corvus

Look up "natural dog training blog" on google. A lot of it is based on food rewards, but with the ultimate aim of having the dog prefer a good game of tug to anything else. It might help you.

Yeah, I see what you are saying Jesskah. I think your average pet home people don't care much about the wheres and whys and quirks of their dog's behaviour as long as the dog is easy to get along with. Ultimately that means the dog is friendly but not, say, howling in excitement and shredding someone's legs. That's something that is pretty easily achieved just by teaching rules. You want cuddles, you sit first etc. Would neutralisation better achieve the "friendly but not over the top" aim most people have for their pet dogs?

Anita, I love your posts. I feed Penny in a crate usually, and Kivi gets the run of the yard with his bone. This is partly because Penny needs to lose weight and partly because she's the one that gets obsessed with food and she easily feels insecure about it. If she sits in the crate and snarls at Kivi every time he walks past and gives me sad puppy looks every time I walk past, I assume she isn't actually hungry and take the food away. I give her about ten minutes. I used to put their bowls up after their mince meal but I have become lazy lately as they both finish so fast and haven't been getting mental about the bowls on the floor. Kivi lets me know when he is hungry by licking Penny's bowl. It's much easier this way if you have a dog that feels insecure about food, and kinder on the insecure one if they know they have a place they can eat where they will be safe from the other dog. As everyone else has said, just remember that he is still settling in and working both you guys and Dakota out. He will want to figure out how far he can push Dakota so he knows when it's a good idea to leave her alone. Penny is the same. I also agree that you set your rules and otherwise leave the dogs to it. In my house, I won't stand for stealing food or snapping for no real reason other than that Penny is feeling old and grumpy. They still do it, but they know they'll get kicked out of the house if I catch them at it.

Excuse me, but I can and I did. All animals respond in much the same way to good things and bad things, you know. It's actually universal. I could compare this to just about any animal on the planet that has a brain and it would be relevant. Dogs are just not special in that way. And I don't know what those quotation marks are for. He is indeed a hare, not a big, leggy rabbit. One of the things I love about having a big cuddly drop-dead gorgeous dog that loves everyone is the opportunities it presents. Wherever we go we get people asking about Kivi Tarro and going ga ga over his sweet and loving disposition. As far as I'm concerned, that gives me warm fuzzies, the person getting Lapphund cuddles warm fuzzies, and quite possibly Kivi warm fuzzies as well. I've never met a Lappie that was luke warm about strangers and I think that's one of the things people find so attractive about the breed, and I guess why they want to learn more about them in a lot of cases. Is there a particular reason why a handler needs to be the bestest thing in the world to a dog? Looking at my Lapphund who is a natural snugglebum and is in his element when being a social butterfly, but will still stick with his people and can be easily won over from a tempting scenario with a treat... well, I don't really see any benefits and I see a few possible downsides. And that's ignoring my weird preference for a dog that blows me off on a regular basis. On the other hand, if I end up with a Basenji like I so dearly want, I think this might be a big help in establishing oneself as something worth paying attention to. Especially considering dogs like Basenjis are a little out of their element in suburbia. I'm still trying to get my head around creating artifical values, though. Finding the right reward is just so fun. I only wish my cuddly Lapphund cared about something interesting so I could use it, but apart from his weird obsession with birds, he doesn't need much encouragement to do things I want him to do for the most part. It makes for a lazy trainer in me and I hardly ever learn anything from him.

A couple of things: My mother had this pup once that went horribly wrong. I think looking back we realise that he was one of those ones born a bit scared, but it wasn't obvious because he would deal with anxiety with aggression. A get them before they get me mentality. He was really good with my mother and I think he trusted her deeply, but nothing she could do could convince him that something he thought was bad was safe to ignore. We both think that his socialisation regime did more harm than good and probably contributed heavily to how things went downhill, but I wonder how one can have a fighting chance with a dog like that by "being the alpha". I hear that all the time and I also hear all the time that you have to lead by example and ignore the source of the fear for your dog. If you do that with my Penny, though, you make it worse. I know because I believed in this method and I did it and it made it worse. What made it better was putting my arm around her and telling her gently that she had nothing to fear and to calm down. What helped was acknowledging her fear and reassuring her (not coddling, they are different!). My thought is, if you have a dog that is scared, if you let them remain scared, you have failed them in their eyes. You failed to deal with the issue. How can they feel safe if it looks like you didn't even know there was danger and didn't listen to them when they were trying to tell you there was? Also, I don't really agree that it is so easy to wipe out a very high positive value for something. Animals are like banks. If you have a bank balance of 20 000, then it's going to take a hell of a nasty experience to reduce that to a minus figure. I know this because I have a wild hare. His bank balance fluctuates every time something happens he's so jumpy. Practically nothing is a neutral to that creature, and if it's bad it tends to be bad in the hundreds at least. All the same, if my bank balance is high enough with him, I can do something truly terrible to him and still not ruin things. I might ruin them for 2 days, but Kit will come around and remember how I have all the food and water and how he quite likes fruit and head scratches and eventually he'll go out of his way to make friends again. Basically, it depends on the animal. Kivi cried about 6 times in the early visits to the dog park and still adores other dogs because that's the kinda fellow he is. He is a crybaby and he loves making friends. If Kit were a dog I would be an idiot to take him to a dog park in the first place.

Mmm, I know dogs that really don't want to be touched when they're trying to work, too. They give you the "Oi, what are you doing? I'm trying to work here!" look. Kivi is a hopeless snug. He's not real big on being placed so much, but he likes clues in the form of touching. Like touching his foot to get him to do something with it. I wouldn't show him exactly what I want the foot to do, but I can hint that I want him to try doing something with his foot by touching it. He gets very impatient and easily frustrated trying to figure something out for himself, but when he does it sticks like glue and becomes very reliable. So I try to balance out the frustration a bit by giving hints. It's still stressful, but he still likes it, too. As for possible training that doesn't involve stress... I used the example of "this side". I taught that to Kivi by saying "this side" every time he went around an object on my side of it. I did use a little bit of encouragement in the form of clicking or something like that to attract him to my side of the object every now and then and I did sometimes give a very gentle pull on the leash to encourage it as well. I also sometimes stopped if he didn't pay attention and went the wrong side and got his leash tangled in the obstacle. I think the extra things I did like that would have created a small amount of stress, but if I'd done it soley by saying "this side" every time he passed an object on my side, I would have achieved the same thing eventually and I don't think there would have been any stress. Where's the stress in associating a word with an action? It's just putting a name to something. When Penny was young I taught her to shake the water from her coat when I said "shake". I couldn't make her do it and there was no pressure on her to learn what it meant. If she did it, I said "good girl". If she didn't, I'd suggest she have a roll instead, seeing as she normally does one or the other, and then I'd say good girl. So she also kinda knows what "have a roll" means. Sometimes she'd do neither and go for a run instead. I didn't put that one on cue, but she didn't seem to be looking for a "good girl". Perhaps she wouldn't do it on suggestion if I hadn't said good girl when she did, but that's another conditioned response. She's used to hearing "good girl" associated with rewards so the words become a vague reward in themselves. I say it so many times a day it's just come to mean I approve of whatever she's doing. She doesn't need my approval to be stress free.

Ness made a good point in suggesting rewards other than food. We moved to life rewards pretty quickly. Things like sitting before crossing a road when on walks. Downing before having a good game of tug or throwing a toy. Kivi is not very play-driven, but he will do things for a game a few times before losing interest. Even things like getting cuddles he will be good for. In fact, we have more troubles with him over his dinner now than anything. He'll stand there and stare at you dumbly when you tell him to sit, just waiting to see if you'll give it to him anyway. He acts dumb, but he's not! I think any reward you use that isn't food helps tell Barkly that it's worth doing it just in case. We also use things Kivi likes doing a lot. If he wants a cuddle, we ask for his paw. He loves that one and will do it just for fun, really. Maybe I'm dreaming, but I think it helps them think beyond "behaviour=food".

Why should training be stressful at all? It took me quite some time to teach Kivi what "this side" means through classical conditioning alone, but I don't think there was very much stress at all. It's very passive, is classical conditioning. However, if I want something to stick and be reliable I use operant conditioning. It's usually quicker and more effective, but I like classical conditioning because you can do it so passively and you end up with a dog that practically speaks english. If he does what you suggest it's fun. If he doesn't, no biggy, guess he didn't feel like it. A lot of people say their dogs love training. Kivi loves clicker training, but I do think it's stressful for him. He'll still run over and try to be spontaneous when he sees I have a clicker, though. I try to give him guidance, which clicker trainers usually don't like doing, but I think it helps keep it less frustrating for him while he's still learning.

Thing about animals like dingoes is that regardless of whether or not they form packs, hunt, or have a social hierarchy, they are social to some degree and therefore capable of banding together when conditions favour it. I am far from an expert on canine behaviour, but it would seem to me that this case was probably a case of a group of dingoes hunting, but I guess we'll never know. Perhaps they weren't hunting but interested in the kid and their interest was contagious and they all fed off each other until they got excited enough to attack. Animals do weird things when their population density is high and food availability low, if that truly was the case. My understanding of dingoes, which may be wrong, is that they are generally loners or pairs and when there are more it's usually a family. They certainly hunt, I know that for a fact. It is said they can work together for trickier prey. I don't think there's any natural prey in Australia big enough to support larger groups. I remember seeing a short film about camp dogs in a remote community in Australia one time. The camp dog pack was very large and they had possibly staked out a territory. At least, they were confident enough to harry people passing by. I believe they got their food from scavenging mostly. My thought is, if there's food enough then dogs will band together. I think of my hare, who is supposedly a solitary animal but seems to prefer company all the same. I have seen hares being a bit social in the wild and my theory is they would prefer to have pals if the constraints on them (food availability, risk of predation) allowed it. This is pure speculation, but sociality has a lot of benefits and I reckon a lot of animals prefer to live in groups even if they don't especially need to. Kelpie-i, I think there would be a lot of resistance to the notion of no social hierarchy, but I know a lot of regulars from a US-based forum that have already embraced it to various degrees. When I first joined it a couple of years ago, such talk was heresy. Nowadays, you can make a post entirely based on the assumption that there is no pack and no dominance and no social hierarchy and people will not even mention that part of it. They will answer from their own viewpoint. Whether it will become more widely accepted is, I think, dependent on whether anyone can come up with some good scientific evidence to back it up. L. David Mech has some interesting things to say about social structure in wolves. I think he has written a paper to clarify his thoughts on dominant behaviour and submissive behaviour as it was being used to back up arguments he didn't actually agree with. It's available from his website for free.

A clicker isn't really a gadget because you could do the exact same thing using your voice as well. Marker training and clicker training are the exact same thing. One just makes a noise that is the same every time. I think the fastest way is not necessarily the best way either, though. Sometimes it's smarter, sometimes it disregards the way an individual might tend to behave. Say you had a dog like my Lappie boy Kivi who likes touching and physical guidance. I could go either way with that. Maybe I would whack a check chain on him and use that to teach him to heel the old fashioned way, or maybe I could put a harness on him and guide him gently with my hands. This is all hypothetical as I did neither in the end, but suppose he is also a soft dog. He might learn very fast that he should walk at heel to avoid a check, but if he's working to avoid something then he might not be that relaxed when he's around me. So maybe I gently guide him with my hands and he learns a bit slower because there are no bad consequences, but in the end he is more relaxed around me because I didn't do anything unpleasant. :D It's all very dependent on what method you're using and what your dog is like.

Firstly, I am wildly jealous that you not only got to visit Wolf Park but got to hear Coppinger as well. I haven't read his book, but I've had a lot of people tell me I should. On the social hierarchy front, I wanted to point out a few things. I posted something about this several months ago. There's an interesting paper on the web called "The Non-linear Dog" that offers an explanation for how dogs could exist without a social hierarchy. It's also good reading and quite challenging. I didn't believe it at first, but when I started to look at the way dogs behaved from that perspective I found it to be pretty sound. I did a fair bit of animal behaviour at uni and just sort of took it for granted that you use words like dominant and subordinate, but unless you work in primates or canines these terms are really only describing the way individuals interact with each other on a case by case basis. So, if I think about the way dogs interact from the perspective of a bird biologist (one of those hats I've worn) rather than a dog owner, I discover that birds and dogs behave quite similarly in social situations. If I then look at it from the perspective of an evolutionary ecologist, I find that there are still more similarities between all the taxa and how they behave in social situations. There are only a few cases where it all falls apart and a social hierarchy becomes necessary, and they are generally groups I'm not overly familiar with so I give up about there. Ultimately, every individual seeks to balance getting what they want against risks, such as physical injury. Where they are thrown into a group of strangers, they must test each other and discover when taking risks pays off and when it doesn't. Hence, you get these "structures" where it appears that one animal is constantly deferring to another animal. That may be the case, but it may be simply because the "lower ranking" animal just happens to be the kind of personality that doesn't like to take risks. Or it may be that the "higher ranking" animal is the kind that has discovered risks pay off and the confidence of past success it brings to a confrontation in its body language warns the other animal that the risk of getting into a fight and possibly sustaining injury has increased dramatically. And confidence is this whole other thing that has become pretty universal. Pretty much animal can tell if you are confident when you approach, no matter how closely related or distantly related they are to you. Confidence tends to illicit a do or die kind of attitude. The animal realises they have to meet you head on, run, or surrender. Meeting a confident individual head on is fraught with danger, but that doesn't mean you can't swing it your way if you are also confident. These things have nothing to do with hierarchy. It's just personalities, experience, body language, and motivation. As an aside, I think it's important to point out that wolves themselves don't really have packs as such. Usually the "pack" is a family unit of mum and dad and the kids. The so-called "alpha" pair are respected and heeded because they are the parents. New packs are usually formed from a new pair and their subsequent kids. It gets complicated when packs get very big. I believe they often splinter up into small packs and then reform in the cold months when big game is all that's really left. I could write about this all day as its a veritable minefield of arguments and counter-arguments, but I'll leave it there for the moment.

I guess I don't really get it. Some people have said their dogs have become sort of naturally neutralised to people and other dogs as they grew older with continued exposure. This has been my experience as well. My old dog will often ignore dogs she doesn't know unless they approach her. I'm yet to see if Kivi will go this way as well as he is only 9 months old and is thoroughly in love with every other dog on the planet at the moment. My mother has a dog that was just like this as a youngster and now walks by most dogs with barely a glance, and she's a bit of a reactive dog. Even Kivi will leave other dogs to come hang out with me if he happens to look up during a play session and remember that he has an owner who is also often quite fun. It's not particularly hard to hold his attention and practice some things at the dog park while other dogs are gambolling all around him. So I have to admit I don't really see the benefit. I personally don't know many dogs over 2 years old that think other people or other dogs are worth ignoring their human to check out. Some, but generally they are dogs that aren't really trained and don't have much of a bond iwith their owners in the first place. I have been thinking about attempting to neutralise a dog to my pet bunnies, though. It's too late for Kivi. Penny has neutralised herself and ignores them, but I'm wondering if you could do it with a prey driven pup.

I think Erny is right and it is largely an argument that can be used to back up pretty much any point of view. From my perspective, I don't like the "easy way" if it's one that I think involves more aversives than necessary. Like the ear pinch example. You can achieve a lot of things with dogs and many of them very quickly if you use certain methods, but just because it's quick doesn't mean that it is necessarily best for the dog. Fear is a very powerful tool, for example, but one that can be easily misused. I would rather dogs weren't afraid of their owners for the sake of quick training. I would generally err on the side of caution and avoid aversives if I could, even if that did mean it took longer. That's how I see the world. Other people might see the world another way and feel that it's better to be quick than less aversive.

Meat regulations in this country mean that even pet food is meant to be checked for contamination and if a carcass has cysts it gets condemned, even though the meat without cysts is actually fine. It is a human health issue as much as a pet health issue after all. I don't know how strictly it is monitored, but I suspect pretty strictly because people would be mighty unhappy if they got a life-threatening cyst from their dogs after feeding pet mince or something. Also, Hydatids are not a natural parasite of humans, which is why they can cause so much trouble when they get into us. They think we are sheep or some other herbivore and can get lost in our bodies. We are a dead-end accidental host for them. Regarding bacteria, as far as I know it's true that bacteria are not killed by freezing, which is why you shouldn't refreeze meat after thawing. You can refreeze after thawing in the fridge, though, as bacteria generally don't reproduce below 4 degrees C. That is the case for meat meant for human consumption as well as dogs. I have heard rumours that the bacteria that can do their thing at below 4 degrees, i.e. the bacteria responsible for meat going bad in the fridge, can be harmful to dogs. I feed the dogs meat from the fridge if it smells a little gamey, but if it's starting to smell really bad or going a bit of a strange colour, it goes in the bin. The dogs won't eat it if it's gone off in the fridge anyway, but they will happily eat something that's gone off in the sun! I think they know what they can eat better than I do.

I have heard a lot of people having problem with the spot treatments lately, even with dogs that don't swim. It's troubling. Just as a heads up, those monthly treatments that do fleas and internal parasites basically turn your dog into a mobile poison excretion unit. If you don't want to kill your garden earthworms wherever the pups poop you might have to be quick about disposing of it. I'm trying to find natural alternatives to loads of chemicals, but I'm not having a lot of luck with that.

Penny has had many fatty lumps over the years. They nearly always grow bigger with time. I always get them checked by the vet and generally only get them removed if they are causing her discomfort. The last couple of big ones that got removed were a bit too big and left gaping holes in her that had to be drained. She got one removed a few months ago at age 12 and recovered very slowly. I have decided to get any others she has removed when they are small as at least it's just a minor wound, then, rather than waiting to see if it gets big enough to impact on Penny's quality of life, which usually seems to happen in the end.

Incidentally, I think people should be aware that if you use one of those flea treatments that also do worms, the dogs excrete nasty chemicals that kill earthworms ALL MONTH until the treatment wears off. Apparently I'm freaked out about this and no one else is, but I think it's worth thinking about considering earthworms are our friends and I'm just inherently leery of the idea that my dog's poo could be even more toxic than it would be normally!

Just a thought, but perhaps the way you quit could also be a factor. You could quit leaving the dog hot with no way to deal with that but to cool down on their own in time, or you could cool them down yourself and extend the general niceness of it all but in a different way. On the odd occassion I train, I generally don't just leave the animal hanging. With my dogs, if they are still revved up for example, I might play a bit of tug, then sit down with them and give them a massage until they are happy to lie down and just hang loose. If I train with my hare, it depends on his mood. If he's really into it and comfortable, then normally he would let me give him a head rub. I will put the food away and maybe give him one last one for free and he generally takes that as a signal that it's time for his head rub and then I will leave. If he's not so into it and is feeling a bit jumpy and took a while to come over for his treats, then I keep it very short and leave him with no pats. He often finds pats a bit too intense if he's jumpy and would prefer I just left him, or let him sniff my fingers and leave it at that. I guess what I'm saying is that I would listen to my animals and try not to leave them hanging. I'm not sure if that affects their drive next time it comes to training or not, as I don't train regularly.

I am also cursed with an adolescent boy who has forgotten most of the things he knew a couple of months ago. This one doesn't have balls, though. He has good days and bad days, but that's an improvement on the all bad days we had about a month ago. Kivi is also on the long line again, and we are also almost back to the beginning with RRR. It didn't help that just as Kivi's recall was something to be excited about, he had a bout of car sickness that left him with an aversion to the high value treats we were using and it took us a couple of weeks to find an alternative. Bugger. I am hopeful he will improve in the next few months. He is better now most days, but some days he's like: "emergency recall? Ehhhhh...mmmmmm..... naaaaaaah." So much for conditioned response. It's hard to not use the recall when he's not going to come when you totally thought he would!

Question, Lilli: Don't you want an LGD to become "neutralised" to certain things anway? For example, say the first time a car drives past the dog thinks that's a big deal. If you lived by a road, you wouldn't want that to continue. The dog needs to figure out that cars are commonplace and can be ignored. Which goes back to my question about neutralisation being somewhat natural anyway. I think I must be making sweeping generalisations and missing the difference, here. It occurs to me that I've been agreeing that this neutralisation thing is easier than teaching a really good recall. I'm suddenly not so sure that's true. It sounds like initially you put in a fair bit of work controlling surroundings and socialising and neutralising. Leslie Nelson says you should have a conditioned emergency recall in your dog using her methods within 12 months. And there isn't that much work involved. You practice it 3 times a day for the first 3 weeks (after laying down the groundwork most people would be doing anyway) and after that you just need to practice 3 times a week. In the meantime, you don't let your dog off in situations you don't know that he's up to yet. Nonetheless, we have found that Kivi usually responds by racing into our arms even when we've had to use the recall in a situation we were worried would be beyond his current training (my partner has a different idea of when to use this recall than I do as he wouldn't watch the bloody dvd and there's no telling him). Thanks for answering, Erny. I think I suddenly see why K9 thought it was funny when I said I like my animals choosing to be with me because they want to! This morning Kivi decided he would rather be exploring the swamp next to the dog park than being with us. Interesting, I thought, I can almost see him trying out this new idea that he could have fun all on his own. When we called him using our normal recall, he thought about it and decided the swamp might be more interesting. Ah, I thought, maybe he's right. Perhaps I should go down there and explore it with him! Which is how I might deal with my mother's very independent Vallhund when he decides to go foraging. Why does he go foraging? Because people are boring. I like foraging as well, though, and it turns out he'd far rather be foraging with a friend than foraging on his own. Suddenly we are bonding, having a forage together, sharing in something that deeply satisfies him and my presence forms a few new connections in his mind. Next time he got out of the yard to go hunting on his own, he saw me from half a mile away and ran right up to me because he'd found a bird nest and thought I would help him get it. That was handy. Anyway, Kivi is not my mother's independent Vallhund and we did not really have time to explore the swamp together, so my parnter used the emergency recall and Kivi came bounding back. He got his reward and then we all ran around being idiots together. It was all very fun. My rambling point is, how do I learn from my animals if I never find a need to because I set myself up to be the best thing in the world from the start? :rolleyes: It seems kind of selfish to diminish the enjoyment of something that isn't me just so training is a bit easier. It would be a terrible shame if someone had conditioned me at a young age to find, say, drawing less enjoyable than, say, spending time with my friends. That would have far-reaching effects on who I become as an adult. Obviously this is a pretty wild comparison, but then, we are constantly finding out animals are more like us than we thought. I only have myself to compare, so if I wouldn't like it, I try not to do it to them. In this case, I wouldn't know any better, but all the same, I can't help thinking my life would not be as rich if I didn't like drawing - which is something that always came naturally to me - so much. Anyway, I doubt anyone will get where I'm coming from so I might leave that argument right there. Wrt the rabbits, unfortunately it all started when I was silly and forgetful and didn't put Kivi inside when I was feeding Kit one day. I guess it was inevitable, though. I don't think it would have been any less inevitable if I'd put extra effort into neutralisation. Got anything else.

K9: coming too hard is only necessary when you allow high values for distractions to be created. Ahhhh. I see. But from my perspective, how would I know what might be a high value distraction and what might be just good fun? I can come in and rule out every potential high value distraction and risk taking out the harmless fun as well, or I could wait and see and then be faced with trying to win my dog back from a high value distraction, but I would know for sure what's ace and what's merely okay and I'd have a juicy problem to solve that may or may not ever be solved. Kivi thinks rabbits and hares are boring except for the moment when he gets his harness on for his walk, at which point he bounds over to the hare, who has just been fed and is feeling jittery out in the open, and gets the fun of watching the hare run. When I first got Kivi I put him in a crate the rabbits had lived in once and gave him a blanket that had been in with them for the last few weeks and that was where he spent his nights and ate most of his meals. I wasn't really sure what else I could do beyond just continuing with the routine and trying not to let him get a chance to figure out they could be fun to chase. Clearly I failed. At least to some degree. Kivi ignores the rabbit and the hare 99% of the time, but if I go and stir up the hare by going into his cage, I make sure Kivi is inside because there's a good chance he'll turn up and start bounding around frightening the poor hare. And I've been rigorously heading the morning hare chasing routine off at the pass and Kivi is under loose voice control. He'll leave the hare as long as I'm telling him to and am ready to head him off at any moment, but if I go inside to grab something and leave my partner in control, inevitably I hear a crash and my partner telling Kivi off as the hare shoots into the side of his cage or something. So the habit isn't broken yet, and now it's a double habit perpetuated by my hare, who forms very strong habits very quickly. Sorry, long-winded. Ultimately, what should I have done in the first place before Kivi learnt that hares are fun when they run?

K9: lol no, your dogs drive has just lowered with age. Haha, my dog never had much drive in the first place! I spent ages trying to get her to chase rabbits as a youngster (before I had them as pets) and it was really hard. But my mother has a pretty high drive Boxer/Kelpie cross, and she walks past most dogs without even looking at them, as does her Vallhund. A kangaroo is quite a different matter, but I was just curious about the dogs thing because you seemed to focus on it a bit. My pup doesn't walk past any dogs without at least gazing after them longingly, and I know the Boxer cross used to be the same way. She just got over it all on her own. Cheating? Well, that depends on whose rules you're following. I set some silly rules for myself sometimes. And I know you didn't say you couldn't train a recall the hard way, but some people were talking about sacrifices and I just wanted to point out that there doesn't necessarily have to be a sacrifice. The dominance thing was just an idle thought. I was thinking, being the only source of good things in your dog's life is kind of like dominating their mind, isn't it? In a passive sort of way. I once had a boyfriend a bit like that. It didn't work out. There is always an uncontrollable element in other living creatures, though. It's fun and exciting and unpredictable. Ultimately you want to reign that in a bit for obvious reasons, but I guess I just feel reluctant sometimes to come in too hard on it. Penny is very cheeky at times and every now and then I call her and she gives me her mischief look and races off in the opposite direction. If I called her in my serious tone, she'd stop and come right away, but as long as she'll do that much I'm happy to run after her screaming "I'll get you!" and waving my arms over my head like a maniac sometimes as well. I feel like I find out a lot of interesting things about my animals when they don't do what I want them to. Sometimes I learn interesting things about myself that way, too. That must be why I like the harder way. And why I depend a lot on management to begin with!

I respect control freaks! But K9 did ask for opinions, and opinions I have. I keep stepping on toes by not training pro-actively and not trying to control certain situations, but hey, that's the kind of person I am. I'm a wait-and-see sort of person. Being criticised for how you are isn't very helpful, so I'd be stupid for criticising anyone who cares more about control than I do. We all just cope with life's uncertainties in our own ways. Doesn't neutralisation sort of happen on its own, though? My old dog walks past most things without batting an eyelid. She's been there done that with most of the world. Wouldn't they learn a bit from you along the way as well? Someone once related to me a story about a puppy in his fear period suddenly freaking out about a letterbox. I had a similar experience when my puppy freaked out about an exercise ball, and then a big green garbage bag. There was no picking what he'd suddenly get frightened of, but it wasn't a big deal to bring him around. It was just like "What? You're scared of this? You crazy dog. It's nothing, see?" And then you'd walk away and ignore it and he would just follow your lead and ignore it as well. Eventually. Actually, this all reminds me of trying to get my old dog Penny over her fear of thunderstorms. Unfortunately, when I got her I was still quite young and a bit scared of them myself. I was over most of my fear by that stage, but thunderstorms still made me tense. I suspect the first thunderstorm she experienced frightened her a little and when she looked to me she discovered I was tense as well and that was it. Thunderstorm phobia for the rest of her life. They don't bother me anymore, and Kivi isn't bothered by them, but I was quite careful with him and actually separated him from Penny and myself the first time we got a storm. I didn't want either of us to impress a phobia on him! I was careful not to make it a complete, unusual separation, too. I was ready to keep doing that for a while, but he was okay. So there you go, I can be a control freak sometimes, even with dogs.

Sorry, maybe control freaks is a bit of a strong term. I did read a lot of the thread (not all), and I do think some people are control freaks about animals. I never said that was a bad thing! And I don't think control freaks have no fun with their dogs. I think maybe I even get the benefits of being a control freak. It's just a matter of the type of fun you have and what floats your boat. Working around things floats my boat. Leaving things as they are unless there's a really good reason to change it is the way I have fun. I didn't mean to imply that you all have robots or something. I'm a control freak about some things and proud of it. Just not doggy things, it seems. Anyway, I'll shutup. Honestly didn't mean to offend.

I agree, try feeding raw. Billinghurst says that the best balance is found in nature. My old corgi was on Supercoat with a bone a week for many years. I took her off it when she was getting some mysterious bouts of stomach upset that we couldn't find an explanation for. We went to homecooked, and the change in her health was very profound. One of the unexpected side effects was that all her arthritis went away. I went from giving her Metacam daily to not using it at all. She was 9 then. She's now nearly 13 and seems to have a lot of aches and pains again. She's been on Sasha's for a couple of years, but I don't know that it does much for her anymore. I am thinking of getting the injections as her pains haven't got any better with the warmer weather this year. She's a very grumbly old girl, now. I've had Kivi on a raw diet since the day I brought him home. He is 7 months old and quite a bit bigger than he is supposed to be. The whole litter grew to be very tall. Kivi's sister is currently having the same problems with her joints as your guys. I've been watching Kivi like a hawk, but he seems to be fine. Maybe the raw has helped, but who knows.