Home of the Snarkmaiden

How do you train a dog to do what you want when you ask it? This does not seem like a political question, but bear with me.

There are a great many techniques for training dogs, and historically they often involved punishing "bad" behavior: shouting, threats, violent leash jerks, swatting with newspapers, and so forth. These techniques work, but perhaps mostly because dogs are incredibly biddable animals. They don't tend to work well with "difficult" dogs (or, indeed, with "difficult" children). The range of approaches for training animals who are, unlike dogs, too large and powerful to readily correct by force is much narrower. When you are training, say, a dolphin or an orca, applying violent correction is impractical, and potentially lethal for the trainer. So some highly effective, positive reinforcement training methods emerged in part out of human beings learning to train cetaceans to do tricks, and these methods work well when applied to dogs, too. The neat thing about that is that along the way, we learned that positive reinforcement works better than negative, not just for whales and dogs, but for pretty much anything with a central nervous system, including planaria, and human beings.

The key to these methods lies in "shaping" the behavior you want by reinforcing things the trainee does spontaneously, using immediate application of a positive reward when the trainee does something, anything really, in the direction of the desired behavior. At first you reward whenever the trainee does something close to what you want. Then only if the behavior is closer to what you want. Then only when it's exactly what you want. And then only occasionally even when it's exactly what you want. This produces reliable execution of exactly what you want from your trainee. The main art lies in finding what reward the trainee is most responsive to.

There are stories of classes of students training their professors using positive reinforcement. One class of colluding students trained their instructor to lecture with his hands on his head by using active listening (nodding, smiling, acting attentive and engaged, leaning forward in their seats, etc.) whenever his hands moved higher, and acting bored and inattentive whenever they moved lower. Karen Pryor has taught behavioral shaping to all sorts of groups, and when she taught a class of teens, some of them apparently took the techniques home and retrained their own parents. And I know from direct family experience that my aunt turned my hyperactive monster of a cousin into the most polite, interested, engaged and respectful teenager I ever met when she switched to only ever using praise with him. So yeah, this stuff, it works on human beings.

Okay, so that's background I had in my head, owing much to Karen Pryor's book Don't Shoot the Dog: The New Art of Teaching and Training, which I commend to you if you are ever in a position to teach, train, or lead other creatures with a central nervous system.

Then I read a couple of unconnected (well, unconnected, except insofar as they are both responses to the current US political circumstance) posts in my Facebook feed.

First, Avedon Carol wonders out loud whether it mightn't be a good idea to tweet sensible suggestions to Donald Trump in hopes of his taking up some. At the very least, it couldn't hurt. To the response that Trump is not that interested in what people tweet of or to him, she says, "Oh, yes he is, that's why he is constantly retweeting anything positive someone says about him and also constantly attacking people for negative tweets." Note that it's positive and negative tweets he specifically responds to. I'll get back to that.

The second post was a reblogging of Charles M. Blow's op ed piece in the New York Times, "No, Trump, We Can't Just Get Along," in which Blow says, among other things, "You don't get a pat on the back for ratcheting down from rabid..."

And my first thought was, "No, but he should." Not because that's what he deserves, but because that's what he needs. And because if he gets what he needs when he takes steps in the right direction, he might just take more such steps. I may well be wrong, but it seems to me you don't get to be Donald Trump without needing just an assload of positive reinforcement. Certainly he seems to respond to attention. And creatures that respond to attention can be trained.

It seems to me that we are living in a potentially pivotal moment. The ability of many, many people to impact anyone who pays attention to their Twitter stream is demonstrably great. Huge, in fact. Admittedly, most of the examples we've seen have been negative. But that doesn't mean the same aggregation of individual action could't be used for good, if there were a collective will to do so. And we have a President Elect who appears to be particularly susceptible to the power of public attention, even childishly so.

What I'm hinting at here is a simple action that we can all take: tweet directed, training praise at Trump. The downside is that unlike attending a protest (which it's perfectly compatible with, by the way), it will not be a big collective feel-good moment. It isn't cathartic. It doesn't provide the galvanic thrill of vindictive bile. It's work. It's incremental. It's a process. It's something that would require attention and going back to, day in and day out. It's more like a chore. Like doing dishes, or training a puppy. It takes a grown up to swallow their feelings and pick up the poop, clean the floor, and skip the punishment in favor of waiting to praise the puppy the next time she does her business outside. Or at least on the designated pad. Or closer to the pad or the door. And then to iterate that process until your dog always poops outdoors. But that is how you train a puppy. And when the puppy in question is far too large and powerful to be trainable by punitive methods, training it with positive feedback is probably your best bet anyhow. And a lot of grownups willing to swallow their feelings long enough to send a positive tweet whenever anything remotely positive comes out of the White House is just possibly one way to do it.

So yeah. I have to start paying attention to Twitter. Because I mean to praise the hell out of Mr. Trump whenever he does something that moves him closer to where I want him to be. When he backs down on terrible campaign promises, I will praise him for his maturity and vision. When he reflects that the general who told him torture doesn't really work, and a pack of smokes and a sixpack will get better information, is a great guy and probably right, I will praise the living crap out of him. And I hope you will join me. Because it will take a lot of us working together to retrain a President. But with enough of us on task, it could make a crucial difference. At the very least, it couldn't hurt to try.

Craigslist subject line says: "Free Pet Rooster, To Approved Home Only." Yeah, I don't even have to click through. This is some softhearted idiot who decided to raise laying chickens and found they or their neighbors can't cope with the noise of a rooster around. And they're We Must Not Hurt The Cute An' Fluffy Animals vegetarians who can't bear the thought of slaughtering their own birds. Or anyone else doing it either. So now they're looking for someone stupid enough or wealthy enough to be willing to do what they themselves are not -- keep a noisy, unproductive bird fed and healthy for years to come out of a sheer love of animals. Not. Gonna. Happen. The Happy Retirement Home for Unwanted Roosters is the fricassee pot. And even if they actually manage to find a sucker this time, it only pushes the problem off a few years. Hens can live a good long while after they stop laying, certainly long enough that keeping them in feed makes the ultimate cost of the eggs they laid during their productive years prohibitively high.

People, if you are not willing to kill a chicken, don't keep chickens in the first place.

Tonight Shoobie was going completely bonkers at the pile of miscellanea in the back corner of my office closet. Scratching, digging, barking, snorking and chuckling to himself in that agitated way he has when he's really enjoying himself, and absolutely determinedly frantic to get at the kipple-blocked far back.

Now, of an evening Shoobie sometimes does get charmingly feisty with the natural rubber ball that is roughly the size of his skull, pouncing upon it with cries of snorkulous glee and running around the living room with it, skittering and prancing and chortling like the happy miser he is, but these moods are a passing thing. With the closet, Shoobie was firm, Shoobie was resolute. Shoobie Would Not Give Up. And I've learned to attend to Shoobie's will-of-iron moods. They typically mean something. So I got up and moved aside the picture frames and the canvas panels and the rubber boots and so forth so he could get at the very backity back of the closet.

He plunged into the gap like the kibble-burning, rotund missile he is. And, true to type, was back out in moments with yet another dead rat, this one in full rigor, locked in his tiny little vise-like jaw, snork-snork-snorking the Shoobie Victory Chorus and flying the grizzled and stringy Shoobie Victory Pennant high. He ran off with his prize to the dog bed in the living room where he was obviously prepared to defend it to the death from all comers. Sigh.

On the plus side, Shoobie discovering the corpse now means it didn't have a chance to get ripe and stinky back there. And, in the department of useful information, tonight I learned that freeze-dried chicken breast is even more interesting than dead rat, at least for long enough for me to bag up the dead rat and toss it in the trash. On the downside, Someone is getting a mite too fond of dumping her spare cadavers in my closet.

And now the Mighty Shoob has been rewarded with pettings and praisings, and consoled for the loss of his fine rat with beef stick, and after a thorough search of all the places someone may have re-hidden a dead rat, he is snoring contentedly on the rug at my feet. Meanwhile, the probable cause of all this sudden influx of dead rat is washing her paws in my recliner pretending none of this has anything to do with her. Good thing it's getting close to closed windows season. I don't like taking this skeletons-in-the-closet business too literally, even at Hallowe'en.

Summer in our house is a bit of a trial -- once things get warm, we tend to leave the windows open a lot. We have awning-style windows all over the house -- hinged at the top, and closing with a latch against the frame at the bottom. Perhaps there were screens for this type of window made when the windows were new, 60-odd years ago -- maybe there still are -- but if any came with our house originally, they were long gone by the time we bought it. So, there are annoyances. Flies and mosquitoes do vex us. But perhaps worst pest is the cat. With the windows open the house becomes fully permeable to cats; they move in and out at will. And one in particular is a darkling beast, red in tooth and claw. Which I don't mind in principle -- controlling the rodent population is a good thing -- but I am a bit more squeamish about getting a personal introduction to the quarry. Particularly when it is either a) several weeks dead or b) on my window sill, still alive.

Just this evening there was a rustling under the blinds next to my computer. Hal took a peek and suggested it might be time to close the window. I'm not sure what good he thought that would do, since when I looked it was clear that our own personal doom beast, Tinka, and her 'kill' du jour -- a live mole -- were already inside on the window sill. Tinka just sat quietly, waiting for us to admire her skill and beneficence. The mole waved one of it's digger-clawed forepaws vaguely. At first it wasn't clear to me if the poor creature was near death or just stunned, but it seemed increasingly to be reviving. Sfter some initial disorganized flapping and milling about I put on my gardening gloves and took the squirmy thing back outside, and set it down. In my vegetable bed by the front steps. The bed is admittedly mostly fallow just now. But any woman who puts a live mole in her own vegetable garden and watches it dig itself in has got to be in the running for World's Worst Gardener.

On the other hand, it looks like the mole may live. And I'm here to tell you they're surprisingly powerful little guys. I could really feel some serious muscle torque behind the squirming in my hand as I carried it out. I guess it's not that surprising once I consider it though -- takes a lot to move earth out of the way that fast, even if it was mostly mulch.

Moles have such lovely fur. Very dense-looking, velvetty stuff. And their digger claws are fascinatingly translucent -- they're really almost pretty. And when you have a dead mole on your back porch, you can observe in in very fine detail, as you delicately pick it up with an inverted plastic bag to dispose of it. (Is there an optimum environmentally-sound and public-health-approved way to dispose of a mole, I wonder? Yard waste, recycling, trash, or toilet? Probably not recycling.)

So after a long interregnum, Tinka has her game on again. My first clue was coming back to find a small deceased rat on the doormat after I had taken Sarah out for her walk. I'm pretty sure the rat was not there when we left the house, because the screen door didn't quite clear the corpse. I had to fish a spare dog-walk bag out of my pocket to dispense with the thing before I could even take Sarah into the house. Happily, she was not overly curious.

When we got back from our LA visit, the sitter wanted to let us know that there was a dead rat in the lidded can where we usually segregate the filled dog bags. "Yeah, sorry about that," I said. "It was the easiest place to ditch it," I said. "No, I mean I found a dead rat and dropped it in there," she said. Oh.

Then there was the one we found decomposing in the middle of the front lawn, and then the sad little pile of feathers that appeared on the back porch over the weekend -- Tinka somewhat offsets her penchant for birds by actually eating them -- and today the mole. I'm not sure she's despatching local fauna at the rate of one per week, but it's close to that. Definitely got game. If she can only inspire Spike and Lefty to make an effort, the squirrels may live in fear yet.

Spike, sweet as always, but demonstrably a) extant b) upstairs and c) not in the ceiling above the toilet. So, progress.

This morning I went downstairs to check on the new cats only to hear a pathetic mewling issuing from the wall between the laundry room and the garage. I stepped over into the garage, and the sound seemed to come from under the floor beneath the downstairs toilet.

Here we commit a brief narrative pause to discuss the vagaries of plumbing. The thing about toilets is that they need several inches of clearance below floor level in order to have room to plumb the outflow pipe properly. If you're installing an after-market toilet on a concrete slab, your choices are to cut a big hole in the slab to put the pipes into -- expensive, noisy, and slow -- or build up a platform to create a raised floor under the toilet, with a gap between to accomodate the plumbing. Our predecessors in the house took the latter course. So the throne sits on its own dais. There's also some fairly heinous flocked wallpaper, but that's not relevant to our story.

It turns out there's a very small gap between the edge of the cabinet behind the toilet, and the platform box the toilet is built onto. Spike, who had previously been hiding out in the bottom cabinet, apparently managed to squeeze herself through that gap. God alone knows how. So now she was stuck in a sealed box under the toilet.

I spent several minutes attacking the platform with a hammer, mallet, and various other implements, trying to prise up a floor board, or at least some of the nails holding them down. Come to realize, the 'boards' are just a pattern printed on the cheap vinyl flooring, and the nails at the edge only hold the flooring to the hefty single sheet of plywood beneath it, and even if I did succeed in prying any nails up, the plywood platform itself his held together with woodscrews. Deep breath.

After some consideration, I applied myself to prying up the bottom shelf of the cupboard behind the toilet, instead. No better luck. Whatever else you say about the guy who did the home built cabinets and the garage toilet, he didn't do flimsy, knock-down work. Finally I figured that I either Spike would figure a way to retrace her steps and squeeze back out the way she had got in, or I'd have to go to the hardware store for a specialized drill-bit to cut a cat head-sized circular hole in the toilet platform. Either way, it would have to wait until after I rewalked the dog. At least.

I went back upstairs to collect the increasingly frantic Sarah and leash her up. While I was putting on my jacket, I heard more mewling downstairs. I opened the cellar door, only to find a very startled Spike making a calico streak back down from the top of the cellar stairs. Obviously, she could get back out on her own. Drama queen.

Tonight I'll be filling the damn gap behind the toilet. No idea what with. Marine foam, maybe. And possibly rethinking Spike's new name. Maybe we'll call her Astrophe.