#Problem Dog Training

[creekfiend]

I rewired my brain so that the "ohh idk .. am I really allowed to do that..." thought process is tied directly to "WHO'S GONNA STOP ME" but the thing is that I forgot that I am the oppositional defiant disorder poster child, and in casting my own insecurity as an authority to defy, I may have accidentally rendered myself too powerful

oopsie whoopsie

[abirddogmoment]

today's hot take for dog people: management is not the same thing as training.

[vaguely-concerned]

I must admit it exhausts me a bit when people compare the interactions between the companions in da2 and veilguard and complain that the veilguard crew don't argue viciously enough or don't have enough fundamental unbridgeable ideological differences. like yeah it's almost like dragon age 2 is a game specifically about implacable human discord in all its forms and that's the theme the companions also build up under and provide a lens to look at. and perhaps. just maybe. veilguard is doing something different and also interesting thematically if you look at it for what it actually is, and its companions are playing into those themes instead (come become beside me my friend none of us have this figured out but at least we have each other along the way. you must struggle with who you are. despite the high high stakes on paper, veilguard (sometimes to its detriment, often to its advantage once you realize this is what it's doing) is really not that interested in outward conflict, between ideas or groups or individuals -- most of the real meat and potatoes is in the internal struggle of the characters with themselves and their identities, the ways they've been changed and also stay the same, it's weirdly deeply trans all the way to the depths of the narrative that way, as well as fundamentally being about trauma recovery. again, what you're ultimately fighting is not actually in the realm of elgar'nan and ghilan'nain at all, it's on the level of solas' despair and his regret over what he's done and who he's become).

tl;dr why are we pitting two bad bitches against each other etc. they're literally both pretty and I love them

[alexsummersgf]

*Someone talking about something I’m interested in*

Me, because I’m convinced I know more about it than anybody:

[cinnamonsikwate]

watching the first 2 episodes of frieren last year shook me so bad i still can't get myself to continue it, but between what i remember of it and the nightmares episode of dungeon meshi i can't stop thinking about the ways laios would prepare marcille for his death. what would he leave behind to remind her that he (and by extension all the people she loved and who loved her) are still with her in spirit, even if not in body?

[rowanthestrange]

Doggy DNA test results are back, and baby Cody is none of the breeds anyone thought he was.

he is…

*drumroll*

Quarter Cocker Spaniel (cute and fluffy yay! Guess that’s where his slightly curly tail hair comes from)

Quarter XL Bully/Pit-and-mix (the UK’s answer to the banned pitbull that just also got banned)

and Half Belgian Malinois (German Shepherd on Hard Mode)

😬🥲 Pray for him, and us lol

Though the people we used also give you relative links, and there’s a dog which has low genetic match but high breed match (so they’re not directly related but their root breeds are very similar) and damn true. Roch even does the ear thing.

[fjordfolk]

also first hike of the year where we've met strangers, and both girls did very well with their trail manners. i always ask them to sit on the side - uphill or on a rock, ideally, because it gives them a bit more mental barrier - while i stand between so people won't have to pass them directly.

sparty has always been good with this because she values food rewards over socializing with people. troj is different and while she won't approach people unless spoken to, if people look at her and talk at the same time, she sees it as an invitation. i haven't been hard on it because she's very calm and the people we've met have seen it as a friendly gesture (which it is) but its happened a few times now and its definitely one of those Things That Make Sense To Troj.

anyway an old man with trekking poles commented on our "good cooperation" which was nice

[darkwood-sleddog]

Can the balanced dog trainers please stop fucking talking about positive reinforcement as if those dogs are not “obedience trained”? A majority of competition obedience dogs I know were trained with R+. Letting your dog wander on the end of a line because you want to do so does not = untrained. It is simply…a choice.

[asdpawprint]

Something I don't often see mentioned about the process of training your own service dog is the period of time where the dog is actively making symptoms worse instead of helping.

I started with a mature adult dog with decent obedience, and still there were several months where he made everything worse every time we left the house. In order to be a good trainer for him, I had to abandon my prior strategy of just shutting down and following my parents through the store. I had to actually be conscious and aware of my surroundings and navigate on my own and give my dog feedback and guidance, and he didn't know how to help me yet. His training wasn't proofed to those distractions yet.

At first, having my dog with me eliminated my existing coping strategies and offered nothing to replace them with. Over time, as his training progressed, he gradually started becoming helpful. That took months even without the challenges of baby puppy stages and teenage stages and general lack of maturity.

Owner training a service dog is HARD, not just because of the time, effort, and skill required. It's also hard because the dog doesn't become helpful until towards the end of the "in training" years, and until then, it's usually the opposite of helpful.

[why-animals-do-the-thing]

I was wondering if you had any advice (or links to such) on the issue of dogs who bark a lot. The two big pieces of advice one tends to see about barking are “figure out what need is not being met” and “don’t reinforce behavior you don’t want” and I kind of… don’t see how to do both of those at once? If I don’t respond (positively) to the barking I don’t know how to figure out what need they’re expressing, and if I do respond to it I don’t know how to ask them to express it a different way? I feel like there’s some Step here I’m missing in how to marry these concepts.

Welcome to why barking is a really complicated behavior problem to address once it’s become frequent. I’m going to say, as I always do here, that you should find a local positive reinforcement-based trainer to work with on your specific issues, but I’m happy to talk theory a little bit.

There’s a lot of different reasons dogs bark, which is where you have to start. They might be letting you know there’s someone nearby (alert barks) or they might be asking for something (demand barks). It could also be communicative with other dogs letting them know to back off (threat barks) or inviting them to play (play solicitation barks). They might be expressing frustration or internal conflict (referential barks - I can’t for the life of me find the paper about this I remember reading). So the first thing you have to figure out is why they’re barking, which means understanding what the context is. Only then can you figure out how you’re going to be able to modify the behavior. That means you may have to watch for a while without trying to interrupt or redirect to figure out what’s going on, even though that goes against the rule of not letting animals practice behaviors you don’t want.

A good example of the variety of causes for barking is your classic “dog barking at a window” situation. A dog barking at passerby and their dogs might be, for instance, frustrated about the proximity of other dogs it can’t greet or interact with. (This is often your classic barrier frustration situation). But a different dog might be expressing discomfort - there’s another dog that’s too close to it / it’s property, and that’s uncomfortable. And a third dog, say of a guarding breed, might be alert-barking to tell you about the proximity of strangers. Each of those is going to need to be addressed differently. For a dog with barrier frustration, I might put up opaque window cling so they can’t see out the window, preventing them from seeing the stimulus that’s triggering the barking. For a dog that’s alert-barking, all it might take in some cases is training an acknowledgement cue. (Basically telling the dog yes, I see your concern, good job telling me, job done, chill out now). I’m purposefully not giving an example for anxiety or fear solutions because those are complicated situations that should be handled individually.

The hard park about modifying barking behaviors is that you’re only the reinforcer for some of them - in some cases, because barking is a bit of a self-referential expression of an internal state, getting to bark at something can actually be internally reinforcing for the dog. In a situation where, say, your dog is demand-barking for dinner, you can very easily choose to stop reinforcing it: don’t react to the dog when they bark for dinner, only put food down when they’ve stopped barking. But if it’s something more complex like a barrier-reactive dog barking out a window, you can’t necessarily stop that situation from being reinforcing for them once it starts: you can’t control passerby or what the outside dogs do, and both the reaction of the strange dogs and your dog’s experience of barking may be reinforcing it. At which point, if you can’t control the reinforcer, you have to control the thing that allows the behavior to happen - in this example, that’s being able to see outside dogs at all, hence why some people put up opaque window film to remove the dog’s ability to see dogs they want to bark at.

Because barking can have so many triggering stimuli, and it’s so context-dependent, that’s why it’s a really good idea to get a skilled trainer who can help you assess the situation and problem-solve it. @doberbutts, tagging you in for any additional thoughts since you’re much more active in dog training than I am these days.

[abirddogmoment]

She's putting the pieces together for such a nice baby retrieve 🥺

[ignisgayentia]

An update on new yard for miss jellybean.... SHE LOVES IT 😭 she gets to sniff, run, and play in her private space without having to worry about mean reactive dogs from our old apartment 🥺 It's sooo nice to just sit outside while vibing and playing with her 😭

[tj-crochets]

So it turns out if I make this pattern with actual canvas instead of what I thought was canvas (it’s duck cloth) it’s a softer, more “reusable grocery bag” kind of bag and less of a tote?

This one is for my grandma! I think I’m making them for pretty much everyone on my list for the holidays this year

[constantvariations]

Recently saw a post in the Adam Taurus tag (an exercise in patience, that tag) that claimed that the signs of Adam not actually caring for the Faunus cause start as early as the Black Trailer. Their evidence?

Blake: What about the crew members?

Adam: What about them?

They proposed that the lack of concern Adam felt for the SDC crew whilst knowing that Faunus were often employed against their will meant he always put his revenge above the needs of the Faunus

Let me tell you, my jaw dropped at the stupidity

The way they went on, you'd think he was about to kill a small nation's worth of SDC workers, but like.

Babe.

It's a cargo train. Their skeleton crew barely has bones

According to the Association of American Railroads, the standard practice is a two-person crew, a locomotive engineer and a conductor, but it's not uncommon to have a crew of one. It would undoubtedly suck to be one of those guys if Adam had succeeded, but it's not the unbridled massacre people seem to think it is

As for the Faunus angle, I highly doubt any slave would be given the skills of either of those positions, much less left in charge of who knows how much lien's worth of name brand products, so no danger of accidentally eliminating the unfortunate kin there. Had they been Faunus that did join the SDC of their own volition, then they's be SOL just like the humans

I'm so tired of people making shit up or blowing things out of proportion to justify their Adam hate

[mandana-the-service-pup]

Mandana Update

TRAINING // My goal this year was to improve Mandana’s ability to work around dogs. I knew this was going to be an issue bc we had very limited resources for training with dogs for the first few years of her life. I didn’t have regular access to a car so we walked the city to do our training and that led to us being charged by nearly 20 different dogs over a couple years. This year our resources improved a lot so we started going to a training center frequently and practicing outside dog parks more.

During our training we uncovered that a big part of Mandana’s dog reactivity is related to resource guarding and her feelings of codependency. Her training masked a lot of it because she feels very supported by being with me and following my cues so she often didn’t appear reactive and was very reliable when on leash but when she is off leash on her own with dogs she panics in a very loud and forward way.

We hired a canine behavioralist and am making progress. I pulled her from public access but the behavioralist is confident she can easily be an amazing service dog and that these are minor problems that are very fixable. I’m not too worried about her service work right now. I wouldn’t have gotten her to begin with if I had a problem with “washing” a dog from public access. My health has improved so much with my weekly injections that I can get by in public with mobility aids for now. Besides that I want to focus my energy on rehabbing my body and making sure Mandana feels safe & happy in life.

Our training right now is very focused on behavioral modification and we are capitalizing on our good communication and cooperation skills. We’re learning how to use consent to facilitate dog interactions instead of her feeling like she has to control the situation on her own by being pushy. If you’ve made it this far in the post just know that we are on a bit of a time crunch, not to get her back into public access but to ensure we are ready to welcome home our next prospect who should be born in October if we’re lucky ;-)

[eqan]

we had such a nice morning and then dewey guarded a sock from ryker