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The Cognitive Dog
Class 15: reactive dogs, nerdy dogs & a parting word
Scuppers
I don’t know if you’d be interested, but...
The beginning
• 7 months old living with breeder & mom, sister, 2 other dogs
• Picked on by other pups
• Spotty socialization (dog park, shows, drop-in puppy class)
• Good training at home (sit, come, crate, housebroken, great manners..., no apparent people issues)
• Confident in breeders house, easy introduction to our house, basket case at Gemini...
• Reactive on walks, but no redirection
Background
The 4 footed cast...
Backyard interactions
The early days
• Immediate socialization: walks, people, dog classes
• too soon and over-the-top?
• walks accompanied by Sydney...
• Feisty-Fido by Patricia McConnell
• Great book, easy to put into practice, but rushed it.
• Neutered at 8 months
The early days
• Dog classes
• CC while being a spectator
• Attention
• Rally
• Agility
• Fiesty Fido Agility
• In general, stressed but not reactive in class
The early days
• Walks
• Not reactive to dogs in yards, or distant dogs in a park: orient or sit & watch
• Extremely reactive to dogs on leashes
• Occasionally reactive to passing cars
• General pattern when interacting with another dog: approach fearfully, sniff and then lunge, bark & nip. The more confident the dog, the less likely Scuppers would attack, but...
• Extensive CC and OC
The early days
• Best intentions, well-informed intentions, and I did a lot right, but...
• Even with all my knowledge I underestimated difficulty
• Ignored stress. In retrospect I would have gone much, much, slower
• Too much emphasis on OC initially and not enough on CC
• Finding excuses to reward as opposed to rewarding for criteria
• Too little emphasis initially on play & tugging
If only agility trials were held in the
backyard...
His agility debut...
Not loving life...
Thyroid...
• Demodectic mange when a little pup. Possible sign of auto-immune issues
• Chronic long grade yeast ear infections
• Bladder/Urinary Tract Infection
• Low-Normal thyroid reading
• Weight gain
• Excessive timidity/reactiveness
Thyroid
• Soloxine
• Significant improvement vis-a-vis timidity
• Lessons...
• You may know more...
• Full panel: Michigan State
• Be polite but persistent
• But is thyroid downstream symptom or cause?
Tugging
On going...
• Feisty-fido agility classes
• Earthdog
• Walks
• CC: throw food when another dog approached
• OC: feed while he sat as another dog approached
• Picked up if dog got too close
On-going until January of last year...
• Reached a plateau WRT other dogs on leashes
• On-going reactivity WRT passing cars
• This january, Scuppers bit a dog walker with whom he was familiar. Seemed to be a fear response...
My response, a great deal of soul-searching then...
• Behavioral consult at Tufts
• Continue on-going Behavior Mod
• Tools to make it easier for the Behavior Mod to work
• Higher dose of Soloxine
• Prozac
• GL when walking
• Crate
5 months later...
• GL made a huge difference on walks
• More settled & lower reactivity:
• Quite noticeable with respect to passing cars, joggers...
• Higher threshold & quicker recovery with strange dogs
• Rare that he orients and barks at other dogs (except in cars)
• Much easier for him to focus on me for OC
12 months later...
• Noticeably less timid. Become more of a dog’s dog...
• Has turned into a real dirt dog.
• Q’d in his first agility competition
• Dog issues have not disappeared...
Scuppers making friends
The journey is the reward
Some final thoughts...
continuation from last week...
Dogs are emotional beings: the amygdala leads and the cortex follows...
Two paths to action: the low road (coarse features of situation) and the high road (complex analysis), and dogs are especially primed to react to the low road.
Find a dog with a good amygdala and soup of neurotransmitters
The power of classical conditioning
• Associate a good thing with a bad thing
• throw food on the ground, before, during, after.
• start out from a comfortable distance
• don’t ask anything of the dog
• if they react, move farther away
Emotion: self-rewarding behaviors...
• Broad view of “reward” and “reinforcement”
• Some motor patterns (typically appetitive motor patterns) may be self-motivating & self-rewarding...
• Terriers chase because “it feels good to chase”
• Typically skills that (a) may require practice to get right, and (b) even when done right, often fail...
• Just because there is no cheese, doesn’t mean there is no reinforcement signal!!!
Emotion: self-rewarding behavior
• It may be hard for your dog not to perform self-rewarding behaviors & even harder to break out of a self-rewarding behavior...
• The tricks...
• Be ahead of your dog
• Manage your dog’s environment (avoid rehearsals)
• Remember Premack: Use a self-rewarding behavior as the reward for a behavior that isn’t.
Emotion: Temperament
• Shy-Bold Continuum
• Playfulness
• Curiosity/fearlessness
• Predatory
• Social
• Threat/Reactivity
Emotion: Temperament
• Interplay of genes/development/developmental context/learning
• Temperament tests/breeder impressions are indicative, but not predictive (esp. if done before fear period)
• Mom & Dad are a good indicator
Learning & Training
• Your dog has to be emotionally ready to learn
• Training is about motivation, timing and consistency
• Positive reinforcement teaches dog what to do
• Punishment teaches dog what not to do
• potential for serious & unintended side-effects
Learning & Training
• Be a shaper not a lurer
• Let the dog find its way, but be there to guide it along the way.
• Be a splitter not a lumper
• Break down a behavior into its smallest bits and train those.
Learning & Training
• Your goal as a trainer should be to be the source of all things good and wonderful.
• Positive not permissive.
• Its ok to control access to resources
• Find reasons to reward rather than excuses to feed
• Find the thing your dog is nuts about and use it.
• Cookie cutters are for cookies, not dogs
Learning & Training
• Don’t read too much into the highs or the lows...
• Sometimes best to think of yourself as training someone else’s dog (takes the emotion out of it...)
• Remember what may seem easy to us, is a “triple lutz on national TV” to your little dog
• Be patient, calm, and confident and you will be rewarded
Learning & Training
• Is a journey to be enjoyed by both, rather than a means to a goal.
In the end...
• Dogs are special, but this does not imply special cognitive mechanisms and abilities, rather implies ‘special’ interplay of genes/development/learning that ‘we see but through a glass darkly’
A parting thought...
• “For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, ... living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time...” - Henry Beston
• Humility, awe and a passion to know more