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Tag Archives: dog training

The Time Draws Nigh (In Which I Agonize About Going Back To Work And Am Both Successful And In Deep Trouble Simultaneously)

15 Tuesday Mar 2016

Posted by IfByYes in Damn Dogs, Fritter Away, Life and Love, Me vs The Sad, Perfect Husband

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

anxiety, depression, dog training, maternity leave, parenthood, Perfect Husband, work, working mother

How has it been nearly a year since Fritter was born? Where did the time go?

  
I have spent the last month or two slowly gearing back up to work mode, because in a month I am going to have to go back into the world of unmet expectations and absolutely no down time which is the life of the working mother.

I don’t wanna.

I don’t want my cuddly baby to get bigger.

I don’t want to leave her at daycare because she has some stranger issues (which I will discuss at some point).

I don’t want the stress of having to meet people’s expectations, avoid judgement, etc.

I don’t want to lose the hour and a half of down time I get every day during Fritter’s morning nap while Owl is at school.

I don’t want any of it. I LIKE maternity leave.

 
But, since it isn’t a choice, what I really want is to get my dog training business going, and going HARD. Because training dogs pays between 40 and 70 dollars an hour and working at the vet clinic… doesn’t. Also because it’s one of my life dreams, along with being an author.

Continue reading →

I FEEL GREAT

15 Sunday Jan 2012

Posted by IfByYes in 30 Posts To 30, Damn Dogs

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

dog training, good day, positive thoughts, self confidence, self esteem

I just had my second session with my new client, and I FEEL GREAT.

THIS GREAT.

It went really well. The first session I wasn’t too sure about. I thought it went over well, but I hit them with a lot of theory so I was afraid that I came across as too scattered.

But I feel good about this session. I taught the puppy to ring a bell, showed them how to startle him into stopping bad behaviour, and how to encourage the dog to walk on a loose leash. They seemed very impressed by all of it, AND they told me that the settle exercises I taught them last time had been a GOD SEND.

SO I FEEL GOOD.

My First Reality Check, Part the 2nd

17 Tuesday Aug 2010

Posted by IfByYes in Damn Dogs, Life and Love

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

behaviour, buster cube, dog training, dogs, learning, parenthood, puppies, puzzles, reality check, tricky treat balls

So, on day five of being a puppy parent, I had a break down. I started wailing uncontrollably in the garden.

“WHAT’S WRONG WITH HIM?? WHY WON’T HE JUST PEE?? PEEEE, DAMN YOU! PEEEEEEEE!”.

My boyfriend of the time, who was visiting for the weekend, was like “Whoa. Okay.” He told me to go upstairs and go to sleep. He would take care of the puppy overnight. I was to sleep. Just sleep. The puppy went in the spare room with my boyfriend and I slept the sleep of the dead.

Things looked better in the morning.

I can has Smokey?

Over the next couple of weeks, I began to get the hang of it. He started sleeping for longer periods in the night time, and I discovered that he loved eating slices of Smokey cheese-stuffed sausages. Within a weekend he had started to pick up that peeing in the garden resulted in a slice of smokey, whereas peeing on the carpet resulted in a lot of nothing.

That was the real turning point.

Soon he was peeing eagerly to receive sausage, and I began to focus on putting it on command, and getting him to tell me when he wanted out. My mother and I looked everywhere for a set of jingle bells to hang on the door knob for him to jangle, but could find no such thing (in Vancouver, Land of Granola-Eating Pet People, you can find exactly that in many pet stores. I was not in Vancouver).

So I decided that if I could train a rat to press a lever, I could train a puppy to push a button. We bought one of those battery operated doorbells with the wireless doorbell button. We stuck the ringer in the kitchen, and the button by the back door. I spent a long time smearing peanut butter on that button, and clicking him for going near it and licking/nudging/sniffing the thing.

There was the slight issue that my puppy didn’t learn as fast as a rat. He was only nine weeks old, after all.

But while I often felt frustrated (and so did he – he would start barking in impatience, unable to figure out what I wanted), I knew I could do this. My self-confidence, thanks to The Great Smokey Breakthrough of ’04, was restored and even if my expectations were still sky-high, my schedule was more relaxed and realistic. I accepted that he might not learn this quickly. I accepted that it might take, quite frankly, for FRICKING EVER. But I knew that some day, my dog would ring a doorbell when he needed to go outside.

How to escape??

Whenever the bumbling efforts resulted in an actual ring from the bell, I immediately threw open the door and led a wild romp outside, to his great delight. It still took him a long time to figure out the connection, and even longer to figure out how to set it off. Nowadays, I could teach him this same trick in under ten minutes. But he was younger and stupider back then.

I was rewarded when he was 12 weeks old. I had left him with my mother for a few days to visit my boyfriend in Newfoundland, where he was getting his B.Ed. I called home to check on my furry baby, and as my mother was giving me an update, an unmistakable sound ding-donged in the background. My puppy had rung the doorbell. Mum immediately got off the phone and took him outside and I did a dance around the room.

From then on, things were a lot easier. The sound of that ringing doorbell had us all jumping to action, but the number of mistakes in the house declined remarkably. When I moved into my new apartment at the end of the summer, my dog was five and a half months old and pretty much housebroken. With the exception of illness (like the Ice Cream Incident), I can only think of two or three mistakes he made in the new place. But boy did I rely on that doorbell. My Beloved Dog hasn’t used that doorbell in years. Now he waits patiently until I decide to take him outside, even if I don’t get around to it until two in the afternoon (IRON BLADDER!). But that first year, it was a godsend.

I spent that year constantly following him around the house, and rewarding/punishing as necessary every single thing he did – and he never stopped moving. I never dared leave him for more than three or four hours at a time, and then only in a crate. We had to get sitters for him if we wanted a night out.

Meet Mr. Squeaky

I discovered the joy of squeaky toys – because when I could hear that squeaky toy, I knew what he was doing. That meant that so long as I could hear that high pitched incessant squeaking from the next room, I could actually take my eyes off of him, sit down and do something else for a few minutes. I could actually check my email, or read a book for five, maybe even ten minutes at a time!  I grew to love that ear piercing squeal. It was the sound of being able to sit down and rest.

I initiated a routine that involved a long walk with stick-fetching if he pooped by a certain point, and an abbreviated walk if he had not pooped by the time we reached that point. He learned quickly that Poo is Worth It.

He was my pride and joy, and the bane of my existence all at once. But really, I loved my enslavement. I loved that my training was working. I had forgiven myself for thinking that I could do in a few days what actually takes weeks and months to accomplish, and for thinking the speed of his learning curve reflected on my abilities. The important thing was that I could accomplish it, and that this pain in the ass, this constantly moving, chewing, romping ball of fluff was actually learning.

My baby had a brain

He came when called, he left things when I told him to, he peed and pooed on command. He could do sit, down and stand-stays. He could play dead. He could fetch. He could play tug. He obeyed hand signals. He dropped things that I told him to drop, and gleefully grabbed things to keep away from me when I said “I’m going to get you!” and yes, he rang a doorbell with his nose when he needed to go outside.

I was learning, too. With the arrival of Mr. Squeaky, I discovered the joy of Knowing He Was Occupied. I became highly skilled at keeping the puppy busy.

Possibly the best gift my dog ever received was from Perfect Husband, who was simply Adoring Best Friend Living in Vancouver And Worshipping Me From Afar at the time. He came to visit me for Christmas and brought a Buster Cube as an offering to my new fur baby. I had already begun to rely on Tricky Treat Balls to feed and occupy my ever-busy puppy, and the Buster Cube took food puzzles to a college level. Six years later, we still fill that same puzzle for him on a daily basis. No food bowls for this dog; not since he was seven months old. He works for every single kibble and it keeps him busy when we leave the house. Buster Cube = GOD SEND.

Big and Handsome

Then, at one year old, he grew up. It was sudden. Over a matter of a month or two he went from a spazzy freak to a calm, obedient, and reliable dog. Since then he has hardly ever caused me a moment’s grief, unless you count the occasional copious diarrhea incident. He’s a good boy, who lies quietly in whatever room I am inhabiting and waits patiently for food, walkies, and anything else I deign to give him.

Still high in my priorities

In a strange way, I miss his youth. He’s too easy now, and too easy to list lower in my priorities. I suffer guilt when I realize that it’s nearly three and he hasn’t been on his walk yet; when I realize his cube has been empty all day; when I realize that Mr. Squeaky has been in a bag in the pantry for over a year. Part of me misses the days when my world revolved around him… because part of me revelled in being so wrapped up in another creature. I still love him. I love him more, probably, than when he demanded every minute of my every day.

But part of me misses the days when he was a furry toddler leaving destruction in his wake, needing my constant supervision and guidance. Now… he’s all grown up.

Warning: This video is rated C for Cuteness. Uncontrollable “squee” noises may result.

The Usual Evil

16 Wednesday Jun 2010

Posted by IfByYes in Damn Dogs, Life and Love

≈ 7 Comments

Tags

authority, dog training, dogs, evil, experiments, Milgram, morality, punishment, reward, work

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about every day evil.

I don’t mean atrocious, terrible evil like baby-rape, dolphin slaying, off-shore oil drilling, or girl’s T-shirts saying stuff like “Daddy’s Little Consumer Whore”. I mean the sort of evil that regular people commit simply because they don’t have the guts to stand up and say no. The kind of little evils we commit from peer pressure, or personal uncertainty, or fear of losing our jobs.

A man named Stanley Milgram once wondered why the Nazis had done what they did. Not the big orchestrators of the holocaust, but the regular joes who ended up doing terrible things because they were told it was okay.

So he conducted an experiment.

He put an actor in a fake electric chair and then he paid some local people to come in. He told them that whenever the man in the chair answered wrong, they had to give an electric shock which would increase by 15 V each time. The man in the chair would screech in increasing agony, and would begin begging them to stop the experiment. The dial was creeping closer and closer to the “Danger – lethal” range. When the subject wanted to stop giving shocks (usually well over the 300 V level), Milgram would tell them that they had no choice.

This of course was not true. They were physically free to walk out of the room at any time. The only thing forcing them to torture another person was the man in the coat telling them to do so. The fourth time the person wanted to stop, they were told they could.

Even though they could have, no one stopped without permission. Less than half of the people ever achieved permission to leave. The majority went on to give lethal levels of shock to the actor in the fake chair three times.

But maybe, you might argue, these people sensed that it was all an act?

So someone did the experiment again, only this time they were genuinely shocking a little puppy. 20 out of 26 people continued to shock the puppy right up to the end of the experiment. Of the few who insisted on stopping, all were men. The rest of the men and all of the women continued to shock the poor puppy, some weeping as they did so, because the man in the lab coat told them to.

Think about it yourself, before you judge – have you ever done something you felt was a little wrong, because your boss told you to at work? Or because the people around you assured you that it was normal or acceptable, or outright told you that your beliefs were wrong? I’m not talking about fatally shocking people. Just little things that conflicted with your personal set of morals.

I know I have.

The dog training world largely consists of two warring factions. There are the “positive” dog trainers, who have actually read books on Psychology and have learned that reward is much more powerful than punishment. Then there is the older school of thought,which talks a lot about “earning the dog’s respect” and “tone of voice”. They use choke chains and other physical methods to enforce their will on the dog.

In my previous job, we tried to merge both schools of thought as best we could. For the most part, I was allowed to try positive methods first. But some things were non-negotiable.

For the first time since I was a small child, I found myself using a “chain collar” (because “choke chain” sounds too negative, y’know). My own dog has never had such a collar. His training was entirely reward-based, with the occasional scolding for serious infractions. But I didn’t have a choice in my job – at least, not if I wanted to keep my job. Not only was I using them on a daily basis, but I was instructing the volunteers who raise the puppies in the art of doing so.

I found my abilities and my confidence as a dog trainer disintegrating.

When you have the power to inflict discomfort on another creature for not obeying your will, you find yourself using that power. When you have that power, you find you don’t need patience or calmness. It becomes easy – too easy – to take out your frustrations on the confused animal at the end of the leash.

Here’s another secret – some dog trainers feel that the best way to train a dog to retrieve something is to pinch their ear until they are screaming and bleeding – and then put the object in their mouth and release the ear. After a few weeks of this, the dog learns that grabbing the object makes the torture stop, and they begin to lunge desperately for something to retrieve.

The old-style trainers aren’t monsters; they didn’t like torturing dogs. But in their mind, they thought they “had to” because they found it difficult to believe that any other method could be as effective. But they were willing to try other methods, and so I was allowed to reward-retrieve my dogs. It worked fine. But the day would have come when I would have been told to pinch a dog instead, for whatever reason.

Here’s the thing – I would have done it.

I loved my job. I wanted to keep my job. I would have doubted myself, and trusted them.

I was upset about being laid off, but now I am glad I got out before that happened. Now I have the perspective to say “No, I will never do that.” If someone tells me to in the future, I will say no, and hang my job. I think I will be a better and happier person now than I was when I was trying to please people with different ideas, and a different set of morals.

I don’t ever want to find myself in that position again.

It’s the trainer in me

23 Monday Nov 2009

Posted by IfByYes in Damn Dogs, I'm Sure This Happens To Everyone...

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

babies, children, dog trainer, dog training, dogs

I’m somewhat bothered by the fact that when I watch parents handling their toddlers in the supermarket, or at a friend’s wedding, I end up comparing how they deal with their small child to how I would handle a dog. I’m sure that has to be wrong. Not because the laws of learning wouldn’t apply to a toddler (after all, the average dog has the intelligence of a one and a half year old child, so…) but because I feel like I don’t have the right.

I have a dog, and I train dogs, so it’s natural for me to wince when I see dog owners making common mistakes. I see overly permissive owners being dragged down the street, and overly firm owners thinking that their dog is being stubborn when it’s really being terrified. But when I see parents make the same mistakes, I feel that I don’t have the right to wince.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not judging these parents (unless I see them doing something really awful, like letting their kid torture kittens or something. Then I would judge). I don’t even judge the dog owners who go down the street with their dogs strangling at the end of the leash. They aren’t bad owners, just poor handlers. I feel bad for them, and frustrated for them, because they don’t seem to know the things that I know. I always wish I could step in and tell them what I know without sounding like a real bint.

So it’s not judging, just frustration. But with parents, I really have no right to even be thinking the things I think, because I don’t have a baby and I don’t teach them for a living. I’m not totally baby naive. My goddaughter is five now, and though I don’t see her as much as I’d like, I baby sat her multiple times when she was younger. I’ve ignored her tantrums, and praised her for using the potty (thankfully, her mother is a firm and consistent handler). So I’m not, like, totally inexperienced. But still, I feel that I shouldn’t think the things I think.

Like, there are the parents who give their instructions in the form of a question: “Do you want to come here so I can put on your pants?”

…and the dog trainer in me thinks, “Make it a command, not a question! Use a firm tone of voice so he knows that this is not an option!”

And there are the parents who soothe their child  through a tantrum in the mall, saying “it’s okay, shhhh,” and then buying the kid candy to shut her up.

…and the dog trainer in me thinks, “Don’t reward bad behaviour! Establish some negative consequences. Get her to do some puppy push-ups!”

Or a toddler starts running around in church, and the father gives an apologetic shrug to the congregation, as if to say “what’re you gonna do?”

…and the dog trainer in me thinks, “Don’t let him break the command like that! If he breaks from his sit, you need to enforce the command or he’ll never stay put again. Return him to the original position as many times as necessary for him to get the idea, and then reward him when he finally stays put!”

I think parenthood is going to surprise me, when I realize that I can’t just crate the baby to keep him from pooping on the floor.

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