Annoyingly Specific Dog

[Laurelin]

Anyone have this issue?

One of Mia's many quirks is that she is very very specific. We can't just play ball, we must play kong squeaker ball. When she was younger we'd play with a bunch of them at the same time and she'd keep fetching and fetching and I'd switch balls no problem. Throw one to the left then throw one to the right as she dropped the first off, etc. No problem.

As she got older she started to get specific. She would get the balls in order and was determined to. Now she has gotten even more specific. If we start playing with kong squeaker A, she will not go after kong squeaker B. She waits for me to throw A. If I don't throw A, she will bark at me and ignore the other kong squeakers (I don't get it, they're exactly the same!). If I put A away and try to play with B she will ignore play and try to figure out how to get to A to get that ball back. If I don't make a big deal of switching balls and throw B, she will run to B then immediately spit it back out and start searching for A.

How do I get her to go back to playing with multiple tennis balls and not fixating on just one at a time? The obvious answer to me is to just switch balls and if she does not want to play with B then too bad, so sad. Game over. But... that doesn't seem to be helping.

There are rare occasions where I convince her that ball B is the one to play with... but then she stops running after ball A. Ball B is now the ball that needs to be obsessed over.

Help? My dog is weird.

 

[Shai]

Any time my dogs prefer one thing over another, I use the one they prefer to get them to do the other.

Mira prefers birds to bumpers. First couple of times I combined the two she refused bumpers and just wanted the birds. She'd go to the bumper, see that it was not a bird, look at me, then turn away from the bumper and go looking for a bird. "This is not what I want." She was not exactly subtle. Flipping me the bird

So I backed up and started over to make the pairing clear, as if I were rewarding a retrieve with food but instead I was rewarding with the bird. Then moved back to retrieves. She refused one and I put her up and let other dogs work for a while then gave her another shot. She didn't refuse it again and was rewarded with a bird retrieve. That cemented things and we didn't continue to have that problem.

There's not really any point to the "end the game" strategy until you have paired cause and effect. You get the one you want if and only if you do as I asked. Your choice. Unless that pairing is clear she's more likely to just get frustrated without getting your point.

Frustration is fine of course, as long as it's productive frustration

 

[BostonBanker]

Gusto often gets called Sheldon.

With him, some of it is things like toys, but it is more related to spaces. I have two (identical) crates in the back of my car side by side. He always goes in the one on the left. He CAN NOT get in the one on the right, and Meg likes to mess with his head by getting in his. No matter how many cookies I throw in the one on the right, he will continue to try to crawl over/under/through Meg into 'his' crate.

Same thing on the bed. He has one specific spot he sleeps in, and if Meg is there, or I am, he doesn't know what to do. He just stands on the bed staring at his spot until it is free.

He also has a spot on the couch, and for the first time last night, Meg took it before he got up. He was beside himself, pacing and crawling all over me trying to shove into his spot.

The second one of his spots is open, he curls right up in a ball of contentment.

 

[Laurelin]

Shai, that's kind of what I was attempting. What do you do if she switches to ball B then ignores A? You just would put her away again until she gets that if she wants to play she fetches whichever ball I throw? I can see that being a verrry long process with her.

I think Summer is the more Sheldon-like of the two. She's the one that has to get up in your face if something is wrong/different. Just to let you know that Summer is aware that something is Not How it is Supposed to Be. And everything should be how it's supposed to. I don't know what I'd do without dogs to keep track of those kinds of things.

 

[noludoru]

As she got older she started to get specific. She would get the balls in order and was determined to. Now she has gotten even more specific. If we start playing with kong squeaker A, she will not go after kong squeaker B. She waits for me to throw A. If I don't throw A, she will bark at me and ignore the other kong squeakers (I don't get it, they're exactly the same!). If I put A away and try to play with B she will ignore play and try to figure out how to get to A to get that ball back. If I don't make a big deal of switching balls and throw B, she will run to B then immediately spit it back out and start searching for A.

Did this start after scent training? If they're identical colors, the only way she can distinguish them is by scent. You've been teaching her to distinguish scents from one another, so maybe she thinks this is an important part of the game.

 

[AmandaNola]

Nola's very specific about her outside ball. It has to be a basketball, a brown one. It cannot be a volleyball. It cannot be a soccer ball. It cannot be a colored basketball. It cannot be a child sized basketball. It has to be a standard, brown basketball.

 

[Shai]

Shai, that's kind of what I was attempting. What do you do if she switches to ball B then ignores A? You just would put her away again until she gets that if she wants to play she fetches whichever ball I throw? I can see that being a verrry long process with her.

Until she understood the goal I wouldn't put her up unless she was short circuiting and needed a break. No matter which one she wants, she needs to pick up whichever you indicate. If it's the one she wants then it's self reinforcing. If not, she earns the one she wants by picking up the other one.

But I mean this general framework is what has worked for me and my dogs and other dogs I've worked but the exact setup and timing and such sometimes needs tweaked for a particular dog. Use your judgement

 

[halblingefrau]

My mom's JRT mix is like that. If Stubby's ball goes under the couch, he wants THAT ball. We could pull out other balls of the exact same type/color, but it's not The Right One. He'll sit there and make little cries, asking you to get it. If you don't act fast enough, he begins wailing. It gets old.

 

[Finkie_Mom]

We have a dog at work who will ONLY play with THAT ONE ball/tug. He's a Lab and he actually had developed a habit before I got there of not only refusing any other tug/ball you tried to use with him, but he would then proceed to play keep away. What I did is maybe not "correct" or what most others would do, but it totally worked.

We first put the ball on a piece nylon webbing. The only play he got with the ball was met with my interacting with him with it. So I could throw the ball/webbing, but then I would get on the ground and make a fool of myself to get him all pumped up, then we would tug with it, he would out, I would throw it again or just release him to tug it, repeat. I made his coming BACK to me with that ball/webbing thing the BEST fun ever. If he played keep away, I would take the leash and do something else with him for a bit generally using food as a reward instead (the whole time he would be dragging a long line while he was wearing a harness. BUT no matter what, I would still tug with him the whole time back to the crate after a session so he knew that leash/crate time did not automatically equal end of fun (which is why he started the keep away game in the first place). Eventually, this flipped a switch in his brain. I started to be able to trade the ball/webbing with another IDENTICAL ball/webbing. Then I would switch just tennis balls (he would still at this point bring them to me to tug with LOL).

Next step was to get him in to a small area off leash and throw one ball, the other, the other, etc. Now that he was interested in coming back to me with whatever he just retrieved, he was bringing them both back. He still had preference for the first ball, but I just started using the first to reward bringing back the second. I would also throw in some distance sits/downs and reward with the second. This built up value for him with the "other" ball.

Now he's great with tugs and tennis balls. He comes like AT you with tugs and will totally retrieve tennis balls and switch them out. His final reward at the end of a session is always his preferred ball, but that's because he deserves it

Oh yeah, and I kept these sessions SUPER short so that his brain didn't explode. I learned that the longer I worked him the more likely he would be to revert to his old ways. So this might not even take up an entire training session but rather be a part of one.

 

[Flyinsbt]

I don't know how you fix it. My old dog, Elmo, was like that. If you played ball with him, it had to be the ball you started the session with, if he lost it, and you tried giving him another ball, he'd ignore it while obsessively searching for the first one.
I used it to train him scent discrimination.
He was also entertainingly specific about command words. I taught him to retrieve a dumbbell using "take it", and after that, he wouldn't retrieve anything else with that command. I was going crazy trying to get him to retrieve a glove so we could train the directed retrieve, and he wouldn't touch it. Finally one day I tossed down the glove, said "take it", and he walked to the piano where his dumbbell was, and looked up at it. So I tossed down the glove again, said "glove", and he happily retrieved it. He wanted everything to have it's own name.

I just go along with it when my dog is weird. :dunno:

 

[Michiyo-Fir]

Laurelin, I have the EXACT same problem.

Especially when I like to bring 2-3 kong squeakers to the park because sometimes other dogs steal it but she won't go after the next 2 I throw that's not the first one! UGH!

 

[Laurelin]

Well we've had some good sessions with two balls and I'm wondering if its not a fluke because I started the session with two balls? She's been doing fine with me switching them out at random. Like old times...

Maybe all I needed to do was complain about her? Haha (Oh god, if she reads Chaz I should probably hide....)

I have started doing some stuff with the 'flirt pole' (aka cat toy) and the kong ball. I'm getting some good tugs maybe 1 in 4-5 times I present the flirt pole to her. Like shaking and killing it and not letting it go for minutes. I reward that with a lot of ball playing. In between she will just half ass mouth it then crouch for the ball. I'm not quite sure how to make this work.... Should I just keep offering it to her until she takes it or would you do it once and then just put everything away if she doesn't take it?

I'm trying to play more with her and Summer because I've been slacking and we've had some good things going on. I'm also trying to work on conditioning Mia better because she's got a bit of pudge so I have been playing ball with her 30 mins 2-3 times a day. (Too dark and cold to go to the park after work). I am guessing I should keep the tug drive building sessions separate from the ball playing/crazy sessions that I'm trying to build endurance and conditioning with.