Oh, my!
2015 was quite a busy year. I’ll be cliche about it and say, “I can’t believe it’s already over!”
If you’re a new reader to my blog (or an old reader!) I hope you’ll enjoy this fast journey through some of the things that happened on my blog and in my life in 2015.
Winter
We had a cold one last year!
I kept myself quite busy with foster dog Wags, who spent three months with me.
The little guy had some pretty bad separation anxiety and we BOTH learned a lot together. He overcame most of his anxiety and was happily adopted.
However, from arranging pet sitters to taking him on errands with me…. I gained a lot more empathy for people who have dogs that cannot be left home alone.
Spring
I once again attended the Art and Science of Animal Training Conference. This year for the 7th conference, we welcomed Dr. Stanley Weiss as our keynote speaker.
The whole conference gave me lots to think about, as it always does!
I posted notes on my blog from Ken Ramirez’s talk about teaching concepts, Bob Bailey’s talk about becoming a better trainer, Phung Luu’s talk about birds in flight, and Alexandra Kurland’s talk about practicing for excellent performance.
Later in the spring, I traveled to San Antonio for the annual convention of the Association for Behavior Analysis, International.
Summer
Summer 2015 brought lots of adventures! Foster puppy DaVinci stayed with me for about a month. We worked intensively on his resource guarding and food guarding issues and also spent lots of time working on basic puppy stuff — potty training, socialization, leash walking, coming, and more. Several of my friends had fun getting him comfortable with grooming activities.
I also traveled for a second year to St. Louis to give a seminar with Dr. Rosales-Ruiz for HALO. We had an awesome group of participants and spent two action-packed days talking all about behavior and training and playing the shaping game PORTL.
I wrote two of my favorite blog posts of 2015 during the summer, a post about the details of food delivery mechanics and a post about mini-habits (which also includes some quotes from our St. Louis trip).
Fall
In November, I traveled to Germany to attend a conference organized by a Germany dog trainer’s association. After the conference, Dr. Rosales-Ruiz and I gave a two-day workshop about shaping behavior. It was my first time to Germany and we had a blast!
This fall also marked some big changes in my life.
I stopped working for the training facility where I taught classes and lessons for two years. Instead, I’m doing private training on my own through my business DogTrainingology. I’m also working for The Art and Science of Animal Training, a new non-profit organization that was formed last summer to run the annual Art and Science of Animal Training Conference, plus other educational activities for animal trainers and pet owners.
We have an awesome new blog that we started in December on The Art and Science of Animal Training website. I encourage you to check out the article that I wrote about the importance of focusing on movement vs. outcome during shaping.
What’s in store for 2016
The first few months of 2016 are going to be pretty busy! I’m off to ClickerExpo at the end of this month, then I’ll be at The Art and Science of Animal Training Conference in February, and then I’m off to ClickerExpo again in March. Dr. Rosales-Ruiz and I will be doing a lab at ClickerExpo about PORTL and shaping games, so that should be fun!
I’ll also be teaching an undergraduate behavior analysis class at the University of North Texas. More about that later on.
I plan to continue posting several times a month on the StaleCheerios blog, and I already have several posts in the works that I hope to share with you soon. I’ll also be blogging on my DogTrainingology site, so I hope you’ll check it out, too.
If you have particular training concepts or questions that you’d like for me to cover on the blog in 2016, please let me know! I’m always interested in hearing what you want to hear more about.
Bless you for fostering. I would love to be able to do so.
It is certainly a lot of work, but it is definitely rewarding!
Little Wags was tough as a foster, especially at the beginning because he had so many behavior issues. But, it was really fun to get to watch his progress.
I don’t think I could do it continuously without wearing myself out. But I try to do a couple a year.
Did you blog about your training experience with Wags? Mr. N has seperation anxiety that we’re working on so I’d like to see it if you did!
I did blog some about it (on another site), but not in very much detail. Wags had to be right with me all the time — he couldn’t even tolerate being in another room or being out of sight of me.
The super short answer, was that I set up an exercise pen in my living room and made it the best place ever – I put his bed in there, some toys, lots of fun stuff. Left the door open.
Once he was going in there on his own, I started closing him in there for very short periods of time (10-30 seconds at first), first with me in there with him and then with me standing just on the other side (even this was tough for him at first).
Then, we gradually added distance, until I could go sit at my desk (which was about six feet away) and very, very gradually built up the time.
All the time, we were focused on having him be totally relaxed and calm while he was in the pen.
After he could stay in the pen for 10-20 minutes continuously, I gradually expanded so that I could go sit on the couch, then go into the kitchen, then go into other parts of the house, and finally to go briefly out the front door. Then, it was just a matter of slowly building up duration.
The real trick, I think, is to make sure the dog is calm / relaxed at every step. It is easy to sometimes think that the dog is calm because he is not barking. But, the dog needs to truly be relaxed.
Not sure if that helps or not, but it is basically what we did. Feel free to leave another comment (or shoot me an email) and we can discuss more, if you want.
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