[QUOTE=Wyrekin;2655812]I'll give you a bit of background on Malcolm that my help explain his behaviour better. Malcolm ended up in rescue at a young age p, somewhere up to a year old. He was neutered prior to coming to rescue so has never fully matured. Malcolm was severely collar shy. From the behaviours I have seen him exhibit on having his collar touched or neck area touched I have concluded that in his previous home he was regularly scruffed and beaten round the head. I say this because the two times I have had to catch him to stop him going somewhere (my dad left the front door open...) he has immediately sat down and thrashed his head from side to side with his eyes shut. The first time it happened he wet himself and because his tail was so far tucked under his belly he got it all over that as well. It was really horrible to see. In rescue he struggled to cope and spent 6 months in their care. They did everything the could with him to try to get him to relax but he was so stressed by the sounds of the other dogs barking he'd scream at them. They worked on his collar shyness and when I first met him he allowed my to stroke him and touch his collar but he was clearly unnerved by this. The result is that I took on an under socialised, abused, stressed out dog that I'm pretty sure would have gone mad if I hadn't walked in to those kennels and rescued him.
On to your response. I have taught Malcolm to pay attention to me but as he spent his first year or so not receiving any form of formal training expect a beating it's a slow process. He firstly had to be taught that training is fun and just that training is all about give and take. The rescue got some basic commands in him but because he hated his kennel so much he used to run to the other side of the paddocks the minute he realised they were taking him back.
One of the first things I did with Malcolm was make use of his love of tennis balls, he's not particularly food motivated so I sought an alternative. Malcolm loves to play fetch. In the rescue the used to stick him on a long line and throw one ball one way wait for him to come most of the way back and throw the other ball the other way, then go and retrieve the first ball. His toy manners were atrocious when I got him. My first step was to teach him that in order to get the tennis ball thrown he had to work for it. I used a longline and two tennis balls at first and I introduced him to the rule that if he wanted the ball thrown he had to come right back to me, sit and let me put my hand in his collar. This taught him several things in one go :
1. If you want something you have to look to me to get it.
2. Hands in collars result in nice things like playing fetch.
3. If you don't do what you are told you don't get the toy.
Now I'm not going to lie and say it was all plain sailing, when I first tried him off the long line in the paddock he knew and made damn sure I couldn't get close enough to him. This was made more difficult by the fact that he had a tennis ball so why did he need to one I had? I also learnt early on that if I even touched the lead he'd been gone and wouldn't come within 10ft of me. I managed this behaviour by putting him on the lead at random intervals on our walks so that he learnt the lead didn't signify the end of the walk but just another stage within it (this solved the bolting away from the lead that you mentioned in your post)
You are correct that I admit to not having a reliable recall on Malcolm and to be perfectly honest part of that is down to my laziness. I took him on at the beginning of winter so his walks primarily take place before and after work which at this time of year is in the dark and as a result I have got into a rut of going out to the fields where I work letting him off and playing fetch rather than working on any really training. However the example you gave of him running towards a busy road and failing to respond should never become an issue as I would never have him off lead near a busy road even if I felt he had reliable recall. By keeping on the lead and preventing the behaviour I am in some ways training it out of him as I am not giving him the opportunity to practice running off and when I do call him if he doesn't comeback I can real him in on his longline and make him come back. He still gets a treat if he has to be reeled in but he gets a really boring one in comparison to a spot on recall. This is the only real 'correction' he receives by with holding the best stuff for when he works really hard.
Malcolm's recall is already significantly better than it was when I got him as he will atleast now return to my feet and allow the lead to be put on instead of standing far enough away to evade capture. I am now at the point where I can really work on his recall but I had to overcome the other obstacles such as the collar shyness before I could even contemplate working on it with him.
Your high drive dog sounds desperate to work for you but I have to question what her motivation was for going back in to the water to retrieve that dummy? Had you used a shock collar on her? Was her desire to go back in the water part of her high drive or in fact a desperate need to avoid the shock she expected upon not completing a command?
Bandit loves to work for me (I raised him myself from 7 weeks old). He'll do anything asked of him straight away, no questions asked and he looks so happy the entire time he's doing it, it's a delight to see. He has been trained by consistency and rewards. He was clicker trained from the start and any behaviours he offered freely were marked and rewarded, such as walking to heel off lead. I now have a dog who is confident in any situation, desperate to please but he has never felt physical pain caused deliberately by a human being. He learns quicker than the abused dogs I have cared for as he has no fear of learning, the worst that's going to happen is he doesn't get his reward, so he can concentrate on the task at hand.
The case of the shock collar on the back of the neck of the gentleman I think boils down to him being taken by surprise. He had no time to register what was happening before he got shocked. It could as you say have been a faulty one or it could be that they turned it up I cannot say but I do not feel this is the case.
I have to admit the anecdote about the man with the e-collar in his lap made me wince and chuckle at the same time![/QUOTE
The dog which suffered the heart attack in the incident I described was after a bird, not a bumper. We were hunting, not training.
C'mon now Wryekin, do you
honestly think there is
any human-applied force that could induce a dying (actually dead, for all intents and purposes) dog to do what this one did??? Really??? Did you not grasp the seriousness of her condition?? Her entire mouth was
black, not blue or gray but
black, and she was not breathing when I reached her. This was a dog which, as a youngster with very little training (read no force or commands involved), was separated from her quarry by a barbed wire fence, and did not even
consider going around it, that would have taken her off target; no, her solution was to repeatedly bash the wire straight on and as hard as she could until she
broke the lower strand, and laid her shoulder open in the process; which, by the way, she never even noticed until it was being stitched up at the vet.
My dog was not desperate in any sense of the word, and certainly did not rise from the dead out of a "desperate need" to work for
me; nor was there a "desperate need" to avoid a shock, she had never had the collar on. (The only shock that would have been useful in this situation might have one from a defib machine, but I didn't happen to have one on me). I never gave her a command to retrieve, and to even suggest that I did is just silly, and a bit insulting; hell woman, I tried to
stop her, and could not hold onto her because I was a bit feeble from my swim out to get her when she went down - in ice water - in January - in upstate NY.
Retrieve drive has it's basis in food-gathering, the dog is working for
itself at the most elemental level. Ember was responding to her
genetic drive, which, in combination with a high pain threshhold and an adrenalin surge, enabled her to block the pain and shock long enough to heed a drive that was just as strong in her as the drive to eat or breathe. It is difficult for people with no experience training and working high-drive dogs to comprehend how the drive affects the animal, and they can't even begin to imagine how drive helps a dog do things that seem impossible, and how it can help a dog
learn. Everyone who is at all interested in the impact of genetics on behavior and training should avail themselves of the opportunity to at least observe such a dog in action.
I will respond to the rest of your post when I have more time. I apologize if this post seems to be overly emphatic, but this is not a pleasant incident to relive, even tho in retrospect it was pretty awe-inspiring.