Dog Behavior Blog

A Troubleshooting Model for Your Rescued Dog

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.

Sometimes, adopters and clients at the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society run into trouble with their dogs and do not know how to manage problem behaviors. Most of this “trouble” stems from normal dog behavior that has gone awry.

 

A vast majority of the questions from clients are about housetraining, chewing, escaping, dogs mugging guests, inappropriate barking, pulling on the leash, failure to obey, grabbing and stealing food or objects and jumping up on people. These are pretty much the top 10 behaviors people want the most want help with. If left alone, dogs will do all of these behaviors enthusiastically and, as a result, they become permanent habits. So how can a pet parent even know where to begin?

 

Start early and practice often is the best way to ensure that the dog’s behavior goes where you want and need it to go. Even if an adopter has had other dogs, by the time the dogs reach eight to 10 years old, most people have forgotten the work they initially put in. And, some have had those one-in-a-million easy dogs that need no effort at all. 

 

I found it was helpful to offer a formula by which pet parents can troubleshoot what is going wrong and get the dog’s behavior to go in the right direction. This model uses

positive reinforcement. In positive reinforcement training, we look at behavior as something to build rather than something to stop. We use a formula: Antecedent, Behavior and Consequences (ABC) to teach dogs specific activities. Here is an example: you call the dog (antecedent), the dog comes to you (behavior), and upon the dog’s arrival you throw a ball or give him a piece of food (consequence).     

 

Dogs learn through a process of habituation, successful repetition and consequences. So, if the dog is exhibiting inappropriate behavior or is giving an incorrect response, you have to look for the failure in these three areas. The formula I give my students is: Supervision-Repetition-Consequences.

 

Let’s look at the area of supervision. If the dog is not housetraining well, which includes both toilet and chewing habits, inadequate supervision is the culprit. Dogs must be patterned to eliminate in appropriate areas. If they manage to do it in the wrong areas, the solution is to be sure they only go in the right areas for a sufficient amount of time to make it a habit. Then they will have a desire to go in the correct area. The same goes for chewing on belongings that are not theirs. The pattern has to be in place and learning is quickest when no errors are made.  Supervision is the key to this.

 

In the area of repetition, the most common failure is teaching the dog to come reliably when called. There are very few cases in which inadequate repetition is not the cause.

Recall training takes many controlled repetitions before it becomes a conditioned behavior. And, as we discussed in the September 2 blog article, may never be accomplished in some circumstances that are overwhelming for the dog. The key is to get a dog to come every time with repetition, control and a generous reward at the end.

 

That brings us to consequences. It is only human nature to think that words are enough to let the dog know what we want. Dogs communicate through an elaborate system of physical expressions and do not process words in the same way humans do. What I usually hear when working with a client whose dog is jumping up on people is, “When he does that, I say ‘no’”. They are surprised when I ask them what they do after saying ‘no’. In this case, the dog should hear the word as he forms the intent to leap up on a person and then be quickly removed from the situation before jumping. That way, a positive consequence can be delivered for a correct behavior such as sitting. Or, in the same scenario, the dog can receive the positive consequence (he gets to greet the person for exhibiting the correct behavior). The correct behavior could either be sitting or standing still. 

 

Almost any failure can be grouped under one or more of those categories. So, when failures occur, think: Supervision, Repetition, and Consequences to find the answer.

           

 

 

Babies Can Tell The Difference Between Friendly Barks And Aggressive Ones

Parents, including me, tend to find their own babies’ accomplishments amazing, no matter how mundane the tales may seem to everybody else. Now, a new scientific study in the July 2009 issue of the journal Developmental Psychology confirms what parents often say: Babies can understand a lot more than we give them credit for.

According to this study, babies can tell the difference between friendly dog barks and threatening dog barks, and they can do this from as early as six months of age. The babies in the study were presented with two pictures of the same dog. In one picture the dog was in a friendly stance with a relaxed facial expression and in the other the dog was in an aggressive posture with a threatening facial expression. The researchers then played a two-second clip of a dog barking. If the bark was a friendly one, the babies directed their attention to the friendly photo but if it was the aggressive bark that they heard, they looked at the aggressive photo.

It’s not clear whether the babies are able to figure out which sorts of dogs—those exhibiting friendly signs or those sending off aggressive cues—would make the best possible playmates and which should be avoided. This study simply provides evidence that babies can make links between auditory cues from dogs and visual information from them and figure out which sounds go with which visual images.

The results suggest that babies can understand emotions before they can talk, and they can understand those emotions in another species, even if they have had little or no prior experience with dogs. For those of us who feel as though we have been able to understand dogs since before our earliest memories, there’s now scientific backup for those claims!

 --Karen B. London

Dogs Can Understand Photographs

Even though dogs have been around people for a long time, we still know surprisingly little about their abilities.

We have very little idea of what goes through a dog’s mind when we try to communicate with her. She might turn her head in an endearing fashion when we talk to her, but what does she really understand? Mostly, we have no clue.

Now some recent experiments are starting to untangle the abilities of dogs to form mental concepts when we try to communicate with them.

A recent article looked at whether dogs can understand iconic images (Kaminski, J., S. Templemann, J. Call and M. Tomasello. 2009. Domestic dogs comprehend human communication with iconic signs, Developmental Science 12: 831-837).

Iconic images are things like photographs or things that look like the real object. For example, a photograph of a hamburger is an iconic image of a real hamburger. Similarly, a rubber toy hamburger is also an iconic representation of a real hamburger.

In this article, the authors worked with 5 border collies.  Three of the collies knew the names of a variety of objects, and two of the collies had no experience with names. Each collie was presented with either a small rubber toy that looked identical to a larger one that was hidden in another room among a variety of other toys, or was shown a photograph of a toy.

After being shown either the small toy or a photograph, the dogs were asked to go and fetch the large toy.

All of the dogs did remarkably well at retrieving the larger toy when shown the small toy, even though there were other toys in the adjacent room. Also, at least some of the dogs could generalize from looking at a photograph of a toy and go into the next room and bring back the toy that was shown in the photograph.

While it is not particularly surprising that the dogs were able to look at a small toy and bring back an identical larger toy, it is surprising that the dogs could generalize from a two-dimensional photograph to a three-dimensional object.  This suggests that dogs can form mental concepts from the information that we give them.

Another study suggesting that dogs can form mental concepts was reported in 2007 in the journal Animal Cognition (Adachi, I. et al. 2007. Dogs recall their owner’s face from hearing their owner’s voice. Animal Cognition 10: 17-21).

In that study, the authors used a variety of different dogs to see if the dogs could form a mental concept of their owner from the sound of the owner’s voice.  They first played the sound of the owner’s voice to the dog, and then projected either the owner’s face or the face of a stranger on a nearby LCD screen.  Using video cameras, the authors measured the length of time that the dogs spent looking at the screen when they saw their owner vs. when they saw the face of a stranger.

The dogs spent less time looking at the face of their owner after hearing their owner’s voice.  When they saw the face of a stranger after hearing their owner’s voice, the dogs spent more time looking at the screen.

This suggests that upon hearing the voice of their owner, the dogs formed a mental concept of their owner and expected to see him or her, but were puzzled or confused when they saw the face of someone else. They spent more time looking to figure out why there was a mismatch between what they heard and what they saw.

So when your dog turns her head to the side when you are talking to her, perhaps she really is trying to understand what you are saying.

--Con Slobodchikoff