Treat Slinging Weenie

Na, this has nothing to do with the fiscal imbalance. But it does involve changes in deeply ingrained ideologies.

When our first son was born we struggled with the baby in the bed question. It just seemed to make sense in the middle of the night to bring him into bed with us so everybody got some sleep. But we struggled with it. By the time son number three had arrived not only had conventional wisdom on child-rearing shifted but more importantly we had decide to ignore the experts and do what felt right. He spent the first three months of his life sleeping between our heads. None of them I'm happy to report sleep with us anymore.

A new puppy is so much like a new baby it's frightening. And like an infant, Bella's arrival shed light on changing views in dog rearing.

While looking for ways to establish basic good manners and to take advantage of the enthusiasm and trainability of a young stock dog I came upon Clicker training. A method based not on correcting negative behaviour but rewarding positive behaviour. Rewarding not just with praise and affection but with food! If you've ever used lease corrections I don't have to tell you how different if not down-right subversive this seems at first.

I bought a clicker and some books and began to click not because I was convinced that conventional training was wrong but because a puppy without a job in the middle of winter can become a squirrelly thing. I needed something to take her mind off the Rooster's new boots. And like the boys in our bed I didn't expect to get to the point where it just made sense based on past experience.

So, it comes as no surprise that Bella gets treats. Lots and lots of tiny little treats. Treats for sitting. Treats for waiting. On long walks, bigger hunks of really yummy treats, for tearing across the field when I call her to me. And, if you can get your head around this - she even gets treats for not begging at the supper table.

Aha, but does she beg for treats you ask? Hasn't so far but she does bother the hell out of me a couple time a day to get the clicker out and play.

Karen Pryor, who began training dolphins which are pretty hard to correct in the traditional sense, is a pioneer of clicker training and her site offers how to's for training dogs, cats, horses, little critters , birds and fish.

Clicker training still has its detractors but at this point I'm quite happy to be a treat slinging weenie. I can't speak for folks who have highly motivated working dogs but I have a gut feeling that clicker training is a better approach for stock or herding type dogs.

From veterinary Education and Information Network this essay on Animal welfare advancements in the field of dog training Read the whole thing if you've ever taken a puppy to kindergarten or an adolescent dog to basic obedience.

Traditional dog training primarily involved positive punishment or negative reinforcement (Hiby et al., 2004) but with increasing evidence of significant unwelcome short- and long-term effects of such techniques on the animals, there has been a recent swing towards using a combination of reward-and-punishment-based, or exclusively reward-based, techniques. The training program for a team of mine-detection dogs in the United States, for example, successfully used "clicker" training as the sole training technique (Fjellanger et al., 2002).

And a bit here which brings to mind broken-hearted owners with a Border Collie or Australian Shepherd spinning like a top on the end of choke collar.

An investigation by Hiby et al. (2004) into the success of reward-based versus punishment-based training recognised there was an important place for punishment when used by trained persons. However, in the general dog-owning community, reward-based training was found to be more successful. The study was in the form of a questionnaire given to 364 dog owners with questions on the training methods they used to train specific responses in their dogs and how they rated each dog's obedience in a given task.

After thought: more recent photo of Belle here with my Dad. He's not really that grumpy he was watching the news a couple of days before the election. He's feeling much happier now.