THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

Lots of dogs go through a “what’s in it for me?” stage (and this stage lasts longer in some dogs than others, right?). Mr. Hope is dancing around it right now, especially when I ask him to come into the house. Several of you asked about ways to handle it; not surprising, since most dogs aren’t like the Lassie on television and don’t automatically do what we want just because we love them.

Here are some of the things I’m doing right now to get Hope to come back into the house from the yard. Of course, “But I don’t wannnaaaaaa” is going to occur in different contexts, but many of the principles here apply to all situations, they just need modifying to fit the problem.

COMING IN MEANS GOING OUT Hope loves loves loves to be outside. He’d happily stay outside all day long if he could. So, sometimes, his reinforcement for coming inside is . . . wait for it . . . going outside. It’s the perfect example of the Premack Principle:  using a high probability behavior to reinforce a low probability one. I can count on him always going outside (high probability) because he loves it there, so I can use that to reinforce him for coming inside (right now it’s a low probability that he’d do it on his own). That means that sometimes when he comes in when asked, I say Good Boy! and dash outside again for a few more minutes.

JEALOUSY IS YOUR FRIEND This only works if there is some other living thing in your house that loves food or toys. But if you do, it’s powerful stuff. When Hope started pausing 20 feet away when I called him to come into the house, I began calling Willie and giving him a treat when he came. Will always comes when called, and I can give him a treat for coming and entering the house whenever I need to. As soon as Hope saw Willie getting a treat,  he instantly came running, only to discover that treats are only available on a limited basis. “Oh, too bad” I say, with sincere sympathy. “You missed the treats this time!” Right now he isn’t getting a treat for coming to the door ‘late,’ but if he then enters the house I’ll give him a treat once he’s inside.

UP THE ANTE I always have a mix of food treats available, from pieces of kibble to real meat. Right now he gets a jack pot of real meat if he comes, first time, when I call him to the door to the house.

MIX IT UP I’m very conscious with Hope of the importance of varying not just the reinforcement schedule, but what Hope gets as a reinforcement. You want to mix it up with any dog, but for some reason it feels more important with Hope than with others I’ve had. He’s pretty independent (okay, for a BC), and I want to condition him early on that if he does what I ask he’ll feel good (versus the more narrow “he’ll get food”). Although I use high value food most of the time for coming into the house, I also use play, effusive praise in which I get down on the ground and laugh like a loon while letting him leap all over me and lick me like a popsicle and again, getting to go back outside.

IF HE WON’T MOVE, YOU SHOULD If all else fails, don’t stand where you are and continue to call (and pollute your cue!) The few times that Hope simply plants his feet and won’t move toward me, or turns and goes farther outside to dig or look for sheep poop to eat (a favorite), I stop saying anything, ensure that I have a great food treat in hand, and go to him. Moving quietly, never scolding, I’ll show him what I’m holding and lure him toward me and back to the house. I’ll shape this, giving him a treat for just a few steps if he was overwhelmed with a distraction (New stinky sheep poop! Fox poop even better! Do you get the pattern here? … there is a reason the word for dog in Navajo translates: “eater of horse poop.”). If the distraction was only so-so, I’ll expect him to come further before I give him the treat.

Are we done yet? Oh my no, he’s just beginning adolescence after all. I expect we’ll work on these things for at least a year. However, he is already much improved; I haven’t had to walk to him more than once or twice in the last 4 days.  Now he comes voluntarily when we move from outside to inside about 75% of the time, even when I don’t call him to come, we just run into the house together. That’s an increase from — I’m guessing here — about 20% of the time, so that’s great progress.

What about you? Tell us your stories of your free spirit, and what you’ve done to work through it. I can’t wait to read what you send, and will be sure to have Hope read them too.

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: We had 2 days of hateful weather on our short vacation, but thankfully the weather cleared and we were able to enjoy Perrot State Park in western Wisconsin for a few days. Jim got to take off his hateful Iron Man brace for part of the day and I even hiked up a steep bluff for a little bit, although it was a far cry from what we intended. But we got time off and a sweet visit with my niece and her new husband. Ummmm, so good to visit with such wonderful people. And we’re related! Go figure.

We returned home to a dying lamb, spent Friday night trying to save it, but to no avail. Turns out, even though we have wormed the sheep on a careful schedule and have alternated wormers, that worms all over the world are developing resistance to worming medicines, and that’s what is happening here.  The little white ewe lamb, the one I bottle raised, took a dive when we were away and was too far gone to save by the time we got back. The next day we started a new worming protocol, aware that no matter what we do it might not be enough. Seems so strange to lose an animal to worms — that just doesn’t happen in dogs (yet) but I understand it’s becoming a problem in horses as well. Gotta give those parasites credit, but I hate losing a lamb to something that it seems like I should be able to prevent. There are 2 lambs I have my eye on, one looks especially thin, but all the others are thriving, and clearly are inherently resistant to worms. I’ll pay special attention to which ewes have resistant lambs when I breed next year.

On a lighter note, here’s the small prairie at the foot of the bluffs at Perrot State Park (on the Mississippi flyway). It’s a beautiful park and a lovely little restored prairie. Hard to imagine that there were 10,000’s of thousands of acres of this across the midwest.

And here’s a happy scene to any farmer: a winter’s worth of hay being delivered to the barn. Thank you Gary, Gus, Gordy and Brad for doing all the work while Jim and I felt guilty (but cooler) in the house!

Your comments have been so interesting about the ‘fair’ and/or “jealous” issue that I thought I’d respond in another post for everyone to read. I’ve included some of your comments, because they add so richly to the discussion.

First off, I agree with many who’ve commented that we need to be very cautious about making interpretations from the results of this study. The bottom line is that while the dog’s responsiveness degraded, as expected, if the food reinforcement was taken away, it degraded faster if another dog was observed receiving reinforcement. That was the “inequality aversion” that the authors mentioned (and yes, I believe it was the media that added “fairness” and “jealousy.” The dogs also could receive one of two rewards, brown bread or sausage. While a similar primate study found that the subjects responded differently to a ‘high quality’ versus a ‘low quality’ reward, the dogs are described as not caring. I’m especially cautious of interpreting this result as a meaningful species difference: who knows if the difference between what the primates got was the same as the difference between brown bread and sausage? (Have you ever had real European brown bread? I’d fly across the Atlantic just to get some if I could afford it… But perhaps it is a species difference in that dogs are scavengers and many of them love just about any kind of food. One of my BC’s, Pippy Tay, loved the sunflower seed shells under the bird feeder. The shells. LOVED them. Go figure.)

Here are some of the many interesting comments re the ‘fairness’ versus ‘jealousy’ issue:

Dee Says:

. . . in my American mind jealousy has to do with a perceived loss of interaction or affection, while fairness has to do with the inequality of reward. In this instance, and at least at first glance, the dogs seem to be refusing to work because of the inequality in earnings/rewards rather than protesting that the other dog was receiving more attention, but that’s where this study becomes very tricky…

It seemed like this was a good time to look up the dictionary definitions: Here is the result from Word Dictionary (my beloved huge dictionary is at home, I’ll look it up there over the holidays):

JEALOUS “feeling bitter and unhappy because of another’s advantages, possessions or luck.

FAIRNESS not exhibiting any bias, and therefore reasonable or impartial.

This fits a bit with what I had been thinking; Here’s my take on it: I think of jealousy as a relatively simple kind of emotion. As I said in the book For the Love of a Dog, although some scientists think jealousy is an emotion that requires “Theory of Mind,” or being able to think about the thoughts of others, I’ve always thought that it was relatively simple version of the core emotion of anger: “You’ve got it, I want it, I don’t have it, I’m not happy about that at all.” It seems reasonable to label that as a kind of frustration, which is a kind of anger, don’t you think? Note what Jennifer said in relation to that:

Jennifer Says:
My inclination is to say that the study may have been measuring something else other than the dog’s attitude in response to the other dog being rewarded…….Frustration is a far less sophisticated emotion than either jealousy or fairness (which I believe are fundamentally different from one another) and, thus, in the spirit of assuming the least complicated explanation as necessary to explain an event, I’m going to side with frustration.

So interesting… is jealousy more complicated than frustration? I’m not sure. I completely agree that ‘fairness’ is another issue. My interpretation of fairness leans toward the concept of social justice. Of course, we use the term in at least two ways: “That’s not FAIR!” a child might say if his brother or sister gets something bigger or better. Surely that’s the simplest version of ‘fairness’ but it’s hard to separate it out from jealousy or frustration. But what if one child (or dog) watched two OTHER children or dogs getting, or not getting an expected reward. Then what would they think? It seems to me that the most sophisticated version of fairness would relate not so much to how one is treated oneself, but how others are treated, according to some social code. Does that make sense? (That’s the study I’d love to see… how would a dog respond if he saw another being treated inequitably?!)

There are lots of other interesting comments, don’t hesitate to read them all in the earlier post, and add yours here or on the first one. Meanwhile, I’m not sure if Lassie’s chinese medicine veterinarian will make it out in yet ANOTHER snow storm. At least it is no longer 10 below and windy. Poor Lassie urinated in the house yesterday morning. I took her outside just to pee and she looked at me and ran to the door. It was brutal, truly. It’s been quite a winter already, and it’s not even the end of December yet. (Didn’t winter just start the day before yesterday? Geeez.)

Here’s a photo from last winter, (and we have MORE snow so far than we did at the same time last winter!)

But here’s some things to warm your heart: first, Jim’s famous Christmas cookies, that we decorated in yet another snow storm last week:

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And least but not least, have you seen this? A friend sent me the url, and I can’t imagine a better holiday present to dog lovers. Here’s hoping that you and yours are able to forget about life’s troubles for a few days, and envelop yourself in love, care and gratitude. HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM TRISHA, LASSIE AND WILL.

AMAZING HOLIDAY DOG VIDEO!

First things first! Lassie’s party was a joy. Many of her friends came to talk, eat and belly rub, and Lassie proclaimed it good. Very good indeed. Lassie reveled in the attention, Willie got tons of petting too and we all ate ourselves silly. Only downside is that I forgot to take photos (camera out and at the ready on the counter…) of Lassie and all her friends. Big disappointment, I have a photo of my first Border collie Drift, at his 15th birthday party, and it means a lot to me to have it. He died 2 months later and I think that’s part of what motivated me to have this one, and I’m so glad I did. However, I fully intend and expect to have a rip roaring 16th birthday party for Lassie next year, so I’ll just get a photo next year.

Here’s a picture after the party of Lassie delving into the box of yummy dog food brought by her dear friend Rick and his GSD Ava.

DOGS, FAIRNESS AND JEALOUS

You’ve probably heard about the research from Austria that suggests that dogs have a concept of fairness and/or jealousy. By the time you read this I’ll have probably talked about it on the Diane Rehm show, but it deserves some attention (and some critical thinking on our parts.) Basically, the researchers taught dogs to ‘give paw’ for a treat, then sat them down side by side and rewarded one dog for a correct performance but not the other. The unrewarded dog’s responsiveness degraded quickly, and he or she stopped performing as taught. This would be meaningless; you’d expect a dog to stop responding if the reinforcement dropped out completely, however, the performance dropped FASTER if the non-reinforced dog saw the OTHER dog getting reinforced for the same behavior. That’s the kicker (though is left out of several of the news posts….).

So here’s a chance to engage our critical thinking. Some news posts call this evidence of jealousy. Others say it proves that dogs have a sense of fairness. Question one: are those the same? If not, then which does the study support?

I’ll weigh in with my own opinions later this week. (And my apologies for being slow to comment on the comments. I read them all with tremendous interest, but fighting the ViRus Wars last week got me way behind….)