THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

A few weeks ago I wrote a post on the cue “Get Back,” which is one of my favorites because it is so useful in so many contexts. Katie Martz, Communications Coordinator here at PMcC, video taped Willie getting back in a variety of contexts, and we noticed that every time I said “Get Back” in a context in which he’d rather not, he tongue flicked. That led to a very interesting discussion with readers about why he was tongue flicking, but distracted us from the reason we did the taping: the usefulness of “non-traditional” cues in dog training. Yes, we all need Come, and Sit and Stay; I can’t imagine what I would do without them. But there are a variety of cues that are equally useful, but not as common or well known. I thought it would be fun to canvass readers to learn about their favorite “non-traditional” cues, and perhaps add to the vocabularies of all of us. Here are just a few to get us started:

ENOUGH: Along with “Get Back,” I also love “Enough,” no doubt in part because I have had dogs (and still do) willing to elicit play or petting until all the entire Antarctic ice pack melts and we are all paddling to work. There’s a video of Enough training in the Reading Room on the website, it’s the Second from the Top. I use it when I want to focus on important issues, including whether Castle and Beckett will ever have a relationship like normal people, when I am done playing with toys with Willie, and when I simply can not stroke Tootsie’s adorable little round belly pooch for one more minute.

TAKE IT/DROP IT: I teach Drop It as the flip side of Take It, and I find I use both of them often. As in: Please drop the dead bird you found, or please pick up your toy and bring it back in the house. I know these aren’t especially ‘non-traditional’ but they often aren’t taught in training classes and I wish they were. Far better to teach Drop It as a fun exercise rather than reflexively shouting DROP IT! in an angry voice and teaching your dog to swallow as fast as she can when she hears it. That seems to be the default of most dog owners, an understandable primate-like response, but not a good way to establish a good relationship with your dog.  I’d love to see it as part of dog training curricula and have included it in The Puppy Primer.

READY? This is a standard signal a lot of serious trainers use, but I wish again it was more common place. I love looking at Willie and asking him if he wants to engage with me. The key here is asking. It’s not a command or even a cue really, in the sense that I’m simply asking Willie if he’d like to start training something new or practicing something old. Any answer is acceptable and I have no expectations of his response, except as information. If he doesn’t turn to me, eyes shining, then he’s not ready, and I change my behavior until he is. Because the sound so often leads to working sheep or doing something that elicits treats or play, Willie seems to love the word as much as I do.

OUT: Katie Martz uses this with Lily, her beautiful Dogo. She uses it when she’s chopping vegetables in the kitchen, to prevent Lily the 90 lb white wonder from dancing on the counters in delight. Out means either go to another room or another surface (floor to carpet for example) or, essentially, stop bothering me right now. She taught it by tossing treats into the other room and body blocking her from coming back in. Lily seems to define it the same way Katie does (often rare in training, right?), because she will respond correctly to it in a new house or apartment.

WHAT’S YOURS? This is just a partial list, and I’d love to hear what “Non-Traditional” signals you use with your dogs that you especially love. I envision a very interesting discussion about it, thanks to all our thoughtful readers. I fully expect I’ll be teaching Willie a new cue by the end of the weekend….

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: It’s gorgeous but desperately dry. I am watering the trees in the yard, but who knows what will happen in the woods and the prairies. But it has been stunningly beautiful, one of the prettiest autumns ever. Dry conditions, followed by sunny days and cool nights are apparently ideal for fall color, and that has been the case here to a T. The sheep are doing well, although that’s not the answer you would get if you asked them. They are confined to the pen because the pastures are little better than dirt. It’s sad to see, but I have had excellent advice from a pasture specialist (thank you Laura) and have a plan to rehabilitate starting next spring. I’m taking soil samples in this week to get that part done now anyway, and we are, one by one, ridding the area of the thistles we didn’t get this spring. (Thistles appear to be drought proof apparently, such a shame they are not edible.)

However, thanks to Jim, who is the primary portable fence mover, the sheep are able to get some grass from selected areas in the front of the farm. In the photo below they are eating the lush grasses right alongside the road. This is the best grass on the farm: it’s a low area that gathers rain run off from a culvert, is shaded much of the day and is mowed by the county on a regular basis. There is a tiny bit of grass in other areas of the front lawn, and thanks to Jim, Willie and the portable fencing, the sheep will be able to get some of it. Most of their ration is the hay we purchased for winter, which we are going through at an alarming rate. But it’s good, rich alfalfa and the sheep are actually doing well on it.

Last Sunday we all got out for a lovely fall walk in the fields and woods close to a good friend’s house. Willie’s shoulder has improved enough so that he is now off leash again. When I had to put  him back on leash, both inside and out, he became as depressed as any dog I’ve seen. It was, in a word, heartbreaking. Now that he can run free again he is back to his happy, happy self. We saw his physical therapist on Monday and she strongly advised that we go very, very slowly trying to bring him back to training for competition. It’s clear that his shoulder simply may never be able to handle the wear and tear involved in training for driving on a perfectly straight line, something that requires a tremendous amount of lateral stress on shoulder joints. If he can’t ever trial again I don’t think he’d care at all, as long as he can work sheep at home. It’s me that wants to trial, so although it would be a great disappointment to drop out now that I’ve caught the bug again, if Willie is happy, that’ll be enough for me. I’ll get over it, and Willie will not care one little bit. I’ll see how it goes, going very slowly and carefully.

Here’s the gang on the wooded part of our walk: Willie, Jim, Tootsie, good friend Beth Viney of Great Pyrenees Rescue of Wisconsin and her lovely lady, Tundra. Willie and Tundra did beautifully when they were re-introduced at the beginning of our walk (they had met once before, I have a video of it on my Dog-Dog Reactivity DVD and we all had a grand old time. Tootsie did get carried by me or Jim part of the way, the grasses were pretty high in some places and what was a path to us was a jungle to her. Short of teaching her to use a machete, we picked her up and carried her. But she was a trooper and still did a lot of walking, and we all had a wonderful time. Then Jim and I went back to doing farm chores, worked outside most of the afternoon, and ate a yummy dinner of local, organic pork, roasted root veggies and home made bread. We fell in bed about 9 o’clock and slept as if we’d been drugged. Hopefully there will be more of the same this weekend (the walks, farm chores and good food, we’ll pass on the “as if drugged” part.)

On Friday I asked you what you thought was going on here, at least as best one could tell from a still photograph. I’m the first to agree it’s hard to say much from one brief moment in time, but it’s a great exercise nonetheless. It helps us all focus our attention and generate hypothesis about what might happen next. It would be perfectly reasonable to suggest several different scenarios…

Here’s the story in this case: These two dogs are great friends and play together often. The yellow dog is a 4 yr old GR/Husky cross, Tucker, who has a tendency to nip faces when he plays. The white dog in the red coat is Lily, a 2.5 yr old spayed female Dogo Argentino, owned by Katie Martz  here at McC Publishing.

Lily was responding to what appeared to be an inappropriate play action from Tucker (getting into her face in a way both Katie and I would call “rude.”). Katie’s interpretation of the event is that Lily, the Dogo, was irritated by the yellow dog’s behavior and was correcting him.

Immediately after this photo was taken both dogs paused, sniffed the ground and then resumed chasing and playing after a break. I take this as yet more evidence of the importance of pauses in healthy dog play… a chance to take break, take a breath, and decrease arousal levels.

Many of you were absolutely right on in your guess, good for you! (And to one commenter who bravely made a guess even though she was afraid she’d feel foolish if she was wrong… I love that you said out loud what many of us often feel. Good girl!) This is indeed play, as most of you guessed and Lily is, at least in my and Katie’s opinion, telling Tucker to back off. I think the most important visual signals here are the wrinkling over Lily’s nose and exposed front teeth, forward motion toward Tucker along with ears forward. Thus, I’d say she’s on offense and her wrinkled nose suggests some arousal and potential irritation. Tucker’s head is back and lateral, and his ears are back. He thus looks on defense to me, but note his high tail and hips leaning toward Lily… no shrinking violet here. I agree with some of you that he looks a tad surprised, (I want to say goofy but I suspect that’s not a technical term). It’s interesting that most of the responses on FB said the dogs were playing, but some said Tucker was on offense and some said Lily was. Given that the dogs are both pretty equally matched and that Tucker’s tail was high and he could have been hip slamming her at the time, not a bad guess!

Let me know if you think this is a fun exercise to do every once in a while. We could expand it to video… And I’d like to do some case studies here too. Like the idea?

Maybe not a 1,000 in this case, but what words would you put with this photo? What do you think is going on here? I’d love to hear what you all think. I know the dogs, the context and what happened before and after, so after I collect your input I’ll let you in on the story.

This might be a fun exercise for us to play every once in a while, yes? Let me know if you like the idea. I’ll write another post on Monday and describe the dogs, their relationship and what happened immediately after the photo was taken. But before that I’d love to hear how you evaluate what you are seeing.

And no fair cheating if you saw this on Facebook last week! It’s just such a great photo I couldn’t resist putting it out here. So… what’s going on here between these two dogs? What are the most likely things to happen next?

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Glorious weather, lots of grass and happy sheep! And happy Willie too, because we’re managing the time to practice our driving skills (or lack thereof).  I’m thinking of entering him in a sheepdog trial this fall that will have a demanding course and difficult sheep, so we have lots of work to do. Tootsie is good too, although she wasn’t a fan of the thunderstorm yesterday morning, but she is already improving greatly with some counter conditioning and cuddles in the bed.

There’s a last chapter in the kitten chronicles too. You may remember that I spent weeks taming the wild things enough to trap them in a cage, took them into the house and began truly taming them in the bathroom converted to a kitty condo. Great homes were found right away for two kittens, and two others went to the good folks at Dane County Friends of Ferals. I kept Callie the Calico in hopes she could grow up to be a healthy, happy barn cat, and that her mother, who I trapped and had spayed, would stay around with her. You may recall I can’t have a cat in the house anymore and have a barn scurrying with rodents, so it seemed like a win/win. But, as often happens, life has other plans. Instead of staying around with Callie, momma cat began trying to lure her away into the woods. Callie, still a young kitten and too small to be spayed, was absent from the barn for increasing periods of time. Her mom was never in the barn anymore. Even when she’d been there with her kittens, she stayed in the upper hay mow and avoided the area in the lower level with the grain and thus, the mice. I actually was trapping mice for her and bringing them up to the haymow on the upper level of the barn and presenting them to momma cat. You may laugh out loud here, who could blame you?

After recovering from her spay surgery, momma cat began to move into the woods and lure Callie there with her. AT one point there was NO little kitten in my barn at any time during the day, except to come and eat dinner at nine o’clock at night. She came running down from the woods, presumably away from her mother, rubbed all over me and ate her dinner. (I should say here that I have no idea what exactly her mom was doing and even if she was still alive, I’m just guessing it was her mom who lured her away from the barn. I can’t imagine what else would have, and she always went in the direction her mom took in and out of the barn.)

That was enough for me. No way was I going to let a tiny, mostly white, hawk-bait of an unspayed kitten become yet another wild cat living in the woods and having litter after litter if she lived that long. The decision made, I went to the barn at 9 pm, ready to pick up Callie the Adorable, bring her back in the house and find her a safer place to live. No Callie. I called and called. No Callie. I walked back to the house, sick with worry, and back to the barn 15 minutes later. No Callie. This continued for a gut wrenching and endless 45 minutes, until she finally dashed toward me from the woods around 10 at night. I picked her up and carried her into the farmhouse, snuggling my face against her fur, allergies be damned. Dan Johnson, bless him, of Friends of Ferals came to pick her up the next day, and within  just a few more days she’d already found her perfect, forever home.

And here it is, with Veterinary Technician Jenny Maahs. She is as over the moon about Callie as one could be, and I’m thrilled that it has all worked out so well.

And here’s more good news: The remaining two kittens, the two little ginger girls Brava and Gabby, are available right now (Friday the 17th and Saturday the 18th) at the Catapalooza at the Dane County Humane Society in Madison, WI. Here’s my request: If you adopt one (or both?), please, please give Friends of Ferals permission for me to contact you and send you a present. If you’d like to come out to the farm and see where they were born I’m sure I could arrange that!

A million years ago, my first Border Collie Drift lept up and nipped a man’s nose at the Wisconsin State Fair. Even though the man was clearly not injured, with virtually not even a red spot on his nose, I was shook up and appalled. He was furious. “Your dog attacked me!”

Well, he did. Just because the man wasn’t injured didn’t mean he didn’t feel attacked. And it didn’t mean that I didn’t feel horrible. Drift and I were about to perform in front of huge crowd by doing a sheep herding demo, and found ourselves jammed into a crowd against the building wall. The gentlemen in question charged up to Drift, grabbed his face in his hands, and yes, you guessed it, bent down to kiss Drift on the nose. It was the same exact context in which newscaster Kyle Dyer was bitten by a Dogo a few months ago. In some ways, everything was different: Kyle was badly injured and it was recorded on video tape for all the world to see. And in one way, everything was the same: A stranger holds a dog’s head in his/her hands and looms over to kiss a dog on the nose. Just like David Letterman was bitten on camera years ago. Just like how many people are bitten every year?

I find myself thinking of this before the beginning of Dog Bite Prevention Week, which runs from May 20 to May 26. It’s an important topic and I’m in complete support of efforts to raise awareness and prevent dog bites. The figures bandied about are that there are almost 5 million dog bites every year in the US (but see Dogs Bite but Balloons and Slippers are More Dangerous…). Given that that figure appears to include events in which there was no injury whatsoever, the number is undoubtedly on the high side, but no matter how many there are, we all should be working to decrease them.

There is lots of good, standard information out there about preventing dog bites. The AVMA has a good website on bite prevention, as does the ASPCA and HSUS. There is lots of good advice on all these sites, especially related to keeping children from being bitten (the most common recipient of a dog bite appears to be a child from the ages of 5 to 9). However, much of it is general: pick a good puppy, train your dog, have a fenced yard, teach children to ask first, etc.

This is all good information, but we all know that no list is enough to prevent many of the bites that occur. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep up our efforts. Here’s my list, which builds on the standard advice and adds my own observations and experience, I’m counting on you to add to it:

1. Leashes Aren’t Muzzles. (Neither are muzzles for that matter.) In other words, keeping your dog on a leash won’t prevent him from biting someone. Sometimes leashes can precipitate bites if a dog is nervous and feels trapped. I’ve been overwhelmed by clients who believed that if their dog was attached by a leash, or even if they were close to their dog, that they could prevent a bite. We can prevent lots of bites from happening, but not always with leashes and proximity. When people miss signals of discomfort or tension in their dogs, they end up trying to stop a bite after it has begun. Stopping a dog in mid-air, within the micro-second required, to observe, evaluate and respond is far beyond the skill level of most people. People rarely say or think “I”m being bitten.” By the time you figure out what’s happened, it’s over.  Far better to understand both context and behavior to prevent a bite long before your dog even thinks about it. And my comment about muzzles? Dogs can still hurt people, even with a muzzle on. There are lots of ways to lower the risk, but there’s no magic out there. Based on all this, you can predict my next point:

2. Learn to Read Dogs, and Teach Others What You Know. Recall Michele Wan’s research that showed the dog owning public is not very good at reading signs of negative emotions in dogs (fear, anxiety, etc.). Thus, we all need to do what we can to help educate everyone around us. It’s not helpful for us to pull our hair and roll our eyes about how bad people are at reading dogs, and how often they behave in ways that simply beg a dog to bite them. That just makes us right, and being right gets us one thing and one thing only: Being Right. That’s not going to decrease the number of dog bites out there, so we need to use our knowledge to help others. If you’re a trainer, get yourself on television, give out handouts, refer people to materials and websites that will help them translate dog. There are tons of them. Needless to say I have my own at my website, (and FYI, I have a new DVD coming out this coming Monday titled “Lost in Translation,” a day-long seminar on how dogs use sight, sound and smell to communicate) and there are many other great books and DVDs available through Dogwise and Tawzer Videos.

3. Understand Context: This contains a vast range of issues, from what tends to scare dogs in general (strangers grabbing their heads and trying to kiss their noses, surely a problem we can all understand–want a strange man to grab your head and smash his face into your own?), what scares each dog as an individual, and how the context itself can add risk. My Border Collie Drift was trapped and overwhelmed, as was the Dogo that bit Ms. Dyer. I’ve had numerous clients whose dogs bit someone after a long, exhausting day. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard about dogs who were “just wonderful” with all the children at the picnic all afternoon and evening long until … In hind sight the owner’s tell me “They should have known how tired their dog was…”. Yes, they should have, but we need to help spread the word that even good dogs can get grumpy too when they are exhausted. And when they are overwhelmed. Or scared. Or a tad tweaked about life at the moment.

4. Practice Interventions and Use Them When Necessary. This is where I went wrong all those years ago. If I was in that same situation now I would have never have allowed that man get that close to Drift. I would have moved between him and Drift before he could have grabbed Drift’s face and leaned down to kiss him. Body Blocks work really, really well on people, and can be used to avoid a great many risky situations.

Just a few days ago I was at a pet store that allows dogs and saw an owner use one perfectly. He had an adult Rottie, a lovely, happy-faced dog, who was approached by a squiggly, squirmy Golden Retriever puppy. The puppies’ owner let her dog dash toward the Rottie until they sniffed nose to nose. We were in tight quarters at the check out line. The Rottie had no where to back up into, and the enthusiastic puppy was about to jump onto his head. Wisely, the owner stepped quickly between the dogs, moved toward the puppy a step or two to move him away and then turned and smooched to his dog to follow him.

I turned to the pup’s owner, who had appeared surprised at what had happened and seemed a little bit put out. I thought perhaps I could use this as a teaching moment, and explained “I think the Rottie might have been a tad bit uncomfortable with your pup.” I hope she understood my point, but I can’t say, because the Rottie’s other owner turned to me and said, defensively, “He is a LOVELY dog, he is NOT aggressive.” Ah, and I thought he was a lovely dog myself, but I also noted that owner number one was wise enough to know that any trouble might react to a rude pup in that context, and quick as a wink did a body block. Huzzah! and Yeah! for him I say. Even lovely dogs have contexts in which they are uncomfortable, and more power to us when we know what they are.

5. The World’s Most Dangerous Words Are “I Think It’ll Be Okay.” I asked a salesman once if the hardware I was about to buy would stay attached to a wall if a 150 pound dog lunged against it with all his power. “I think so,” the guy said. This is when red flags should fly and noises generated by the security systems of nuclear power plants should start pounding into your ears. “Think it’s okay” is just not good enough when you are talking about a potential dog bite. I tell clients whose dogs are at risk of biting that we first, before talking about treatment, need to create the kind of risk management system included in submarines and power plants. If your not sure if your dog is 100% stable in a situation and you find yourself saying “I think it’ll be okay” without a careful and thoughtful risk analysis, I want you to hear AH OOOGA, AH OOOGA blasting in your ear. You want to hear “I KNOW it will be okay,” or given that life is never 100% predictable, “The probability of my dog hurting or scaring someone is less than .01 of one percent, and I’m willing to take that risk.” Whatever you decide, it should be very thoughtful, based on a lot of knowledge and be very, very conservative. Bites can be horrible for everyone, including the dog, and once they happen you’re in a entirely different context, and it’s not a good one.

And you? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. I expect they will be both thoughtful and thought provoking, as usual.

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Spring sweet spring. Well, sort of. Summer, sweet summer? It’s in the low 80′s, sunny and warm and already I’m worrying a bit about when it will rain next. It’s been awhile.

But 8 of the 9 lambs are thriving, filling out with muscles and frolicking in the dappled shade of the woods. Spot’s twin ram lamb, who I’ve been supplementing with goat’s milk (mom’s udder is only giving milk from one side), was a voracious vacuum at first when given a bottle, but now he’s fussy and hesitant and only takes a few sips and then stops. This started after he was vaccinated and banded (and thus he lost trust in me), but the other bottle lamb, one of triplets, needed only a day to get over it. Spot’s boy, however, has remained hesitant and cautious.

His tiny twin sister, who I was most concerned about originally, continues to remind me that size doesn’t matter. She’s the pushy one. And although she refuses to take milk from a bottle (“Ugh, ugh!” she indicates by curling her lip and turning away), she’s filling out like a tick and has begun mounting the two ram lambs every time they start to drink out of the bottle. I’m speculating that with only one teat working, she’s dominating it and her brother is losing out. He doesn’t look bad, he’s just not gaining like the others, so I’ll keep working on getting him more milk. I tried a self feeder, which has been successful in the past, but I started late and because they all get milk from their momma’s they had little interest. I’ll keep you posted, we’re going to look at him more carefully this weekend for any physical or medical problems.

Willie and I just moved the entire flock up the hill to the orchard pasture so that my handy neighbor could bring in his bobcat and clear out the barn pen. May I be forgiven for saying that Willie’s work on the sheep was paw perfect? And where was the video camera when I needed?

As you can see, right now at the farm it’s all about lambs and flowers and working Willie and weeding weeding weeding.  And, oh yeah, rhubarb & strawberry pie. Did I mention weeding?

Here’s the only bloom on the new Tree Peony we planted last year. I almost didn’t include the photograph because the focus isn’t crisp, but decided to anyway because it is still lovely in a kind of smear-petroleum-jelly-on-the-lens-for-the-aging-actress kind of way.

And here’s the Iris in front of the please-paint-me-this-summer porch. You can see Willie boy in the background, watching the sheep in behind the electric fence in the front yard:

Thanks for all the great comments about your experiences with dogs who are reactive, whether it’s to other dogs, or to people, or other objects. If you haven’t read the comments, here’s what comes out (at least to me) loud and clear:

1. There isn’t any one method that works for all dogs. Dogs are “reactive” for a variety of reasons, including being afraid of other dogs, wanting to greet other dogs and being overwhelmed with excitement or frustration about it. In addition, some dogs seem to be helped by being first taught an appropriate behavior on cue, others do better if allowed to initiate it on their own.

2. The methods that seem to work best for most people involve teaching a dog to turn and look away from another dog, BEFORE the dog begins the problematic behavior.

3. If the dog is afraid of other dogs, letting him look away and then move away from the other dog is the best reinforcement for most dogs. You can start this by teaching an Autowatch, or by waiting for  him to look away himself, and reinforce it with food, play and/or an increase in distance between the dogs. I like to ‘mark’ the desired behavior with a clicker or just by saying “click,” then reinforce with a primary reinforcer –’marking’ is a more precise way of letting the dog know what behavior resulted in the reinforcement. However, years ago I didn’t use a marker and had a lot of success, so there’s a lot of variability in how you do this. I very much like the addition of  having the subject dog move away from the other one after it has looked away and broken eye contact. If the dog truly is afraid of another, surely that is tremendously reinforcing. Interestingly, I found that as the years went on I began moving backward three or four steps when a dog did an Autowatch . . . but didn’t consciously add it to the program until recently.

4. If the dog wants to get to other dogs to interact, (and is barking because she is frustrated) then increasing the distance between her and another dog is a punishment, not a reinforcement. For these dogs, you can teach some form of polite behavior, like stopping and looking back at the owner, again long before she has reached threshold, and give her food, play or access to the other dog as a reinforcement. Needless to say, interactions should be done carefully and only with dogs who are totally trustable.

5. UNDER THRESHOLD is a key here. I’ve long believed it and your comments support that most people have been more successful if they set up a dog so that it can see another dog, but is far enough away that the subject dog hasn’t yet begun barking and lunging and carrying on.

6. [That is why] SET UPS are tremendously helpful. Treating reactivity goes much faster if you can arrange for someone with a non-reactive dog to help you out. But if you can’t, you can take advantage of situations in which you know that you can control the distance between the dogs: Perhaps there is a dog behind a fence who is not too reactive that you can use as a stimulus? Try driving to the parking lot of a dog training center, where you know the dogs will be on leash and will be moving from Point A to Point B. How about your local vet clinic? Pet Store? Just be sure to pick places where you know the other dogs will be on leash and you can be the one to control the distance between your dogs.

7. EMERGENCY U TURN: Life tends to happen to us when we didn’t expect it, so everyone needs a conditioned response to a dog showing up too close or by surprise. You can use the Emergency U Turn before your dog responds to prevent trouble (and give your dog lots of reinforcement once you’ve turned and moved away) or you can use it to get out of a bad situation in which your dog is already reacting (just turn and move away, no reinforcement this time, but stop when you think your dog can listen and ask for an appropriate behavior.) The key is to have practiced a fast pivot and cheerful retreat, so that both you and your dog are conditioned to do it fast in an up-beat, happy way instead of being in a panic.

8. REINFORCEMENT? Remember it is defined by the receiver, so knowing what works best for your dog is crucial. If you’re going to mark an appropriate behavior and reinforce it, you need to be sure you know what works best for your dog.

Here’s a video illustrating Willie being given food rewards and then tug games as reinforcements for Watch, AutoWatch and Where’s the Dog? He’s looking at an adolescent Dogo Argentino, who he has played with once as a puppy and parallel walked with outside the office. (He’s still nervous about her when they are in the office.)

Normally, if he is truly nervous about another dog he’ll take food but he snatches it with his ears pinned, while he’ll relax much more if he gets reinforced by playing tug. In this particular video he is very interested in greeting Lily, and the difference in his response to food versus play is VERY subtle here . . . can you see it? You’ll see a combination of on cue “Watch” and “Where’s the Dog”, and Autowatches in which Willie looks at me by himself… I wasn’t paying much attention to who initiated what, (note how I totally ignore an Autowatch). I was attending to getting a good recording of his different responses to food versus play. That turned out to be more subtle than usual in this case, but discernible. (Note that when I say “Stop” I’m talking to the videographer, not to Willie!)

The last half of the video shows you the result of our work. In between taped segments, we let them sniff at the fence (camera was off, darn), and then released them into the play pen together. (Lily the Dogo was taken to the middle of the pen so that they wouldn’t meet at the gate, always a tension-filled place for dogs to greet.)

Result: Wheeeeeee!