Dawggery

27/01/2024

22/11/2023

I know many of you have seen as Ji poured her heart and soul into creating many spaces for learning, growth, and mutual support in the dog world. She's been the go-to person for solutions and a dependable friend that many rely on.

Now we have a chance to give back in a small way that can make a big difference to her—we can help her get her book started on the right foot.

She priced it to start at only $2.99 so we can all get a copy. If even half of us took a couple of minutes to spend less than a Starbucks to help her it would really help amazon start showing her book to others.

So a little bit from us can really go a long way if we all grabbed the book—which by the way will really help you improve your relationship with your own dogs.

Let’s all show our support. Grab a copy, share it with your friends, and let's make her book launch a great success.

Thank you, Ji, for everything you've done for us and this would be a great way to say thank you to her. We're here for you now, just as you've always been here for us. 🐾💕

https://www.amazon.com/Cracking-Canine-Code-Unleashing-Language-ebook/dp/B0CLTPBD7W/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=2KTDG5N69GY1V&keywords=cracking+canine+code&qid=1700624696&sprefix=ceqcking+canine+code%2Caps%2C140&sr=8-1

Ji Khalsa

Cracking the Canine Code: Unleashing the Secrets of Your Dog's Body Language

28/06/2023

If anyone is interested in learning more about pet food labels, there's a webinar with an industry insider.
It's tomorrow night (Thursday June 29) at 7 central Message me for details.

10/06/2023

Wow look at this.it’s an amazing book.

05/06/2023

09/02/2023

https://www.avma.org/news/fda-end-updates-dilated-cardiomyopathy-and-grain-free-dog-food?fbclid=IwAR2_Gx7fB7rzdsWFuvotb-gcfoO7utpXP0cBJLMzs8Inz0wE_6sW1iT2nBE

The Food and Drug Administration plans to end routine updates on the investigation of case reports of nonhereditary canine dilated cardiomyopathy and of certain dog foods and ingredients.

31/01/2023

If you have ever been curious about the products I use and love, now is the time to try them.
Treat your pets to something delicious and healthy and get 50% off EVERYTHING plus our Happiness Guarantee.
bit.ly/3GUC5y6

21/01/2023

These cubs at Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in China are dropping, flopping and rolling their way into our hearts.

03/02/2022

Sometimes you just have to do what brings you joy.

27/01/2022

17/11/2021

Apparently the cycle is 400 years

15/11/2021

Perks of being a country dog

02/09/2021

This is great equipment. The leashes are amazing and custom made for you.

12/06/2021

When your hot you need relief.

04/06/2021

A reminder for me

29/03/2021

Well there’s another dog food recall. Check and see if you are using any of these.

March 27, 2021 — Midwestern Pet Foods of Evansville, Indiana is recalling multiple brands of dog and cat food because they have the potential to be contaminated with disease-causing Salmonella bacteria.

What’s Recalled?

Recalled products include specific lots of CanineX, Earthborn Holistic, Venture, Unrefined, Sportmix Wholesomes, Pro Pac, Pro Pac Ultimates, Sportstrail, Sportmix and Meridian produced at its production facility in Monmouth, Illinois.

22/02/2021

Made these for my dogs and cats. Snickerdoodles. Smelled better than the ones I make for people.

20/02/2021

THEY INVENTED ANIMAL TRAINING
Who invented animal training and what can we learn from them?
The question may seem silly. Animal training is older than the hills. For certain, it is as old as the dog.
That said, most of what we call animal training today fits into the folder of "operant conditioning," a term first coined by American psychologist B.F. Skinner in the early 1930s.
Chase it around the room, and operant conditioning is simply learning from consequences.
Skinner codified the basic principals of operant conditioning, and he invented a laboratory-based mechanical-training machine which rewarded animals with food when they pulled levers and pecked at spots.
Skinner's real claim to fame in the world of dogs, however, is that he hired Keller and Marian Breland -- two young assistants who more or less invented the modern art of animal training.
▪️Teaching Pigeons to Bowl▪️
The Breland's made their first big discovery while working with Skinner in 1943.
As odd as it sounds, the goal on this occasion was to train pigeons to "bowl" a ping-pong ball down a short alley to knock down a few pins. Keller Breland decided to use a hand-held switch to trigger a food reward, rather than a purely mechanical device. A small problem was that the pigeons had no interest in pecking at the ping-pong ball! Though Keller waited for hours for the right behavior to express itself, it never happened. In frustration, Keller decided to give the pigeons a reward for doing anything approximating movement in the right direction. To his amazement, the pigeons caught on pretty quickly, and the completed trick was learned in short order.
Thus was born "shaping," or progressive rewards based on approximating a task.
The second big development occurred in 1945. By this time, B. F. Skinner had left the University of Minnesota, and the Brelands had decided to strike out on their own as professional animal trainers.
While shaping tricks, the Brelands noticed that the animals themselves seemed to be paying attention to the noises made by the hand-held food-reward switches.
Keller and Marian Breland soon discovered that an acoustic secondary enforcer, such as a click or whistle, could communicate to an animal the precise action being rewarded, and it could do so from a distance.
The Brelands called this a "bridging stimulus," (now generally called a bridge) and it dramatically sped up animal training by increasing the amount of information going to an animal.
Thus was born clicker training.

The Rise of Commercial Animal Acts
By now the Brelands had created their own animal training company -- Animal Behavior Enterprises. Their first contract, with General Mills, was so successful that other contracts with movies, circuses, museums, fairs, and zoos soon followed.
Over the next several decades, the Brelands trained more than 15,000 animals representing more than 140 species. At one point, the Brelands had more than 1,000 animals under training at a single time -- a jaw-dropping level of production.
The Brelands did not just train animals; they also trained other animal trainers who went on to work at such venues as Busch Gardens, Disney World, and Sea World. The Brelands themselves signed contracts with such major amusement parks as Marineland of Florida, Marineland of the Pacific, Parrot Jungle, and Six Flags.
Rewards-based clicker training worked so well that in 1951, the Brelands authored an article in American Psychologist, in which they said they thought rewards-based clicker training might work on any animal to train just about anything.
And then something happened. They noticed that clicker training was, in certain circumstances, beginning to fail in ways they could no longer overlook.

When Clicker Training Failed
In a 1961 paper entitled, “The Misbehavior of Organisms,” Keller and Marian Breland described their first experience with the failure of reward-based operant conditioning.
It seems that when working with pigs, chickens and raccoons, the animals would often learn a trick and then begin to drift away from the learned behavior and towards more instinctive, unreinforced, foraging actions.
What was going on?
Put simply, instinct was raising its inconvenient head.
Though Skinner and his disciples had always maintained that performance was driven by external rewards or punishments, here was clear evidence that there was an internal code that could not always be ignored.
The Brelands wrote:
“These egregious failures came as a rather considerable shock to us, for there was nothing in our background in behaviorism to prepare us for such gross inabilities to predict and control the behavior of animals with which we had been working for years.... [T]he diagnosis of theory failure does not depend on subtle statistical interpretations or on semantic legerdemain - the animal simply does not do what he has been conditioned to do.”
The Brelands did not overstate the problem, nor did they quantify it. They simply stated a fact: instinct existed, and sometimes it bubbled up and over-rode trained behaviors.
Clearly, every species had different instincts, and just as clearly, a great deal of animal training could be done without ever triggering overpowering instinct. Still, the Brelands noted,
“After 14 years of continuous conditioning and observation of thousands of animals, it is our reluctant conclusion that the behavior of any species cannot be adequately understood, predicted, or controlled without knowledge of its instinctive patterns, evolutionary history, and ecological niche.”

The Problem with Dogs
What does this have to do with dogs?
Quite a lot. You see a small, but vocal and militant group of clicker trainers believe everything a dog does is learned by external rewards, and that internal drives are "old school" fiction.
While the Brelands argued that a species could not be adequately controlled without “knowledge of its instinctive patterns, evolutionary history, and ecological niche," the most extreme militants in the world of clicker training now seek to minimize and disavow the very nature and history of dogs.
Dog packs? There are no such things, we are told.
Dominance? It does not exist in feral dogs or in wolves, and never mind the experts who disagree.
Prey drive? Not too much said about that!
Of course, instinctive behaviors and drives do not disappear simply because they are inconvenient.
As Keller and Marian Breland put it,
“[A]lthough it was easy to banish the Instinctivists from the science during the Behavioristic Revolution, it was not possible to banish instinct so easily.”
Of course, one must be careful to qualify the role of instinct.
Yes, dogs have instincts, but the history of dog breeding has largely been about reducing instinctive drives. As a consequence, most breeds have instinctive drives that are sufficiently attenuated that they are not much of an impediment to basic rewards-based training.
That said, not all dog breeds are alike. Not every dog is a blank slate, as the owner of any herding dog or game-bred terrier will tell you. Prey drive does not disappear because you want it to. Many problematic behaviors in dogs -- especially behaviors in hard-wired working dogs that are being raised as pets -- are self-reinforcing behaviors that express themselves without any external reinforcement at all!
Clicker training, the Brelands remind us, cannot solve everything.
Is rewards-based training the most important tool in any trainer’s box of tricks and methods?
Absolutely. There is not much debate there.
But the Brelands remind us that dogs do not come to the trainer as a tabula rasa, nor should we think of all dog breeds as being more or less the same, or that all responses are equally conditionable to all stimuli.
Dogs and other animals, it turns out, are a bit more complicated that white rats, and the real world is not a laboratory.
In the wild and on the farm, animals have managed to learn, all by themselves, since the Dawn of Time and long before clickers came on the scene. How did they do that? Does the real world have as much to teach us as the lab? Keller and Marian Breland thought it did.
Terrierman

18/02/2021

The weather is horrible all over the country. I’d love to see images of your dogs outside.

16/02/2021

Dr. Grandin is an incredible person.
Her story is so inspiring.

https://www.varsitytutors.com/courses/star-temple-grandin/dp/c560adfb-deab-4779-9964-5e57b2008a28

Dr. Temple Grandin, diagnosed with autism as a child, talks about how her mind works—sharing her ability to "think in pictures," which helps her solve problems that neurotypical brains might miss.

15/02/2021

It's snowing all over and I live where there is no snow. Post pictures of your dogs in the snow. I miss watching all the fun they have.

14/02/2021

Great information a friend sent to me.

If you are cold outside then so is your dog?

The thought behind this statement is based in wanting to do the right thing but it comes from a lack of understanding. It’s too broad to be based in fact.

First off - dogs are not people. I know some folks have a hard time with this idea but they ain’t little people in dog suits. They are designed differently and can deal with things that we can’t. This is especially true of certain breeds. It’s actually much crueler to have these dogs in the South with our summers than our mild winters.

Next - it’s about whether your dog has been conditioned to live outside. If you have one that’s been inside his entire life and then you stick him outside in this kind of weather, that’s going to be a problem. If he’s used to being outside then this is a different story.

Dogs require three things to stay warm.
They need to be dry, out of the wind and enough calories to generate the body heat that they need to stay warm.

The question should be - are your outside animals protected from the weather?

Mine are. They have insulated dog houses that are warm, dry and out of the wind. The funny part is that many of them still spend a large part of their time outside and on top of their houses.

They also get double the calories this time of year vs the summer. This allows them the ability to burn extra to stay warm.

The bigger issue is keeping open water. Making sure they can get to enough water can be a problem. I feed dry most the year but I add water to their food in these kinds of weather situations to help keep them hydrated.

We also sell dog house heaters and water bucket heaters. I don’t use them myself (well not for the dogs but our tortoise has one) since our winters are generally mild.

The question needs to be about protection more than anything. Having outside dogs is a year round thing and giving them what they need all year is important. This is also true in the summer when it’s 100 degrees. They need cool shade and plenty of water. We run fans that time of the year and have multiple checks on them daily to make sure everyone is safe.

If you don’t have this kind of setup than you either need to get it or you need to provide protection for them in this kind of weather.

If you are not willing to do these things for them, then maybe you don’t need to have a dog. You might just not be worthy of that kind of relationship.

I’m sure some of you won’t like these statements and I’m ok with that. Keep in mind that I love my dogs much more than I like most people.
Steven Snell
Gun Dog Supply