Dog Behavior Blog

What Makes A Good Dog Trainer?

Over the years, I have watched a lot of dog training classes and I have found that there are certain qualities that all good dog trainers have.

One thing that good dog trainers always remember is that the people in their classes genuinely want to have a good relationship with their dogs. The people are there voluntarily. No one forced them to come. So that enthusiasm for a good relationship has to be nurtured and encouraged.

Dog training is a people-oriented activity. As the old joke goes, dog training teaches the people more than it teaches the dogs. And a good trainer has to like both people and dogs to be really effective.

Good trainers know that different people learn in different ways. Some people learn by watching. Others learn by doing, in a trail-and-error process.  Still others learn by listening. So the lessons have to be presented in a way that includes all of the people with different learning styles. The trainer has to tell people what to do, then demonstrate with a dog, and then let people try it for themselves. Throughout all this, there has to be abundant praise for both the people and the dogs.

In my opinion, the best way to teach dog training is to make it fun for everyone. People and dogs learn best when they have a good time.

For those of us who have been training dogs for a long time, it is very easy to forget that a lot of people don’t know how dogs learn. In fact, a lot of people don’t know much about their dogs. I believe that it is always best to take the time to explain how and why a dog does something, even if it takes a few minutes of class time.

A frustration of teaching dog training classes is that many people do not do their “homework,” or work with their dog outside of class.  When I find this frustration building up inside me, I always stop and think about all the things that I should be doing that I don’t do because of time pressures. My intentions are good, but my time is limited. And so it is with people who don’t work with their dogs outside of class. I think that having a fun time in class is more conducive to learning than reprimanding people for not working with their dogs.

For the dogs, part of the fun of a class is seeing and interacting with other dogs. They are social creatures and thrive on seeing, smelling, and perhaps licking their fellow dogs. In my classes, I have a dog socialization period in the first few minutes of class, where the dogs can greet and meet each other, and I have a socialization period at the end of the class, where the dogs can romp around with one another.

I always end classes by asking people to lavish praise upon their dogs for a job well done, and I always spend a lot of time praising the people for making good progress with their dogs, even if it is only in class.

I believe that the ultimate goal of a good dog trainer should be to enrich the lives of both the dogs and the people that he or she works with. That can best be done by bringing out the love and joy that a dog and a person share for each other.

--Con Slobodchikoff

Canine Distemper in Puppies

We just had some friends lose two puppies to canine distemper. They got a lab puppy from a breeder and a lab mix from a shelter. The lab mix had a cough when they got her and the lab was perfectly healthy. Several weeks later, both dogs had died from distemper, despite extensive attempts to save them with excellent veterinary care, and despite being on track with the standard course of puppy vaccinations.

 

Canine distemper is a virus related to measles and for puppies, only rabies has a higher mortality rate. Puppies from three to six months seem to be particularly susceptible to this infection, which spreads to new individuals through contact with bodily fluids including nose and eye secretions as well as feces and urine, or through food and water contaminated by these same products.

 

Symptoms include fever, runny eyes and nose, followed by vomiting and diarrhea, dehydration, excessive salivation, weight loss and loss of appetite, trouble breathing and coughing. Later symptoms include twitching, seizures, swollen foot pads, loss of muscle, incontinence, circling, and sensitivity to light and touch. Sometimes the serious symptoms show up right away, and sometimes they appear many weeks later.

 

Any suspicion of canine distemper should be followed by a consultation with a veterinarian. There is no specific treatment for the disease, although antibiotics can often help with the secondary bacterial infections that often result. Prevention is best accomplished with vaccinations, although obviously in puppies that is not always successful because it takes more than one shot to get full protection, and in the meantime, puppies can be exposed to the disease.

 

My friends who lost their puppies to canine distemper suggest being aware of puppies with a suspicious cough, which they originally thought was something milder such as kennel cough. I give my heartfelt sympathies to these friends and anyone else who has lost a puppy to this disease.

 

Would anyone else who has lost a puppy to a serious illness like to comment or offer any suggestions/empathy?

 

--Karen London

Canine Intelligence: Ranking Dogs By Breed

Note from Con Slobodchikoff: This is a guest post by Dr. Stanley Coren.

Dr. Stanley Coren is professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia and author of many books on dog behaviour, including The Intelligence of Dogs,  How to Speak Dog, How Dogs Think, The Pawprints of History, Why We Love the Dogs We Do, and a children’s book, Why Do Dogs Have Wet Noses? which won the Best Children’s Book award from the Animal Behavior Society. His website is www.stanleycoren.com.

Just as everyone wants to have smart kids, most people want to own clever dogs. However whether a dog is “smart” or “dumb” depends upon the specific aspects of its behavior we consider. For example, was Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein intelligent? Obviously, to derive the theory of relativity required a mathematical genius. Yet Einstein was so bad at simple arithmetic that his checkbook was always out of balance.

Intelligence has a variety of different dimensions. In human beings we might subdivide intelligence into verbal ability, numerical ability, logical reasoning, memory, and so forth. The intelligence of dogs also has several different aspects, among which we recognize three major dimensions. The first is called instinctive intelligence. This really refers to what a dog was bred for. For example, herding dogs were bred to herd animals. Their ability to round up animals, keep them close together, and drive them in a particular direction is inborn and only requires human intervention to keep it under control and to give it a bit of direction.

Different breeds obviously have different types of instinctive intelligence. Guard dogs watch over things, retrievers fetch, hounds track or pursue, pointers sniff out birds and indicate their location by pointing, while companion dogs are attuned to human social signals and respond to our moods to provide comfort. Every dog has an instinctive intelligence, but it is senseless to make comparisons across breeds as to which are “smarter” in this respect—their abilities are simply too different to compare.

The second dimension of dog intelligence is adaptive intelligence. This is basically a measure of what a dog can learn to do for himself. It includes learning and benefiting from experience with his environment, solving new problems, and so forth. Adaptive intelligence can differ among individuals of the same breed. Thus, all Golden Retrievers have the same instinctive intelligence, yet while most are quite clever you will occasionally encounter one that seems totally clueless and makes the same mistakes over and over again. The difference between the various Goldens is a matter of difference in adaptive intelligence, and this can be measured by using the appropriate tests.

When most people think of dog intelligence they often think of the dog working his way through complex obedience exercises in an obedience ring or on a stage. They might also think of highly trained animals such as police dogs, guide dogs for the blind, hearing assistance dogs, or search and rescue dogs. A dog responding appropriately to his master’s commands and signals tends to give us the impression that we are viewing the peak of dog intelligence. Thus when a dog demonstrates through his response that he understands what particular commands from a human mean, he is demonstrating one of the most important aspects of his intelligence. It is important because if dogs did not respond to human instruction, they would not be capable of performing the utilitarian tasks that we originally valued them for, which means that they would never have been domesticated and wouldn’t be with us now. This third type of intelligence in dogs is appropriately called working and obedience intelligence. It is the closest to what we might call school-learning ability, and is based upon what the dog can learn to do when instructed by humans.

        It should be possible to actually rank dog breeds in terms of their working and obedience intelligence. Using statistics from kennel club records based upon obedience competition trial results doesn’t work, because it gets mixed up with popularity. For example, in one recent year, according to American Kennel Club (AKC) trial records, Otterhounds earned no obedience degrees while Golden Retrievers earned 1,284. This doesn’t tell us that Otterhounds are stupid, however; there were approximately 670,000 Golden Retrievers registered with the AKC, while in that same year there were only 300 Otterhounds. Even if Otterhounds were the most brilliant of all dogs, and if every single one of them earned an obedience degree in the test year, that would amount to only 300 obedience degrees as compared to the 1,284 degrees for Golden Retrievers.

            While their records can’t help us assess dog intelligence, the kennel clubs do provide us with another resource, namely the dog obedience judges themselves. These individuals are trained to observe and evaluate how dogs perform under controlled conditions. It is not unusual for a judge to spend 12 to 20 hours on any given weekend judging and scoring dogs of various breeds. In addition, most judges are also dog trainers, spending many more hours observing and working with dogs. Because of this extensive experience watching and evaluating dogs, if any one group of people should have the accumulated knowledge of the relative performances of various breeds, it is them. They see each dog perform under the same conditions, and should be able to separate out the quality of the performance from the number of competitors.

            For my book The Intelligence of Dogs (Free Press, 1994), I contacted all of the dog obedience judges registered with the AKC and the Canadian Kennel Club, and provided them with a long questionnaire that allowed them to rank the various breeds in their working and obedience abilities. Despite its length, 199 judges provided complete information, which is approximately half of all the obedience judges listed in North America. If we limit ourselves to breeds for which at least 100 judges provided assessments we end up with a ranking of 133 breeds. This is shown in the sidebar where dogs are ranked from a high of 1 to a low of 79 in terms of their obedience and working intelligence. Dogs that share the same rank number were tied with identical scores. You will note that in the middle (around average obedience intelligence levels) there are a number of tied ranks, which is what you would expect if there are some notably bright and some notably less brilliant breeds, with the vast majority of breeds coming in around average.

            The degree of agreement among the judges was amazingly high, suggesting that there were real observable differences that were being reliably detected. For example, when we consider the dogs ranked highest in obedience or working intelligence, we find that 190 of the 199 judges ranked the Border Collie in the top 10! There was somewhat less agreement as to which breeds showed the poorest working or obedience intelligence, yet even here the degree of agreement was still high among my sample of experts. Of the 199 judges, 121 ranked the Afghan Hound in the bottom 10.

            According to the judges rankings the top 10 dogs in terms of working and obedience intelligence are, in order:

Border Collie

Poodle

German Shepherd Dog

Golden Retriever

Doberman Pinscher

Shetland Sheepdog

Labrador Retriever

Papillon

Rottweiler

Australian Cattle Dog

While the bottom 10 dog breeds  (moving downwards) are:

Basset Hound

Mastiff

Beagle

Pekingese

Bloodhound

Borzoi

Chow Chow

Bulldog

Basenji

Afghan Hound

             Does this mean that everyone should rush out and get one of the top 10 breeds of dogs? Definitely not! While a smart dog will learn everything that you want it to know, it will also learn everything that it can get away with. This means you may have to spend much more time “civilizing” your clever dog so that it learns the limits of behaviour in your household.

            Does this mean that we should stop breeding the dogs low in the rankings to “improve the species”? Definitely not! Every dog has an instinctive intelligence for which it was bred. Thus the Afghan Hound, at the bottom of the list, was bred to spot, pursue and pull down antelope and gazelle. If you ever saw one of them running you would appreciate how refined that skill is. Also most dogs in our urban society were chosen as companions—did you take the time to give an intelligence test to the last person that you were considering as a possible spouse, lover or companion?

            In addition, some of the dogs lower in the intelligence list have other qualities. The Afghan Hound is arguably among the most beautiful of dogs. I notice that every year People magazine has a special issue presenting “The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World.” I don’t ever remember People ever having an issue featuring “The 50 Most Intelligent People in the World.” Just think about what we consider to be the most important aspects of humans—well, the same applies to dogs!

Getting Your Adopted Dog Off to the Right Start

Note from Con Slobodchikoff: This is a post by guest author Nancy Frensley, CPDT, CAP2, who is Manager of Behavior and Training at the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society in Berkeley, California. She will write periodic posts about the behavioral challenges and joys of shelter dogs.

Once you make the decision to add a dog to your life, you begin a journey. Choosing a dog you can love, one that fits your lifestyle and is safe to live with is challenging in itself. It is easy to think choice alone will give you everything you want in a pet. But, it is only the first step of many in creating that livable, lovable, give and take relationship we all strive to have with our dogs.

 

Many adopters are surprised when they bring that ‘ideal’ puppy or dog home. Behavior, being a very fluid attribute of any species, changes as animals adapt to new environments and seek ways to get their needs met. So, new adopters are often shocked to find what their perfect puppy (or adult dog) is capable of mastering. Besides destroying shoes, a remote control (or two) and plants, he seems to have no interest in settling down. How could this happen… when the choice was made so carefully and thoughtfully?

 

Those of us who observe adoptions on a daily basis know from experience that starting out with a solid plan; consistent rules and good management will prevent a lot of behavior problems from the get-go. And, we know that what you see is not always what you get. However, you will get what you reinforce and mold. Doing what is necessary to get a dog successfully situated in your life will go against every instinct you have. Taking home a new dog is akin to falling in love. You are fascinated by him, love him, and want to do right by him. Chances are you want to make up for the poor life he had before you adopted him. The last things you’ll want to do are to confine and limit your new canine friend.

 

But, to confine and limit is exactly the recipe for success! From day one, limiting his freedom in order to show him the right way to get things provides the best start in your home. Dogs are opportunistic and great at adapting. They are good at figuring out what works best to get their needs met. The secret to setting up the situation for success is getting them to understand that all of their needs will be met through you (and other family members). I have always said that dog training can be summed up in two phrases: “Dogs want stuff” and “we show them how to get it.” It is that simple. Limit them through supervision and a good (but humane) confinement system to prevent impulsive acts. Give them plenty of structured interaction with people in their new home. Make sure they get enough exercise, chewing material, play and training to keep them from getting bored. Allow them to earn their freedom, one bit at a time, by working for you. They will repay you by becoming good canine citizens, learning what is theirs and how to behave in their new environment.

 

A recent study* showed owner consistency resulted in a higher level of obedience and fewer training problems. So, as the song says, “freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose.” When you adopt your new dog from a shelter, start with a good plan that includes consistent rules. Make sure everyone in the household abides by these rules.  Don’t feel guilty about confining your dog in a way that prevents mistakes. Be fearless in asking your dog to do little tasks, like waiting before going out and sitting before getting affection and food. Dogs really appreciate it when they know the rules. They are willing to give us everything we ask and more.

 

*The Importance of Consistency in Training Dogs, G.E. Eskeland, R.H. Hillung, M.Bakken, http://www.atferdssenter.no/IVBM_poster_tekstprintes%20word%20fil.pdf