Day 29 A.M. &. P.M.

Mary-Ann Sontag June 24, 2020

This is will be a quick update this morning as I have an appointment and (masked) errands in Missoula this morning — Dear Husband will be here to keep an eye on the Wildflowers, of course. We never leave them alone.

Two Nursing Alcove photos…

This is Sage.

Pete the cat — Daisy does not mind the cats wandering about with her puppies.

The puppies have a definite preference for the toys that “crinkle” and that includes the wildflower toys and the bananas. Very interesting.

Click HERE to see a short video from this morning after the Wildflowers moved from the Nursing Alcove back to Puppy Central.

EVENING: Photos from the Fun Day

A bunk bed…

I love this photo because it says so much about Daisy.

Zoom lens! I was not as close as it seems.

That is Daisy happily meeting Suzanne’s daughter for the first time — in the middle of the Wildflowers. Daisy could not have been more thrilled to see her Bestie Suzanne and to make a new friend in Sarah. Daisy is such a kind dog.

A photo of a photo being taken of Clover.

Suzanne is in my social bubble and has been for the past three months. Masks will be required for visitors not in my immediate social bubble.

Suzanne with Mariposa and Lupine.

Okay — here is your look at puppy teeth!

Paintbrush — so cute and serious.

We all had fun visiting and being outside — even when there was a passing thunderstorm.

The puppies did a great job and are ready for more visitors!

Some of you cannot visit in person and so how about a meet-and-greet via Zoom on Saturday morning at 10 Montana time? I will post the link on Saturday morning.

Good Night, Friends!

Day 28 A.M. & P.M.

Mary-Ann Sontag June 23, 2020

Back to the research on How to Build an Amazingly Awesome Puppy.

Clover — one of nine amazingly awesome Wildflowers

Most things I discuss are related, although I know that is not always clear.

Today I hope to create a connection between the last two days of my minor ranting about board-and-hurt so-called training and the related concepts of Learned Helplessness and Resilience.

I want to produce confident, resilient puppies.

Just guess which puppy this is leading the charge to master new experiences.

What does that mean? It means I want a puppy who will try new things, and who will “bounce” if things do not go well.

I am looking to shape an internal locus of control — a perception that effort influences outcome — because that is key to resilience.

I want the puppies to march through the world with an “I Can” attitude. We want puppies with Grit!

In a review of fifty years of work on the concept of learned helplessness Maier & Seligman (2016) assert that helplessness is not learned, but rather “…passivity and heightened anxiety are the default mammalian reaction to prolonged bad events” (p. 364).

The authors go to say that “what can be learned is cortical—that bad events will be controllable in the future” (p. 364).

And so we should understand that newborns arrive hardwired to be upset and passive in the face of an adverse experience, and this is overcome “…by the experience of mastery over aversive events… (Maier & Seligman, 2016, p. 363).

Of course, this assumes the bad event doesn’t so traumatize the developing brain that the youngster stays stuck in anxiety. Learning to escape something bad, after all, is not the same thing as mastery.

Mastery of a challenge comes with rewards — escape the Nursing Alcove and there are new things to chew and places to pee!

It is normal to feel some degree of distress in the face of a challenge (Brown, 2015). What we want is the willingness to whine through the distress and do it anyway — or at least try.

Sigh. Loose puppies make one clean Puppy Central in a big hurry.

A resilient human does this all the time — in fact, we are all doing this now as we face the pandemic. Lots of whining (and some wine-ing, I know) but we keep marching.

Our job as humans is to offer puppies opportunities for mastery. The tasks must not be impossible or super scary — or too boring, easy, and/or repetitive.

There is a sweet spot — that is our goal.

Well, it is my goal.

The puppies who did not escape but who decided to hang with mom — or climb her.

Dogs and humans who learn to avoid bad outcomes are not building resilience — in fact, avoidant coping styles are associated with less resilient personalities (Brown, 2015). Therefore, pain-based and/or fear-based training, which relies on avoidance of an aversive (e.g., e-collar, which is code for shock collar), are exactly the opposite of what we want — unless we want a dog who is anxious and avoidant.

I sure don’t!

What I want for puppies and people is the ability to square up and face the challenge, confident they can do it — even if they whine a lot.

Our Wildflowers are four weeks old today. They are still exclusively nursing — of course. They are enjoying novel things every day to support the development of intelligence, curiosity, and resilience — but they are carefully protected from experiences that push them past their developmental capacities and comfort-levels. And starting tomorrow — their world will expand to include visitors.

But today — party time.

EVENING: Four Week Photos (plus a couple of extras)

Good Night, Friends!

Work Cited

Brown, R. (2015). Building children and young people's resilience: Lessons from psychology. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 14, 115-124.

Maier, S., & Seligman, M. (2016). Learned Helplessness at Fifty: Insights From Neuroscience. Psychological Review, 123(4), 349-367.

Day 27 A.M. & P.M.

Mary-Ann Sontag June 22, 2020

All is well here at Puppy Central.

My post yesterday prompted a couple of people to share additional horror stories about board-and-train situations.

Serious Yikes.

Just to be clear — board-and-train is when a person takes the puppy or dog that has been trusted to their care and leaves it with someone else.

The puppy is boarded — not bonding and learning with her family. Boarded. In a kennel. Isolated for much of the day.

Clara can tell which puppy this is — can you?

These type of places frequently involve use of a shock collar, which the so-called trainers minimize with sale pitches about how it doesn’t hurt, is like a static shock, blah blah BS. Dogs eventually learn what to do to avoid the pain — they call that training.

HUH?

In fact, a lot of dog trainers have this approach — their techniques to train a behavior are all about teaching the dog how to avoid an unpleasant consequence. For example, they teach heeling by jerking the dog when she is out of position.

I wonder what it means when people have a preference for noticing and punishing undesired behavior. It seems like a sad way to live in the world — always noticing what is wrong, and ignoring what is wonderful and amazing and great.

And what the heck — how can people seem to enjoy themselves while hurting, shocking, and/or scaring a puppy? It was one of Marti’s daughters who — with the wisdom of a child — observed that it was “creepy” when people at the dog show were smiling while doing unpleasant things to dogs.

Creepy indeed.

Training a dog is a great opportunity to shift our focus from wrong to right, and that mental shift can make a big difference in both Life with Dogs — and just Life.

I offer some additional resources as Food for Thought about training.

First, click HERE for the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior’s Position Statement on The Use of Punishment for Behavior Modification in Animals.

Second, I am a big fan of Dr. Ian Dunbar, who helped revolutionize dog training; the following is just some of his work:

Before and After Getting Your Puppy: The Positive Approach to Raising a Happy, Healthy, and Well-Behaved Dog by Dr. Ian Dunbar.

Click HERE for SIRIUS Puppy Training Classic

Click HERE for Dog Training For Children with Dr. Ian Dunbar.

Third, this is another good resource: The Puppy Primer by Dr. Patricia McConnell and Brenda Scidmore.