Re: Dogs : Wed Nov 13, 2013 12:26 pm  

Hull White Star wrote:

I haven't read something I have read a multitude of articles, magazines (which I subscribe to) and books, the best book by far is "In Defence of Dogs" by John Bradshaw. In it he explains how the pack theory is rebuffed and refuted.

SO, in a sentence, WHAT is "rebuffed" and "refuted"? Are you saying dogs aren't pack animals? I have read nothing much at all about “pack theory” and so don’t really know what you or he mean when they use that phrase. It doesn’t matter. What matters to me is the (self-evident) truth that a dog is a pack animal, as are many species. Whatever “pack theory” is, if it is “rebuffed” or “refuted” won’t change the fact that dogs are pack animals.

Edit: I just watched a short yotube vid by Bradshaw and didn't disagree with a word. The main thing was that "punishment training" is bad and "reward training" is good. I don't personally find anything novel in that, but just to be clear, punishment training is bad, the dog doing what it does cos it wants to and is thus de-stressed and happy doing it, is good.

Hull White Star wrote:

If you apply pack theory methods in your training

What are they? Or what do you mean by them? If you tell me what you refer to, then we can establish whether what I do fits your definition, or not. It isn't helpful for you to accuse me of applying a "method" when we don't know what your mean by your label.

Hull White Star wrote:

surely you believe in pack theory, as in who is top dog etc.? Mr HWS and I both share being care givers to them. They don't see either of us as pack leader, as far as they are concerned we are equal.

Either your dogs behave as you want, in which case you are leading their behaviour, or they don’t behave as you want, in which case you would indeed be being viewed as an equal or less, so the dogs could choose to do their own thing, regardless of what you want.

With respect, it is just nonsense to say you “are equals”. The dogs are entirely under your management, you feed them , provide them with shelter, exercise, health care, etc. They go out when you say, they go where you dictate, they stop in at your whim, they have to walk on a lead if you decide, they have to wait if you stop and chat. You may claim you see your dog/s as “equals” but its just ridiculous.

Hull White Star wrote:

I am trying to say that there is no "top dog", there is no "alpha male", John Bradshaw, in his book explains all of this.

Unless your dogs are out of control, which I very much doubt, then they clearly see you as (a) “top dog”, since (presumably) what you decide goes, and they accept that. What labels you want to try to stick on it don’t matter to me, you are ignoring the fact that, when it comes to many aspects of their lives, you ARE in charge. Why are you trying to pretend to yourself that you’re not, but are somehow “equals”?

Hull White Star wrote:

I don't misunderstand my own research at all. People have belived (wrongly) that there has been a pack hierarchy …

Meanwhile back on planet Earth, dogs quickly and automatically and constantly establish and re-establish their respective status and mostly this enables them to rub along just fine. We have 3 dogs at the moment, having recently lost a 4th. The “pack hierarchy” is crystal clear to anyone who watches them interact. The oldest, (who incidentally is the best-natured, most placid dog either of us has ever owned), is very much the “alpha male” to use your terminology, if by that I mean ultimately the others, when it comes to the crunch, defer to him. They occasionally have disagreements and he quickly and neatly puts the juniors in their place, and they settle down and happily carry on with life, having pushed a boundary and been told off. This is what I am talking about when I talk of pack behaviour. It’s natural and it’s part of their genetic makeup; and it is also learned and developed from being a puppy if they have regular interaction with other, older dogs (not all do).

Hull White Star wrote:

Your trainer can get your dogs to do whatever because he has experience and knows what he's looking for.

Hang on, I said that!

Hull White Star wrote:

Once he teaches you, you will be able to do exactly the same thing.

Well, yes, isn’t that the whole point of using an expert?

Hull White Star wrote:

An example is clicker training, once your trainer has showed and explained to you the timing of clicking, your dog will do for you as he does for your trainer.

We don’t use clicker training. What did dogs do for the thousands of years before clickers?

Hull White Star wrote:

My two love clicker training because they know a treat is always coming, its just very limiting for me as I can't easily get down on the floor to their level to get started with stuff

Whilst initial training is much helped by treats, my take on this is that the dog doesn’t specifically know – as it can’t speak much English – what a new spoken or other command means; so if I give a new command, then the dog does an action, and immediately is rewarded for that action, this, to me, is the method of communicating and explaining to the dog “Yes, that is what I meant when I said ‘lie down’ or whatever. You got it. Well done. “ I genuinely believe that the dog WANTS to understand what I want from it, and will be happy to do it, if it can only understand it. So once the dog “gets” the new command, it will happily do that for me, no treat required. The dog feels enough reward in knowing I am happy it obeyed. It might get the occasional “good dog”, or even a treat – but the point is, it’s not doing it for the treats, it is doing it essentially because it gets what I want, and does it because it likes to please me.

It won't get fed up and at some future point stop obeying that command on account of it never gets a treat for it any more.

Going way back to my earlier comments about border collies working on herding sheep, the dogs are trained what the chosen phrases mean (eg “away”, “come by”, etc., or whistles replacing words) and as soon as they get it, they do it. They love doing it too. Now, in the field, they will never, ever, get a “treat” for any one of those bits of obedience. They can’t; the shepherd might be hundreds of yards away and they won’t interact with him till the sheep are safely in the pen. And then they’ll all go home. The shepherd won’t have a bag of treats in his pocket. Yet they will merrily obey sequences of dozens and dozens of commands, precisely and with no reward (in the form of treats etc) whatsoever. They know their role in the “pack” (sorry) and they understand and want to follow the lead of the “leader” (sorry) and this is why it all works beautifully.

Re: Dogs : Wed Nov 13, 2013 12:46 pm  

Ferocious Aardvark wrote:

SO, in a sentence, WHAT is "rebuffed" and "refuted"? Are you saying dogs aren't pack animals? I have read nothing much at all about “pack theory” and so don’t really know what you or he mean when they use that phrase.

Thats evident

Maybe I haven't explained too well (I know in my head what I mean but I suppose I'm not clever enough to describe, I'd make a crap teacher ).

I don't refute the term "pack" to describe a collection of animals. What I do refute is that every "pack" has one dominant leader who everyone else submits to. I'm not covering old ground again explaining as I think I've covered everything in the last day or so. This in a nutshell:- (from Association of Pet Behaviour Councillors website)

This meme originated in the “dogs are wolves” theory in the late 1960s. It was spawned in the pond of genetics from the premise that if a dog is the same species as the wolf they must behave identically. The perceived wisdom at the time, emanating from L. David Mech’s book, The Wolf: Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species(2), was that wolves pack and dominate each other, therefore dogs must also pack and dominate each other. The theories of wolf and dog “dominance” and the “alpha” firmly entered the imagination of not only the public, but also the scientific community. As a police dog handler in the 1980s I regularly tried to “dominate” my dogs using the best available scientific model.

[i]However, as science advances our viewpoint changes and in Mech’s case, as he points out in his 2008 article Whatever Happened to the Term Alpha Wolf?(3) more rigorous examination of wild living wolves revealed that their social behaviour was centred on the family unit, built around cohesion and co-operation, not conflict. A fight for pack dominance would mean striving to displace one parent in order to mate with the other. The model of the wolf’s supposed fight for dominance and alpha status was replaced with one where parents and older siblings guide and lead younger offspring in order to enhance overall genetic fitness. In 1999 Mech published Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs(4), in which he corrected his earlier mistaken ideas. He happily reports that in the 2003 book Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation(5) written by twenty three authors and edited by Mech and Boitani, the term “alpha” is only ever mentioned to explain why it has been superseded.
[/i]
You sound to me as though you are very interested in dog training, behaviour and psychology and I would thoroughly recommend John Bradshaws book which gives a great insight into how dogs developed into domestic animals and touches on "pack theory"

Re: Dogs : Wed Nov 13, 2013 1:01 pm  

As a police dog handler in the 1980s I regularly tried to “dominate” my dogs

He should have given me a call. I didn't seek to dominate my dogs in the 80s either and could have told him that was not the way

Mind you it was around that time that I had the privilege of owning Rocky, a big boxer dog that was almost certainly the dumbest animal that ever walked the planet.

Re: Dogs : Wed Nov 13, 2013 5:07 pm  

Hull White Star wrote:

Lol, so do mine for the most , but unfortunately my lurcher survived on the streets by scavenging and its not something that can be erased from her memory or something that can be trained out of her. I have sought help about what we can do, but I live in the middle of a city which, like any other city, is usually strewn with litter wherever we go. Its hard to find somewhere close to where I live to walk which is free of bins, litter, wheelie bins etc.

Me being from Leigh have access within 250 yards fields with wild deer in them, plus as I said, my dog is both obediant and extremely clever, his maths is coming along really well at the moment, but he is struggling a bit with his french

Re: Dogs : Wed Nov 13, 2013 5:40 pm  

Starbug wrote: Me being from Leigh have access within 250 yards fields with wild deer in them, plus as I said, my dog is both obediant and extremely clever, his maths is coming along really well at the moment, but he is struggling a bit with his french Are you the owner of Chaser? http://ideas.time.com/2013/11/05/your-dog-is-a-toddler/

Starbug wrote: Me being from Leigh have access within 250 yards fields with wild deer in them, plus as I said, my dog is both obediant and extremely clever, his maths is coming along really well at the moment, but he is struggling a bit with his french Are you the owner of Chaser? http://ideas.time.com/2013/11/05/your-dog-is-a-toddler/