The harvest of the educated

On collecting textbooks

INCOMING…

ranty moan.

Feel free to skip if you like.

If you want the tl;dr, I got ripped off and I then felt sorry for myself for believing influence over knowledge. This happened twice so I’m mostly mad at the common denominator, which appears to be me.

Someone asked me the other day if I’d seen such-and-such’s approach to teaching some dog skill.

I hadn’t, I confessed.

I felt like it sounded important; it was from a trainer whose work I have enjoyed very much in the past, and I figured a little end-of-tax-year celebration was in order, so I paid my $150 for the course, mostly out of FOMO, it seems. The price seemed steep, but I assumed it’d be worth it.

Well, reader, I was disappointed.

I’m sure that for most guardians who have dogs who struggled with that specific situation, it’d have been worth it for the scant 2 hours the cost covered. It might as well have said, “teach the skill by luring - fade the lure - add in duration - add in distractions.”

$150.

What made me cross was that it’s a skill that would be quite important for a lot of dogs I work with and their guardians. It’s something I already teach in my own fashion, but I was hoping it’d be better than that. There was a massive misunderstanding of what the dogs seemed to be doing in the exercise and all kinds of assertions made, but not once did it stop to ask why the dog’s guardian might have thought it would be a good idea or a useful skill to teach the dog.

I imagine a lot of the dogs who need it would be struggling with their relationship with the guardian and struggling with knowing how to self-soothe. This very specific form of frustration hits both ends of the lead and I was sad that at no point did the person try to train a dog who actually needed it other than with a dog in a foster programme who really struggled. What made me especially upset was the amount of negative punishment, ignoring and extinction recommended. It’d be a great way to teach staring, whining and barking.

It was then I remembered that this was exactly the way that one of my clients ended up with me, with a dog who barks long and hard every time she wants anything.

It made me really sad (and a bit mad because there was no facility to leave a public review). I won’t name and shame because it’s not my cup of tea, but I just wanted to compare it to another book I picked up last week.

I also got a second-hand (or hundredth-hand) copy of Fanselow & Bouton’s homage to Robert Bolles, Learning, Motivation & Cognition (eds Mark Bouton & Michael Fanselow, 1997) who had been their supervisor early in their career. It cost me £7.99 from a vintage bookseller who posts books out. Most of the cost was postage.

On opening it, not only did I learn more about the life of a quite remarkable academic, I was heartened to see all kinds of companionable names in there. There was Lew Petrinovich, who co-edited the wonderful Habituation, Sensitization and Behavior. There was Michael Domjan, who wrote the wonderful textbook that has become my firm favourite, writing his own chapter. I hadn’t realised that the book was written as a tribute to Bolles, who had died of a heart attack before a conference in his name, and that many people he inspired contributed a chapter. And there were, of course, chapters from Mark Bouton & Michael Fanselow among many others.

It is a picnic of academic treasures, wrapped up in a dusty library book that was sent out to pasture and sold for a tiny fee. It’s Michael Domjan’s chapter that really set the lightbulbs off. I think he blew me a fuse there. Mainly, of course, because it’s about quail sex, and that always tickles me to know people are out there, investigating what makes Mr Quail excited to see Mrs Quail. It’s also about how all reinforcers are not created equal. It’s about the functional link between stimuli and responses. Anyway, it made me think more about reinforcers and dog training and the implications of what he said than anything else I’ve read in a while.

In fact, that dusty chapter from 1997 explained all the faults and errors that I’d found in the $150 course I bought and why it wouldn’t really work very well.

It did make me cross that we turn to ‘industry leaders’ whose work is not only a rip-off but not as ‘fluffy’ as they sell themselves to be and would probably fail a good number of guardians and dogs. It was, in short, uneducated.

Actually, that then caught me up in something else I read last week. It was a download that had cost me 0.99 from Amazon’s deal of the day. The writer professed to have a BSc in Neuroscience & an MSc in Organisational Psychology. Not only that, she said, she was a phenomenon on Instagram for her insights into behaviour change. I checked. She had half a million followers, so certainly a phenomenon compared to me. By page 2, I was cursing. I confess I skim-read the rest. Most of it was out of the whole ‘dopamine = reward’ and ‘give yourself a dopamine pop’ camp that makes me want to punch myself in the head repeatedly. A lot of it was plain wrong or trivialised or silly.

But a lot of it was actually dangerous nonsense. The idea being that you could ‘think yourself’ whatever you wanted; think yourself free of ADHD; think yourself out of OCD.

I could post a public review of that, so I did. My headline was ‘DANGEROUS NONSENSE’. I was the only 1* review of over 300.

It made me think about the power of influence. We’re so lost now, aren’t we, that those who have influence can say whatever? Even if it’s dangerous. Even if it’s wrong. Even if it trivialises things. Even if it never situates behaviour in the context of the individual and their body and their life.

But…

I’m a big fan of changing what you can change and not being that bothered about the stuff you can’t. If I want to annoy myself over the Orange MAGA lord, I can do so, but I know there’s very little I can do about it. I can decide I’m not spending a penny on Amazon ever again and that is within my control. But getting the MAGA overlord to stop causing chaos across the world is a bit beyond my scope. Do what you can do. Stop stressing about the world beyond your control. I can’t very well control what influencers do on social media, so I can just do what I do, beavering away in my corner like usual.

It did get me thinking very much though about how we can start to sow the seeds of critical thinking. I noticed a sponsored post from an animal educator last week where she’d mentioned something vaguely controversial about aversive methods and a) there was a bit of a pile-on from those trainers who have no idea how much of the bad stuff they use in their daily training saying they absolutely DO NOT do that and they DON’T need to know about it either and then said something incredibly lacking in nuance or wrong that showed they don’t understand learning at all, and b) likes or hearts from sensible people. All this made me realise how much chaos there is out there.

And again, there was a paper out last week from someone yet again citing books you can buy in airport book stores. Nothing against that, but they shouldn’t be in science papers as evidence for a citation. It’s not good when the academics on whose words we rest are not particularly good at critical thinking themselves. You know, of the vein of, “This copy of a book by a dodgy sex pest guy who got sacked from his own foundation for misconduct… this book that is sold in airports on displays next to Katie Price’s memoirs and a bonkbuster from Jilly Cooper, I think this is a good book to cite as my evidence of the effects of stress on the body…”

That kind of thing.

Chaos. And that’s published ‘research’ from people with PhDs, sometimes involved in teaching other people how to get a PhD!

By the way, there are people worth paying $150 for an hour of their time. The Living and Learning with Animals course I did with Professor Susan Friedman cost about that for the taught time, but it set me on the trail to ordering textbooks from libraries celebrating the lives of inspirational thinkers, and that’s all good.

I don’t know how we make sense of all of this. Sorry for the ranty moan!

Reading more is my only answer. Knowledge definitely makes lives better for our dogs, if not for ourselves. Find those dusty books from forgotten academics and cherish them, before the only books on sale are those from ignorant influencers who found marketing strategies without any morals or ethics being involved in the crap they throw out there. I’ve made it my mission for the year to collect as many dusty textbooks as I can and revive their wisdom, or hoard them until I die and then bequeath them to someone younger with the stamina to digest them.

Small benefits!

Note to future self: do not buy expensive courses because of FOMO; buy more dusty textbooks and revive them.

Anyway, rant over. Feel free to resume reading from this point!

Last Week’s Compendium

• The Mayhem to Maestro course re-opens today for six short weeks. You can obviously take as long as you like, even if that’s six years. I’m very much looking forward to getting practical. Lidy has been warming up as my able assistant and I’d forgotten just how much she loves training, bless her. She is keen as mustard to show off new skills. I’m very much a fan of simplicity these days. I feel like I’ve come full circle on the whole ‘simple solutions for complex problems’ thing. Link here if you want to join!

• I had a chat a while back with Rachel from Canine Connection. She asked me about my difficult cases, and I shared some of my insights about working with clients facing challenging circumstances. Life is WELL messy, isn’t it? I’m not sure if you can still get tickets, but if you can, they’re here.

• It was Lighten Up’s third inaugural birthday on the 1st April. I feel dead on my legs, so there’s that! I know once the Fear stuff is committed to hard drive, though, the heavy lifting is done. Last week was incredibly heavy lifting. I did a session about moving beyond Panksepp when it comes to the neuroscience of fear & anxiety, one on modern interpretations of neural networks involved in fear & anxiety (warning: there are lots!) and one on the SAM & HPA axis/adrenaline and so on. That’s Module 2 now in the bank and I can start writing Module 3. I thought there were 8 modules, but it turns out there are 9 because I am silly and I cannot count. 900+ hours still left to write, and 89 sessions to record. I’m using the counter to motivate myself! Module 3 is all the stuff on traits, states, heritability, genetics, context vs cued fears, learned fears & social fears. There’s a little on emotion regulation. I got my new copy of Gross & Ford’s Handbook of Emotion Regulation and that’s now covered in beans and couscous from my lunchtime attempts to squash in a little light reading about the state of the science. I’m looking ahead to Module 4 and crying a bit. It’s ALL so important… downregulation, cognitive reappraisal, signal detection theory, memory acquisition, consolidation, encoding, memory lability… I’m feeling like it should be less big, but how? This is all so important!

• There was a post about why I sometimes ask for videos of dogs sleeping (or not!) in the night. It’s not because I’m weird! Well, maybe…

• I also shared a post from the supporters’ substack about Mylde & Tameable Beastes. If you’ve not had it, enjoy. I am in need of light relief.
  

I’ve been writing about all things culture, religion and dogs for a bit… there is nothing I cannot relate to dogs, I swear.

On the Cards

• Other than the first week of the Mayhem course…

• I’ve got a post coming up for supporters on substack on the stuff you buy for your dog depending on your political leanings. I’ll be in the health corner, buying Lidy home-made foods. That said, she also has necklaces with her name on and a blanket for her as well. Make of that as you will. Anyway, I’m writing this week about Paul’s letters in the New Testament and how they’ve ended up in chlorinated chicken and all kinds of dogs bred for ill health, so it kind of explains why we ended up where we did in this week’s post. Dogs & politics. What’s not to enjoy?!

• There’s some social posts. Maybe a video. Idk. Am I in the mood? Who knows?! All I want to do at the moment is the fear & anxiety course. I am loving getting it out of my system.

Miscellany & Paraphernalia

I’m hoping I get some good nights’ rest this week, and not reading into the small hours. I have been thinking very much about how our dogs relax. A lot of that seems to be ‘lying down’ taken as a de facto indication that the dog is ‘relaxed’ when a lot of the time, the dog looks like they’re a) bored b) waiting c) in a state of anticipatory excitement & taking the down-stay as their cue that a jackpot might occur any moment now.

That got me thinking about how I relax.

I am not good at lying down.

I am rubbish at doing nothing. Doing nothing, doing yoga, doing stillness or meditation - these are stressful to me.

I am quite good at switching off by colouring stuff. I am also quite good at switching off by reading. I’ve been reading a lot of fiction recently - sometimes my soul yearns for a story. But I’m not good at doing nothing. I relax by moving, by walking or even just sitting and looking at stuff. As you might have guessed, I am not good at doing nothing. My sister relaxes in social company.

It made me realise how hard it is to define relaxation, especially when the mark of it is a sphinx-like high postured down-stay which doesn’t seem relaxed to me at all.

Of course, nobody’s really gone to the trouble of operationalising relaxation. And while we all know our dogs relatively well (well, I thought so, before I saw people saying their dogs were relaxed when they were wound as tight as coiled springs and everything in their posture said so) I wonder if relaxation is really, as Susan Friedman might say, a study of one? Do we all have our own unique relaxation style?

And how do we differentiate it in our dogs from boredom, relief or fatigue?

Big questions that my mind yearns to know an answer to. I bet someone, somewhere, wrote a dusty textbook on the matter.

I shall endeavour to find out.

Anyway, have a lovely - and relaxing! - week. May your week be filled with treasure from the past that reminds you that you know more than you think you do!