is it possible to get my dog to keep her tail a bit down and let the energy flow during the skijoring?

her tail is almost always all the way up when we do this.

so she is holding back, says the senior musher, and it looks as though you agree.

i would like to participate in a race with her and Freddie next week so it would be nice to get her to really run without holding back.

have any of you seen any studies etc, have any theories, is that a humane way to keep a dog ?

since i am working with sled dogs, and helping at a kennel, i would like to know more. the dogs i work with seem very happy…maybe this is the exception,,,

i just read some comments on the below web site, they do not seem to be very scientific…

http://www.helpsleddogs.org.

I read something interesting on Kevin’s blog yesterday (or the day before), about how nearly everyone who takes their first ride on a camel or elephant experiences motion sickness, but this doesn’t happen when riding a horse for the first time. Kevin’s reasoning is that this is because horses know how to adjust their movements to incorporate the rider’s center of gravity.

In thinking about that statement, and in working on a blog article of my own which will compare Cesar’s method of teaching a dog to heel, another, new example from the positive training field (linked below), and Kevin’s work with Laszlo, I realized that what’s missing from both the dominance and +R approach, and what’s now more clear to me about what Kevin does, is that dogs really do have an emotional center of gravity, as Kevin postulates. And when we teach them to heel using thoughtcentric models they have to figure out, on their own, how to match their forward momentum and energy with ours. But when we teach them using Natural Dog Training techniques, no matter how bad we are at it initially, if our goal is to teach the dog to be in-synch with us physically and emotionally (instead of by teaching them to respect our leadership, or by rewarding external behaviors only), at some point we’ll find that we’re creating a feeling in the dog of a shared center of gravity. In that respect, heeling not only feels natural to the dog. It feels really, really good.

This also reminded me of how I taught Freddie to heel years ago using techniques from Kevin’s book, where I put him in a high-energy state and found, somewhat clumsily, the invisible point in space where our emotional centers of gravity were aligned and locked together.

“Fine. So what?” Some might argue. “A heel is a heel. The dog learns it or he doesn’t.”

Well, a year or so after I taught Freddie to heel in this way, I was at an ad hoc dog run in my neighborhood (an asphalt basketball court behind a high school on Second Avenue) with Freddie and a Jack Russell terrier named Mack. At one point, it started to drizzle, and some kids in another part of the park started setting off firecrackers. Mack decided he’d like to go home, so he found a gap in the chain link fence, wriggled through, and started trotting up 68th Street toward Second Avenue. I’d been working on Mack’s recall but hadn’t perfected it yet. So I had no choice but to either let him wander into traffic and get run over or to go after him.

I couldn’t wriggle through the fence the way he did, though. In order to get out of there, I had to go the opposite direction. I ran toward the gate and called Freddie in an excited tone, but didn’t waste any time putting his leash on. I just ran and he ran with me.

We crossed 68th Street together and ran toward Second. I was scanning the sidewalk, looking for any traces of Mack, though I couldn’t see him; he’d already turned the corner at the end of the block. Then I finally looked down and saw that Freddie was running right next to me, in perfect synch with my gait, and had been gazing directly up at me the whole time. I hadn’t commanded him to heel. The only thing I’d done was to call his name and run. And he ran with me in a perfect heel. (We turned the corner, I questioned some pedestrians about Mack’s whereabouts, and finally found him wandering the aisles of a video store, pestering the employees for treats!)

The point is, we may get a pretty good heel by training a dog through either dominance or positive reinforcement. But unless we understand how the dog experiences such training techniques as actually interfering with his ability to be in-synch with us both physically and emotionally, we automatically lose the ability to have the kind of pin-point control I had with Freddie in a high-energy, high-pressure situation.

Here’s a link to video, chosen at random off YouTube, showing one example of teaching the heel using “positive reinforcement.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQYlAkA8gDg&feature=fvw

LCK

i.e. if you feel sad and frustrated about not being able to go to California, it is best not to think about it. but think about the stuff you CAN do…

also, if an owner keeps thinking about all the bad stuff a dog has done and might do, the dog will perhaps pick up on that vibe, and do exactly what the owner is projecting. visualizing in his anxiety, anger, whatever negative emotion the owner might have about the stuff the dog is doing wrong for him….but if the owner is completely positive emotionally about the dog’s behaviour, the dog will, potentially, feel that kind of a spin coming off off the owner and have a better success ratio in training,

…going back to this pendulum experiment, that Mrs. Dunbar did not think was so entertaining.. that i posted on the dogstardaily blog,
when we try to move the pendulum, we do not FEEL “right”, we (mostly) think “right”, and the pendulum twirls to the right etc…

like those atomic particles in certain physics experiments, where the observer anticipates an outcome and thus influences the experiment – which is why scientists decided they need double blind studies… (am I getting this right >?)

so as a result of this, I am thinking that..energy is also generated by thought, not only emotion ?