Hello all, the Pig will be trying her Gold Kennel club assessment at the end of November with our training class. Most of it we should do fine (well, the Stay is a bit touch and go but I know how to work on that) but I think we have a problem with the ‘relaxed isolation’. Here, they are tied to a fence outdoors in our training compound, probably 3 meters between each dog, and left with the owners out of sight (I think) for between 2 and 5 minutes. The Pig doesn’t have separation anxiety, but she does get bored, and when she gets bored she whines. Apparently whining is an automatic fail. She is just quite a vocal dog - she whines when I am around too so nothing to do with separation. She whines to herself when chewing her bone, she whines before taking herself off to bed for a nap. Any momentary frustration causes her to whine a little bit! How should I go about working on this? I know I shouldn’t return to her or pay her attention until she is quiet but I have been doing this technique for a while now and it doesn’t seem to reduce the whining. She doesn’t seem particularly upset, she just likes to loudly bemoan her situation if something isn’t quite right for her at any one moment! Any ideas?
Whining is a difficult one because it's more of a symptom than a behaviour in itself. Luna whines when she's bored and frustrated, too. You're right to not give her attention for it, because she could make the connection between whining and getting what she wants, but your approach shouldn't be to reduce the whining, but to prevent the cause of the whining. This means building up the tolerance to boredom gradually so she doesn't get an opportunity to whine and really ramping up the rewards. Not just food, think about what is the thing she likes more than anything else, and find a way of using that.
This sounds like a really difficult way of completing that part of the test. The rules say that the handler can choose the method of isolation -and crates are allowed. https://www.thekennelclub.org.uk/media/21396/gcdsgold.pdf I wonder if your trainer would be amenable to that?
Yes thank you, you are right, building up tolerance of boredom is what I need to do, I had been so focussed on stopping the symptom rather than addressing the cause. Hmm trouble is, above food on the Pig’s reward list it is just hunting deer and pheasants...things that I am trying to discourage! Toys and games come below food with her unfortunately. So do you think it’s just a case of tying her to something, and leaving her for very gradually increasing durations with the best food rewards I can muster? The trouble is it seems like if the reward is too great, that seems to make her boredom and frustration worse because she finds it even harder to wait to get at it!
Ah you are right. I think if we really had a problem with it the trainer wouldn’t mind us using a crate. But I think the proximity of other dogs aren’t really the problem and I suspect that she would be the same whiny creature in a crate. But I could give it a go...perhaps the crate would muffle the whining! And the bonus is she wouldn’t have to lie on the wet ground which really causes us problems with these assessments because she has a bald tummy and hates getting damp!
