thehappyfarmdogs

[thehappyfarmdogs]

Oh, to be a Maisie, lounging in the warm autumn sun

[thehappyfarmdogs]

Couldn’t be a more beautiful morning here.

[thehappyfarmdogs]

he's reeeally pushing his luck

[thehappyfarmdogs]

Tommy

Spring, Summer, Autumn, winter

[thehappyfarmdogs]

Walter Hunt, Four Puppies at Play (1903)

[thehappyfarmdogs]

Rabbit hunting with Sealyham terriers

(William J. Sumits. 1950)

[thehappyfarmdogs]

It only snowed like 1h and it melted instantly, the boys where Happy ❄️.

[thehappyfarmdogs]

Edi so tired from playing all day yesterday but still finding the energy to bap Pip's face

[thehappyfarmdogs]

Alright everyone. What is your pets' life's mission? Robin's is to be inside the dishwasher and Sparrow's is to dig all the way through both the hardwood floors and my boots

[thehappyfarmdogs]

MJ家・柴ボーダーシェパ on X: “新しい車にテンション上がる子 https://t.co/8sdYel5Vsx” / X

[thehappyfarmdogs]

Stuff you see on certain kinds of dog training business websites that might appeal to uninformed clients who don't know any better and want their "money's worth" - especially at $4800-$6500 for only a three week board and train, ouch - but would send any good science aware trainer, dog sports person, or educated dog owner who knows their shit running away clutching their dogs and their wallets close to their hearts.

Do not trust any company or trainer that promises going from untrained to a dog that is fully off leash obedience trained and off leash safe for recall in all kinds of public spaces with distractions in just three weeks, for the health and safety of your dog (because they likely use harsh stressful training methods to try to passably achieve that sort of ridiculous goal, and also because your dog will most likely not actually be fluently off leash recall safe which could put them in danger if you let them off leash believing they are) as well as because that's just a scam. Fluent, reliable off leash recall takes longer than just three weeks to achieve for most dogs and most breeds, even with a remote collar.

Dogs also are not mentally capable of spending 40+ hours a week focused on working, learning, and retaining new information. Humans aren't even really capable of working that much a week without it having negative impacts on our physical and mental health - yes, my fellow Americans, our standard full time work week is unhealthy and abusive, this is backed by science, sorry if you didn't know that already but I'm sure most of you did because of your own personal experience suffering from it.

Dog training is most effective when done in short sessions limited to a total of just a couple hours a day max (possibly longer on a good day with a more experienced already well trained dog, or when doing review or practice of simpler things a dog already knows really well, but certainly not with teaching new behaviors to mostly or completely untrained dogs) with rest breaks that are ideally at least 15-30 minutes long in between sessions and include naps. Breaks to decompress and nap for a bit are important to provide dogs time to return to their baseline stress and excitement level (which would ideally be 0) so they can recover some mental and physical energy and be able to process the new information they've just been given and properly store it away for later use before being given any more new information to process.

This may not be the best example, but it's how it was explained to me; think of dogs' brains (brains in general, really, of all animals including humans) like computers. Computers have limits to how much information and how many commands they can process at once. When they're at that limit continuing to add more stuff to process will result in them starting to overheat, stressing and/or damaging the processor which may cause corruption of processed data and incomplete processing to happen going forward, and will eventually result in the processor failing if not corrected. The same applies to teaching and working your dog and their brain processing new information and behaviors that you are trying to get them to learn, or already learned behaviors that you are asking them to recall and perform.

Longer training without sufficient breaks will negatively impact a dog's mental state by quickly exhausting them and leading to a higher stress level for the rest of the session after they start to become exhausted, which will likely continuously worsen the longer the session goes on past their natural point of exhaustion. It will also make them perform worse during training because of that exhaustion and stress impacting their processing and recall abilities, resulting in more corrections needing to be used by their trainer during the session (assuming they're using any of the most common training methods, which typically use correction of mistakes to try to teach dogs what not to do), which will cause even more stress that could easily have been completely avoided by providing breaks and keeping sessions shorter.

The increased amount of mistakes and corrections alongside the exhaustion and stress will also make the dog less able to correctly retain anything they learned for the future and probably also make them more stressed about training that specific behavior, similar behaviors, or training in similar contexts going forward, as well as likely make the current training session and whatever you're trying to teach them during it more confusing for them and possibly even poison whatever you are trying to teach them (because the more a dog makes mistakes and is corrected and the more stressful a training session is the more potential there is for corrections to be misunderstood by the dog or for the dog to begin to become avoidant of any behaviors they have offered during the session for fear of more correction, especially if you/the trainer aren't delivering those corrections with ideal timing or in a way that is "fair" and balanced with rewards enough for the dog to be able to reliably recover from and move past being corrected to continue training, which is more likely to become the case when you/the trainer are doing long and probably very frustrating sessions where you/the trainer are also likely becoming stressed and exhausted).

I doubt they are actually doing 40+ hours (which is part of the scam of the advertising of that board and train package) but if they are that is actually cruel, ESPECIALLY given that this particular business uses harsh remote collar/e-collar/"shock" collar training with minimal rewards (I know this because I went through their interview process for a job with them a few years ago that I was offered but ended up turning down because their training methods conflict with both animal behavior science and my personal ethics).

They're the kind of training business to claim that you can make remote stimulation (the "shock" from the collar) a totally neutral thing by making the stim into the A (antecedent) in ABC (Antecedent, Behavior, Consequence) instead of the C (consequence) by pairing the stim with the command when it is given as a "little tap on the shoulder" to "remind the dog to keep their attention on the trainer" instead of doing the stim after a dog fails to offer the desired behavior as a form of correction which IS JUST NOT HOW THAT WORKS AT ALL. THAT'S NOT HOW ANIMALS LEARN, THAT'S NOT BASED IN ANY SCIENCE, THAT'S NOT HOW ABC WORKS! YOU CAN'T IN ANY WAY GUARANTEE AND SHOULD NOT ASSUME THAT AN ANIMAL WILL LEARN TO INTERPRET SOMETHING THAT IS GENERALLY AVERSIVE AS A NEUTRAL ANTECEDENT INSTEAD OF JUST RANDOM AND CONFUSING APPLICATION OF AN AVERSIVE SIMPLY BECAUSE YOU WANT THEM TO INTERPRET IT THAT WAY. It also shows a serious lack of understanding from someone claiming to be a professional that you can trust with your dog of what an aversive is and who in a training interaction decides what is or is not aversive - the dog, not the trainer. So yeah, you can probably see why that's bad and stressful for the dogs if you have even a basic understanding of the science behind how dogs learn, especially if they're actually being subjected to that nonsense training method for 40+ hours a week.

TLDR, any training business making promises of totally completed training of a bunch of different skills like this in a short amount of time - some of which are complex skills and for a lot of dogs would generally require months of regular consistent training to achieve reliably (loose leash walking and off leash recall, in particular)(your retriever who came pre-installed with these behaviors from birth is an exception okay lol) - and claims to work your dogs a full time job amount of hours a week or more in order to achieve those claimed rapid results (while also more than likely having other dogs at the same time that they are also claiming to be working the same amount which is simply not possible for a human being who requires sleep and food breaks at minimum to function) probably uses training methods that many people would (rightfully) consider to be anti-science and abusive in order to get your dog to act the way they want quickly enough and consistently enough to make you believe they've properly done their job for just long enough to keep you from going after them after they take your money (because this kind of lazy training will more likely than not fall apart down the road, but by then you'll probably just blame yourself for not knowing how to upkeep it well enough or not putting enough hours in like they claimed they did or w/e). I know this because I have seen it myself and I have helped fix the training on more than one dog who has been through "training" programs like this. Just save your money and avoid it. It's a scam.

[thehappyfarmdogs]

I miss you wonderful boy.

[thehappyfarmdogs]

pi telling mom about his day

[thehappyfarmdogs]

all I could hear was growling, so I stood up to take a look

[thehappyfarmdogs]

he thinks he's being so smooth with his little face on my leg. i SEE you, villain

[thehappyfarmdogs]

You’re going to look into my big brown eyes and tell me no? Unbelievable

[thehappyfarmdogs]

BEAST DAY!!!!

Happy 3rd birthday Woody!!! Technically you grew bigger but you have never grown up