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Dave and I have been taking turns blogging about Tajji over on Book View Cafe. For those folks following the saga of rehabilitating a retired seeing eye dog here, here's the latest entry. The image is of Tajji romping the our daughter's lily pond.
I suppose everyone has had the experience of looking into an animal’s eyes and wondering what thoughts were passing through its mind, or how it was experiencing the moment. When learning to train an animal, the wonder becomes tinged with frustration, as one realizes how poorly one hears the animal even when it’s frantically semaphoring its thoughts and emotions. What chance of sensing its internal life, then, when the animal is quiet?
Looking back from the other end of the leash, such uncertainty disappears. As the result of hundreds of centuries of co-evolution with mankind, Tajji’s mirror neurons give her a pretty good model of my internal life, as far as her purposes are concerned. And what she lacks in empathy, she makes up for with the startling speed with which she learns the rituals of play or training or everyday life.
Paradoxically, the combination of two highly desirable canine traits, empathy and trainability, yields a dog that can actually be more difficult to train. For instance, two of the drills we do with her daily if possible are the “name game” and “puppy in the middle.” In the name game, you throw a piece of food on the ground in front of the dog. As soon as the dog is finished eating, but before it lifts its head, you call its name, then mark and reward any turn of the head towards you. In “puppy in the middle,” two people take turns calling the dog away from the other partner, rewarding in the same fashion for a head turn or, hopefully soon, the dog’s return.( Read more... )
I suppose everyone has had the experience of looking into an animal’s eyes and wondering what thoughts were passing through its mind, or how it was experiencing the moment. When learning to train an animal, the wonder becomes tinged with frustration, as one realizes how poorly one hears the animal even when it’s frantically semaphoring its thoughts and emotions. What chance of sensing its internal life, then, when the animal is quiet?Looking back from the other end of the leash, such uncertainty disappears. As the result of hundreds of centuries of co-evolution with mankind, Tajji’s mirror neurons give her a pretty good model of my internal life, as far as her purposes are concerned. And what she lacks in empathy, she makes up for with the startling speed with which she learns the rituals of play or training or everyday life.
Paradoxically, the combination of two highly desirable canine traits, empathy and trainability, yields a dog that can actually be more difficult to train. For instance, two of the drills we do with her daily if possible are the “name game” and “puppy in the middle.” In the name game, you throw a piece of food on the ground in front of the dog. As soon as the dog is finished eating, but before it lifts its head, you call its name, then mark and reward any turn of the head towards you. In “puppy in the middle,” two people take turns calling the dog away from the other partner, rewarding in the same fashion for a head turn or, hopefully soon, the dog’s return.( Read more... )
