Yo! Absolutely!

Ultimately it worked super well because:

The beep tone has been conditioned as an interrupter = stop him from doing things (e.g. barking, pacing, breaking out)

The autodispensing of food = redirection from current activities into a new activity

Having the dispenser raised = enforced sniffing to find the food = self soothing and calming activity

All this going on doesn’t prevent him for registering outside sounds/triggers, but it helps him practice dismissing them in favour of his new activities.

This interruption combined with redirection and calming activity = breaking  existing habits (barking/pacing) and building in new habits (sniffing, laying around waiting, not fixating on things outside of the yard).

All without my supervision because I set it to auto dispense. Initially at super frequent intervals like 15 seconds for 3 days, then 30 seconds for 3 days, then 1 min for 7 days, then 2 min for 7 days then then a final 3 weeks at every 6 minutes.

The final stage was super drawn out because it takes roughly 6 weeks for an old habit to be replaced. So I really wanted to give him a lot of time to develop those new habit path ways and avoid practicing his old habits.

Then a week where it was out without any dispensing enabled at all BUT I continued with the sniffing for food by setting up increasingly complicated kibble trails for his breakfast (oh boy does he love THOSE). Then I removed the manners minder all together.

Ta-dah! A dog who self soothes in the morning with his morning kibble sniff party and will then chill out in his yard until it is time to rejoin the family. A couple of backslides here and there, just bring his manners minder back at a 3 or 6 minute interval to remind him the routine.

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A post shared by ⚠️Scared Dog Learning ⚠️ (@thymeforthistle) on Apr 15, 2020 at 9:01pm PDT

(Progress videos - press the little arrows to see the videos in chronological order - deets of which stage they are down below. PS I SWEAR we could embed instagram videos, what gives???)

joejoetheracer replied to your photo: Boone doing his best mummified corpse impression

Looks like he’s loving his slumber ball now! What size did you go for, is it the large one or the extra large? x

We are lucky to have inadvertently chosen a good location with so many options! On the average day, nothing really takes more than 30 minutes to drive to. RallyO is the closest, being only 9 minutes away. Thistle’s classes range between 22-35 minutes to get to, depending off there is any sport event going on.

You’re too kind!

It came out of a “101 things to do with a box” game! My friend @pomofo did this artwork and it is so much fun! You get better and clicking and dogs learn to throw out whole new behaviours with an object and then you can shape fun things like dog on a log or dog in a bucket or only putting the booty up!

It’s a game aimed and refining both our skills with the clicker and for me, had the bonus of Thistle defeating her fear of boxes (they have flappy bits, it’s very alarming)

(also look at how still and nervous bb thistle is awwwww)

and then I thought….how small can we go? and we slowly went down in box/object sizes. The answer, turns out, is pretty small.

I don’t think anymore than other dogs in other countries…breed and personalities depending of course. I swear, some dogs are drawn to dumb dangerous situations (terriers omfg)

Absolutely have to be careful in summer when the snakes come out. Nothing better than a path in a popular walking spot for a snake to want to sun itself! In summer I don’t go to our usual walking reserve at all - all it is is 1080 baiting for foxes and happy fat snakes lazing about. As the weather changes they’re moving closer and further about. 

I’m super diligent in summer on mowing my lawn because I’m not far from a nature reserve at all and I don’t want a snake coming into the yard.

There’s usually a couple of dogs bitten in my area each summer :( last year my friend lost her 16 year old Jack Russell to a snake that wandered onto their property… :’(

I’ve only done this with Thistle so far, but I have familiarised her with some domestic snakes so she’s not super excited and obsessed about them. She’s been rewarded heavily for moving away from them. It’s not the same as a wild snake but better than nothing.

Not available locally to me, but not something I’d pass up if the option became available, is the snake-deterrent training. The tl;dr is a dog investigates a native poisonous snake (smells different to the pythons I practice on, it’s a copperhead usually used in the training I believe), dog gets zapped hard with an e-collar, dog now finds the scent of the snake incredibly aversive and will hopefully avoid approaching them in the future (nothing is 100%). With that and a solid recall, I’d hope to get that time I need to take us away.

Honestly the best measure is to just avoid snake prone areas, leave snakes alone, work on your leave it and avoid avoid avoid but any fraction of a second could be beneficial.

YES I HAVE THE SAME COLLAR IT IS THE FIRST MARTINGALE I BOUGHT HER SO DAMNIT IT WAS GOING TO BE STYLISH AND GLORIOUS