THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

It makes me so happy to say that Tootsie is doing great. Right now she’s sleeping in her crate beside my desk. The door is open, but she loves it there. The only places she likes as well are 1) being in bed with me, 2) being on the couch or 3) being by herself in the crate in the back of the car. She likes it so well in the car crate that I am actually having to train to leave it. I’m assuming this is baggage from her puppy mill days and that she feels most secure and comfortable in a small, confined space.

She’s progressed so well in so many ways: I’m especially taken with her flipping around mid-air when outside after I call her to come, ears flying like a furry dumbo, her open, happy mouth taking up half of her tiny little Cavalier head. As I mentioned in an earlier post, now that house training is behind us (wheee!), she can be outside off leash as long as I watch her like a hawk and keep her close to the house, she no longer barks to wake us up and produce her dinner, so it’s time to continue work on standard training. We’ve gotten started on sitting on cue, but I thought it would be fun to start her on clicker training at the same time.

I’ve worked on sit off and on, never with much diligence, but she is getting the hang of it. I started with lure training–using the smell of a great treat to ‘lure’ her body into a sitting position. Now that I’m going to start her with a clicker, I find myself thinking about the two different methods of training: luring and clicker training. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but I find that combining the two of them can be especially effective in some contexts.

Luring has the advantage of initial speed: In the case of sit, a la Ian Dunbar, you hold a tiny, tasty treat at the crown of a dog’s head and move it back toward their tail (not up, straight back.) As a dog’s nose follows the treat straight back toward their tail, their body finds it hard to stay standing, and so the hips automatically collapse and voila, your dog is sitting. Bingo, the treat gets popped into the mouth and your dog just got rewarded for sitting. Once you have the behavior established, you turn the motion of luring into a visual signal, and then bring in the verbal cue and start minimizing the hand motion.  (For a more detailed description, see The Puppy Primer.)

Luring also has a disadvantage: If you’re not careful to drop out the lure and the visual signal early on, the movement becomes the cue. You can end up with a dog who only sits when you move your hand, not when you say “Sit.”

Clicker training has the advantage of creating razor sharp precision, which helps you communicate clearly with your dog. It’s a great thing to teach a dog that their behavior can influence your own, and in a good way at that. I especially like that in most cases, the dog initiates the action, rather than you ‘helping’ him or her. However, strict operant conditioning suggests that you don’t do anything to initiate the behavior, you wait until the dog initiates him or herself, then click and treat to reinforce it. But truth be told, I’m not someone who is going to wait for a dog to sit when they feel like it, click opportunistically and then wait again for the next time. Not when I can lure a dog into a sit, get 15 reps into one sessions, and then take over with a clicker once I’ve got the behavior started. I tend to mix methods for actions that are easy to lure and for movements or behaviors that dogs do naturally. I should warn you: some trainers feels strongly that methods should never be combined, but I’m an equal opportunity employer, and so have no problems doing so as long as you know how to use them together without confusing your dog.

[10 minute break while Trisha goes to work with Tootsie]

First I used a lure/hand signal (with treat) to raise her chin and get her to sit down. My hand was just inches from her mouth and head. She responded well, and I repeated it 3 times.  Then I moved my hand 2 feet from her head, moved it with the same motion as while luring her (just farther away). She responded well until I moved my hand farther away. Now my hand was so far away from her head its motion probably  looked like a completely different signal. I stopped there because I wanted to  move on to clicker training.

I “loaded” the clicker with 25 click/treats (small dog kibble, which she adores… she adores bird seed shells for heaven’s sake, so finding a motivating treat is not a problem with Tootsie.).

Then I lured 3 times relatively close to her head (to create a success) and click/treated when she sat. I then proceeded to disappear the visual signal, added the word “Sit” and in 20 trials had her sitting just to the word “Sit.”

Ah, but here’s an important lesson: I noticed that while saying “Sit” I held both of my hands behind my back. Wondering if that might in itself be a visual signal, I moved the position of one of my arms. Sure enough, she looked at me as if completely confused. When I put both hands behind my back, she sat again when I said “Sit.” But the cue that she was responding to wasn’t the word, it was the position of my hands. Easily fixed, I just began moving my arms and hands into different positions, saying “Sit” and waiting up to 3 seconds for a response, and clicking immediately when she responded correctly. By the time we stopped she was sitting to the word sit no matter what I did with my hands.

And then… experienced trainers can predict the next stage…. I moved three feet backward into the kitchen. Now I was in a different room. Tootsie again looked completely befuddled. Easy to fix; just critical to remember that any action, any posture, any context, any location can be a relevant cue to a dog. In just a few trials she was sitting just to the word in the kitchen as well as the living room. We stopped so that Tootsie didn’t become a Tootsie roll sausage and I could finish this blog.  We’ll take it up again tonight and tomorrow, and start on some tricks this weekend. Ain’t training grand!!!

Question for you all: I know that some trainers are true purists, only using one method or the other. I’m a fan of mix and matching, as long as one understands the potential pit falls. You? [And fyi, I haven't forgotten about following up on the clicker study I wrote about earlier (clickers versus just food as reinforcement): I'm playing phone tag with the author, but I'll let you know as soon as I know more.]

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Willie and I have 3 new sheep to work. I don’t like working him on my small ewe flock now, because they have young lambs and huge bags of milk that have got to be miserably uncomfortable when they flap/slap around whilst the poor ewe is being pushed by a dog. Willie and I try to work them slowly and carefully, but there are times it’s just not possible to keep them from speeding up. There’s another reason: Willie has lost a tremendous amount of confidence since his surgery and confinement, and my most aggressive ewe, Barbie, has gone after him and won several times now. I hate having a dog fight a ewe with a young lamb but I don’t want her winning over and over again and continuing to erode Willie’s confidence. So I have 3 new Katahdin ewes with no udders and no lambs. They are flighty and easy to move and will be great for Willie while he builds up his confidence. Jim, Willie and I just split the 3 newbies off and put them in the orchard pasture high behind the farm house. It took split second timing and quarter-horse short stopping by Willie, but we got it done. Everytime I see him slam his forequarters into the ground I wince: cross your paws for him that he’s not lame tonight, I can’t help but worry. I’ll do some stretching as soon as I’m done here and ice him if his shoulder feels hot.

Here are the new girls, as yet not named (though I’m leaning toward Chili for the red one in the middle). Okay, they aren’t bathing beauties, but they will have a good life here this summer and will be perfect for Willie and me to get our paws back into the game. Those of you who work sheep know that the one in the middle is going to be the challenge: see that lifted chin? Oh my!

Here’s a wider shot, showing you the only reason I could get a close shot of the sheep! Good boy Willie.

Here’s TOOTSIE!

Also known as:

Little Bit, Mini Me and my favorite, Mop of the Woods.

There’s a new kid on the block, or at the farm I should say. Meet Tootsie, a 7 year old King Charles Cavalier who was rescued by Lucky Star Cavalier Rescue from an Amish Puppy Mill, after the owners had used her up. Her mouth and ears were horribly infected; she had twenty teeth extracted.  She also was fat as a tick, so you couldn’t say she was starving. She weighed 22 lbs (now she weighs 15 and is still a bit overweight).

And what, you might ask, is a Cavalier doing at Redstart Farm? Doesn’t every farm need a Cavalier? (What, you think we farmers don’t have laps?)  Seriously, there is logic to all this. Here’s a brief version of the back story:  If you have been following the blog for awhile, you know that after Lassie died I had my heart set on getting back up to 3 dogs–Willie, a little lap dog from a shelter or rescue, and another Border Collie. I had wanted the lap dog first, but then a litter of BCs came along that looked too good to pass up, so last summer we raised Hope, a Border Collie pup with great herding lines.

It’s a long story, as you know if you followed the bouncing ball last year, but it turned out that Hope and Willie brought out the worst in each other, and I decided it was in both of their best interests to place Hope in another home. It was a brutally hard decision for me to make, and I was roundly criticized by some for it, but I did what I believed to be right for both of the dogs, took some deep breaths, and went back to looking for the next dog. If you know Willie’s history (extremely uncomfortable, and at one time aggressive, to unfamiliar dogs) you know that picking the right dog for him was a challenge, and not as easy as it would have been with any other dog I’ve ever had. But early in the year, a dear friend and I found a little fluff-ball-oxytocin pump from a rescue who sounded perfect, and was about to come out to the farm when Willie was badly injured.

And so, the next dog was put on hold for many, long months while we worked through Willie’s injury in February, his surgery in May and his first 5 months of PT. Once Willie was able to have a bit of off-leash time I began looking again. One of the places I looked was at Cavalier rescue, because Willie has had some great experiences with them. One of my sitters has two females who come to the farm often, and Willie gets along beautifully with them. In addition, one of his best friends when he was younger was Brody, a sweet little male Cav, who used to love to wrestle play with Willie on the living room floor.

After consultations with two wonderful women in rescue, Nancy and Leslie, and two super rescue groups, Lucky Star Cavalier Rescue and Greater Chicago Cavalier Rescue, we all agreed that Tootsie might be a great match. She is a small female (least likely to make Willie nervous), quiet (good again), deferential to Willie (good again) and great around cats (and yet again). After a trial period Tootsie became a  permanent member of Redstart Farm and I can’t tell you how happy it makes me. She is great for us–she does need a lot of training, but she’s going to be a good, good little dog, and will fit in well. It also feels good to finally be able to bring a needy little dog to the farm. I’ll talk in a later post about how this adoption relates to my concerns about the problems that occur when breeding dogs for our sake rather than for theirs, but for now, it’s all about integrating Tootsie into the farm.

As you can imagine, Willie’s feelings about all this are paramount to me. I am happy to say that so far things are going well, given how little time has passed. She and Willie are not buddies, and I don’t know that they ever will be. But that’s okay; he can’t have a playmate now because he is still on a great many restrictions, so I couldn’t bring in a dog he wanted to play with. At first he was a bit uncomfortable about her in the house, but less so than he normally would be with a new dog in the house. Willie does well with unfamiliar dogs in the great outdoors (a huge change from his behavior 2-3 years ago) but he is nervous with new dogs inside the house. As expected, he was not 100% comfortable with her in the house at first, although he was still pretty darned polite. Mostly he made what I call “snake face,” hard flat eyes, flattened ears and a sour look that made it clear he wasn’t thrilled with the addition. But he was appropriate, and in very few days he appears to have accepted her presence. He still seems happy and relaxed and seems to think of her as part of the ‘new normal’ of life.

Of course, I’ve worked hard hard hard on counter conditioning him around her getting food and petting, and now he’ll even let her eat out of the same plate when they get snacks after our dinner. Resource guarding was one of my primary concerns with Willie, and that is going extremely well so far. She pushes in between us for petting and he puts up with that too, although he clearly doesn’t like it. Who could blame him? She’s the one who needs work here; she is super pushy and will be learning some manners soon. (Thus the name, Mini Me.)  A good sign I think: he is starting to sneak in sniffs when he can, as if pretending he just happened to find his nose in the area of her belly and groin. “Oh my, did my nose end up under your tail? I have no idea how that happened.”

She, on the other hand, pretends he isn’t there. She is an especially small Cav (her legs are ridiculously short) and he must look like a giant to her. I suspect they will become more and more comfortable together, and who knows, maybe they will learn to be buddies. It’s very very early …;

I’ll write updates about how things are going when I can. Weeks one and two have been all about:

1) House Training: She is a mill dog after all–but Leslie at Lucky Star made a GREAT start. I took her out every 10 min for the first 2 weeks. Seriously. She is still in shock that she gets a treat every times she pees. She’s doing great, but I am still on it all the time.

2) Teaching her to respond when I say Tootsie. That was her name when she was in foster care, but she had no idea what it meant when I said it. Around day 15 she literally had a Helen Keller moment when (I think) she realized that the noises I made meant something. I would give a lot to have had a video of her face when she made the connection.

3) Leash Manners: Not charging away at 20 mph when on a leash. I never trust her off leash now, so we worked hard on teaching her to stay close to me when the leash is on. It’s taken a lot more treats, but she’s making fantastic progress.

4) Barking: I was warned she barked in the morning at 5:30 until she was let out of her crate. Oh my, not good for me and Willie and our super sensitive ears. We’ve worked very  hard on this too (began by setting the alarm for 5 am, then slowly later etc etc.) She does NOT bark in her crate in the morning (the goal is no crate at all, but the house training issue with a mill dog takes priority) YEAH! But she does bark at other times when she wants out, sounding something like a huge, operatic mouse. We’re working on it and she’s making progress on that too.

Best of all? She is super friendly and is much less shy than most mill dogs. She loves people, men and women both. She has some health challenges; a minor heart murmur and subluxated knee (also minor), and of course there’s her heart to worry about given that she’s a Cav. I don’t know how long her life with us will last, she is already seven years old, but she’s found a home at Redstart Farm, and in my heart forever.

Here she is:

And on one of her first walks in the country, my goodness this exercise stuff can tire a girl out!