I’m taking a nice long, computer-free weekend for Labor Day and recommend you do the same.

I leave you with this article about mental stimulation (for your dogs) that I answered some questions for, and this cool video:

See you Tuesday!

Happy Labor Day! Now step away from the computer. is a post from: Dog Spelled Forward

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The problem, you see, is that the iPad is fantastic for reading comic books. I have started quite a few different books the past couple of months, both paper and electronic, and then somehow ended up reading comics. It’s tough competing with Spider-Man from the 70s, the Fantastic Four during John Byrne’s epic run, or Fables when you are dealing with an overgrown adolescent.

But on Thursday I started the review copy of Katie Up and Down the Hall that Goldberg McDuffie Communications sent me a couple of months ago. I finished it Friday night.

I’ll be honest, it’s not the only review book I was sent this summer…but you can tell by the dearth of reviews on this site it’s the only one I finished.

Katie is about a cocker spaniel and the ad hoc family she forms around herself in an apartment building in Battery Park City. For those of you not familiar with New York City neighborhoods, Battery Park City is a community on the southwestern tip of Manhatten. It was formed from the soil and rocks excavated when the World Trade Center was built.

The book opens with a description of Battery Park City and how the author, Glenn Paskin, ended up moving there and then later adopting Katie. From there we’re swept up into a tale of how she created a family from some of the tenants in the building: Pearl and Arthur, an elderly couple, John and Ryan, a single Dad and his son, Lee, a woman who befriends Pearl during the confusion of 9/11, and a few other people who come in and out of Katie and Glenn’s lives.

It’s a heartwarming and poignant story that spans all of Katie’s years, including a harrowing, compelling and thankfully apolitical, description of September 11, 2001. (Battery Park City borders the World Trade Center, putting the story almost at Ground Zero.)

Glenn Paskin is a journalist, interviewer, ghost writer, and novelist. His extensive experience and background is evident in his writing. His descriptions of Katie and her interactions with the book’s other wonderful characters were very entertaining and yeah, I even teared up a bit a few times. You’ll know where I mean.

Mr. Paskin is honest. This is a true story, "true" in the sense that it happened and "true" in the sense that Mr. Paskin shares his feelings, his mistakes, his regrets, and his misgivings. While this book is fun and inspiring, it couldn’t have always been easy to write, and my hat goes off to Mr. Paskin’s for his courage.

Katie Up and Down the Hall is a great read and I heartily recommend it. You can pre-order it here on Amazon.com, in Kindle or Hardcover.

Book Review: Katie Up and Down the Hall is a post from: Dog Spelled Forward

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I see more and more stories about service dogs being banned from here or needing to go to court to go there. What’s the problem?

Here’s a great one: service dog banned from Special Olympics. No, I’m not making this up. The Special Olympics is discriminating someone for being too special.

What’s up with this? Why are service dogs contentious at all? I can kind of see why a school might need to make some time or review some policies to allow a dog into their facility for an entire year (with the understanding that the final result will be accommodating the child.) But a store, when the client might be there for an hour? A sporting event that is freaking set up for people that might need a service dog?

What do you think?

Dog Discussion Wednesday: What is it with service dogs? is a post from: Dog Spelled Forward

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Until recently Evo and Merrick were in our kibble rotation (with a few others). Proctor and Gamble recently purchased Natura, the manufacturer of Evo, which takes it off the table. Meanwhile, Merrick has so badly mishandled a spate of recalls that they can never be trusted again.

When I attended BlogPaws in April I met Anthony Holloway from K9 Cuisine. We had a great conversation over why he started his company and I had made a mental note to check it out. Mental notes don’t work very well for me. At least I have to lose paper notes. The mental ones just disappear.

Fast forward to early last month, when K9 Cuisine contacts me with an offer to order some complementary food to review. The timing was really good, given the aforementioned issues with two of my favorite foods. Around that same time I was talking with a friend of mine, a vet tech with a new puppy, about food and she mentioned Taste of the Wild and how she thought it was a great food but had a hard time finding it. The name sounded familiar, and I realized that Anthony had mentioned it when were at BlogPaws.

So I ordered some.

The way the offer worked was excellent – I went to the site and ordered just like any other customer, so I was able to see how the website works and how it is shipped to a “regular” client.

The site is superb. The navigation is smooth and it is very easy to find what you are looking for. The search also works very nicely. Food is displayed with a handy set of tabs where you can view ingredients, analysis, feeding instructions and comments from other customers. Everything you need to make an informed decision.

(click to see a larger version)

The shipping was fast. I had the food within a few days. I have since ordered two more bags and they showed up within three (it may have been two, but I’m not sure) days. Shipping is free for orders over $50! So I got 2 bags of kibble shipped to my house in three days for free.

As far as Taste of the Wild goes, well like I said, I have since ordered two more 30 pound bags. The ingredients (you can check them out here) are high quality and all three of my dogs are doing great after a full month on it.

So far the salmon, the bison, and the fowl, have all passed the Buddha taste test — which is not easy to do. Buddha is not a picky eater at all, but he does have an interesting way of telling us how much he likes a food. If it’s O.K. he eats lying down. But if he stands up to eat, it’s some good stuff. He’s been standing to eat since mid-July. Our compliments to the chef!

Product Review: K9 Cuisine and Taste of the Wild is a post from: Dog Spelled Forward

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After 3 years of training a successful candidate works with human rescuers to help reach people and, if necessary, retrieve them. It’s no surprise that while any dog over about 65 pounds can be accepted into the training, most of the dogs are Lab, Goldens, or Newfies.

Here’s a video from MSNBC with some footage of the training:

Dogs Help Coast Guard in Italy is a post from: Dog Spelled Forward

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1. In December 2008 over 100 dogs are discovered outdoors on a man’s property, with inadequate water and food. There are also dead dogs on the property.
2. He is arrested on 96 counts of animal cruelty.
3. He is charged with 70 counts of animal cruelty.
4. He pleads guilty to 5 counts of animal cruelty. (Fortunately the deflation stops there. Any further and the state would end up owing him more dogs.)
5. He is sentenced to 90 days in jail and is ordered to pay $10,000 to the rescue organizations that took in most of his dogs.

So, you don’t have to play for the NFL, at least not in Oklahoma. Oklahoma law allow for a sentence of up to five years for each animal in a cruelty case, so he could have faced 960, 350, or 25 years, depending on which set of charges you want to use. But he was sentenced to 90 days. Really? How about long enough for his TIVO to run out of space?

But wait! There’s more! 5 years ago the same man was forbidden from ever owning dogs again in Kansas! While asking for a national database of animal cruelty convictions is probably beyond the pale at this point, did the Oklahoma judge know this? Did he take it into consideration?

As Brent points out, do we really need more animal cruelty laws? Maybe what we need is people willing to enforce what we have, including putting some teeth in them by actually, you know, punishing people that are cruel to animals?

Just a thought.

More animal cruelty laws, or the will to enforce them? is a post from: Dog Spelled Forward

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Wow.

I’m going to go over a few things you can do in a series of entries while also dipping, ever so slightly, into the theory behind them.

While working on this issue, keep safety at the very forefront of your mind. Also, avoid trouble spots and avoiding getting your dog into problems where you know she will lose control. Think of every incident as “practice” for the aggressive behavior. Also think of how unhappy and stressed she gets. Dogs don’t enjoy being aggressive. They are usually terrified.

Consider Getting Help

If you are having a very difficult time with this on-leash aggression, find a dog trainer. Any kind of aggression is serious stuff and some help and guidance from a professional can make a huge difference.

Don’t Watch That, Watch This!

If you’ve been reading my blog for any amount of time you should be able to guess what I am going to talk about first. Attention. Grab a piece of paper and write down all of the things that your dog cannot pay attention to on-leash when she is paying attention to you instead. Got it? That’s why this is important.

You’re going to have to work extra hard on this. Play the “name game” everywhere. Until you can get your dog’s attention outside, in the face of serious distractions, this strategy isn’t going to work. But when this does work, there is a lot more going on than just a useful tool to distract your dog.

Your dog has a conditioned emotional response. When she sees a dog her emotional state changes and she is responding by barking, growling, and/or lunging. If you can get her to redirect her attention to you when a dog first comes “in range,” you can slowly change her initial reaction and take the opportunity to start to change her opinion.

Before:
See/smell/hear dog -> become fearful/angry/frustrated -> bark/lunge/growl.

After:
See/smell/hear dog -> think of Mommy/Daddy -> look at Mommy/Daddy.

The timing is the tricky part here. You want to figure out when she first notices the other dog and get her attention before she reacts. Easier said than done, I know. You may need help, perhaps from a “spotter” that can focus on the environment for you so you can focus on your dog.

Hardware

If you have a big and powerful dog, or even a medium-sized and not-so-powerful dog, control on-leash may be an issue. Dogs are strong and can generate a lot of pulling force very quickly. Collars anchor the leash very close to where they can generate the greatest amount of force. Traditional harness actually do anchor it where they are the strongest. (Ask any dog sledder.)

A front clasp harness, like the Sense-ation or Sense-ible from Softouch Concepts, anchor the harness in front of the dog. This takes away most of her leverage and can prevent you from ending up face down on the pavement. They do this with simple leverage – it’s really hard to pull a leash forward when it is attached to your chest. Also, rather than hurting your dog or making her uncomfortable they actually eliminate the stress a collar can cause.

For tougher dogs, or situations where there is a greater mismatch between the strength of the dog and strength (or size) of the handler, a head halter may be necessary. The Snoot Loop has become my favorite of late. This can be uncomfortable for some dogs, but in cases where a lack of control can lead to a safety hazard, it may be necessary.

Next week: power steering and anti-lock brakes.

Video of the Week?

I think these videos are starting to become a tradition. What do you thing?

I can’t say “Don’t Watch That, Watch This!” without taking you…One. Step. Beyooond!!

And now you know why, when I first saw that famous scene with Gerard Butler in “300,” I busted out laughing.

On-Leash Aggression: Don’t Watch That. Watch This! is a post from: Dog Spelled Forward

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Like an entire other person’s worth.

But I need to shut up and take my cue from someone much stronger than I am:

Four year-old Lucy climbed a mountain without the use of her hind legs. Not bad for a disabled dog, eh?

You can find me at the salad bar.

Disabled Dog Provides Inspiration is a post from: Dog Spelled Forward

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Core dump? Are those edible?

You’re probably reading this on a web browser written in C++. C++ (pronounced see-plus-plus) has 63 “keywords” and about 30 or so arithmetic and logical “operators.” Compare this to the roughly 600,000 words in the last edition of the Oxford English Dictionary! With less than 100 basic building blocks, C++ can produce Firefox (for better or worse), Chrome, Internet Explorer (definitely worse), and most of the software you use every day. You don’t need a large complicated system to get things done. You’re better off with a smaller and simpler one. (As a matter of fact many programmers, myself included, think that C++ could probably lose 20 or so keywords and be the better for it.)

The four basic building blocks of operant conditioning, and thus dog training, can take us a long way toward describing and changing behavior. There’s a lot more going on than they describe, and sometimes they tend to oversimplify, but they still tend to get the job done.

When we want to train a new behavior we use positive reinforcement (R+ for short.) We are adding something (a treat, a toy, praise….) that reinforces the behavior.

This means our dog found whatever we added as a consequence of the behavior reinforcing or, as we mortal humans without white lab coats might say, rewarding. This is the first area where some people get tripped up with positive reinforcement. Just because you think it’s reinforcing, that doesn’t mean your dog will.

For example, 45 minutes into a one hour class, that yummy dog treat might start getting boring. As one of my dog trainer friends is fond of saying, “I love cheesecake! But after an hour it gets a little old.” You have to be willing to reward honest work with appropriate pay.

But the biggest mistake people make with positive reinforcement has to do with a slightly more complicated concept: reinforcement schedules. How frequently someone is rewarded for a behavior is just as important, if not more, than the type of reward. These schedules can get very complicated, but for our purposes we can keep it pretty simple.

If you’ve ever had a job for pay, you have been on a fixed reinforcement schedule. If you were paid every week, two weeks, or once a month you were on a fixed interval schedule. After a set period of time, you were paid.

The pitfall with these fixed schedules is pretty simple. What would have happened (or did happen) when it came time to get paid and you were not? Chances are, you stop working. Immediately.

So, if you give your dog a treat every time she sits for a few weeks, and then stop because “she knows it now and should just do it.” What happens?

Now think about the slot machines at Las Vegas or Atlantic City. We all know that there is no way that those machines can give out more money than is put in. But people stand there for hours, emptying their pockets into them because the machines operate on a variable reinforcement schedule. The players never know when the next reward is going to come. This is very compelling — compelling enough that some people literally cannot stop.

Most trainers will tell you, in simpler terms, to work on a fixed reinforcement schedule when you introduce a new behavior, usually rewarding your dog every time she performs the behavior (technically a “continuous” schedule). When the behavior is “reliable” (the dog does it whenever we ask) move to variable reinforcement. Many trainers will tell you “Become a slot machine!”

Many owners never get out of the fixed reinforcement stage or wait too long, and end up with what I call a “Show me the money!” dog. The dog will not perform unless she can see the treat.

Next week: how to use positive reinforcement to stop a behavior. (Think that doesn’t make sense? Good! You’re paying attention.)

Real Man’s Guide: Positive Reinforcement is a post from: Dog Spelled Forward

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Future Bed Bug Hunter?

Now the parasites have been found in the Empire State Building, which has lead to more coverage of the problem — even though the bugs there have allegedly been exterminated.

Part of the coverage has been on what is apparently the most effective way to find the pests: specially trained dogs! As you might imagine, an insect that prefers human blood for a meal once every 5 to 10 days has a distinct scent. Dogs can be trained to locate this scent and signal to their handlers. This provides exterminators and inspectors with a way to target the much more accurately than just carpeting an area with chemicals.

Another example of how valuable man’s best friend is to us.

Dogs Helping New York With Bedbugs is a post from: Dog Spelled Forward

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