Dog Behaviour Advice - Dog Advice Articles

Processionary Caterpillars and Continuing with the way dogs learn

You may have read that the Pine Processionary Caterpillars (Thaumetopoea pityocampa) are back with us again during the months of January and February. Their nests are found on the sunny side of pine trees and look like cotton wool balls decorating a Christmas tree lit up by the sun. I have received a number of requests and I see a letter in a paper asking for information to the dangers from these caterpillars to our dogs.

The caterpillars live in small groups and have provisional nests whilst they feed on the pine needles. In the winter, they spin the final silky nest in the most illuminated part of the tree. At the end of the winter, the caterpillars walk in a procession down the tree to find areas of warm soil where they dig themselves in to pupate.

The caterpillars are yellowish brown with urticating hairs that can cause mild skin irritations to sever allergic reactions in both humans and domesticated animals. The hairs are like fine fibreglass often embedding into a pets tongue when they try to eat the caterpillars. For dogs the usual reactions is for the tongue to rapidly increase in size to the point where the animal cannot breath.

A tip given to me is that if you cannot keep clear of infected pine trees then ask your vet for the correct dosage of anti-histamine pill for your pet. Place this in a small pouch that you can attach to the collar. If your pet is unfortunate to have contact with a caterpillar and shows a sever reaction you can push the pill down into the throat. This will possibly give you additional time to get your pet to the nearest vet who can then administer medicines more powerful to counter the reaction.

There is no need to panic but just be aware and let’s be careful out there.

How Dogs learn continued

Continuing from last week, I said I would detail two incidences that though they look different and contradictory they actually show the dogs use the same method of thinking in both.

The first instance is from a Police/Patrol dog competition. Training with John Rogerson in Durham, it decided instead of judging each individual exercise like the straight chase, the hidden person search etc we would combine all the exercises into an incident similar to that encountered by any Police dog handler whilst on duty.

The handler with his dog walking on his left and the judge walking on his right would approach a large screen on the left representing a shop. Persons with arm protection mingled ahead like people in any street in a town centre.

As the team approach, they hear two gunshots from within the shop. A man comes running out shouting and fires two more shots back into the shop. The people in the street fall about in panic as the thief runs away from the team. The handler calls him to stop or he will send his dog. Just before the judge allows the handler to do this, the shopkeeper runs from inside the shop waving a stick and shouting at the thief to bring back his goods. The shopkeeper is now running after the thief when the judge says to send the dog. In all cases, the dogs ignored the panicking people, ran past the irate shopkeeper, and detained the criminal.

The handler catches up and disarms the thief whilst the dog barks a warning he is watching. The handler searches for any hidden weapons. None found the handler commences walking back towards the judge with the dog at heel but prepared for any sign that the thief may try to make an escape or attack the handler.

At this point one of the people who were in the street gets up shouting to the handler to let his accomplice go. He fires two shots towards the team. The dog without command goes straight for the shooter who then starts to run away. At about half way between the criminal and the handler the first prisoner now starts to try to escape where upon the judge says that the accomplice is only running into a blind alley so the handler should recall his dog to help recapture the first prisoner.

Having escorted the first prisoner to the dog van and locked him inside the dog and handler then approach the area where the accomplice was last seen disappearing into the wood behind the shop. The handler tells the dog to search and can help by directing the dog over all the area until by using scent the dog finds the hidden criminal.

Having located him, the dog must now bark without command and not to eat any of the poisoned meat offered. The handler approaches the criminal and arrests him at which point he tries to attack the handler. Again, without any command the dog must attack the criminal to defend his handler. Finally detained the handler then escorts the criminal back to the judge and so to the end of the tests.

Watching such a demonstration of the normal daily work of a serving Police dog handler looks very impressive and yet just like in the Lassie films or the film K9 these are only combining a series of individual exercises of sense and reactions performed by the dog.

What looks like a very clever dog having to work this all out is only the judge creating a cleverly choreographed series of stimuli in the right places that will produce the correct response from trained dogs. I am not depreciating a dog’s intelligence merely showing you the dogs thinking process used to achieve this incident.

The second incident is something that happened with my hunting dog Rolly. Whilst training on an airfield year York, we were waiting for our tracks to cool and Rolly was busy hunting. This airfield was only a dispersal area for American B52 bombers so rarely used and resulting in hundreds of rabbits running about. Rolly would see a rabbit and start to chase it but as he started to get close he would set up another rabbit and he started to chase that setting up yet another rabbit and he would chase that and so on. He could never catch these rabbits and eventually he would have to give up as he ran out of steam. One of the other handlers asked why I had not taught him to chase one rabbit at a time so it would eventually tire one out so he could catch it.

On one hand, we have a patrol dog chasing a criminal yet no one in between diverted it from its chosen quarry. Why does the dog even ignore the shopkeeper who is shouting and waving a stick at the thief? The reason is that he is not showing his aggression towards the dog.

On the other hand, we have a highly trained hunting dog diverted by every rabbit that pops up.

In fact, both dogs are obeying the simple sense and reaction commands as taught by the handler over the period of training. Handlers therefore teach each exercise individually so the dog senses these and for each learns a unique response. To chase a criminal that is being verbally challenged the dog is focused on that person apposed to any other. The shooting of a gun at a dog it is to teach it to automatically detain the shooter without command. Had the lookout stood up during the straight chase then the dog could possibly have changed its reaction and attacked the shooter instead?

For Rolly, he learned his skills on rough shoots where there are not so many rabbits available. He quickly learned his best chance of catching a rabbit was before it had time to accelerate to full speed. This meant that with so many rabbits as each popped up his learnt response was to try to catch a rabbit when at its slowest speed. Unfortunately, another rabbit would pop up and his response directed him to chase that one then the next and so on. Rolly could not change that conditioned response. Only if he was to regularly hunt on the airfield could this response change to one where he stood a better chance of catching a rabbit.

Both situations are easily divisible by the learned sense and response action method of learning. There is nowhere here where there is any evidence of any human type of planning in a dogs learning ability. A dog cannot rapidly change any already learned responses to sensing of any particular incident. Like Rolly, it must follow its learned response to each type of incident even when there are changes that reduces his chances.

Humans on the other hand can calculate a possible outcome and so can rapidly alter their responses to suit each incident. If the incident changes permanently, a dog must then learn a new way to succeed. Once retrained, it will then repeat this until the particular incidents changes again making the dog fail. Yes, we do try to change gear by winding the window down when we change cars from driving in the UK to driving in Spain but this is because we are lazy and put our learned skills onto autopilot to allow us to do other things.

This brings us back to Pavlov’s dogs and the ringing of a bell makes dogs salivate without even the smell or sight of any food. If ringing the bell the dog no longer received food then it will eventually stop salivating.

To teach Winston to close a door I must first teach him to jump up for a titbit I am holding in my hand that is also in front of a slightly open door. As he jumps up for the titbit, his front paws will land on my hand and the door. With his weight, he effectively closes the door. For this he receives loads of praise. I will then say, “Close the door” followed by “up” and Winston will jump up again landing on the door so closing it. As he learns to do this, I leave out the word “up” and simply say, “Close the door”. By regular repetition Winston will learn to not only do this on command but also whenever he enters the house as the stimulus is not my command but seeing the open door.

For the training of our dogs if we make the reward great enough for any response we require and we give that reward immediately the dog reacts it will rapidly condition itself to repeat that reaction time after time. This means that if you wish to teach your dog to respond to a command you must make sure the total action you are wishing to accomplish has only one sense or command producing only one unique singular reaction.

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