Training the dog in front of me

It's been hard to train two dogs at once. My old dog, Jack, never minded when I trained my young dog, Jenny. He was happy to chill out on the couch. But Jenny is different now that she's the old dog and Dash is the young dog: she wants to be part of whatever I'm doing, especially if it involves food. If I baby-gate her in another room while I train the puppy (and puppies take a lot of training) then she will sit right up against the gate and obsess. (Up side: gates have become much less scary to her recently, even though they are just as likely as they always were to fall down and go boom.) When I try to put her upstairs, she goes reluctantly and is ramped up and anxious when I let her out.

I read "A Secret to Training Two Dogs" by Eileen And Dogs, and determined that I would use mat training. I'd been told time and again that I should be mat training Jenny anyways: take the mat to the scary new place, and you have a safe haven for your shy dog. (Jenny is still extremely shy, though hugely improved from when I got her.)

I got a Mutt Matt for Dash and pulled a tiny old area rug out of storage for Jenny. Dash picked up the mat concept quickly: you lie down on it and get treats. In fact I now have trouble prying him off of it to put it away.

Dash on his mat.

But Jenny couldn't seem to do it. She eventually learned to lie down on her mat, but didn't like to stay on it. I tried asking them both to stay on their mats while I walked around them: Dash was glued to his, but Jenny would come off of hers and wander away.

This morning I unrolled Dash's mat and asked him to go to it, and Jenny went and hopped on the couch. The light bulb went off: this is my dog who refused to touch foot to ground unless absolutely necessary for the first months I had her. She lived on couches. I had to train her to get off of them. I used target practice with a yogurt lid that I moved farther and farther from the couch; she came up with the solution of picking the lid up and putting it back on the couch so she could keep getting rewarded without having to leave her safe space. The first time I saw her sleeping on the floor, four years after coming to live with me, I almost cried from joy. She even already has a "go to your couch" command which is quite strong.

Jenny training on her couch, shortly after she came to live with me.

So I trained Dash while she was on her couch, and then trained her while Dash was on his mat, and it was lovely. Both dogs were stuck in place until I asked them to get off. I was able to train something fun (a tunnel) working one dog at a time (with frequent treats thrown to the other).

The moral, as Denise Fenzi tells us in her excellent blog post, is to Train the Dog in Front of You. See what works for her, not what you think should work for all dogs.

Which leaves me to figure out how I will take a couch with me to the next strange place I need to bring Jenny...

Jenny on her couch two years ago.

Living with a shy dog: the house full of spiders

I’m lying on my bed, cuddling with the person I love most in the world, periodically eating chocolates. And yet I’m shaking with fear. Just one flight of stairs away from me, the bottom floor of my house is teeming with spiders. Big ones, small ones, masses of them, crawling all over each other, completely covering the floor in a sheet of black. My loved one tells me not to worry. Why would the spiders come up here? I'm being silly. Yet I can’t relax. Who is to say what a spider might do?

No, that didn't actually happen. What did happen was this: I had my shy dog Jenny upstairs in bed with me and I fed her little smelly meaty dog treats while she shivered in terror. Outside, our tenant was moving out, and burly men were carrying boxes and pieces of furniture down the driveway. I knew none of these men were going to come inside, pin Jenny down, and extract her organs, but somehow she couldn’t believe that. Every time I found myself getting frustrated at her over the top reaction to these men from whom she was completely safe, I reminded myself about my vision of the room teeming with spiders. Who am I to say what will happen? Who am I to say what is terrifying?

Jenny, always alert!

Jenny barks in fear when my husband comes home. She loves him, and after her initial startle, she comes up to him to be petted. My husband sometimes gets (only so slightly) frustrated with her: she knows it’s him! She loves him! So why is she scared every time he comes through the door? I imagine what I'd feel if my loved one had a habit of coming home waving a large gun in my face. Even if I knew intellectually that he had no intention of firing it, I’d still feel deep apprehension. I think that the sound of the opening door is as scary to Jenny as the sight of a loaded gun would be to me. When I’m feeling unsympathetic to her fears, it helps me to translate them into images that are as viscerally compelling to me as her fears clearly are to her.

We continue to give her treats and reassurance when something scary happens, to teach her how to relax in the face of her fears, and to provide her with both daily and as-needed medications to aid her brain in processing her fears. Over the years, she is gradually becoming an entirely different dog. But it’s an ongoing process.

Jenny, learning to relax with a loved one.

Should dog training be 100% positive?

This dog is clearly enjoying being trained.

There's been an interesting discussion recently on a mailing list for animal behavior consultants and hangers-on like myself. (The group is the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants, IAABC.) These highly-skilled behavior consultants are knowledgeable in how to deal with behavior problems in dogs and other species, rather than focusing on basic obedience or competition skills like agility.

As you may already know, the modern dog training world can be described as split into two factions: those who advocate methods using dominance theory and/or force, such as alpha rolls or leash popping, and those who advocate methods using learning theory and specifically operant conditioning, such as clicker training.The behavior consultants on this list all fall solidly into the latter category, and all agree that the basis of training should not be founded on punishment-based techniques. They are hashing out the question: Is it ever appropriate to use aversives in training a dog?

Because the two factions split mainly on the use of punishment, it can be easy to fall into black-and-white thinking and assume that any aversive is unacceptable, and equate all aversives with pain and fear. But does “aversive” necessarily mean “painful”?

An aversive is something unpleasant. Give an animal something pleasant (a treat) and it will be more likely to repeat whatever behavior it most recently offered (sitting down). Give an animal something unpleasant (a tug on a prong collar) and it will be less likely to repeat whatever behavior it most recently offered (lunging at a passing dog). Both techniques work in getting the desired behavior. Techniques using an aversive stimulus may have side effects, however — in this example, a dog who lunges at passing dogs out of fear may learn to associate pain from the prong collar with other dogs. While he may stop lunging, he is likely to develop other unwanted behaviors, like biting when the other dog approaches close enough.

Pain and fear are absolutely aversives, and I think everyone in this discussion is agreed that pain and fear should be avoided — that some aversives are just too aversive to use. Many trainers in the discussion declare that they would never use a shock collar; some say they might, but only under extreme circumstances, after many other approaches have been tried and failed. Where do you draw the line at “too aversive,” though? That’s a very interesting question, and different trainers have different answers. But can you be a trainer who works in the positive training camp, and still sometimes uses aversives? For sure.

And here’s the thing: it’s the dog who determines what’s aversive. So some tools that we think of as very mild, like a head halter, can end up being quite aversive for some dogs. A head halter — that’s nothing like a prong collar or a shock collar or a choke chain, and it doesn’t hurt the dog at all. But it is (according to many dogs, including one of mine) incredibly annoying to have on your nose. Is it aversive? Yes. Is it inhumane? That’s an awfully strong word for such an innocuous device. But if you use a head halter on your dog, you are not engaging in 100% positive training. You are using a (mild) aversive. Not one that probably involves pain or fear, but an aversive all the same.

And it turns out it’s pretty difficult to train successfully using no aversives at all! Even telling a dog “that wasn’t the right choice” by using a marker like “oops!” during your training can be a mild aversive. Is it okay to train with mild aversives? Everyone has to answer that question for themself, but from my perspective, of course it is. Life has its ups and downs and everyone is going to encounter mild obstacles from time to time, even a pampered dog. The question is how big an aversive you want to throw at your dog, where exactly you draw the line between acceptable and not. That line will be drawn differently for every owner and every trainer.

So when you’re choosing a new trainer for your dog, remember that some will advertise that they use 100% positive methods, but they may not have quite thought through the implications of all of their methods. Others may state that they’re not 100% positive, but that they still use mostly positive methods — and that’s okay. As your dog’s owner and advocate, it’s up to you to talk to your potential new trainer about their methods, discover what kinds of aversives they do use, and decide what’s acceptable for your dog. Just work through the language your trainer uses to make sure that the kinds of aversives they use are at a level that’s acceptable to you, and of course make sure that they use scientifically-based learning theory (look for words like “positive reinforcement” and avoid words like “alpha” and “dominant”). As a dog loving community, we can agree that the use of aversives should be minimized, while still accepting that from time to time it’s okay to use mild ones.

What percent nature? What percent nurture?

The Nature versus Nurture debate is over: we no longer ask if genetics governs personality or if environment does. They work together, and it’s hard to pick their effects apart. But surely we can pick their effects apart a little? For example, if a dog trainer is trying to impress upon their students the importance of getting a puppy from a good breeder who takes behavior into account — or conversely, the importance of bringing a new puppy to a puppy class: what should she tell them? 50/50? 60/40? Surely there are some numbers we can cite?

It’s a tough question, but one that researchers have tackled. The concept is called heritability: the measurement of how much of a trait is due to genetic influences, and how much is due to environment.

Human researchers have it easier than dog researchers, because humans sometimes produce identical twins, and twin and adoption studies form the basis of human heritability studies. Some twins are identical (100% identical genetics), some are fraternal (around 50% similar genetics); some are raised in the same home, and some are adopted out and raised separately. You can do some complex math to all of these situations and come out with conclusions about particular traits. Identical twins more similar than fraternal twins for a particular trait? Strong genetic component. Raised together twins more similar than raised apart twins? Strong environmental component.

These studies have given us some numbers: IQ (how someone scores on a particular standardized test) is about 40-50% heritable. Environment does the rest.

Dog studies are harder. Dogs don’t have identical twins. Theoretically, the best way to study the heritability of personality traits in dogs would be to breed parents who do or do not show the trait in question and assess the puppies, then rinse, wash, and repeat for several generations. But this is expensive and somewhat ethically fraught to do in a laboratory, so we fall back on finding populations of dogs whose personality traits have been well measured and whose pedigrees are well known.

How often does that happen? Not very. But there is a test, the Swedish Dog Mentality Assessment (DMA), which is given to a large percentage of dogs in Sweden and some other European countries. Those crazy, overly-responsible Europeans measure their dogs’ personalities before breeding them, to make sure they're breeding stable dogs. Researchers have mined this resource repeatedly to learn more about the heritability of a variety of personality traits.

As lucky as we are to have this resource, it’s not an ideal one. The DMA is a suite of behavioral assessments which are given to a dog on a particular day in a strange environment by a judge who doesn’t know the dog well. Ideally, personality is best measured over time, by someone who knows the animal very well — its owner. And, in fact, every study I read that evaluated heritability of personality using the DMA noted that one of the most important factors was not genetics but the identity of the judge who gave the test. Did some judges tend to judge more severely than others? Did dogs respond differently (more or less fearfully, perhaps) to different judges? Hard to say, but we know that the reliability of the test suffered as a result.

Perhaps more alarmingly, we’re not really sure about the validity of the test, either. What are these assessments actually measuring? They’re measuring the response of a dog to a particular stimulus in a particular situation. Can this response be generalized to a personality trait? If the dog reacts fearfully to a person wearing a sheet over his head so he looks like a ghost, does that mean the dog is fearful or just that this was a particularly surprising experience? The DMA asserts that it measures playfulness, chase-proneness, curiosity/fearlessness, and most interestingly, aggressiveness. But does it? Studies of the validity of behavioral assessments in shelter dogs — a similar situation in which a series of small tests are given to a dog by a stranger in a strange situation — have repeatedly shown that the subtleties of personality are really hard to measure in this way.

Ideally, a personality heritability study would be designed using the canine behavioral assessment and research questionnaire (C-BARQ), a questionnaire which relies on the dog's owner to assess the dog’s personality through 101 questions. This test has been found to be valid and reliable. And the University of Pennsylvania has a database of the results of this test when given to thousands of different dogs. Except... they don’t have the pedigree information for many (or perhaps not for any) of these dogs. So this isn’t a practical solution, either.

So it’s hard, and I don’t really trust the studies that are out there as a result. What do these studies find? Most studies out there use the DMA or tests like it, and find roughly 20%-50% heritability for most personality traits studied. These numbers might be artificially low, though, because the tests may not be testing real traits — behavior that is stable over time.

I was able to find one study using the C-BARQ, which had much higher heritabilities, around 70%-100%. It's a dramatic difference, but I would hesitate to assign the responsibility for that difference entirely to the C-BARQ. This study used a non-random set of samples, selecting aggressive golden retrievers and dogs related to them. With no control set of non-aggressive goldens and unrelated animals, it’s hard to know how to interpret the study’s results.

So what are the real numbers? I still want to wriggle away from an answer. I don’t think we really know. I’d love to see a C-BARQ study using a random sample — maybe by finding pedigrees for dogs already in their database, if that’s possible. Until then, I’ll guess that the real answer falls in the 30%-60% range for most traits. But, in the end, does it really matter? Genetics are important and environment is important. The best genetics can fail in the face of a poor environment, and the best environment can fail in the face of poor genetics. We can’t predict everything about our next dog; we can just do our best to make a good decision, and then provide the best possible environment for whoever comes home with us.

I owe the inspiration for this post to my students in APDT's Canine Behavioral Genetics course, who asked about the balance of nature versus nurture and would not be satisfied with vague answers.

References

• Strandberg E. & Peter Saetre (2005). Direct genetic, maternal and litter effects on behaviour in German shepherd dogs in Sweden, Livestock Production Science, 93 (1) 33-42. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.livprodsci.2004.11.004
• Liinamo A.E., Peter A.J. Leegwater, Matthijs B.H. Schilder, Johan A.M. van Arendonk & Bernard A. van Oost (2007). Genetic variation in aggression-related traits in Golden Retriever dogs, Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 104 (1-2) 95-106. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.applanim.2006.04.025

Looking at dog brains

Today I was privileged to visit Dr. Greg Berns' laboratory to see awake dogs in an fMRI. In vet school, of course I saw dogs getting MRIs of their brains as part of medical diagnostics, in hunts for cancer, stroke, inflammation, etc. But because an MRI requires that the subject hold perfectly still for several minutes at a time, these dogs were under general anesthesia, which is both expensive for the owner and physically difficult on the dog.

In humans, we can use the related technology, functional MRI (fMRI), to see changes in brain activity in response to different stimuli, such as music, smells, or looking at pictures. This is a useful tool in research, for example as we try to figure out which brain areas perform which tasks. In dogs, we haven't been able to do such studies, because the only way to keep dogs still enough for an fMRI has been to anesthetize them, and obviously a sleeping dog isn't going to have a meaningful reaction to external stimuli.

At Dr. Berns' lab, they have trained dogs to hold still in an fMRI machine while resting their chins on a chin rest. Can your dog hold its head perfectly still for minutes at a time? What about in a strange room, with loud machine noises all around, with ear muffs on to protect their hearing? It's an impressive feat, and done using entirely positive methods. (The training protocol was developed by Mark Spivak of Comprehensive Pet Therapy, Inc.)

I was most impressed by the dogs' relaxed body language. They entered the machine willingly, when their owners asked them to. They lay down with their chins on the rest and waited. As I watched from behind, I could see that many of the dogs were lying on one hip or even frog-legged, in very relaxed postures, suggesting that they were comfortable being in the machine. (Have you ever had an MRI? It is a claustrophobic experience. Humans getting MRIs would benefit from the extensive conditioning preparation that these dogs had, as well as having a loved one present to feed them treats periodically!) Some dogs would balk at some points and exit the machine, at which point their handler would ask them to return and they would. Dogs always had the opportunity to leave. At the end of the test, they came out happy and wriggly.

Highlights of the day for me:

• The Boston terrier who hurled himself into the fMRI at full speed and then became rock-still for as long as his owner asked him to. That dog was committed to his fMRI experience! (Who would expect the Boston to be the calmest dog in the magnet?)
• The dogs with their ear protectors wrapped onto their heads with an elastic material normally used to attach catheters and the like. They looked hilarious.
• The treats fed to dogs on the end of long sticks so that they're easier to deliver inside the magnet. Ingenious.
• Personally getting to participate in experiments by giving hand signals to dogs who were in the magnet, watching me intently as they waited for their treats.

The joke around the lab is that these tests will tell us why our dogs really love us: are we best friends or just food dispensers? It is a joke because of course fMRI is not a test for love; science has some trouble testing for squishy concepts like that. But fMRI does give us a new  tool for guessing at what goes on in doggy heads, in addition to having to muck around with hormones like cortisol (as I have done) or strange little cognition tests like separation experiments or pointing experiments, as others have done. We have never been able to use this tool on awake animals before, so this is a huge step forward.

It was a fascinating day. I am deeply happy to see non-invasive research going on which takes the welfare of its canine participants into account, and waiting with bated breath to find out the results of the experiments I saw.


Further reading
 

• Greg Berns' home page at Emory

• Functional fMRI in awake unrestrained dogs (open access)
•  

Dog training is sexy

Tonight I tweeted: “Dog training is sexy. I wish more people understood how cool it is to train.” And then I thought: but who better than me to tell them?

So why is dog training so sexy?

• Dog training is communication with an alien being. Dogs really are “other nations,” as Beston’s famous quote goes. They have their own understanding of the world. In fact, the world they live in is not the world we live in: they live in a completely different mess of colors (fewer) and smells (many many many more) and sounds. Their understanding of the world is different from ours, and we still have no real idea how they perceive things or what is going on in their brains. But we can communicate with them by gentle pairing of signals (“sit”) with actions (their butt goes on the floor) and consequences (cookies). And once we become really good trainers, we can start exploring their dictionary, maybe discover that the translation isn’t what we thought it was (we think “ball” is a noun, meaning that spherical thing, while they think it is a verb, meaning to get something throwable). We get insights into their brains, and maybe they get some into ours.
• Dog training is brain remodelling. When I am desensitizing my shy dog to the presence of strangers, I am actually helping her form new connections in her brain. In fact, I am influencing which new connections form, and which old ones atrophy. I am modifying her brain. I am a brain architect!
• Dog training is an art. My shy dog is afraid to leave the house, so we take very short walks on which I reward her a lot and make sure she doesn’t become overly stressed (in dog training geek talk, I am trying to keep her “under threshold”). She can be unpredictable, and some days keeping her under threshold is difficult. So I try different approaches: more food, more sniffing of grass, not so far from the house, moving more, moving less. I don’t know what is going to work for her on a particular day. Sometimes I don’t even know why I stop trying one approach and switch to another. It’s a gut feeling. I have been working with this dog for so long that it isn’t just an intellectual exercise. It is the art of playing with my dog.
• Dog training is a science. In years past, we didn’t think of training as a science. We approached it with Just So stories, such as “Dogs evolved from wolves, and wolf packs have a dominance hierarchy, so the trainer should make sure to behave like an alpha wolf.” But then science started making itself heard. Trainers started geeking out on learning theory, using terms like “the four quadrants of learning” and “extinction bursts.” Read Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor if you want a digestible but fascinating introduction to learning theory. Or Excel-erated Learning by Pam Reid. You can’t remodel brains without the proper tools, after all. You need good tools to create fine art, too.
• Dog training deepens your relationship with your best friend. That is, if you do it right. Good training is fun for you and fun for your dog. It is not a chore, used temporarily to create a good dog and then set aside. It is an ongoing, integral part of a relationship that is built on communication between two very different species.

Training improves my life and the lives of my dogs. I love training my dogs, and they love being trained.

Felicia Day and dog training

I was a geek before I was a dog zombie. I am a fan of The Guild, which is a web-based show produced by Felicia Day. Day also has a YouTube channel called Geek and Sundry (I am a geek and I am sundry!) and on a recent episode of The Flog (which is a video blog type thing — Felicia’s Blog, Flog, get it?) she has a professional training session with her dog, Cubby. Who is super cute, but not the cutest dog ever. 




It was a nice segment. The trainer did some basic agility work with Day and Cubby, a good choice for a dog who looks like he has the genetic background (herding breeds) to have some smarts. She instructs Day to do a lot of luring with Cubby — using a food reward to guide him where she wants him to go. A lot of agility trainers use shaping instead, in which they set the dog up to do the right thing, let him figure it out, and then reward the right choice. This method can be a little slower up front, but produces a dog who learns how to learn, learns how to experiment in order to figure out what you want him to do, and in the end gets the concept you’re trying to communicate a little better. (Theoretically, anyways. Every trainer has their own opinion about what’s the best way to train.) One reason to choose luring over shaping for a YouTube show is that you need to have quick results. As fun as I think a shaping demo would have been, that wasn’t what this show was about.

The trainer concludes by saying that Cubby needs some mental stimulation every day. She had to pick one message to get across in a short segment, and I think she picked a great one. Yes, mental stimulation is important, especially in dogs who have to sit home all day when their owner is out working! Agility is loads of fun and I highly recommend it as a great partner sport that works your dog’s brain and muscles. In Cubby’s case, since Day described him as an older dog, he might benefit from a quick vet check to make sure he is up for the exertion of an agility class. In fact, it is always a good idea to check with your vet before starting a new exercise program for your dog, to make sure your dog is up for it. Some dogs need to lose a little weight before embarking on jumping over obstacles, for example.

If you want to get involved in agility, look up your local dog training clubs and schools and ask about local agility organizations, and take a class. When I was getting into agility, I found a local agility trial and volunteered at it. Then I asked all the competitiors what school they recommended locally. They all said the same one, so my choice was easy.

If your dog isn’t up for that kind of activity, you can give him mental stimulation other ways. Train him tricks. Leave him with toys stuffed with food for him to work out during the day. When you feed him kibble, scatter it in the grass for him to hunt for it. Everyone needs a little brain exercise from time to time, even dogs.

Book Review: Plenty in Life is Free

I just finished Plenty in Life is Free: reflections on dogs, training and finding grace, by Kathy Sdao. It was revelatory. It is funny to say that I had trouble putting down a dog training book, but I did (I put off email and sleep to finish it). It’s a short book, but truly lovely. The two Sdao seminars I’ve attended have both stuck with me years later and informed my training, and Sdao is as engaging and thoughtful an author as she is a speaker.

This book seems to be written for an audience of dog trainers, but it has plenty in it to appeal to the dog owner as well. Don’t expect it to walk you through how to train your dog to sit, or to provide details on how to handle a new puppy or to turn around dog-dog aggression. It’s really a philosophy book about how to approach dog training: we don’t have to control our dog’s every move and obsess about leadership. We can be our dog’s parents, protecting and guiding but leaving them a reasonable amount of independence too.

Sdao discusses the concept of “sticky stories,” stories that stick in people’s minds, such as the story that dogs evolved from wolves and therefore a good dog owner acts like the alpha wolf. She provides an alternate version of a story that is more accurate and hopefully just as sticky: dogs evolved from scavengers and we should be their parents, doling out resources as good parents do. I like her proactive approach; let’s hope that the new, improved sticky story takes root.

Sdao also constructs a sticky meme in the same vein as Michael Pollan’s famous advice about how to eat (“Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”). Hers goes “Reinforce behaviors you like; remove reinforcement for behaviors you don’t like.” She correctly identifies that, while pithy, this is probably not catchy enough to be sticky, and goes on to describe a SMART (see, mark, and reward training) system, in which you train your dog by doing little more than rewarding the dog 50 times a day for doing cute or useful things. (I may be oversimplifying, but not by much; the point is that it’s simple.)

It’s a short, fun, useful read. I cannot recommend this book highly enough. Available at Dogwise.

Learning from marine mammal trainers

I’m in the middle of two weeks out of state shadowing sea lion trainers. (I am planning a detailed post on what that’s been like.) Back home with my dogs this weekend, I find myself enthusiastically applying some new approaches to their training.

• Plan each session ahead of time. The plan can be very brief: in Jenny’s case, “while I’m in the kitchen making dinner, I’m going to work on her recall from the living room and highly reward it,” or “when I go from the living room into the kitchen for a snack I’m going to work on her ’stay’ command.” But think about it ahead of time and know what your plan is rather than leaving yourself to think “here I am in the kitchen with some good doggy snacks to hand; what shall I do with them?”
• Know what you hope to accomplish from each session. “When I practice these stays, I want to be able to get out of sight for less than a second without her breaking her stay.”
• Keep working with your animals even if they are old and already well-trained. Your relationship with them will benefit from it! Jack loves training, and I have been focusing on Jenny and ignoring him.
• Be patient. Progress can take time. Don’t push it.

The sea lion group I worked with this past week was a well-rehearsed team. They worked animals singly or in pairs, depending on how they were housed, but often had five trainers working a session. Teamwork like that isn’t the norm in the dog training world, of course, because we don’t hire large staffs to train our dogs! But I could still take some lessions away.

Classical conditioning: do try this at home

In What is classical conditioning? (And why does it matter?), Jason Goldman asks, “Can you think of other real-world examples of classical conditioning?” Dog training, Jason! I can’t believe you missed it — beyond talking about Pavlov, who wasn’t really a dog trainer. How useful is it really to teach a dog to drool?

I used classical conditioning on my dog Jenny a few minutes before writing this post. She is in the process of developing an ear infection, but she hates to have her ears cleaned. I’m using classical conditioning to change her emotional reaction to the ear cleaner from fear or stress to anticipation and enthusiasm.

The unconditional stimulus (UCS) is the ear cleaner. When I show it to her, she has a natural response (fear, demonstrated by her sudden flight from my vicinity). I could pair this UCS (ear cleaner) with a neutral stimulus (a bell). The animal learns to apply its emotional response to the second stimulus (fear of the ear cleaner) to the first stimulus (the bell). In other words, the bell comes to predict the ear cleaner, and eventually, the dog would learn to run away when she heard the bell, as if she were afraid of the bell.

That’s not useful either. What I am doing is pairing something to which Jenny has a positive natural response (cheese) with the ear cleaner. The first thing she sees predicts the second thing, so I show her the ear cleaner first, then give her cheese. Over time, the ear cleaner comes to predict cheese, and eventually she will greet the ear cleaner with the enthusiasm previously reserved for cheddar. Of course, I have to build slowly up to actually cleaning her ears, but after one session she is enthusiastically touching her nose to the bottle when I show it to her instead of leaving the room. I expect the process to take several sessions, so I’m starting before I actually need to clean her ears.

Classical conditioning is also used frequently in behavior modification, to change the emotional response (fear) of dogs to a stimulus (strange people, strange dogs) into a new emotional response (enthusiasm). Again, pairing food with the approach of the stimulus works well, with a sufficiently gradual approach. This counter-conditioning approach is frequently used in the behavioral treatment of dogs who erupt into enraged barking at the sight of other dogs.

It is important to remember that the first stimulus predicts the second. If you get things backwards, you can break your dog! I have heard stories of people teaching their dogs to flee the room upon smelling peanut butter, because peanut butter had been overused as a lure before a variety of unpleasant stimuli (ear cleaning, nail clipping...). So remember, bad thing first, good thing second.

Go, try it if you have trouble cleaning your dog’s ears or clipping their nails!

[ETA: There is some very interesting discussion about the definition of classical conditioning in the comments. -DZ]

Book review: Control unleashed

I recently finished Control Unleashed: Creating a focused and confident dog, by Leslie McDevitt. This book is designed for people training dogs in agility who are having issues with their dogs’ ability to focus, so you might imagine that the book isn’t useful to people with fearful dogs like mine. But it turns out, unsurprisingly, that if your dog is having issues focusing, he may well actually be nervous about something in his environment, such as strange people or other dogs. This book is full of exercises for helping your dog be more comfortable and relaxed, whatever his reason for being distractable. It was incredibly helpful to me in thinking through exercises for my shy dog Jenny, to help her learn to trust the world a little more. Even if you don’t do agility with your dog, this book may be helpful in making you a better trainer. It includes many examples of specific training exercises to try, and stories about situations in which they were particularly helpful. It was also an enjoyable enough read that I got through it while working long hours on some difficult rotations — I looked forward to finding ten minutes to read it before bed. I recommend this book to everyone who has has basic understanding of positive training and learning theory, and wants to learn more.

Dogs and babies

Today I heard this sad story third-hand: as a baby is crawling away from Grandma’s dog, who has always been fine with him before, the dog without any warning pounces on the baby and bites him. The baby loses part of an ear and has deep wounds on his face. The dog is euthanized. The parents were there to supervise, but it all happened too fast to prevent. What went wrong?

The first thing I want to say is that at the point that a dog bites a child (or any human) this badly, I agree that the dog must be euthanized. He is not safe. For this reason, it’s really important to figure out how to keep this situation from happening in the first place, for the sake of the baby and the dog.

What was going on in that dog’s head? We can’t know for sure, but it sounds to me as though the dog was treating the baby like prey. He pounced when the baby was moving away from him, and he bit to injure. If he had been trying to play with the baby, he might have bitten hard enough to bruise, but dogs have excellent control of their teeth, and a bite bad enough to remove part of an ear was probably intentional. The fact that the baby was moving away from him at the time is supportive evidence — the sight of something small and helpless, which makes high-pitched noises and moves erratically, running away from him may have triggered him to act.

Do dogs really act like predators around babies, even if they know them? Some dogs, not all. I would be particularly suspicious of dogs with high prey drives — dogs who are obsessive about chasing small animals outside. They may learn to like small animals who are part of the family, like cats, but with dogs like this, I would be very careful with my introductions. In the case of a human infant, I wouldn’t leave the baby on the floor with the dog loose in the same room unless I really, really trusted the dog. I live with four good dogs who get along just fine with cats, but there is only one of them that I would trust with a baby on the floor. The price is just too high if you make a mistake.

How can you prevent such a situation, since the dog gave no warning signs? I was not there, but I can almost guarantee you that the dog did give warning signs; his owner was just not trained to read and understand them. The dog probably did subtle things like stare at the baby a little too long or sniff it a little too aggressively — things that wouldn’t make the average dog owner think twice, but would make the average dog trainer extra cautious.

So what do you do if you’re expecting a baby and you have a dog? Or if you are a grandmother and want your grandchild and your dog to get along? The safest and easiest answer is to not let the dog and child interact until you know you can trust them together. Put them together for short periods of time only, while you are holding the child, and observe the dog closely. Don’t leave them on the floor together until you are confident that the dog will ignore the child and that the dog shows no stress, fear, or predatory behaviors around the child. If you don’t think you can read the dog well enough to tell, hire a dog trainer to evaluate your dog. A dog trainer can help guess what problems your dog might have around a child, tell you specific signs to look for, be a resource to ask questions, give you tips on how to manage them together. To find a certified dog trainer in your area, search on the Association of Pet Dog Trainers site.

Dogs and kids can get along great, if they are introduced carefully, and when the kid is old enough. But the consequences of a bad relationship between the two are so serious that it is very important to take those introductions seriously, and to make sure you’re seeing things from your dog’s point of view before you assume everything’s okay.

Working with Sadie

Sadie was a rambunctious young shelter dog whom I had been assigned to exercise and train. We were working in an auditorium, the best space the shelter had for exercising dogs indoors. Like most of the dogs I worked with in there, Sadie had some trouble with the smooth floors; every time she ran to catch a ball she would slide and slam into the wall. Because she was basically an oversized puppy, this didn’t faze her. We were having a great time, working on her retrieving skills, practicing “drop it” (at that point, just a swap of the ball for some treats).

Then Sadie saw some dogs playing outside through the big glass doors on one side of the auditorium. Sadie was already diagnosed as dog aggressive, which was part of why she was inside playing alone with me. The mood of the session changed immediately. Sadie ran at the glass doors, barking and racing back and forth. I tried to interpose my body between her and the doors, to back her up and get her attention back on me, but it was like I wasn’t there. I wanted to put her leash on to back her away, but I was worried that grabbing her collar would cause her to turn and bite me.

I made Sadie’s leash into a loop and lassoed her with it, then backed her away from the glass doors. She still wasn’t focusing on me, but neither was she turning to bite me as we backed to the far end of the room, where I sat down on a low stage and kept her on leash. She had her back to me, focusing on the doors. She couldn’t see the dogs any more, but she could hear their deep hound barks, and she really wanted to get at them.

Sadie had worked with a clicker already, so I pulled out my clicker and started to click her for any movement away from the door. Step back towards me: click, handful of treats. Quick look over her shoulder when I made kissing noises at her: click, handful of treats. I kept up a very high rate of reinforcement to keep her interest, so she was essentially being fed a steady stream of pieces of hot dog. Gradually her body language changed, so that she was not arrow-straight pointing at the door. She became looser, more relaxed. She turned towards me, looked at me (treat, treat, treat). And then finally she was lying down next to me, leaning into me, enjoying having her sides rubbed. When the dogs barked, she looked over towards the doors briefly, then back at me. She was with me again.

Olympic level dog training seminar

The nice thing about having weekends free on your ambulatory rotation is that you can do the things normal people do with their weekends, like go to incredibly geeky dog training seminars about the details of learning theory. I went to a seminar on improving the cues you give your dog with the brilliant Kathy Sdao. Some of her main points, below.

• A command is something you give with the expectation of making the animal obey. A cue is something you give to say “you know that behavior that you have learned is a really good thing to do, because you often get paid to do it? Now would be a great time to do it!”
• Oh, for those of you who aren’t dog training geeks, I should back up. “Getting paid” is dog training lingo for the idea that dogs don’t work for us just because they love us. Do you do work because you love your boss? Dogs get paid with food, praise, life rewards (getting a ball thrown), etc.
• You can’t control a behavior. You can only control what happens before and after a behavior, and therefore the animal’s expectation for cues that predict a good or bad time to perform the behavior, and consequences of the behavior.
• You certainly can use cues which are difficult for your dog to distinguish, like down and out, which have the same internal vowel sounds and are very similar to the ear if you don’t have human-level language skills. However, why would you? Choose words that make things easy for your dog by being easy to distinguish from each other. Your dog is the one who is struggling to understand language, something his species does not excel at.
• We know it, but it’s worth repeating: a dog doesn’t refuse to perform a behavior for spite. That’s only something humans do. A dog who doesn’t respond to a command or cue does so for only one of two reasons: a) he doesn’t understand what is being asked of him, or b) he doesn’t feel it is worth his while (he is not being paid sufficiently).
• We think of cues as verbal or gestural. Of course, dogs are more comfortable with gestural cues in general. (One participant found that her dog completely ignored a verbal cue which she had always given paired with a gesture.) You don’t have to make gestures only with your hands! Some people with small dogs find that the dogs respond very well to foot gestures, which are closer to their eye level.
• Cues that we give without meaning to include eye movements, where our attention is, body language (the classic story of the dog refusing to lie down unless the owner bends forward, because that may not be the cue the owner taught, but it is the cue the dog learned). Tone of voice. Time of day. Antecedents like picking up your keys. My dogs have learned that “okay,” spoken while I am on the computer, means I have decided to get up and get myself off the keyboard, even though it is something I say unconsciously to myself and not intentionally to them.
• Dogs live in a sea of information coming from us. Sometimes it is hard for them to pick out the cue we want to give. You think you are just raising your hand to indicate sit, but the dog is taking in tone of voice, where you are looking, if you are bending forward, what your other hand is doing, the position of your feet. It isn’t obvious to the dog that the hand (or word) is what he is supposed to be paying attention to.
• Kathy gave two examples to illustrate that point. The first: you know the feeling you get when you are tuning a radio and you can’t quite get the station, and have to listen to it through static? Dogs live in that world all the time.
• For those who know the invisible gorilla illusion — if you don’t know to look for something, you may not see it. If the dog is paying attention to how far forward you are leaning, he may not even hear the word you are saying to him. After all, words come out of your mouth all the time, and he usually doesn’t understand them. Why should he pay attention to this one and assume it has some importance? Why should his brain even filter is so that he hears it at all?

We played a fun game with the participating dogs called “Prove It.” The handler asserts something like “my cue for sit is the word ‘sit.’“ The challenger says, “Yeah? What if you say it with your eyes closed? With your hand over your mouth? Looking at the ceiling? Whispering? Standing on a chair? Will your dog still do it then?” I worked with a handler whose dog did standard commands flawlessly, promptly, and enthusiastically. When her handler told her to sit while looking at the ceiling, the dog stared at her hopefully, trying to figure out what she was supposed to do. (During this game, we took lots of breaks to give the dogs easy tasks and reward them.)

Fun day learning about how to communicate with your dog, and gave me good insights into my own training methods. Kathy Sdao is an excellent teacher. If you are a beginning trainer, her classes may seem a little arcane to you, but I highly recommend her if you are a learning theory geek, or someone who teaches other people to train dogs.

Living with a shy dog: clicking with Jenny

I am clicking everything with Jenny now! The click marks the behavior which I want to reward. If I just toss her a treat when she does something I want to reinforce, she has a harder time knowing exactly what she did right. Of course, I could mark the behavior verbally (when I don’t have the clicker on me I will say “yes”), but research has shown that animals learn faster with a clicker, perhaps because it takes less mental processing.

The click is obviously not rewarding itself; it is rewarding because it is always followed by a treat, so that she has a strong association between the click and food. The rule is that you must always reward after clicking. If you click the wrong thing by mistake, tough; you still have to reward. With Jack, who is more savvy at this game, I sometimes reward by throwing his favorite toy for him.

What am I clicking Jenny for?

• Coming into the kitchen while I am making food
• Touching my hand with her nose while I am holding out her harness open as if to put it over her head
• The Boy clicks her for responding to him saying her name. Because he is a martial arts instructor, he has a very good sense of how to reward small progressions in physical responses, so he is clicking just as she starts to sit up in response to him.
• Eye contact with me when scary things happen

Jenny on her second day with me

Jenny today: “Why did you put the clicker away? I was having fun.”

Go go clicker training!

Living with a shy dog: target training with Jenny

When last I reported on the state of my shy dog Jenny, she was submissively urinating every time I went to put a leash on her. We nicely solved that problem when she volunteered to go outside and come back inside on her own and no longer required a leash. She is extremely responsive to my indications about what it is time for dogs to do next, and the elder dog in the household helps instruct her as well. So while I have continued to desensitize her reactions to the leash (by showing her leashlike things and then giving her treats), I have been focusing on other things with her lately. This is my greatest failing as a trainer: I get bored with one program and move on to the next.

These days, Jenny and I are working on target training. The idea is to train the dog to touch a particular object on command, commonly a yogurt container top, which is what I’m using. Target training is useful as a stepping stone for training more complex behaviors. You can use it, for example, to train a dog to close a door on command, by taping the target to the door and then eventually removing it. In this case, I am hoping to use it to encourage Jenny to touch me more, by giving her a way to touch me that is under her control (touching a target in my hand). Of course, we are starting out with the target on the couch next to her, where she feels safest.

The work I was doing with her before was classical conditioning, which is used to change the way an animal feels about something. I was pairing something good (food) with something that I wanted Jenny to feel good about too (the leash). In the case of target training, I am using operant conditioning. The goal here is not to change how Jenny feels about the target (who cares if she likes a yogurt top or not?) but to change her behavior around it (show her that it is useful to touch it with her nose, eventually on command).

Specifically, I am using a clicker for this purpose. I’m not going to explain clicker training in this post, but if you are interested in clicker training with behaviorally challenging dogs, Click to Calm is highly recommended.

So, Jenny is doing great. We’ve had four sessions so far. Session one: I tossed the lid in front of her repeatedly and rewarded her for sniffing it. Then I stopped tossing it, and rewarded her just for looking at it. She sniffed at it again once more before the end of the session (jackpot! Ten treats in a row and end on a high note!).

Session two: I only tossed the lid down once or twice to get her started. I still rewarded her just for looking at it. This time she showed more intention in her sniffing at it, like she was thinking about what she was doing, and she sniffed at it three times.

Session three: I only tossed the lid down once. She sniffed it repeatedly, immediately after each treat (whereupon, obviously, I gave her another treat). When it was clear that this was easy for her, I moved the lid a half inch farther away. This flummoxed her a little, possibly partly because I had moved the lid, which might have suggested to her that I didn’t want her to interact with it. So I went back to rewarding her for looking at it. By the end of the session she was sniffing it again, though not quite as regularly. Good thing I only moved it a tiny amount; she was clearly not ready for more.

Session four: she was nosing the lid so regularly that I started inching it farther away from her every few repetitions. She followed, but on the third or fourth time I moved it away, picked it up in her mouth and moved it back closer to her. Jackpot! (Lots of treats for that, all in a row.) That wasn’t what I had originally intended her to do, but I figure it’s a good idea to reward her for being assertive and really interacting with her environment.

Target training with her has been fun. She is extremely smart, much more limited by her shyness than by her brains, sort of the opposite of working with my other dog Jack, who is very outgoing but of only average intelligence. I think the signs are good that the target training work will be useful in bringing her out of her shell.

Living with a shy dog

I adopted a shy dog two days ago. You can see how tense she is in my house in the first picture. I’m including a second picture to prove that she isn’t like that all the time! (Also: doesn’t she look just like a domesticated fox that was dipped in yellow paint?)

 

This is Jenny. Jenny spent her first ten months on the same property on which she was born. She got to live with other dogs and knows a lot about how to interact with them. However, she doesn’t know a whole lot about interacting with humans, and we are pretty scary to her. She also doesn’t have much experience with the world in general. She’s been with me for about two days now and is just getting to the point where she’s willing to eat while I am in the room.

When Jenny is really alarmed by something I do, she pees. This is known as submissive urination; she’s sending a social cue to say “I’m harmless; please don’t eat me!” I can mostly avoid doing things to her that are this scary, but sometimes I do have to put a leash on her to get her outside, and then she is liable to pee. I’m taking various management measures to preserve my furniture, but this afternoon Jenny started being interested in eating treats that I tossed her, so I saw the opportunity to engage in some counter-conditioning with her.

The problem

When I approach Jenny purposefully and pull out a leash, she is scared, and pees.

Conditioning a new emotional response

The goal is for Jenny to see the cue (my purposeful approach, leash in hand) and feel good about it instead of scared. The solution is to break the scary cue down into cues that are smaller and less scary, and help her work through each of those with the help of something positive (treats).

It’s not just one thing that tells Jenny that I am about to grope around for the clip on her harness and attach a leash. It is my approach; the way I look straight at her; the purposeful way I walk towards her; the display of the leash in my hand. Each of these things is really a separate cue, and each should be worked on individually.

Working with Jenny

Jenny was on the couch downstairs. I wanted to be able to walk down the stairs and approach her with the leash. First, I tried it without the leash. I walked down the stairs more slowly than usual, stopped farther from her than usual, and avoided eye contact. I tossed her a treat. She thought about it, then ate it.

I repeated exactly the same sequence of events. This time, she ate the treat  promptly, suggesting that she was comfortable with the sequence.

I tried it again, and this time walked a little bit closer to her. That was okay. I tried again, making eye contact and walking faster. This scared her; she wriggled away from me on the couch. I stopped and backed up, looked away, threw a treat. She waited for me to go upstairs before she ate it. I tried again, this time backing up to something that she had previously accepted — stopping a ways from the couch and not making eye contact. This was still successful (she ate the treat without appearing alarmed). Phew. I started progressing again, but more slowly.

Counter-conditioning is extremely simple, but it can be really hard to implement properly in practice. We tend to get impatient. Why do we have to take such small steps? Can’t we go faster? Unfortunately, if the protocol you’re trying isn’t working, the answer is almost always to break the sequence you’re conditioning into smaller events and add new challenges more slowly (or maybe give better rewards; I could explore different types of treats to see if there is something more exciting for Jenny). But that is really hard for most humans. That’s the challenge of counter-conditioning and why it is often best to do it with the help of an experienced trainer until you get the hang of it.

Hopefully I will be able to teach Jenny over the next few days that the leash isn’t scary. For tonight, I stopped while I was ahead and didn’t push things too far.

Links post

• Are clicks better markers than words? (The Other End of the Leash): Patricia McConnell gets nerdy about the mechanics of operant conditioning (in this case, animal training).
• Massachusetts Animal Coalition’s Pit Bull Spay/Neuter Task Force: “The task force recognizes that Pit Bulls are the most common breed surrendered to adoption centers and found as strays and that spaying and neutering that is affordable is key to reducing the number of homeless pit bulls in our state.” A constructive approach to the pit bull problem.
•  “Animal connection” helps separate humans from other species (Nobel Intent): Nice post reviewing a journal article about our domestication of various species, with a particular emphasis on how we domesticated dogs. If you want to read more about how humans and dogs developed together, and what the process of canid domestication might have looked like, I recommend reading Dogs: a new understanding of canine origin, behavior, and evolution, by Coppinger and Coppinger.

Links post

• Pluto's demotion is a great opportunity for science. Timmer concludes that scientists need to do a better job of communicating with the public.
• Westminster dog show. Interesting rant about the issues with dogs bred for the show ring today.
• Sciencefeed: Twitter for scientists
• How will I know when it's time? Musings on knowing when it’s time to euthanize a pet.
• How to avoid “he-said-she-said” science journalism
• American Humane and Cesar Millan have met to discuss the differences between their two camps of dog training methods. A board member of American Humane provides us with an urbane report in which both sides of the debate are recognized. I really appreciate this kind of reporting! I agree with many of the points made in this opinion post, but am not sure its tone is as constructive.
• We're so good at medical studies that most of them are wrong