The Equine Play System
By Kathie Gregory Play enables an animal to practice and project emotional states in safety, without intent. We have all seen play get out of hand, and that would seem to be the result of play turning into actual emotional states that take the mind out of the play circuit and into other emotional systems. These actual emotions then need to be processed and addressed, hence the change from play to seriousness. Play deprivation results in intense bouts of play when the opportunity arises. Panksepp (2014) states that the urge… Continued
Lost and Found
By Paula Garber Sabi and Wabi are 7-year-old long-haired Russian blue neutered male siblings. When their previous owner, an elderly man, died suddenly, they were left alone in their home for several months “fending for themselves.” Family members stopped by once a week only to put out food and water. Although the family described them as affectionate, the cats had become extremely fearful. When a local shelter was called in to remove them from the home, they “went wild” and had to be captured. Both Sabi’s and Wabi’s fur was badly… Continued
Lulu’s Lottery: Life Lessons from a Boxer
By David Shade I was one of many returning warfighters who had to walk this difficult path of transitioning back into society…I still felt like I had to keep my guard up around the clock. And Lulu would also help me with this. She showed off her skills as an organic alarm system, always letting me know whenever someone approached our house. When I was asleep at night and there was a noise, she would immediately alert me of the impending danger. For some people, this might have been irritating.… Continued
Distinguishing Night from Day
By Debbie Bauer Some people living with blind/deaf dogs report that their dogs have trouble staying asleep all night. Often their dogs will wake them during the night and can’t seem to settle back down to sleep. If your blind/deaf dog is unable to distinguish between light and dark, it may be challenging to help her tell the difference between day and night. This can make it challenging for you to get enough sleep on a proper schedule. Keeping a bedtime routine can be helpful. Create as many clear cues… Continued
Dog Owners Appreciative of Gear Swap
By Kathy Reilly In April, we participated in Pet Palooza, a local event which was sponsored by the Charlotte Humane Society…In order to attract people to our booth and really begin to change their minds about aversive training devices, however, we planned a trade-in program. Much like PPG’s gear switch program, Project Trade, we offered free harnesses to anyone that would trade in their shock, prong, or choke collar. The result was amazing…If a dog passed our booth wearing a shock, prong or choke collar, we would approach (with harness… Continued
Canine Professionals and Court Testimony
By Daniel Antolec “Overaggressive marketing of training services can result in liability based on false expectations about a trainer. If you hold yourself up to possess special expertise in an area, then you will be held to the same standard as an expert in that area. I am thinking specifically of the term ‘behaviorist’ to describe a trainer. If you are not an accredited applied animal behaviorist or a veterinarian who is board certified in animal behavior, my recommendation is do not use the term ‘behaviorist’ to describe what you do.… Continued
From the Horse’s Perspective
By Kathie Gregory There is a general perception that using food in teaching will cause the horse to be rude, mug you, be “pushy,” or start nipping. People often dismiss the possibility of using food for these reasons, but the above situations can arise when working with any animal, it is not unique to horses. There are plenty of dogs who will behave in the same manner if they haven’t been trained otherwise…All of these words are labels from a human perspective. In fact, a horse does not know the concept… Continued
A Quick Fix
By Vicki Ronchette If we expect an animal’s behavior to change, we need to implement changes in the world around them…Quick fixes are generally not permanent, long-term solutions. However, there is one piece of applied behavior analysis that allows us to sometimes get a quick, sometimes immediate change in behavior and that is by creating a change in the antecedent…When faced with a problem behavior with a bird take a look at the environment and see if there is anything you can change in the general set up to affect the… Continued
A Good Start in Life
By Francine Miller The amount of handling a cat receives, the age at which this occurs, and the number of handlers all affect a kitten’s degree of friendliness towards people later in life. Frequent gentle handling and play with varied people including men, women and supervised children is ideal. It is important to encourage the cat to be comfortable with being held, picked up and touched in different places, such as the ears, paws and belly. You can socialize a kitten very well in as little as 15 minutes of daily… Continued
A Life Full of Learning
By Rachel Lane Dustin was scared of many things (for example, the refrigerator, and any sort of extreme emotions on my part, such as being too angry, excited or upset). He was scared any time he made a mess inside my apartment, like urinating or vomiting. I learned that he was happy and content in his crate; liked squishy treats, but not biscuits; and that he was potty-trained, and not destructive. He would play with his toys for hours and he was a little cuddle bug at night on the… Continued
Setting a Course to Confidence
By Diane Garrod Can confidence be built in dogs? If so, how and what does a confident dog look like versus one that isn’t confident? Confidence building requires helping a dog to feel safe, to trust again, and to change habits, while guardians may be changing attitudes, tweaking their home environments and also changing life-long habits. A dog who is not confident portrays this in a way that looks very much like fear. Fear in dogs can be debilitating, stressful, and cause them to act out, react and even aggress. All… Continued
Reading List for Dog Owners
When I got my first dog in 1983 I knew nothing about living with dogs, so naturally I got a puppy. Needless to say I knew even less about raising a puppy. Samantha relied upon me to teach her, and I relied upon the only source available at the time: a book. If there were local dog trainers or puppy classes in particular I was unaware of them. There was no internet to search nor a Pet Professional Guild to inform me. I bought the best selling dog training book… Continued
The Shock-Free Coalition: What’s Next?
By Don Hanson I have been waiting for an organization of pet professionals to take a stand against the use of shock collars since 2002, so when Pet Professional Guild launched the Shock-Free Coalition on September 25, 2017 I was more than ready to sign the pledge to eliminate shock devices from the supply and demand chain. However, I also knew that signing the pledge, while an important step, was not going to be sufficient to stop the use of shock collars. Signing the pledge is just the beginning of what… Continued
Making Room for the Little Guys
By Emily Cassell Fish, guinea pigs, hamsters, mice, rabbits, and the like are not known for their high intelligence, and bear the undeserved reputation of “untrainable.” It is ironic that in a world of coercive training, the tiniest, fluffiest, and most relatively defenseless animals we work with are the most resistant to aversive training techniques…Prey animals view the world in a completely different way than dogs and cats do. Small prey animals are not as inclined to explore or be open to new things. The simple reason is that, in the… Continued
A Cry for Attention
By Lara Joseph In the wild, it has been noted that parrots can spend up to 60 percent of their day foraging for food. They travel up to 40 mile circumferences in their search for food (Meehan & Mench, 2007). So how does this relate to the behavior of the birds we care for? Their minds and bodies have evolved and developed to incorporate this activity in their daily lives. We, as parrot caregivers, often work with parrots in cages. How we feed them impacts behavior. If we feed in… Continued
Why Do They Bark?
By Morag Heirs Barking is a form of communication for all dogs so it is important that we spend some time thinking about why our dogs might be barking. Are they anxious, over-excited, upset, fearful, thrilled, frustrated? Something else? Avoid concentrating on stopping the barking (particularly through the use of ‘aversives,’ e.g. telling off, harsh signals, water spray or air sprays, exclusion from the room or crating on a regular basis) as this gets in the way of understanding why the barking is happening. Without understanding why our dog is barking,… Continued
Marketing for Service Practitioners
By Niki Tudge You are in the business of solving problems. You help your clients with what matters to them. You are marketing all your products and services to people who need and desire them. In the service industry, however, recognize that this is based on the trust and confidence your clients have granted you. You are marketing both the “sizzle” and the “steak,” or the “peace of mind” that comes from having a qualified, insured, bonded, certified pet sitter or dog trainer, as well as the actual pet sitting or… Continued
Are ‘Free-Shaped’ Dogs Better Problem Solvers?
By Carmen LeBlanc Most professional dog trainers have heard about criticisms of lure-reward training in recent years. These criticisms have been made along with enthusiastic claims about the superiority of free-shaped (unprompted, trial-and-error) clicker training. Those of us who use free-shaping understand the enthusiasm. It is challenging and exciting to communicate with dogs in such a free-form way, developing a new behavior one small increment at a time. As technicians of scientific procedures, however, it is important that we take a collective, critical look at what is being said. Read more.
Target Practice
By Lara Joseph Training animals to target makes husbandry a lot less stressful and much safer. It is also a useful tool to have at your disposal in an emergency situation…There are so many instances where targeting and stationing are beneficial to our animals that we should be training these behaviors consciously. Doing so will make their lives less stressful by giving them an attractive choice of what to do and how to behave in countless situations… I train the mammals to target and station to either the tops of buckets… Continued
August 12, 2018: New Study of Red Fox Genome Assembly Finds Candidate Gene for Tame Behaviour
The study, Red fox genome assembly identifies genomic regions associated with tame and aggressive behaviours, finds a “strong positional candidate gene for tame behaviour” in the red fox (Vulpes vulpes), noting that the fox represents “a powerful model for the genetic analysis of affiliative and aggressive behaviours that can benefit genetic studies of behaviour in dogs and other mammals, including humans.” Read study.
Of Piglets and Puppies
By Lara Joseph Pigs give a squeal that can send a dog over threshold. If it does not, this same squeal, paired with their jerky movements and fast running, is a trigger for many dogs to chase. The squeal can mean many things but when I hear it, I ask my dogs for a station immediately while I try to remove the reinforcer for the squeal…I see many households living with prey and predator, and my training facility is also full of prey and predator. I train and prepare for… Continued
Focus and a Visual Connection
By Morag Heirs I became interested in obedience and rally after adopting my first deaf dog, Farah, a border collie. She was a bright dog who would have been an excellent working dog if only she could hear, and clearly we needed something to focus on. At the time it was difficult to get into competitive obedience training in my area if you wanted to use reward-based methods, and my deaf dog was met with a great deal of skepticism…Platform training (where the dog learns to stand or sit, or… Continued
Helping Dogs, Helping Families
By Daniel Antolec Years ago, puppy Samantha had come to me at eight weeks of age and, in a move that I thought would help both of us, I bought the best-selling dog training book of the time. The author explained many ways to punish your dog, and I tried them all. It is a choice I have regretted ever since, because even then I saw that it was damaging our relationship. I set the book aside and simply stopped using the aversive methods it expounded. Suddenly my relationship with… Continued
The Need for Self-Care
By Sheelah Gullion As pet professionals, many of us have pets with issues, be they behavioral or medical. Some of us got into the business because of a pet with issues. We wanted to learn how to succeed with that pet and then we wanted to share what we learned. But our industry seems to be unique in that we work largely alone, with little or no support to speak of, using our skills and our emotions, and though the focus is almost always on the pet (dog trainer, dog… Continued
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