Ali Foundation Behavior

Being off sick has been a great opportunity to get into our first Lisa Mullinax webinar and start some application, and my, Ali has been a fast study!

The webinar we have just completed was focused around cooperation training particularly with regards to husbandry and medical care--so teaching behaviors and approaches to doing things like nail trims, ear cleaning, eye treatments, and even injections.  Greyhounds are such tolerant and docile dogs, most of the procedures are relatively easy to accomplish with them which makes them delightful patients for us vets.  However, Cooperation Training has so much to offer in terms of moving us beyond tolerance and into the world of patients and pets who are willing participants in their care.  The skills and trust they learn in the process has great potential to augment our relationships with our dogs, and for those dogs that do have concerns about care procedures it offers a positive way of building their confidence and provides us with a framework for them to communicate when they have reached their tolerance and need a break.

One of the core components that the webinar dealt with was training a Foundation Behavior.  This can be something new, or a modification of something the dog already knows or offers.  Things like sustained nose targets, lateral recumbency on cue, chin rests, or even offering feet (shake) or placing their feet on your leg were all presented as examples--really the options are only limited by your imagination.  Once you develop duration in the foundation behavior, you can start adding in "distractions", remembering to break things down into simple components and build up gradually.  If they stop the behavior or move away, it means they have had enough and need a break.

Ali has a remarkably soft mouth and loves to rest her head in my hands and have me play with her face. So it was pretty easy to get her to start chin resting to my hand on the training mat.  She also does a lot of "face" game where I have her put her face in openings like her collar and halti or her muzzle.  Once I started shaping to "Start" (the cue I've picked for this behavior) without my hand, she decided to offer placing her face through the space at the back of the chair.  I was stoked as such flexible thinking is a great sign of her growing confidence in general!  Plus it gives her more precision in her placement.  Once she was offering good duration, I started adding in distractions--fingers in ears, touching around the eyes, some foot and tail touching and gentle skin lifts such as you would do for injections--and she's holding throughout!  I can't wait to start doing tooth brushing this way!

My kudos to Ricky for keeping up some good boundary behavior on his red disc during our video!  It's such a good way to keep his nose out of the treat cup while I'm working with Ali, plus works on some turn taking and boundary duration for him.

Ricky Challenge 7

It took us a few weeks, but Ricky did finally succeed at Challenge 6 and is now working his way through Challenge #7.  On this challenge, he has to differentiate between two lit touchpads and pick the one that is brightest, so it is important that this is in a dim room where he can see the difference in the lights easily, so this sometimes means keeping the blinds closed.  Also, according to what I have picked up on the Explorers Forum, the Hub will be doing some experimenting with the dog at this challenge level to determine what level of brightness difference they can differentiate, which will help inform how it plays future challenges.  So I expect this one to take a wee while, as well, especially as Ricky's impatience still means he does a bit of double touching that affects his success at each play.

In other news, my behavior vet seems to have found a suitable anti-anxiety medication for Kate.  We've been on it for about two months now and have really noticed a difference.  She is much more playful with toys and the other dogs than she has been in ages, is eating very reliably, and overall seems to have a whole new lease on life! Here she is playing with one of the dog toys while Ricky is occupied with his Hub and Ali is waiting for a rally-o training session.

Housekeeping and the Blue Screen of Death

Ricky is still working through Challenge #6, which involves 2 touches to get food.  He is getting better at watching for the lights, and in his typical frugal manner of expending energy, he has figured out he only needs to tip his nose down and back to see over it rather than bouncing back and forth like you might see from videos of other users. He still gets a bit ambitious and occasionally holds his nose in place as, on a random basis, he has a 1/3 chance that the light right under his nose will be the one to light up.  He also still plays it a bit like a keyboard while waiting for the lights to alert, again, probably due to the odd occasion when this has resulted in faster reward due to the chance circumstance of the light under his nose going off. Check out his progress here

Our progress has been slowed this week by a couple of key learnings on my part.  Number 1--the importance of good housekeeping!  We have had a few occasions where a light doesn't seem to respond to being touched. A good clean up of the light board seems to set it right, so it appears the aberrant device responses were due to a build up of nose drippies (as Ricky doesn't really slobber) on the light pads.  I have heard of other users on the forum I follow experiencing aberrances in the device's responses associated with excess wetting/drool. So we will be instituting a strict regime of wiping it down with a damp cloth twice daily.  Easy to remember--whenever Ricky gets his twice daily heart meds, his machine gets it's twice daily wipe-down to keep his happy heart entertained.
Our second complicating factor this week has been the "blue screen of death".  Much akin to this event when it happens on our own desktop computers, when the dark blue/indigo light shows up, it means we're having internet connection issues and the device has fallen into off-line mode and is minimally functional.  The high winds have been jostling our internet antennae a bit, and good connection can be challenging enough on a fine day on our rural internet connection.  So I have had to do a fair bit of resetting of the device, and one day even just had to put it away for most of the day as our internet was playing up quite badly--that was the day I had to do mobile tethering to get internet connection on our desktop!  We hope for better internet access options in the future, although that may be fairly distant as the fiber cable currently runs down behind our neighbour's dairy farm.

Hair of the Dog

 The one thing Greyhounds lack is a ready supply of craft supplies.  Though, in reality, if did have a dog with a truly craftable coat, I would probably have to spend so much time grooming it that I wouldn't have time to craft with it!  Fortunately I do have friends with well-kept fluffies who are happy to keep me supplied with plenty of raw craft material, and my own dogs are happy for me to be pottering around the house with bags of strange-smelling dog hair.  After a good pick through, scalding, spinning, and dyeing (knew that crockpot would come in handy sometime) we're well on our way to some lovely and scrumptiously soft and warm garments.  I have nearly finished a round of Keeshond (6 skeins and counting) and will soon be starting into some Samoyed.  I still have a bag of Husky down in my back room that will be next up for processing, too.  I'm finding that, given the variable nature of dog coats, I still get a bit of fats&thins with spinning so everything is getting plyed with a 2ply laceweight alpaca to help give consistency when handling for making final products.  Thank goodness for my tunnel house--it doubles as an amazing heated drying room that really helps speed up all this fiber processing!  

Ricky mastering the lights

Ricky is making great progress with his Hub!  Over the weekend he has become a master of the lights and now we're on to Challenge#6--responding quickly.  Now that he has gotten the hang of the game and isn't so bent on gutting the Hub and anything he thinks is part of it, I've gone back to elevating it as, being a leggy Greyhound, he does find it a bit difficult to keep repetitively reaching down all the way to the floor.  Having the Hub elevated also seems to encourage him to actually engage with it rather than sprawling across all the buttons.  It makes it easier for him to approach/retreat as when he is too close (like when he was lying down next to it), he would have difficulty seeing around his nose to actually observe which lights were illuminating.

The Importance of a Well-Rounded Diet

We're still on a bit of a learning curve with operating the Hub.  Today we have confirmed that Ricky's square kibble (Royal Canin Mobility Support) on the right of the photo above doesn't appear to agree with the Hub's food pod dispensing mechanism, resulting in confusion on the part of the machine and frustration on the part of Ricky when it stalls.  We did have some stalling issues early-on when I first tried using this kibble in the Hub, but had thought it was related to our internet connection at the time so when it came time to refill it, we tried the squares again.  It worked fluidly for a little while, but reasonably quickly was back to stalling.  The R/C food also has a lovely tumeric coating, which probably makes it a bit more sticky moving through the food pod.  So we'll be staying with round kibble without sticky coatings and see how that goes rather than persisting with trying the "square peg in a round hole" approach.  At the moment we're using some of Kate's Hill's B/D (on the left in the photo above), but I will also be trying some Hill's J/D as it would have more specific benefit for his joint and heart disease.

*Update from the lovely customer service staff--they have confirmed that the size limit for kibble is 18mm in largest dimension.  The Mobility Support would meet this (15mm on the diagonal), however, I reckon that the size which is approaching machine limit combined with the blocky shape and the stickiness of the tumeric coating do make this food more difficult for the machine to work with.  Fortunately our Hill's J/D appears to be working just fine in the Hub this morning.  It is only approximately 10mm in largest dimension, and a normal round shape without a sticky coating.

Ricky found a short-cut!  Leave it to him to sort out the most low-energy and lazy way to play the current game level--lie down contacting all the buttons!  Don't have to think or even have to move except to eat the bickies as they come around.