by Sue Barns | on November 10th, 2009 | in Features, Your Questions
http://www.flickr.com/photos/druidicparadise / CC BY 2.0
A few weeks ago, Grayson posted some tips on how to prevent your dog from wolfing down his food. That post drew a criticism for referring to dogs as scavengers rather than straight-up hunt-kill-eat carnivores.
Physiologically, dogs are certainly carnivores. This is evident in the structure of their digestive tract, from their sharp, flesh-tearing teeth, through the bone-dissolving acidity of their stomachs, to their short span of intestine—useful for absorbing fat and protein but wholly inappropriate for digesting vegetable matter. I’ve fed my dogs a raw diet for 10 years. Assistance Dogs of the West also advocates and feeds a raw diet, and has for many years. We have seen remarkable benefit of this sort of feeding in the health, temperament and longevity of our service dogs. Here’s some more info on the how and why of feeding raw.
Although dogs share the majority of their genetic makeup with wolves and can interbreed, in many ways they are distinct. Since their hook-up with humans tens of thousands of years ago, many physical and behavioral changes have taken place. There are many theories on how wolves came to be domesticated into dogs, but a likely route was by learning to scavenge for scraps around human settlements. This behavior was the source of my suggestion that dogs be fed more than once a day—together with personal experience, and veterinary recommendations. Certainly dogs can get by on a single, large meal per day, and there are people who feed this way. As with all interactions with our dogs, it is up to each of us to determine what best serves the health and happiness of our companion animals.
by Sue Barns | on October 30th, 2009 | in Features, Media, Time Wasters
Hey, it's Halloween
Links to some of my favorite clicker training videos and people:
http://www.youtube.com/user/supernaturalbc2008
http://www.youtube.com/user/kikopup
http://www.youtube.com/group/traininglevels
http://www.youtube.com/user/kpct
http://www.youtube.com/user/LeslieMcDevitt
http://www.nerdbook.com/sophia/movies.html
by Sue Barns | on June 15th, 2009 | in Books, Features, Media
Reaching the Animal Mind
In her new book, Reaching the Animal Mind ($25, Scribner), Karen Pryor offers a lively, wide-ranging overview of the use of operant conditioning for training, well, nearly any animal you can think of. Ms. Pryor is easily the best-recognized of clicker trainers, having popularized the term and practice over the last 30 years or so, starting with her hugely popular book Don’t Shoot the Dog. She uses her experience as a trainer of an enormous variety of animals—from hermit crabs to dolphins to people—to explain the technology of operant conditioning in an entertaining, insightful way. The book interweaves personal history, observation, and science to provide the reader with a profound understanding of how clicker training works, and how it allows communication between humans and other species in ways that other training methods cannot.
As most experienced clicker trainers have noticed, clicker training has some unusual properties. Training times are often dramatically reduced by the clicker, animals sometimes learn a new behavior after a single click. Generalization of trained behaviors is faster, and the clicker is excellent for addressing fear-related problems. And animals (and people) seem to find being trained with the clicker very motivating, much more fun than with reward-based training alone. Pryor went in search of explanations for these effects, interviewing neuroscientists and others in an effort to understand “how” clicker training works. This section of the book provides some tantalizing preliminary information on this topic, and I hope it will spark additional investigations in future.
Personally, I found the second to last chapter the most interesting, as it describes application of clicker training to people. A recent development, “TAG” teaching (Teaching with Acoustical Guidance) is being used for everything from working with autistic children to improving golf swings to increasing efficiency on commercial fishing ships. We are animals, too, and the same principles of learning apply. With the addition of language to speed the process, TAG teaching provides a fun, efficient method to train people at many tasks.
The gift that clicker training offers us, as Pryor eloquently describes, is the opportunity to enter into a mutually rewarding training relationship with animals, including people. When we remove force, pain, and domination from the learning process and substitute patience, respect, and communication, we open the door to true partnership. For anyone interested in training others, human or animal, this transition is crucial, and Reaching the Animal Mind provides an outstanding introduction to the philosophy and technology needed to get there.
by Sue Barns | on May 18th, 2009 | in Your Questions
Cute, but Brutus is a toy-hoarding monster
Q. My dog, Brutus, loves his toys to the point where he attacks other dogs that try to play with them. And it’s not just his toys. Say we’re at the dog park and there is a dog that is playing with a tennis ball: He will steal the tennis ball from the other dog and get very mean if that dog tries to take it back or even share it. At home, I have to take his toys away and put him in “time out” which is him being sent to his crate. I don’t think it’s a matter of lack of exercise; I let him run next to my scooter until he’s tuckered out, which he absolutely loves. Any suggestions on how to stop this possessiveness/obsession?
A. Possessiveness is an entirely natural behavior for dogs and, in the case of dog-dog interactions, a difficult one to modify. From Brutus’s perspective, his behavior works—and every time he successfully steals a toy or defends one from another dog, his obnoxious behavior is rewarded. I know of no way to decrease his interest in toys—I expect that “time outs” will have the opposite effect—and I don’t want to deprive him of what are obviously a great source of joy in his life! But here are some thoughts on improving his etiquette around other dogs:
- I suspect you’ve figured this out by now, but… Don’t give your dog toys when he’s around other dogs.
- Train your dog to drop toys (or anything else that’s in his mouth) on cue. When your dog has a toy, offer him another, better toy or treat. As he opens his mouth to take the new thing, say “drop” and praise him enthusiastically when he does. If he likes to retrieve, you can throw the toy for him as a reward. This is going to take a lot of training with every toy he has before it becomes automatic. Make your dog think that whenever you say “drop,” an even cooler toy or fabulous treat will appear. You will get lots of use out of this command, and you can use it when Brutus steals another dog’s toy. We’re working on this one with Danger at ADW, now.
- Train your dog to have solid leave it and come (recall) commands, and use them to prevent stealing other dogs’ toys. This is especially important if your dog is inclined to get ugly with other dogs. As your letter indicates, you recognize that he lacks self-control around toys, so it’s your responsibility to provide that control. Just like you wouldn’t let a son (or daughter) bully other kids at the local playground, you can’t let your pup bully other dogs at the park for their toys!
by Sue Barns | on May 12th, 2009 | in Features, Training
Danger with the object of his torment
In operant conditioning, you often hear about positive reinforcement: the dog earns some reward for performing a desired behavior. But there are three other ways to influence behavior that fall under the same training theory. The four ways, broken down simply are:
- Give your dog something good–a treat for a sit
- Take away something good–a timeout for bad behavior
- Give your dog something bad–the shock of an e-collar
- Take away something bad–releasing the pressure on a choke collar for a sit
In general, we try to keep our training to the first two items both because they’re more effective and because they produce fewer unwanted side effects like bolting and loss of the dog’s confidence in the handler. But certain dogs just won’t avoid temptation by positive reinforcement alone.
Enter punishment. Specifically, we’re going to talk about positive punishment–the sort that’s generally associated with rolled up newspapers, e-collars, and the likes. When it comes to greeting other dogs, Danger has a long history of lunging out to “say Hi!”, which he evidently finds enjoyable. Further, Grayson’s yanking on his lead isn’t changing his behavior. He just ignores the nagging. So we’ve got to find some way to get him to stop. In Danger’s case, we discovered that his aversion to water could be an advantage. I had Grayson and Danger walk across the room past another dog. When Danger pulled out to greet, Grayson gave him a quick squirt of water in the face and that ended that.
But positive punishment (the proverbial stick) is dangerous territory for both dog and handler. The punishment has to be severe enough to actually stop the behavior and not so much as to actually injure the dog physically or mentally. Steve White, a well-known police dog clicker trainer, has come up with eight rules for punishing your dog. They underscore just how hard it is to get punishment to work properly without undue fallout. The best reason to avoid punishment is that it tends to be reinforcing to the punisher–the owner feels some satisfaction in “getting even” with the dog, and turns to punishment more and more often to change behavior . Not good.
The Eight Rules
1. The punishment must be something the animal dislikes and something the animal does not expect;
2. The punishment must suppress the unwanted behavior, otherwise it’s just plain abuse;
3. The punishment must be of the perfect intensity. Too much and the dog will shut down. Too little and the dog develops resistance to punishment;
4. The punishment must happen immediately after the behavior;
5. The punishment must be associated with the behavior, not you! Otherwise your presence is a signal that punishment may occur, and your absence is one that it will not. The result? A “sneaky” dog;
6. The punishment must happen every time the behavior occurs. Otherwise, you may put the undesirable behavior on a variable schedule and make it even tougher to break;
7. There must be an alternative for the dog. Give him an opportunity to perform an acceptable behavior in order to escape or avoid the punishment;
8. Punishment must never be used to the extent that punishment outweighs reinforcement … from the dog’s perspective.
If you can’t follow all eight of these rules, you’re probably better off avoiding the use of punishment. Heck, even if you can follow all eight rules, it’s better to try positive reinforcement before resorting to punishment.
