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Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, Welcome to The Houndation’s podcast. I’m your host Tony Peterson. In today’s episode is all about the ways in which we train our dogs to do certain things when we don’t even realize it. Oftentimes, something will happen in my life and I’ll just kind of like start to think about why, and then I’ll realize that somewhere in that event is the makings of an article or a podcast. Well, this happened to me recently as I listened to my wife lightly scold my five year old lab for not being downstairs and in bed with one of my daughters. It occurred to me that our dogs learn a hell of a lot of behaviors that we don’t teach them, and those behaviors shape the course of our lives with them. This is important stuff, so listen up because it’s what I’m going to talk about right now. The usage of tools in nature is one of those things that humans are fascinated by, and rightly so. It’s a big differentiator between an animal that has figured out to some extent how to manipulate something that isn’t part of its body and its environment to use it to its advantage. This is sort of considered a skill that represents a higher level of cognition, and for a long time, surprise surprise, humans thought we were the only ones who did it. Well, we aren’t, and now we know that some species of birds and fish and mammals and insects and cephalopods are all tool users, and of course so are some primates. Some simple examples when it comes to monkeys include species that eat nuts and crabs, because both can be easier to eat if you figure out how to smash them with a stone. Now, that might not be super impressive to you, but it’s essentially kind of a hammer without a handle. It gets more impressive when you realize that several species of primates use what is essentially a hammer and anvil set up, because some of the stones they use can weigh up to seventy percent of the monkey’s body weight. In nature, there is a constant push for quality food without excessive energy output to obtain it, and it seems like tool use in this case doesn’t result in an overabundance of food according to research, but access to really quality food. It’s worth it. Now. Other primates have been observed using sticks to fish for termites and mounds and eat them, or to pry seeds from fruit. Tool use extends way beyond our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, though bottlenosed dolphins have been seen to use sponges to rouse up snacks from the seafloor. Elephants will grab the right branch to swat away insects or give themselves a little scratch, and also to plug up water holes when they have to dig them out, so that they won’t drain and there’ll be water there when they come back. I think that one’s pretty interesting. Crows and other corvids will use twigs in pieces of wood, and if they can get their beaks on it, metal wire to create tools to impale larva tucked into tree trunks. Some types of woodpeckers exhibit similar behavior. Researchers have observed octopus, which are cool as hell, using coconut shells and other specific stones to act as shields when dealing with predators or to construct shelter in some cases, and even build little hunting blinds in areas where crabs frequent. You might have noticed so far that this list is pretty light on canines, but that might not be fair to certain wolves. At least some wolves that live up in British Columbia that were observed hauling in crab traps along the beach. Now, these traps set up by members of the heightsig nation to catch European green crabs. I’m pretty sure I said that wrong, but I don’t know how to say it right, so bear with me. These people found that their crab traps keep getting torn up and they couldn’t figure out who was the culprit. Now, some of the traps were mangled, and a lot of them were missing bait cups, you know, the netting was torn and some were just totally destroyed. The usual suspects in this type of crab caper are sea lions, seals, and otters for reasons I’m sure you can imagine. But it wasn’t some seafaring mammal. It was gray wolves. Camera traps first recorded a female wolf in the spring of twenty twenty four emerging from the water with a booie in her mouth, which was attached to a crab trap. She managed to get that trap up on the beach, which was probably fun for her because it’s sort of a version of Tuggle war. When she had that trap on the beach. She tore open the netting, grabbed the bait cup, and stood there munching away on the fish that were meant to lure in the crabs. You can watch this on YouTube. It’s incredible, trust me. Now, the debate around this is whether this is actual tool use, and I’m going to leave that up to the scientists. What it is, at least to a fellow like me, is really freaking cool. You have to wonder what the timeline is for the first wolf to make the connection that the buoy was attached to something that might have a snack worthy of the effort it would take to tuget from the ocean. Most likely, everything involved in crab netting operations smells a little like something a wolf would snack on, particularly a wolf that lives right on the coast and undoubtedly has a fair amount of seafood mixed into its diet, much like how if you live in Florida, you probably eat more shrimp than us upper Midwesterners who are too busy chugging ranch dressing and noomming on cheese curds. When you dive into this case of wolves and crab traps, it’s interesting because a lot of people fall all over themselves to declare these wolves smarter than humans thought they were. I think it’s awesome behavior. But I also think the average bird dog trainer could get a lab to pull a crab trap out of the water to eat a snack in about three sessions. Now could a wild pack of laborator retrievers figure that out on their own? That’s a different story, my guess is though, probably. And the reason I say that is because we look at dog training only one way, the usual way, which is, we have some behavior in mind that we’d like to see happen on common, so we figure out how to get our dogs to offer that behavior while tying it to a verbal command or a hand signal or both. And well, that’s just how it goes. And it works pretty well too, if you’re consistent and understand how to ask the right questions of your dog. But there is a catch here that can kind of be explained by thinking about negative space and art. Maybe you’ve seen some art that exploits this reality, or at the very least you’ve probably seen someone who has a tattoo that uses it. Essentially, artists use positive space and negative space to balance out the composition of a piece. Think of the positive space as the subject of the art, and then negative space as the area around and between the subject. A black and white drawing of a fish, for example, you know, with a fish being the subject and then just a couple of crude bubbles or the outline of some rocks or seaweed, could effectively convey a sense of an entire underwater scene, while most of what’s actually around the fish is just nothing. Our brains fill in the rest, which is the trick to a lot of art. When it comes to dog training. The positive space that’s the retrieving drill you set up the treat training for, you know, the sit command with a young pup, and all the actions you take to encourage and reward a specific behavior. The negative space is everything you allow that foster’s behaviors you don’t condone or even understand, are being reinforced. That example I gave in the intro for this podcast, which I’ll reiterate because most of you probably skipped right through. It was about how my lab Sadie, is supposed to sleep with one of my daughters every night. It means a lot to my daughter, and it means a lot to my wife, since my daughter is on a different floor from us, and if anyone breaks in, that pup will let us know, but it will not, I assume, do anything more than bark. What really got me thinking about this is a couple of things. First off, Sadie knows she’s supposed to be downstairs at night, yet she will sneak upstairs to snooze on the couch as soon as she thinks she can get away with it. Now, once she hears anyone wake up and start moving around in the house, she will sprint back downstairs and hop into bed with my daughter. She also learned that when we say get down there, that she is supposed to well get down there. But I didn’t train her for the get down their command. She just picked it up and learned what we meant. When you think about our dogs, they do this kind of stuff a lot. If you don’t believe that and you own a dog, go grab yourself a piece of bread, or go open the cupboard where you keep the dog treats. One of the things that just caught me way off guard when I had to put my last dog down was the absence of the sound of her nails on the kitchen floor and her furry golden butt hitting the ground behind me every time I went to make some toast. You know, these are conditioned responses, but also demonstrate some level of reason. An easy way to understand this is to think of, perhaps how your dog listens to you versus how that very same dog handles the exact same commands from your spouse or your children. Whoever, when my kids want ice cream, they ask me first for this very reason. Now, their mother will let them have ice cream, but it will almost always be predicated on them eating some carrots or picking up one of the seventeen thousand yogurt containers or half full bubbler cans around our house. The girls know I’m usually distracted by something and less likely to make their ice cream options contingent upon them doing something they don’t want to do. Dogs do this too, and they learn how to get things they want by doing the least amount that they can to get it. Take a retriever here, for example, if you don’t make them stay and wait for a release command, they are one hundred percent going to break and run to where they think the bumper or the ball is going to end up. Why would they wait, if they don’t have to, they’ll also test this at every stage they can, way beyond what I just mentioned about not following strict orders from one family member when they would with another. They’ll also test this. You know, when you go from a bumper to a ball, to a frisbee to some kind of other dummy maybe that has some feathers zip tied to it, to actual ducks on the water, and every step where the rules of that same game might change ever so slightly. The thing about this is that what we allow is a permission slip to keep doing that behavior, but also lots of behaviors we don’t know we are giving permission for. I keep running into this with the cat people in my life, who will casually say something like mister Whiskers has started breaking into my room at three thirty am to bat me in the face and claw my lips until I wake up and feed him. Me, who is not really a cat person, finds that behavior insane on a few different levels, not the least of which is rewarding absolutely trash behaviors out of your pet in the name of short term convenience. Now I’ve mentioned this a few times on here, but one of my daughters figured out how to treat train Sadie to yawn on command, which at first I thought was super cool. But she didn’t do it just with treats, but any time that she was eating a meal or a snack. So, guess what my dog begs so bad right now? And even though she knows she’s not supposed to when I’m around, I’m not around a lot, that behavior is not likely to ever go away, And that was a big mistake on our part. A lot of this kind of boils down to trying to figure out what you’re ok tolerating and what you just don’t want to have to deal with. And then you have to figure out what your dog is learning when you aren’t trying to teach them something now is through some glitch in the matrix. A dog trainer from say, nineteen seventy three could hear this podcast up to this point, he’d say, we’ll light that sound bitch up till it’s terrified of that behavior. Then he’d probably take a poll on a Marlboro Red and maybe pop the tab on a Schlitz beer or something. And while he’d also be technically correct that you could correct just about any behavior out of a dog. Most of us don’t have it in ourselves to do that, to do what it would take. That leaves prevention again as the best medicine here. And I know this is just in a way dog training at a basic level, But the secret here is to think about the training that’s happening when you’re not training. That stuff will actually play a much bigger role in your life than the hunting stuff will. Since most of us spend most of our time not hunting with our hunting dogs, there are basically unlimited ways in which we can teach our dogs to do things that we don’t intend that could plague us for their entire lives. How they get into your vehicle and out, how they are allowed to greet strangers when they have dogs with them or not. How they are expected to act when someone comes to the house or you’re on your deck in the summer and the neighbor who the dog absolutely loves goes into his backyard to fire up the grill. When they eat, where they sleep, whether they are allowed to growl if someone decides to grab their food dish halfway through their dinner, how they should behave on the boat. If you take them fishing what they are expected to do. When you’re out for an off leash walk on a barely used gravel road and you see a grain truck heading your way, the thing to remember is that they don’t want to be controlled anymore than we do, but they have to be for their safety and for our sanity. This is obviously huge with the puppy phase, because if you can get ahead of not super desirable behaviors, you can save yourself a lot of grief later. But you can also train this stuff out of adult dogs. It just takes some work and a hell of a lot of consistency. That last part is the most important, And while it’s a common theme in dog training advice because without consistency, you really kind of don’t have dog training, it’s also the reason this stuff falls through the cracks all the time. Just like it’s easier for them to keep testing us to see what they can get away with, it’s easy for us to talk ourselves into believing it’s not that big of a deal if our four year old German short hair totally ignores the recall command every time another dog is around. Now, when that happens at the park and we are bsing with one of our neighbors. It doesn’t feel like that big of a deal, but it sets a precedent that will follow you and your dog into the CRP next season, and when that happens, it’s a different story. While this is relevant to all dog owners, and certainly all bird dog owners, it also becomes something more pressing as spring kicks in and we actually start to do more things with our dogs that involve outdoor activities and being around lots of other people. Now I realize down south that’s the case no matter what, but just bear with me here because us damn near Canadians are finally just starting to break out of our igloos to squint at the sun once again. This means the teachable moments come at you in your dog pretty fast, and the ones that could plant a seed you don’t want to sprout into something are often clothed in non threatening, benign looking garb. But those are the ones that affect daily life a lot. And while you can make the argument that an obedient dog is an obedient dog that is highly situational, most people who have bird dogs have an obedient dog in some capacity, which is usually very tightly linked to good behavior while hunting. But good dog behavior isn’t important only in the duck boat or in the pine plantations where the bobwhite covees might still be found. And if you think good behavior in one setting isn’t linked to good behavior in another, you’re wrong. It’s kind of like thinking that exercise is only good for the body and not the mind. It doesn’t work that way because they are in so many ways one and the same. Just like the rooster cruncher you love to watch pound the cattails all day long is also the same dog that has to sleep with your daughter, even when the upstairs couch is much more to her liking. I guess the easiest way to wrap a bow on this is to say, think like a dog trainer all the time. That’s what you are as long as you own a dog. It’s not what you are when you grab the bumpers and the placeboard and head to the yard to train. It’s what you are pretty much every day and are at every interaction you have with your dog. Now this probably sounds more militant than I mean it to, but really the point is this, we know what we allow in our intentional training is what we will deal with when we are hunting with our dogs. But it’s also what we allow and often encourage when we don’t think we are training that can become real issues that will affect our relationship with our dogs for their entire lives. Are these things in that positive So think about that and think about coming back in two weeks because I have some really, really bad and devastating news for you guys that I’m gonna drop on the next episode. That’s it for this week. I’m Tony Peterson and this has been The Houndation’s podcast. Thank you so much for all of your support. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Maybe some of you find folks are turkey hunters, and if you are, you’re gonna want to check out the mediater dot Com next week when we have our Turkey Week where we celebrate America’s favorite game bird. Lots of cool stuff going on there. Check it out. Also, if you just need some more entertainment, maybe you need a little education, maybe you want to read about the latest conservation news, whatever, the mediater dot com has you covered. We drop new content literally every day and there’s so much good stuff on there, So go check it out and thank you once again for all of your support. The public cots a tactic for ins in the Tati com
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