I wonder if there’s an “antidote” to this fear pheremone that can be sprayed in high stress areas like kennels and shelters to subdue anxious dogs? I mean, one that works on a scientific basis, as opposed to the snake oil misters that are currently on the market.
You know, I don’t know if I’ve seen this in any of the books I’ve read recently, but I’ve been experimenting with lots of LITTLE training sessions. Eowyn needs work on her food aggression, reactivity, and resource guarding. Henry needs work on his anxiety and is, unfortunately, picking up Eowyn’s reactivity. Every book I’ve managed to beg, borrow, or steal on the subject stresses over and over not to make training sessions longer than 10 minutes and not to allow the dog to get bored… but they dont mention how much time should be between sessions.
I’m mowing the lawn right now. Eo’s in the backyard, and every time she doesn’t react to a dog or bicycle going by she gets a treat. Henry’s inside while I mow in his crate, and every 5-10 minutes I’ll come in and give him a treat. Before I went outside, Eo and I did a ‘attentiveness’ clicker training session in front of the big front picture window.
It’s kind of like my day to day need to get back into shape. Instead of joining a gym, I started walking miles and miles with the dogs every night. Every now and then at work when I get bored or frustrated I’ll stop and go up and down a few flights of stairs, or I’ll drop and give myself 20 pushups. Much better to integrate the physical and emotional training into life than it is to make a special time with other artificial constraints.
I think I’ve arrived at an indoor solution for Henry and Eo that manages both of their issues.
Eo is fine in the house, kennel or yard… but doesn’t deal well with her frustration when another dog / cat / squirrel runs by and she can’t give chase. In that case, she barks, runs, and destroys things. The barking is bad for the neighbors, the running is bad for her hips, and the destroying things is bad for keeping the peace with my roommate. The kennel is the ideal place for her because of her hips and because from the kennel she can’t see passing dogs / cats / mooses / squirrels, and the white noise from the A/C and HEPA filter keeps her from hearing them.
Henry is fine in the kennel as long as Eo or I are in the room with him. If he can’t see her (or if she’s asleep or hidden in her own kennel in the closet) then he’ll panic and try to escape because of his separation anxiety. When he escapes from the kennel by any means necessary, and finds that I’ve gone out the front door (he’s a GREAT scent tracking dog) and he can’t follow me, he’ll eat at the front door. Also not good for my roommate relations. When he’s outside with her, I think Eowyn plays a little too rough with him, and he’s somewhat afraid of her. And when he’s left alone in the house, he’ll bark the same way Eo will and paw/claw at the front windows and blinds.
I think I’ve finally found a good solution. If I leave Eo up on my bed in my room, and close the door to my room behind me, they’ll stay in there. Henry will stay in his kennel, and Eo will just sleep up on the bed or play with some of her toys. She won’t eat at the door (she knows the house tastes bad… and she’ll make me mad), she won’t eat at my bedding, and she will keep Henry from freaking out. My room can kind of be a big kennel for her, with a little one inside for Henry. Which is what I was thinking about building in my closet for the two of them, anyway.
A question posed by a behaviorist that I talk to — how do you keep track of your progress when you’re training? There are better days and worse days. There are improvements and setbacks. Most people can keep a general sort of ‘tab’ on their progress just by feelings alone — am I happy and is the dog happy? If so, training is working. If not, re-evaluate.
For people who are into sports and running, there’s statistics to track like how far you’ve run, what your heart rate is when you’re cycling, and how fast you’re going. With dog training, there’s the same kind of metrics (”How fast does the dog respond to my commands?” “How reliable is my dog’s recall in the yard?” “How many times do I need to correct leash walking behavior?” “How long can I be out of the house without the dog panicking?” “How many reactions does the dog have to X stimulus in the course of a walk?”), but in the few training classes I’ve been in with the behaviourists that I have access to in my area, I haven’t seen any efforts made to track metrics.
The behaviorist that I’m working with now is encouraging me to blog daily as a tool to track progress, which I’ve been trying to do every time after we do a training walk. I’ve also been keeping track of a couple of metrics at Daytum, like the fights that Eo picks with Henry and the circumstances around them and how many times Eowyn reacts to particular stimuli on our walks. After a week of doing it so far, I’ve decided it’s important to track positive metrics as well as negative metrics… I’m planning to add counters for how many times the dogs DON’T jump up and rush to the front of the house when the dog next door barks, and how many times they sit or otherwise respond immediately without a clear and present reward.
I think blogging — and being able to go over the blog with the behaviorist — is going to be a great tool in the long run. In fact, I might just start blogging in other places that I’m trying to change my life, too…
One of Eowyn’s behavior problems relates to her high reactivity relating to resource guarding. Basically, food aggression. Since this problem is manageable, we haven’t been actively training it… I simply put them in their crates before feeding time, and then lock the doors so that they don’t have access to each other and I bring them the food separately.
I should clarify that — it’s not that the problem is manageable, it’s that I have a workaround that lets me manage the likelihood of an incident happening. Until I make a boneheaded mistake…
This past week I started feeding Henry Innova Adult instead of the (more expensive) Innova Adult Large Breed that Eo gets. Eo’s food is in a tupperware thing on wheels… Henry’s, though, is currently in the bag in the laundry room (with the door closed). Haven’t had a chance to get a tub for his yet because I haven’t made it to PetSmart this weekend… it’s a game day and everyone + their mother is in town. Last night, I was doing laundry and let them in from the backyard… they were laying in the kitchen when I opened the door to the laundry room to change loads, and both of them got up when I opened the door. I didn’t even THINK about it until I heard Eo start her “war growl” … when she reacts to Henry she snaps at him with her teeth and makes the world’s loudest “fighting dog” noise. She rarely connects, but Henry (quite justifiably) cries and cowers. With a surge of adrenaline, I picked Eo (all 75+ lbs of her) completely up off the ground by her collar, and she stopped… Henry belly crawled away and tried to crawl under one of the living room chairs. Ugh. Add another one to the score of “times Eo has Eaten Henry’s face…”
To remove the sting from the experience for Henry, I put Eo on a down-stay across the room (Note: I did NOT yell at her or hurt her; corporal punishment would only serve to validate the way she acted towards Henry…) and then attracted him back into the laundry room with handfulls of food.
So. Starting some resource guarding training. It basically involves me putting Eo on a down stay across the room and showing her a resource she wants, and then giving it to Henry. Slowly, I move them closer together until Eo gets agitated. We build it up over weeks and months. At least I have two dogs living in the house all the time so it’s easy to do… food aggression / resource guarding really is hard to do in a one-dog household.
The first step in Eowyn’s Behavior Modification Plan is to teach her to focus on me a lot better. The first step was to create a scarcity of affection… which is working, even though it’s WAY more difficult on me than it is on the dogs! They’re both getting used to the idea that I won’t walk up to them and give them affection. They MUST earn it, and in Henry’s case, he only gets affection during training periods. I’ve had to watch where my hands are when I’m asleep because I’ve found if I leave them dangling off the side of the bed, he’ll crawl under them and try to ‘pet himself’ …
The second step in Eowyn’s Behavior Modification Plan is to get Eo to start focusing on me more. We’re starting to work with it during the day by correcting her instinct to run to the front door barking when she hears something outside or the dogs next door bark. I’m trying to replace that behavior with “Come to Me”. The other thing I’m trying to get her to do is to look at me for cues all the time.
Can’t get your dog to focus? Don’t know where to start? First, remember that you have to get a dog to display a behavior before you can reinforce it. Jennie Chen, who’s a member of the local kennel club and who also trains and shows her Swiss Mountain Dog and Lowchen in the Texas region, posted a video on youtube that details a technique that I’m going to start working with Eowyn on. It involves holding a treat in your mouth and spitting it at the dog so that they look at your face — after all, that’s where treats come from!
As Jennie says, most of dog training is actually human training.
I’m getting the feeling that Henry will be worse before he’s better. He’s been seeking every little bit of attention from me that he can possibly get… which is none. (Although I did once subconsciously pat his head while I was working on a project from .) He’s been begging, pleading, trying to move his head under my hands to pretend that I’m petting him. Yeah, I think he’s gonna get worse before he’s better … but he is playing with Eowyn some more. I just hope that he doesn’t turn to her completely for attention.
Eowyn was a pain in the rear before we went on the walk tonight. On the other hand, she’s been an absolute charmer on walks compared to her normal behavior. She hasn’t tried to drag me, even when we’ve walked right past a cat. Henry’s been especially good, too… walks are one of the only way for him to get praise right now. I give praise because every time they’re on leash their training time is “on” even if I don’t have treats. Where normally I have had to correct both of them nearly constantly on walks (together or alone), both of them walked with me on a slack leash for almost the entire 1 mile walk tonight. We’ll try walking a little earlier tomorrow night.
For both behavior modification programs, the goal is “a quiet and confident dog that either has a neutral or positive reaction towards events during which they would previously have shown signs of distress.” Well, good luck on that. I’ll cover behavior plans in more detail tomorrow night.
With the help of a experienced behaviorist, we have localized Eowyn and Henry’s issues down to two treatable areas.
Eowyn’s main obstacle is called “high reactivity.” When she sees something that triggers a reaction, she loses conscious control of herself. It’s equivalent to a panic attack in a human.
Henry is a charm to train for obedience, but his separation anxiety is a beast to deal with. With a human child that was afraid of being apart from someone, the most common methods of dealing with it are to talk it out and demonstrate how the child is going to be OK even if mom or dad isn’t home. But Henry can’t talk, and I’m not sure that he would understand it because his fear is so deep rooted that he doesn’t have any control over it.
With Eowyn, our training plan is to first practice getting her attention consistently in a controlled outdoor and indoor environment. It’s a constant process to ‘dull’ her reaction specifically without triggering it… because triggering it would reinforce it. So the first step is the classical “click and treat” step — get the dog to look at you, and reward them. One of my friends who competes with obedience had an awesome idea — she holds the treat in her mouth when she clicks, because the dog will always watch where the treat comes from. Then she spits it out and the dog will grab it. This will be ongoing and I’ll record progress here. The behaviorist also recommended this Book about training reactive dogs, which I’ve got on order at Amazon and plan to buy as soon as I’ve figured out what else I need to buy in this order.
With Henry, the behaviorist I’m working with has developed a training plan that has a first step that I’d never heard before. Basically, I’m to ignore Henry when he’s in the house with me. Don’t give him extra attention outside of training exercises. This breaks my heart. I’d prefer to have him cuddled up asleep on my feet or in my lap, and I enjoyed that he sought attention from me (where Eo’s much more like a cat and would rather be off sleeping somewhere soft… … unless she’s hungry). The behaviorist might be right, though… and I’d try anything at this point to find a long-term solution for Henry. Ignoring him is HARD, though. Tonight he was curled up in the corner of the kitchen. I watched him lay down and his legs were shaking, which he does when he’s close to panic. Rough. They’re my kids, damnit!
A lot has happened since I last updated over here. We’ve added a new member of the family, Henry, and are working with some of his issues now as well as Eowyn’s issues. As a result, I’m going to move this blog over to a more generic URL in the next few days and change the picture so that it’s Eowyn’s and Henry’s blogs.
The trainer we’re working with wants me to keep track of how many times we have particular issues, so I’m going to be doing that by trying to write here daily about the issues we’ve faced and what’s worked and has not. I’ll try to come up with some way of doing a monthly summary of what has happened and how many times it’s happened.
Eo, by the way, still has not fully recovered. Some of that is Henry’s fault. With his extreme separation anxiety, I can’t leave him crated or alone in the house (although we’re working on that — especially the crating part.) It’s been a constant back and forth as I’ve tried to reconcile her need for physical therapy in the spaces in between his issues — I didn’t realize how hard adding a 2nd dog would be, especially one with so many special needs. Writing here is going to help me keep things more consistent and will probably be good for Eo’s continued progress.
that I’ve been considering buying for Eowyn.