The Dog Blog

Being diagnosed with Lyme Disease this past August certainly explained the mysterious range of physical and neurological problems that plagued me for months: the unrelenting fatigue, why I kept forgetting my client’s names, why my hands started to become arthritic, and why I started to lose interest in my business and everything else in my life.  

My treatment began immediately, with heavy doses of antibiotics.  The antibiotics would bring down the bacterial load in my system so that my immune system could do the rest.  But as the bacteria die, they release a toxin causing what is called a Herxheimer reaction.  This means that before you feel better, you feel a whole lot worse.  

If there was one factor that I never considered as a dog trainer, it was my chances of contracting Lyme Disease, a bacterial infection spread by ticks. Lyme is transmitted to people and animals while being bitten by an infected tick. Up until a few months ago, I didn’t know much else about Lyme, other than it came from ticks in the Northeast.  

Here in North Carolina, ticks are just part of life, particularly during April-October.  During these months, I frequently check my dogs for ticks and if I find one crawling on myself, after being creeped out, I carefully remove it without much thought. In the 14 years I’ve lived here, I can’t ever remember finding ticks on my body that were attached for any length of time, or so I thought.  

Recently, I went down to the classroom with my Chow mix Mokie.  I had invited Mokie's best play pal Leila and her owner Nicole so that the girls could play while I vacuumed the classroom.

Mokie has absolutely no fear of the vacuum whatsoever.  In fact, she frequently expects you to vacuum around her and will remain napping even if the vacuum is bumping against her.  After she and Leila had played until they could hardly move, Mokie relaxed for a nap while Leila busied herself contently with her favorite classroom toy, the Nylabone.

As I was vacuuming, Mokie was napping directly in my path.  I tossed a treat to the side to get her to move out of the way.  She rose to get the treat and I continued vacuuming.

Two rows later, I found her directly in my path again.  Again, I tossed a treat to entice her to move.

The next row, the same thing happened.

It’s often said many people either give the dog too much information, “stop no hey no agrh get off down…”, or perhaps do not do anything that has any real consequence or value to the dog, “That’s good old Buster he’s just a jumpy dog”. Either way the behaviors that the human is looking to decrease are getting rehearsed, thus becoming stronger.

Many times with clients I will explain that getting in front of the behavior is very important in having good timing. Being aware of the surrounding context and being ready is one of the major ways to keep dogs paying attention outside or even inside around hectic events such as door greetings.
 
Once you’ve established a good solid reward history and a humane consequence history what follows are some ideas to tighten up the training. Always factor duration and distance as well as level of distraction.