It took me a LONG time, much diligent training and careful management to teach my Kelpie mix Vinnie not to chase my cat Ted, and to get a tug toy instead when he gets the cat-chasing urge. We enjoyed a lengthy stretch of peace at home; dog and cat could both chill out in the same room in close proximity to one another without problems.

Vin Settled With Ted Nearby

I was overjoyed. There’s almost nothing I like better than the company of both my critters at the same time. And the dog-cat harmony at home was no small achievement. Vinnie is a herding mix with high energy and an intense desire to herd moving critters.

But that was then.

Lately Vinnie starts whining in frustration and his eyes light up in that, “I’m dying to chase you now!” way whenever he sees Ted. Vinnie has also taken to following Ted so closely, he’s practically standing on top of him. Ted is not amused.

At first I was puzzled about the change in Vin’s behavior. Then I remembered that of late, our garden has been overrun with feral cats. There always seems to be at least one feral kitty lurking in the shadows. (I don’t leave food or garbage out there. A well-meaning neighbor has been feeding the ferals daily and ever since, the surrounding yards have become a feline playground.)

No wonder Vin’s interest in Ted has revived. Vinnie’s had plenty of recent opportunity to chase the feral cats outside. And chase them he does!

For Vinnie, chasing cats is a self-reinforcing behavior. Chasing cats is tons of fun for him. He’s rewarded powerfully whenever he does it; chasing and herding cats must feel incredible to him. Herding is after all, what he’s hard-wired to do.

Animals aren’t static entities or robots. They’re living organic creatures who respond and react to their environments. In other words,behavior changes. It can change for a host reasons such as an illness, a health problem, or as a result of natural development and maturing (transitions from puppyhood to adolescence to adulthood to the golden years).

Ted

Behavior can also change as a result of environmental factors. These run the gamut and include changes in diet, in amounts and types of exercise and mental stimulation, in life routines, a move to a new home, the addition of a new pet or family member, or the death of a loved one to name a few.

Vinnie’s in perfect health and the only recent change in his life has been the feral festival in our yard and the many opportunities he’s seized to chase those cats. Behavior that’s rewarded increases in intensity and frequency. The more Vinnie chases cats — a rewarding behavior to him — the more he wants to chase cats, and the more he wants to chase cats, the more he chases them. This explains his changed behavior and attitude towards Ted.

One of my instructors at the SF-SPCA Academy for Dog Trainers always said, “If you want the animal to change its behavior, change your behavior.” So true.

If I want to curb Vinnie’s desire to chase Ted, I need to change my behavior. Relying on my pre-feral cat training plan won’t suffice. I need to manage the environment to prevent Vin from chasing the outdoor kitties.

I can’t block them from my yard and it doesn’t seem fair to suspend Vin’s yard privileges. My management plan is to go outside and get any feral cats to skedaddle before Vinnie is allowed into the yard. I also need to ramp up the training – more recall and leave it practice away from Ted, lots of practice calling Vinnie to come inside from the back yard, and stupendous rewards for those behaviors.

If your dog’s behavior has changed suddenly and it’s not to your liking, try to figure out what may have caused the change. If it’s not due to maturing, rule out any physical problems with a vet exam.

If there are no health issues, consider whether there have been any changes in your dog’s life or routine. If he’s been getting less physical or mental exercise, increase it. If the environment has changed, depending on what’s changed and how intensely it’s affected your dog, he may just need some time to adjust.

If you’re concerned and/or your dog’s behavior doesn’t improve, it’s best not to let the undesirable behavior continue as it will most likely worsen.

Do your best to prevent your dog from doing the behavior and consult with a good positive reinforcement trainer. Deciphering behavior puzzles and crafting a plan to address them is what dog trainer geeks like me relish.

I should have known better.

Yesterday was Vinnie’s and my first public freestyle performance. We danced in a group routine at a dog festival in a park, with a large audience of dogs and their people, including my husband a.k.a, Vinnie’s “Papa.” (Very corny, I know. But c’mon, I have a hunch you’ve dished up some corny talk to your dog.)

Back to the festival. As soon as we arrived, a little voice in my head said, Uh oh. Vinnie was very excited. He wanted to play off-leash with other dogs, to inhale the scent of grilling meat wafting about and hunt for dropped tidbits. He saw kids playing soccer and wanted to nab their ball. And he was hell-bent on keeping his group – me, him and his Papa – together. Rounding us up is something my dear Kelpie mix has always done, and more intently in new environments.

I’d agreed at the last minute to dance in the routine, and Vin and I’d been practicing our parts diligently. But that was mostly indoor practice at home, a familiar relatively distraction-free location. I’d come to the park ready with a large bag of chicken, which had never failed to help Vin’s focus and for which he’d danced eagerly the day before in the same park. But that was without barbecues, human food galore, scores of other dogs in the vicinity, and Papa at the ringside.

When it was our turn in the ring Vinnie’s performance fell apart. Instead of heeling and spinning next to me across the stage, he took off towards the gate, his eyes darting around for any sign of my husband. I quickly got Vin’s attention and he did most of his routine after that only to lose it again during his solo finale. Instead of trotting towards me and taking a bow, he spotted my husband and ran to the side of the ring to greet him.

Like I said, I of all people should have known there’s just no short cutting the training process. One essential key to effective training is to train gradually, making tasks more challenging for your dog one step at a time. It’s like training for a marathon; you don’t vault from jogging a mile a day to being able to run a 26-mile race.

It’s not surprising that Vinnie didn’t perform well. I rushed his training and neglected to set him up for success in several ways.

For one thing, dogs don’t generalize easily. It you want them to apply learning acquired in one context to another, you have to help them get there. If you only train “sits” in the kitchen, it will take a bit more training for the dog to learn that “sit” means the same thing in the living room, a yard, at the beach and on the sidewalk. Even though Vinnie had nailed the routine again and again at home, he’d only had one practice at the park and another in someone’s back yard. That wasn’t nearly enough to bet on a solid performance on the day of the show amidst a sea of distractions.

The world is a mighty distracting place!

For another thing, dogs are notoriously distractible. To get behavior around distractions, increase distraction levels incrementally. A dog who responds reliably to, “Let’s heel,” in your hallway may look as if he’s never heard the words the first several times you try heeling at the beach. Other dogs, new people, food, new smells and sounds are just some things most dogs find pretty darn enticing. Poor Vin was faced with multiple high level distractions at the same time. That together with insufficient practice to generalize was enough to doom his performance.

On top of all tha, Vin was grappling with a strong competing motivator. Most dogs love food and are very motivated to do stuff, training included, to get it. But a treat that keeps a dog’s attention on training when there’s nothing else going on may very likely pale in comparison to a chance for a squirrel chase, to romp with other dogs, or in Vinnie’s case, to round up his humans. On show day, Vinnie was highly motivated to keep his group together. While he was motivated at times to score chicken by doing parts of his routine, at other times the desire to find his dad won out.

Thankfully, the performance was just for fun. We all laughed about it. No harm was done except for a little bruise on my ego. And I’ll make sure not to repeat the same mistakes as we prepare for our next performance. Next time, we’ll both be ready!

We recently returned to Willowside Ranch for Vinnie’s first herding lesson. He started panting and pacing in the car as soon as we turned off of Highway 1 to Pescadero. The closer we got to the ranch, the more excited he got. By the time we parked the car, he was emitting short quiet whines and scratching at the window. I was certain he knew exactly where we were – the glorious place where he gets to herd sheep.

My husband gamely agreed to be the handler – the human who goes into the pen with dog, sheep and herding trainer. I watched, curious about how you train a herding dog to do his thing under human direction.

The first instruction from Marian Pott, the herding trainer, was that Vinnie had to sit before he got to herd. No way, I thought. He was too worked up. The sheep were too enticing. As we’d waited our turn to herd, Vin had been rearing up on his leash, barking, whining in a warble, and unable to focus on us or keep still. I’d never seen him in such a state.

Now that he was in the pen with the sheep, he was even more amped. The sheep were so close. Vinnie couldn’t take his eyes off them. My husband asked Vin, then kept stepping in front of him to block him from the sheep. It took a few minutes, but the unbelievable happened. Vinnie sat! The immediate reward? He got to herd!

My husband kept repeating the exercise and each time he requested a sit, it took VInnie a little less time to do so. Minutes later, not only did Vinnie sit, he stayed while my husband backed away from him and moved towards the sheep.

Ahh, the power of Premack, I thought. For non-dog geeks, Premack’s Principle, a powerful training strategy, states that more probable behaviors will reinforce less probable behaviors. In plain language, a behavior your dog really enjoys doing can be used to reinforce a behavior he’s less inclined to do. In Vinnie’s case, herding — an activity he adores — was used to reward and reinforce the sits and stays in the sheep pen. Once he was rewarded with herding time for sitting in the pen — something he was very uninclined to do — it was easier for him sit again, and even easier the next time, and so on.

Premack applies to humans too. People use it all the time without realizing it. Parents tell kids they must eat their veggies (something the kids are less inclined to do) before they get to eat dessert (something the kids are happy to do). It’s Premack at work when kids have to clean their rooms before they can watch TV. People motivate themselves to do things they’d rather not do using the same approach, like exercising 4 times a week for the reward of eating ice cream on the weekend.

There are abundant daily opportunities to use the veggies-before-dessert approach with your dog. Ask your dog to sit before you offer a toy to play tug, or to lie down before you toss a Frisbee, or before you take her for a walk. Every day presents plenty of these potential training moments. Take advantage of them — start Premacking ‘em! It’s great practice for doggy manners, and helps train and maintain doggy impulse control.
Not only that, more and more your dog will offer desirable behaviors when she wants something – the canine equivalent of saying please.

With a wee bit of time and effort on your part, “Premacking it” yields lovely behavioral results. And surely that’s preferable to jumping up, nipping, barking or whining for attention, play and other good stuff!

When people ask me what my dog Vinnie is, I say he’s a herding mutt, a term that up until this summer I’d been using loosely. When we adopted him from a shelter, all we knew of his past was he was found on a dairy farm and his mother was an Australian Kelpie. But as for the rest of his DNA, who knew?

As he grew, I became convinced that he was mixed with another herding breed because he acts like one. He’s got their intense energy, smarts, focus and drive; he LOVES to train; and well, he herds. He’s tried to herd our cat and sometimes rounds up other dogs. When he’s out for a hike with his humans and one strays, he runs back and loops around the person until he/she rejoins the group. If given the chance, he’ll also “herd” moving vacuums, mops, brooms or rakes. That’s funny stuff!

This summer I learned the reason for Vin’s compulsion to herd things other than livestock. He earned legitimate herding dog status when I took him to Willowside Ranch in Pescadero for a herding instinct test. To my delight, he passed.

Dog behaviorists and professional stock dog trainers say that herding isn’t something a dog can be taught to do. A dog is either born with a hard-wired instinct to herd livestock or she isn’t. A dog with the instinct automatically “knows” how to work stock without any prior experience or training, and without trying to kill the stock. And you don’t need treats to get a herding dog to herd; she works the stock for the sheer pleasure of doing so.

That’s not to say that working stock dogs don’t need or get training. A dog with the instinct can be trained to perform specific herding tasks under the direction of a human handler. Their natural herding skills are honed and refined through lots of training and practice.

On test day Vin was in the excellent experienced hands of longtime positive trainer Marian Pott, who trains, competes and judges in the herding world (www.miramardogtraining.vpweb.com). In the pen with Marian, me and three sheep, Vin, often a nervous guy, was unsure about the strange new situation. Though he showed interest in the sheep, he seemed far more worried about whether my husband, who was outside the pen, was going to leave.

After a break we tried again in a larger pen with different sheep and suddenly something kicked in. Vin’s ears went up and stayed that way and he began a high-pitched yipping I’d never heard from him before. He forgot about his humans and went to work on the sheep. Whenever one broke away from the flock, Vinnie raced after it, cut in front of it so it reversed direction, and drove it back to the others. He was energized in a way I’d never seen him before. I could practically see his neurons firing. My dog was herding!

When Marian had me walk away at one point he completely ignored me. Instead he stayed with the sheep, intent on their every move. I heard Marian say, “Those are his sheep now; he wants to stay with his sheep.” Later when we put him back on leash, he reared up and tried to go after the retreating sheep.

It was thrilling to see this completely different side of my dog and watch him do the work he was designed to do. He was still Vinnie but a revved up more vibrant version — Vinnie in all his dogness! When Marian told me he’d passed I couldn’t stop grinning. I know I had nothing to do with his passing the test but I felt like a proud mama anyway.

He can’t do competitive herding – that’s reserved for purebreds – but he can still take herding lessons. Those will provide another legal outlet for some of his energy and drive, and it might boost his confidence. I in turn, will learn what I’m supposed to do in the pen vis-a-vis the sheep and Vinnie. I suspect I will be the slower student. (Look for more on that later in Part 2 of this post.)

While we were at the ranch we watched some experienced herding dogs in action. Talk about awe-inspiring! A border collie moved a flock of sheep move from one pen to another through a narrow gate. Then he separated them into two groups and moved one group into yet another pen. It all took a matter of minutes and no sheep got away.

If you ever get the chance, watch herding dogs at work. That precise subtle choreography between handler, dog and sheep is nothing short of poetry in motion.

If your dog has had herding adventures, we’d love to hear about them so please share them in a comment below.