A very interesting theory about why clicker training is effective

Posted on April 3, 2012 by annieriecken

Karen Pryor is widely recognized as the initiator of clicker training and continues to be one of the leading authorities on the subject.

In this post she puts forth a fascinating theory about why the clicker is so effective.

Pryor is working with German scientist Barbara Schoening, a clicker trainer and a veterinary neurophysiologist in private practice. Schoening drew Pryor’s attention to the relationship between clicker training and research on stimuli and the limbic system [the oldest part of the brain].

Pryor says that “Research in neurophysiology has identified the kinds of stimuli—bright lights, sudden sharp sounds—that reach the amygdala [part of the limbic system] first, before reaching the cortex or thinking part of the brain. The click is that kind of stimulus [italics mine]. Other research, on conditioned fear responses in humans, shows that these also are established via the amygdala, and are characterized by a pattern of very rapid learning, often on a single trial, long-term retention, and a big surge of concommitant emotions.

“We clicker trainers see similar patterns of very rapid learning, long retention, and emotional surges, albeit positive emotions rather than fear [italics mine]. Barbara and I hypothesize that the clicker is a conditioned ‘joy’ stimulus that is acquired and recognized through those same primitive pathways, which would help explain why it is so very different from, say, a human word, in its effect.”

So, maybe that’s why clicker training is so effective.

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Chico and Mozzie play

Posted on March 31, 2012 by annieriecken

This week Chico and I went to visit my cousin Eva at her amazing small farm. If you are interested in food or flowers or gardening here’s lots of exciting stuff going on there, and I plan to write more about it soon. Right now, I am so excited I can hardly contain myself.

At Eva’s, Chico met a dog that he wanted to play with. That might not sound like much, but in our world it is beyond huge. They tell me that when he lived with my sister’s family, Chico was a star at doggie daycare, leading the merry chase and getting along with everyone. When Chico came to me, he was very unfriendly to other dogs and we’ve been working hard to move beyond that. He has learned to tolerate other dogs, to ignore them,  to engage in “parallel play” – he’s even learned to pay more attention to me or to agility obstacles than to other dogs, but I have not, in over two years together, ever seen him PLAY with another dog until this week. Then he met Mozzie, another rescue dog who’s the same size as Chico and just friendly enough, just playful enough, not too pushy, not too big, not too scary. As Goldilocks says in the fairytale, “This one’s JUST right.”

And here’s what it looked like:

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Chico, a wonderful host

Posted on March 28, 2012 by annieriecken

On the way home from Run Thoughs, about 1/4 mile from home, on my dark, quiet, dead end, country road, I saw a dog. An unfamiliar dog, with no person nearby. It was cold, headed below freezing, and the dog’s body language said, “I’m in unfamiliar territory.”

So I stopped the car, got out and called to it. It stopped moving. I mentioned that I had cookies and it came closer, then allowed me to grab its collar. No tags. I wasn’t sure that grumpy Chico would allow the dog anywhere near him, I couldn’t bring myself to leave it there, so I called the police station in my town (that’s how you get hold of the animal control officer), but at almost 10 PM, there was no one there and I was directed to call the emergency dispatcher. This is no emergency, but how else to contact animal control? Dispatcher grumpily agreed to contact the animal control officer, and I waited, hand on the collar of this dog for a good ten minutes and nothing happened. No call to my cell phone, no car appearing, nothing. So I put doggie in the front seat of my car and went home. Chico gave one bark, I told him that wasn’t the thing to do and he stopped. Doggie  didn’t respond with any behavior that looked at all aggressive, in fact he cringed at Chico’s outburst.

I got Chico out of the car and into the house, put doggie in Chico’s car crate and went inside to think things over. Thankfully, I have a second crate (thank you N&L) in the house. I set that up in my back room, added a blanket for padding and a bowl of water, shut Chico in my bedroom and brought doggie in the house and ushered it into the crate (which it entered pretty happily). Then I posted a notice of a found dog to my town’s electronic bulletin board and started calming myself down (somehow there was a huge adrenaline rush from the “rescue”).

About fifteen minutes later, there was a knock on the door, it was the animal control officer. She looked at doggie, who by then had revealed that he was an uncastrated male, and said she was supposed to take him to the shelter – about 30 minutes away. We talked, she thought doggie looked OK in his crate, a tad bit crowded, but OK for overnight and she kindly let me have until 10 the next morning to find his people.

Chico was not at all interested in the room where doggie was. To me that was quite surprising, I had imagined that he would have a hard time letting another dog into his house. I gave doggie a bone and we went to bed. Doggie started to whine. He whined for an hour and I finally put in some ear plugs and went to sleep.

In the morning, I slipped a leash onto doggie (and started calling him Ralph) and he and Chico and I went outside for their morning pee. It was fine. Again, Chico was not at all interested in this other dog, he did his bathroom thing, Ralph did his and nobody had a bad word to say. When we came back in the house, Ralph had no interest whatsoever in returning to the crate (and he was too heavy for me to pick him up and shove him in), so I took a chance and let him and Chico free in the house. They didn’t argue, they didn’t snarl, heck, they hardly even sniffed each other.

For the most part, what Ralph did was look out the window.

Ralph was wearing a studded collar with the Harley Davidson logo on it. That was actually a clue to his name.

There hadn’t been any response to my post on the internet and I was sure someone was looking for this dog. I called some neighbors, no one recognized the dog from my description. I called M, the man who works on this property, because he is a distance runner who knows a lot of the dogs for miles around and I thought he might recognize Ralph. He didn’t, but he knew someone who he thought might. M hopped in his truck and drove off to where that guy was working and I took the dogs for a walk.

It seems that M’s contact knew exactly what dog I had found – Ralph lives next door to him. Our walk got about half a mile from the house and an unfamiliar car came up the road, the windows went down and the woman driver called out “Harley!! Harley! There you are! Where WERE you all night!?” I explained that he’d been in a crate in my back room, safe and warm.

Harley lives about a mile and a half from me, on my same road but on the other side of a state highway. His people had looked for him until almost 11 the night before. I’m sure they were worried, but I am so glad that he didn’t have to cross that big road again to get home.

At two minutes past ten, I got a call from the animal control officer. What a pleasure it was to tell her that Harley had been reunited with his humans. I made sure to let her know that I appreciated that she had made a judgement call instead of just following the rules.

After all the excitement dissipated I went to dismantle the crate and fold it for storage. The water had spilled, so I took out the blanket and went to hang it on the line. Ralph/Harley had apparently been dissatisfied with his accommodations:

I gave him a bone before bed, I guess he needed to chew more than just one little bone.

But he doesn't seem to have swallowed any of it.

My father, in his sweetly-cynical way, is fond of saying “no good deed goes unpunished.” The blanket wasn’t expensive, if folded just right it will still function as a crate pad and I keep my saddle in that room. I’d much rather have ruined blanket than a ruined saddle.

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Run Thoughs March 15, 2012

Posted on March 25, 2012 by annieriecken

On Thursday the 15th of March Chico and I went to Run Throughs at White Mountain Agility in preparation for an upcoming trial (also because it’s fun and a good socializing opportunity).

Here’s a video of our first of three runs through the course (ya wondered why they are called Run Throughs, didn’t ya?).

The run throughs went fine, the second and third runs were better than the first, as is to be expected (Too bad that at a trial you don’t get to practice the course with the dog, you just get to walk it and [in my case try] to visualize where the dog will go).

For me, the real highlight of the evening was Chico interacting with Khloe.

Khloe. I'm crazy about those little spots on her muzzle - to me they look like drops of ink flicked from an old fashioned dip-it-in-the-inkwell pen.

Khloe is a Dalmation who is also in agility to help her with behavior issues. It seemed like she comes on kinda strong to other dogs. Chico and Khloe were able to sit about 5 feet from each other and even to take exploratory sniffs at each other. Her person, T, was super vigilant, as was I. We rewarded them *while their tails were wagging* for sniffing each other politely and while they were still “soft” in body and face. Amusingly, after we had been playing the “be nice to that dog” game for a while, Julie noticed us close together and warned us to be cautious with the two of them. “Well,” T said, “they’ve been doing pretty well so far.”

Chico and Khloe. Chico is a tad bit nervous, my guess is that it's because I had to step a few feet away from him to take the picture. That left him close to Khloe without me right at his side. Or maybe I flatter myself and he doesn't yet fully believe that I have control over all situations. But if he does, it makes sense that he is concerned when I step away.

At run throughs, after three times through the course, we play one of the agility games (there are some games that make use of agility obstacles – among them Time to Beat, Fifteen and Send Time- FAST, and Pairs Relay).  The game this session was pairs relay and Khloe and Chico and T and I were a team. The dogs have to be near each other at the start, the end and when the baton is passed from one handler to the other and both of Khloe and Chico were so interested in the agility work that they ignored each other when in close proximity. Yea Chico! Yea Khloe!

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River Dance Dog

Posted on March 17, 2012 by annieriecken

I can’t quite tell if this is speeded up or otherwise trickily edited, but it’s a pretty swell 20seconds of doggie video.

River Dance Dog

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LA County takes a step in the dog-friendly direction

Posted on March 17, 2012 by annieriecken

Recently, Los Angeles County passed a law that allows dogs to dine on the outdoor deck or patio, provided they enter the patio from an outdoor gate and don’t sit on a chair or table. There’s an interesting article about it here.

Of course, I am one of those people who thinks dogs should be able to go everywhere with us. As I have said, European dogs get to go LOTS of places that our dogs in the States don’t get to go. I spent a lot of time in the Netherlands at one point and the dogs I met there were astoundingly well socialized. They never seemed to argue with each other over silly things, they went to cafes and pubs. I wonder how they do that.

{Cool picture of a dog in a cafe in Salzburg, Austria here, one in Amsterdam here, this one and this one in Flickr photo streams, and this Japanese site with what I believe is a 1575 yen calendar of cafe dogs.}

If you’d eat dinner at the home of a dog owning friend, what’s the difference between that, a situation where the dog generally has access to the kitchen, and eating in a restaurant where there’s a dog at someone’s feet, where it doesn’t have access to the kitchen? I guess not everyone would eat dinner in the home of a dog owner.

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Why do dogs roll in stinky stuff?

Posted on March 14, 2012 by annieriecken

Chico simply adores rolling in stinky things.

Poop, especially if it’s frozen,

and dead things, seemingly the slimier and smellier the better.

Of course, Chico’s not exactly the only dog to feel this way and I have discussed the question “Why do they do that?” with other dog owners. A number have explained, sometimes with great authority, that dogs roll in stinky stuff to mask their own scent. It is, these folks explain to me, to cover their smell lest they alert prey to their presence.

In his book The Truth About Dogs scientist and animal writer Stephen Budiansky looks at the issue. Wolves and other predators, he says, have been observed engaging in the behavior. Budiansky says that scent masking may be the reason, but asks us to consider the idea that the animals might be leaving their own scent on the object. A dog has scent-producing glands on its head. Stinky things, he points out, are attractive to canines because they eat them, so this may be a way of saying to other dogs, “I was here and (perhaps, Budiansky suggests) I intend to return.”

Whatever Chico’s motivation, as the human who lets him sleep on my bed, I am supremely grateful that I have a handheld shower head and can fairly easily rinse him off.

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The cover of this week’s New Yorker magazine

Posted on March 12, 2012 by annieriecken

. . . shows Mitt Romney driving a car with Rick Santorum riding in a dog house strapped to the roof of the car. You can see it here.

In 1983 Mitt Romney’s family went on vacation and when the car was too full for everything, Romney put the dog in a crate tied to the top of the family station wagon and drove off. The dog, Seamus, survived that trip, and the Romneys later maintained that afterwards he eagerly clambered on top of the car in anticipation of rides. I’m not so sure about that, and even if the dog *did* like it, to me that’s not a safe or healthy place to put your dog.

These days they’re calling it Crategate. New York Times columnist Gail Collins, she freely admits in this story at NPR.org, is obsessed with it.

So is this blog: Dogs against Romney. Dogs Against Romney was founded by Scott Crider in June 2007, so this is a long-running campaign. Something like the current competition for the Republican party nomination.

Politics aside, I’m going to keep Chico inside his crate, inside the car, with me; thank you very much.

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“Magic” treat bag adds value to kibble

Posted on March 8, 2012 by annieriecken

I wrote last week about my resolve to have Chico eat only kibble for dinner. It’s been quite amusing. For a couple days, he was absolutely not willing to eat kibble from his bowl in the evening. On both of those evenings, it snowed. On both of the following mornings, M came to plow and snow blow. Chico *really, really* DOESN’T LIKE either of those machines (or is afraid of them) and the only way to keep him from going to the window/door and yelling at the machine at the top of his lungs is to distract him with treats. Scatter a handful of treats across the floor and he’ll snuffle around and suck them all up, not thinking for a moment about the disturbing noise in the background. Of course, as soon as he eats them all he’s back to barking, so the game usually goes on as long as the disturbance does.

Anyhow, on these two snowy mornings, I placed last night’s kibble in the treat bag, mixed  with a few bits of high-value treats. Both days Chico ate an entire dinner’s worth of kibble off the floor and I could only figure that it was because the kibble came out of the treat bag. And, of course, he was hungry because he hadn’t had dinner; that’ll make kibble look a whole lot better to a fella.

The following day, there was no snow to blow (no excuse for a lengthy game of ‘have a cookie instead of barking’) and I had to go out in the afternoon and leave Chico home for a few hours (no working, no training, thus no treats to fill his belly), and when I got back in the evening, I knew that he had to be hungry. But would he eat his dish of kibble? Noooohhh. Put the bowl down for ten minutes, take it away, thirty minutes later try again; we did that a couple times and he was still holding out. In a moment of something – frustration, inspiration – I decided to start feeding him the kibble out of the treat bag as a reward for doing his tricks. He snarfed it right up. I took everything but the kibble* out of the treat bag and dumped it on top of the kibble already in his dish. He ate it. All. Of. It. And pretty fast.

The next night, I again cleaned out the treat bag and placed Chico’s dinner portion of kibble inside. He was mooching around the kitchen, watching to see if I dropped anything good on the floor, so I let him watch me dump the kibble from the treat bag into his bowl. I put the bowl on the floor and he ate it right up.

If I understand this correctly, passing through the treat bag (in Chico’s mind at least) has a magical effect on kibble, turning it from “You must be kidding, I’m supposed to eat this? Where’s the good part?” into “Holy mud! What on earth did I do to deserve this? I just got an ENTIRE BAG of cookies dumped in my dinner dish! Yipeee!”

Who knew this grungy looking thing was magical?**

I can’t say if this will continue, or if he’s adjusted to the new regimen of dry kibble only. We’ll see. I suppose one question is “If I have to do the kibble-shuffle, is Chico still working me?” If so, it is with a much healthier net result. And does it matter? Anybody have an opinion about all that which they’d like to share?

*There’s generally a mix of things in the bag. I’m to understand that the mystery of ‘will it be kibble or will it be cheese that comes out?’ adds value to all the treats.

**This was left at Julie’s for so long she said I could have it. You can buy one at a feed or pet store, or through Amazon.  Or, if you find yourself wearing it every single day like I do, you might want a fancy one, like these from Olly Dog.

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Sooo, tell me, what else have ya got?

Posted on March 1, 2012 by annieriecken

I’ve been reading an interesting book on dog behavior, physiology, and history: Stephen Budiansky’s The Truth About Dogs, An Inquiry into the Ancestry, Social Conventions, Mental Habits, and Moral Fiber of Canis familiaris. There’s a lot of interesting science in there, including an interesting theory about why dogs roll in stinky stuff (but we’ll save that for another day).

In the chapter Odd (but mostly normal) Behavior Budiansky talks about a behavior I know as “training the human to up the ante” – at dinner time there are dogs that “learn to hold out for something better than ordinary dog food. They learn that if they refuse to eat, their owner will put [something delicious] on their food, and this too can lead to a rapid upping of demands.”

I am so guilty of having been trained like this by my dog. Even though I knew in my head that Chico wasn’t thin, that he didn’t always eat every day, that he gets lots and lots of calories every day from training treats, it didn’t matter; early in our relationship I decided he needed to eat his dinner every night. So started the escalation of dinner demands. And it got bad, really bad. There was always wet food – often cheap, sugar and grain and mystery-meat filled canned food – atop the kibble, sometimes with other delicious treats added.

Oh, I tried not to be too bad – I swore that if he didn’t eat kibble with wet food, I wasn’t going to add anything else. That worked about 50% of the time. I was projecting my own food issues on Chico and he gained four pounds, 10% of his weight.

Budiansky maintains that the “up the ante” behavior is easily cured with conviction, points out that in the wild dogs will eat almost anything, and generally will not let themselves starve to death if there is anything to eat. He relates a joke that goes something like this: Bill is complaining to his neighbor Sam about the cost of feeding the dog. “Oh,” says Sam, “I solved that problem. I feed my dog turnip greens.” Bill exclaims, “Turnip greens! My dog wouldn’t touch turnip greens!” “Oh,” Sam replies, “that’s how my dog felt about it for the first two weeks.” No one is advocating that one feed one’s dog only turnip greens,  the point is dogs are always looking for a better deal and if humans succumb there is no limit to how much the “so, what else have you got?” game can escalate.

From the get-go Julie has encouraged me to feed Chico only treats and dry kibble, I just couldn’t do it. Recently Chico had a chance to stay at Julie’s while I went to visit my father. He’s there with her dogs who are thrilled when they get their kibble (I know, I’ve fed them). At Julie’s Chico got fed treats when he worked and then his kibble at night. If he didn’t eat it in fifteen minutes, she took it away and he didn’t get anything else. I decided that this is the time to make the break from my past bad habits. Since he came home a few days ago, Chico is accepting kibble when it comes from the treat bag and also (with variable levels of enthusiasm) eating it from his bowl.

And that's the way it's going to be. This bowl of Taste of the Wild kibble is a complete and balanced meal with the calories needed to keep Chico fit but not fat.

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