Psychology

Don’t worry. I am perfectly aware that I have a blog going to ruin here. I just thought I’d better blog to let you know that I won’t be blogging for another week or so, and then there will be much-o blogging and catching upping of posting.

On the pokerbot front, progress has come to a frustrating halt. The whole thing works, but unfortunately calculating accurate odds is a very difficult thing, and it pauses for anything up to a minute while it performs lots of horrific maths. It also consumes all of your computer’s memory (And I’ve run it on a very beefy computer) so it’s basically useless unless I can strip it down slightly.

On the dog training front (because I know you all want to know about how badly trained my dog is) things have come to a head.

She ended up biting a passing jogger the other day who was probably less surprised than us that she managed to draw blood. Serious discussions were had and we decided that, all things considered, we’d be better off getting rid of her to someone who can spend more time training her than we can.

I tell you what though - I’d miss that little dog no matter how much of the house she destroys and it was emotional trying to find somewhere that would find a good home for her.

Damned lucky then that we took her to the vet for a booster shot* and a nail-clipping. The vet gave us some very useful advice on how to get her under control using dog psychology.

Apparently, (and also according to the book he recommended us,) she’s ruling the house completely. We need to become the alpha dogs in the household. Once that is achieved, there will be no more barking (She will be absolved of the barking responsibility,) no more pulling on the lead, (We go first as the leaders of the pack,) and no more chewing of things thanks to lowered anxiety, (She won’t be worried that the lesser pack members have wandered off, because she’ll be the lesser pack member, not us.)

To do this, we need to act like alpha dogs. This is very very difficult. So far it’s involved ignoring her completely. When we come in from work, we have to ignore her jumping up on us and being all pleased to see us. We have to act as though she isn’t there. This means no eye contact, no use of her name and no petting. This should last from five minutes to an hour.

It’s harder than it sounds, but if it means we get to keep her, we need to stick at it until her little doggy brain accepts the new pecking order.

Progress reports will follow, when blogging resumes.

* I did write ‘booster jag’ but changed it to ‘booster shot’ after I remembered someone telling me that ‘jag’ was a scottish term and is rarely understood beyond the border. Is this true?

Add comment July 21st, 2004