Weasels

My kelpies hate standing around too, so boring! :laugh:

Like Kavik I do lots of little tricks for focus, I have a selection of simple ones that are on small body language cues: a hand-lift and point for sit and down, putting my head to the side for lying on their side etc. These are handy if someone is talking, since I don't have to make any noise. Plus moving from heel to front and back again. I taught a 'quiet' cue which works as long as they aren't super aroused or bored.

I also think this is a great game for pushy dogs :) -

You cannot reward your dog with food or toys for calling off stock

I did with Weez :) Worked great for him specifically.

Ok, there are always exceptions. maybe "cannot" was too generalised. I will change to " it would be very unusual if you could"

I did try it once as a joke...I was working Fly, (who is about as ball obsessed as a dog can get) and I said "where's your ball?".I wish I'd videoed it. She flipped, gave me the wild eyes, looked at the ball, then looked at me in disgust & went back to her sheep.

It was part of a peripheral training goal: I wanted to be able to let the dogs roam around off-lead at herding training. Since we were there for hours I preferred it to tying them up, so I specifically taught them that the reinforcer that's available is the one I'm giving you, i.e. if I take you into the sheep, we are working for sheep. When I say enough, we are working for something else. Meant they weren't constantly trying to get into the sheep while other people were training, in the absence of any other activity. So it wasn't an automatic thing, it was a trained thing, and worked well to the point I could switch Weez on and off inside the yard to train other things more quickly as a side-effect. We even did a few sessions of normal heelwork inside the beginner yard to teach him to walk out to the first obstacle nicely without pushing the sheep off the set-up.

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Incidently, I'm on record as saying I use aversives in herding. By that I mean yelling, pointing a stick at them, and stopping training. It works better when I make the yelling constructive (stop!/down!/back!) but I'm the first to admit sometimes my brain lets me down and all I can come up with is "hey!". Work goes much slower when I am vague like that. I think it is very hard to permanently damage the 'drive' of a dog that is doing its innate job, but I think it is possible to cower them to the point they are overthinking their footfalls or checking in and out of the task (eating sheep poo or going off to pee being good indicators). So I try to be adaptive.

(And whenever people talk about the right tool to train a dog, my first thought is "yes, the best Tool is me" :laugh: )

You cannot reward your dog with food or toys for calling off stock

I did with Weez :) Worked great for him specifically. Didn't do it with Chess but she seems to have the obedience gene

It annoys the hell out of me when people say drive when they mean arousal. :) Because I get misinformation rage. About 90% of my purpose in life is to investigate the truth and communicate it. It really offends me when people insist on spreading stuff that is not true and on top of that, doing it with really poor communication so that it muddies the waters for anyone who might want to go looking for the truth. It's like they are directly opposing me and everything I stand for! :laugh: I have learnt to not take it so personally and keep my mouth shut, mostly, but self-control is difficult when you're very passionate. People are sensitive about their beliefs. I should be more compassionate and patient.

I get this when people talk about 'what dogs do in the wild'

I suspect 'drive' is becoming a marketing term, especially OS where dog training is a more lucrative business.

Mine don't creep but Weez will 'bounce' and Chess will 'hover' (you could throw a tennis ball under her elbows if she was able to choose her down position ).

I correct (in the literal sense: by telling them what they should be doing and luring if needs be to show them) and then reward when it's what I want to see. I agree that if is your first day training, the dog may not really know what a sit-stay is supposed to be yet, and will assume it is whatever you are rewarding.

Sitstay is not a complex behaviour so I wouldn't try to shape it from sloppy to good. If it was going wrong I'd just lower the criteria by asking for less time or using less human movement :)

Your dog cannot be thoughtlessly acting on instinct alone, it needs to temper it's actions with patience and focus. I hope that sort of makes sense.

I think this is true of every thing we train though. Heelwork has been used as an example here a lot as a time where we would TID, however heelwork requires a lot of attention, focus and precision and the dog needs to be able to think through arousal and compress its drive to a point where it can achieve the right balance between drive and precision. There's a big difference between suppressing and compressing drive.

But with heelwork, you are starting with neither understanding nor drive and generally building them in alternating parts, maintaining balance. With work they are bred for, you start with a lot of imprecise drive and some understanding, and need to work back to redress the balance rather than maintain it. So from that perspective I can see where BlackJaq is coming from.

It's rarely spoken about in the herding world, either, AFAIK. Often I think "training in drive" refers more to arousal than anything else. There's a lot of talk about chemical rewards and whatnot, but all rewards are chemical at the heart of it. Arousal is intrinsically entwined with focus and performance. In security and shutzhund where you hear most about training in drive, the behaviours being trained are quite different to herding and retrieving. It's fast and punchy and intense and doesn't really require much cognitive processing on the dog's part. Totally different arousal requirements for good performance than in something more prolonged and needing more cognitive processing.

My understanding of 'tranining in drive' is it generally applies to adding drive satisfaction to an otherwise neutral behaviour. In herding, as I imagine with retrieving, the drive is a given since very very few people persist with a dog who has zero drive and instinct for the job - especially when ones that do are so common.

So when I e.g. train prancy heels with toys, then getting them into that 'drivey' brain space is useful to motivate a performance in a functionally useless behaviour. But, in my observation at least, untrained drive is dumb. It needs to be balanced with the ability to think and listen. Put a kelpie pup on stock for the first time and many will herd just fine, but that is in no way the end of the sport. As my brilliant herding trainer says: in most sports you are building up a behaviour from nothing, but in herding you are starting with a complete set of behaviours and moulding it to be what you want.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is in 'instictive' disciplines, the drive isn't the part you are training. It is something you are managing while you train the dog to think, listen and be precise. Which is probably why people don't talk about TID in these types of sports & activities.

Ness if you need anything for Kenz or Ness or You don't forget to let me know :)

A related vent: trainers and clubs who just flat out lie about how they use reinforcement.

e.g.

- "we use a variety of rewards based on the individual dog" followed up by "we never use food and teach dogs to work out of respect".

- "we use reinforcers to teach and then correct once the dog has learnt the behaviour" but in reality are commanding people to use physical correction on dogs and puppies in the first class.

- or conversely "no physical punishment is allowed in class" followed by "but check chains are mandatory and food is forbidden".

Just man up and be honest people.

when I tried to clicker train him before, he looses attention after around 5 minutes and goes to attacking everything around him.

Oh goodness I'm 31 years old and struggle to keep attention on clicker training for 5 minutes! Short & sweet!

Apart from that, what everyone else said :)

I had to really go back to basics when I got my current scaredy-boy. It was a bit of a shock after previously having either dogs from puppyhood or our girl who would wiggle herself inside out for some human attention. The boy just had no value for human interaction at all. I still don't know his past, but like Nekh said patience was the biggest part of getting him back to a good place. Also hand-feeding, rewarding with food for just coming up to say hello (obedience was a distant second concern), and letting him approach new things in his own time. He was encouraged to face his fears in controlled situations, but not forced. He will always have lower-than-average ability to cope with new things but now he's my little buddy and has learnt that humans aren't *always* for running away from :)

Good luck with your girl, and remember that 7 years of living in fear and deprivation is a LONG time. Sending good vibes

I got a doggone good rapid rewards on free shipping from Clean Run for about $18. Happy with it too :) Fits heaps of treats even for 2 dogs, poo bags, clicker, phone, money, and with pockets to spare. Plus treats don't go everywhere if I take off on a little sprint with the dogs.

http://www.cleanrun.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=product.display&Product_ID=2606&ParentCat=54

I read this article yesterday and found it well-written and interesting, hopefully some others here might too :)

5-harsh-realities-of-treating-dog-aggression

Maybe it wouldn't have taken up quite so much of his time if he wasn't continuously writing essays about how wonderful he is?

Note to TheLBD = we will have to discuss this food handling bit its not helping the kelps = HOMEWORK assignment cut up treats into bite size bits and don't use things that are crumbly (sermon over) :laugh:

Ah but if I'd cut up the chicken I would have been running even later! :p It's just one big balancing act of chaos in LBD-land :laugh:

So today I went to the quarry for swim/fetch/tug, I tried to get her heeling for tug in that environment, and she just can't do it, she can sit and stay and give me eye contact, but heeling still needs too much focus for her to be able to do it in that state of mind. I wished I had a camera to film her in this environment, I think I could work on making her brain more clear in this context, to allow her to control herself well under that level of arousal.

I have the same problem when I have a ball in sight, but I'm making progress by sending them right around me to heel, to a hand target on my left, then throwing the ball. The zooming-around movement is easier for them when they're all crazy and the hand target give them something to focus on and makes them stop (my recall criteris is a hand target already so that helped). Now we're just incrementally increasing the time they have to hold their nose on the target at heel before release :)

Oh and I drop food everywhere too, and am not making any progress with that at all :laugh:

I think they're alright. I've never been but apparently the mount gawler area is quite steep. ;)

Mount Crawford Map

Out of that map we run Dickers, Waterholes, Forbes, Big Flat, Fromms, Dewells, Cromer and Mt Pleasant. I think..

They're all good, a bit hilly but nothing crazy. Never run into any stock out there, but of course wildlife is there if you're not with a big group of people.

Endless places to run ;)

*drool* Oh that looks just perfect. Thank you!!

Paddles I'm sure the others will answer too but rewarding out of position is generally a side-effect of using toys rather than food. So for eg. the dog heels nicely, you mark and release, and the dog leaps out and gets a game of tug.

I reward mostly with food but use both tug and ball as a higher value reward (ball being the ultimate). Problem being (especially with tug) if you always release in front of you the dog will usually work slightly too far forward out of anticipation. I am extra conscious therefore to mix it up with the ball and throw it away from where the dog is anticipating, with tug it's harder but if I kind of spin on the spot after release it helps keep 'em guessing :)

ah, I get it now.. I mainly use food, so he tends to reward in position I guess, unless I'm practicing coming into position? in which case I throw the food?

It sounded like you do from your description :) You don't need to always reward in position as long as you either don't systematically release to a certain direction, or if you are confident the dog is keeping the correct position. Can be hard to tell the latter sometimes though, so if you can find a tame obedience competitor or judge they should be happy to let you know :laugh:

Edit: more snap! :)

Paddles I'm sure the others will answer too but rewarding out of position is generally a side-effect of using toys rather than food. So for eg. the dog heels nicely, you mark and release, and the dog leaps out and gets a game of tug.

I reward mostly with food (in position) but use both tug and ball as a higher value reward (ball being the ultimate). Problem being (especially with tug) if you always release in front of you the dog will usually work slightly too far forward out of anticipation. I am extra conscious therefore to mix it up with the ball and throw it away from where the dog is anticipating, with tug it's harder but if I kind of spin on the spot after release it helps keep 'em guessing :)

Wow that's a great list MRB! I have used Vic Park and it was really good, about 1.5km for one lap around the way I went, could probably have expanded the path but it was a public holiday and I didn't want to run through the kids learning to ride bikes :) It's a bit of a trek but perfect when I'm heading to town for training anyway :)

Will check out Modbury next I suspect! I don't think I have expensive enough running gear for Burnside :p

Thanks GeorgieB someone else just messaged me saying the same thing :) Sorry I'm still working all this local council stuff out

Thanks MW! I went there yesterday and had a look around, according to the map I went through an offlead area but didn't see any signage. I'll give it another look later and try to keep my bearings a bit better :/

I think rewarding in position is important if you are having position issues. If you aren't you can probably be a bit more lenient :) I have one dog who forges and drifts away and another who crowds and lags (lucky me ) so rewarding in position with them is important. I suppose it also depends how specific you want to be about position. When I am using toys I try to make sure the toy goes the opposite direction to where the problem is, as Ness said. I am also trying out getting a hand-target in position before throwing or tugging, as a sort of an exclamation mark that "here is correct!".

Maybe he's camera shy :p

I have been using a high (out-of-nose-poke-range) hand target in front of their face for them to focus on, to get a nice prancy looking-up heel. It has been really handy to direct forward, back, in and out in small adjustments, and easy to fade to a hand-on-hip. I can see the 'pocket' target works on a similar principle but is there an advantage I might be missing? It's not too late in training to change if there's a secret advantage :)

Oh that's a nice idea, my problem with that is that hand up high in front of her face is a jump cue (jump and nose poke my hand), which we rather enjoy.

I found they could understand the context, when I first started Chess tried to jump up and touch the hand so I just ignored it until she fell into heel. She soon learned that when I put the hand out, standing at side = heel, standing at front = jump up. I also angle my palm down when doing the heel and hold it parallel to the ground for an "up". Not saying it's a better way, just that dogs are aces at working with details like that which does make it a different cue :)