How to Use Your Voice When Training Your Dog

Here's a tip on how to use your voice more effectively in training.

Voice Training for Dummies

Dogs are emotional. They learn things through the changes that take place in their emotional states. One of the most important tools a trainer or owner has, in terms of applying the proper emotion to a training situation, is how they use their voice.

Years ago I was working with a beautiful blue great Dane named Achille (Ah-sheel). His owners said he was nervous about meeting people on the streets of New York. He was a beautiful dog and it wasn’t uncommon for people to stop and stare and want to say hello. Achille didn’t like this. He would bark nervously at strangers: “Ruff, ruff! Stay away!”

My job was to fix this. So on each of our training walks I took along a pocketful of treats. And every time someone commented on how handsome Achille was, etc., I would thank them then explain what I was trying to do to help him, and would they mind showing him a treat and telling him to sit?

Most people said yes. But once I'd given them the treat, quiet a few were very stern about how they gave the command, which caused Achille to bark at them. Some, though, gave the command in a very pleasant tone of voice, and when they had a different tone, Achille sat quite quickly and was very happy to do so. So I changed tactics: once they agreed to help out, instead of asking them to “tell” Achille to sit, I always phrased it thusly: “Could you show him a treat and then ask him to sit?” This almost always changed the way they interacted with the dog, and as a result he learned not to be so afraid of strangers.

I was in a somewhat similar situation the other day. A woman who lives down the hall from me recently adopted a young Lab/pit bull mix named Diva, and I ran into them at the dog run. At one point Diva was showing an avid interest in the far corner of the run where the garbage bags, etc., are stored in a large industrial-plastic type container, which sits pushed up against the fence. Diva was fascinated with it, smelling all around the container, even pushing herself between it and the fence. (My feeling was that it was a popular spot for rats to hang out at night.)

Diva’s owner was saying, “No, stop that,” and trying to pull her away from those fascinating smells. So I suggested that we just walk away instead.

Once we were a good distance away, Diva was torn between following us and continuing with what her nose was telling her to do.

To overcome this final bit of resistance, I told Diva's new mommy to praise her dog. She did, but her voice was flat and held no excitement or emotion. Then I praised Diva, and the dog got a happy look in her eyes, and immediately came running to me as if I were the most interesting thing in the world at that moment. Once Diva’s owner heard the difference in our voices, she was able to imitate the way I’d praised her dog and it had the same effect.

So, since this isn’t something that can be explained as easily in print, I’ve used my Olympus Digital Recorder to give you a few samples of how to do it. Just click here to listen.

Some Myths About Behaviorism

I've been revamping my website, and in the course of upgrading one of the articles in my list of the Top Ten Myths about dogs, I came up with some interesting, and I think, valid criticisms of one of the current trends in dog training.

Some Myths About Behaviorism

Dog trainer and behavioral expert Patricia McConnell wrote in Bark Magazine not too long ago, "The process of learning is pretty much the same whether you're a pigeon, a planarian [flatworm] or, come to think of it, a philosophy professor."

Of course what McConnell means is that when an animal of any kind finds that a behavior produces positive results, it will have a tendency to choose that behavior over and over again. And that's true. But the implication is that there is only one type of training that works for all dogs (i.e., the "cookie-cutter" approach), and that all training should be based strictly on giving a dog rewards for good behavior.

What's wrong with using rewards?

Nothing. But for most behavioral science-oriented trainers that usually means food, partially because the foundation of behavioral science is built almost exclusively on the behaviors of albino rats locked inside Skinner boxes, and partially because it's usually the easiest and quickest way to get a dog's attention. As for those rats, their only motivation for learning to press a lever was supposedly to get a food pellet. But dogs aren't rats. Plus we don't normally train them inside boxes in a research lab.

"Yes," positive trainers would argue, "But whether the incentive in dog training is a treat or being given a ball to chase, it still boils down to one thing: positive reinforcement."

I agree. But as soon as we get locked-in to the idea that the linear, cut-and-dried precepts of behavioral science can show us all the answers, we don't keep our minds open to other possibilities. And far too many trainers these days consider food to be a universal reward. And that tiny little flaw in thinking keeps some dogs from ever being fully trained. If you're a dog owner who's been to a +R trainer and you tried to follow the protocols they gave you but found they didn't work, what was the first thing they said in reply? Probably: "Up the value of your treats!" (I had a client who complained, "What am I supposed to do, slaughter a cow and take the carcass with me on our walks?")

It's also instructive to understand that behavioral science techniques are notoriously ineffective when it comes to curing serious behavioral problems. The best proof of this is The Dog Who Loved too Much by Nicholas Dodman, even though Dodman didn't consciously write the book as a critique of behavioral science but as a justification for using drugs. But if behavioral science techniques were really effective we wouldn't need drugs except where there's a definite physiological cause of the behavior.

It's also interesting that Patricia McConnell has a much better success rate in solving behavioral problems than Dodman does. Much better. I think there are probably two reasons for this: 1) McConnell genuinely loves dogs while Dodman reportedly doesn't even like them, and 2) McConnell's protocols for solving behavioral problems also include teaching obedience skills, Dodman's doesn't. (Since all obedience behaviors are based on the predatory motor patterns of wild wolves, and since the prey drive is the key organizing force behind all canine social behavior, it stands to reason that teaching obedience skills will have some positive effect on bringing a dog's emotions back into alignment with his owner's needs.)

Going back to Skinner, I think we need to consider that when he proposed his theories it was widely believed that animals didn't even have emotional lives. With some of the recent advances in neuroscience, and the discovery of the same emotional circuits that exist in both the non-human and human brain, we now know that animals can be very emotional. This is especially true of dogs. Yet the behavioral science approach is based almost exclusively on changing a dog's behavior with little or no thought given to the underlying emotional cause of that behavior.

Some in the field would disagree. They would say that they're very conscious of how emotions affect behavior. I have no doubt that that's true. But the techniques they use are still based on a clinical, unemotional, Skinnerian foundation, one that's simply not geared to change a dog's emotions as much as it is to change his behavior. That kind of thinking is built in to the system despite the fact that all behavior, learned or instinctive, is the end product of emotion. In fact without emotion there would be no such thing as positive reinforcement. This is not something that factored in to Skinner's equations at the time he made them. It should be factored in now, but from my observations that rarely happens.

Meanwhile in Natural Dog Training our focus is always on changing the dog's emotional state first because we know once we do that and bring the dog's emotions back into balance, the right behavior will always follow.

It was also believed during Skinner's time that the foundation of all animal behavior was geared specifically around the survival instinct, so when his rats pressed the lever and "learned" to make food appear, it made sense that their only impetus for doing so was based on their own survival: food is necessary for survival, therefore food is a primary reinforcer. But with the current trend in science to find and understand the roots of "biological altruism," the tendency in social animals (and even in some non-social species) to give up what's in one's own "self" interest in order to help another animal in need, the primacy of the survival instinct is starting to seem a bit mothworn if not badly outdated. Biological altruism is a huge puzzle because it implies that a very important aspect of Darwinism (and one that has a domino effect on behaviorism as well), may not, in fact, be what it seems.

Strangely enough, the clearest window into this puzzle (or perhaps not so strangely) is the domesticated dog. No species is more famous for its ability, let alone its outright unstoppable zeal for putting its own survival on the line in order to help those it loves. In the past few months alone (I'm writing this in July of 2009), there have been two videotaped incidents of dogs dashing into traffic in order to rescue a fallen comrade, one was on a freeway in Chile and other on the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx.

This brings up another point about the difference between Pavlov's and Skinner's era and ours (i.e., the early 20th Century v. the early 21st Century). Back in Skinner's day it was believed that all animals were vying for dominance within their own habitats as well as within their own social groups. And just like the beliefs about the survival instinct which accompanied and most probably engendered this Darwinian idea, the underlying principle was that animals always put their own "self" interest above all else. And that's simply not true. It's especially not true in dogs, and it turns out that it's not even true in wolves. And yet every single dog trainer who espouses behavioral science as the bedrock of all animal learning is still operating under this false premise. They don't accept the fact that sometimes the survival instinct simply isn't operational, which means that sometimes a primary reinforcer is not only not primary it's not a reinforcer. And yet we're told time and again: "Up the value of your treats!" (I'm not saying that Darwin's theory is wrong, or that evolution isn't a real process, or that treats aren't valuable in dog training, nor am I saying that the survival instinct isn't an important part of the evolutionary process, just that it's not as important as we once thought it was, which again has a domino effect on Skinner's theories about behavior.)

One of the clearest examples we see of a dog's ability to routinely override its own survival instinct is in dogs who do search-and-rescue work. With the recent explosion of interest in behavioral science some search-and- rescue dogs have been trained exclusively with food and clickers. There was great hope in certain quarters that this would be the dawn of a new age of perfectly conditioned working dogs. But in the end most of these dogs have proven unreliable, especially when forced to work for long hours, because they’ll often indicate a false positive just to get a treat.

"Dogs want rewards," says Dr. Lawrence J. Myers, of Auburn University's College of Veterinary Medicine, "So they will give false alerts to get them."

Giving a false alert is something a dog trained through his prey drive would never do; he wouldn't know how. He'll work for hours and hours, and he won't quit until he finds exactly what he's looking for. Why? Because he's focused on hunting, not on getting an external reward. The only problem they had with the search-and-rescue dogs at Ground Zero was making them stop to rest. Those amazing animals would have kept working until they found a survivor or a body or just dropped dead themselves. Is that courage? Is that altruism? Or is that just the way dogs are?

Kevin Behan made a very insightful comment on his blog recently. (If you don't know this, Kevin spent a major portion of his career training police dogs and detection dogs, using their prey drive -- not food rewards -- as the focal point of learning.)

"Search-and-rescue dogs can search disaster sites whereas no other animal can be conditioned to do so, which is especially revealing since cats and monkeys are far better adapted, physically speaking, for such work. One can acclimate a police dog to love running up a metal fire escape with someone throwing metal pots and pans down at it. All these so-called negatives ... arouse [the dog's] prey-making urge to an even greater pitch."

Can you imagine what those pots and pans would do to cats and monkeys? Is it even remotely possible that they could be trained to run up a fire escape while you're throwing loud, clattering objects at them? Even if they did make it to the top, my bet is that their first priority after getting there would be to find a safe place to hide and not come out for days.

Monkeys clearly have more mental agility than dogs. And to a large extent, so do cats. And Kevin's insight is, as usual, dead-on; both species are also more physically agile when put in the kinds of situations that most search-and-rescue dogs find themselves in. So if learning is only about reinforcing the behaviors you want from an animal, and monkeys and cats are smarter and more physically capable of working in and around disaster sites, why can't they be conditioned to do it?

Because they don't want to. Dogs, on the other hand, live for this kind of stuff. Talk about treats, they eat this stuff up. When dogs are trained properly, through their prey drive, they're absolutely driven to find survivors at a disaster site, or to sit and stay and come when called, or to do whatever else you want them to. They'll do it: no questions asked, no treats expected. You can't condition that kind of willingness into a cat or monkey just as you can't condition it out of a dog.

If we apply this lesson to flatworms and philosophy professors we can see that Patricia McConnell's idea really is off, particularly since she's a dog trainer herself, and particularly since the quote in question came from a piece she wrote for a magazine devoted exclusively to canines.

Again, I'm not saying that conditioning isn't a valid form of learning. It is. It has its place; there's no question about that. But in some cases, at least where dogs are concerned, there may be a much better alternative. You simply have to open your mind a little to see it.

And no, all animals don't learn the same way. Dogs are different. And it's their very difference that can help us see some of the cracks in the foundations of behavioral science.

LCK

Raising Hero: A Great New Blog, a Great New World

Natural Dog Training devotee Trisha Selbach has a new puppy. And she's raising her in a very unusual way...

Raising Hero

If nothing else, this a very interesting way to raise a puppy. No training, no using her name yet, just letting the puppy play and chase and bite and be a puppy—investigating the world in her own way but doing so in a totally safe environment.

It seems to me that like kids, puppies start the world with an insistent and overwhelming need to explore and understand everything the world has to offer. They're Marco Polo, they're Christopher Columbus, they're Captain Kirk. They're explorers. They have a thirst for life. And too much training too early has a profoundly negative impact on that.

Here are some snippets from Trisha Selbach's blog:

"People really love their puppies, but are confused about what they need. Puppies need quality time where they can be puppies uninhibited, safely and without incurring our wrath. Since dogs have no sense of time, for a puppy, it only matters that each experience is [interesting and fun]; it makes no difference how long it lasts. One bad experience; one scolding, one finger wagging, one grab from behind, damages a dog forever. Protecting our puppies from these bad experiences is our number one job as dog owners.

"Hero lives contentedly in her crate while she’s sleeping and when she’s not sleeping, she is playing safely and contentedly in her little yard, accompanied by one the family members. Here she is free to jump on us, chew our hands, chase butterflies, and bite whatever is available. She is safe from getting into trouble and from being yelled at for simply expressing her energy. She is learning that she is safe expressing her energy when she is with us, and that is the key to the training that will come down the road."

And...

"Anyone who has had children knows that they go through certain developmental stages; we accept them because we ourselves grew out of them. Puppies are no different. Everything in their universe is tested through their mouth with little needle teeth. They grow out of it. They don’t need to be taught how. When I quietly sit in the puppy yard, and allow Hero to chomp on me, from her point of view this is what she is 'learning'; I am safe to express my drive and energy around human beings. It’s that simple.

"I don’t fear that this little land shark will grow up to be a biter; I know she won’t. Instead of teaching her not to bite, slowly over time I will teach her what to bite, and that will be a crucial element in her training."

And...

"To untrain your dog, as I am doing with Hero, takes a huge amount of trust. You must trust that a dog knows how to be a dog. I hardly know how to be a human being let alone a dog. So I let the dog lead. I trust she will be a dog because she is a dog. For 100,000 years domesticated dogs have lived with humans and I don’t think it took puppy kindergarten to get them here.

"All dogs know how to sit, down, stay, heel and come when called no matter what. Just watch them. Maybe they don’t do it for us, but they do it. Our goal in “untraining” is simply to work with the dog’s natural impulse to do these things; by the time my older dog [Athos] was a year old I was able to elicit all these things without commands."

And...

"Since I’m raising Hero the Natural Dog Training way, I never use her name. Never. Instead, I go goofball. She’s been called; Little stink pot, Little tank, My little bear, Pumpkin, Ms. Mighty Bite, Ms. Shark, Piranha Puppy, Poopsy, Tootsie roll, Puppsy Wuppsy, so and and so forth. I don’t use her name. I didn’t with her brother either (he still has a million names but I won’t affront his dignity by printing any), and his name, Athos, is the most riveting word to him in the universe. It’s because his name means; 'Come to the most exciting thing in the universe and all your deepest desires will be satisfied'. ( Usually it’s a bite toy)."

...

"Of course not teaching a puppy her name right away can be scary. We’ve all been told that we must be consistent and that we must imprint all these millions of things onto our puppies asap or they’ll grow up to be raving maniacs. I know that not to be true. That’s part of what this blog is all about. To raise a dog naturally, in accordance with a dog’s nature, and to document it. The most important thing for me in raising Hero is to imprint her with the feeling I can be trusted. In order to do that, I must trust the goodness in her; I have to trust her nature. And I do."

Here's a link to "Raising Hero." Check in often. There are pictures. There's food for thought. There's a whole new world out there beyond the one telling everybody that their puppy has to be taught everything right away. In fact, if you haven't noticed, the more people we see taking their dogs to puppy classes, the more behavioral problems we seen in dogs. It's true. Things haven't gotten better, they've gotten worse. Plus, one of the primary reasons for the proliferation of puppy classes in the last 10 - 15 years is that early training will supposedly keep more dogs from being abandoned. Well, guess what? Not only hasn't it worked but many people who bought into the PR and were very good and diligent and acted like responsible new puppy owners have found that their puppies not only didn't retain much of what they learned in puppy class, some of them actually developed behavioral problems and learning deficits as a result! (See the article on my website about why this happens.)

Mother Nature has been guiding and directing the emotional and behavioral development of puppies for millions of years. Let's not let a few well-meaning but misguided dog trainers think they know better; Mother Nature is older, more experienced, and knows far more about this process than anyone. It's time for a new way of looking at things.

Change is hard. It's scary. But we need to do what's right for our dogs and puppies. We may not all be able to do (or want to do) everythig Trisha Selbach is doing, not exactly. But we need to do something different. We need to keep that thirst for life alive in our dogs. So we may need to be like Marco Polo; we may need to do a little exploring of our own to accomplish that goal.

Thankfully, Trisha Selbach and Kevin Behan are already out there, planting flags for us to follow.

LCK

How Man Creates Dog in His Own Image

This is a compilation of 3 articles I recently wrote for Psychology Today.

How Man Creates Dog in His Own Image

Dogs Have Colonized Our Subconscious

Kevin Behan writes, “Whether we know it or not, we all develop highly complex theories for [canine behavior]. Even someone who doesn’t own a dog and never even thinks about why [dogs] do what they do nonetheless develops a highly elaborate theory.”

I think this is due in part to our Disneyfication of animals, which causes us to unconsciously confer "personhood" on our dogs. But it's also the result of something very clever that the domesticated dog, and no other species, does. They read us and react, read us and react, read us and react, over and over. The other part is something exclusive to humans: we form identities that include not only our occupations, our religions, our ethnic backgrounds, etc. We identify with our pets as well.

"I'm a dog person," someone might say.

"Not me," says another, "I'm more of a cat person."

"I like horses!" or “I’m more into birds!”

And just as we need to assign identities to ourselves, we also need to assign them to our dogs. (I don't now about birds and horses, but cats already have their own identities.)

I met a woman on the street a few weeks ago while I was out with a Welsh springer spaniel named Caleb who is probably the most ebulliently social dog I've ever met. The woman had a King Charles cavalier spaniel. And as Caleb went through his bag of tricks the other dog scooted away in a wide circle, making an almost perfect arc with Caleb at the center of her radius.

The woman said, "She's just playing hard to get."

How interesting, I thought. The "dog-as-stuck-up-cheerleader" theory.

Caleb had to pee so he gave up on his attempts to conquer the little dog with love, and started sniffing for a good spot. But once his back was turned, the female immediately came zooming toward his backside for a quick butt sniff. When Caleb realized what was going on he turned around, and the other dog quickly rolled over on her side.

"See?" said the woman, proudly. "Now she's being a total slut."

Hmm. First she's hard to get, now she's too easy.

There are any number of explanations for how this exchange actually happened (and why). I suppose her explanation for the behavior is valid but I doubt it. The most common explanation would be that the female was first exhibiting an avoidance reaction, then she became submissive.

I don't see it that way. Avoidance makes sense until you realize that the female really wanted to make contact with Caleb, she just didn't know how. This is borne out by the way she came zooming in once his back was turned. And submission makes no sense at all unless you were to first change the size, shape, and structure of a dog's brain.

The human mind is designed to find reasons for things, even things that don't have reasons. And dogs don't have reasons for their behaviors; they can't. The dog's brain is designed primarily to process sensory data and emotional information in real time. It would not have been advantageous, in evolutionary terms, for dogs or wolves to take time out to "think" about their circumstances and then use reason or logic to make decisions. In the wild a logical animal is a dead animal. That's because logic is a slow, high-energy, top-heavy mental process. Even chess masters don't use logic to win matches; they rely on pattern recognition and working memory. Yet whenever we see a dog stop for a moment to make choices about which action he wants to take, or pause to "feel things out," we automatically (and mostly unconsciously) believe the dog is "thinking things through," i.e., using an innate ability to reason.

There are several "reasons" for this. One is that dogs have faces. And one of the primary social circuits in the human brain is designed to recognize not only the faces of people we know but to "intuit" what the expressions on those faces "mean." These circuits are equipped with a lot of dopamine receptors, making face recognition a kind of natural high.

When we see footage of wolves hunting, for example, our analysis of what we think is going in their minds (which probably goes back to the Darwinian idea of species having adaptive "strategies") is that the wolves are planning their attack; they've got a "game plan." We see it in their faces. Yet when we see a spider go into a hole and pull a leaf over himself to "hide" from his prey, do we believe the spider is thinking this through logically? Does it have a game plan? Of course not. And one of the reasons we don't do that is that a spider's "face" is expressionless.

Another "reason" we believe dogs use logic and reason may be that dogs don't feel themselves to be separate from us, and on a certain level we don't feel separate from them. Many pet owners report that they grieve more over the loss of a favorite pet than they do over the loss of a parent, a close friend, or a spouse. These owners say that losing the pet is like losing a part of themselves. That may be because parents, spouses, and friends have ego boundaries. Dogs don't. As a result it becomes easier for us to see our dogs as indivisible from our own thoughts, making us susceptible to the belief that they think more like we do than the size and shapes of their brains would suggest or support.

Another anomaly is that dogs are much smarter than wolves in terms of being adaptable to new environments and in terms of their social and emotional intelligence. And yet a wolf's brain is at least 25% larger than the brain of a dog the same size.

Where does the dog get its extra brain power?

I think they get it from our brains. I think they literally hijack parts of our brains and use them to think with. I borrowed this idea from the philosophy of embodied embedded cognition, written and hypothesized about by Daniel Dennett, Andy Clark, Susan Hurley, and others.

Here's how I think this happens: Dogs read us and react, read us and react, read us and react, over and over. And we project our own emotions and thought processes onto their reactions, based in large part on our personal beliefs and identities. As a result, our reactions, in the moment, reinforce whatever small behavioral changes the dog exhibits in response to us in an almost continuous loop. This happens repeatedly, countless numbers of times every day, even when we're not thinking about it. And as a result, the dog begins to reflect back to us many of the same things we're unconsciously projecting onto them.

That's what they do. That's what we do.

So it makes sense that the woman with the female cavalier thought her dog was playing hard to get. It wasn't that being hard to get was part of the woman's persona. In fact, probably just the opposite. But dogs feed off our emotions. So by having an emotional issue with that specific behavior, the woman was unconsciously reinforcing it. If she hadn't had an emotional issue with it, and hadn't labeled it, she would have had more of an idea about what was really going on with her dog (she was anxious), and would have done something to help her.

The Dog as Psychotherapist

None of us are complete human beings. We all have unresolved issues. Most people are aware of the health and psychological benefits dog ownership can have. There’s plenty of research showing that owning a dog reduces stress, lowers blood pressure, etc.

There's another benefit that not many people are aware of; dogs can also be great psychotherapists if we let them.

Years ago I saw a woman in Central Park call her dog to her in a stern tone of voice. The dog had been doing something he shouldn't have; I don't remember what it was. He came to her nervously, head down.

She grabbed his snout and shouted in his face. "Do you have any idea how irresponsible you are when you do that?" she yelled at him. "Do you? What would make you even think that that kind of behavior was acceptable?"

The dog looked "guilty," which satisfied the owner momentarily.

"All right, then. But you'd better never let me catch you doing that kind of thing again."

What I took away from this encounter (other than that the owner was completely unaware that she was talking to a dog, not an unruly child) was that some of us seem to use our relationships with our dogs to work out emotional issues of our own, which we then project back on to the dog's behavior in a circular fashion.

How could a dog act "irresponsibly?" How could he have "thought" his behavior was acceptable or unacceptable?

His owner seemed certain that he felt guilty when she chided him.

But did he?

A recent study done by Alexandra Horowitz at Barnard College shows some pretty solid evidence that the "guilty look" we sometimes see in our dogs is a complete and utter figment of our own imaginations, and is actually the result of the way the dogs have been treated, not an awareness of any misdeed on their part. (Some of the dogs in the study exhibited a "guilty look" — or so their owner's imagined — even when they hadn't done anything “wrong.”)

So clearly dogs don't feel guilty, but people often imagine that they do.

Does this have anything to do with the callow supposition I made years ago, that some dog owners use their dogs as surrogates for their own emotional issues?

Yes. I still think that's true. In my first mystery novel, A Nose for Murder, Jack Field — an ex-cop turned dog trainer — describes the kind of relationship one of his training clients had with her Airedale, Ginger:

"She was using Ginger to work out emotional issues she had with her parents. It's not uncommon. The owner engages in a kind of psychodrama, with the dog playing the role of the owner's inner child and the owner in the role of a parent or authority figure."

Jack also thinks it's possible to determine a person's complete psychological profile by how they interact with their dogs:

"If Sigmund Freud had allowed his patients to talk only about their pooches, instead of free-associating about their mommies and their potty training, they would have all been cured a lot faster."

These are jokes, of course. And yet Freud said jokes are a way of telling the truth.

Our dogs love us to pieces. They also read us and our emotional lives in ways we can only imagine. I'm convinced that they know, on a purely unconscious level, what our issues are. They feel them. And it seems to me that if we can learn how to pay attention to what our dog's behaviors reflect back to us about how we feel, if we can tune in to how their actions might trigger whatever unresolved childhood issues we may have, particularly at times when we get frustrated and angry at them over minor issues, I think we could save a lot of money on therapy. Or we could just talk to our therapists about our dogs. Either way, there's something about the nature of the domesticated dog that can get to the heart of the matter like no other animal on earth.

By the way, about 4 years after I wrote the passages in my first novel I've quoted above, I found out that Kevin Behan, who originated the training methods I use and the philosophy I subscribe to, felt the same way. Here's a link to an article that's been on his website since at least 2001.

The Dog Who Helped Me Forgive My Father

Let me start by saying two things concerning my personal understanding about the nature of emotion.

The first is about memory, which is that there is virtually no difference between physical and emotional memory.

This is something I learned while studying at the NATAS acting workshop in New York. (I was never a very good actor, by the way; I was always too self-conscious on camera.)

Most people think that when a method actor is preparing for a scene, he starts by thinking about an emotional event from his past, and then tries to recapture that same feeling. That's sort of true. But trying to simply recall the emotions doesn't work. Being caught up in a deep emotional state — the only kind actors find worth using — puts you in a vulnerable position, and there's a part of the psyche that tries to prevent us from being vulnerable if it can. So you can struggle and strain all you like to recall the giddy, almost tipsy delight you felt the first time a girl (or boy) you liked told you they liked you back, for example, or the despair you felt later when she (or he) told you things were over. But try as you might to recall the exact emotions, they won't come. Yet if you simply recall some of the sensory details surrounding those events — the color of her eyes, the texture of the walls, something as inconsequential as the angle of light shining off her hair — then the emotions come flooding back, to carry you away once more.

Emotional memory is not mental or abstract; it's visceral and concrete.

The second thing about emotions is that while we may categorize many different types — anger, jealousy, longing, lust, joy, etc. — they all come from the same well, meaning there is essentially only one emotion. And like white light it can be refracted into a rainbow of different emotional colors, something I also learned in acting workshop. For example, if a scene requires your character to be angry, but you're feeling more on the sad side that day, it makes no difference at all. If any kind of emotion is there you're free to use it however you want. Yes, you may feel sad before the scene starts, but once you're in it you'll be absolutely furious.

So the only difference between emotions is their "color."

Years ago I had a black-and-white English field setter named Charley. He was named after a character in a screenplay I'd just sold: The Legend of Charley Maine, about a Manhattan couple — Maggie and Charley Maine — whose youngest daughter is kidnapped by elves on Halloween night. Charley often appeared on David Letterman's NBC show, where he was known as "Charlie [sic] the Bubble-Eating Dog." And when I wasn't waiting for phone calls from NBC, or out on my own auditions, I loved spending long hours in Central Park watching Charley play with the other dogs. A favorite of ours was a young Weimeraner named Flash, a wonderfully exuberant dog.

Flash's owner and I would sometimes make small talk as our dogs played, and in the course of our casual conversations, which took place over several months, outdoors, in a relaxed setting, little tidbits emerged about a kind of love/hate relationship she had with her father. And I slowly began to understand (or I thought I did) something about the curious relationship she had with her dog; she was often red-faced with anger at Flash for doing next to nothing, yet at other times she smothered him with kisses, also for doing nothing. She had a love/hate relationship with her dog too.

So one day I asked her why she'd named him "Flash," and she told me that it had been one of her father's nicknames. Well, of course. It all made perfect sense.

As I thought about it, though, I realized that something similar had been going on with me and Charley as well. I never berated him for playing, but I did get very seriously mad at him whenever he did something I thought might put his life in danger. At such times I felt helpless and out of control, and could feel myself actually becoming my father.

What was going on?

When Charley died suddenly six months later, some answers came.

First of all, my father had passed away 22 years earlier, but I didn't cry at his funeral; I was the only dry-eyed Kelley in the church that day. And I had never cried over his death at any time after that either. And the reason, or so I told myself, was that I was still pissed off at the way he'd treated me when I was very, very young. (Let's just say he'd been overfond of corporal punishment.) But when my poor little dog Charley died, man did I cry. I sobbed for 3 days straight. I couldn't even get out of bed. And it seemed to me that there was no difference in the tears I cried for Charley in 1990 and the ones I should have cried for my father 22 years earlier. In fact the love and loss I felt for that dog, reawakened something in me about the deep nature of the love I'd actually felt for my dad following the mistakes he'd made when I was 3 or 4. Tears are tears, after all, whether we cry them for our lost parents, or while watching the end of a good production of Romeo and Juliet or seeing My Dog Skip on TV, or just because we hear some dumb song on the radio. So I ended up crying for the loss of both animals, human and canine, daddy and doggy. (I also learned that you may be able to ignore your feelings successfully for 22 years but that doesn't mean they've gone away.)

Then, as my grief began to ebb and fade, I realized I'd also somehow forgiven my dad. The burden of anger and resentment I'd carried around in my chest like a dead weight for most of my life was gone, vanished. I finally understood what a great man he was in so many ways. He fought a war, he was part of a unit of soldiers who freed the prisoners at Dachau. He could sit down at the piano and play virtually any song he'd heard for the first time, completely by ear. He was also the most popular dad in our neighborhood because he was the only grownup who'd play with the neighbor kids. Many times when the doorbell rang, and a kid stood on the other side of the screen door with a football or basketball under his arm, he wouldn't ask, "Can Lee [or Jamie or Del] come out and play?" but "Can Jack [my dad's name] come out and play?" And yes, my father made some mistakes when I was a tyke, but bless him, once he realized what he was doing he learned how to control his temper and it never happened again. I should have recognized what a difficult thing that must've been instead of staying angry at him for so long.

So thanks, Charley. You were a great dog. I miss you.

And thanks Jack. You were a great dad. I miss you too.

Happy Father's Day, 2009.

LCK
www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
“Changing the World, One Dog at a Time”
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The Pushing Exercise

This is a corollary to my previous blog post, "An Open Letter to New York Dog Trainers."

How to Do the Pushing Exercise

In Natural Dog Training one of the most important and pivotal exercises we do is called “the pushing exercise,” where we hand feed a dog outdoors, encouraging the pooch to push against us while he or she eats. Kevin Behan — the originator of NDT and the nation's premiere expert on the rehabilitation of problem dogs, particularly those with severe aggression problems — created this exercise, probably as an outgrowth of the work he did for many years training police dogs, border patrol dogs, and detection dogs. In order to build a dog's drive to the levels needed in such work a trainer will often play tug-of-war and then push against the dog as he's tugging on the toy. This builds the dog's drive and makes him more reliable in a crunch situation.

One of the things the pushing exercise does is it creates a better emotional bond between you and your dog. But it's also amazingly effective at solving all kinds of behavioral problems, particularly those that are fear-based.

Why?

All behavior is an expression of energy, but energy always has to flow toward something. And sometimes a dog's emotional energy gets blocked by past experiences, fears, lack of confidence, etc. The pushing exercise can help a dog learn how to push past her internal resistance, her emotional barriers, and whatever other kinds of energy blocks she might be experiencing. Once she does, she'll be happier, more confident, plus a lot more obedient.

All dogs are good dogs, some just need a little push!

NOTE: This version of the exercise is designed to be used by the average dog owner, one whose dog has mild to moderate behavioral problems. Do not try this with a dog who's aggressive toward humans over food. You have to either do some preliminary work with such dogs before moving on to the pushing exercise, or leave it in the hands of an experienced professional.


The Pushing Exercise (Please print this page so you'll have a hard copy!)

At meal time, take the dog outdoors on-lead to a quiet spot with few distractions. Have the dog’s morning or evening meal with you in a bait bag (or you can use a leather nail bag from the hardware store). It’s a good idea to feed the dog only half her usual fare at her previous meal so that she’ll come into this exercise with a bit more desire to eat than usual.

When you find a good spot, stop walking, calmly stroke her and praise her. Scruff her under the chin or scratch under her ears. Set up a warm, convivial feeling.

Take an open, loose, non-threatening stance, not directly head-on, but at a kind of 3/4 degree angle, with your legs apart so when she comes to take the food from your hand she’ll be coming at a more direct angle. You don’t want her coming in from either your right or left side—she should come straight between your legs.

With some dogs I do the exercise while seated, but keep the same loose body language.

Bend your knees slightly, but lean back from the hips in what I call the “Kramer.” But keep your shoulders rounded, not stiff. This is the kind of stance that will automatically encourage your dog to want to come toward you. (She might not at first, but she’ll at least have some desire to do so, much more so than if you stand close and loom over her).

Grab a handful of food from the bag. I like to use my non-dominant (left) hand for the food (I’m right handed). Also, if the dog eats kibble I usually marinate it in hot water for 20 mins. or so, until it’s nice and mushy; I also like to add some juicy chicken or bits of steak, or some tasty canned food as well. Sometimes a dog I’m working with will be eating a raw food diet. That’s fine too. I always wear a latex glove on my food hand.

Show the dog that you have a nice handful of yummy food. Praise her for showing interest in it. Then close your fingers gently across your palm (covering the food), and say, in a warm, gentle tone of voice, “Wait…” And as you can see the dog holding her energy back for a second or so, say, “Good… Ready!” in a happy tone, then open your hand and let her eat.

As she eats, put your other hand lightly against her chest, with your palm up, cupping her breast bone. Don’t push against her with this hand. Just let it sit there. If she shows nervousness about having that other hand against her chest while she’s eating, you have to take it a little slower; use that hand to scratch under her ears again, etc. You want her to feel comfortable. Let her eat while you pet her and scratch her with that hand.

Once she’s finished eating that handful of food, withdraw your other hand from her chest, dip into the bag for another handful, and start again, repeating the same sequence of words: “Wait…” She waits. “Ready? Okay!”

If she really gets into eating this way, or is almost there, but not quite, I’ll encourage her while she’s eating. “Oh, you want it! Come on! Come on and eat it! Push me! Push me!” You have to make sure this doesn’t throw her off though. It should make her want to push into harder. If her interest lags instead, ease off a little. Another variation, once the dog is really into the game, is to move away from her as you push. This not only increases her interest in the game it has the added benefit of making her more interested in coming when called.

With some dogs it may take several days or more to get them comfortable with this. Take it very slowly. Sometimes it's beneficial with such dogs to simply not "push" it at one meal and "skip" to the next. It won't hurt a dog to fast for a meal or two. In fact holistic vets recommend that you fast your dog once a week. It's actually good for a dog's digestive system. Doing this will also reduce a dog's nervousness about eating from your hand. Don't go overboard, of course. And if you're working with a rescue dog who's severely underweight, let her get closer to her ideal weight before doing any fasting. Kevin Behan recommends that for some dogs you have to keep them at about 85% of their ideal body weight until their behavioral problems are resolved. (There is sound reasoning behind this idea: hunger is nature's way of curing fear.)

Over the course of a few days, as you sense your dog's increased openness toward eating this way, you can start pulling your food hand away bit by bit, while keeping the other hand in position, nice and steady against her chest. If she’s interested enough in the food, this will automatically cause her to push into you to keep eating. As she gets used to the feeling of pressure, and seems to start to like it, you can slowly build the amount of pressure she’s able to tolerate against her chest. The harder the dog pushes the more of her fear and confidence issues she’ll be getting rid of (because she's pushing past her emotional barriers).

The ultimate goal is that eventually, over the course of a week or two (maybe more, depending on the dog), you’ll have her pushing so hard that she’s up on her back legs, nearly knocking you over. But never let her feel pressure against her chest unless she’s also eating at the same time. As she begins to push harder and harder at each meal you’ll see some incredible changes take place in the dog’s behavior. She’ll become calmer, more obedient, less pushy (I know!), and more centered and balanced.

That’s what always happens. You just have to see it to believe it…

Click here to purchase Neil Sattin’s DVD on pushing.

What Kinds of Behavioral Problems is the Pushing Exercise Good For?

Why it works.

LCK
www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
My Psychology Today Blog
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