What my dogs teach me
Whew! It’s more than a month later and I maybe, possibly, barely can write about how things have been with Lewis.
I had only a couple of days to prepare for Lewis before he came. I did three main things.
Continue reading “Training a Teenage Puppy”
What are the first things to train a puppy? I’ve seen so many lists. Behaviors at the door rarely make the top five because there are so many other important things! But I work on doors early on because I’ve always had a household with multiple dogs. My dogs need to learn how to respond to my traffic direction. This is something I take entirely for granted until there is a new dog in the house. Whoops! I make the smooth “go ahead” motion with my hand, indicating to the pup to go ahead into the next space (room, crate, outside) and get a blank look. Or, in Lewis’ case, a gleeful leap to grab my hand or sleeve. Yay, this must be a tug game!
Continue reading “Out and In: Door Training with My Puppy”
We never planned to stop with the book. Marge Rogers and I want more materials on puppy socialization out there, so now we are writing some in bite-sized pieces.
I am pleased to link to the first four (free access) educational articles on the Puppy Socialization Project site!
Enjoy!
Eileen & Marge
Puppy Socialization Book is Now Available
Copyright 2021 Eileen Anderson
Puppy Socialization: What It Is and How to Do It, by Marge Rogers and myself, is now available at Amazon and several other vendors (with more to come)! You can purchase the e-book, with 63,000 words, 50+ photos, and access to 50+ linked videos, for $9.99.
UPDATE: The book is now available as a paperback as well. The paperback is currently at Amazon only, but another vendor is in the works.
This book is why the lights were off for an unprecedented two months in my blog! Late at night sometimes I work on some posts—it’s impossible for me not to write blog posts—but I haven’t had the brain cells to polish them. Polishing the puppy book is all Marge and I have been doing for most of that time period!
We are very proud of this book. It was a huge endeavor and we and hope there is something in it for every reader.
Copyright 2021 Eileen Anderson
I’m reading this great book called The Death of Expertise. It has helped me think more clearly about my role as a dog blogger. It’s a fabulous book that I may write a review of a bit later. But here’s one piece of my response to it.
I am not an expert dog trainer. The people who are experts have specific training and education in that and are out there training a variety of dogs. They train a wider variety of dogs in a week than I have in my whole training life. Most of them have credentials and all of them seek and value ongoing education in their field.
Continue reading “My Lack of Expertise as a Trainer and How It Relates to Pipe Insulation”
Do you have a new puppy or know someone who does? Then Marge Rogers and I have a present for you.
Dog and puppy training have changed a lot over the years. We recognize that not everyone is aware of those changes. So when my friend, trainer and behavior consultant Marge Rogers got her new puppy, I wrote blog posts to go with each one of her first six puppy training videos. I was thrilled with her first lessons for Zip and wanted to share them far and wide. And now they are in a book as well!
The book with embedded videos is available exclusively as an iBook and can be read on iPhones, iPads, and Macs with iBooks. [1]If anyone knows of a book reader for PC that will work for iBooks, let me know and I’ll list it here. Having the videos embedded means you can download it and have everything available even when you aren’t connected to the Internet.
By popular demand, I have also released a PDF version. It doesn’t have the videos embedded, but they are linked. Otherwise, it is the same as the iBook.
Best of all, they are both FREE!
Find out what a dog training professional teaches her puppy first–and why–in Lessons for My Puppy.
We hope you enjoy the book! For more about Marge Rogers and more great resources, check out her website, Rewarded Behavior Continues, or follow Rewarded Behavior Continues on Facebook.
Copyright Eileen Anderson 2016
Notes
| ↑1 | If anyone knows of a book reader for PC that will work for iBooks, let me know and I’ll list it here. |
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Remember “Lessons for My Puppy,” my collaboration with Marge Rogers? She made some videos that I loved so much that I wrote blog posts to go with them.
Marge is still out there working with dogs and making great videos, and I’m featuring another one today. Although there is a lesson for a puppy in this video, and also a lesson for the adult dog, the biggest lesson here is for puppy owners. (Isn’t that usually the case, when you come to think of it?) In the video she shows how she gradually introduced Tinker, a fox terrier puppy she was boarding, to her own dog, young male Portuguese Water Dog Zip.
How many of you, when adding a new dog to your household, follow the “stick ’em together, stay close by, and pray” method? I have certainly done that in the past, though I don’t recommend it. I was more prudent and conservative by the time I got Clara, but even then, my situation was so unplanned and complex that I basically made digital decisions: this dog can hopefully be with the puppy, and these dogs definitely can’t.
When Clara came into my household, I kept her permanently separated from Cricket, my small, elderly and frail rat terrier. Clara could easily have knocked over Cricket with her wagging tail alone. I also kept Clara separated from Summer for a good while. Summer has a history of moderate dog aggression and I wasn’t sure she would grant Clara a “puppy license.” But I immediately turned Zani loose with Clara, since Zani is incredibly friendly, likes puppies, and was well matched in size. Zani lived up to my expectations and became Clara’s buddy and babysitter.
But what I didn’t do was any controlled introductions and gradual exposures. If and when I get another puppy, I certainly will do that. All the dogs in a household, both the residents and the newbie, can benefit from good planning and making acquaintance with each other gradually with good associations.
A common and effective method that pro trainers often use when introducing a puppy into their household is classical conditioning of the adult dogs: whenever the puppy is brought into proximity, fabulous food rains down on the adult dog. This can help build pleasant associations and prevent jealousy, since puppies can be obnoxious and can take up a lot of the owner’s time. That method was not necessary in Marge’s case. Her dog Zip is naturally friendly and gregarious and was likely to enjoy the pup; he just needed some time to calm down and learn to be gentle.
This is not really a how-to post. All of our individual situations are different, and it would take much more than a standard-size blog post to cover even the basics of doing introductions.
What I want people to see is the visual of the dog and the pup getting to know each other safely and gradually, through a barrier and with good associations.
One of the things I love most about Marge’s approach is that she didn’t have any sort of time schedule mapped out for “releasing” Zip and Tinker to play together. In fact, it would be great if we could even stop thinking about it in those terms. At the time the video was filmed, the puppy Tinker was a baby, and at an age where a scary experience could potentially have negative residual effects for the rest of her life. Zip, although a friendly dog as Marge points out, had zero experience playing with a puppy now that he was a (very) young adult. He was much larger than Tinker and had a history of exuberant play with dogs around his size (i.e., not tiny and breakable) as a youngster. So before even considering putting them together, Marge had to be sure of two things: Tinker wasn’t scared of Zip, and Zip wouldn’t be too rough for Tinker.
I love the visuals in this movie. It’s something that we rarely see, and it is so incredibly valuable. You can watch as Tinker gets acclimated to Zip with the fence of the exercise pen between them. Marge reinforced Zip for calm behavior in Tinker’s presence, and built good associations with Tinker for being near Zip. After a few days, Marge allowed them together, but kept Zip on leash as a safety precaution. Tinker was comfortable enough to climb on him!
Tinker was there for a week. If she and Zip hadn’t indicated that they were getting comfortable with each other, Marge would simply have kept them separated, using the ex-pen and other means. And if Tinker had indicated that even the ex-pen barrier put Zip too close for comfort, Marge would have kept them separated even further. The paramount concern with a puppy this age is providing positive experiences.
Putting the two dogs adjacent with a fence in between was a good method for this friendly adult dog and confident puppy. But there are many situations in which it would not be appropriate. Here are three of them.
But take a look at how well it worked out for Zip and Tinker.
Link to the movie for email subscribers.
Whatever method you use to integrate a new dog into your household, patience and barriers are your friends. Even if you are a gregarious person, you probably don’t want to spend 24/7 with an acquaintance you met yesterday. Most dogs probably don’t either. Take the introductions slow and easy. For instance, I didn’t let my dog Summer interact directly with the new puppy Clara until Clara was about 5 or 6 months old. That was more than 2 months. Some people wait a lot longer than that, depending on the situation.
If I had it to do over, I would probably do some classical conditioning with Summer: associate the appearance of the puppy with great food falling from the sky. I didn’t have it together to do that at the time. But when I did finally let them into the same space, I supervised closely and kept the sessions short. Summer in particular needs her “down time” so I made sure she had it. Clara needed to learn, without getting hurt, that Summer would probably never want to play with her and that it was not wise to pester her.
Back to Marge and Zip. As it happened, Zip never did get to play with Tinker off-leash during that week. He was too clumsy and goofy (did you see the paw to her head?). He did learn a lot though, including a softer approach and play style. Marge may have an “uncle dog” in the making! (That’s a term for a good-natured male dog who is good with puppies and good in general at putting other dogs at ease.) But she knew better than to rush things. This is another situation where “slow is fast” though. Zip earned off-leash time in two days with the next puppy who came to visit!
Being gentle with a puppy is not something a human can directly teach a dog, but Marge facilitated it with carefully controlled exposures and lots of breaks in the play. I know she is counting her blessings that between her efforts and the fact that Zip is friendly and socially savvy, he is learning gentleness through direct experience with the puppies themselves.
You can view Zip’s lovely interactions with his next puppy guest here: Off Leash Puppy Play.
Copyright 2016 Eileen Anderson
You are not born with the skills to be successful in my world. It’s up to me to teach you.–Marge Rogers’ pledge to her puppy, Zip
In case you hadn’t noticed, all these “puppy lessons” are lessons for the trainer as much or more than for the puppy. But Lesson Six most of all. In this lesson, Marge makes a pledge to Zip: She will remember that it is up to her to teach him what he needs to know and how to act in order to be happy in our strange human world.
It’s not a question of “obedience.” It’s more like someone explaining to a dear friend how best to get along in foreign country.
So much of our normal approach to dog training is that of solving “problem behaviors” that bother us (usually after they have gotten established). Nine times out of ten (that’s a made up statistic, but I bet it’s true), the problem behaviors are just regular old “out of the box” dog behaviors that don’t fit well in our human world. You know, chewing stuff up, stealing food, jumping on people, digging holes, barking too much, nipping at fingers. These things aren’t evil. They usually just aren’t convenient for us. But throw in the mythology of dominance, where we are told that dogs are continually challenging our authority, and these natural dog behaviors can cause a dog to lose its home or its life.
What you will see in this movie is the opposite of that. The most important word in the movie is “teach.” Thoughtful, preemptive teaching such as Marge is doing is a win/win for human and dog. Puppy learns a palette of fun, acceptable behaviors via positive reinforcement. He develops skills for even more fun and learning with Marge. He develops good associations to the world through careful exposures. Marge gets a lovely, well behaved dog and Zip gets a big, big world to play in.
Marge points out in the movie that puppies are not born with the skills to get along perfectly in the human world. And it’s actually worse than that: they are born with behaviors that are actively troublesome to us. For instance, “See food. Eat food,” as Marge puts it. The counter surfing dog is not challenging our authority. He is doing what comes naturally: scarfing up whatever is available. And once he finds something up there, it will be tough teaching him never to go there again. It will make little sense to his doggie brain. It’s not about authority, it’s about availability. How much better would it be to teach him never to go there in the first place? Never get that first sweet reinforcer for counter or table surfing.
Hence, Marge will teach Zip habits that are incompatible with inappropriate scavenging. Marge used to have much bigger dogs (mastiffs, then ridgebacks) and I was going to tease her and say she finally got a dog who couldn’t reach the counter, but I can hear Sue Ailsby laughing at me. Porties are said to be incorrigible counter dogs. But Marge is a match for that. As you’ll see in the movie, she has her special “magnetic mat” in the kitchen door that has thwarted many a potential food thief.
My favorite part of the movie is when Marge has Zip in her lap for administering eye medication and getting a toenail trim. She prioritized handling (building positive associations with classical conditioning) and has a pup who is all squishy in her lap: relaxed and trusting. She has the benefit of being able to do some tricky husbandry behaviors with a cooperative puppy. But Zip is the big winner here. He doesn’t fear the grooming table, the clippers, the medication bottle, or Marge’s hands, for that matter.
My heart still gets all mooshy when I see people doing training that doesn’t have human preferences as the sole prompt. This whole movie is dedicated to Zip’s welfare every bit as much as Marge’s convenience. The more things our dogs are comfortable with, the more skills our dogs have, the wider their worlds can be.
Link to the movie for email subscribers.
Marge’s summary to Zip after the six Life Lessons (so far!):
These are my life lessons for you, my sweet puppy. And for me too. Now, let’s train!
Life Lessons for My Puppy (a blog page with all the puppy lessons)
Marge’s Channel on YouTube: Subscribe!
Marge’s FaceBook business page: Rewarded Behavior Continues
Zip, please meet the world. World, watch out, here comes Zip!
In a way, this should be Lesson Zero, since Marge has been socializing Zip from the very start. Also, socialization is in a class by itself. The impressions puppies get when very young, particularly in their first three months of life, will create their world view and affect their temperament and attitudes. This world view is infinitely harder to change later. Dogs can learn training and games for their whole lives. But if their early impressions of the world are negative, or they are not exposed to our human world during the socialization window, they will be playing catch-up for the rest of their lives. (I have direct experience with this, having a dog who grew up in the woods.)
Marge is socializing Zip with skill and care, with consideration of both his physical and emotional safety.
Many people still follow outdated advice to keep their puppies sequestered during the early months of their lives because of the danger of infectious diseases. While it’s true that precautions should be taken to protect pups while their immune systems are still developing, the sad truth is the following:
Behavioral issues, not infectious diseases, are the number one cause of death for dogs under three years of age. –AVSAB Position Statement on Puppy Socialization
Let that be our call to action to get puppies out and about in a safe and positive way. Puppy classes, handling, and other socialization activities correlate positively with good behavior and retention in the home.
The following position statement (the source of the above quote) has appropriate information about balancing puppy socialization with protection from contagious diseases. I’ll cover some practical suggestions about that as well.
American Veterinary Society for Animal Behavior Position Statement on Puppy Socialization
There is a good summary in the position statement:
Veterinarians specializing in behavior recommend that owners take advantage of every safe opportunity to expose young puppies to the great variety of stimuli that they will experience in their lives. –AVSAB Position Statement on Puppy Socialization
Let me emphasize the word “safe.” This refers not only to hygiene and protecting puppies’ immune systems. It also covers the type of exposures that are appropriate for puppies.
You will see in the movie that Zip is observing the world and experiencing new environments, with direct, deliberate associations by Marge with pleasurable experiences like great food and play. Remember how Marge taught Zip that she was fun and that learning was fun? In today’s clips, which represent a tiny percentage of her daily work with Zip, she is teaching him that the world can be fun.
We see him at a retirement home, at the sports fields, the bookstore, a strip mall, a parking lot, the lobby at the vet office, and the hardware store. And Marge says, don’t forget to build good associations to the car, too!
She is also doing preemptive work. With puppies, we don’t generally have the luxury of going out and doing strict classical conditioning separately on every possible thing they will encounter. We don’t have a tractor day, a bicycle day, or a mailman day, when all other stimuli retreat. But when you have a blank slate, you can take action that will either head off possible negative associations to sudden events (management) or, if you are lucky, work towards creating a positive association. For instance, you will see Marge give Zip a slurp from the food tube* when a car goes by or when another dog fusses in the vet office. She does this as soon as he perceives these things and does not wait to see if he reacts. In formal classical conditioning one would probably wait a couple of beats before causing the food to appear, and have more controlled exposures. We don’t always have that luxury in real life, but often with puppies we don’t need it.
When we are consistent about the general pairing of sudden events with goodies, the dog can get both the classical association (a motorcycle–great, that predicts salmon!) and the operant behavior (I think I’ll reorient to my human to help that salmon along!).
Common sense will take you a long way here. One way pups can get exposed to infectious diseases is through the bacteria present in dog feces. If you take your pup to a class, make sure that the hosts of the class use disinfectant cleaners before the class, as suggested in the position statement above. When doing socialization on the road, people can minimize a pup’s exposure to pathogens by setting it down on a rug when in public. When the pup is very small, it can be carried, then placed on a mat or rug for minimal exposure (see the sidewalk picture above). Later on when you let the pup walk about, steer him away from unknown animals (obviously!), trash, and feces. And avoid dog parks, where all three of these are generally present.
There are also some things that people assume fall under socialization which have hidden force in them (flooding), and can really backfire. This happens a lot with puppies and fearful adult dogs with perfectly well-meaning humans.
So what don’t we see? We don’t see a bunch of strangers petting Zip. We don’t see him being lured up to children to get treats from them. We don’t see a “pass the puppy” exercise (where puppy owners sit in a circle and hand the puppies around to each other). All of these scenarios can create or exacerbate fear, as the puppy is put into strange situations with insufficient control over the scenario and insufficient support from his owner.
Let me repeat: leading puppies or shy or fearful dogs up to strangers to have the stranger give them a treat is a really bad idea that unfortunately has made its way into the cultural mythology about “how to introduce dogs to people.” Here’s why not to do that.
Zip has indeed met plenty of people and kids (not covered in this video). This was done in a controlled way, one at a time, and performed with lots of breaks. Marge herself handled the food and/or toys until Zip was entirely comfortable with the person.
People naturally have different goals with their dogs. Since almost every dog will be handled by a vet and will meet strangers in its lifetime, exposure to different people and careful handling are both beneficial in the formative weeks, the so-called socialization window. But dogs don’t have to be social butterflies. As dogs grow older and their temperament becomes apparent, many will not want to interact with and like every human (or every dog) they meet, and they don’t need to.
I write frequently about my formerly feral dog Clara, and will soon be publishing an update on her own–extended–socialization process. I missed her socialization window, so for several years have been doing a slow-motion version of what Marge and many others do with their puppies. Interestingly, Clara is showing herself to be a curious and extroverted dog. I think she would have been extremely people-friendly had she not been raised feral. I take that into account when considering my goals with her. Given the chance, she probably would have been a social butterfly. So, belatedly, I’m giving her that chance. Our activities would be a bit different if she weren’t turning out to be so gregarious.
Likewise, the video is not a tutorial on how to socialize YOUR puppy. Each puppy is an individual and has different needs. This video provides a sampling of how Marge is expanding Zip’s world beyond the confines of her house.
Link to the video for email subscribers.
Got any good socialization tips? People can always use good ideas about this.
Life Lessons for My Puppy (all)
Marge’s FaceBook business page: Rewarded Behavior Continues
* Marge and I both use food tubes for high value treat delivery. We use Coghlan’s tubes, which can be bought at REI and other places online. I’ll do a whole blog on food tubes and what to put in them one of these days. You have to get the right consistency. Most high end pâté style canned dog foods (not chunky) work well.
So how many of you with puppies out there wish sometimes that you could flip a switch to turn them off, just for a little bit? Catch your breath, do the dishes, sit down for just a minute?
I have it on pretty good authority that most of the puppies would also appreciate having an off switch, too! Just as human babies can get all wound up without knowing how to come down on their own, puppies get overwound too.
Some of the advice that gets passed around is off the mark. Owners of high-energy dogs are told to exercise them more and more to burn off the energy. Every time the dog leaves the house it’s for a rousing run or play time. While stimulation and exercise are vitally important, taken by themselves, they can actually exacerbate the problem of being wound up. The dog rehearses a pattern of arousal.
That’s why learning to relax and settle is an important life skill. Marge is really good at teaching it, in my opinion. She teaches “relax” as a behavior, just like teaching sit, down and come. And it’s a win/win for puppy and caregiver.
There are many, many resources for this. A lot of what Marge does with her dogs, including what you will see with Zip, is from the work of Leslie McDevitt (Control Unleashed, Control Unleashed– The Puppy Program, Control Unleashed Seminar DVD) and Dr. Karen Overall.
Lots of other trainers have methods for teaching this behavior, too. Sue Ailsby teaches it in her Training Levels program. Nan Arthur has a method in Chill Out Fido, Laura VanArendonk Baugh has a whole book about it, and Emily Larlham has some videos. I have some resources here in the blog as well. You can search the blog under “1,000 Treats” to see Clara’s progress in relaxation.
The goal of all of these methods is far beyond just getting the dog to stay still. It is to teach the dog to chill out and relax.
Being able to recover and think through increasing levels of arousal can be taught. Most people play with their dogs and puppies without breaks. But breaks allow the puppy to reset, and to learn how to transition between different states of excitement and arousal. They also can keep the pup from going over the top.
In the movie, you will first see Zip relaxing in a non-challenging situation. Then Marge transitions him back and forth between relaxing and getting up to play. Marge works with lots of puppy owners, and has them start with play increments of 5 seconds (one banana, 2 banana, up to 5.). Reset/relax, then start again. Gradually increase duration and difficulty.
At 1:06, watch Zip’s right front leg. He is not just lying down; he is relaxing his muscles. Later you can see him also change his breathing when asked to relax. I’ve watched the movie several times, and keep seeing other aspects of the relaxation. In the last tug session, between the 2:00 and 3:00 minute marks, Zip is growling–a symptom of high arousal for him. You can see how hard he has to work to control himself when Marge asks him to release the tug and relax. “Ohhhh I wanna bite that shoe……but I won’t.” This is yet another version of impulse control.
Take note as well, how Marge reinforces Zip for the relaxed behavior. She is using food rewards, delivered with soft body language right to his mouth. Nothing active, no tossing treats. This is in contrast to the active play with the toy during the “up” states.
The final part of the movie shows a real world application. You can’t see it in the movie, but while Zip is chilling on the floor at the animal hospital, there are two very active toddlers and another dog nearby. This is where you can see yet another benefit of playing tug with a puppy (with a rule structure such as Marge uses). Environmental stressors can also bring about an aroused state. A dog doesn’t have to be jumping around to get over-excited. But playing tug has helped Zip learn how to “come down” from that state, and his lessons carry over beautifully to the new environment.
Just like last time, this is another lesson on how to teach a puppy not to do something using positive reinforcement-based training. Notice all the things Zip is not doing?
All because Marge has “filled in the blanks” with desirable behaviors, and is teaching Zip at a very young age how to calm down.
How about you all? Does your puppy have an off switch? Also, any guesses about Lesson Five? Because we have left out something BIG!
Life Lessons for My Puppy (all)