Dog Training World Forums General Dog Training Discussion Miscellaneous Article: Does predatory sequence predict performance on human-guided tasks Reply To: Article: Does predatory sequence predict performance on human-guided tasks

  • Arthur Lopatin

    Member
    September 13, 2019 at 5:54 pm
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    Interesting, suggestive study. Good companion to Fdtn Trng 4.0, Stream 3 (Breeds). Related, perhaps unanswered or unanswerable question that I ask myself almost every day: My dog, Carrie (Short for Carolina. I didn’t name her. I adopted it w/her.) is, I believe a Carolina Dog/Hound/Terrier mix. Based on her appearance and behavior. When I got her and for a considerable time after I got some basic obedience training on her, including Phase 3, she exhibited all the predation style steps, except for eating what she killed….mostly small, ground-dwelling critters in the woods. She’s about 12 now but still sometimes gets into it (off-leash, which is how we hike in the woods,  if I make it very clear she’s ‘Free.’ to follow her nose. But  less so than in earlier years. I sometimes ask myself if that inhibition is attributable to poor training on my part or advancing age, or a combination of the two. I also wonder whether this — practically very necessary — instinctual repression does to a dog, physically and psychologically over time. Compared to other dogs, Carrie’s got it pretty good: She’s off leash in the woods a lot and gets to follow her nose pretty frequently including going for critters, but I think the general question suggested by the above and by observations of dogs here in my village (always on-leash, w/limited opportunities for physical exercise, let alone, for exercising their full instinctual repertoire, either in a natural environment or via substitute activities — e.g. flyball) remains: What does this do to a dog over time? What does living lives of silent desperations (Thoreau said this about us humans) do to dogs? Have there been any scientific studies of this topic? I doubt it. Seems to me it’d be hard to do scientifically as opposed to anecdotally.