Daisy Peel

And so I think the bite sport world, which is part of why I've kind of glommed onto it is that you guys, I think are ahead of us in terms of, all right, well, we know we need to use aversives and punishment, but we don't want to be shitty about it.

So what are, how can we

out and about here i am you know until somebody has to say a little bit more firmly just not not okay stop you know that that's um and that's part of what has happened what's been happening more and more in the sport is that as we've gotten as a community as we've gotten better and better about developing motivation and drive and engagement

Now we've got all these dogs that we've really worked into a heightened state of arousal and we take them to a competition and we have no…a lot of people don't have any strategy to keep the dog from…I hate using the word reactivity but to keep the dog from acting like an idiot on the end of the leash because there's no…

There's not been any strategy to institute any consequences for that behavior and it doesn't get addressed.

And the advice usually is, well, just move the dog further away from the ring until it calms down and give it a bunch of cookies.

And that's not really practical because you have to get to the ring if you want to compete.

And so I think there's a lot of tension in the community at the moment to solve these problems.

What ends up happening is what comes to most people naturally which is the some sort of mistake happens or the dog is wrong or the handler gets frustrated and will start yelling no or you know hands on the hips social pressure that kind of stuff and so even if you say that you don't want to use any punishment and you don't want to be mean you get into the ring and

And you get aroused and you don't really have a strategy for what to do when things go sideways because you've only ever been taught how to train behaviors and how to reward the dog and the other side of things has never been addressed.

And so there's a lot of that that happens.

Handler goes in the ring, something happens, they get frustrated and angry.

Certainly it's happened to me before.

or they do something really subtle like slump their shoulders or sigh heavily and the dog is so unprepared for that kind of social pressure or omission of reinforcement that the dog just quits and leaves.

So we have a combination of dogs that are pretty insensitive to any sort of correction.

And then also on the other side of things, dogs that are just practically traumatized by the slightest hint of, oh my God, I was wrong.

I don't know what to do with this.

it's pretty interesting and uh we we had uh i had dr stewart hilliard and forest mickey at my place back in december yeah they didn't really know much about agility so i had a fun run the night before we started and so some local people could come and and just normal agility people come and do their thing so that they could watch and it was pretty interesting because stewart's

The first thing he said was, I am so surprised.

I have never seen so many dogs have such a traumatic response to such low level omission signals like disappointment or shoulder slumping.