainlink kennel, lay down in the new gazebo/doghouse that Ryan made for him, and went happily into his doggie reveries. 

I've learned so much from Joey, the biggest lesson being that too much freedom is not only an obstacle for training, it can become a stressful thing for dogs. I'm not sure what the story has been with Joey. People tell me that Samoyeds are known for their escape behaviors, and Joey has been rehomed many times over his 8 year life, but today I'm really not sure if he was used to constant freedom, or to no freedom at all, since he was perpetually anxious when he thought that since he could, he probably should escape. Now that we have completely reeled him in (he is always on leash, or in the super-max kennel) and taken away any possibility of him escaping, to my amazement, he is relaxing more. 

Almost our entire property here is fully fenced in, and no other dog has escaped from our yards during the time we've had Joey here (not counting Lion, who did follow Joey one day out the gate). Something about the way Joey was able to get out of a crate, and jump out our windows while we were sleeping, and magically disappear out of confinement was making me feel very discouraged and worried about him, and it felt like there was nothing I could do. Many dog owners come to me in this frame of mind, that there is nothing anyone can do. Joey has reminded me of how real that feeling can be, but how false it actually is. It took this little bit of effort -- his owner bought and brought a special Joey-proof crate, we made some modifications to the kennel (Joey's owner spent last week building her own fortified fenced in habitat), and we modified our training plan, and now we should all take our little bow, including Joey. He is showing us that he has what it takes to be a happy dog in his forever family. Now that he can relax enough to sleep in a crate at night, and to be contented in a kennel during the day, he is letting go of his drive to escape. Being held, and confined, is comforting him. You can see it in his face and body language. It is obvious to all of us that Joey wanted this.   

When Joey went

All day yesterday, from when I popped out of bed at 7:30 a.m. am discovered Joey Houdini missing (he'd jumped out a window plus two fenced enclosures while we were sleeping), till I found him tied to Barry Shaw's porch railing at 3pm, Joey was missing. Last night I found out more about Joey's adventure from Mayo from Awayo, a local fisherman and musician friend who has fished off Alaska, and Canada as well as off the coast of Maine and of course that's where Joey had spent most of his day yesterday. 

Mayo says he got up, stretched, stepped out on his porch and nearly stepped on this big fluffy white dog, who looked up at him, like it was a question, and Mayo says like "Fine with me man, stay as long as you need to."  Mayo says he read his tags, but couldn't figure them out (Joey has four tags, including one that says "Whole Dog Camp") and anyway he admits he was in a hurry and had to be someplace and  kind of liked having Joey laying there on this porch. "He wasn't going anywhere, man," Mayo says, "He was flat out."

I actually collected Joey off Barry Shaw's porch. Barry is a mason who believes that dogs should be free, and so he is not the sort who wants to leash a dog. Barry also didn't look at the tags, but the only reason he collected the dog, tied him up and called the cops (who called me) was because Joey tried to get into his chicken coop.  Barry released Joey as I got out of my car, so with all the build up I practice dove on Joey. Barry says, "He's not a runner. He's not going anywhere. He's been hanging out here all day." 

Um, yeah, that's what Joey does. He hangs around, until something in his spirit says it's time for leaving. 

Joey the escape artist

It took me about a week from the time Susan introduced me to Joey Houdini for me to begin to understand her concerns. Though he is an older rescue, and has been rehomed many times, at first he seemed like the perfect dog. But at 8 years old, he's never been taught how to be alone anywhere, not in a crate, not in a kennel, not on a tether, not in a house or car.  He's learned that he can have complete freedom, if only he fights for it. A master escape artist,  his anxiety builds if he feels that he can't go out of the house (or kennel, or yard) whenever he wants.  So, he is smart about it, and he sneaks. When he gets it into his head that he wants to be somewhere else, he waits till you're not looking, then doesn't give up until he's gone. 

So in the two weeks he's been here, he's gone over, under and through numerous fences, gates and buildings, partly destroying one crate, one window, a window screen and a door in the process. All the damage has occurred while we've been right here in the house with him, during what are normally our sleeping hours. 

Yesterday he stayed and relaxed for several hours  (with raw beef bones to chew) in our various chain-link kennels with no complaints, which gave me a lot of hope.  But when we are successful in  confining him, in spite of all the various fenced in environments we have here, he get anxious and unhappy. That anxiety is expressed in incredible escape behaviors. Last night, after a couple of hours chewing a beef bone in our 12x24 foot "most secure" kennel,  he was brought into the house for dinner, some games, and to sleep. Albert and I were exhausted, and as we were falling asleep, he pushed a partly open window open further,  jumped through the screen onto the fenced in porch, out of the fenced in porch into a fenced in yard, and then out of the fenced in yard. It took me 8 hours of searching to find him sleeping happily on a neighbor's porch down the street.  

So, to make a long story short, it's really too bad he didn't learn that confinement is an okay thing  back when he was a puppy, because now it is much harder for him to trust it, or to trust the people who attempt to confine him in even the most benign ways. 

 

Joey Houdini

Peaks Fest was a blast. Here the dogs appear to consider what condiments they might like on their Whole hotdogs. And pictures of Joey, who would MUCH rather go under a fence than through a gate. 

After my report, Susan came to see Joey (I think checking to see for sure to see if he still has his head on, and give him lots of kisses!) and below, Sophi and Travis's kitty, Francis. Tigerlily and Charlie both had to chill in their crates for 1/2 hour before they were able to calm themselves at all around Francis, while Joey shows us that kitties are almost as nice as escaping.

 For those of you who have been following the saga of Joey Houdini, he's the guy in the white coat. Everyone has asked "why didn't you take pictures of him sticking his head through the wire crate," and but at the time, I was wondering, how come there's no blood?  It looks like he cut his head off! The camera was not at the front of my thoughts.  If only I had taken pictures, they would have become an internet legend, sigh, so it will have to suffice to share these other pictures of a dog who doesn't really care ALL that much about freedom, but he really LOVES escaping!  A big part of the reason he came to Whole Dog Camp was because he is an incredible escape artist, and once he escaped and stood in the middle of a train track while a train was coming, and nearly caused his family to have heart attacks! And he looks so mellow, eh? We're crazy about him, and obviously, so is his owner!!

Whole Dog Campers after a very big rain

I'm still fiddling around, learning to use my imovie editing software, and thought I'd try to show my Whole Dog Campers at play -- in the hours right after our torrential rainfall. Somehow Joey Houdini (Susan, you need to spell his real nickname for me! heehee!) didn't get into these clips very well, but I'll post some cute pictures of him later. These clips were right after torrential rains. Our gardens normally don't have a water feature!!

I'm recovering

I'm recovering from the scare Joey gave me last night, and it helps that tonight's training session went so well. Not long after we recorded this session,  Joey was trying to push past the gates to break INTO this crate. That's super good. 

So, this is how I am handling the dangerous scare of last night, when Joey forced his head through the bars of a sturdy wire crate. First off, I will NEVER use a wire crate with a dog who isn't perfectly crate trained  ever again. I guess I did have an idea that some sort of crate destruction was sometimes possible, but I thought that would be more of a loud big frantic dog, not a quietly determined lightweight. 

And two, I'm carrying on with our mission, but tonight he will be in the big plastic crate, with me sleeping right beside him on the couch. Duh. So, look who's getting used to sleeping in the crate. Me!  And the world's most ambitious samoyed. Joey Houdini. 

Another Joey clip

The thing about Joey is, what will he do when you're not looking? The more he is practicing relaxing in a crate-like or kennel-like or fenced in setting while we ARE looking, the more likely he will behave in the same way when we aren't looking.  Joey is an older dog, who gets anxious, so  he needs lots of stress relieving free time. Right now he practicing being alone in a space under the outside stairs, curled up in the shade relaxing.

Joey surrenders?

This is a long (5 minute) clip, but I wanted to show Joey's learning process. Last night Joey scared us to death. We put him to bed at midnight in the big wire crate, and he wasn't noisy, butknowing Joey  I decided to check on him at 1 in the morning.  He was laying down, his head stuck through the wire crate, head outside (through a 4 inch by 1 inch slot) body inside. I nearly dialed 911, but Albert had the right tools and we were able to extricate him quickly. Surprisingly to me, he was fine. He acted like nothing happened, but he could have strangled or mangled himself to death!

It scared the pants off us, and once my knees stopped knocking, I despaired about how it would influence his crate training. But here is his session today, post Houdini. He's doing great? Dare I imagine the crate/head wedgie taught him something?  So, I can't believe it! In spite of what seemed like a big setback, we're marching merrily forward in conditioning him to the crate.He's laying down, eating, showing signs of relaxing. I have another shorter clip of him in the mini chainlink kennel, and he acts even more relaxed there, just entered, lay down and relax.   But he won't be spending any unsupervised time in  crate with me again!  

Escape artist

I've never seen a dog who is as much of an escape artist as 8 year old samoyed Joey. His owner rescued him in March, and now it's June. Joey is staying with me for about 10 days of retraining. We're teaching him to accept being crated at night, and to respond to his name, and to follow a hand target. It's a great arrangement, where Susan did residential training with me for a few days, left Joey as she heads off for Geneva, and she will stay for another few days to help Joey practice his exercises when she comes back.

But first, we had the Joey fence test. At Whole Dog Camp, almost all of our land is fenced, in a sort of onion fashion, with the small yard off the porch, a big agility training yard wrapped to the north of that, a big fenced flower garden (with further fenced vegetable garden off that) to the south, and a fenced woodland to the west. The idea being, we can train off leash while still managing our dogs for safety and training purposes. 

On arrival, when unleashed, Joey would just turn his back to the world and go off inspecting intently for any weak spots in the fence. We ran after him, filling in places that he might be able to squeeze under or leap over. To my amazement Joey escaped a several times in his first few hours here, but fortunately, we are on an island, and there really isn't anyplace to go, so we ignored him and he would return to the ever more secure yard after a few minutes. Susan and I sweated and pounded and kept dragging out more fencing, and finally even the very determined Joey couldn't get out. 

And once he discovered he really couldn't get out? He relaxed. He stopped staring out gates and started acting happier and more playful. He could think about toys and social behaviors instead of weak spots in fences. 

Escape behavior is interesting. Joey was the type who would pace the house at night, stare out windows and doors and threaten to jump out windows. He just couldn't seem to settle down. But now that he is more convinced that he really isn't going anywhere, his energy is far more relaxed and happy looking.  He is coming when called (we call him in the north door, and reward him by letting him back out the south door). At 8 years old, he is learning how to learn. His surrender to our management appears to be a really happy thing for Joey.  He is learning that he doesn't need all the responsibility of running the entire show. He can relax, and we'll take care of him.

Dogs don't really want to be in charge.  It must be a bit scary to outsmart the humans. Maybe all his escapades were really testing us, more than the fence. 

USDAA tournament

We went to our first USDAA agility trial.  Because I live on an island, going to competitions has always been kind of an overwhelming adventure. You know, load up the dogs and gear on the boat, then unload and reload into the car, then hit the road, drive two hours, then reverse the whole process. Too much rushing around. But it was so worth it, that I am printing out all the other USDAA entry forms I can find, planning on going to as many as I can this year. Island life has confined me a bit too much, and now it's time to bust out. This is what an agility trial  is like: 

You arrive and all these people have set up tents and coolers and easy chairs and doggie playpens around a couple of huge agility playing fields. The people are mostly women, and they are accompanied by highly trained young dogs. Old women, younger women, middle-age women, one or two young girls, plus maybe five men. And everyone of these people is an excellent dog trainer. You never hear a harsh word, you never see a choke (nor a tug on a) collar, you see everyone dishing out reinforcements, playing games, having a language with their dogs. These people understand dogs, they understand behavior in general and they train and compete at very high levels. It is so wonderful to see smart women running amazing dogs. And you are allowed to grow old in this sport! Old is good! Old is cool!  Best of all,  old is potentially competitive! Or perhaps, there is no such thing as old, it's just "experienced."   

And the newbies are all sorta grouped together competing in one ring, and the pros in the other ring, and everyone is helpful. When your dog dashes out of the ring to chase another dog (I mean, when MY dog did that!) people say things like, "We've all been there," and "that's a green dog for you." When my dog completes her second run over time, but she actually DOES it, and I am so happy about that, people recognize the small accomplishments. They see her sniff another dog's butt and they are like, "Look at her! Isn't she the brave one now!"

We didn't q or place, but we played and learned and made some excellent mistakes. We watched and learned. I came home and wrote a song about running the dogs for the island talent show. I fell in love with the sport, in love with the people who play it.  Can't wait for the next trial!  Maybe I will run Charlie too...

Do you understand your dog's body language?

This video shows some helpful examples of dog body language. We see a BIG puppy, blundering around, a bit like the proverbial bull in the china shop. Two of the small dogs are her "siblings," they live with her, and then there are my three dogs (the white curly Dandylion, my black curly and naturally shy Tigerlily,  and the one that looks like a german shepherd is Charlie). The big dog is about twice the weight of the next largest dog (Charlie), which makes my  dogs a bit nervous. Observe the dog body language when this big puppy comes charging around. They are trying to figure out how to slow the big puppy down or stay out of her way, and they finally do that by holding very still and  looking away. If a dog is bothering you, you can do the same thing. Stand still, look away. This is their way of trying to avoid attracting the larger dog's attention. 

Also notice how face to face confrontations makes  dogs  (Charlie) nervous. That behavior of the big dog -- of blocking Charlie's path and getting in his face is a bit pushy and intimidating for Charlie, yet often times dog owners don't understand this, and allow or encourage their own dog to get into the face of another dog. Charlie gives a little "back off" growl and then politely turns away  to sniff. Charlie is a formerly feral dog, who is very smart about dog language, and also, he does NOT want to get pounded by this big puppy! Sniffing helps quiet  the other dogs,  by putting focus on the ground.  Notice how when the big puppy comes and sniffs Charlie's butt, that's not quite as stressful as when the big pup stuck her face in Charlie's face. 

Typically, young puppies (this one is less than a year) are  socially awkward, often pushy and  wanting to get in older dog's faces and jump all over them. Just as with little human kids, that isn't polite behavior, older animals don't always love it and especially with big puppies, it can hurt to get landed on by a big puppy! It's  important to supervise and interrupt big puppies, and discourage harassment of the other dogs.

Also notice how the large dog stops sometimes to scratch. Dog's don't always scratch because they are itchy. Very often, it looks to me like when little kids twirl their hair or  chew the eraser. Turid Rugaas identifies scratching as a calming cue, sort of like sniffing. It helps dogs relax by taking the focus off social interactions. It shows a dog  who's focus is internal, thinking about an itch, not thinking about bothering anybody. The scratching behavior helps us recognize that although this big puppy might be pushy, she is totally friendly and means no harm.

 

Ruff Love

I've been doing Susan Garrett's "Ruff Love" program not because I have any particular problems with my dogs as pets, but because I am trying to ramp up their performance in competitive freestyle and agility. My sensitive dog Tigerlily has refusal issues. If it's raining, or if there is a stick in her fur, or if there is something slightly annoying  going on, she might decide she doesn't feel like performing, whereas when all the stars are in the right position, she is AMAZING. So, I want to be able to show off how amazing she is any time, any place. Charlie, my formerly feral best friend, is still young and learning many things, and he knows that if he's off leash in the woods, I can't catch him. So, with him too, I'm aiming for "the perfect performance, anytime, any place. I am convinced that the Canadian trainer Susan Garrett has the right method to bring my dogs from having variable responses to having more consistently "excellent" responses. The one issue that I have run into with Susan Garrett's "Ruff Love" program is that at first, it seems to stimulate an extinction process that can be difficult to recognize and respond to properly. 

To explain what I mean by that, I'll backtrack and talk about something else, something I call "boundary frustration." Boundary frustration or aggression happens in big ways when dogs are confined, as behind a fence or on a tie out, and if they finally escape they can explode into freedom and can be dangerous actually. An extreme example of boundary frustration was observed when the Jack Russell terrier who is constantly tied, left to bark his brains out across the street from the grocery story, suddenly broke his chain, ran across the street and ripped a bichon dog out of his owner's arms and killed it. So, frustration can build adrenaline and aggression.  Fence fighting is a type of boundary frustration. 

Just a little bit of frustration can build energy too, hopefully in more useful ways, as it can build energy and drive in performance dogs. 

When I first began Susan Garrett's protocol of taking away all my dogs' privileges, when I took them out to work with them, or around the situations where they usually have my permission to sleep in the bed for example, and suddenly that wasn't being offered, I saw them expressing some frustration and excitement. They were "demanding" these things.  I thought of this as "boundary frustration" at first, but now I think that this is actually an extinction process (and if I'd been paying better attention, I would have seen that Susan Garrett warns us about this!). The dogs are used to receiving a bit of something for nothing, and when I stop doing that, they try harder than ever to get something for nothing. 

So, I'm handling this in a few different ways. I'm working with the dogs off leash and off collar inside the tent, or in the house, where they really can't take off on me. I don't want the presence of the leash or collar to be their cue that I have control. Also, I am being more clear about my criteria. With Tigerlily, that means the one second space out during training is no longer acceptable. If she loses her focus even for a second, I want her to experience a consequence (crate!), and not just have her expect that I'll give her another cue.  I am also fading the long line in different ways, using lighter line, not necessarily shorter line with Tigerlily, to reduce the possibility that she can explode off to chase a bird or whatever without getting a consequence. 

I am having a blast, learning and growing so much as a trainer, and learning many new things about my dogs. They are more capable, more communicative than I ever realized.  The dogs are responding to my "clearer communications" with incredible awareness and high spirits. 

Training clips

We did four little sessions like this, where we just play around with the music, and latter I did some session without the dogs, where I thought through some choreography ideas.  This is Charlie, the sato we adopted from a beach in Puerto Rico one year ago, and Tigerlily, my "Princess and the Pea" french waterdog who is four years old and needs to be groomed. 

Susan Garrett's method

I've been applying Susan Garrett's ideas here, imperfectly, but the glory of her  method is that even when you don't do it correctly, you learn a lot from trying!

So, to make a long story shorter, it's building their working drive! Wowza! Tigerlily is jumping 22 inches, Charlie too, blasting around the yard. Well, this is also Silvia Trkman's method, because when we run the course it's progressing from just running a board on the ground, we're doing running contacts! and it's also the Rockin Vibrations method (that was a reggae band I sang with years ago). As we do in training dogs,  they practiced beginnings or endings separate from the whole song, or groove, and when it came time to actually play the song, they didn't keep stopping and starting, but cycled through again and again. I'm aiming to do that more in our run-throughs, just mark it, and keep going, cycling through again with variations. I think that is also Silvia Trkman style, but I don't think I could reinforce my dogs highly enough to do Silvia Trkman's method,  without Susan Garrett's crate games, and her understanding of environmental reinforcements, and how to get control of them and put them to work.

My dogs are so funny and smart! They give me so many funny stories and not enough time to tell! But I think the difference between an electric collar approach, which I don't do, (but can EASILY imagine pulling that trigger and, just, you know, zap! Take that you dang rascal dog!) but I can't do that to my dogs any more than I could do it to my child, and this is why. When you teach with reinforcement, and focus on controlling reinforcement, dogs develop more creativity and confidence. They aren't robots, also they aren't afraid that suddenly, they might experience a sharp pain. Electric shock-collar trained dogs are taught to avoid pain. They learn, when you are avoiding the pain, you are doing the right thing. Whereas my dogs are taught, like any great athletes,  ignore pain. They are taught GO FOR IT! Tigerlily was born naturally shy, Charlie was feral, but I've been building their confidence in me and in the world along with their skills. Both are so much fun to watch and play with, they fly through the air with the greatest brave abandon! Dandylion too, I should mention is also behaving with this new desperation to train! It's not less work for me, but it certainly is fun! I will post a few clips of our practices ASAP...

Spring

Sophia Yin: Experts Say Dominance-Based Dog Training Techniques Made Popular by Television Shows Can Contribute to Dog Bites

People ask me what I think about Cesar Milan, and the article link below explains my opinion on "The Dog Whisperer" pretty concisely -- that it is dangerous for pet owners to "believe" in the Dog Whisperer. If you are a "believer" in Cesar Milan, please click on the link below and read this article. 

Sophia Yin: Experts Say Dominance-Based Dog Training Techniques Made Popular by Television Shows Can Contribute to Dog Bites

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Permissiveness

One of Susan Garrett's training mottos is "permissive is not positive," and I do agree with that, but I also think sometimes "permissiveness" has a purpose, unlike punishment it doesn't do irreparable damage if you learn from it and modify it,  and I wanted to write about and show a video clip of that. 

"Permissiveness" is referring to the criteria we reinforce, and how we set our criteria.  You can't start with the same criteria for every dog. I organize my classes so that in the first class, we begin conditioning a marker signal, and training a dog to respond to his name around distractions. But what if, as happened recently, a dog arrives to class who is afraid of people? Who is afraid to have his collar touched? Who is afraid of or reactive to a leash? Who is averse to being touched?  Or what about a dog who is super confident and bites his owner when he wants food, or when he doesn't want to walk in a certain direction? Our criteria and handling skills for each dog is going to be very different.  

This week in class I had a rescued aussie pup who is super confident, agile, gentle, playful, friendly with people, with dogs, loose on leash and not all that interested in wildlife, and first class games were  easy for this nice pup. We gave her more advanced games, playing "trade ya" with high value bones and she was quick  to pick up beginning hand targeting, but then we  saw she actively avoids being crated. So in that behavior, we might need to take the crate apart and start reinforcing her for entering just the bottom half of it.  We customize training for each team.  We do "permit" dogs to show us what they need. 

My dog Tigerlily was born a scaredy cat. At eight weeks old, she saw another dog 50 feet away, and screamed in absolute terror. I was on the CBL ferry, bringing her home, and she was my bargain, a shy waterdog.  I have progressively built her confidence and reduced her shyness and prey reactivity, but I can't change her genetics. I have to set my criteria, my expectations, my training plan, for who she is where she is. Punishment -- even simply withholding reinforcement or taking a dog out of a game -- can discourage some dogs and reduce low confidence to even lower confidence.  In training, we need to build a dog's confidence in focusing on the handler, and that requires more reinforcement for desired behaviors and less "correction." Some dogs can tolerate less correction than others!   Tigerlily can tolerate more negative consequences now, at four years old, because she has so much experience earning positive consequences in responding to my cues. Videotaping can help us see when a criteria has become "permissive," or below what the dog can reasonably be able to perform.   

 

My Charlie, who was dying last year on a beach in Puerto Rico, is reactive to beaches. It's weird. The first time we brought him to a beach, he went into an absolute panic. So, springtime, and I'm beginning to work with him on the beach again.  Normally, I think/hope I deliver each cue just once, but  notice in the first clip that on the beach, I was being quite permissive and giving Charlie every "sit" cue twice. A cue is reinforcing. If you give the dog a cue twice, you are actually reinforcing him for ignoring the first cue. I definitely don't want to keep that up, so I'm glad that we videotaped. He did better with the recall (below), but next time, I plan to go back to kindergarten with his beach behavior, which means, shape and reinforce but  avoid putting cues on beach behaviors until I can see he is ready to respond on the first cue.

Ruff Love

I've been studying Susan Garrett's approach to training, and the process it is teaching me a lot.I'm With both my four year old genetically reactive/excitable waterdog, and my 2 year old formerly feral chihuahua/german shepherd type mix, and increasingly, even with my bichon, I am going back to foundations work and getting lots of details about what is reinforceable behavior and what is not reinforceable behavior crystal clear. 

In music, I had to do lots of ear training (and turns out, it's helped me a lot as I've lost my hearing). In animal training, we need to do eye training. We need to wake up our eyes and see the behavior that in pet homes is just the wallpaper, the stuff we take for granted. We don't take any of the wallpaper behaviors (along with their wallpaper reinforcements) for granted anymore, Susan Garrett has really outlined where the environment that we create is molding behavior, and perhaps in a confusing way for the dog. 

One thing I am "seeing" more clearly is all those little moments when Tigerlily temporarily checks out/spaces out/loses focus/ takes a wee break. I have a habit of ignoring many of those moments, getting over them somehow and getting back to work. That habit had a raison d'etra earlier in our training, but at this point, my aim is to teach her that there is a consequence to spacing out, or flying off the handle. 

This morning we did crate training with distractions, she was my perfect little buddy, and so I decided to do some agility as a reinforcement. I asked her to down on her mat while I moved a tunnel. I am running her over the teeter first thing, and not again, as a way of building her drive for the teeter (which last fall she was refusing). I go into the tent to get treats, she busts off the mat to go bark at someone passing the driveway, so I "oopsie" and cue her to "crate" and she flies back, runs right over the teeter and holds her two on two off position. I know I'm not supposed to laugh, but how smart is that? She figures I can't POSSIBLY call off the game if she's going to teeter like that. So, I food reinforce the teeter and verbally recue "okay, crate" and she runs into the tent to her crate, and so I just call her right back out again and now we're doing tunnel/obstacle discriminations. 

So, maybe I was making it too tricky, just standing there saying "tunnel," while she ran through a tunnel that was set up leaning against the "A frame" and then I cued "Aframe" a few times, and I was working up to random times, and that was probably getting to be too many times because she goes up over the Aframe, from the top she spies Robert and Jack (bouncy dog) walking down the road, and she explodes off the Aframe to  run barking to the gate. 

"Too Bad," I say, which means, totally the jig is up, she's going to be crated, so at this point what has she got left to lose? She gets in a few more barks and starts trotting to evade me as I come to collect her. I said, "Tigerlily, where are you going? Come over here." And she gives me her cutest smile and comes racing to me, cueing right up onto my shoulder. I snuggle and cuddle her and bring her to the crate, and then I just leash her and Dandylion, and back inside. 

Any of Tigerlily's reactivity is far less duration, far less out of control than it used to be, but what I am aiming for now is closer to 100% reliability that the reactivity can be stopped before it expresses itself physically. This is a behavior chain that I want to build: see distraction, turn to handler, collect reinforcement. Yesterday she had this 100%, but today, she had an opportunity to learn what happens when she reacts, and I have to get clearer and quicker at seeing her start to react, and the consequence of any break in focus, big or small, has to be extremely boring for Tigerlily.  Part of this must include her understanding that when she is off-leash, that's not off-duty, playing with me off leash is not an opportunity to relax the focus,  that's not a cue that criteria is softening. I want her to understand that when she is off-leash, that means on duty, full focus. I want to be one of those pain in the butt handlers where Tigerlily feels she has to focus on me constantly to keep me in the game. This means shorter, more perfect sessions, not longer with loose criteria. 

Distractions

I'm just figuring out how to edit movies. This is the start to a training video about distractions that I am working one. Hope it's helpful Katie!! Sophi I love your page!

Jost Van Dyke demo

Jost Van Dyke demo

Jost Van Dyke has about 40 kids in the school, so it reminded me a lot of the Peaks Island school. I began with a little demo to music,(which I can't seem to upload from the wi-fi, so I'll post pictures instead) improvised as we were in the shady area which was maybe 10 by 14 foot, and the kids were the most enthusiastic audience! I love kids! Every single child said they had a dog, and a few said they had more than one dog. And it was also obvious (from all the screaming!) that many of them were fearful of dogs, so after the freestyle demo, in addition to talking about training, and how to teach the dog the dog's name, we talked and I answered questions about dog safety, preventing dog bites, and keeping dogs healthy and fit. The kids had smart questions and were interested to know that Tigerlily is spayed. Not having litters of puppies is part of what has kept Tigerlily so healthy and fit!

I encouraged the kids to teach their dogs to trust them, by understanding what dogs need to be healthy, mentally as well as physically. After this demo, we couldn't go anywhere on the island without a handful of kids who recognized us, followed and shouted friendly hellos to Tigerlily. We made lots of young friends. Jost Van Dyke is a wonderful community. We were treated as people, not as tourists, which was notable and wonderful.

Virin Islands

Here are pictures of a collie we will be bringing back from Puerto Rico. We are looking for a home for her, she is very sweet and about six months old, a smooth coated collie mix, with excellent conformation and a very submissive temperment....She's super gentle and loving and pretty....

Jost Van Dyke

Jost Van Dyke is one of the smaller of the British Virgin Islands, but it is the biggest in my heart for it’s loving community. The first person we met was Gregory, who gave us a friendly smile and offered to “hold your dog,” while we were entering customs for check through. I told him no, thanks much, I am the only person who holds Tigerlily’s leash. One minute later we were refused admittance to the customs until we’d tied up our dog, so I had to return sheepishly to Gregory and thank him while taking him up on his offer.

And Gregory turned out to be the son of Roxy, who owned the music/tee-shirt selling establishment, who was the best friend of Errol. Errol is a native of Monserrat who has lived on Jost Van Dyke since the volcano exploded there, and he was the longtime keyboardist for Foxy, while Foxy was the leader of the band. Foxy told me he no longer performs “on Doctor’s orders” but he had lots of good tune suggestions. Errol was a delight, open minded and everywhere he went he had people smiling, and introduced us to so many people, so Albert and I took to thinking of him as Jost Van Dyke’s version of Matthew Day.

The men we’ve met here have been very funny, smart, excellent storytellers,very entertaining to sit around and listen to their stories which often have a punchline. Foxy is like the king of this paradise, he’s got what we compared to “Jones’ Landing” on Peaks Island if you combined Jonesies with Plants, because he’s also got the mini-ferry. It old him I was surprised, and hadn’t realized that he not only operated this community music and party, bar-b-que and tee-shirt central but he was also a musician. Foxy might not play anymore, but he is the consummate entertainer. This white lady walks by and I asked Foxy, “Is she your wife?” and he said, “She’s my boss,” and I think I may have looked horrified for a moment until he laughed and said, “You don’t know what a boss is. She’s been my boss for 37 years!” He says he doesn’t do anything anymore, he doesn’t know who is playing music or what’s on the menu or what anything costs. He just sits and socializes. He was very friendly and nice to sing to.

We haven’t really gotten to know the women as much, they haven’t been out socializing or playing music, but I sat near several local women who socialized a bit after work, or maybe some were still working, admiring a newborn baby . We have had cooking conversations and informal recipe trades with the woman who sold us two coconut ice cream cones, plus six tomatoes and two eggplants from her garden). I enjoyed meeting the teacher, Jessica, at the school, and after the kids are finished with their mid-year exams, I plan to offer a little class on dog care and training.

We’ve had very limited internet access, and so can’t really keep up with the many adventures and the many wonderful friends we’ve made. I am presenting a canine education program at the island school next week, and will try to get pictures of that. The people here are wonderful, we don’t lock anything or worry about anything, it feels very safe and loving, much like home.

Salinas

(These are our Salinas friends, Julio and Joy)
We met up with Sophi and Travis, first in a beautiful ecolodge in El Yucay National Rainforest, and then they came back to Salinas and spent the night in the boat. Tigerlily has been switching on as a service dog, almost acting a bit strange as she starts to adapt to quite a lot of new responsibility, and last night I noticed she was resting on Travis and Sophi’s pillow. Sophi had made up the berth so it was fit for a Queen, and Tigerlily evidently took a shine to the role, reclining there she looked so pretty, but I noticed wet pawprints in the fabric. I just thought, her paws were wet, so I kicked her off, then Sophie said, “it’s pee.” Tigerlily had just lain down and drained herself!

I have told others that when a dog pees in your bed, it means he’s a little bit insecure and he’s trying to mark his place and say, “This territory belongs to me,” and my theory continues that as the dog becomes more confident of his territory, and has a deeper sense of ownership of the space, he won’t need to mark it anymore. The theory certainly seems relevant here.

Sophi and Trav left yesterday, and outside of Tigerlily’s one big mistake, she has been showing me incredible self-control and intelligent thinking, alerting me to all manner of things, including a couple of teenage boys who were mysteriously swimming around the docks and looking into the boats. She insisted on getting off the boat and showing me the kids, and then she wasn’t comfortable coming back aboard until they swam away. She is my hearing dog, and she has been alerting me to all sorts of things, including the usual cell-phone and equipment sounds, which is very helpful. Communication is a two-way street, and I make more mistakes than she does, as she alerts me to things, and I mistakenly think “it’s nothing” and it takes me a few seconds sometimes to understand that she isn’t being disobedient, but she is telling me that someone is walking up behind me, or a car is coming through the gate, or there is a baby crawling at the gate (true!), or quite a variety of useful things. I have been shifting away from assuming that she is reacting to the feral and wildlife, because increasingly, she isn’t.

When you have a service dog like Tigerlily, you are giving the dog a bit of adult responsibility. I mean, I can’t use her services if I can’t trust her judgement about what is important and what is not important. So today, after Travis and Sophi left, Albert and I did some work on the boat (I smashed my shin) and then I took her for a little walk. But she would just stop in her tracks, refuse to move another step. Weird. And I really don’t like the way that lately I have found myself pulling on her collar, I will not have her forcing me to force her, so to speak, so I decided to just see where she wanted to go, let her alert me to whatever the hell things she was thinking were so important.

So I told her, “Okay. Let’s go,” and I let her lead me. She strolled across the inner sanctum, the parking lot in the mangroves where only boat owners can park, and then into the outer parking lot, searching the spot where we’d said goodbye to Sophi and Travis. She walked me out back, to where the trashcans are, alerted to a cat, I told her to leave it, just a kitty, and she was completely fine with that suggestion, just went immediately back to sniff and alerting me to the area where she’s last seen the kids. She froze again, peering across the inner sanctum, really refusing to walk forward. I said, “Tigerlily. Sophi went home. They ‘re gone, they went home, they aren’t here anymore. I’m sorry.” And she started walking again, but hesitated at the dock to look down toward the end, where the kids spent time this morning, gawking over the boats and the people on them as well.

Termites, and ticks

We landed in Ponce Puerto Rico at at 4:30 in the morning, rented a car and in spite of warnings that the streets of Ponce can be dangerous after dark, we went outside and slept for an hour in the car, Tigerlily sharing the back seat with me. Then we made the drive to Salinas just after the sun came up, and through farmland that snuggles between a view of the mountains and the sea. But these aren’t ordinary farms. Many acres belong to Monsanta and other chemical companies who grow genetically engineered crops here. Julio translated on a “red tape” trip to austere government offices that make Maine’s Registry of Motor Vehicles look like a bastion of elegant efficiency, but it took us a day, and then we registered the boat.

Everything looked more impoverished than it did last year, but still beautiful. The politics, we’re told, are corrupt and we don’t know about that, but we have seen signs of misplaced priorities. It’s hard to believe, but there seems to be no real environmental controls here, no pump out boats at the marinas, no recycling or bottle return, no bans on out door burning.

Other dog owners at the marina had been warning us of pesticide resistance in ticks which carry a disease – ehrlichia – which is potentially deadly to canines. So far, Promerisw seems to be working fine on Tigerlily.

Last year, when we bought this beautiful old boat, we were seeing signs of termites. We were reassured that the boat had been “tented and gassed” and the only possible termite on our boat was a dead termite. But it Magus had (has)live termites.

We used a week doing things we hadn’t planned on doing. Fortunately, my suspicious nature had led me to ship a bottle of “bora care” (a boron salt pesticide and wood preservative) to Puerto Rico, just in case we might need it, and we spent a very grungy icky week , working from stern to aft, and getting to know our “new old” boat very intimately, lifting every board, yanking everything out of every hold, sweeping up termite dust , and antique flecks of human skin and dust and hair that accumulated there, and painting the underside of every board, searching for live termites. It was obvious they were there, but where? Albert said he thought termite culture was a lot like ant culture, and I was wondering what sort of music termites like, when we hit paydirt. That not quite the right word, but it’s the right consistency for the termite city we finally found in a stern cockpit locker, under the screwed-in plywood bottom . A pile of softwood scraps saved from long forgotten project was completely swarming with maggoty looking termites.

Apparently, the gas hadn’t reached into this corner of the boat. We felt like surgeons removing a tumor, and we feel as though we really got every last speck. The every hidden corner of the boat is coated with boron salts. Albert followed our surgery and treatment with some carpentry, and now we only need to get the sails on, check the engine and thru-hulls, fix a few electrical issues, and hopefully we’ll be underway by Tuesday night.

The people of Salinas have been extremely loving and helpful. Frank went to San Juan, and brought us back the parts we needed from West Marine. Fred is a semi-retired boat surveyor, loaning us an outboardmotor for the dinghy, and he’s helped us with all manner of boat issues (and his opinion on the termites? “I wouldn’t worry about them. All the boats here have ‘em. Termites never caused a fiberglass boat to sink!”).Julio later invited us to dinner with him and his wife, Joy. Mary, with her substantial, informal dog-rescue gave us a ride to Walmart, and we went to a birthday party (for Reggie, who is sexy and beautiful at 66, and who says her secret to good health are the many dogs she rescues). Internet access is extremely sketchy, and I am posting this in a hurry from a local bar!

Matilda's toenails

  I want to reinforce Matilda for relaxing her paw. So, I hold her paw and as she relaxes it, I let it go. I want her to find out that when she relaxes her paw completely, I let it go. 

I practiced this without the nail clippers in sight, but later it might be good to practice this with the nail clippers just laying on the ground. Matilda was here for ten days this time, and on the last day. Albert brushed her while she was standing, and I went around and clipped all her nails with no problem at all. Let's get a video of that the next time we clip her nails. 

Going to Puerto Rico soon

There are quite a lot of hoops to go through in getting ready to sail in the Caribbean for six weeks. Without even going into the boat preparations, but just on this end, we now have Rob, who will be staying in our house and watching the dogs, keep the woodstove going, water the greenhouse, pick up poops, and we also have Rhonda and Amelia to deliver extra cuddles for Charlie and Lion. And Charlie slipped on the ice yesterday and pulled a muscle and is limping a bit, and then I found he had pulled a bottle of ibuprophen out of my backpack, and cracked it open in a kennel! It could be funny, as I was going to call my vet and ask him if I should give him an ibuprophen for the pulled muscle, but it's not funny. I am just packing anything remotely toxic well away, and Rob, I hope you will do the same! This trip makes me realize what a great service Whole Dog Camp offers, as now that I am in need of similar homestyle professional care for my own dogs, I can't find any other place else that has makes this sort of canine lifestyle available! But Charlie will get to go hang out with Rob, and that will be a fun change of pace for him, and both Charlie and Rob seem very adaptable. Dandylion will be mostly with Rhonda I suspect.

Because we plan to sail on into the British Virgin Islands, I had to get blood drawn from Tigerlily, and have her rabies titre($180), another expense of many which are adding up. Timing was good, as she was due for her three year rabies vaccine this fall, and the BVI requires the last rabies to have been done in the past 12 months. Then after my vet filled out the long form, I brought that to the USDA veterinarian, because he had to stamp his approval on it (another $76), which he did with a VERY fancy stamp. Today Albert is faxing the form to the BVI to make sure all is okay, but we have had difficulty reaching anyone in the veterinary division by phone.

And, I found my debit card and checkbook, right where I had carefully FILED them, duh, and I am not letting my passport out of sight, because I lose things , especially when I am excited or nervous. I've been telling Tigerlily, "You have won a six week freestyle and sailing and swimming vacation in the Caribbean, all inclusive!" Tigerlily loves sailing, loves everything about being on the ocean, she is an incredible swimmer and retriever and she is excellent about alerting me to things I can't hear, like, boat alarms! The one good thing about my increasing hearing loss is Tigerlily, who gets to wear her vest and ride in my lap on the plane, which would be fine except we have a long lay-over in JFK, and then we get into Ponce at 5 am! So I am hoping she will pee on cue on her puppy pee pads, because otherwise she will be holding it for 11 hours.

I am packing one teenyweenie bag for me, and a big HUGE bag for Tigerlily! It is rather comical. Tigerlily has dog toys and all her food and treats and medicines (I got a dog stapler, just in case, in the first aid kit). She's got a lifejacket, and long line and training journal.Tigerlily is bringing more pairs of shoes than I am!! On some of the islands there are cactus with huge thorns, so you will laugh when you see pictures of her in her special shoes. And all I need for myself is two bathing suits and summer stuff which packs down very small.

Mini work- out

Here's an example of a short training session both for Charlie and for Lion, in case handlers want to give it a whirl. You'll notice I am usually saying the cue just one time, and then giving the dog a chance to respond. These little clips are pretty short, but even a little session like that can really help an energetic dog settle down (although right now Charlie is certainly ready for agility class! So that's good!) 

The reason we do "paws up" and "off" is so that if he jumps on you, or something, and you say "off," he knows exactly what you want him to do ("off" means, put your paws on the floor). I tried to demo hand targeting, but couldn't video tape well while doing it, so the idea is that the dog puts his nose on your palm. You DON'T put your palm on the dog's nose. The dog will come to the palm, the palm doesn't go to the dog. 

Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing


Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing
Photo Sharing - Video Sharing - Photo Printing

Toenails

This is Matilda, who is just about the smartest dog I have ever known.  Anna saved her life about 3 months ago now, and through her Matilda has come a tremendous distance in learning to trust humans again.

Unlike every other dog I've ever known, Matilda truly does not care much for food as a treat. This will make her a very cheap dog to train! A hug and a kiss and a tickle and a giggle work wonders on Matilda. For her, the best treat in the world is being brushed, or any sort of touch and play. We notice that she recalls the fastest when we giggle and wiggle our butts. She also, incredibly, learns by watching what the other animals do. She watches everything that happens very carefully. It's funny to watch her with our bichon, Dandylion, because Matilda takes on her natural role of a sheepdog guarding her sheep, we can easily picture her watching over a flock of bichons, but really, we are all Matilda's sheep.  Deep sleep is easy when a dog like Matilda is guarding the house. 

However, she also has this real issue regarding her toenails. She doesn't want clippers coming any where near her toes. I put a whole bunch of Matilda videos, playing outside etc., on my video blog at www.dropshots.com/yasijenny , but here is one where I've actually made a little bit of progress, and Matilda is letting me make clipper noises and show her the clippers.  (Unfortunately working around my technical issue via dropshots has removed the end of this clip?! argh) But if you look at some of the dropshot clips (eventually I think I'll edit them altogether and make a toenail clipping tape if Anna lets me?), you can see how at first just the sight of clippers caused her to want to escape.  In fact, right after the first presentation on the previous day, where I just showed her clippers with the brushing, she curled up in the corner of the couch, then threw up.  In this clip, she is just starting to accept them as part of the brushing environment.  When I ended this session, she was definitely left wanting more. By practicing in this way for just three minutes most days, it won't take forever for Matilda to get over whatever trauma she suffered with clippers before, and accept them as an everyday part of a peaceful life.

Shaping

I am having difficulty uploading video, I don't understand why, but I am working on it.... If you are curious about the KGS (Keep Going Signal, where I use "yay") you can see it in play a little bit with this dark clip of Tigerlily posted below....

Shaping

Shaping a belly up position is sort of an emotional thing. My dog (formerly feral) Charlie is just learning, and (Princess and the Pea) Tigerlily already knows how to do roll overs and belly ups, but I just thought I'd take away any cues, and go back to shape them both with reinforcing belly up in mind. Charlie wasn't in the mood for anything serious, so I didn't push it even though he is further along than it looks here. Charlie was distracting Tigerlily outside the door, so with her too, I called it quits the instant I got the behavior that I was looking for. I can always play this game again tomorrow, and get it on cue later. But these are good examples of how it looks with two different dogs when I am "shaping" a behavior. The behavior I am trying to get ultimately will be on their backs, with their feet in the air, but for now I'm happy with Charlie is he'll start to go flat on his side, and Tigerlily when she rolls all the way over.  

Resource Guarding

The little cockerspaniel is back, and wow, amazing how easy it has been to clean up the resource guarding. Today he snuggled up to Charlie, leaned the bone against him, and chewed, gnawed as peacefully as a cow chewing cud.

I'm so glad we nipped that in the bud. Resource guarding can really be a problem, but dogs generally respond very well to a sense of safety and abundance, as I described below, a couple of posts ago.

This is a picture of Charlie and Tigerlily, from last year, when we had just adopted Charlie, and we were showing him that he was safe, no one was going to take away his toys, there are plenty of toys, giving him more toys, flooding him with all the toys he needed, not taking toys away. Dogs really relax after they find out that no one is going to just steal their stuff. People tell me feral dogs often resource guard, but Charlie doesn't demonstrate any resource guarding at all. I see some nervousness in his face in this image, which was in the first month we had him, but he is completely relaxed and smart about sharing. It's not a high stakes game. By providing plenty for everyone, sharing stuff is more of a fun game, not a desperate game.

Clicker Training

Since 1996, when I studied with Leslie Whitney at Tails Up! in Falmouth Maine, during a time I was also studying behavior science at Vermont College of Norwich University, in an independent, self-designed major which allowed me to integrate a Buddhist approach and studies with Thich Nhat Hanh with reading lots of B.F.Skinner and Darwin, and training dogs, and anyway, for all these years, I've called myself a "clicker trainer."

I don't know why I used that label. Yes, I was clicking, not luring, not choking, not forcing the dog into a sit. It sure sounded like clicker training to me! But several years after reading Karen Pryor's "Don't Shoot the Dog," it slowly became more significant that I wasn't doing things exactly as a "Karen Pryor Clicker Trainer"(TM) is taught.

Karen Pryor promotes the use of a handheld clicker, and I ditched the handhelds and starting clicking with my mouth about four years ago, partly so I could stop buying the damn things from KPCT. Also, the KPCT academy training, that "click ends the behavior" is something that many of my agility mentors have helped me see as not desirable, not always true, and certainly not not always necessary.

 If I'm clicking my dog to be quiet, hopefully I haven't taught her that the click ends her behavior. I don't like to corrupt my marker signal, and have it serve as a cue to end a behavior, as well as a reinforcement marker signal, yet the Karen Pryor Academy defends the notion that "click ends the behavior" as though it's their religion. And using a Keep Going Signal, and behavior chaining, is increasingly important and useful in my practice, and little in play among KPCT(TM) clickertrainers.

Over the past few years, I've attended seminars with some of the greatest trainers in the world -- such as Carolyn Scott, Mary Ray, Diane Kowalski, Emma Parsons. I went to a KPCT "clicker expo" and got to bathe in the aura of trainers like Kathy Sdao, Kay Lawrence, Attila Szukalek. And I regularly train with local agility trainers like Anne Andrle (who is a nationally ranked competitor), Cindy Ratner,  Liz Harrison. In written communities, and in online training groups, I've been able to learn from some of some of the greatest trainers in the world, like Michele Pouliot, Attila Szkukalek, Tina Humphrey, Kayce Cover. I'm always asking questions  regarding how these great trainers do things-- and no one does everything in exactly the same way. 

Learning to "play the language" of operant conditioning is a lot like learning to play a musical instrument. It requires sensitivity to the animal, and creativity, and love, for great trainers to take the science of operant conditioning, and from it, craft a language that communicates artfully with animals, and turns around to express itself through the behavior of our animals.   It is very inspiring and liberating to observe how a great variety of trainers approach their art.

So, over all these years as I grow as a trainer, I find I'm falling away from the KPCT corporate idea  of  "clicker trainer."  Rather than promote dog training as  "proprietary" knowlege, which is bought and sold and employed as a whole cookie-stamped package, I am finding the better  journey will look more like my other artistic ventures, where I can freely explore technique, make my own discoveries, while cultivating fluency and creativity with an operant language that is spoken among a diverse and multilingual community of trainers.

Fifty

It's my birthday, I'm 50 years old today! Went through all these old photograph albums, and so much not in the albums, but found this photo of me at five years old, at my first birthday party. That first birthday party was a really big deal, I had to talk my mother into having it, even though my brother and sister had already had like two parties each, but then yeah, she let me invite my kindergarten, and some of the kids came. Mommy gave me a card, from Nana I think, and it opened into a crown that said 5. And I was wearing this orange fluffy dress, with one of those nylon puffy slip things. I saw that picture of me at five, today as I turned 50. The memory of me at five hit me so vividly, weirdly, and I felt it so clearly, how I was then, how it felt to wear that 5 on my head, how important and scary and wonderful.

Resource Guarding

"Resource guarding" is the term we use to describe a sort of aggression that occurs around "possessions." The possession might be a food dish, dog bone, a soft space on the couch, or even the dog's human. Sometimes new dogs here do that. They figure out that I dole out treats, so they start to growl or threaten when other dogs approach me, as though saying, "hey, that's MY treat dispenser."

Needless to say, nobody likes resource guarding. It can be a bit dangerous, for example, if a dog is guarding a bone from another dog, and the handler intervenes, there is a chance the handler might get a redirected bite.

So, for some reason, a familiar guest arrived showing a bit more intense resource guarding this visit than last visit. I definitely don't like to see resource guarding escalate. Generally it is a sign of insecurity, where the dog feels he needs to defend his stuff, as otherwise, he fears someone might take it. It's not the worlds most horrible thing when a hissy fit is directed at another dog, but when they are a bit startling, it's time to address the issue.

So, what I've been doing is practicing "trade ya" to make sure this dog is happy about giving me his bone or whatever, and flooding the environment with delicious chewable things, and giving him lots of safe secure un-threatened opportunities to chew. So, out there today are two beef bones, four pig ears, zillions of toys, and I keep passing out dog biscuits and dental chews. This is the opposite of what you might hear about resource guarding, where you have to keep toys and treats picked up. In this sort of situation, where a young dog is just starting to resource guard and it is not an established aggressive behavior, but more of a game that is just a little too serious, I think it, it's best to FLOOD resources onto the floor, so the dog gets a sense of abundance, and gets used to having so many resources available, that the perceived need for guarding is reduced.

It's working. He is finding out that he can chew on a pig ear, and the other dogs aren't going to bother him, because they have their own pig ears. Pig ears are beginning to seem a little less over-the-top exciting. In fact, there are so many good things to "chews" from that he is laying here at my feet, maybe his mouth is exhausted from chewing, not at all worrying about the fact that Tigerlily is chewing on a beef bone a few feet away.

We need to teach dogs that sharing "their" stuff is fun, and painless, nothing to worry about. We can do that by reinforcing the dog's sense that giving up any object is a low cost (there's plenty of objects! I'll trade you this one for that one!), and highly reinforced ( I'll pay you for letting me have it) behavior.

Yard manners

I am SO glad we have fenced in yards! It makes it possible to teach things that would be very difficult to safely train otherwise. So, Matilda is proving herself to be a total sweetheart, and also, she has a LOUD bark! She needs to be able to enjoy the great outdoors without too much barking, and also come when she's called.

Last night the kids left out a plate full of turkey, so I am using it as treats today. First I just call the dogs (Matilda suspects she is one) and they all come running because they know the drill. Yasi calls when she's handing out snacks. I don't call because they have to come inside necessarily, I call because I found this chunk of meat that they might like. Yippee! They come running as though they've got a phone call.

And when I bring the dogs inside, it's the same thing. They come inside to get the meat and then they go right back outside. I don't want the dogs to avoid recalling because they don't want to come inside. I want them to think they are just recalling for a snack, and then, right back outside to play! So they come flying! And when they have lots of outside time, they get so they don't mind the inside time after all.

So, to condition a quick recall with less barking, I wait till Matilda is quiet, and then I go outside and call her for turkey-time. If she is barking at the trees (or some other dog a mile away), I avoid calling her, but just go outside, interrupt her, and sort of shepherd her back inside if I can. Maybe give her some dog food if she cooperates, but nothing spectacular, and if she persists in barking she has to come inside. But I call turkey time when she's quiet. So, she is quiet more and more, because that increases the chance I'll come out and call her (self-discipline required on my part!). And so she comes running, "here's a yummy treat, now get lost kid." So now instead of hiding, barking in the furthest corner of the yard, worried that I might come out and ruin her happy moment (as she was doing two days ago), she is hanging around quietly for longer periods of time, and nearer the door, just in case I might call.

Matilda

My camera is so annoying, I took all these videos of Echo and Matilda playing together, and then when I look at the camera it has one second of video. Rrr. My last easy share camera was great, but this one does not function well on rechargeable batteries. Oh well. Here are some photos I took yesterday. Matilda doesn't like the flash, so she doesn't like the camera, thus the expression on her face.

Matilda and Pirate

Matilda is fabulous with other dogs. Pirate has also improved his canine social skills. They take turns chasing, and let each other take a break. This is really nice dog play.

I love to watch dogs interact. Observations skills are an absolutely essential foundation skill of good trainers. Trainers need to observe a great deal of canine behavior in order to understand what we are seeing.

A belief in punishment...

If you are my student, the first thing I have to learn about you is, what are your training beliefs? If there is a sort of dancing-bear magic to it, do you believe in the magic, or more in the in the bear's chains and muzzle? The muzzle and chains are management, not training. Many students arrive at first training classes with a sort of religious belief regarding the power of punishment as a training system. This belief is an obstacle, and can get in the way of giving focused reinforcement a serious attempt.



Beliefs are often obstacles to new information. I just clipped the following out of an article I found on google news via Chicago Tribune, http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-obama-birth-certificate1dec08,0,7258812.storytoday .

“Nyhan co-wrote a study this year that said journalists' attempts to correct misinformation is unlikely to sway public perceptions because many people want to believe the misperception.

"People often have a strong bias for believing the evidence they want to believe and disbelieving what they don't believe," Nyhan said. "There is less of a sense that we all have a common set of facts we can agree on. There's a polarization, and we can't even agree on the basic factual assumptions to have a debate."

I see this every day in dog training. People WANT to believe in punishment. We want to believe in change that we can make occur anywhere other than inside ourselves.

Another news story today lends credence to what the Buddha has always said, and Thich Nhat Hanh has always said, that happiness is contagious. http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=525793

Well of course. Behaviors are contagious, happiness is a behavior. Beliefs are also contagious. Behaviors/beliefs don’t exist in a vacuum. Behaviors/beliefs exist in relationship, and our most important relationship as dog trainers, is our relationship with ourselves. We need to know what cues we are sending out, what punishment, what reinforcement. Our right hand needs to know what the left hand is doing. Whether we learn this in dog training or in our human relationships, it’s the same: change our own behavior, to change the behavior around us.

Many behaviors are always happening at once. My behavior, the dog’s behavior, the bird’s behavior, the behavior of the paper bag in the wind. We can’t train response to any of it unless we can first train our own response.

Believe you'll need to get rid of the food reinforcement pretty quickly, but intend to keep using punishment as long as you need it? Instead, try using reinforcement for as long as you need it. The more you practice, the more you build that history of reinforcement on the behaviors you like, and the more you will see results that reinforce your faith in reinforcement.

MY sister made this video!

Matt Damon on Palin

Election and The Daily Show

The Nest

Sophi and Echo are gone off to college, and I am incredibly busy, organizing my body and mind and environment to adapt to this change in our lives. And it doesn't feel that my nest is empty, not at all. I still feel my children's presence here, I still feel like a mother hen, but my nest seems to be stretched across a much wider space. As children go off into the world, and really much earlier, our role as mother's concerns us with the condition of the whole world.

My blog topic this year has been "what do I want?" Lately I find myself completing the question as "What do I want to do?" I made a list recently: play guitar and sing, swim, play/train with my dogs, walks, write, share information regarding behavior and community health and lifestyle. Though for many many years, I used to say and believe that I hated money, over the years my understanding of the role of money in the world has really changed. At this point, I have some good ideas of ways to put money to good use in the world, and so I want to earn money. I want to put money to excellent use.

We're looking at property in Bath Maine and I am incredibly excited about it. I love Whole Dog Camp on Peaks Island, but I've felt somewhat constricted regarding what we can offer and do here on the island. If we are able to finance the purchase of what would become Whole Dog Farm, in Bath Maine, we would be situated in a beautiful maritime city, fog horn distance to Portland and Augusta, just about 3 hours North of Boston. The property we are looking at would be ideal for our sort of sustainable lifestyle, and it has a history of being lived in and loved for long periods of time. We could expand our organic gardens and have tremendous flower power! The pictures I have here are from my gardens now. We have a friend here on the island who we hope could serve as a resident manager for Whole Dog Camp, while we offer canine and behavior science programs in both locations.

I've always been a teeny bit superstitious, and never wanted to buy or live in a house where the previous occupants were divorcing or if it seemed like the energy was confused and under a lot of upheaval. Environment influences our behavior so much, perhaps it is often the home that causes the divorce?! Anyway, when I walked into this property, I immediately loved everything about it, but I didn't say that or even look around, because I was thinking I was really only there to look at the land. We've built our passive solar, energy efficient, low toxic home on Peaks Island, and I've assumed our next home would be an energy efficient straw bale home, off the grid, with a urine separating composting toilet. But this old house is sturdy, brick, and in the pretty hallway it seemed the wallpaper was original? From 1850? I actually kept my head lowered, didn't want to look around, because I loved the house. I loved the wallpaper! The windows looked out on the field, there were two chimneys. I could feel warm bodies, a Grandmother and Grandfather. It felt cozy, friendly, completely unpretentious, safe. It was a healthy, loved-in environment.

Now I've done more research. One family kept the home for 136 years, and Hazel Tardiff, who died a few years ago, lived 61 years in that home. Albert and I laugh for the way we seem to be stepping into the shoes of Grandmas and Grandpas who've gone before us (thinking also of our boat, Magus). So I'm putting together a business plan and we are shuffling around our deck of cards. My business on Peaks Island has been successful with 900 year round residents, and 3000 summer residents. Bath's population, which also swells in the summer, is 9000 (plus 6000 entering the city daily to work). And Bath is on the mainland. Though there are lots of dog daycares and dog businesses in Maine, there are none in Bath, and anyway no one in the state is doing what I am doing (focusing on the whole environment and taking a wholistic approach to applied behavior science) with Whole Dog Camp.

Also when I was there walking the land, a neighbor in the distance peered over her steers in a pen and seemed to notice me with the dogs and the realtor in the field. And of course it's too soon to know if this dream will come to fruition, but I felt this friendly welcoming energy. Funny how sometimes everything literally falls into a place. Or maybe that's just what I want.

Attila Szukalek and Fly

I am thinking about Attila Szukalek, and wishing to send him warmest regards, and words of comfort if there are any, and condolences upon the death of his beautiful, brilliant border collie, Fly.

I was thrilled a few years ago to meet Attila Szukalek at the Clicker Expo in Newport, he actually handled Tigerlily for a few seconds there in a seminar. He is such a great teacher. He and Fly performed several demonstrations, and he joined in Kay Lawrence's freestyle seminar. You know how good trainers are really good observers of dogs? I got the impression that Attila didn't miss a speck of behavior going on anywhere! So he was very helpful as he went around the room and helped handlers get a feel for his fluid training style. The highpoint of the expo for me was enjoying his dinner table, hearing him telling stories, and answering burning training questions from around the table. I especially remember one comment he made, about how sometime in the past, he might get mad at Fly when she was making a mistake or something, and talk to her in an angry tone of voice. He regretted ever having yelled! I think that's a pretty humble thing to think about, so self-effacing and self-reflective, the very greatest dog trainer on earth, showing how important it is, as trainers, to pay attention to our own behavior! I was very impressed. Here's an article about Attila and his dog here,
http://www.clickertraining.com/node/884 and another that is very informative here: http://www.caninehorizons.com/Attila_seminar.html .
This is a second major blow to freestyle enthusiasts, as another pioneering dog, Carolyn Scott's dog, Rookie, died just about a month ago. I can't imagine how hard this must be, to lose a dog you've trained for so long. Life isn't for wimps, as they say. Atilla is such an extraordinary trainer, I'm sure he has trained himself to prepare as much as anyone can for these realities of life and death. Oh Attila, I'm sorry. Many people are thinking of you fondly and wishing you peaceful beautiful thoughts at this time of transition. May superior freestyle and Fly live on in all your many admirers!

Wedding

I'll post pictures as they come in (I've been operantly punished, by the manufacturer I guess, for using my camera, it never works right)..oh digression.

Dandylion was just barking so I ran to see what was up, and he's out in the training yard, looking extremely keenly at me, sitting on a mat.

Now Charlie's barking, hold on...

He seemed to be barking at what Dandylion was saying, which was, "train me! I insist! I'm not leaving this mat till you train me!"

Marriage is kinda like mat training. It's a reinforcement station. It's an area of life, let's say, where you can become trained go to collect various reinforcements, provided you meet certain criteria.

Anyway, Matthew and Liz have just begun their training process, Saturday, in a spectacular wedding, which included the perfect (very short yet very intense) torrential rain and thunder storm immediately following their windy, blustery vows.

I only have seconds to write, all these vases and bowls to empty and store, the house is a mess, the dogs want to be trained. But I had this one big realization over the course of this wedding week, which included several marvelous meals, many wonderful people, a midnight ocean swim, (cold water nudity), many heartfelt conversations with my husband.

And I realized, all the ways he is, all the ways I am, it's not really our fault. When he says or does or behaves in some way that seems "wrong" to me, it's just the way he is. We're different. It's not his fault that he doesn't see, or hear, or feel, the things I see or hear or feel. We're structured differently internally. Our brains have been trained differently. We have different things, in terms of chemicals, biology, bone structure, muscle mass, not just in terms of ideas and mental processes, going on inside our bodies.

Sometimes I have really been frustrated with the idea that Albert should "know" certain things, but I had a moment this weekend anyway, where it really dawned on me that there are certain things that he will never know (see, hear, feel, taste, smell, think, dream) the way that I know them, and that just has to be okay. Somehow we all have to put up with how alone, in that way, we inevitably are. I've noticed my genetic tendency to have an almost desperate-looking interest in communicating: I write it, sing it, dance it, grow it, publish in every available format, stand on my head if that's what it takes! Whereas Albert is naturally more content, he seems to have a different understanding his own aloneness. We've been married 24 years, and I still have so much to learn from him.

Rain

Another torrential rain today, and so cool I am wearing wool socks and a fleece jacket. A group of kids came to the training yard today, and Tigerlily got to do all her tricks: therapy dog, freestyle dog and agility dog behaviors. Dandylion came out for a visit too. And the training yard is full of the living flower arrangements that I planted for the wedding, so it feels like we're in a rain forest. Very beautiful.

I want to go swimming and all the rain just makes the water so cloudy, plus it's cold and I feel wimpy. Wimpy and old and fat. Plus I am looking at the tail end of a well-employed summer season, and not sure what will happen through the fall. Will I continue to get these interesting winter board and train clients, and how in the world do people find me anyway? Should I go ahead and finish my several writing projects? Or maybe just book some gigs? Or is playing music in public a complete waste of time and energy? For that matter, is writing a waste of time? Or just keep on keeping on with the writing and music and dogs and flowers, the boats and swimming, hoping that it's okay to have these many loves, that somehow I can make room, time, money for them all?

Is it possible that we all live this way, just bungling along, laying one dumb foot in front of the other, and then suddenly we look up and think, how in the world did I get here? And, where is here?

Charlie

A few new thoughts on my formerly feral dog Charlie. He's actually only been a pet dog for about five months, we brought him home at the end of February, and since he was sick for the first six weeks, and we were gone for three weeks, he's only been in training about three months. So there, he IS making reasonable progress, if only I can stop complaining or wishing to speed it up. As a trainer, we need to stop complaining, ever, about how long learning takes. We just need to evaluate our training plan, stay on top of it, and let the behavior grow. You can't force growth. It just takes how long it takes.

Last night in agility class, after spending several hours in the car ( I came in on the 2:45 boat to do pet therapy with Tigerlily at Spring Harbor, and she was so amazing with the kids! She is so smart! A little boy with MR and also he bangs his head, was rocking repeatedly, and Tigerlily played kiss the baby with him to interrupt his behavior, she was so great. Very loving. And a four year old, not sure what his diagnosis was, but he kinda wanted to pull tail and stuff like that, Tigerlily seems to understand her job better and better. She played a retrieving game with him and she was so happy to do that! I just love her so much! I felt so proud of what a great job she did yesterday at the hospital! And I think she is starting to really understand what she is doing there), but anyway, agility class wasn't till 7:30 pm, I did errands till then, and both dogs at first just got out of the car and looked at me like, "You've got to be kidding." I asked for "down" and they were like, um, NO.

And trainers, let's not forget that our dogs aren't robots. They need to warm up and get in the mood, they need to stretch and breath and sniff around a little. They need to take a leak, and get a drink. So I laid down on the grass and played with my dogs, and I couldn't pay attention to the dogs AND the teacher (so I DO understand this phenomenon, never worry!), and that's the best thing to do anyway, always focus on the dog. The teacher will come around and put you on course later. If the dog doesn't want to do the exercise, just focus on getting the dog playing!

So, I went "back to kindergarten" with Charlie, started clicking and treating eye contact and response to name, and hand targeting and then he started offering some downs, finally. Mosquitos were getting bad, but Tigerlily also just needed time to warm up.

It's a mistake to compare our own dog with what any other dog is doing or thinking, just as it is a mistake to compare one child with another. Each being is where the being is at. We all have our own mood of the moment. You just have to work with what you've got, at that moment in time. It doesn't help to get frustrated, or to get angry. It doesn't help to tear hair and think, "but he should be able to do this! He KNOWS this trick! Look at how the other dogs all have it down!"

At the hospital, a doctor (or something. Not sure what he was. Maybe a social worker? ) seemed mightily grumpy, and I heard he'd had problems with the kids. I saw a couple of angry looking young boys too, but they were behaving just fine while the professional was still displaying angry face, as though angry face was helping to keep those kids in line. It disappointed me that the professional was showing that anger, rather than reinforcing what was apparently improved behavior. Anger clutters up behavior plans with punishment that isn't targeted on the ongoing behavior and it doesn't belong in the trainer's demeanor. The trainer has to be really ready to cheer up and start reinforcing desired behaviors the very instant they start happening, rather than hang onto a disappointed/punishing attitude after good behavior has started happening.

Charlie regresses

Charlie, the wonderful sato who adopted us last February in Puerto Rico, has been trying to revert back to the parts of feral life that he enjoyed. It is common that in the first few weeks of dog ownership, especially with a rescue dog, that the animal is on it's "best" behavior. And Charlie, even back when he was still pooping blood and when he was so skinny you could see every bone in his body, was on very nice behavior.

But lately, now that's he's healthy and happy and safe and about six months into pet doghood, he seems to be remembering the good ole feral days with nostalgia. First, when my sister Kathy was here, Charlie kept jumping up on everyone and everything. I had compassion for that, Charlie is accustomed to using his arms as well as his back legs, imagine how you'd feel if someone told you you couldn't lift your hands above you head? And he was raised in an environment where any food was fair game and trash cans provided his staple diet. But still I started delivering a friendly consequence -- crate or tether or send outside -- when he jumped up without an invite.

So this week he's not jumping up as much, but he just isn't wanting to play my games by my rules. When he was feral, he made his own rules. I throw a ball and he runs to the gate, "let's go for a walk!" I try to make getting the ball the criteria for going for the walk, but then on the walk he isn't recalling as well as he was last week. I call and if he doesn't come flying, I call "too bad" and head back to the house. The idea being that if he wants my companionship, he needs to work at it to get me to stick around.

And these things progress one step forward, one step back. He just has this huge history of being able to reinforce himself, so if I head back to the house, he's not particularly devastated, he just goes to roll in some poop somewhere and then runs back to the house to meet me. Or in the training yard, if he doesn't want to perform a behavior, he might just take off and grab a toy or a bone, or else he might just stand there. My liverwurst apparently doesn't taste quite as good as the ability to reinforce himself.

So, I have to reel him in. By now, he is quite accustomed to his harness (though he even managed to wriggle out of that yesterday) and so I think he will benefit from the umbilical cord game, where I just leash him to me and take away all his ability to go score reinforcements without me for a while. I don't want to make this aversive at all, I will have to reinforce him a great deal for putting up with it, and I'll have to build the duration. But it is important that he learn that the best way to get reinforcements is to play games with the handler. The only way to do this is to make it a lot more difficult for him to collect any big kinda "fun" without me.

Swimming against the current

I just got back from about a one mile ocean swim with Katie. On the way out, we marveled at how fast we were going, and I could see from the way all the ocean vegetation was flowing the same way we were that we were going with the current. The water is 65 degrees -- fantastically comfortable in a wetsuit -- and the water was smooth. It was nice that it was fast or it might have been boring.

On the way back, we were swimming against the current, the tide had come up, and we were riding pretty exciting waves. It was a hard slog to get back to where we started, a boat sorta scared us, we'd lose each other in the waves, but all those difficulties made the swim much more of an adventure. I love waves. I love the exhausted way I feel now, every muscle in my body is warm and I've been thoroughly soaked in salt water. Something happened to the back of my hand out there, maybe it got stung? And now it's swelling up. I guess in these ways, our sufferings make life more interesting. As Debbie told me once, if we didn't have some struggles, life would be boring.

Feeling in love

Daughters, when you feel in love, never forget that the source of your joy lies in your love for yourself. Laying awake last night, in bed with my husband (and two dogs!), I was listening to the foghorns toning in an unusual pattern. They began in a chord struck altogether and then fell apart into an unfamiliar melody, like Christmas bells. The fog must have been coming from all directions. And then it rained heavily, loudly.

I listened, feeling so in love, so full of gratitude, so humbled by everything in my life, in-love with my current ability to hear, for however long it lasts.

I’ve been talking with Liz about love, and the feeling of being-in-love, because she’s so in love, getting married! She and Matthew are writing their vows, and I’m growing the flowers for their wedding. At the same time, Albert and I are entering as new phase, the so-called “empty nest” phase, of our marriage. We sometimes freak ourselves and each other out, displaying newly middle-age feelings, and it’s not always that goggle-eyed romance thing, sometimes we have dull cross-eyed feelings. And so I was telling Liz that she shouldn’t get married or not married because of “feelings.”

You have to expect, if you stay together for any real length of time, to go through a whole bunch of different feelings. That’s what humans do.

But in our culture, we’re taught that the feeling of “being in love” is an indicator of profound truth, a gauge like a thermometer by which we can measure the strength or truthfulness of our relationships. But love is just another feeling. If we are truthful we see that love isn’t something we feel only in the presence of a particular person, but it’s a lovely feeling, a joyful feeling that is always available, rising to the tip of our consciousness when we feel moved with appreciation. Jesus, they say, loved us all. When you feel “in love,” you are a feeling gratitude that benefits the whole world. We should cultivate and creatively apply that feeling to our daily lives, whether or not we have a romantic partner. There are so many sorts of love! Each love is tremendously important, beautiful, valuable.

Everyone, everyplace, is worthy of love if our own heart can open and accept, truly accept, the imperfect as perfect. In this way, our own beautiful heart makes love.

Visiting Dad in the nursing home, he gave me this smile (from the depths of his own suffering and loss), and something about it struck me as so beautiful. I allowed that feeling to bloom in my heart. True, at times in my younger years I was so mad at Dad, times I raged and didn’t understand him – but when my heart overflowed with gratitude and forgiveness for every single moment of both of our lives, that was a good thing. Nothing was anybody’s fault, everything made sense, it all fit together. Our forgiveness and gratitude for each other was a work of art for both of us.

Gratitude is a feeling that recognizes temporality. Any life lasts just a short while. Maybe we get married because of the hurried pace of life, but maybe it’s because of the way life goes on.
I have a hearing problem, but the world is still musical. Similarly, love is always there, even if we can’t always sense it. Each partner feels love independently, with their own imperfect senses. In a long marriage, we don’t get this deal where we can just go around love-deaf as a bat, dependent on the other’s ability to sense love, and make life bearable. We have to take care of our own ability to feel love. We have to believe it is there and listen for it. Even in a marriage, we have to practice gratitude, deep listening to everything, in the quiet aloneness of our own private heart.

Georgia OKeefe

The Portland Museum of Art has a Georgia OKeefe exhibit that I found very inspiring, and it answered some of my questions about what it might mean, to me, to continue to feel in love and beautiful and to be achievement oriented in later life. Daughters, no I am not discussing petty ideas about beauty, but what does it mean to be beautiful, truly beautiful, as we age? Skin creams are fine, but by themselves they can't cultivate beauty. We cultivate beauty in our hearts and thoughts and deeds. Beauty is a form of joy. If we aren't full of joy, it's impossible to be beautiful.

I think one of the sad things that happen to people as we age is when we lose our idealism, or passion for life. When we've been bumped a few too many times by accidents and losses, we become afraid of the future, and lose our joy, or maybe we just feel superstitously inhibited in expressing joy. Maybe we think that our sadness can better twist the arm of fate. Maybe with cynical sadness, we feel in better control of our fate. Maybe a passionless demeanor seems more realistic. Maybe hopelessness seems less likely to disappoint or surprise us.

But hopelessness isn't beautiful. Beauty is a fire in the eyes. Beauty is brave and slightly foolhardy, and doesn't really worry as much as it could. Beauty jumps up and down, and laughs loudly!

Even when something awful happens, it's never wrong to be happy, to feel grateful. I'm thinking about Allan St. James, of course, and how beautiful he is. Thinking about him and how he faces his challenges can inspire us when we think about how we want to cultivate beauty in our own lives. Georgia Okeefe was that way too. Her beauty as she aged was the result of her courage, her passions, her decision to live a life of joy, her conviction and determination that to be happy and to uphold her commitment to her own truth and never allow her commitments to be compromised by natural challenges and opposing forces.

When Dad was in all those nursing homes, I saw people who had been curled into a fetal position for years, and it frightened me. What happened to Allan frightened me. I realized, any of us could end up that way, it can happen in the blink of an eye, and the idea of losing what we have really frightened me. But fear itself is a loss. It makes us shrink. Daughters, don't be afraid of your choices. Give yourself entirely to your commitments, don't give yourself half-way. Do what you believe in doing. Don't be afraid.

Georgia Okeefe accepted her fate, she gave herself entirely to what she believed, and she was still blossoming into her 80's and 90's. She wasn't shocked or downtrodden by her losses. Her losses were nothing, they were just things she was willing to give away. Generousity means an ability to accept loss peacefully, without fear. All her life, Okeefe was beautiful and in love -- open, receptive, appreciative, giving, absorbing --beauty was her life, and love was her world.

What I want

My theme this year has been to think about what I want, and I found this article today that encouraged me to do financial planning in that direction, beginning with listing all the things I want to do with my life and then prioritizing, coming up with a top five. They suggest taking 60 seconds to write down all the things you want to accomplish with your life, and then picking the top five from that. I'll embarass myself, but here's what I came up with at first:

Feel in love
write some books
achieve in behavior science
achieve physical health and strength
be beautiful
travel the world
see some jungles
learn to scuba
have close friends
be a fun Gramma/Aunt
help children

And then I just circled the first five, figuring I didn't really know what they meant anyway, and so I could let their meaning be flexible. Then my neighbor, Johanna, told me her Bernese Mountain dog just had twelve puppies, and I thought, I would like to choose two of them, expose them to early neurological stimulation, and train and place them as service dogs.

I've been surveying service dog organizations, creating a chart that at a glance would let a perspective client have a sense of training organizations various styles and approaches, and working on some articles that would be helpful to people looking for a service dog, and it makes me realize that there are some really FANTASTIC organizations out there doing some fantastic things, but there is definitely a need for more.

Spunky Kate Cinnamon Casserole 1989-2008

Spunky died yesterday. We had been expecting it, so Albert dug a hole for me to bury her in before he left (he's taking Echo to visit her college, and I'm here working, and repainting the downstairs).

Spunky was healthy till last February, but since then it's been a steady decline. I was grateful that I didn't need to dig a hole. All I do was sing to her, and then tuck her back into the earth. Spunky was a very good cat for a very long time.

Tigerlily surprises us

Tigerlily wowed me in two ways this past weekend. One, I've been taking her for off-leash walks, building her ability to remain at heel and respond to cues around all sorts of distractions. It's interesting to observe. It takes SO much mental energy for her to remain at heel beside me, that she really can't pay attention to anything else. She appears to go into a little trance on long walks, she sort of just hangs her head and gets in the zone, like swimming laps. I told Albert it looked like we beat her, the way she was so surrendered into the behavior. This was the first time I took her on an off-leash expedition with Albert, and having him there made it possible to go a bit further, because we trained her to walk between us, and that reduces the stimulation available to her from the environment, supports her in ignoring passing bicycles, skateboards, kids, dogs, cars, firetrucks, all of which passed us with Tigerlily remaining at her very introspective heel or sit or down.
We even stopped on the side of one of the island's busier roads, and visited with Nancy and Mike and their labradoodle, and although Tigerlily did react for one second when the doodle came over to give her a hug, Tigerlily's off-leash behavior on the whole was pretty impressive. It was like there was a leash. We were so proud. On the beach, I played freestyle/ball games with her, wowing beach goers as they watched her twist, twirl, pop, jump over my arms, weave figure eights around me, do long back away, and turn back to back through my legs, and galloping send out and arounds, all this rewarded with the opportunity to splash into the water, swim out to retrieve a tennis ball. So mcuh fun!

So, to make this long story shorter, later I decided to take both her and Charlie through the woods, and off-leash low criteria romp where Tigerlily wouldn't have to remain at heel, but she could zip and zoom and enjoy time to be a dog. And we were having such a great time, I was just getting ready to remove Charlie's harness (didn't want it getting hooked on a branch) when Albert said, "Someone's coming." I took Charlie's harness and turned to see two dirt bicyclists appear, young girls. And glanced back at Tigerlily, and she was poised to do something out of control. "Hand!" I said, thinking that might work, but she exploded off, barking "stop! stop!" at the cyclists, but they just kept right on coming into our space. "Please stop!" I said to the cyclists, hoping to God they'd believe me because in spite of the way Tigerlily's hysteria seemed to be escalating -- she was nipping at a cyclists ankle -- they were determinedly still pedaling right towards us. "Stop, you're provoking the behavior!" I actually said that, and the second they stopped pedaling, Tigerlily fell still and silent.

"She bit me!" the young girl said, and I asked, "can I see?"

And sure enough, she had some scratch marks and a little red dot on her leg. Mortified, I apologized.

"It's not bad," the girl said, "but it could have been worse. Don't you think she should be on-leash?" I looked at Tigerlily who was standing there with a confused expression on her face. "Yes," I said. "I guess she should."

So that happened Friday. Saturday and Sunday we brought bicycles into the training yard. First I just reinforced Tigerlily for performing behaviors around the bicycles. I used them sorta like agility obstacles. Then I had Albert get on the bike, and reinforced her for ignoring that. Then Tigerlily practiced stationary behaviors (sits, downs) and also moving behavior (send to table, mat, heel) while Albert kept popping "out of nowhere" on a bicycle. It's the sudden environmental change that often gets us, so I want to start practicing "surprising" Tigerlily with all kinds of things, slowly increasing the intensity of the "surprise," see if I can get her to start recognizing "surprises" as a training game. I want "surprise" to become a cue for "look to Jenny for next cue."

Racism on Fox

This just infuriates me. We've got to do something about it.

Maia

It's amazing how fast dogs learn once you have a plan in place. Maia, a beautiful one year old standard poodle, is still quite a puppy, doing puppyish things like jumping up, mouthing, and destroying everything possible. She is a sensitive soul, what we call a "soft" dog. That means she is a bit insecure and needy, and she reacts -- generally by jumping all over, submissive urinating, or mouthing frantically -- to anything which escalates her uncertainty, for example, if someone speaks to her a bit sharply.

Unfortunately, as she's grown, her destructiveness, mouthiness and jumping has grown more annoying, and so people get annoyed with her, and that makes her more insecure, which makes her do all her annoying behaviors more often.

My strategy in getting her over the hump involves managing to prevent her from practicing her undesirable behaviors and strongly reinforcing incompatible behaviors. So, for this crazy jumping up, I've practiced by tethering her, and approaching her to pet her as long as four paws are on the ground. As soon as a paw starts to come off the ground, I back quickly outside her reach, yet I pounce in to love her up as soon as her paws are back on the ground. This has worked very well. In addition, when she is off tether and jumps up, I move away, closing a door and leaving her alone on the other side of it, whereas when I pass her and she has four paws on the floor, I make sure to bend over and cuddle her generously. In just this long weekend getting control of these simple consequences has changed this young dog from a frantic panic jumper into a sweet mellow dog who seems all but glued to the floor! It's amazing.

The mouthiness I'm retraining by reinforcing her for touching her nose to the palm of my hand. As long as it is just the nose hitting the palm of my hand, she gets a click and treat. But if I feel a tooth or see her opening her mouth, no click or treat. You can actually see the light dawning in her eyes. She'll mouth and mouth and then look at me quizzically and try the nose. Aha! Nose, nose, nose. Eventually we'll put more of a negative consequence on the mouthiness, but for now, it is making a huge difference in her confidence to put emphasis on rewarding the things I DO want, and ignor the things I don't as much as possible. This helps her relax and that helps her behavior.

I've also kept her on a leash around my waist for several hours each day, I've heard this called "umbilical cord" method, don't know who invented it, and also I tether her in the kitchen while we eat our meals. In this way I help her to learn the right way to behave in the house. When she is on a leash , it is easy to prevent her from counter surfing or destroying shoes or getting into other mischief , and she really does need this "good manners" practice indoors. Although the owner has been hoping that she'll outgrow her problematic puppy behaviors, puppy misbehaviors too often grow bigger while the puppy waits for someone to have time to teach him what he needs to know. Maia is acting like a completely different dog today. No more frantic behavior. She had been getting a mixed message about what was expected of her. Now that we've simplified and clarified what will and won't be reinforced, this information has calmed her down greatly.

Boston Terrier

I love my job, partly because I get to meet all these cool dogs. Right now I have a Boston Terrier spending the week. Her name is Stella and as soon as I get better batteries for the camera (aargh, camera troubles), I'll show you some pictures. Apparently, this breed of dog was used as the inspiration for creating aliens in the movies, because she looks exactly what we think aliens look like. She retrieves and delivers extremely well, she would be a very useful dog around the house, but when you go to take the whatever out of her mouth, you have to be careful that you don't accidentally stick your fingers in her eyes. She's got very big eyes, very big ears. I think maybe she' s been debarked? Her voice is quite muffled. Not a big one for food treats, she will do anything for a chance to get a ball, so I had her shaped yesterday to jump over my legs, and to follow along a line of jumps to get a ball. She is a blast and never seems to tire. In fact, I find myself watching the clock, and providing enforced rest every ten minutes or so. She has the heart of a much larger dog, really a working temperment. And a face, what a face. Once you get used to it, she's so beautiful.

Hiding from Thunder

Thunder and lightening has always been a bit scary, but since Evans was struck and killed by lightening last year (not on Peaks Island, but in Maine, and Evans is from Peaks Island) it feels scarier.

We get serious booming, shake the house thunder, followed by blinding flashes of light. Some summer nights, the real event is taking place at a distance, and it's peaceful to sit on a boat and watch the lightening twinkle across the sky. But lately we've had a couple of storms where I crawled into the closet, and was quickly joined by the husband and every dog in the house. It was waves of thunder, that approached, blasted overhead, and then went on by. Then comes another.

And Charlie's anxiety with the storms is definitely showing signs of evolving. Now when he hears it arrive, he'll hoot, then come get me, and try to steer me into the closet. I've got it lined with dog beds, so it's kind of a nice place to be. And Tigerlily lays down with her head smothering me. I don't know how the dogs can tell when a big one is about to hit, or if I'm imagining this, but just before a big one arrives, Tigerlily's breathing seemed to get more rapid and she'd lift her head, like she was expecting it, and then kaboom. Or else she had rapid breathing and lifted head quite often, and we were getting kaboomed. But other than that, during the last big one we cuddled and laughed and felt almost bored and then not bored, then bored again. It wasn't scary in the closet. Albert asked me, "Is there a name for that behavior?" Charlie had his nose in the corner under the coats, tucked into a furry round disk, but he didn't cry or whimper. "Hiding?" I guessed. Hiding is a great example of what I'd think of as an "instinctual" behavior, but then again, what behavior ISN'T instinctual, at some level?

Lola-- Good news!

Great news! It sounds like Lola has found her forever home. Having been rescued from Hurricane Katrina, and spent a year going back and forth between Lubec Maine and Peaks Island Maine, her owner says that she put up a sign in a local deli, explaining her predicament, and a woman who works there went right over, ripped the sign of the wall and said, "This is my dog. I don't want anyone else to get her."

And all the little details seem made to match. The woman understands the importance of keeping Lola muzzled in public, and she doesn't have any other pets or children. Lola met and seemed to really like (licked her like crazy) this woman. So, assuming it goes as planned, Lola will be able to hang out unmuzzled around her new home (unlike when she visits here), and only wear the muzzle when she goes on outings. I'm so glad! Lola is wolfie, wildish, moody, brilliant, beautiful, and just so eager to devote herself to her person. She's not designed to be a social butterfly wisking around doggie daycares. When she doesn't have other dogs or cats to contend with, she is easy and fun to be with, fun to train. It seems that now she will have a chance to really settle into her own quiet Queendom. I hope the new owner will keep me informed about how Lola is doing!

Writing Fast

I can't write fast enough to keep up with all the things I want to write. Like how Bailey is the trickiest dog ever, because he's just so fast and athletic, and he thinks that food is a trick. And also how Lola, the Akita, is looking for a new home. I saw that coming for a while, and I am kinda recommending it actually. You've seen Lola, who I've muzzle trained, and whose owner ships out and works all around the world on boats. Lola's owner is thinking, this isn't great for Lola, to be moving back and forth between households and lets face it, boarding your dog to the tune of $12,000 per year -- hard to justify doing that for 6 or more years. I mean, hey, I'll take her money, but she could donate that kind of money to an orphanage and save more lives. Lola should be living in a home with her family, not in boarding school for years and years, and yes, Lola knows the difference. She knows who sleeps in the bedroom and who sleeps in the living room, and she wants to be the type of dog who gets to sleep in the bedroom.

Anyway, 3 year old Lola is trained. She's beautiful and smart, and really lithe and athletic looking. Although she can be quite a couch potato, she also likes to bounce around the fenced-in yard. Lola wants to be Queen of the household, so she would do best as the "only" pet. Sleeping in your hall, you've got your own personal life guard on duty, but she is discriminating. She doesn't hassle the neighbors or the meter-reader . She does not display territorial aggression, she's great with regular size people, but she would likely kill a cat if given the opportunity, she has aggressed on other dogs, and I'd never trust her with a little kid. So when mingling, she wears her muzzle, which she loves and she's chill and relaxed and a fine one for just hanging out quietly anywhere. Lola retrieves and delivers, sends to hand and mat targets, sits and downs with distance and duration, she walks fabulously on a loose leash. Though it's important to keep her muzzled for safety, she responds well to her name and is readily redirected.

I think Lola would be a real prize for a retired type, or a work-at-home owner. Lola has learned several service behaviors. Although she is not suitable for public access, at home she would be very happy to offer service behaviors for a "training abled" handler. Lola has a working dog temperment, and I believe that in the right household, with consistent muzzle management in public, she would be worth much more than her weight in gold.

Extinction plus reinforcement

Bailey was putting up a stink in the crate, whooping, whining, and making an occassional bark. Echo said to me, "I don't thi