Jump Starting the Prey Drive

I’ve been wanting to supply a simple trick or two to getting dogs with “no prey drive” jazzed up and starting to act drivey, for those dog owners who need that kind of help, and I dug into the archives and found this. .

(Originally posted, in slightly different form, on Amazon, August 20, 2006):

Jump Starting the Prey Drive

I met with Trevor and his owner yesterday and was trying to get Trevor to push against me to get his food (he likes vegetables so I was using broccoli and cauliflower florets). It was around one in the afternoon, and he hadn’t eaten breakfast, so he was hungry, which should have made it easy when I tried to demonstrate the technique so his owner could do it between now and Monday.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s an exercise I use to build a dog’s drive. It’s pretty simple. You take the dog outside when he’s hungry. Tease him with his kibble, or something even a little more tantalizing, holding it in your left hand. Then you put your right hand against the dog’s chest (but you don’t push him, just hold your hand steady), you put the treats or kibble in front of the dog’s nose, using your left hand, then tease him with the food, encourage him to take it, but you don’t let him. You hold your right hand steady against his chest. All he has to do to get fed is push against you. Once he does that, he gets to eat. You gradually (over a period of a few days or weeks), increase the pressure you put against his chest so he has to keep pushing harder and harder against you. The harder he pushes the more you’ll build his drive.

I was sitting on a couch, with Trevor, who weighs about 20 lbs. on the floor. But he kept getting a little spooked and pulling back or trying to come at the food in my hand from a different angle. Then I got an idea, I invited him up on the couch so he’d be on my level. He jumped up eagerly and I could see some of that drive energy I was trying to get him to express come out in him. Still, though, as soon as I started the game, he backed off and got nervous.

So here’s where I did something that might be helpful for some of you to learn: I put a floret in my right hand (effectively removing it as a source of emotional discomfort for Trevor, since that was the hand that I’d been using to block his access to the food), then I teased him with it. He got interested, but decided, “Wouldn’t it be easier to get the food that’s now in your left hand?” So I put those in a little bowl and got them out of the way. Then I went back to teasing Trevor with the one in my right hand. Once he was excited about the game, I tossed the floret toward the kitchen, saying “Go get it,” in a happy, excited tone.

He jumped off the couch and raced after it! (I know it sounds dumb, but for Trevor this was a first step to being able to play with me!) While he raced after it I grabbed another one from the bowl, invited him up on the couch, and when he jumped up, I teased him with the second one then threw it for him chase. I repeated this one more time, and with the 4th floret, I held it in my left hand and placed my right hand against his chest, just as I’d tried to do before, and he pushed against me to get it. His drive was really coming up now.

Sometimes it’s a little improvisation, a simple change of plan that can bring a dog’s drive to the surface. So if your dog is hesitant about playing with balls or toys, but he loves his cookies, use them as a prey object. Some people might worry that you’re setting a pattern that’ll interfere with the dog bringing the toy back. Don’t worry about that, the first goal is to get the dog to love chasing something. Remember, that’s already hardwired into his DNA. Once he has fun repeatedly chasing a biscuit or piece of chicken (or a floret), you’ve opened up a channel to it, you’ve re-awakened his DNA. Then you can slowly introduce him to the idea of chasing a ball. For instance, you could switch the game around a little from what I did with Trevor (inside a crowded apartment), and instead of just tossing the food object, you could tease him with it and run away, get him to chase you around the back yard, then toss it a few feet. Then one day, when you think he’s ready, substitute a tennis ball as the focal point of the chase me game, and when you can see that he’s crazy to catch you and nip at you in play, you get him to focus his urge to bite onto the ball, then toss it a few feet. It doesn’t even have to be a ball, either; it can be his favorite toy. The idea is to increase his desire for something he already has a smidgen of desire for, then get him to chase it.

This brings up one last point, if a dog has little or no interest in chasing a toy or a ball, you need to start him off with very short throws. (This is especially true of puppies and tracking breeds, like bloodhounds.)

LCK

The point about this little exercise I did with Trevor (it was initially done indoors, but once I started working with him on a daily basis, I did it outside most of the time), is a simple fact of nature. Once you get a dog chasing something, anything, a change takes place internally. You’ve reconnected him to his predatory nature, if only fleetingly. Anything that stimulates the urge to chase can be utilized to increase, amplify, and jump start a dog’s prey drive in training.

My Norman Mailer Story

Last year, when Kurt Vonnegut died, I wrote about a nice little encounter we had once, when he was out walking his dog, and I was walking a client’s briard to a training venue. Very nice man. And I’ve always loved his books. At the time I wrote that post I apologized for name dropping, but said if I was in the mood to really name drop someday, I’d tell you my Norman Mailer story. So here goes:

I lived in Provo, Utah during the time of the Gary Glimore murders, the subject matter of Mailer’s book, The Executioner’s Song. If you don’t remember the story, Gilmore was the first prisoner to be executed in the United States after the Supreme Court reversed an earlier decision, banning the procedure as “cruel and unusual punishment.”

I was a disk jockey at the time, and I remember reading the news story about Gilmore’s capture as it came over the wire service. It was very memorable for two reasons: Provo had recently been voted one of the ten safest cities in America (I think by Esquire Magazine), so any kind of violent crime was unusual. The other part, of why I personally found the Gilmore murders so memorable when they were first reported, long before anyone knew who the killer was, is that about a year earlier a very good, and very dear friend of mine had come home to her apartment one night, and found her roommate’s dead body in the bathtub. There was blood everywhere; the poor girl had been brutally raped and stabbed to death. (We later learned that it may have been the work of a prolific serial killer named Henry Lee Lucas, who was eventually caught in Texas.) So a year later, when in the course of just a few days two young Mormon men were found murdered—one a gas station attendant, the other a motel manager—it was very shocking.

Here’s an even more shocking part of it for me: once Gilmore had been captured, and his picture was in the papers, and on TV, I recognized him. I’d seen him once in a little diner on the “wrong side of town.” Provo is a college town, and has a large student population, and a large Mormon population as well. But there are also some bars and “seedy” diners in certain parts of town (or there used to be, back when I lived there). And I really liked chicken-fried steak and chili, so I often frequented some of those diners.

One day, a few weeks before the murders took place, I was in one of those dives, and there was a guy staring at me from across the room. I though it odd, but looked away and got back to my meal. My neck kept tingling, though. So I looked up again. He was still staring, glaring, telling me with his eyes that he would kill me if I didn’t get out of “his” diner. I later learned that there’s a term for this kind of look—it’s called “the prison-yard stare.” After a few minutes of this, I left the diner, my meal unfinished. Then when I saw Gilmore’s picture in the paper, I realized it had been him. To top the story off, when I read Norman Mailer’s account, which explained that Gilmore had killed those two young men because they were clean-cut Mormons, and looked like BYU students, and the he hated BYU students, and that I’d been student at the time when he stare me out of the diner, I realized how lucky I was that I hadn’t run into the bastard while I was alone some night.

Cut to a few years later: Gilmore has been executed, The Executioner’s Song has been on the bestseller list, and is now in paperback. I’m living in Salt Lake, and I buy a copy and read it. (It’s the only book of Mailer’s I’ve ever read.) And I have to admit, it was great. It really captured a lot of the Provo milieu, although there were a couple of things Mailer, a native New Yorker, got wrong. Little things, but they were there.

After living in Salt Lake for a couple of years, working at KCPX, which was an “oldies” station at the time (and there’s a Beach Boys story semi-attached to that part of this*), a friend of mine from acting class in college got a part in a mini-series that NBC was making of The Executioner’s Song. He recommended me to his agent, I got an audition, and was eventually cast opposite Rosanna Arquette, as the married Mormon businessman whom Gilmore’s girlfriend, Nicole, was having an affair with after she got too creeped out by being with Gilmore. (The book is a thousand pages long, so I’m condensing this just a little…)

Larry Schiller, who I think actually contracted Mailer to write the book, was the producer and director of the film. And he asked me if I’d like to do the table reading of the script with Arquette, Tommy Lee Jones, Eli Wallach, Christine Lahti, and the rest of the cast. It was held at a motel conference room in the south part of Provo.

As I came into the room, Larry Schiller took me aside, and said, “Don’t tell anyone what part you’ll be playing. Norman wants me to cast his son in the role, and I haven’t told him yet that I cast you instead.”

Well, this gave me a big boost of self-confidence coming into the room with all these great actors! So we all sit down, and Schiller introduces himself, as does Tommy Lee Jones, Eli Wallach, etc. And everyone tells us what their role is. Even Mailer. Then it comes my turn.

“Hi, I’m Lee Charles Kelley. Larry wanted me to read most of the smaller parts today. I don’t know which part I’ll actually be playing in the film.”

Then we read the script. And it was pretty damn good. I had read the book, remember. Plus I’d studied the craft of screenwriting in college, had seen practically every great American and foreign film ever produced, had written and directed some student films, even sold the option on a full-length romantic comedy to an independent producer. So I’d come into that motel conference room with more than just a bit part. I knew just a little bit about movies.

However, as good as it was, there were a few minor mistakes in Mailer’s teleplay, both of which I thought could be easily corrected with just a simple change or two.

So after the reading was over (this was just the first day, it was an 8-hour script), I went up to Mailer and told him that I’d studied in film in college, and that I’d lived in Provo when the murders had taken place. (As I was talking to him I could see Larry Schiller, talking to Eli Wallach or someone, but giving me darting glances, hoping I wasn’t pulling some kind of actor’s stunt, and spilling the beans to Mailer about his son’s failure to get the role, etc.)

Mailer was extremely open and gracious toward me. There was none of this kind of hierarchical thing you get on movie sets. For instance Christine Lahti treated me like I was less than a worm. Tommy Lee Jones ignored me completely, but he wasn’t being an asshole and looking down his nose at me, which is what Christine Lahti did (I said something nice to her, and she just gave me a pained look, like “Who the hell are you?”). It’s true that Tommy Lee couldn’t be approached at all except maybe by Schiller, Mailer, or Eli Wallach. But he wasn’t being an asshole about it, he was just wrapped up in the role—kind of protecting himself from anything that didn’t pertain to creating Gilmore onscreen.

But Normal Mailer was a total sweetheart. He has (or at the time, he had) kind of a rough, arrogant reputation, and I’d been a little nervous about approaching him. But he was very open and genuine.

Then I said, “Since I know a little about the Mormon church, and lived in Provo during the murders, do you mind if I point out a few mistakes you made in the script?”

“Hell, no,” he said. “Tell me! I hate getting things wrong!”

To give you the background, there were a few scenes in the book featuring the lives of the victims, though neither of them had any contact with Gilmore before the murders. But in the interest of compressing the story a little, Mailer had taken the license to have this young Mormon couple, one of the victims and his wife, in line at the same movie—One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which was rated R. This whole scene was a key plot point.

I explained that because of the newness of the ratings system in America at the time (1974), these two newly married young Mormons probably wouldn’t have gone to an R-rated movie, you’d have to add a scene where they prayed about it or got permission from their bishop.

“Yeah,” Mailer said, “I worried about that. But I wanted to condense the story, and I thought this would be a good way to introduce one of the victims to the audience. I had to cut a lot of stuff out because the book was so damn long.”

“Yeah, and I think it’s a great way to do that. But here’s the thing. I actually saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in Provo when it first came out. It played at the Uintah Theater, which is on Center Street. They were the only theater in town to play R-rated films. But two doors down, is another theater, called The Paramount, and they showed G-rated movies, and were probably showing Grizzly Adams at the same time. So you could have this Mormon couple be in line to see Grizzly Adams—”

“—and Gilmore and his cousin are in line to see One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest!” he said, finishing my idea. “That’s brilliant! Let me talk to Larry about rewriting that scene.”

He talked to Larry, even asked him if the production company could hire me as a technical advisor on the film. (This made Schiller extremely uncomfortable, which I kind of enjoyed.) But it turned out that Schiller had already decided to film that particular scene at the Academy Theater, which was around the corner from the Uintah, on University Ave.

So Mailer kind of shrugged, and apologized with his eyes, but thanked me again for my input.

Later, when I became a novelist myself, I was grateful for Mailer’s attitude, for the example it set for me. I can still hear his words: “Hell, no. Tell me! I hate getting things wrong!”

So that’s my Norman Mailer story.

LCK

*Many of the disk-jockeys I worked with at KCPX had been around in the 1960s, working at a rock station called KNAK. The Beach Boys were really popular in Salt Lake (they even wrote a song called “Salt Lake City”). And KNAK promoted all their concerts.

So during one of their visits a few of the DJs (Skinny Johnny Mitchell and Woolly Waldron) were in the limo with the Beach Boys, going from the airport to the concert, and one of the jocks mentioned that the station owner couldn’t join them because his daughter had run off with his new T-Bird, and he was trying to track her down. Mike Love reportedly turned to Brian Wilson and said, “You know, we could make a song out of that.” And that’s how “Fun, Fun, Fun,” came to be written…

“Well, she got her daddy's car
And she cruised through the hamburger stand, now.
Seems she forgot all about the library
Like she told her old man, now
And with the radio blastin'
Goes cruisin' just as fast as she can, now
And she'll have fun, fun, fun,
'Til her daddy takes the T-Bird away.”

One more Beach Boys story: Sacramento was another popular venue for the Beach Boys. And a friend of mine likes to tell the story that his best friend in high school had a sister named Rhonda, who was kind of a groupie, I guess, and whom one of the Beach Boys happened to like a lot. So that’s where “Help Me, Rhonda" comes from…

Now here’s my latest lyric (which, unfortunately, is not autobiographical—I wish it were):

Winter Love

Snow wraps our hearts in a dream.
Though the weather’s extreme,
we stay snug in the fire’s glow.

Flames shadow dance in the dark.
No storm can dim their spark,
or blow our candles out.

Even if the skies aren’t gray
and no icicles form,
I get chills when you say
“Honey, come keep me

warm.” Let the world turn to ice.
Our featherbed paradise
burns with a winter love.

Based on “Lydia’s Crush” by Christian Jacob
Music © 1993, by CHRISTIAN JACOB (BMI)
Lyric © 2007 by LEE CHARLES KELLEY (ASCAP)

Using Praise as a Correction

In the interest of building an easily-referenced library of dog training tips, here is another article from a dog training book (in progress), previously posted on the Amazon blog. By the way, in reviewing this before posting it, I realize it may be one of the most profound things I’ve ever written about dogs. Enjoy!

Using Praise to Correct Unwanted Behavior

My dog Freddie and I were in Central Park one day when he was a little over a year old, and he found a discarded chicken breast near a park bench. What a treasure! As soon as he saw it, he ran over, took it in his mouth, then looked over at where I stood, about twenty yards away, and dug his paws in, getting ready to run off with it.

At the time I had developed the idea that everything the training books say is wrong, and I was experimenting with my hypothesis by randomly doing the exact opposite of what you’re supposed to do in any given training situation, just to see what would happen. As Fred got ready to run away with his prize I thought, “I should probably tell him no or correct him in some way. What would the totally opposite, wrong thing be?” The answer came back, praise him. So I said, “Good boy! What a good boy!” in an excited, highly emotionally charged voice.

Freddie, without knowing what he was doing or thinking about it, immediately dropped his treasure and came running back to me, wagging his tail, and smiling. (Dalmatians do smile.) I praised him even more, picked up a stick, teased him with it, then had him chase me to get it. We played a little tug-of-war, with Freddie on his back legs, and his front paws braced against my body. Then I used the stick to heel him past the chicken breast. I did it three or four times in a row. Then I had him sit right in front of it, took a few steps back, and said, “Freddie, come!” and he came to me and we ran off, playing.


Accentuate the Positive

I thought this over, wondering why it had worked, and the only thing I could come up with was that I’d interrupted Freddie’s flow of feelings. He wanted to run off with his lovely, tasty chicken breast and make a meal of it. All my praise did, in this way of looking at things, was interrupt his behavior, his desired expectation, or his flow of feelings. As I thought it over even more I realized that whether you correct the dog or praise him, all you’re really doing is interrupting his behavior and/or his flow of feelings. Both methods stop the behavior as it’s happening, but corrections carry an unfavorable association towards whomever is doing the correcting. On the other hand praise carries only positive associations. So the question is, would you rather have your dog see you as a positive or negative?

A few months after working this out in my head I heard of a study done at Harvard which showed that the human brain is designed to be unhappy, or at least not to be happy for very long. This has to do with how dopamine and serotonin levels always go down after they spike, and is similar to the effects of an addict's high, and how his substance of choice tends to lose its effectiveness the more it’s used. Another way of looking at it is the new toy at Christmas phenomenon. Man, on Christmas morning that new toy is the most wonderful thing in the world, but two weeks later it’s old hat. The Harvard researchers’ theory was that the brain is designed to not allow us to be happy for very long so we'll continue to do things, to achieve new levels of civilization, or to just get up in the morning.

I wondered if a dog’s brain worked the same way, and it occurred to me that whenever a dog (or wolf) leaves the den, his hunting instinct immediately kicks in. This means that there’s some level of dissatisfaction going on in the dog’s emotional system; some internal mechanism is telling him he’s not going feel better until he finds some way to use his prey drive, whether it’s meeting another dog to hook up with and play/hunt with, or to find a squirrel to chase.

If this is true, then when Freddie found the chicken breast he was thinking, “I’ve found it! This is what will fill that empty feeling!” He wasn't really hungry. He’d eaten a good breakfast. He was simply looking for some way to satisfy his hunting instincts. (By the way, if you think about it scavenging is a very economical way for a dog to hunt: you go directly from search to eat, with no need to stalk, chase, grab, and kill your prey. . .)

Then, when I praised Fred, flooding him with positive emotions, which came from a person who was the most important focal point of his life, it was even more emotionally fulfilling for him than finding the chicken breast had been.

Going back to the underlying mechanism, here’s how praise works:

A dog sees a piece of food. He goes after it with the expectation of achieving satisfaction. If he’s interrupted, both his desire and his expectation of achieving satisfaction are thwarted. Since interrupting him by saying “No!” drags negative associations with whomever is saying it into the equation, the food object is rarely seen as the primary negative. Neither is the dog’s behavior. In the dog’s experience:

THE HANDLER IS PERCEIVED AS THE PRIMARY NEGATIVE

because

THE HANDLER IS AN OBSTACLE TO THE DOG’S DESIRE.

Saying “No!” is an impure correction because the negative experience of being interrupted is directly attributable to the person saying “No!” (A true Pavlovian or Skinnerian would never use a verbal correction for this very reason.) On the other hand, when you use praise, the negative experience of being interrupted can’t be attributed to the handler, only the the thing the dog desires at that moment is perceived as negative. When you praise as a correction

THE HANDLER IS PERCEIVED AS POSITIVE

because

HE SEEMS TO BE SUPPORTING THE DOG’S DESIRES.

When Freddie found that chicken breast his social instincts became polarized toward resistance. The food was more important to him than his need to feel connected to me at that moment. But by praising him, I instantly reversed the polarity of his emotions from social resistance to social attraction. He lost his feelings of attraction to the food. Or rather, my praise changed his feelings of attraction for the food into feelings of attraction to me. In other words I changed his emotional state, and

WHEN YOU CHANGE A DOG’S EMOTIONAL STATE,
YOU AUTOMATICALLY CHANGE HIS BEHAVIOR.

After the chicken breast incident I spent the next few days praising Fred, who’d previously been a bit of a problem scavenger, whenever he found something on the street. In three or four days his scavenging totally disappeared. All because I’d pigheadedly done the exact opposite of what the dog training books (and common sense) would tell you to do.

You have to remember that when a dog goes after something on the street he does so because of an inner feeling of need or desire. He may have no real desire to eat a pizza crust, just a general sense of dissatisfaction. (Freddie and other dogs will often scavenge after eating a full meal, so they don’t do it out of hunger, but out of a need to reduce emotional tension.) When you praise a dog, you give him a feeling of connectedness which overcomes his need for the food object. When you correct the dog, you may be successful at getting him to leave the object alone at that moment, but you do so by leaving him with an unfulfilled desire, a desire which has to then find its expression through another outlet. Ultimately it’s a matter of attraction and resistance. Praise makes the dog feel more attracted emotionally to you than he does to the food object. Scolding, even though it seems successful and seems to make sense, actually makes a dog feel more attracted to the food object than he does to you!

However, this technique only works when the praise reverses the dog’s emotional polarity. When the dog is too wound up, it does no good to praise him. So you have to praise the dog before things get ratcheted up too high.

So remember this isn’t a cure-all; it’s just a helpful tool.

LCK

(By the way, this article is part of a blog carnival, which will be available for viewing as of Monday, November 12, 2007.)