I’m not proud of my own efforts at rabbit husbandry. It was a very, very long time ago, before I knew much at all about animals and animal behavior, and the rabbits lived outside in a cage in a building. Granted, it was warm and safe, but one of the most important things I now know about rabbits is that rabbits are like dogs in that they are highly social and inquisitive. Keeping a rabbit in a cage outside with little social interaction  is no life for a rabbit.  (Thank heavens we at least had 2 of them together, and they  got along well.) They need physical and mental exercise just like dogs, and they need relationships with others that are friendly and fun.

On the other hand, rabbits are nothing like dogs. And there’s where I messed up on my radio answer to the rabbit who wasn’t using its litter box. I had cat and dog behavior too much on my mind when I answered, and I didn’t say that rabbits, unlike dogs but exactly like my sheep, potty where they eat. Like dogs, they use urine and feces  to mark territory, but unlike dogs, they take this territory stuff inside the house very, very seriously. So seriously that the national House Rabbit Society (a marvelous resource by the way, as is the Wisconsin chapter) advises you to avoid even putting your hand in their cage. Their cage (with litter box within it) is their territory, and rabbits do better when what’s theirs is theirs and what’s yours is yours.

The House Rabbit Society advises never putting your hand in the rabbit’s cage for any reason if the rabbit is inside. Don’t reach in to pull him or her out (they are prey animals after all), and don’t pick them up and put them back. Herd them back, Border Collie like, so that they make the choice themselves to go inside.

There’s a lesson for all of us here, one I find myself learning over and over again: Every animal has its own ethology, its own umwelt or reality that it lives within, and it is critical for us to understand and respect that. The sheep taught me that the first year I had them, when I spent hours trying to close up and insulate the barn so that they wouldn’t suffer during the brutal Wisconsin winters. . .  and ended up giving them pneumonia because sheep need fresh air to be healthy. I sometimes find them on the coldest of mornings lying in comfortably outside on icy snow, instead of the warm, comfy straw I’ve put in the sheltered barn.

What about you? I’d love to read about what your experiences with any species has taught you. Horses and sheep taught me to think more like a prey animal, my cats have taught me about the need to pause before going outside so that one can look and smell for other cats or danger. What about you: Lessons from gerbils? Here’s what my pet rat taught me?

And oh yeah: One last thing: Rabbit fanciers call rabbit poop “pills.” If that’s not cute I don’t know what is. (I should note that rabbits also have two kinds of poop. Check it out here.)

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: It’s gorgeous and sunny but cool with puffy clouds and blue sky and blooming poppies by the front door. I can’t savor much of it now because it’s crunch time at the University, lots of exams to grade and lots of work too on our new website (coming to a computer near you this summer). Here’s some of what I’m soaking up:

She’s progressed so well in so many ways: I’m especially taken with her flipping around mid-air when outside after I call her to come, ears flying like a furry dumbo, her open, happy mouth taking up half of her tiny little Cavalier head. As I mentioned in an earlier post, now that house training is behind us (wheee!), she can be outside off leash as long as I watch her like a hawk and keep her close to the house, she no longer barks to wake us up and produce her dinner, so it’s time to continue work on standard training. We’ve gotten started on sitting on cue, but I thought it would be fun to start her on clicker training at the same time.

I’ve worked on sit off and on, never with much diligence, but she is getting the hang of it. I started with lure training–using the smell of a great treat to ‘lure’ her body into a sitting position. Now that I’m going to start her with a clicker, I find myself thinking about the two different methods of training: luring and clicker training. Both have advantages and disadvantages, but I find that combining the two of them can be especially effective in some contexts.

Luring has the advantage of initial speed: In the case of sit, a la Ian Dunbar, you hold a tiny, tasty treat at the crown of a dog’s head and move it back toward their tail (not up, straight back.) As a dog’s nose follows the treat straight back toward their tail, their body finds it hard to stay standing, and so the hips automatically collapse and voila, your dog is sitting. Bingo, the treat gets popped into the mouth and your dog just got rewarded for sitting. Once you have the behavior established, you turn the motion of luring into a visual signal, and then bring in the verbal cue and start minimizing the hand motion.  (For a more detailed description, see The Puppy Primer.)

Luring also has a disadvantage: If you’re not careful to drop out the lure and the visual signal early on, the movement becomes the cue. You can end up with a dog who only sits when you move your hand, not when you say “Sit.”

Clicker training has the advantage of creating razor sharp precision, which helps you communicate clearly with your dog. It’s a great thing to teach a dog that their behavior can influence your own, and in a good way at that. I especially like that in most cases, the dog initiates the action, rather than you ‘helping’ him or her. However, strict operant conditioning suggests that you don’t do anything to initiate the behavior, you wait until the dog initiates him or herself, then click and treat to reinforce it. But truth be told, I’m not someone who is going to wait for a dog to sit when they feel like it, click opportunistically and then wait again for the next time. Not when I can lure a dog into a sit, get 15 reps into one sessions, and then take over with a clicker once I’ve got the behavior started. I tend to mix methods for actions that are easy to lure and for movements or behaviors that dogs do naturally. I should warn you: some trainers feels strongly that methods should never be combined, but I’m an equal opportunity employer, and so have no problems doing so as long as you know how to use them together without confusing your dog.

[10 minute break while Trisha goes to work with Tootsie]

First I used a lure/hand signal (with treat) to raise her chin and get her to sit down. My hand was just inches from her mouth and head. She responded well, and I repeated it 3 times.  Then I moved my hand 2 feet from her head, moved it with the same motion as while luring her (just farther away). She responded well until I moved my hand farther away. Now my hand was so far away from her head its motion probably  looked like a completely different signal. I stopped there because I wanted to  move on to clicker training.

I “loaded” the clicker with 25 click/treats (small dog kibble, which she adores… she adores bird seed shells for heaven’s sake, so finding a motivating treat is not a problem with Tootsie.).

Then I lured 3 times relatively close to her head (to create a success) and click/treated when she sat. I then proceeded to disappear the visual signal, added the word “Sit” and in 20 trials had her sitting just to the word “Sit.”

Ah, but here’s an important lesson: I noticed that while saying “Sit” I held both of my hands behind my back. Wondering if that might in itself be a visual signal, I moved the position of one of my arms. Sure enough, she looked at me as if completely confused. When I put both hands behind my back, she sat again when I said “Sit.” But the cue that she was responding to wasn’t the word, it was the position of my hands. Easily fixed, I just began moving my arms and hands into different positions, saying “Sit” and waiting up to 3 seconds for a response, and clicking immediately when she responded correctly. By the time we stopped she was sitting to the word sit no matter what I did with my hands.

And then… experienced trainers can predict the next stage…. I moved three feet backward into the kitchen. Now I was in a different room. Tootsie again looked completely befuddled. Easy to fix; just critical to remember that any action, any posture, any context, any location can be a relevant cue to a dog. In just a few trials she was sitting just to the word in the kitchen as well as the living room. We stopped so that Tootsie didn’t become a Tootsie roll sausage and I could finish this blog.  We’ll take it up again tonight and tomorrow, and start on some tricks this weekend. Ain’t training grand!!!

Question for you all: I know that some trainers are true purists, only using one method or the other. I’m a fan of mix and matching, as long as one understands the potential pit falls. You? [And fyi, I haven't forgotten about following up on the clicker study I wrote about earlier (clickers versus just food as reinforcement): I'm playing phone tag with the author, but I'll let you know as soon as I know more.]

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Willie and I have 3 new sheep to work. I don’t like working him on my small ewe flock now, because they have young lambs and huge bags of milk that have got to be miserably uncomfortable when they flap/slap around whilst the poor ewe is being pushed by a dog. Willie and I try to work them slowly and carefully, but there are times it’s just not possible to keep them from speeding up. There’s another reason: Willie has lost a tremendous amount of confidence since his surgery and confinement, and my most aggressive ewe, Barbie, has gone after him and won several times now. I hate having a dog fight a ewe with a young lamb but I don’t want her winning over and over again and continuing to erode Willie’s confidence. So I have 3 new Katahdin ewes with no udders and no lambs. They are flighty and easy to move and will be great for Willie while he builds up his confidence. Jim, Willie and I just split the 3 newbies off and put them in the orchard pasture high behind the farm house. It took split second timing and quarter-horse short stopping by Willie, but we got it done. Everytime I see him slam his forequarters into the ground I wince: cross your paws for him that he’s not lame tonight, I can’t help but worry. I’ll do some stretching as soon as I’m done here and ice him if his shoulder feels hot.

Here are the new girls, as yet not named (though I’m leaning toward Chili for the red one in the middle). Okay, they aren’t bathing beauties, but they will have a good life here this summer and will be perfect for Willie and me to get our paws back into the game. Those of you who work sheep know that the one in the middle is going to be the challenge: see that lifted chin? Oh my!

Here’s a wider shot, showing you the only reason I could get a close shot of the sheep! Good boy Willie.

Here’s the question: What do we call the new section of the website that is a compendium of things I’ve written or taped that are available by the click of a mouse? It will include my Bark articles, blog posts and videos, all organize by topic. At the bottom of the ‘page’, if it’s relevant, we’ll include links to books, booklets and DVDs available for sale from the shopping cart.

We are all excited about having this new part of the website available, but would love your thoughts on what to call it. We have been referring to it as The Learning Center, but have some concerns about expectations. Although we are planning to add to it as we can, and keep it growing and expanding, when we launch this summer it will primarily consist of material already written or taped. Here’s how it will work: When you click on this section (whatever it is called), you can then choose from “Training Your Dog,”  “Solving Behavior Problems,”  “Behavior & Health,” or “Finding Resources”

If you click on Solving Behavior Problems, a list of problems will come up, including, for example, Separation Anxiety. Click on that and you’ll see pdf’s for any Bark article I’ve written on the topic, links to any blog post I’ve written about it, and a link to the book I’ll Be Home Soon available in the SHOP section.

We were thinking of calling the section The Learning Center (as you can see below), but are concerned about the expectation that suggests. Given that every topic won’t necessarily have a specific “lesson” on how to train X or Y, or how to treat problem A or B, we are concerned that people will expect that and not get it. Here are favorite choices for the section’s title so far:

The Learning Center

The Library

The Media Library

The Resource Center

Which one do you think best describes the content?  Expectations are so important in behavior (all dog trainers know that, right?!), and we don’t want people to expect one thing and not get it. BUT we’re super excited about having this new section on the website that will provide a number of resources that haven’t been on the website before. We would all (that’s me, Denise, Katie and Lisa at McConnell Publishing) would be very grateful for your feedback.

Here’s a sneak preview of the home page in progress. Wheeeee! (Did I say we are excited?) The pictures at the bottom will line up, I promise, there will be a lot less of Willie boy in the photos and the text and individual photos will change (the photo at the top will be a revolving one, along with different text focusing on a book, upcoming seminar, Bark article, toy, etc) but you get the idea. It’s the “Learning Center” at the bottom we’re not sure of… do we really have the right title?  THANKS!

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: The seasonal temperatures and plant life are still 5-6 weeks out of alignment, and so the plants are where they normally would be in early June, but the temperature is right on schedule. Thus, a couple of times a week we get heavy frosts, and each time my poor plants suffer some more. I covered them for 5 nights, but ran out of steam last week. And I can’t cover everything, so there are several areas, and plants, that I’ve just got to accept are not going to make it. (No apples or plums this year? Probably not, but maybe…? Hope springs eternal, right?!)

But Willie is wonderful, worked sheep at a friend’s beautifully, and seems as sound as I expect he’s ever going to be. We still do some exercises and his stretching, and he’ll never be allowed to jump up to catch anything, ever, but he’s happy and I still sometimes have to pinch myself that the year from hell is over. His year of constraints definitely had a price–a new fear of men and a lack of confidence on sheep that no doubt was the result of being badly injured and then confined for so long. My most aggressive ewe, Barbie, chased him away a few days ago. Granted, she’s extra protective now with her lamb, and has always been the most difficult ewe to work, but he’s always been able to face her off once her lamb was old enough to work. Not this time. I didn’t force anything, although I gave him a few more tries, but then finessed things so that he moved the entire flock without having to face off Barbie. I suspect it’ll be an entire summer to get his confidence back up. But the lambs will grow and Barbie will become less protective, and I have dear friends with sheep who Willie and I can work who are flighty and not confrontational.

Every day I put Willie on a down/stay and hide his floppy disc. Searching for it avoids his ‘short stopping’ and straining his shoulder. He loves the game. When he finds it he leaps and runs and shakes it like a terrier with a rat (sorry rat lovers!). Here he was this morning, so proud he’d found it yet again. And no, he doesn’t want a new one. He has new ones. He likes this one. I call it his Binky.

In sheep herding, “balance” refers to a dog’s ability to place itself exactly where he or she needs to be to take control of the sheep without frightening them. It refers to two things really. One is the distance between the dog and the sheep. Too far away? — no control, no pressure. Too close? — forces the sheep to run away in a panic, or to turn and fight. Just right? Exactly at the point at which the sheep will turn and move away from the dog without panicking.

The other aspect of balance is side to side, left to right. For example, does the dog stop at exactly the right place on an outrun to move the sheep directly toward you once he begins to walk directly toward them? Novices tend to believe that a dog should always stop at 12 o’clock, but that’s not always true. If the sheep want to go to your left (as you face the dog and the sheep), then the dog needs to stop at 1o or 11 o’clock, not 12.

Dogs can learn better balance, but there’s little more valuable than a dog who just “has it,” and early in training, finds for him or herself that perfect position to manage the sheep. The perfect position is different for every flock, in every context and even at different times of the day, so it’s not easy at all. It just looks that way when a dog is really talented, just like great dancers and ice skaters make it look effortless.

But easy it’s not, it takes skill and experience. And while thinking about balance (see the photos below), that finding it in many other contexts isn’t so easy either. That’s as true in dog training as it is in sheep herding (not to mention the rest of life). And as with sheep dogs, some balance is innate and some can be learned. Over twenty three years of working with aggressive dogs helped me find a balance between reinforcing good behavior and practical, humane ways of inhibiting ‘bad’ behavior (often just management, but if we’re talking about biting people, the word “just” should be deleted).

Here’s another example: I’ve learned that Willie needs a balance of quiet time and exercise, more so than any of my other dogs. Too much fetching, for example, not only hurts his shoulder, but it makes him overly aroused, rather than relaxed. Too much stimulation (for example, leaving him loose to bark at noisy trucks passing by when I’m gone) makes him crazy; too little makes him fearful and neurotic. Granted, Willie will always be my special needs dog, but I think this general concept applies to all of our dogs in some ways.

I also need to balance my voice with Willie. Sometimes Willie needs me to use my voice to quiet him down, and so I speak with a low voice, either quiet, long words like “Slooooooooow” or “Eaaaaaaasy”. Other times I need to speak sharply to stop him (“Whoa!”) because, well, he’s being an idiot and about to get himself hurt. Other times, he needs encouragement, and I’ll use a completely different voice, higher pitched, more modulated and often short, repeated notes.

What about you? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this: Take the word balance and play with it awhile: What have you found you needed to balance with your dog? Yourself? Your methods? Open ended I know, but sometimes that leads to the most interesting conversations. (And if you have figured out the whole “work-play balance thing,” let me know how you found it.)

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: The unseasonal heat has left (yeah) but now the frosts are back a few nights a week. It got down to 24 F last week, low enough to cause some serious damage. But it’s lovely even in the rains we’ve had lately, and feels very spring-y indeed. The lambs make it even more so, here’s Rosebud’s triplets a few hours after birth. I’ve just dipped their umbilical cords in iodine, you can see them still attached:

And here’s Willie (if he’ll forgive me for advertising his error), illustrating a glitch in the balance I was talking about. I sent him around to the right to bring the flock to me. This was the first time I’d worked him on the flock since they lambed. I don’t work a dog on the sheep for the first 2 weeks after lambing, the ewes are understandably too protective around their lambs and it causes fights that I think are unnecessary. The ewes below have lambs over 2 weeks old, but are still willing to give Willie a hard time. He knows that, and in addition, Willie has lost confidence on sheep since his injury, surgery and lack of work for over a year.

Is that why he stopped short here? I don’t know, but you can see that he did. I sent him and waited to see if he’d pick the right place to stop and walk in on the sheep. He didn’t. He stopped short; see how the sheep are still heading toward the left? Some have turned their heads at least, but the dark one in the  middle, Lady Godiva is still facing left, and she and Barbie are the 2 leaders.

I stayed quiet, and Willie balanced himself, moving counter clockwise to get into the correct position. You can see how some of the sheep have already begun responding.

And here’s where he choose to walk in again. This time it was perfect. See how the sheep are facing me head on and walking directly toward me now? Good boy Willie.

You might have noticed that 2 of the sheep have their heads down grazing. That’s because I asked Willie to stop so that I could get a photo. His stopping took the pressure off, so they put their heads down to eat. Always a good choice (eating) as far as I’m concerned. Time for me to go do that now! As always, I look forward to your comments.

When we came down the lamb seemed a bit weak; she’d stand up to nurse and then lie down before getting any milk. It was sunny and warm, and because young animals don’t thermoregulate well, I wondered if she was getting overheated. So I picked her up and and moved her and mom into the shade inside the barn. My guests and I went into the house, and I didn’t get back to check on her for over an hour. When I did, I found the lamb dead, sprawled on the ground beside her mother, who was still nickering and nudging in a futile attempt to rouse her newborn.

It’s hard to articulate what it’s like to walk into the barn and find that one of your sheep is dead. It’s a shock of course, but there is so much more that I struggle to translate. It was alive, and now it’s dead, and “dead” is just too damn final to deal with when it comes out of the blue. “Wait!” I want to say… roll back the clock a minute and I’ll come to the barn sooner and do something to save the lamb and then this won’t have happened and the little life that spent five months growing inside Butterfinger will still be here…. If only, If only, If only.

But that way lies madness, and I know it.  I’ve raised sheep now for over 20 years, along with ducks and dogs. I’ve been a zoologist for just as long, and have thus seen numerous animals dead or dying and in all states in between. And although I felt physically sick for the rest of the day, I also realized that is this is why I love my farm so much. I imagine that sounds strange, at best, and at worst, an indication that I have indeed gone mad — “I love raising animals because they die” is not an easy line to explain. Bear with me.

It is easy to be disconnected from “life” in our culture. I mean “life” in the sense of “life on earth,” or the complicated all- encompassing web of soil and worms and birds and pollen and dogs and pine trees and streams and flowers that surrounds us whether we focus on it or not. And after living in the country and raising animals, I know now at some primal, atavistic level that you can’t separate out “life” and “death.” They are part and parcel of the same thing, two sides to the coin, the night that defines the day. And as hard as it often is, there’s something about this awareness, this being forced to deal with the shock of a dead newborn lamb along with the joy of watching healthy ones frolic, that gives me comfort. It helps me to feel centered, with the earth holding me up and the land surrounding me, with something bigger and better than my own little life.

And this is also part of why I love dogs so much. What better animal to keep us connected with other species, other realities, the joys and sorrows of biology? Here’s how I expressed that in The Other End of the Leash: “We humans are in such a strange position–we are still animals whose behavior reflects that of our ancestors, yet we are unique–unlike any other animal on earth. Our distinctiveness separates us and makes it easy to forget where we come from. Perhaps dogs help us remember the depth of our roots, reminding us–the animals at the other end of the leash–that we may be special, but we are not alone. No wonder we call them our best friends.”

Last week I spent many hours trying to save my perennial flowers from the inevitable hard freezes we all knew would come after the unseasonable warmth caused them to grow as if it was May instead of March. One evening, as I piled on mulch and covered plants with old towels, I groused in anger about having to spend my time doing this, when what I really wanted to do was “garden.” And then I began laughing at myself, because how else would you define what I was doing, except by calling it gardening? Of course I was gardening, but the weather and the plants got to define what that meant, rather than me. Gardens, and dogs, and the sheep in the barn have their own agendas. We are wise to understand where each of us, just one little life on earth, fits in. Sometimes we get to write the agenda, or direct the traffic. Sometimes we are merely along for the ride. It’s good to remember that, no matter where you live.

Here are some photographs taken by one of our visitors on Saturday. He is a far better photographer than I (and Jim and I lusted after his 500 mm lens), and he graciously agreed to let me post his photographs. Thank you, Rob, I love being able to post these pictures.

This is Butterfinger and the lamb that died a bit later. Butterfinger is doing well, by the way, she called for her lamb for about two days and now is quiet. She stays close to her mother and her sister, Oreo, who has a two-week old, healthy lamb. I’m afraid I am going to have to change her name: although I’m not giving her any supplemental food, Butterfinger is downright fat. After a few more days of sympathy, I’m going to start calling her Butterfat. (And by the way, just in case you’re not used to seeing them, newborn lambs come out little more than bones and skin, so this little lamb looked perfectly normal compared to the rest.)

Here’s her sister Oreo and her black and white lamb. The other 3 lambs are solid white (2) or black (1), it’s just this one who is replicating a Border Collie. We’re still waiting on Spot and Rosebud, who must not have been bred the first time they mated with King Charles. He was a young ram and I suspect his sperm just wasn’t up to it. Ewes cycle every 17 days, so we’re hoping for some more lambs this weekend.

And here’s a photo of me and Willie boy. He’s a bit out of focus, but after a year of his severe exercise restrictions, it still makes my heart sing to see him run.

Speaking of hearts, and what fills ours with happiness, the question arises about how effective AAT (Animal Assisted Therapy) and AAA (Animal Assisted Activities) really are. I remember a conference put on by the Delta Society many, many years ago that included a controversial study. It showed that, in this study anyway, the greatest benefit was to the owners of the dogs, not the patients in the facility. Whoops. While the audience greeted the news with a disapproving silence, I was cheering in the wings, because it’s good to examine the issue objectively, rather than just following our hearts in this case.

Indeed, the study was very useful and no doubt had an impact on “best practices” as currently defined. It found that the teams in this case had just walked into people’s rooms without asking permission. No surprise then that the residents weren’t all in favor of the project; they’d already lost so much control in their lives that the last thing they needed was to lose more. That’s why good programs like The Delta Society and TDI emphasize the importance of putting the patient first, and letting them drive the system.

But the question remains: Is AAT and AAA really effective? First, we need to distinguish between AAT and AAA. Much of what people call AAT isn’t truly therapy in the medical sense of the word.  To be labeled as therapy the interactions need to be directed or delivered by health and human service professionals, with goals set, treatment plans written and progress carefully recorded. Animal Assisted Activities, on the other hand, include visits, petting, games and tricks.

Here’s the good news for those of us who want to believe that AAA and AAT are beneficial to the recipients: There is indeed research that shows it’s efficacy in several modalities:  Two studies that I can think of off the top of my head found that visits from dogs decreased the perception of pain after surgery. One study asked children to rate their pain (Robbins et al, J of Holistic Nursing, Vol 24, No 1, 206) and another looked at the amount of pain medication used after joint surgery, which is a good, objective and quantifiable measure (Kaplan, AAT Conference Abstract 2004). A third study found that walking with a dog significantly increased compliance with physical therapy programs and increased ambulation exercise: 28% refused to walk without a dog, only 7.2% with a dog. In addition, steps walked more than doubled once patients did walk (Abate et al J. of Cardio. Nursing 2011).

This is not surprising to those of us who are aware of the impact of dogs on our oxytocin levels, and the impact of oxytocin on pain perception (it decreases), immune responses (it increases) and affect (it tends to make us feel safer and more secure). But we do have to be careful here: Not everyone benefits from visitations or therapy from a companion animals. You have to like dogs to get an oxytocin rush from them. (Most “therapy” animals are dogs, but some programs have cats or rabbits for selected patients. No reports of sheep yet….) Awhile ago I visited a senior center with a good friend and her dog. I’d guess about half the people we saw were interested in interacting. The rest appeared to be either neutral or clearly avoiding an interaction. My friend knows what she is doing, and was careful to not impose her dog onto anyone who wasn’t a dog lover.

This all gets back to one thing I emphasize in the DVD: The patient is the star of the program. Not your dog, not you. As much as we love our dogs, if we do this right we’re doing it for people who aren’t as fortunate as we are, and don’t have the opportunity to interact with dogs as we do. It’s all about them, and keeping that in mind is critical to a program’s success.

Other aspects of AAT and AAA are essential too: The Lending a Helping Paw DVD has an extensive section on what dogs are suited for therapy work, and how to ensure that your dog is really enjoying the process (these are the 2 most common problems that professionals in the field encounter). It discusses organizations that certify teams, what is required to obtain certification and how to work with facilities in a professional and pro-active way.

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Instead of playing with the lambs or gardening, last night I went to a senior facility outside of Madison and delivered copies of the DVD to one of the stars of the show: Ruth Trameri. She’s the lovely lady on the right of the cover, with my good friend Beth Viney’s (on the left) and her certified therapy dog, Czar. (Czar was an early admirer of my Gr Pyr, Tulip… that’s actually how Beth and I met.) Here they are,  gracing the cover of the new DVD:

And here’s a video from the DVD of Tootsie’s first visit to a facility. We used her (and Willie and 3 other dogs) to evaluations of  potential therapy dogs. (Tootsie passed, Willie… no surprise here, does not: too enthusiastic). This video segment is testing for one of the most important qualities of a good therapy dog — sociability. Dogs need to be interested in everyone, true social butterflies, but calm and respectful at the same time. Watch how Tootsie tells us where she’d most like to be…. (and feel your oxytocin levels rise?). Thanks to Beth Viney, the Director of Pet Pals in Madison WI, Dr. Linda Sullivan, and Pet Pals volunteer Diane Peltin and Ruth Trameri for helping with the evaluation section of the video, we all had a great time and it resulted in some very instructive (and, I might add, amusing) videos.

I say “Here Here!” to that. It’s just another version of dominance theory, and as Kathy argues, it can have a negative effect on the relationship between a dog and its owner. What I especially like about the book (besides perhaps the most endearing cover to a book imaginable) is its focus on teaching a dog what you DO want him or her to do, and how to use what she calls “Get SMART” to do so. SMART = See, Mark and Reward Training. In other words, first you focus your attention on your dog, paying attention to when he does something that you like. You Mark it with a clicker or a verbal marker, and then Reinforce it with food, play or touch.  No “commands,” just watch, look and listen… and use your increased awareness to reinforce your dog for behavior that you like.

Here’s a short list of some of the many things we can notice and reinforce (she recommends 50 times a day!): looking at your face, walking by your side, relaxing quietly while you work, staying in the crate. Besides being attentive, the key here is to use the dog’s dinner to reinforce the behavior you want. The example from Redstart Farm is Tootsie heeling when we walk to the barn. There’s no fence around the front yard and the driveway leads to a county highway. But I want Tootsie to be safe off leash in the yard, so without using any cue at all, I’ve taken part of her breakfast and dinner with me every time we walk past the driveway to the barn. She gets a treat every time she is in heel position on my right side. (Willie is trained to the left, so I thought I switch sides so that someday we can all walk together.)

She now walks with me from the house to the barn like an obedience trial champion, about 65 yards or so, in a kick-butt, eyes glued to my face, head and tail up, with a big grin on her face. Would it work in other contexts? Not yet, but on our walks anywhere I wait for her to choose that position and reinforce her for it. It makes her dinner bowl pretty sparse indeed, because she’s gotten so many treats during the day for training, but it works, it works and she still gets some good food every morning and night in a bowl, so we’re all happy.

What about you? How much do you use your dog’s dinner throughout the day? What behaviors have you found best to watch for, mark and reward? And have you seen Kathy’s book yet? It would be a great addition to anyone’s library. As always, I look forward to your thoughts….

Now, would someone please monitor the food in my bowl every meal? It would help if I hadn’t learned to make crusty-on-the-outside and creamy-on-the-inside French bread and if I do say so myself, the best berry pie you’ve ever had. Sigh.

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Whew, I am sure that some of my friends will roll their eyes, but it’s cool and rainy and I’m so relieved. Now all the beautiful flowers will stay around awhile rather than burning up in a day or two, you can work sheep without overheating them or your dog, and the grass is so green it almost hurts your eyes. The storm last night brought cool temperatures and needed moisture, but poor Tootsie is seriously thunder phobic, so we’re all running on very little sleep right now. But the rain was good for many reasons, and the sheep held off from having their lambs in a downpour before I got them into the barn.  (I told them to wait until the weekend to lamb, so far they’ve been very obedient.) Even though it rained so hard last night you couldn’t have slept through it even if there hadn’t been thunder, the flowers seemed to have come through it without too much damage. Now we just have to cross our paws and hope for no killing frosts.

Here’s that green I was talking about. Yup, honest, it really is that green out here. The green strip you see if alfalfa, which has the most intense green of just about anything that grows in spring.

And here are the blossoms of our wild plum trees. More probably I should call them “feral,” not sure where they really came from, but I’m trying to help them spread because their fruits are fantastic. I combine them with wild apples and make Apple Plum Butter Sauce. Uh oh, there I go talking about food again. Bad Trisha, bad Trisha.

First of all, why do we repeat ourselves when it makes no sense? A look at the science of vocal communication is helpful here. We know that individuals who are emotionally aroused tend to produce short, repeated vocalizations. Think of repeated whines from a needy dog, whimpers from a child upset about something, and your own predisposition to repeat yourself when you are nervous. In The Other End of the Leash I talk about a good friend who had never ridden, and yet was inappropriately placed on a nervous, high strung horse. The faster the horse went, the more my friend said “Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” and the more he did the faster the horse went and the faster the horse went the faster he said “Whoa Whoa Whoa”… You can well imagine that it did not end well.

This linkage between emotional arousal and short, repeated vocalizations is so common in mammals that some speculated that all animal vocalizations were nothing more than indicators of their emotional state. As arousal increases, so does the rate of vocalizing. Thus, it makes sense that when we are nervous we tend to repeat ourselves, and who isn’t nervous the first time they take a dog into a dog training class, no matter how kind and benevolent the instructors?

But there’s more to vocalizations than the internal state of the producer. An important aspect of my dissertation research was to shift the focus and look at a sound’s effect on the receiver. I had found that across language groups, cultures and species of receiver, people use short, rapidly repeated notes to speed animals up, long and slow ones to soothe or slow them and one sharp sound to stop a fast moving animal. And the study I did on puppies showed that they indeed were more active in response to short, repeated notes than to long, slow ones. That’s why I argued that sounds do more than provide information about the internal state of the producer (or predict future behavior), but can be used to influence the response of the receiver.

Go back now to the story I told in a recent blog about having to get Willie out of his crate beside a busy highway. Picture cars and trucks whizzing by at 65 miles an hour, a huge bleeding, flapping beast barely contained by Jim’s arms, and me needing to open the crate in the back of my RAV to get Willie out and put the turkey in.  Describing everyone as “aroused” is appropriate here: If Jim had lost the turkey it could have fallen/ran/flown just a few feet into the highway and caused a horrible accident. If I didn’t handle Willie right he could have been killed. Tom Turkey must have been the most agitated — injured and now captured by monsters, he must have been terrified.  Here’s what the scene looked and sounded like, as best as I can describe it:

I opened the door to the back of the car (the door to Willie’s crate facing directly to the back). While holding my out, palm toward Willie in the universal “Stay” signal, I began repeated “Staaaaaaay, Staaaaaay, Staaaasaay” before I opened the door to his crate. Notice there were two important variables the sounds I used here: I repeated myself, but I was using looooooong, sloooooooow notes designed to keep Willie calm and still. I was also consciously keeping my voice low, the better to sound confident and even somewhat inhibiting to a dog. Thus, there were 2 functions to my “cue.” One was using sound to inform Willie what I wanted him to do. The other, which over rode the first,  was focused on using sound to influence his emotional state and motor activity levels. This had an indirect benefit on me, in that speaking as I did acted to calm me as much as it did Willie. (Not a small benefit at the time, believe me.)

Was that a “perfect” use of sound in that context? Nope, I don’t think so. It was adequate, and it worked, but here’s a tweak that would have made it better. Ideally, now that I have time to think it through, it would have been better if I had said “Staaaaaaay” once, and then, as Willie did stay (which he did, bless him), I should have said “Gooooooooooood boooooooy” and repeated it as long as I needed to until I had him safely by the collar. That avoided repeating a cue (and thus undercutting the power of it when spoken once) but would, at the same time, serve to keep all of us calmer and safer.

Lots to think about here: First, think about what you say to your dog. Are you using vocal cues to convey information, or to influence your dog’s emotional state? And how do the sounds you use influence your own internal arousal levels? I’d love to hear your thoughts about this. Heaven knows I will never use sound ideally in every context (I have been known, on occasion, to shriek like a five-year old when truly panicked) but I find the more I understand about acoustic communication the better I am at it. You?

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Welcome to July. It’s been in the 80′s most of the week. About six weeks of growth has occurred in 5 days. I’m serious, it is absolutely strange and weird and seems to be acting as a kind of ink blot test: The people that I know who are most connected to the land are both confused on some deeply primal level and frantic about how to get six weeks of gardening/farming/spring chores done in a few days. Others, who live less earth-bound lives, have fewer concerns and are thrilled with an early spring. This makes sense. It’s all good if you don’t have to worry about killing the thistles before it’s too late and they take over your pasture at the same time that you need to prune the raspberries, get ready for lambing, weed the gardens, worry about insect pests and parasites that didn’t get killed off over winter that usually do …… You get the idea. I have learned to smile and celebrate with my more urban friends and commiserate with my country ones and take it one day at a time.

Here’s some of the good parts of our early spring. And there’s lots of it. It’s gorgeous now: Tiny leaf buds that define the color “spring green,” cheerful, nodding daffodils, and carpets of my favorite spring flower, Scilla. We got some great rain yesterday and last night; it was getting terribly dry, so that was a good thing. We are also expecting a cool down… back to the 60′s (still 20 degrees or so over normal for this time of year) instead of the high 70′s and low 80′s. The only down side of the storm is the discovery that little Tootsie girl has Thunder Phobia (which I learned around 3 am this morning, our first thunder storm together). Poor kid. We’ll just add that to the list we all have of “Things to Work on For Our Dogs: Treating Thunder Phobia.” Oh well, what else is there to do, right?

Here’s hoping that you are enjoying your own weather….and perhaps some flowers as pretty as these daffodils.

Here’s a carpet of Scilla (or Siberian Squill) under a Dogwood bush from Tootsie’s perspective:

Here’s my other news: (or Why Does the Title Say Tom Turkey?) FaceBook readers know this story, but I know everyone on the blog doesn’t read FB so I thought I’d relate it here. Last Saturday, Jim, me, Willie and Tootsie are in the car driving back from the market. Our plan is to spend most of Saturday cooking and cleaning for the Univ of Wisconsin vet students coming out to learn to do ultrasound pregnancy checks on my flock. Dr. Harry Momont of UW is a reproduction specialist, and each year the Ruminant Club comes out with him for ultrasound training, good conversation and my homemade pie. I wanted to make them a nice lunch too, so we were on our way home from picking up what we needed for Sunday’s lunch. (Menu = home made chicken salad made from one of our local, grass-raised chickens; cheese, kale and roasted tomato sandwiches with home made bread for the vegetarians, and most importantly, home made pie (this time a mix of strawberry, cherry, black raspberry & rhubarb).

We’re almost home on a local busy highway and run into a traffic jam. Cars are slowed because smack in the middle of the road is a turkey. He’d been hit by a car, but his head and neck were up, his eyes alert, and a string of cars veered around him as we approached. This was not something I could just drive by and forget, so I asked Jim to stop, and he pulled over right away. Extremely mindful of the danger (it is very dangerous to walk into the middle of a highway, please keep that in mind if you are in a similar situation), Jim took one side and I took the other and we stopped traffic completely. Thankfully everyone had already slowed down, so it wasn’t too difficult or risky. Then Jim, another man and I attempted to capture Tom. To our amazement, he stood up and woozily began to walk. So we herded him off the road into an adjoining corn field, and because he seemed pretty spry, decided to leave him there to recover. But as we walked back to the car I found myself unable to drive away. After we left he had crumbled down into the field, and was lying in the hot sun. We knew he was badly injured, but he seemed to be a long way from death, and I just couldn’t bear the idea of leaving him there to suffer.

“Jim….,” I began to plead. “I just can’t leave him there, can we go back and get him?” Without an eye roll or objection of any kind, Jim stopped the car, and we went back with a blanket to catch him. We had little trouble this time, Tom Turkey was not able to outrun us. His injuries were starting to catch up with him. While I cautioned Jim about the danger from his feet (huge nails for digging in the ground), he swooped a blanket over him and we paraded to the car. (Notice my brave, supervisory role here.) My biggest worry was getting Willie out of the car and putting the turkey into his crate; ever since Willie’s injury and treatment he’s been less obedient about not leaving his crate until I say. (He HATED me picking him up and carrying out of his crate, which I had to do for months.) He is much better now, but I wouldn’t say 100%, I’d say maybe 95% reliable. That wasn’t good enough now that traffic was screaming along at full speed right beside us. I told Willie to stay (and yup, I guarantee I repeated myself just like we’re not supposed to), while I pried open the crate door with my heart in my throat. He did stay, bless him, but I kept the door almost shut while I wormed my arm inside, took his collar and held on while he jumped out, pretty much into the wing feathers of Tom Turkey. I wish I had a video of Willie’s face when he discovered the turkey. Or maybe of the turkey’s face? Within about one second or less, I got Willie off the road and into the back seat of the car, (smack on top of Tootsie who was in a body harness attached to a seat belt), I lost my perscription sunglasses and Jim got the turkey into Willie’s crate. Everyone got re-arranged, the turkey settled down in the crate, Willie got off Tootsie’s head and we searched unsuccessfully for the sunglasses, then gave it up and drove home.

The rest of the story is a bit sad, but perhaps predictable. We took the dogs home, took Tom Turkey to a Wildlife Rehab Center in Madison, who promptly told us that Tom was too badly injured to save. I wasn’t surprised, I had heard him begin rattling with every breath on our trip into town. So we gave them the go ahead to euthanize him, and drove home again. Facebook readers have been so incredibly kind about what we did, but as I mentioned there, we did this as much for me as for the turkey. I just hated the idea of him dying a long, pain0-filled death. And as a zoologist, I should mention that in some ways it would have been better to leave him for the coyotes and hawks. They need to eat to after all. Perhaps it might have been kindest to kill him by the side of the road, but I didn’t know at that time how badly he was injured, and it’s probably not even legal anyway.

So we tried our best, and the house & barn got cleaned, and the food got cooked, but the dogs never got brushed. And, of course, I had planned to do a good grooming of the dogs on Saturday, but it never got done. Heaven only knows what the vet students thought. Ah well, what’s more important, an injured turkey or groomed dogs? So here’s to Tom Turkey, who made it through the winter but not the spring. The cycle of life… and so it goes.

Here’s a photo of Tom before he was euthanized; A handsome lad he was:

Here is her list of Canine Cognition Research Groups around the world, including links to their sites.

Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary. Known as the “Family Dog Project,” founded by Vilmos Csanyi, currently led by Adam Miklosi, especially interested in evolutionary and ethological foundations of the dog-human relationship.

University of Vienna, Austria. “The Clever Dog Lab,” with Zsofia Viranyi and Friederike Range. They did the work on human and canine responses to growls and “inequity aversion” in dogs.

Max Planck Institute, Germany. Michael Tomasello, Josep Call & Juliane Kaminski (and previously B. Hare). They did much of the work suggesting that dogs innately understand human pointing gestures because of their long association with humans (but see M. Udell’s study on a previous blog!)

Animal Behavior and Cognition, Italy. I don’t know much about this group and don’t read Italian (although I wish I did… I think it’s got to be the world’s most beautiful language!). Any Italian readers out there willing to translate for us?

University of Lincoln, UK (England). Especially interested in behavior as it applies to animal welfare.

University of Bristol, UK. Here’s from their website: The Animal Welfare and Behaviour research theme encompasses fundamental studies of animal behaviour, cognition and emotion, strategic and applied studies of animal welfare issues, and the implementation of research findings and solutions, involving farm, companion, laboratory, zoo and working animals.

Anthrozoology Research Group, Australia. From their website: Anthrozoology is the study of human (anthro) and animal (zoo) relationships. In our work, we focus particularly on companion animals. When interspecies relationships work well, they provide terrific health and well-being benefits for both humans and animals. When they fail, however, animals can suffer terribly and so can humans. What we do is use a multidisciplinary approach to try to understand what makes our relationships with companion animals succeed or fail. We then use our knowledge to try to make life better for everyone, whether they have two legs or four.

Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia. Simon Gadbois, especially interested in olfactory processes and learning, social behavior, stress and reproductive hormones.

University of Western Ontario, Canada. The link is to their FB page; lots of interesting information and studies discussed here.

Barnard, New York City. This is where Dr. Alexandra Horowitz studied what is often called the “guilty” look in dogs (showing that it is appeasement, not “guilt”). Ms. Hecht also did studies on this topic for her Masters, and now runs the lab at Barnard. Michele. Wan, whose work on people’s ability to ‘read’ dog’s emotional states I’ve discussed here, did her work at Columbia University, which Barnard College is associated with.

Duke, North Carolina. Now the home of Brian Hare. Here’s from their website: The Duke Canine Cognition Center (DCCC) is dedicated to the study of dog psychology.  Our goal is to understand the flexibility and limitations of dog cognition.  In doing so, we gain a window into the mind of animals as well as the evolution of our own species.  We can also apply our knowledge of dog cognition to improving programs in which dogs are bred and trained to help humans (i.e. service dogs for the disabled, etc.).

Eckerd College, Florida. Lauren Highfill. From their website: Are you interested in learning more about your dog’s behavior, personality, and thought processes? We are! The Dog Behavior Project conducts non-invasive behavioral experiments to try to answer these questions. We are always searching for new dogs to join our research team.

University of Florida. Home of Dr. Clive Wynne and Nicole Dorey, and where Monique Udell did her work testing Hare and Tomasello’s contention that dogs could innately understand pointing gestures. (Her works suggested that environment is more important than genetics.) Wynne and others have collaborated with Wolf Park in Indiana to compare wolf and dog behavior.

University of Kentucky, Comparative Cognition Laboratory. From their site: We are exploring the cognitive abilities of our canine friends. The goal is to define, measure, and distinguish dog behaviors. In the past it has been believed that the associations dogs make are based on either a positive or negative outcome. We are attempting to document the occurrence of more complex cognitive abilities through a variety of situations.

Here’s what I’d love from readers: Any of you who have worked for, at or volunteered for any of those labs, please let us know more! We’d all love to hear more about what’s going on around the world about what’s going on inside our dog’s heads….. And thank you, Julie again, for compiling the list.

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: I’m actually back on the farm, that’s the biggest news for me. Tomorrow will be my first day off in three weeks, and  my first weekend home since Feb 25th. Ahhhhhhh! My travels have been well worth it, but still, Dorothy (the girl in The Wizard of Oz, not the ewe!) was right. There really is no place like home.

This weekend will be especially fun; students from the University of Wisconsin Vet School will be out to learn from Dr. Harry Momont how to do ultra sound pregnancy tests on sheep. It’s a bit moot, since the flock is due starting March 28th or 29th, and every ewe is obviously pregnant (yeah to the new ram, King Charles), but still it’s a great exercise for the vet students.

Here are some photos from the last few days: First, here’s a wild javelina that one of my favorite authors, Sy Montgomery, and I got to see at the Tucson Wildlife Center. The center does fantastic work rehabilitating injured abandoned animals in southern Arizona. They rehab individuals of many species, including lots of raptors with broken wings, a now grown Bobcat who needs seizure medicine due to he and his litter being run over by a tractor and a tame Coati Mundi who has no idea how to make it on her own in the desert. The staff is almost all volunteer, and does amazing work. I loved how they pair adult animals unable to live on their own as foster parents of injured or abandoned young. That allows them to keep human-animal interactions to a minimum, so that as many animals as possible can be returned to the wild, having been raised by members of their own species. The wild javelina in the photo was attracted by the javelina’s in rehab. Apparently the wild ones stop by to chat on a daily basis. Sy is the one who arranged the visit, a huge THANKS! to her for doing so. It was a wonderful break from what was also a wonderful book festival. 80,000 people on Saturday alone? Amazing!

And back in Wisconsin, here’s Rosebud being shorn the day before yesterday by Jerry Rice, to whom I pay multiple times the going price because he is so very, very good with my sheep. He’s fast yet gentle, and left not a nick on any of my girls. I’m so lucky that he is willing to come out to shear my tiny little flock. Rosebud’s two ewe lambs are in the background, Oreo and Butterfinger. They are due beginning in a week and a half. Oh my, where did the time go?