#might restrain myself and get is as a gift for after exams

[akualapaau]

.: stolen from @yolodari because I need to flesh out this verse anyway :.

TEN LAYER CAKE

LAYER ONE : THE OUTSIDE

Name: "Leilani Kapula Mahea Nahoa Kanunu Kekauoha, at your service! ... Or, Lani, for short.” 

Eye Color: “Hazel. I have my mother’s body and my father’s eyes. At least, that’s what I’ve been told. I remember her looking different but her and Papa told me I have her pre-me body.”

Hair Style/Color: “It’s just plain brown. In full sunlight, lighter bronze streaks show up. I wear it long because I like it. There’s no reason for me to have it long because I always have it tied up or otherwise restrained out of my work.”

Height: “I’m a little wee, even by human standards. I was huge in Ironforge, though.”

Clothing Style: “A long coat with lots of pockets or a bag is essential. Other than that, I’m used to wearing just about nothing. It’s one of the things I enjoy the most about around the great Illidari. Everyone else is just this side of naked so I don’t feel out of place wearing island gear. And most of them are covered in more scars than me so I’m kind of less self conscious about not being exposed. I definitely cover up if I’m going outside.”

LAYER TWO: THE INSIDE

Your Fears: “Spiders. And being useless in a time of crisis.”

Your Guilty Pleasure: “Children’s stories. Fairy tales. I’ve noticed some cultures are a little more bloodthirsty than others with the things they tell their children but overall, little bedtime stories make me think of a less stressful time of life.”

Your Biggest Pet Peeve: “People not putting things back exactly where they found them. There is order to my chaos!”

Your Ambition for the Future: “Travel the world, learn everything there is to know about every race as far as medical and healing goes, maybe get some surf and sand in when I can...”

LAYER THREE: THOUGHTS

Your First Thoughts Waking Up: “It’s usually along the lines of, ‘Okay, up on the count of three. One... two... HEAVE!’ and I have to go over it several times before I’m actually able to get up and move.”

What You Think About the Most: “How to phrase things without coming across as a mad scientist, like asking if I can have the corpse of the next dead out of any race so I can tear them apart and see how they work. I haven’t yet come up with a way that doesn’t immediately make people wary of me. I already work so hard to earn their trust so they’ll let me around even races that don’t usually tolerate my own, the last thing I want to do is have them hate me because I have a need to know.”

What You Think About Before Bed: “I think about going to bed, and then realize how much stuff I have to do, and then just don’t go to bed. If I go to sleep it’s normally not in a bed but on a desk or in a chair or even slumped over on an exam table.”

Your Best Quality Is: “I am obnoxiously insistent on helping. And although I really hate having to figure something out, I’m really good at it.”

LAYER FOUR: WHAT’S BETTER?

Single or Group Dates: “I... I don’t. Mostly because I don’t have time or anyone interested, but also because the last time I dated it didn’t end well and I’m still not real over it yet. He was not a good guy but I was lonely. The last time I saw him was when my neighbor, Lahoko, was dragging him out of my house by his neck, and Lahoko’s wife stayed with me for a few days. I don’t know what happened after that. Nobody on the island saw my ex again, but Lahoko returned with a severed tusk. It was neat because I got to figure out how to reattach it. He was very patient and sat still while I worked and moved only once to tell me in no uncertain terms ‘No more boys for you’ so...” 

To be Loved or Respected: “You can hate me all you want but you will respect me or there will be issues.”

Beauty or Brains: “Brains. All day, every day.”

Dogs or Cats: “I’m actually a cat person! I prefer them, I’m more like them than a dog... but I have a dog. Granted, he was a gift and he’s very useful and I would be out to tide with no paddle without him but I would not have made the conscious choice to have a dog on my own.”

LAYER FIVE: DO YOU?

Lie: “I... bend the truth to my advantage, and especially to the advantage of my patients, especially especially to parents. Will this otherwise perfectly healthy and robust orc child die from a small handful of poisonous berries? Most likely not. Will I tell his father that he might, if it means making sure the child will be properly treated instead of just left to suffer? You bet your ass I will.”

Believe in Yourself: “No, but I believe in what I know and I believe in my limitations.” 

Believe in Love: “I believe in different kinds of love. I believe in the love I have for my island and all those on it. I believe in the love they have for me.I believe in the love of my friends and the family I made with the other misfits in the world, but as far as romantic love goes, I’m not sure there’s any for me. If it happens, it happens. I won’t chase it. I have too much else on my plate. Let it come to me.”

Want Someone: “It would be nice. I’m in no hurry. Let me cure the world and then I’ll worry about it.”

LAYER SIX: EVER?

Been on Stage: "As a speaker and a lecturer for some things I discovered but not as a dancer, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Done Drugs: “... I’m in pain a lot. I have to do something for it.”

Changed Who You Were to Fit In: "I reign myself in but I don’t change it. I know I can be a little much to handle so I try my best to keep that under control but that ‘little much’ becomes ‘just enough to get us out of this’ sometimes.”

LAYER SEVEN: FAVORITES

Favorite Color: “Orange, pink, white, blue, yellow, red... all the colors of the sunsets I grew up under.”

Favorite Animal: “The owls in the Night Elven cities I’ve been to have all been beautiful and weirdly affectionate. I love it!”

Favorite Food: “Poi. It never fails to cheer me up. Finding the right stuff to make it is next to impossible, though.”

Favorite Game: “I am NOT good at darts but it is fun!” 

LAYER EIGHT: AGE

Day Your Next Birthday Will Be: “November twenty third.”

How Old Will You Be: “Thirty three.”

Age You Lost Your Virginity: “We were both sixteen.”

Does Age Matter: “To a point. For the longer living races, being five or six hundred years older than me doesn’t really matter, as long as it translates over to about the same age range. Shorter living races, I cap it at seven years difference.”

LAYER NINE: IN A BOY OR GIRL

Best Personality: “Oh, wow, just someone who puts up with me and won’t try to force me to be something I don’t want to be.”

Best Eye Color: “It doesn’t matter. I don’t look at them much anyway.”

Best Hair Color: “Just so that it’s long, I don’t care. I like to braid stuff. It calms me down.”

Best thing to do with a Partner: “Make it through a shift alive. ... oh, you mean a romantic one? Uh... let’s come back to that one.”

LAYER TEN: FINISH THE SENTENCE

I love: “My job! I hate that it has to exist but I do love it.”

I feel: “Honestly, I’m in pain right now. I let Ruslan to go run around and investigate this new place so that if I need to rely on him, he won’t be distracted sniffing around at something he just discovered. It means I’ve had to be fully on my own for moving around on hard metal flooring. It’s not fun. I need to get better shoes for this place, I think. I wonder if there’s a bath to soak in?”

I hide: “A lot of things but mostly how much I want to stick my hands in the nearest injury.”

I miss: “Home. My grandfather. My parents.”

I wish: “People could trust each other even a little. Seriously! I’m a medic! I’m here to learn and help, not to cause harm!”

[gymnasioargos]

Hello fellow force-free trainers!

I wanted to introduce myself. I am CJ from Gymnasio Argos which is a company I founded in February of this year. I am a force-free trainer who is on break from my PhD in Chemistry.

If you want the details:

I have completed my coursework and my Qualifying Exam, which was a defense of a research proposal entirely of my own design. My defense included a closed-door session with a committee of experts in Chemistry who had full latitude to ask me any chemistry questions they would like (it was a grueling hour-long session), which was preceded by a public presentation and Q&A session that was widely announced, as is legally required. I have not yet completed my research requirements in order to receive my PhD (which isn’t to say I didn’t do research). I don’t know if I will yet or not. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes.

Moving on:

Like many of us, I have always had a gift with connecting to dogs. However, I am relatively new to the dog training scene. I have only been into dog training earnestly for about the past four years. I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve gone through many modality phases. I’ve been LIMA, Milan-esque, “balanced”, R+ force-free, and now I have my own spin on Bond-Based Choice Teaching*, which is also a force-free approach to dog training (or “dog education”, as I’d prefer to call it if I didn’t have to worry about SEO).

I don’t want to step on toes, but Bond-Based Choice Teaching was such a departure from everything I felt I knew about dog training that I feel incredibly lucky that I’m new to dog training. It took so much un-learning and revisioning that I couldn’t imagine trying to do it after a lifetime of understanding dog behavior through the lens of the Behaviorism most common among dog training.

I also feel very lucky for the training I received during my incomplete PhD. While Chemistry is an unrelated field, preparing for my Qualifying Exam taught me how to parse journal jargon and how to rank the epistemological** value of information. When I happened upon Jennifer Arnold’s Love Is All You Need, which is where I learned Bond-Based Choice Teaching (BBCT), I had the skill set to convert my incredulous reaction to fact-checking. Again, I don’t want to step on any toes, but I have yet to run into a dog trainer who is as up-to-date on research, empirical, and adaptable as Jennifer Arnold of Canine Assistants.

Regardless, I know that my approach as The Girl Who Talks To Dogs is unique and considering it is unsettling for all. It’s fine. It was for me, too. I won’t demand you consider it, but please know that Canine Assistants places 75-100 working dogs each year with a 95% success rate. It works.

However, if I could ask one thing of my fellow force-free trainers, it would be to note your own feelings about such a radically different approach. Does it seem uncomfortable and non-intuitive to you? (Yes.) Do you trust that it will work? (No.) Are you tempted to try to explain any success I’ve had with my approach within the framework of your own methodology? (Yes.) I’m familiar with the feeling as I’ve crossed over training philosophies several times.

I’m not pointing this out to sell you on anything. I do want to make a point about reaching out to punishment-inclusive trainers. They feel the same way about force-free as you do about The Girl Who Talks To Dogs. To punishment-inclusive trainers, force-free doesn’t seem like it will work. Many punishment-inclusive trainers believe force-free trainers have a “backroom” where we harshly punish our dogs. ...because they don’t believe force-free works. If you don’t believe an approach works, then it naturally follows that someone who claims success with it is obscuring information.

So, while we have ideas and deep sentiments about canine welfare, those aren’t particularly useful things to share. Punishment-inclusive trainers are torn by the cognitive dissonance of “wouldn’t that be nice” and “but this what I know; it is what I have to do”. This dichotomy is a perfect recipe for pushback. As an example, it is hypothesized that a similar element of dissonance is why vegans are regarded so poorly. Do you like to taunt vegans about bacon and meat? Do you feel a little attacked when someone declines a food you would eat with “no thank you, I’m vegan”?

If there’s anything I could change about force-free activism, it is the realization that no amount of science or moral appeals are going to “set them straight”. That sort of thing worked for us, but we were already inclined to consider force-free approaches. A recent study on owners of reactive dogs found that dog owners felt incompetent applying force-free techniques, that they didn’t trust force-free techniques would work, and that they were often incredibly desperate. There’s not a place for “this is abusive” in that perspective. Instead, I feel the burden is on us to make force-free widely accessible and enviable.

While I also struggle to restrain myself sometimes, I believe antagonism towards punishment-inclusive trainers only deepens their commitment to it. Who wants to hear that some stranger thinks they are abusive? It’s not healthy to worry so much about the opinions of hostile strangers. When I fail to restrain myself with punishment-inclusive trainers, I do my best to focus on what is effective and how I’ve personally addressed their challenges in a force-free manner. Does it mean I do some free work sometimes? Yep. If the goal is to reduce the overall utilization of punishment in training, then force-free needs to become accessible.

Which is a decent prompt for the niches I think BBCT fills.

1. First and foremost, all reinforcement training requires good timing. Research indicates that the response time to sustain a previously conditioned behavior is less than half a second. I was not able to find a study on the reaction speed a dog owner is capable of, but I was able to break down the neurological requirements to find an equivalent response time test. The Driver’s Break Reaction Time Test adequately measures the average person’s ability to recognize something unexpected during a task they do all the time, switch mental gears to respond, figure out an appropriate response, and then the speed of that response. The average response time was 0.9 seconds, with a quarter of people taking a full 1.2 seconds. Which was a really technical way of saying that I don’t think everyone is cutout to maintain a dog trained through reinforcement. I see BBCT as less technically demanding, which I believe gives it an advantage with dog owners who will struggle with reinforcement due to neurological limitations.

2. While many dog trainers find BBCT incredibly non-intuitive, those who are unfamiliar with formal dog training find it incredibly intuitive because it does not treat canine cognition as a black box. While they might be prone to naive anthropomorphization, we are learning more and more that informed anthropmorphism is highly appropriate. It is simply much easier to reach people when they get to be mostly right.

3. BBCT allows handlers to build the sort of relationship with dogs that we all dreamed of as kids. As far as building envy to encourage force-free handling, I can’t imagine a better motivation.

So, I guess, hello. My name is CJ. I have an unhealthy amount of formal education I don’t use and I have a lot of ideas. I hope I don’t offend you, but I do hope I’ve made you think. Let’s stop calling punishment-inclusive trainers abusive.

Please know that I am happy to engage in discussions so long as conversation remains levelheaded and that I am very excited at the prospect that you will chat with me. :)

*While Arnold’s approach also eschews obedience training and incorporates sentences with several parts of speech, cooperation over compliance, and yes/no questions, I am the only person I know who uses head gestures for real-time conversations with dogs using yes/no indications. I also really dislike “sit” and refuse to teach it, though Arnold teaches it to her dogs using a technique similar to Do As I Do called Like Me.

** My preferred term is “truthiness”, but I don’t want to come off too flippant. There really aren’t a lot of good words to explain this skill, so please forgive my word choice.

#animal behavior #doggo #animal communication #animal intelligence #dog training #dogs #dogtraining #petblr #force free dog training #force free #dog communication #cooperation #behavior #dog behavior #overly idealistic #overly idealistic millienial