naughty playful puppy dog after biting a pillow tired of hard work
Guys, I cannot tell you how important it is to teach puppies that “What do you have?” and “What did you do?” are the best phrases on earth.
From the first times my puppy is “naughty” — and let’s be honest, it’s a puppy, it’s going to get into things you thought you had safeguarded — I try very hard to teach them that bringing me stuff is the very best of all options. You found a sock? Fantastic! You stole a chicken breast a guest left on a low table? I’m so glad you showed me! Are you parading my underwear through the living room in front of my in-laws? Excellent!
I had the opportunity to compare our husbandry behavior training with two species, as I both took my dogs to the vet for their annuals and I went to the ophthalmologist for my semi-annual.
I’ve written about managing my own behavior at the eye doctor before, and it’s gotten a lot easier, actually. I know how to avoid the disturbing images, I know how to manage myself for the routine examinations, and for the most part the staff is not aware that I even have an issue.
Until something new happens, like taking an image of my tear ducts for the first time, and once I was comfortably settled in the frame and awaiting a photograph a tech picked up a large plastic hook and pushed it toward my eye.
Peace out, see ya! I was out of that frame and away from that new gadget fast enough to startle her.
“As I mentioned before, I work in behavior, and my specialty is managing fear and aggression, so all my professionalism is coming to bear right now.”
I have newly returned from a dream trip I’d been planning for fully ten years, a visit to New Zealand and then a cruise back across the Pacific. Yes, it was awesome.
I wanted to take the fantastic opportunity to do things I cannot do at home. Indiana has plenty of caves (our limestone supplied Washington D.C.’s and most other major cities’ buildings and monuments, and limestone country is cave country), but we have a distinct shortage of glowworms, so I wanted to go down under to see them. And rather than take a boat, I wanted to do something a bit more adventurous. So I booked a spelunking tour.
I knew the tour would involve abseiling (also called rappelling) and swimming/floating through 50-degree water. I didn’t realize that the abseil would be 35 meters through a narrow neck into the cave itself, and thus would be the very first task.
Heights, dark, tight spaces, all the classic fears in one go. Whee!
I was listening to a short podcast with Seth Freeman on negotiation — “be hard on the problem, soft on the person” — and there was a moment that I just had to grab and share with you.
Many clicker trainers are familiar with what is almost universally known by the ridiculously simple name of The Training Game. It’s a shaping game played among humans, and most often a learner is sent from the room while the group determines a (physically and socially safe) behavior to shape, and then a trainer shapes the learner with the clicker to perform the chosen behavior.
There are a number of variations on this game, many useful. The trainer (and observers) can learn a great deal by doing this! and it’s a great way to test various training concepts and approaches. There is a variation I have not used in nearly a decade, however, with good reason: It broke the learner.
Did you ever wonder exactly what the heck could be going on inside your dog’s head at the vet? Maybe why your toddler is freaking out, or why your cat tries to make your insides into your outsides when it’s time for a medical exam or treatment?
We don’t have mind-reading equipment yet, but we’ve got the next best thing — a human who can explain from inside a clinic where she’s uncomfortable.
photo by clickthing.blogspot.com/2008/10/tennish-anyone.html
So right now a lot of writing friends and I are stocking up on coffee, candy, and Prozac, building our bunkers for National Novel Writing Month (fondly known as NaNoWriMo). Only I don’t like coffee, so I make up for it with chocolate. To each her own.
NaNoWriMo is a blitz to write at least 50,000 words in 30 days. (Of course, no, one isn’t writing a publishable book in 30 days, nor is 50,000 words a complete novel in nearly any genre. But that’s not exactly the point, either, so work with us here.)
Considering that at my sugar-and-caffeine-induced perfect zone, I peak at about 1000 words per hour, and that’s not really sustainable — I know a lot of professionals who are quite pleased with 250 words per hour — and considering that normal life doesn’t actually suspend for most of us, you can see the challenge here. So motivation and discipline are big concepts for the NaNo community.
There are lots of ways NaNo writers motivate themselves, but it boils down to several commonly-used terms — small incentives, big incentives, anti-incentives, and rituals.
Let’s look at them from a professional behavior perspective, and maybe you’ll find them useful for any big projects you’re facing.
Autumn is coming, and Canines In Action is sponsoring our favorite monsters at The Historic Artcraft Theatre‘s Monster Mania! All six of Universal’s famous monsters in one fabulous film festival? When can we start?
Yesterday my friend Mark sent me a page about polite and, hmm, less polite deer in Japan. And of course (as he suspected would happen) my little behavior brain took over, and we have here not only a great example of deer learning to work a system of tourists, but how we unintentionally create behaviors both cute and dangerous in our pets.
I need to stick at least one actual behavior post in here between medical updates, I think, so here’s one from the creative side of things.
Besides my day job in training and behavior, I also write fiction. I just spent three days at the Midwest Writers Workshop, charging up my creative batteries and getting new techniques for revision and for developing ideas. And while I didn’t run into this Joss Whedon quote there, it was brought to mind again:
