Boxes!

When I first got Pyg, he was done with crates. It's hard to blame him; after being uprooted from his comfortable life in Alabama (well, I assume it was comfortable- he was in a foster home), he was put in a crate on a small, loud, crowded plane. He then went to a crate in a car. And then onto another plane. 

By the time he'd arrived to my house, he'd spent the best part of 48 hours in a crate, and he said NO MORE. He turned his crate pan into confetti, moved it across the room, and then pulled a Houdini and somehow escaped from the crate without destroying. Seriously. I still have no idea how he got out. 

Well. That wouldn't do. I need my dogs to be crate trained. They need to ride in a crate in the car, be crated a dog shows, and will likely need to be crated if he's ever boarded or at the vet without me. 

I started simply, and fed him all his meals in his crate with the door open. We did this for quite awhile. I waited until he was running to his crate voluntarily, and then did it longer. I probably spent two months on this stage. 

Next, I closed the door, but opened it immediately after he was done. At this point, I introduced him to the concept of waiting until he was released. I taught this the way Susan Garrett does in her Crate Games DVD: if he moved towards the door, I shut it immediately. I'd open the door again, and if he waited even a second, I'd give him his release cue. 

Gradually, I lengthened the amount of time he had to wait for his release. There were like two times that he self-released, and promptly chased him down, picked him up, and put him back in his crate. I didn't yell or hit him, but it still made an impression. He doesn't self-release anymore, even if Maisy is released first, or if I walk away. It's probably time to up the ante a bit and leave the room.

We are now working on the amount of time he stays in his crate after he finishes eating. In the mornings, he'll be quiet for about 45 minutes before making some pathetic whines. At night, after playing all evening with Napi, he's tired and just falls asleep and will stay there a few hours until I let him out. He's also comfortable and quiet in the car crate while I'm driving, but gets a bit noisy when we stop. I've started introducing the concept of staying in the crate while I pump gas or run back in the house to grab something. 

Anyway, here's a video I took a few months back (and then promptly forgot). 

My favorite part of the video is how it looks like I'm not wearing pants.  

Puppies: Proving I Suck at Potty Training Since 2007

Sometimes I meet people who tell me that they can potty train any dog in a weekend. I'm never quite sure how to respond to them, but I'm pretty sure it's a mixture of wanting to yell “BULLSHIT” and “SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY” because I suck at potty training dogs. I'm not sure why this is; the concept is simple enough. Take the dog out on a regular schedule, watch them like a hawk in between times, and confine them when you can't.

Either both of my dogs are difficult to potty train or I suck at this whole thing. With Maisy, born in a puppy mill and then lived in a small cage at a pet store until I found her at about 14 weeks, it made sense. She had always just squatted and gone where she was.

Pyg, though, lived in a foster home for a good six months. He likely had some potty training before I got him. Even so, I'm finding myself struggling with him, too. I know part of it is that it's December in Minnesota (read: cold), and I just don't want to bundle up and go out regularly. And I'm clearly not very good at supervising him.

"Just wait until I figure out how to open this window, Squirrel."

A big part of this is Pyg's absolute determination that he will not be confined. Perhaps I should have named him Houdini, because he is an escape artist. The first day I had him, he scaled a four-foot tall x-pen. Then, he went through three baby gates, which had been placed floor to ceiling in the kitchen doorway. I would have loved to have seen that.

Crating worked for awhile, but two weeks ago he figured out how to get out of a wire crate. I'm not entirely sure how he did it; the door was tightly latched, all the bars remained straight, and it was not otherwise destroyed or popped apart. I assume he slithered out somehow, but until I can get him reliably crate trained (a work in progress), he is now left loose in the house, complicating the potty training.

I know this too shall pass. Maisy, impossible as I found her potty training to be, now has a bladder of steel. She rarely has accidents, even when she's got a UTI. I can potty train a dog. I can. But until that happens with Pyg, I'm grateful for belly bands, maxi pads, and my steam cleaner.

Training Tuesday

I want to play the relaxation game, Mom!

If you won't set up the crate, I'll figure out how to get in myself!

Relaxation Protocol
Maisy and I continue to work on the Relaxation Protocol. Although I haven’t been quite as consistent about it as before, we’re still doing it several times a week. Our progress has slowed down a lot, though: we’re still on Day 5. This is a hard one, especially the task where the dog remains calm while you walk to an entrance and touch the door knob. For the first three days, Maisy stood on her hind legs to peek out the top of the crate when I touched it. I celebrated mightily the day she finally remained lying down.

Despite the fact that she’s remaining lying down for the duration of the day’s protocol, she still doesn’t seem relaxed. Well, to be fair, she never really seems relaxed, but she isn’t even faking it right now, either: she’s not lying her chin on the ground, she’s not rolling onto her hip, and she’s not taking the treats gently. My big question right now is whether we should continue on the tasks of Day 5, or if we should work on an easier, earlier day for a bit… any thoughts from those experienced with the protocol?

Crate Duration
The lack of relaxation during the protocol seems to be carrying over to the crate duration exercises. While we had been making rapid progress for awhile, we’ve currently stalled out. I do want relaxed behavior, not just patience. Currently, we’re working on 15 minutes’ duration, with a treat at every three minutes, but I think I need to either cut back on the duration, or increase the treats. Or both.

Poke!
Well, Maisy definitely understands the poke behavior, but it’s coming out sideways and backwards. I should have seen that coming, I guess.

Last week, we were in the waiting room of the vet clinic when two large dogs suddenly came through the doorway. This surprise caused Maisy to lunge at them, growling and barking for a good 10 to 15 seconds. Although it’s rare that she actually goes over threshold, she did this day. Anyway, during the middle of this reactive episode, she suddenly rushed back over to me, poked me very hard, and then rushed back to bark once or twice more.

I guess that’s progress?

Treibball
The other main thing we’ve been working on for the last couple of weeks is Treibball, which is a relatively new sport in which the dog herds large balls into a goal. Since Maisy’s heritage includes a herding breed, I was excited when I learned of a way she could use her natural instincts despite my lack of livestock. Even better, I’m taking a Sunday morning class with someone interested in Treibball, too!

This week, we’ve been working on the first step: sending Maisy to a target, where she automatically lies down. It’s going well so far, and she’s figured out what I want her to do. Now I need to start adding in distance. I’d like to be able to send her to a target 10-20 feet away in the next two weeks, but I’m not sure I have that kind of space in my house.

Training Tuesday: Update on the Relaxation Protocol and Other Foundation Tasks

Malcolm continues to "help" me do the Relaxation Protocol.

Despite the boringness of this whole relaxation thing, Maisy and I continue to plug away at it. Please note, dear readers, this should not be construed necessarily as “dedication” so much as “sheer stubbornness.” At any rate, I’m pleased with the progress we’re making. We’re also working on a few other tasks, and I thought I’d take the opportunity to update on those, as well.

The Relaxation Protocol
We’re doing well with the Relaxation Protocol. Although it’s still boring, we’ve been working on it for about a month now, which means it’s becoming more of a routine and less of a chore. Although I still don’t get it done every day, I manage most nights, and Maisy seems to enjoy it. If it starts to get late, she’ll whine and nudge at the travel crate, as though to remind me we haven’t done it yet. I must admit, this helps motivate me.

Last night, we did Day 5 for the first time. There is a definite pattern in our work- the first time we start a new “day,” she’s worried and a bit anxious. She won’t remain lying down, and she gets a bit frantic when she takes treats. However, I’ve noticed that we’ve needed to spend fewer sessions on each day before she relaxes for the duration of the exercise. While we had to spend seven sessions on Day 2, we did five sessions for Day 3, and only four sessions for Day 4. (We only needed to do Day 1 once, but that doesn’t really count as we’ve done that one a lot here and there over the past year.)

I repeat each day until Maisy seems calm, relaxed, and even a little bored. For Maisy, I’m looking for the following things: to remain lying down for the duration of the exercise, to roll over on to a hip instead of being in an “alert” down, to periodically rest her chin on the floor, to have sleepy or droopy eyes, to quit making eye contact with me, and to take the treats with a soft or “lazy” mouth. I find the eye contact to be an important indicator, as it lets me know that Maisy is switching from “working” mode to relaxation. Similarly, the way she takes treats tells me a lot; snatching the treats indicates higher levels of arousal.

Although I’m not sure yet, I think she’s beginning to figure out that even when the tasks change, she can still relax. It used to be that during the first session of a new day, she would remain anxious for the whole session, but yesterday, she seemed to calmer by the end. For example, one of the tasks for Day 5 is to walk to an entrance and touch the doorknob, an action which is done three times. Maisy found this unsettling, and every time she heard me touch it, she would stand up on her hind legs and peer out the top of her crate. The first time this happened, after I returned, she remained standing until I finally cued her to lie down twenty seconds later. The last time, though, she offered a down shortly after I returned.

Crate Duration
Another thing we’re working on is lying calmly in her crate for longer durations without the distractions of the relaxation protocol. I started out with a duration of five minutes, giving her a treat every 30 seconds. We slowly stretched out the length of time between treats, and got up to five full minutes with a treat only at the end! I was pretty excited about this, because that’s a long time lie still for a dog like Maisy.

Just like the Relaxation Protocol, she’s been needing fewer repetitions of each stage before we can increase the difficulty. We spent four sessions with a treat every 30 seconds, and another four sessions with a treat every 45 seconds. After that, though, I was able to spend only two sessions on the intervals of 60 seconds, 90 seconds, and two minutes, and she only needed one session each for the intervals of three minutes, four minutes and five minutes!

Last night, I increased the duration from five minutes to ten minutes. Since I made the duration longer, I reduced the length of time she needs to wait for a treat from five minutes back down to two, but I should be able to work up to five again quite quickly. Ultimately, I’m working towards one hour of calm crate time with a treat every five minutes.

Poke!
“Poke” is my either awesome-or-crazy strategy to teach Maisy a new way to get my attention. I’m hoping she’ll learn to poke at me instead of lunging at another dog when she’s feeling stressed. It’s going well. I started out by transferring a hand target to my leg, then worked on it while I was sitting, standing and lying down. Once she was reliably poking my legs, I added the cue, and then started working in different rooms around the house. She’s poking on cue about 90% of the time, even when interspersed with other known cues like sit. Last night, we started working on poke outside. Although she was confused at first, she figured it out pretty quickly.

Reorienting
The last major thing we’ve been working on is reorienting. We’ve mostly worked on it while going through the fence gates in or out of our yard. The back gate is easier, and the reorienting is almost automatic there, although she’s a bit quicker going into the yard than when leaving it. The front gate is a bit harder because there was a bunny outside that gate one time a few months ago. Ever since that, she scans for the bunny every time we walk through. Still, she’s reorienting quicker every time, and last night she only looked for the bunny for three or four seconds before she turned back to me. I’m going to need to transfer it over to other locations soon (the car, the training center, etc.).


Overall, I’m very pleased with this focus on foundation work. Maisy is really doing a great job at learning to relax- no easy task! I’m hopeful that this is the piece we’ve been missing.

Training Tuesday: The “Good Lord Why Did I Decide to Do This?” Edition

Maisy and Malcolm doing the relaxation protocol.

It has been two weeks since I instituted the “no more trials until I finish the relaxation protocol” rule, and as predicted, I’m hating myself already. (Actually, I started hating myself a week ago, but whatever.) Thankfully, I posted it quite publicly, and enough of my real life friends read this that I know I won’t be able to gracefully back out. This is good, because holy cow, this crap is boring. BORING.

It’s also working, thank god, because I don’t think I could sustain the motivation needed to get through this tedium if I wasn’t seeing glimmers of progress.

First and foremost, let it be known that the relaxation protocol, while challenging for the dog under any circumstance, is even more difficult when there are cats involved. Obnoxious, nosy, food-obsessed, den-loving, clicker-trained cats. In other words: they are constantly right there when the clicker, treats and/or crate comes out. Unfortunately, Maisy has a bit of a problem with resource guarding when it comes to the cats. This, combined with the fact that Maisy has self-appointed herself as the resident kitty cop, means that it can be very, very difficult to convince her to relax when they’re around. Which they are. Constantly.

While they slow the process down, their presence is a huge help. For one thing, they make an excellent distraction, though not as intense as what we might encounter at a trial. Beyond that, Maisy has a long history of rushing the cats and bowling them over, so when she is able to control those impulses around the kitties, I know we’re on the right track.

In fact, it was just one of those moments last week that helped me know that she’s making progress. During one session, one of the kitties did something that Maisy has decided is naughty, something that she would usually discipline them for. Her entire body tensed up, and she raised herself just slightly from the ground. But then she stopped herself, evidently thought about it, and quickly lowered herself back down. She wasn’t relaxed, exactly, but neither was she reacting mindlessly!

I’ll admit, I’ve been a bit lazy with it all. I just can’t bring myself to do it every day. We’ve done it 9 times over the last 14 days. It’s not perfect, but that’s not embarrassing, either. We advanced to day three in the relaxation protocol on our last session, although that session was a little rough. If the next one is as bad (she had a hard time staying in a down, although a sit isn’t really the end of the world), we’ll drop back down to day two for a bit. I’m also working on duration in the crate, and she’s currently managing quite well with a treat once every 60 seconds over the course of five minutes.

I could probably push her further faster, but I want to build this foundation strongly and carefully. As a result, I’m spending several sessions on each step, waiting until I see her relaxed before I move on. Some of the things I’m looking for includes being rolled on to one hip, rather than in a sphinx down, resting her chin on the ground, and taking treats softly instead of grabbing them roughly.

For her part, Maisy is loving this. She’s inside the crate before I can even get it fully set up. When I call her out, she jumps back in before I can break it down again. And every night, at about the time we do the protocol, she starts to whine and poke at the folded-up crate with her nose, all while looking at me hopefully.

Speaking of poking things with her nose, I think that my possibly hare-brained scheme, is working. It was quite easy to shape her to touch my leg, although she tends to think the proper location is in the left kneecap. That’s fine, really, and maybe even better than doing it anywhere else. After all, this way she’ll have to turn away from whatever’s bugging her in order to poke me there. It was a bit more work to convince her that she could poke me when I’m standing, too, but she figured that out.

Right now I’m in the process of assigning a verbal cue to the behavior. She’s got it about half the time, and once it’s a bit more solid, I’ll start cuing that behavior when she’s whining to get my attention. On one occasion, she did use the nose poke to communicate that she wanted something from me (a rawhide), so I think this could work. I must admit, I’m really excited about the possibility of reducing some of her whininess, although I’m aware that the poking could become even more annoying. I hope I don’t regret this!

Anyway, overall I’m very pleased with the progress she’s making. It’s slow, but I’m hoping that as she understands it better, we’ll be able to pick up the back a bit. I hope so, anyway, because at our current rate of progress, this will take six months otherwise! Although that sounds like forever, I know that the time investment will be worth it. I’ll keep you guys updated, of course!

CU Seminar: Crate Time

Photo by Robin Sallie.

In my last entry, I laid out a plan for teaching Maisy how to get my attention. In the comments, Laura (rightly so) questioned the wisdom of this. Do I really want to teach Maisy to be pushy? Wouldn’t it be better to teach her impulse control? I know this sounds contradictory, but the answer to both questions is yes.

See, the truth is, Maisy already has a “demand behavior.” She’s barking, growling and lunging at other dogs in an effort to get my attention. And let’s face it: it works. No matter how hard I try, I can’t completely ignore it. It’s also embarrassing, and if she’s going to persist in being obnoxiously pushy, she might as well do it in a quieter, more socially acceptable way.

Beyond that, though, I really believe that she needs a way to alert me to her needs. We already have one way in the Look at That game, which Maisy only initiates when she’s feeling anxious about something, but she needs something she can do when I’m not looking at her. While teaching her a demand behavior may backfire (and knowing this dog, it’s quite possible!), I think there is enough potential value that it’s worth the risk.

Still, I don’t exactly want a pushy dog, either. And I certainly don’t want her to be dependent on me for all her needs. My ultimate goal is to help her become confident enough to relax in the face of stress without any intervention on my behalf. Which leads me to the second (and probably more important) thing I got out of the CU seminar: creating a plan to help Maisy learn how to relax.

I already knew this was important- after all, part of the problems we’ve had at trials is waiting for our turn. I really wanted Maisy to have a safe space where she could relax, but I didn’t know how to create this for her. While a crate seemed like the ideal choice, Maisy often became reluctant to go near it after a few hours at a trial site. I experimented with using her mat as a safe space instead, but this was problematic, too. Without the solid barriers that a crate can offer, the visual stimulation became too much for her, and she often seemed more stressed by the end of the day than when she’d been in the crate.

I knew that I needed to build enough value for her crate that she’d happily hang out in there, so we began playing Crate Games. As a result, Maisy is comfortable in her crate at home, but we’ve still struggled with being calm in her crate in other places. Luckily, the seminar provided exactly the opportunity we needed: 10 hours in a new, yet relatively low-stress, environment so we could practice.

At first, Maisy seemed uncomfortable. She shifted positions a lot, peeked out the top, and just generally had difficulty relaxing. I tossed a treat in her crate every 20-30 seconds or so, and dropped in a handful of treats every time she lay down. Soon, she was lying there quietly, rolled on to one hip with her chin on the ground, and I was able to gradually lengthen the time up to two minutes between treats.

The seminar provided the jumpstart we needed, because by the end of the weekend, I had a crate junkie. More importantly, it helped me turn my goal of “help Maisy be more comfortable in her crate” into a fully formed plan. Here’s what it looks like:

First and foremost, do the Relaxation Protocol from start to finish. Although Maisy and I have played with it from time to time, we’ve never completed all fifteen days, mostly because it’s mind-numbingly boring. Still, Alexa encouraged all of us seminar attendees to do it with our dogs. I’m modifying it slightly; we’ll do it lying instead of sitting, and in her crate instead of on a mat.

Next, we need to continue to build duration. I’ve created a schedule which starts with Maisy lying quietly in her crate for a duration of five minutes, receiving a treat every 30 seconds, and ending 42 steps later with a duration of an hour, with treats every five minutes. I’ll repeat each step with her until she is relaxed before moving on to the next step. Once we’ve completed the entire process, we’ll take it on the road, first at training class, then to a local obedience club, and finally, as the ultimate test, we’ll go to run-throughs or trials that allow unentered dogs on site.

Finally, I’ll incorporate impulse control and off-switch games with her crate. I’ll talk more about how to do this in the future- Alexa spent a fair amount of time on both, and I think it’s important enough information to dedicate an entire post to the subject- but suffice it to say, the entire program ought to teach Maisy how to relax in her crate even when she’s aroused or distracted.

Since all of these things are incredibly important, but not terribly exciting to do, I’ve decided that I’m going to retire Maisy from competition until we've done this. Returning to trialing is dependent upon both completing the entire relaxation protocol, and the real world test of laying quietly in her crate in a new environment for an entire hour, with treats no more often than once every five minutes.

I know that this is going to be boring, and you all can expect a whiny post from me in a week or two about how this is the dumbest idea I’ve ever had. When that happens, remind me that the result is going to be awesome, okay? Because I really think that this is one of the biggest things missing in Maisy’s foundation. Boring or not, I really believe this is the change we’ve needed, and I’m excited to see it.