Comments on: Trick Training Run Amok

By: christine randolph

christine randolph — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:05:29 +0000

i just went to see the wolf sanctuary in Golden B.C.

i learned that coyotes and wolves interbreed in the wild and so, this causes another problem when someone wants to protect wolves:

it is not easy to tell a coyotes apart from a wolf and a coyote-wolf hybrid

(or dingo jackal etc. hybrid)

I also had an idea: that humans should re-do the wolf-to-dog breeding experiment and make a new set of dogs from wolf babies like our neanderthal or whatever ancestors did…

just to see what kind of dogs we get in a do-over, maybe very different dogs !!!

By: kbehan

kbehan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:54:25 +0000

The show dog breeder is an old boogey man that’s been dealt with, the new problem are breeders aiming for the working market. They’re turning all the breeds into terriers so that they’re compulsively obsessed with the highly stylized behaviors that win points. I once did a little Karate and had to go to a tournament to support the Sensei and dojo. I was hoping for an early elimination but I actually beat a guy on points and then qualified for the double elimination. This guy was a street fighter that could have killed me, but I got lucky (or unlucky from my point of view) and beat him. There ended up being two kinds of fighters, the guys that were great on points, and then the guys who were great at knockout. In competition there’s so much emphasis on style, and the level of training is so good, that these little things become the determining factor and the main focus and which can interfere with the messy reality of the outside working world. Breeders have figured out what works and select accordingly and the family dog owner is ending up with a dog with too low a threshold that’s hard to live with.

By: christine randolph

christine randolph — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 16:30:48 +0000

you meant, the breeders began to aim for the SHOW DOG market, right ???

that german GSD breeder saliently said in his interview, there are “ernsthafte Zuechter”, that means serious breeders, and “show dog Spinner”, that means “show dog crazies”.

.. and..there are also puppy mills now…

there’s no hope in hell now to get a hardy, high treshold doggie any more…

..anyway, some people seem to delve into the challenge of an unstable dog, a “normal” dog by old world standards would perhaps not be enough of a challenge ?

…like some people get married to an alcoholic so they can help them get better…

…helper syndrome…

can be very exhausting…

human falls off the wagon all the time, doggie reverts back to original behaviour whenever stressed…

…I suppose we can learn a lot about variances of dog behaviour that way…

By: kbehan

kbehan — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:02:59 +0000

The problem with breeding is that the notion of “friendliness” became confused with temperament, so that when stock is selected for friendliness, it’s really selecting for nervousness and this ultimately produces the hyper-active temperament and the overloading syndrome of phobic to defensive aggressiveness. Also, breeders trying to reinvigorate their stock began to aim for the working market which turned into highly stylized formats for competition. The breeders gamed the system and because the trials are so controlled, turned all the breeds into terriers, compulsive about the stereotypical behaviors that are going to win points. So the old world rugged notion of temperament, i.e. syncopated drive, wasn’t being selected for as it once was. If you look at that Dobie in the picture of me as a kid, it is remarkably hardy and very high threshold by modern Dobie standards. Those dogs lived in unheated kennels on top of Macy’s department store at Herald Square and they weren’t hyper like they are today. Then in the sixties, trying to make them more palatable, breeders bred the heart out of them.

By: christine randolph

christine randolph — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:47:09 +0000

i guess the breeder’s focus is no longer on emotionally stable animals,

aggression is what gets people’s attention in the media etc.

us dog owners just have to cope with fear, aggression, and any difficult emotion in between that requires us to learn more about doing whatever we can to stabilize our dogs’ temperament.

not even talking about hip displasia,exercise induced collapse, chronic fatigue syndrome etc in dogs, all problems that current breeding practices seem to cause.

with killer whales, Tigers, elephants etc breeding in captivity, also, the natural selection process will no longer apply

zoo owners will want to keep ALL offspring because these animals are so expensive and can make them so much money.

emotionally unstable animals will continue having offspring predestined to be emotionally unstable.

so these animals will become more like us!

flawed, manic, overstimulated, heavily medicated, predators falling off the deep end, dangerous to themselves and others…

By: kbehan

kbehan — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 15:16:25 +0000

Don’t worry, you caught me before the double espresso. The pit bull phenomenon is a sociological/demographic question, but my personal experience is that we’re seeing aggression at younger and younger ages in dogs, and in breeds unheard of before, and then Stephen Budiansky in the “Truth About Dogs” maintains that scientifically/statistically speaking there is indeed a rise in the rates of aggression. So from every angle it seems to me “the animals are getting restless” (Killer Whale attacks, elephant attacks, circus acts gone mad, black bear attacks, coyote, sting ray, and then the domestic dog freaking out.) We can parse it every which way about displaced habitat, more people in the wilderness areas and so on, but all of that is symptomatic of an underlying restlessness and energy vacuum as well and which becomes most vivid in the domestic dog. We’re training them younger and younger, universal neutering earlier and earlier. Basically, all of the above reflects a judgment against aggression and wildness that has entered “network consciousness” so that what is being repressed in humans is being expressed via the animals. Energy’s got to go somewhere.

By: Alec

Alec — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:44:40 +0000

Kevin – You mention the increase in dog aggression. I haven’t had time to research this but is there really an increase in dog aggression or is the word spread more now with the internet? In the city of Atlanta that has close to 5M people and is as dog friendly as can be, only has a small amount of attacks (from what I’ve noticed, maybe 1 of note every couple years). Add to that the media infatuation with “pit bulls” and I just get the feeling that the incidences are just covered more. I understand your point about dogs being over indulged and not given and outlet but I’m just not so sure they have ever been give that outlet. I guess I would think that tying a dog up without an outlet is not really better than loving one up without an outlet. It seems that they are getting frustrated either way.

Your experience and knowledge is much greater than mine so don’t beat me up too much.

By: christine randolph

christine randolph — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 16:40:07 +0000

2004 !!!!! SAN ANTONIO — A killer whale performance at SeaWorld came to an abrupt end Friday when one of the giant marine mammals slammed his trainer underwater repeatedly.

No one was injured in the incident involving the killer whale, named Ky, and his trainer, Steve Aibel.

“It looked like Ky lost a little bit of focus,” Aibel said in an exclusive interview with KSAT 12 News.

Aibel has trained with Ky for the past 10 years, and said he was caught off guard by Ky’s behavior.

“Seventeen years of training with animals and I’ve never had an experience like that,” he said.

At first, it seemed like part of the show, but then Ky began diving right over Aibel. As soon as Aibel would come up for air, he was slammed back underwater.

Trainers rushed to the side of the tank, there was little they could do.

“I wasn’t frightened,” Aibel said. “I think that by being calm throughout the process — that helped to calm (Ky) down.”

Aibel went back to work with Ky Monday, and credited patience and training with helping to resolve the situation.

He wasn’t sure what set Ky off, but said that the killer whale was near breeding age, which might be to blame for the erratic behavior.

By: christine randolph

christine randolph — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 01:00:55 +0000

oh good you found it.
true, technically, i am wrong to say that karen said it is toy drive. i should have said her facebook page copied a newspaper article where it is stated that Thad Lacinak said that it was toy drive.

anyway, here’s the mentions of the toy drive stuff, if others want to know what this is about and do not want to have to look it up.

the headline…
“whale may have seen ponytail as toy”,

this is from the text of the article in the san diego union tribune

“A theory emerged yesterday among some orca experts: The whale mistook Dawn Brancheau’s ponytail for a toy and grabbed it.”

“It was a novel item in the water, and he grabbed hold of it, not necessarily in an aggressive way,” said Thad Lacinak, who once taught Brancheau while serving as head of animal training for SeaWorld until 2008.

He and others said trainers routinely use toys and novelties in working with the animals as rewards to keep them interested and active.”

By: Lee Charles Kelley

Lee Charles Kelley — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 19:30:56 +0000

Thanks, CR,

However, the KPCT blog was written by one of Pryor’s staff, not by Pryor herself, and there is no mention in the San Diego Tribune article of Karen Pryor referring to the orca’s “toy drive.”

Thanks for providing the links, though.

LCK