What is Shelties?

I'm waiting to see how many balls he manages to find in the house. What I'm finding interesting is that he's not bringing them one right after the other and is instead pacing his deliveries out over time.

For folks that struggle with teaching their dog Fetch because they'll chase the ball but aren't super motivated to bring it to your hand this is a great method to try. I was inspired by watching so many dogs playing flyball drop the ball before the line and watching the handler struggle to get the dog to go back for it. I thought if I only rewarded the dog for bringing me the ball, regardless of whether I threw it or not, it could super charge that "in my hand" piece.

It worked.

Too well.

Often people will rush into pushing dogs for faster recalls and snappier turns and let ball retrieve atrophy as it’s deprioritized. “I’m giving them the tug because they came back fast!” Some of the fastest dogs in my region are notorious for losing races due to dropped balls because all they care about is Go Fast.

When you provide (AND MAINTAIN) a clear criteria to the dog that the rewarded behavior ends at ball (to hand/to target/to release cue/etc) the problem magically disappears.

A large dataset (227 breeds; dataset 1) of median heterozygosity values (H) was obtained through commercial DNA testing of 49,378 dogs. The mean number of individuals per breed was 217.5 (95% Confidence Interval 162–273.1) and the range of individual dogs/breed was 30–4728. Since the H values do not provide a simple relationship to pedigree, we wanted to determine what their equivalency was to the coefficient of inbreeding (F). The genotype-based coefficient of inbreeding was determined in 19 breeds with 8–20 individuals in each breed (dataset 2) for comparison to dataset 1. Dreger at al [8] used 10 individuals per breed and calculated F based on genotypes and the correlation with dataset 2 was 0.85 (12 breeds in common). Yordy et al. [9] used 6–724 individuals per breed and the correlation with dataset 2 was 0.75 (15 breeds in common). F from dataset 2 was highly correlated with H from dataset 1 (Pearson correlation coefficient of − 0.8899 (P < 0.0001) for the same 19 breeds. Linear regression (r2 = 0.79) was performed to obtain adjusted F values (Fadj) for the dataset 1 breeds. Based upon linear regression, an H value of 33.1% was equivalent to F of 0.25. The H values were adjusted based on the regression to provide breed estimates of inbreeding for the 227 breeds in dataset 1 (Fadj). These adjusted values from dataset 1 were compared to adjusted values from [9] which included 97 breeds in common and the Pearson correlation was 0.883 and [8] which included 75 breeds in common and was 0.89. The mean of the Fadj values for 227 breeds was 0.249 (95% CI 0.235–0.263) (Fig. 1). Strikingly few breeds (N = 12) had low inbreeding values (< 0.10). The breeds with the lowest levels of inbreeding were mostly landrace breeds or breeds with recent cross breeding. To put the inbreeding values in context, the breeding of two first cousins produces F = 0.0625, two half siblings F = 0.125 and two full siblings or parent-offspring F = 0.25.