Kathy Sdao Seminar Notes: Fear and my Fosters

"If you are concerned with the general well-being of an animal, avoid forcing him to confront severe conflict between habits (strong tendencies to make a response) and inhibition (strong tendencies not to make a response.)"   Learning & Motivation, Frank Logan pg 71

So imagine a situation where you have an undersocialized dog and you want them to be more comfortable with strangers. So you give the stranger a piece of their favorite treat and they offer it to the dog. This is forcing that dog to confront that "severe conflict" that the quote talks about. The strong tendency would be for them to eat the delicious treat. The inhibition is to approach new people.

A past foster dog getting to know our son

This goes back to sequencing a bit, but it was a "lightbulb" moment to me. The reward is actually greater if they make the choice to push through and do the thing that is uncomfortable to them and then get the reinforcer from you, who are safe and don't taint the enjoyment of the treat. If they have to take it from the stranger they are frightened of it's very unlikely that the goodness of the treat is going to attach to the person because fear trumps learning in these situations. So a better (and safer) option to trying to get a undersocialized dog take a treat from a stranger, is to teach "touch" to the dog so that instead you can get the dog to touch the stranger and then get rewarded for their bravery by coming to you for the reinforcement of the treat.

And this brings up a second thing that Kathy talked about in her "Some Things in Life Are Free" seminar. A starving dog does not see food as a reinforcer. For me as a rescuer this had a different meaning to what I think she was using the example. She was talking about how people will skip a dogs meal before training or even refuse a dog food when they don't "perform" correctly. Think about when you were in school - if you didn't eat before a class and were really hungry, it made it a lot more difficult to concentrate and learn. Now that's not saying a dog should be stuffed, but they shouldn't be hungry when you want them to learn - their focus is completely on the food then and it will be tougher for them to retain any learning.



Hobbs was pretty underweight when he first was rescued

But as a rescuer I translated this more literally. At times we as foster parents receive dogs that are literally starving. They have spent weeks, sometimes even months, having to focus entirely on getting the basic needs of food, water and shelter met. When they first get here we need to take a deep breath and not assume we are seeing who this dog is. They are still in starvation mode and until they understand that food, water, shelter and attention are the norm in their foster home, socialization and basic training need to wait a little bit. Give them a few days to take in the wonderland of being a house dog because until that happens you won't really be able to assess their true skill set.