I gave a speech yesterday at my Toastmasters club about how the way to achieve more is to learn how to manage the stress that achievement brings with it. In the middle of the speech (I speak mostly off the cuff), I connected something I’d seen recently with dogs to the point I was making.
This video was posted a while back on someone’s page, asking for what we thought of it.
Shelter Behavior Training - Aggression Toward People from Bound Angels on Vimeo.
People heavily into positive and clicker training obedience thought what the guy was doing here was wrong, and cruel. However, I think what he’s doing here is right. The dog has all these intense emotions and is operating on instinct. He can’t learn like that. He can only learn by finding an alternate way to deal with those feelings. That means making him strongly pay attention to other stimulus and see that flight is an option, not just fight. And . . . it worked. The dog started thinking instead of just feeling.
This is totally a stockdog thing, though I don’t think I’ve heard it articulated anywhere before. I always explain to people that my dogs are more edgy than usual dogs because when a cow says, “No,” they’ve been bred to instinctively react in fight mode to that. People, me included, don’t always come prepared for that and can really mess up how a dog interacts with the world if you don’t fully understand that.
But you’re going to get horrible messes if all they do is react with fight mode and instinct. You’ve got to have that space to think and react, too. Training your dog (and you) needs to include this part of it, too. When a puppy and new handler first start, it’s usually the handler all thinking and the puppy all feeling and the magic happens when there’s a balance.
That’s what I’ve been working on with Rippa. She is getting to a point where it’s not just “wahoo!” whenever she’s on stock, but she’s thinking and applying the lessons we’ve used (like going around obstacles rather that going in tight, taking square flanks, and just balancing herself to me and the stock) more and more. She’s better on goats and sheep because she’s had more time on them. She understand them, and there’s no threat to her.
With cattle, though, she starts out pretty excited unless I put the screws to her in the beginning. I’m doing flank commands off stock and “outs” as well as plain obedience, then I go in, move the stock with her on a down stay and show her they’re mine, and then we go to work and things are nice. I saw a lot of thinking out there today and a lot of really good decisions when she had space to make them.
But, if she has to break into a run, you can see her brain start panicking and she goes for dumb moves – coming in too close to them, taking high bite shots (and getting kicked), etc. Experience is what she needs (and what I need) in this department. We’re both finding a balance between tightening the screws on her and just letting her work. Shannon wants me to be able to get more sharp responses because a foot or two can make a difference, but I also have to balance it with Rippa’s need to work independently of me, too.
I’m reading Bob Vest’s book right now to see what he has to say and one of the things I’ve got so far out of it is this thing about 55 gallon drums. You can have a dog with 55 gallons of confidence, but if you undermine the dog with bad handling and training, you lose a little in ever session (I feel like I did this with Fury). You can have a dog with 25 gallons and you can use that dog, but you might never get 55 unless you work on it – I feel like that with Rippa. And then anything less, you’re going to be working hard, but you have to do it. I don’t think a lot about building confidence in dogs when training, but the agility people have this part down. I think that’s why Rippa isn’t trialing well when I take her to agility trials – I’ve not built her confidence up because I assumed she was a 55 gallon dog like Fury and didn’t need to.
Now to figure out how to do that, exactly.
No comments:
Post a Comment