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 Read More
The Model-Rival Method
I mentioned "The Model-Rival Method" earlier when talking about training dogs to associate words with objects, and I thought it'd be fun to illustrate what I was talking about. The video at the bottom of the post is an example of this method, famously used by Dr. Irene Pepperberg to train Alex the African Grey Parrot to label a large number of objects, materials, colors, etc. It was originated by the European scientist Todt, in contrast to the "Skinner Box" kind of training in which a parrot got a food treat from a mechanized box for vocalizing something similar to the sounds being played by loud speaker. Using that method, American behaviorists had concluded that parrots "can't be taught language," but Todt noted that it had little relationship to how our own children learn language. He Read More
Willie speaks: Only living things have names
Like many of you (great comments!) I've been playing this week with what words Willie defines the same as I. As suspected, most of the words I have used to communicate with him are verbs (to him), and that appears to be his "default" understanding. He HAS learned however, names for living things, me, Jim, Sushi, my other dogs when they were alive, etc. But all his toys are either "toy" or "ball," and as I think about it that's exactly how we used those words for several years. Go "up the hill" and "go to the barn" are effective and impressive cues, but I'd bet a lot of money that he has no idea what I mean by "barn" or "hill." This weekend we're going to work on labeling an object (his scorpion, Scorch, a favorite toy that is miraculously in great shape after 2 years) by holding it, Read More
Could you learn 1022 new nouns?
Move over Rico. Have you heard about the new article out in Beh'l Processes about a BC named Chaser who has not only learned names for 1022 objects, but has shown that she distinguishes between verbs and nouns? There's more to this study, but let me start with the noun/verb issue. This is an especially interesting issue: one of the criticisms about the research on the dog, Rico, was that there was no proof he understood a label given to an object as a noun versus a verb. In other words, if you say "Go get your ball," does your dog understand that "ball" refers to an object, or that the entire string of sounds means "go get something and bring it back". This is not a idle question. You may recall a post I wrote about Willie's difficulties discriminating between objects, "What Do Words Read More
More NZ photos; Working Dogs
Just a few photos now, more later when more time (and can download a video of a working Huntaway when we get home).... We're on the Banks Peninsula now, just south of Christchurch, gorgeous place, staying at a B & B called the Olive Grove (complete with olive trees and yummy high quality olive oil). Yesterday we went to a working NZ sheep farm, Paua Bay Farmstay, a fantastic place. Sixth generation farmers, great connection to the land and the history of NZ. Will write longer post on our visit, but here are a few photos: Here's one of their Border Collies (some called them Heading Dogs, some Border collies, while some say that BCs are different than Heading Dogs, although all derived from Scottish BCs.) S Here's Kate, a young Huntaway, doing the barking typical for her Read More
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