Pat Miller Blog

A MOUSE BAIT MISHAP, A CHALLENGING BEHAVIOR CASE AND OUR INSTRUCTOR ACADEMY

Mouse Bait Mishap

We use mouse bait to control rodents in our barn. Mice and rats can overrun a horse barn where grain is abundant and easily accessed. Our feral cats do a good job of rodent control in our lower hay barn, but they don’t come up to the horse barn – too many humans around! My husband has always been very careful to set the bait out in enclosed containers (with an opening just large enough for mice to enter) so the dogs can’t get to it. The brand we use is called Tomcat BAIT CHUNX, and the active ingredient is Diphacinone – an anticoagulant which causes internal bleeding. Not nice, I know, but neither were the mouse traps we had been using. I hated when I found a trap that had been tripped and the…

Aggression Academy – Not So Much... and That's Okay!

It was the Aggression Academy that really wasn’t. It can be challenging to find the right dogs for this academy. We want dogs who have demonstrated some aggressive behavior, but we don’t want Cujos, as we want everyone to be safe. We also cannot work with dogs who are significantly reactive to humans or other dogs, as that behavior is too hard to manage in the academy environment. So, we generally look for dogs with arousal biting, resource guarding, husbandry issues, and mild fear-related aggression. Several of the dogs who came for this academy ended up not really presenting with the behaviors they were reported to have, but that was okay – we still found plenty to work on.

For this academy two students brought their own dogs. These were:

Heidi Moreau’s Autumn, an 11-year-old spayed female Staffordshire Terrier/Bull Dog cross…

3 CHALLENGING AGGRESSION CASES – PHEW!!! AND - AGGRESSION ACADEMY THIS WEEK…

I am up to my neck in our Aggression Academy this week (more about that next week), so this one is going to be shorter than normal – but I wanted to share with you my three very challenging behavior cases from last week.

Three Challenging Cases

These were all breeds of dogs and levels of aggression I don’t see often – a Shiba Inu with fear-related aggression, a Catahoula/Dane mix with generalized anxiety and fear-related aggression, and two German Shepherd siblings with stress-related intra-family aggression. Yes, aggression is cause by stress, and “fear-related” is the most common presentation of aggressive behavior.

Eric, the 3-Year-Old Catahoula/Dane mix

THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME!!!

Shaping workshops are always great fun, and this one was no exception! We started with six dogs and handlers and one auditor – but one dog went home early because he found the environment too stressful. The remaining five pairs explored lots of new behaviors and had a ton of fun.

What is Shaping?

“Shaping” means breaking a behavior down into small pieces and starting with the first bits, reinforcing successive approximations (steps) until you have built the whole behavior. It is a great way to teach complex behaviors as well as simple ones. It works best if you actually sit down and write out your whole shaping plan before you begin, so you know what small behaviors you are looking to reinforce. If you’ve never tried it – and if you’re not using it in your training programs, I strongly suggest you give…