Lee Charles Kelley is still going at it with his latest blog post, Three Forms of Dog Training.
Most people think there are only two types of training for pet dogs, dominance training and positive reinforcement. But there is actually a third form called drive training, which is far more effective than the other two.
In the current dog training marketplace drive training is the least understood and the least used with pet dogs, and yet it’s the most effective of the three. Plus it’s the method most often used to train working dogs: drug and bomb detection dogs, search-and-rescue dogs, military dogs, and police dogs.
So what is drive training, exactly, how does it work, and why isn’t it being more widely used for training pet dogs?
Before we get into that, let’s take a look at how all three methods evolved.
[read on...]
Then, in 1992 a new form of drive training was developed based on the laws of physics rather than the unscientific concepts of dominance or the somewhat semi-science of operant conditioning. This new method was created by former police and drug-enforcement dog trainer Kevin Behan.* His model—which he called Natural Dog Training—was based on the principles of flow and thermodynamics (among other things). In other words, it was based on physics.
[hmm...]
Saturday, March 28, 2020
Tuesday, March 10, 2020
Chaser the border collie
Many
owners struggle to teach their dogs to sit, fetch or even bark on
command, but John W. Pilley, a professor emeritus of psychology at
Wofford College, taught his Border collie to understand more than 1,000
nouns, a feat that earned them both worldwide recognition.
For
some time, Dr. Pilley had been conducting his own experiment teaching
dogs the names of objects and was inspired by Border collie farmers to
rethink his methods.
Dr. Pilley was given a black-and-white Border collie as a gift by his wife Sally.
[alternate paragraphs as printed in the Star Advertiser 7/28/19:
In 2004, Pilley started an experiment after reading about a dog named Rico who was taught to recognize over 200 items.
Pilley bought a black-and-white Border collie from a breeder near Spartanburg, S.C. He named the female puppy Chaser.]
[alternate paragraphs as printed in the Star Advertiser 7/28/19:
In 2004, Pilley started an experiment after reading about a dog named Rico who was taught to recognize over 200 items.
Pilley bought a black-and-white Border collie from a breeder near Spartanburg, S.C. He named the female puppy Chaser.]
For three years, Dr. Pilley trained the dog, named Chaser, four to five hours a day:
He showed her an object, said its name up to 40 times, then hid it and
asked her to find it. He used 800 cloth animal toys, 116 balls, 26
Frisbees and an assortment of plastic items to ultimately teach Chaser
1,022 nouns.
In 2013, Dr. Pilley published his findings that explained that Chaser was taught to understand sentences containing a prepositional object, verb and direct object.
Chaser died on Tuesday at 15. She had
been living with Dr. Pilley’s wife and their daughter Robin in
Spartanburg. Dr. Pilley died last year at 89.
Another daughter, Pilley Bianchi,
said on Saturday that Chaser had been in declining health in recent
weeks. “The vet really determined that she died of natural causes,” Ms. Bianchi said. “She went down very quickly.”
Ms.
Bianchi, who helped her father train Chaser, said the dog had been
undergoing acupuncture for arthritis but had no other known illnesses.
Ms. Bianchi said Chaser was buried in the backyard with the family’s other beloved dogs and with some of her father’s ashes.
“What
we would really like people to understand about Chaser is that she is
not unique,” Ms. Bianchi said. “It’s the way she was taught that is
unique. We believed that my father tapped into something that was very
simple: He taught Chaser a concept which he believed worked infinitely
greater than learning a hundred behaviors.”
Ms.
Bianchi said that her father’s experiment was “uncharted territory” in
animal cognition research, pointing to news media coverage calling
Chaser “the world’s smartest dog.”
“Her language learning is very high-level, powerful science,” she said.
Chaser understood that words have independent meaning and understood common nouns as well as proper nouns, Ms. Bianchi said.
If
Chaser had 30 balls, Ms. Bianchi said, she would be able to understand
each one by its proper-noun name and also as a part of a group of
objects. “She learned the theory of one to many and many to one, which
is learning one object could have many names and many names can apply to
one object or one person,” she said.
Greg
Nelson, a veterinarian at Central Veterinary Associates in Valley
Stream, N.Y., said humans were learning that animals have a deeper
understanding of the world around them.
“People
have always been under the belief that animals respond to commands
based on a rewards system,” he said. “Learn limited commands and tricks,
then get a treat.”
But “they do have a
language among themselves, spoken and unspoken,” he added. “And it’s
apparent that they can understand the human language probably in much
the same way as we learn a foreign language.”
Ms. Bianchi said that Hub City Animal Project, an organization dedicated to animal homelessness, sponsored a bronze statue of Chaser that will be placed outside the Children’s Museum of the Upstate in Spartanburg next year.
Dr.
Pilley’s footprints, also in bronze, will be placed beside the statue
of Chaser, and a portion of a street near the museum will be renamed
Chaser the Border Collie Boulevard, according to Ms. Bianchi.
Dr. Pilley told The New York Times
in 2014 that “the big lesson is to recognize that dogs are smarter than
we think, and given time, patience and enough enjoyable reinforcement,
we can teach them just about anything.”
Correction:
An
earlier version of this article misidentified John W. Pilley’s
occupation when he got Chaser, the Border collie. Dr. Pilley was a
professor emeritus of psychology at Wofford College, not a retired
psychiatrist. The article also misstated the name of the street near the
museum that will be renamed. It will be called Chaser the Border Collie
Boulevard, not Border Collie Avenue.
Sunday, March 1, 2020
Being a Dog Lover May Be in Your Genes
There may be a genetic explanation for why John Wick (played in the film series by Keanu Reeves) cared so much about his puppy that he embarked on a murderous rampage after a team of hit men killed the innocent pup.
OK, maybe not. But scientists did recently discover that people who love dogs may do so in part because of their DNA.
Prior studies have shown that exposure to dogs during childhood can shape a lasting affinity for canine companionship, but researchers wondered if genetic factors might play a role as well. To find out, they examined data from more than 85,000 twins in the Swedish Twin Registry — the world's biggest twin registry — searching for genetic clues that may be linked to dog ownership in adulthood. [10 Things You Didn't Know About Dogs]
For the new study, the scientists consulted copious twin data and 15 years of records on dog ownership. (Sweden requires all dogs to be officially registered with the Swedish Board of Agriculture, while pedigreed dogs may also be registered with the Swedish Kennel Club.) Of the 85,542 twins evaluated in the study, 8,503 people owned dogs.
The study authors then created computer models to identify patterns among the twins that could represent genetic influence or environmental impacts shaping a lifelong attachment to dogs. Researchers found that genetics were slightly more predictive of dog ownership in adulthood than environment; genetic contribution to dog ownership amounted to about 51% in men and around 57% in women.
"These findings are important as they suggest that supposed health benefits of owning a dog reported in some studies may be partly explained by different genetics of the people studied," study co-author Carri Westgarth, a lecturer in human-animal interaction at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.
For instance, scientists reported in 2017 that owning a dog could lower the risk of heart disease by providing people with emotional support and increasing exercise. However, the new findings hint that genetics could also partly explain physical and mental health trends in dog owners.
OK, maybe not. But scientists did recently discover that people who love dogs may do so in part because of their DNA.
Prior studies have shown that exposure to dogs during childhood can shape a lasting affinity for canine companionship, but researchers wondered if genetic factors might play a role as well. To find out, they examined data from more than 85,000 twins in the Swedish Twin Registry — the world's biggest twin registry — searching for genetic clues that may be linked to dog ownership in adulthood. [10 Things You Didn't Know About Dogs]
For the new study, the scientists consulted copious twin data and 15 years of records on dog ownership. (Sweden requires all dogs to be officially registered with the Swedish Board of Agriculture, while pedigreed dogs may also be registered with the Swedish Kennel Club.) Of the 85,542 twins evaluated in the study, 8,503 people owned dogs.
The study authors then created computer models to identify patterns among the twins that could represent genetic influence or environmental impacts shaping a lifelong attachment to dogs. Researchers found that genetics were slightly more predictive of dog ownership in adulthood than environment; genetic contribution to dog ownership amounted to about 51% in men and around 57% in women.
"These findings are important as they suggest that supposed health benefits of owning a dog reported in some studies may be partly explained by different genetics of the people studied," study co-author Carri Westgarth, a lecturer in human-animal interaction at the University of Liverpool in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.
For instance, scientists reported in 2017 that owning a dog could lower the risk of heart disease by providing people with emotional support and increasing exercise. However, the new findings hint that genetics could also partly explain physical and mental health trends in dog owners.
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