It’s NOT Up To You: To treat or not to treat

One of the questions that comes up often is what type of reward (motivation tool) to use during dog training. Some folks swear by affection (The Monks of New Skete for example), some like to use toys (Wendy and Jack Volhard for example), and of course the old stand-by is food reward.

So which one of these (or is there a forth option?) is the best tool. The answer? It’s not up to you.

It’s up to the dog of course. What motivates the dog the most? Your job as a dog handler is to figure that out and then use that.
 
Most dogs are motivated by food, so of course food reward is the old stand-by; however, I’ve worked with dogs (two in particular come to mind) who could care less about food.

One (Lassie look alike) was all about affection. What was little bizarre about it is that Lassie was motivated particularly by male affection. Her owner was female, and her owner had worked with a female trainer before and they didn’t get very far. This dog seemed to respond and work for male affection.
 
The other (Snoopy look alike) wasn't motivated by affection, food or toys, but by interaction. She wanted someone who could match her energy and the level of excitement (the owner was an elderly lady who had another very mellow dog). Once you managed to get as hyper as she was, once we were on the same wave length of sorts, she was very easy to work with.

So how come some trainers have tremendous success always using just one method for all dogs? There are at least two reasons.

First, it is congruent with their personality and they have become technically proficient at maximizing the desired effects.
Second, there are ways in which one can make any of these methods more effective. In other words, we can manipulate the dog's proclivities to our advantage.

We will discuss the first point in another post, for now, we will talk about making whatever method you use more effective.

To that end, whatever is used for training, shouldn't be used outside the training. Why? Because it loses value.

Would you work for money if you had all the money in the world?

Lets drive this point home.

What is your favorite food? Pizza, cake, stake, chocolate...? If you were fed your favorite food 3 times a day, how long before you were entirely satiated and sick of that particular food?

By the same token, if your dog receives treats throughout the day and for doing absolutely nothing, those food rewards will start to matter less.
Affection is a particularly difficult thing to withdraw, however the same principle applies. If you are constantly smothering your dog with affection, he will not work for it. Same goes for toys. I am not saying to deprive your dog of toys, but I am saying that certain high-value toys that are used during training should ONLY be used during training.

Here is a trick some trainers use. This is almost never shared with general public.

Trainers will reward-starve the dog before the training session to make the dog work harder and pay close(er) attention to the handler. This may be a difficult concept to digest for some folks, but its no different than when your doctor asks you not to eat the day before a procedure.

Here is an example.

Lets say we will have a food-reward based training session tomorrow. In order to make the dog a highly cooperative party in this training session, we will choose NOT to feed the dog dinner the night before and breakfast the day of. A healthy dog can last weeks without food, so skipping 1-2 meals is not that drastic. You can bet that a dog who is only somewhat motivated by food will be highly motivated by food if hungry.

Same goes for affection. Trainers will keep the dog isolated for few hours to a day before engaging in a training session. Once the training begins and affection is shared with a dog that hasn't received it in a while, it becomes very valuable.

You can see how taking these techniques to their extreme can be cruel and inhumane, which is why they are NOT shared with general public.
Thinking goes like this. Your average dog owner is probably unable to apply these techniques in effective yet humane way. Besides, most dog owners don't need this level of cooperation. However, knowing about these techniques, how they are used, and how they are applied, should be enough to convince the dog owner to pull-back on treats outside the training times (if treats are used as motivation), or hold-back the affection if affection is used as a reward. Same goes for toys.

I would love to hear about weird dogs you've encountered. The ones that work only for male affection, or the ones who are looking for someone to match their energy level before they start "listening" to you. What motivational tool have you used outside of the big three? (food, affection, toy).

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If Life is Really as Short as They Say, Then Why is the Night so Long?

I came across this song while browsing http://garr.posterous.com/if-life-is-really-as-short-as-they-say-then-w
Awesome post, awesome song, I recommend you check it out.

So I decided to try to answer 2 out of three questions posed in this song.

What do you do with the pieces of a broken heart?
How can a man like me remain in the light?

And I'm going to let you guys answer the last one.
If life is really as short as they say, then why is the night so long?

Can there really be an answer to such questions? Who knows such things, but life is all about failing forward and if the choice is

1. Not trying and failing or
2. Trying and maybe succeeding

 Then I say we give it a whirl.

 

Q. What do you do with the pieces of a broken heart?

A. Re-frame it.

Once I was sitting next to a teacher, much like the one in this song, and he told me about his "wellness knee".

When he was a young man, he severely injured his knee in a car accident and had to get several operations just to be able to walk again. His knee was shattered and it took months of recovery just to be able to walk again. He did recover, but never fully. His knee was never at 100% again.

Now that he was a man of certain age, his bad knee was a barometer of sorts. He called it his wellness knee. If he was eating right, getting enough sleep, exercising, meditating, and generally speaking taking good care of himself, his knee would be fine. If however, he was slacking-off in one of these areas, his knee would start to hurt. His bad knee was an indicator of how well he was living. It was his wellness knee.

I thought that was a brilliant way to re-frame a negative and turn it into a positive.

Can this method be used to glue the pieces of a broken heart back together? I think so.

Whenever it happened to me, I wrote a song about it. My broken heart became a treasure trove of inspiration. In fact, I’m pretty sure that the artist who wrote this song started in a similar predicament.

There are 3 occasions that I remember having a non-romantic pain from a broken heart. Those may not be as intense and can serve as a training ground of sorts. The three times I remember was when Freddie Mercury died, the second when Frank Zappa died and third and very recent when Daddy (Cesar Millan’s pit bull) died.

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I remember having a distinct case of a slightly bruised, cracking at the seams, damn-near broken heart. In these instances I always had a tendency to remove myself from the feelings and observe them at a distance. Later, I’ve learned that in Buddhism, this is known as Observer/Observed. A kind of out-of-body experience that with little bit of practice, anyone can use to take them selves out of a situation (even if you are in the middle of it) and take on a bird’s eye view.

It doesn’t matter if you are observing your feelings and noticing how the pain makes you feel alive; or if you are observing a business meeting and noticing the entire picture, the details, taking in everyone’s posture, the mood, etc.

Final word on reframing. Humans define themselves though suffering, it’s been said.
If you can take something bad and turn it into a wellness knee, then you know what to do with a broken heart.

 

Q. How can a man like me remain in the light?

A. Its not the darkness, it’s the opportunity.

I struggled with this one, as I imagine many of us do. You see, when I was a young man living in Bosnia, Serbian armies had invaded my country. I’ve lost my father in that war, many of my close friends had perished, and I became a refugee living in tenement camps until eventually I landed in the good ol’ US of A. For many years, I’ve carried resentment and pain towards Serbs.

Until one day I heard His Holiness the Dalai Lama speak about a young boy who was forced to flee his land narrowly escaping his prosecutors who did their best to track him down and kill him, for this young boy was the spiritual leader of a nation. That boy of course, was Dalai Lama himself.

At that time, Dalai Lama was forced to take on the burden of a displaced and destroyed nation, assume both spiritual and political leadership while in exile, all the while practicing love, compassion and understanding.

So how do you show compassion to your persecutors? This is what he said and I paraphrase.

I realized, he said, that Chinese were a challenge and an obstacle I needed to deal with, but I didn’t feel resentment, hatred nor need for revenge. Instead, I saw it as an opportunity to practice forgiveness.

An opportunity to practice forgiveness.

I kinda took on faith that it was the right thing to do and it turned out that it was. The act of forgiveness is ultimately self-serving because it takes the burden away from us. The burden that we would otherwise take with us in all future situations.

Your turn.

Q. If life is really as short as they say, then why is the night so long?

 

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If Life is Really as Short as They Say, Then Why is the Night so Long?

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Orbital Swank (Orbitus Swahnkularis)

There is a little knows secret regarding fitness and health that’s circulated amongst the members of acting, scientific and wealth elite. The secret that gave Arawak Indian women the ability to compete in swimming competitions along side their men. Arawaks themselves were known for their amazing health and physique. They were tall, muscular, and lived long and productive lives. Their secret?

Arawaks incorporated an avocado-like vegetable as part of their regular diet. This magic ingredient was named by Columbus as Orbitus Swahnkularis, or Orbital Swank for short.

Dr. Ignatius Popowski of London Scientific Assembly had recently managed to extract the ingredient from the plant that gave Arawaks almost super human abilities. This enzyme was proven in trial studies to help people drop weight in a quick yet healthy way. Those who were relatively fit to begin with saw an incredible increase in their overall musculature. Across the board, all participants (over 6000) saw an increase in their cardio-vascular abilities and vast majority reported significant elevation of brain activity and mood.

Since then, the extracted Orbital Swank enzyme has been circulated outside the “regular” channels and can only be acquired “under the table”; tho it hasn’t been banned officially.

If that sounds good I have a bridge I'd like to sell you.

There is no such thing as Orbital Swank. Healthy mind and body don’t come from a pill, a can, an enzyme, the amazing new diet, or whatever other nonsense they are pushing this week.

Maybe next time your read something about the new magical pill, diet, a drink...whatever, you will remember Orbital Swank?

In a nutshell, eat less, exercise more, never stop learning and never stop asking questions. What’s yours?

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Hi, my name is...

Hi, my name is Dino Dogan and I am Dogan Dogs Video Blogs (it rhymes if you say it with a British accent :-)

Top 4 reasons why I decided to start this blog

1. The ideas presented here have been roaming around my head for years and to make sense of it all (and preserve my sanity in the process :-) I decided to turn it into a thesis
2. In order to test these ideas and sharpen the various points, I need your help
3. There is no one out there presenting information on Human-Dog Equation in quite the same way (or even close to it). 
4. The dog problem we have in developed countries (I’m in USA) is not only unfortunate (more dogs each year wind up in shelters and euthanized) but it’s also emblematic of a larger problem, which is exactly what I attempt to address in Human-Dog Problem Tree.

Seven years of my professional career (Network Engineering) was spent in corporate training which I’ve used as a real-life lab to test many learning theories, delivery methods, teaching principals and knowledge-transfer peculiarities. These findings were later used when developing a critical look at the way adults learn, seek and receive information, communicate (both internally and externally) and apply learned info, specifically as it pertains to Human-Dog Relationship. 

My personal interests were just as important in developing the Human-Dog Problem Tree.
My background is in music (I’m a singer/songwriter) and fitness (specifically as it pertains to Martial Arts), I’m a biker (find me on http://2wheeltips.com) and perhaps most importantly, I’m a life-long student.

While the information used to develop the Human-Dog Problem Tree was culled from many disciplines, few deserve a special mention.

Dog training is the obvious one but it didn’t stop there. You will find traces of evolutionary biology, social neuroscience, psychology and philosophy, Buddhism, economy, fitness and nutrition in my Human-Dog Thesis.
I’ve pulled some information from all these disciplines to develop what I believe is a comprehensive look at all points affecting our relationship with dogs.

You can contact me at dogandogs@gmail.com

For those that have made it thus far, tell me little bit about yourself in the comments section.

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