THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

Wow. What an amazing experience for me, and I hope for the 250 participants in the Madison Seminar. We spent the weekend immersed in hot-off-the-press research on canine behavior, (I was worried it would be too wonky but apparently I’m not the only one starved for intellectual stimulation about dog behavior!), and Ken Ramirez’s inspiring wisdom about training, well illustrated by compelling videos and stories. You just can’t listen to this man talk and not be a better trainer for it. We were even honored by the presence of David Wroblewski, the author of the deservedly best-selling and instant American Classic, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle.

I’m basically brain dead today, able only to mumble monosyllabic nonsense, but I’m looking forward to lots of posts inspired by the weekend, from articles about some of the research I talked about, to some of things we learned from Ken, to answering some of the many questions I was unable to answer, and even to posting some data from an experiment we did on Saturday. But here are some photos from the weekend.

Here’s just some of the participants before we got started after lunch on Saturday.

Here I am torturing Meeka, one of our cover dogs from Love Has No Age Limit. Like all the dogs in the book she was rescued (found as a stray in this case) and adopted by Shannon who brought her to the seminar. What a treat for me to meet her.

And here I am with Ken, attempting to have his training skills flow into me in some kind of magical transfer… I’ll let you know if it works.

Here’s one of the great lessons Ken Ramirez had for us at the Clicker Expo in Chicago last weekend: The basics aren’t really all that basic after all. In his experience, one of the most common mistakes he sees in even experienced trainers is forgetting the importance of some of the basics. Here are some of the reminders he shared, and believe me, I am taking them all to heart.

Precision: Yes, we all know it, timing is everything, but no matter how obvious it is, it is often forgotten. This is relevant whether you are using a marker (like a clicker or ‘yes’) or not, often because we don’t do the following:

Clean Delivery: Ken reminded us that dropping the treat on the ground or fumbling the delivery can be very aversive to our dogs. Say we are on a roll, clicking and treating at a good pace, and then we drop the treat on the ground. The dog has to sniff around and find it, and that might not be so much fun for him. At worst he may feel frustrated, and at best he has completely forgotten what he got the treat for by the time he found it. Not a crisis, of course, but a little bit of frustration can have a lot of effect. Ken reminds us to practice delivery WITHOUT our dogs around (supporting my belief that dog training is a science, a sport and an art.)

Where Reinforce? Are you thoughtful where you reinforce your dog? Do you do it where the behavior occurs (say your dog lies down, so you move the treat down to her on the ground) or, in a location set up for the next repetition. There is no right answer, it depends completely on what you are doing, what’s important is to be thoughtful about your goal and consciously choose where to reinforce your dog rather than doing it randomly.

Stationing: If working with two or more dogs, also be thoughtful about who is stationed where. You can avoid a lot of trouble between dogs if you always set them up to work with one on left, other on right for example. Or take a trick from prof’l performance trainers, and teach each dog to go to a station to work. That avoids the potential of competition or veiled threats from one dog to the other.

Fairness: If working multiple dogs, you must recognize how each animal perceives the session. Is each getting her fair share? What if you have two dogs sitting looking at you, and you ask one to lie down. Who do you reinforce? Just the one who lay down? But the other also did what you ask (stayed in place), why not reinforce him too?

These are just a few of things I pondered on the way home, and that made me glad I was able to catch some of the talks at Clicker Expo in between my own. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this… what are the basics that you think you’d be wise to review?

Such great food for thought. If we could all just live on Ken’s shoulder for a week we’d all be better trainers, I’m sure of it. Check out his website, he really is a great resource. I’m even more excited than ever now about him coming to Madison this October.

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Here’s the good news — we know what’s wrong with Willie’s shoulder. Besides an inflamed bicepital tendon, his has a bone chip floating around in his shoulder, probably from an earlier injury when part of the tendon was torn and pulled a piece of the bone away. Here’s the bad news — he will need surgery, but I’ve put it off until May because this time of year is the worst possible time imaginable for me to have a dog recovering from surgery, and Dr. Susan Schafer at UW  (who is just as wonderful as everyone told me she is), said the surgery wasn’t urgent in any way. The timing is especially relevant because we got some painfully bad news the morning we arrived home. Jim’s sister has been in a valiant battle with Stage 4 Ovarian cancer and it looked a few weeks ago like she might come out the victor.  But things changed fast while we were gone, and she’s not doing well at all. Jim will be up with her as much as he can in the weeks to come, as will I, although I’ll have to stay home more because of lambing, teaching, etc.

So May it is for Willie’s surgery. Dr. Schafer will take out the bone chip, sever the tendon, drill a hole in the bone and screw the tendon back into place. (She has gone back to this method, as have several other experts, after finding that truly athletic dogs don’t do as well with a simple severing, which is commonly done now.) This is the same exact surgery that Jim had about the same exact time last year. Good grief. That means all trialing is out for this year, we won’t really be able to work sheep until August or September. But it does mean he can be off leash a bit, no herding or hard play, but at least some freedom after five weeks of no fun at all.

Here’s Mr. Will, with his shaved shoulders, a mohawk down his chest and still slightly sedated goofy look. This morning I got to take his leash off! Ahhhhhhhhhhhh.

With virtually no objectivity what so ever, I’m excited to announce that registration is open for a completely new seminar, to be held in Madison, WI on October 29th & 30th. I’ll be working much of the summer on creating an up-to-the-minute summary of what we know about canine behavior and cognition for Saturday, and Ken Ramirez, simply the best animal trainer I know, will knock your socks off with his presentation on Sunday about how to solve training problems and use reinforcements in a way you’ve probably never thought of before. Last summer I left his seminar motivated to train anything that breathed before I could get home to Willie. (I can report that it does not work on TV remote controls in hotel rooms, and okay, granted, remote controls can’t breathe, but I was unable to stop myself from trying.)

I know, I’m not an objective source (I’m doing the presenting on Saturday), but I’m already looking forward to both days. After being frustrated for almost twenty years about how little research was being done on dogs, FINALLY dogs are hot in science and there’s some great new information out there about training, behavior and cognition. I’m not the only one who is excited. We’ve already gotten registrations from as far away as Arizona and it’s only been announced for two days. I truly hope you can join us. If you do, promise to come up and say hello and introduce yourself as a blog reader.

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Willie, Jim, Brittany, Dorothy and Barbie and I actually left the farm today to do a herding demonstration for my University class. The ewes Brittany, Dorothy and Barbie did not exactly volunteer for this assignment, but they’ve all done it before and weren’t particularly stressed about it. Dorothy and Barbie ran right up the ramp, bless their hearts, but hefty Brittany (she somehow manages to eat twice as much as every other ewe at the farm) had absolutely no intention of getting into the truck. I don’t like letting dogs bite my sheep, so even though Willie was in back sending out “Let me at her!” thought bubbles, Jim kindly pushed and prodded Brittany’s huge frame up the ramp and into the truck.

Brittany, by the way, came to the farm with her sister, Paris (yes, you’re getting the connection here). I named them when they were quite young, before I could have predicted that Brittany would be, uh, with child as a teenager, and Paris never got pregnant after 3 years. Needing my ewes to produce as I do, Paris has moved on to other pastures, while Brittany pumps out lambs like a factory. Maybe if I taught her some dance moves she’d lose some weight.

Willie was a super boy at the demo, I was very proud of him. It’s his third time there (he’s 4 now), and it’s fun to watch him each year as he matures. The first year he was very nervous, and I didn’t let him do much, relying on a dear friend to do most of the demo’s with another dog. Last year he performed well, but was clearly still more nervous than at home,but this year he worked pretty much like Willie at the farm. This was especially nice  because we were doing well with our 2011 commitment to work Willie off the farm until the snows came, but for the last six weeks we’ve been shut down by deep snow. It was fun to finally be able to work him on sheep, even if it was in a small arena. At the end some folks from Animal Sciences brought in a horse and did a great natural horsemanship demo. Was just lovely (thanks Liv and Fawn!).

We didn’t get any photos today, but here are some from the same place from last year.

I got back recently from doing a seminar in Ann Arbor, Michigan for the Ann  Arbor Dog Training Club.  What a wonderful audience; we had a fantastic time together. At least, I did, so thanks to Tammy and everyone at the club  for having me. One of my favorite parts of this seminar (Both Ends of the Leash) is its focus on signals, or cues. The question we looked at in depth was: what sound or movement is actually the one that is salient to your dog?  You may say “Sit,” and think your dog is responding to it, but so often it’s the tightening of the leash or the nod of the head to which your dog is responding. (okay, “to which” is grammatically correct, but good grief it sounds awkward!)

We had a great example of that in Ann Arbor. A lovely Golden (perhaps the most perfect example of “Life is good if you’re a Golden” I’ve seen in a while…. I mean, this dog was HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY!) was being asked to sit and stay. The dog was young, and was just in the beginning stages of understanding stay.  We were working on practicing body blocks as a response to a break.  Two women, great observers, noticed that the dog broke, every time, when the otherwise almost motionless owner let the leash unravel just the tiniest little bit.  After saying stay, she backed up one foot and didn’t move, keeping eye contact with the dog. But without knowing it, she let the coils of the leash in her  hands unravel an inch or two, and every time she did the dog broke.

That was an especially interesting observation, because I had just suggested to the owner that the only change I would make in her training was let her body loosen and move a bit while the dog was on stay, because otherwise the stillness would become the cue to stay, and any motion would cause the dog to break.  Sure enough….

What a perfect example of a wonderful dog and a super trainer (she was great, and I apologize profusely for not remembering her name!) communicating on slightly different planes.  It’s just amazing how tiny a movement can be and still get an effect out of a dog sometimes.. sometimes I wonder how we ever manage to communicate correctly at all!

Speaking of, last week I got myself spoiled silly with an entire morning spent with Ken Ramirez at the Shedd Aquarium. He indulgently let me work with Nya a beluga whale (I’ll tell you next time how I screwed up) and let us watch behind-the-scene training of a sea lion and a sea otter.  The morning brought up lots of questions in my mind about the similarities and differences between training captive marine mammals and animals who live in our homes. I’ll talk about that next time…

Meanwhile, here’s the  Golden of our Office Manager, Denise Swedlund, channeling HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY for all of us.