THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

Oh boy, what fun. As many of you know, I’m not doing many more full day seminars anymore, but I couldn’t resist pairing up with the Steve White for a two-day seminar outside of Chicago, Illinois on August 10th and 11th of this year. Thanks to a Facebook reader who jumped in with dozens of others with ideas for a title, we are calling the seminar Sense(s) and Sensibility. Thank you Mairi and kisses to your lovely dog, Layla!

On Saturday, I’ll be doing an updated and expanded version of  “Lost in Translation,” or How Dogs use Sight, Sound, Smell and Touch to Communicate. As usual, I’ll take a comparative approach, looking at the way our sensory systems (notice the focus on vision?!) affect the behavior of the animals at both ends of the leash. The day will be full of slides, videos and demonstrations, including the role of smell in dog-dog interactions, the power of touch (both positive and negative), how to use your voicemost effectively when communicating with your dog, and how to improve your ability to “read” visual signals given by dogs.

On Sunday, the incomparable Steve White will present “What’s the Problem, Five Simple Steps to Fixing Any Behavior or Performance Problem.”  Steve’s presentation will build on Saturday’s material, and is sure to send you off inspired to go home and work with your dog. Steve will argue that most behavioral problems are actually skill deficits, and will present fun, and effective training paradigms that change “failure” into reliability.

Special Sunday Lunch: At lunch on  Sunday, Steve and I will talk about the many routes to becoming an animal behaviorist and/or professional dog trainer. We’ll keep it casual and will be happy to answer any questions of the participants as best we can.

The first 100 people to sign up will be entered into a drawing, two of whom will get $100 off their registration. In addition, signing up five or more people results in a 15% discount on the ticket price. And please, please, if you are a blog reader, come up and say hi!

We picked the location because it is easy to both drive or fly to. It is close to Chicago’s O’Hare airport and at the confluence of several highways in Itasca, Illinois. The hotel is dog friendly and has a shuttle service from the airport to the hotel. Hey… we’ve gone to a LOT of seminars, so we are doing all we can to make this one as accessible and enjoyable as possible.

I’m not foolish enough to guarantee that this will be my last full-day seminar in the US, (never say never, right?) but there won’t be many more, so I hope you can come to this one. I’m loving doing evening fund raisers for shelters now, and am focusing on doing more of those in the year(s) to come. But I simply couldn’t resist pairing up with Steve White. I always learn from him, I love his sense of humor and I can barely wait to get home and work my dog at the end of one of his seminars. Steve has a long career with working dogs; he’s the cop you hope shows up when you need one, and has dedicated his life to promoting positive reinforcement in police dog training and to helping people like us find fun and benevolent solutions to canine behavior problems. We are going to have a ball… be there, or be square!

MEANWHILE, back on the blog: Our IT prince has fixed the bugs, so you shouldn’t see any text cut off anymore. We also redesigned the right hand column and added (as requested) the number of comments for all the recent posts listed. Thanks for all your feedback, you’ve been great!) By the way, if you are having the same problems (text cut off, for example), clear your web cache in whatever server you are using (not the one for your entire computer!) and you’ll see the new version.

First off, some good news. Many more people from all over the world have joined us in the past few months, the traffic to The Other End of the Leash blog has increased rapidly in the past six months. (Hello Serbia, United Arab Republic, Boliva, Nepal…!) What a joy it is to have this international conversation with dog lovers from so many different perspectives. However, our increased traffic was causing some website problems; as a friend says, a “high quality problem” indeed. Along with fixing website glitches, we are taking this as an opportunity to renew and refresh, and so we have made some design changes to the blog.

When you go to the home page you will automatically be on the page of the most current blog post. Comments will be visible directly below, and previous posts are linked at the top of the page on the right hand side. It’s cleaner, easier to read and write comments, and should allow yet another substantial increase of visitors to join in without causing the website to lick its electronic paws.

Secondly, this seems like a good time to pass the microphone to you, and ask what you would like to discuss on this forum. I have a list of potential topics that I’m charged up about and look forward to writing up, but since we have so many who are new to the conversation, this is a great time to hear from you about what you’d like to discuss. The sky is the limit and I’m all ears… And if you recently joined us from Albania, the Palestinian Territories or Albania, (etc.) just jump in and say hi.

MEANWHILE, back on the farm. Cabin fever is raising its bland, soggy head. We missed the huge storm that much of the midwest got today, I’d say we only got 4- 5 inches out here.  But, oh oh oh, I miss color! I miss green leaves and red flowers and bright yellow and black bees. Fresh snow is beautiful, and the woods here in winter can be a true delight, but for right now, I must confess, I’m more than ready for spring.

In a desperate attempt to surround myself with color, rather than the black, white and grey of the outdoors, I took a photo of my winter socks that I wear to bed every night. Besides being warm and cozy, the bright colors make me happy. Move over Lady Gaga.

Forgive me if I’ve shared too much.

This morning on the way to feed the sheep, Willie posed in front of the red barn with his blue plastic encircling his head. A great photo and lovely colors, but of course, I had no camera on me. Later this morning I tried tor recreate it… you all know how that went. I ended up laughing so hard I couldn’t keep the camera still, because either Willie wasn’t in front of the barn, or he dropped his frisbee and cocked his head, or he was facing away, etc. etc. Here’s a shot I did get, in which Willie enchanges his head for the frisbee itself.

Someone tell me that spring really will come again? Willie and I BOTH have cabin fever, we are both fighting boredom in the evenings. The silver lining is that we are making significant progress on his learning labels for two toy objects. I’m going super slowly, this is clearly difficult for him. The hardest part will probably be going from two toys to three, but that is far down the road. At least this week Willie got to work some of the flock at the University, when we did a sheep herding/predator-prey demonstration for my UW class. He was clearly a bit nervous.. he hasn’t worked all winter and the stock pavilion is small and enclosed, but he did just fine and seemed as happy as I’ve seen him when we got home. Spring will come, yes it will.

This post could be sub-titled “No, a tired dog is not always a good dog,” or alternatively, “Why We Choose Pasta with Cream Sauce Over Vegetable Soup on a Difficult Day.” Okay, maybe it’s just me that makes poor decisions about lunch when I’m exhausted, but this research suggests that I, along my dogs, are not alone.

A study by Miller et. al. followed up on earlier work about the effect of self-control on risk taking and decision making. (“Too dog tired to avoid danger: Self-control depletion in canines increases behavioral approach toward an aggressive threat.” Psych Bull Rev 2012 19:535-540.) Here’s the background to this study: Multiple studies on humans have found that we appear to have a limited amount of self-control (A shock to us all, no doubt). It is as though we have a bank account of energy devoted to self-control and once it is depleted, we are unable to spend any more. For example, people told to control their impulse to eat fresh cookies (versus radishes) gave up faster on attempting to solve a difficult puzzle. Subjects who were asked to spend some of their “self control savings” were more likely to take risks and put themselves in dangerous situations more than those who had not “used up” some of their self-control energy.

This tendency is not just limited to a particular type of task. Rather, it is “domain general,” meaning self control on one task effects behavior in a variety of other types of tasks. Thus, as in the example above, the energy exerted to not eat cookies affects the energy available to solve a puzzle, even though one task is related to food and another to problem solving.

Neither is this tendency limited to people. Miller et. al. found in 2010 that dogs asked to control physical movements also gave up sooner when later asked to solve a puzzle task than dogs who had not. For this study, they asked if dogs were more likely, as are humans, to take more risks after a session of “self-control depletion.”

I’ll quickly summarize the methods and results here, and then add a discussion about what I think are the practical implications. Ten dogs were asked to either maintain a sit/stay while an “electronic hamster” buzzed around the room, or to be caged with no need for self-control. Each dog was its own control, meaning that each dog experienced both conditions, an excellent decision here given the small sample size and the question being asked. Which condition happened first was randomly balanced to eliminate order effects. After a 10 minute period of either being on a Sit/Stay or in a crate, the dogs were escorted out of the room briefly, while a highly reactive dog was put into a cage at the back of the room. The subject dog was brought back in and the researchers scored how close the subject dogs got to an unfamiliar dog barking and growling at the subject dogs. (The authors managed safety well, by putting a pen around the crate in which the barking and growling dog was kept, but I’ll comment about the effect on the “stimulus” dog in a minute.)

As expected, the data show a significant difference in time spent close to the aggressive dog depending on the dog’s experience just before. After the dogs maintained a Sit/Stay, (if they broke their owner returned to the room and had them Sit/Stay again), they spent more time close to the threatening dog than when they had been left in a crate for the same amount of time. The conclusion is that, like people, dogs take more risks and have less impulse control if they have depleted their stores of self control. This is the kind of result that confirms my experience and world view: that dogs, like people, have a limited amount of energy to spend on self control at any given time. I’ve seen what I think are the consequences of this over and over with my client load: Dogs, for example, who were “angels” all day long at the picnic and then finally bit someone after 5 hours of not stealing hot dogs off the table at the park. I suspect it also has a profound effect of dogs on leashes, because even though the leash is a constraint, the dog still has to exert a lot of self control to not explore the environment as he or she chooses.

However, (and there is always a “however” in science!), there is one aspect of the methodology that might make the results a bit less clear than one would hope. In the “Sit/Stay” condition, a mechanical toy was released that buzzed around the room, thus forcing the dogs to exert a great deal of self-control to maintain their stays. All good. But in the “Crated” condition, the mechanical toy did not move around the room. The authors stated that their pilot studies found that if the toy was turned on, it caused some of the crated dogs to “whine, circle and paw.” I’m unclear as to why this would be a problem: surely dogs allowed to whine, circle or paw would be dogs NOT using energy on self control. As is, one could argue that the study was comparing levels of arousal as much as energy exerted on self control. I’ll email the authors about this and let you know what I find.) [Note added after Dr. Miller herself responded in the comment section: You are best off reading her comments yourself, which I found extremely interesting, but after reading her response I am more comfortable with the conditions as designed in the experiment. Bottom line is that in one condition dogs had to exhibit a great deal of self control, and in the other condition, they did not. That was the basis of the study, and I found her explanation compelling. Again, read the comments for an extremely interesting discussion about all this if you are especially interested in the topic.]

What do you think? I’d love to hear your thought not just about the study and the two conditions, but whether its conclusions fit your experience. Although I question some aspects of the methodology, my experience suggests to me that “self-control depletion” is an important factor in behavior. That is true as much for our dogs as it is for us: Haven’t you found yourself, as a dog owner or trainer, making poor choices after depleting your bank account of self control? We tend to think of it as just “being tired,” but I think recognizing that “tired” has many nuances might be extremely helpful. In addition, “tired” can mean so many things: Well exercised dogs are very often better behaved dogs, but dogs over tired either physically or emotionally are not, right? I look forward to your thoughts and experiences, and I’ll be thinking all weekend about how this perspective might affect the individuals at both ends of the leash. (I should also mention, briefly, that I wish the study could have been done without subjecting the stimulus dog to being confined in a crate while clearly  uncomfortable around other dogs. But I do understand their desire to create a realistic context of “risk” for the dogs, I just wish it could have been a different one.)

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Argh! This is a tough time for people who like to be outdoors. The temperature isn’t too bad (was about 12 when I got up, not too bad for this time of year, and it’s been over freezing during the day for much of the week), but it is extremely difficult to walk anywhere. Either it is ice suitable for a skating rink, or snow that was half-melted by rain and then re-frozen into a hard, frosting-like surface that is hell on your feet and exhausting to walk in.  Willie and I both have a serious case of cabin fever, so I am going back to seeing if he can learn words as nouns instead of objects in the evening hours. Tootsie is happy to cuddle on the couch, and the sheep and the cats seem to be doing just fine.

The good news is that there is a lot to look forward to. Not too long from now students from the Small Ruminant Club at the UW Vet School are coming out to learn how to do ultrasound pregnancy checks on sheep. My flock “volunteered,” they just don’t know it yet. We’ve done this several years in a row, and after the work in the barn we come into the farmhouse for chili, salad, bread and pie, and have a great time sharing our love of animals and interest in their health. Then I leave on the 28th for San Diego for the Interdisciplinary Forum on Applied Animal Behavior, where I will glory in flowers and greenery, 2 days of intellectual stimulation and, if things go as usual, laughing so hard my ribs begin to hurt. And this Sunday we’re going to see West Side Story, so cabin fever is beginning to be relieved.

More good news is that, after endless days of clouds, rain, and sleet, the sun has come out and it is such a lovely thing to see. It felt like a dear friend coming home that I had missed. Here’s one of the ewes, Solo, highlighted by the morning sun when I went out to check on the flock earlier today. I always feel a bit sorry for her, she came with 2 others from another farm and after they left was clearly the “odd girl out” in the flock. But gradually she is being assimilated, and I hope she feels more at home here. I’m curious to see how her lambs are (due April lst, there’s another thing to look forward to!)

Surely our mutual love of play is one of the reasons that dogs and people get along so well. As Karen London and I write in Play Together, Stay Together, “Play is powerful stuff. It influences so many things, including development, motivation, emotions, physiology, communication and behavior. Wow! That’s an impressive list.”

After years working as Applied Behaviorists, it was clear to Karen and I that play has the power to strengthen one’s relationship with a dog, or alternatively, to destroy it. You can use play to teach self control and good manners, or to inadvertently teach a lack of frustration tolerance and a lot of rude behavior that ends up getting a dog into trouble. You can use play to allow a dog to release tension, to learn a behavior incompatible with a problematic one, or to become wound up and hyper-reactive. The list goes on and on. Play is so important that one of my favorite seminars is one I did on play (Dog Play DVD), talking about both between dogs and between people and dogs.

So here’s the question, How do YOU play with your dog?

Willie and I have several different ways to play that have become incorporated into our daily routine. After the chores are done (dogs, cats, sheep and birds fed), Willie and I play with one of his favorite toys, usually an old plastic disc. Because of his shoulder we can’t play his favorite game of all, which is a classic run and fetch game (he’d love NOTHING more than to catch the frisbee in the air but those days are long over), so we’ve evolved into either 1) he runs around in silly circles with the frisbee in his mouth while I clap and encourage him, 2) I put him on a stay and throw it and then release him to go get it once it’s landed (but this only if there is a lot of snow on the ground, and only 3 to 4 times at most) or 3) he goes on a stay and then I hide his toy somewhere in the front yard. We always play some hide and seek games, because it gets him running around without stressing his shoulder.

Later in the day we play lots of object-related games in the house. Our favorite are tug games. It’s great exercise for him (and me) and we combine it with lots of exercises in self control like “get back” and “drop.” Then we’ll usually do a round of tricks, also in the evening. Usually earlier we’ll have been on a walk up the hill, and in better weather it might include working him on sheep, but that’s just not possible right now.

As I write this I realize that Willie loves two kinds of play: Object play with me (which he also plays by himself, tossing objects into the air and running around the house) and playing chase games with other dogs. Willie doesn’t like rough and tumble play or any kind of play with lots of contact with other dogs: he wants to run and run and run and run, and sometimes I think nothing in the world makes him happier. I wish I could run as fast as he. If I could, we’d dash around the pasture together like foals in springtime. Alas, I’m built like a sturdy hiker and not a runner, so that’s just never gonna’ happen.

I’m not the only one interested in how you play with your dog. There’s an interesting study ongoing at the The Horowitz Dog Cognition Lab at Columbia University (Barnard College) about how people play with their dogs, and they (and I!) would love it if you would participate. The study, run by Alexandra Horowitz (author of The Inside of a Dog) and Julie Hecht (author of the fantastic blog, dogspies, will investigate interspecific play between people and dogs by collecting videos of people playing with their dogs for future analysis. You can learn more about it by going to a brief description of the study and what you have to do to participate.

I’m going to send in a video of me and Willie playing tug, because we both seem to enjoy it so much. It’s hard to choose though, because we do have so many different ways of playing. By the way, I’m focusing on Willie because Tootsie simply never plays with anything. At all. I don’t worry about it for a moment. She wants food and cuddles (in that order), and loves sniffing around outside now that she’s discovered she’s a spaniel (and eating cat poop now that she’s discovered she’s a dog). It would be lovely if she and Willie would play, but then, it would be lovely if I had arms like Angelina Jolie, and both of those have about equal chances of happening and both Tootsie and I are pretty happy anyway.

Here’s the video I’m sending to the Horowitz lab:

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Snow snow snow snow. Did I mention it’s snowing? It’s snowed here almost every other day, although yesterday it began as rain. That’s the worst possible weather scenario you can get this time of year: first it gets everything wet and super slippery, then it freezes into ice and then snows on top of it. It makes everything extra dangerous (the hospital emergency rooms were full to the brim from falls), and creates a hard coating of ice between layers of snow. But I’m still happy we are getting the moisture and that we have a real winter this year. I will admit I’m getting a little cabin fever-y, but I’m so glad that the earth is getting back some of the moisture that we missed last year. We were 12 inches down and in “severe drought” through fall, so I hope that all this snow will soak into the ground come mud season. But right now it’s all about the snow. We didn’t get the huge storm that is probably hitting the East coast right now, just got 3-4 inches yesterday, but it’s still basically a white and blue/grey world out there. I love the way the snow tops off the fence posts, like whipped cream on a sundae:

One of the best things about being an author is being sent pre-publication copies of books. It’s great fun to see what’s going to be out on the bookshelves and eReaders in a couple of months. (Of course, one of the worst things about being an author is being sent pre-pub copies of books. They pile up. They sit on your desk looking at you, begging in some passive, rectangular way for endorsements.)

Most of the books are somewhat interesting, a few of them are downright, uh, horrible.  And every once in a while a truly great one comes along, that sucks you in and causes you to change your schedule and read, read, read until the last page is turned and the book closes and you are mad at yourself for staying up so damn late.

That describes Ted Kerasote’s new book, Pukka’s Promise: The Quest for Long-Lived Dogs. I fell in love with his writing in Merle’s Door, and Pukka’s Promise contains the same clear and luminous stories, but this time about his new pup, Pukka. But it is much more than a book about a dog. He begins by telling us about Merle’s last days, and describes greeting a couple’s new chocolate Lab pup: “His breath smelled like milk and vanilla and young teeth. I made a smooching noise with my lips; he squirmed in delight. ‘Oh, you are a beauty,’ I told him, kissing his head . . .  and as I watched them [the pup and the couple] go I thought ‘In fourteen years, perhaps sooner, certainly not much longer, he’ll break your heart. Your entire life from now until then will be colored by him: his woofs, his wags, his smells, how he swam, his yips while he dreamed, how he rode your first child on his back, and how he began to slow down just as you were hitting your stride.’ I looked back at Merle, grinning at me from the truck. Like everyone’s dog, he had been all that and more, and I thought: ‘Why do they have to die so young?”

That’s why Ted wrote this book, and that’s what this book is about: The Quest for Longer-Lived Dogs. It is a book whose topic is long overdue. I met Ted when he came to Madison on book tour for Merle’s door, and over coffee he asked if I thought it was a reasonable topic for a book, having been struck so often when talking about Merle how short our dog’s lives are, and how painful their deaths. “Oh yes yes yes” I said, as I’m sure did many others. How often have we said “If only they lived longer….”?

I’ll talk later about some of the details in the book because they deserve their own posts: Does spaying and neutering help or hinder a dog’s longevity–what does the research say? Are dogs more susceptible to cancers than adult humans, and if so, why, and what to do about it? What really goes on inside a dog food production facility? Kerasote spent a good five years tracking down the answers to questions about diet, environmental health, genetics and medicine with a relentless obsessiveness that would put a Border Collie to shame. This is a guy with some serious stamina: wait until you read what he goes through to find his next dog.

As in Merle’s Door, Ted writes, without apology, as if he always aware of the inner most thoughts of his dogs. I have some problems with that, but not enough to keep me from loving the book. Ted makes some training choices that some won’t agree with, but his honesty is refreshing, and makes the book even stronger. A warning: Most of us will never be able to do all the things that Ted is doing to keep Pukka healthy (there are no elk in my backyard, and I wouldn’t know how to kill one for Willie if our lives depended on it). But there is a much here for all dog lovers. Maybe, just maybe, each of our dogs can live a little bit longer because of what we are learning about canine longevity. I liked the book so much you can order it off of our website. I can’t wait to hear what you think.

[Spoiler alert: I spent most of the weekend holed up with a bad cold and another pre-pub book, Susannah Charleson's The Possibility Dogs. (She wrote Scent of the Missing.) The new book is coming out in June, and even though I've already read it I can barely wait. Here's part of the blurb I wrote: "Simply BRILLIANT!"]

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Well it was ten below zero this morning (that’s Farenheit, or  -23 Celsius). Thank heavens we got a fat layer of snow that plopped down on Wednesday and is insulating the soil, plants and small mammals underneath it. But it’s nippy, very nippy for us around here. It’s all relative, isn’t it? This is average weather for the interior of Alaska and for some readers in colder climes, but chilly for us here in Wisconsin and ridiculously cold for someone in Florida or Columbia.

Tootsie makes it out to pee and poop and then lifts one cold paw and looks at me pathetically. (It’s such an irony that extreme cold feels like a burn on your hands and fingers, isn’t it? The first time I experienced snow I was shocked that it made my hands feel like they were on fire.) Willie is not picking up his paws and seems oblivious (“Let’s play, let’s play some more!!!”), and I get cold long before he seems to, so I don’t know where his limit is.  The kitties seem just fine, they cuddle together in their cozy kitty igloo in the garage and the sheep.. well, that’s what wool is for, right?

The wild birds will be fine IF they have enough food, and we are working hard to keep the feeders full. I’d say we are going through about 4-5 pounds of sunflower seed a day, not to mention a pound or two of suet. Here’s a photo I took the morning after the storm of 2 Chickadees preparing to launch onto the feeders. It’s not an especially good photo of the birds themselves, but I include it here because I love the light in it along with the deep blue sky that often follows our storms . . .

And here is Mr. Willie loving winter play–he gets to do some fetching in winter if the snow is deep because it helps to soften the impact when he chases. (He still loves the old, beat up disc best!)