Lee Charles Kelley

Captive & Laboratory Learning vs. The Natural Way

2009-11-07T08:37:00.000-08:00

Here's a comment on my latest Psychology Today blog article, along with my reply. If you haven't already read the article you may still be able to follow most of the arguments put forth here.

Captive & Laboratory Learning vs. The Natural Way

Comment Submitted by Anonymous on November 6, 2009 - 7:16pm

I really don't feel there is a firm grasp of operant (behavioral) conditioning concepts in place here. Getting your dog to stop picking up trash off the ground by praising him is putting that behavior on stimulus control. This is widely used to eliminate unwanted behaviors-you don't ask for it, you don't get it. And I don't think you can call trying something with a few dogs a "theory." That is an insult to the scientific method, quite frankly.

I appreciate dog owners doing their best to be better owners to their dogs, operant conditioning is ALWAYS at play in every interaction you have with not only every dog, but every human you come into contact with. Behavior is constantly being reinforced or punished.

Operant conditioning is NOT simply positive reinforcement, and anyone who makes that claim (which I will admit has become fairly common) does not understand operant conditioning.

Read Skinner, read the Brelands, read Karen Pryor!!

Operant conditioning is postive and negative reinforcement (both which INCREASE behavior), and positive and negative punishment (designed to DECREASE behavior).

These methods are used to train animals of literally nearly every species in captivity from elephants to whales to sharks to turtles to fish to alligators to cats to rabbits to frogs to fish (zoos and aquariums aquire all KINDS of behavior with it), so please do not disregard something proven to be so universally successful as something that may not really work for dogs. I love dogs, but I am sorry to say they are not any more special or unique than any other animal. Don't "dogthropomorphize" behavior when it is simply behavior that is yes, specifc to dogs, but not so unique that the wheel must be reinvented to accomodate it.

Answer, submitted by Lee Charles Kelley on November 7, 2009 - 7:41am

Hi,

I don't think you have a firm grasp of what I've written.

1) How was the scavenging behavior put under stimulus control? The general principle for that technique is something I'm very familiar with. I use it all the time to teach dogs not to jump up or bark by first teaching them to jump up or bark on command, then teaching them what “Okay, off,” or "Quiet..." means.

Explain how that applies here.

2) I never said that the use of praise to stop a dog from scavenging was the basis of any theory. If you had read my articles more carefully you'd see that this behavioral shift was only presented as an example of learning that can't be explained through the alpha theory or learning theory.

3) The idea that operant conditioning is always at play in every interaction someone has with any animal or human is a myth. Not even a die-hard behaviorist would argue that. (They'd say you're ignoring instances where classical conditioning is at play.) Meanwhile, I would argue (and have) that neither form of conditioning can explain all types of behavior or learning in animals and humans. How does a child learn impulse control by pretending to be a factory guard? Is that operant conditioning? How does operant conditioning explain the scavenging example? Like everyone else, you've only attached a label to the phenomenon, you haven't explained it.

4) As for your reading list, I've read Skinner. Lots of Skinner. I've also read the Brelands. And sad to say, I went through my own Karen Pryor phase, where I thought operant conditioning was the "one true answer." But the more I applied oc principles to dogs the more I realized that the emperor has no clothes. Perhaps you should read Dennett and Chomsky and Pinsky and John Staddon and Gary Cziko.

5) I understand full well the difference between positive and negative reinforcement. I was explaining my approach to dog training yesterday in Riverside Park to a woman who's been training dogs for 6 years using clickers and positive reinforcement. We were discussing the praise issue mentioned here. She seemed to think that whether you're praising a dog or shouting at him you can still be reinforcing the behavior.

"Though shouting," she said, "would be negative, not positive, reinforcement."

"Actually," I said, "if shouting increased the behavior it would still be considered a positive reinforcement."

She didn't understand; she thought I was making it up.

6) The fact that these methods are used to train captive animals means very little. When we base our understanding of learning on the behaviors of animals in captivity we're only seeing a small, unnatural piece of the pie (which is, unfortunately how Skinner’s theory was first developed, in the lab, with animals kept captive in boxes, not walking around in real life). Captive wolves exhibit hierarchical behaviors, wild wolves don't. Why is that? When captive dolphins, who are designed by nature to swim hundreds of miles a day through open waters, are held prisoner in small (to them) tanks, why wouldn't they be willing to perform all sorts of acrobatics for food, or even for praise? What else are they supposed to do with their energy? Could they be trained to do all those things out in the open ocean? No, because in their natural environment they'd have another outlet for their energy.

7) Finally, you're completely misinterpreting my argument for dogthromorphism. I never said we should dogthropomorphize behaviors, but that instead of anthropomorphizing dogs, we should dogthropomorphize ourselves, meaning we should try to see their behavior from their own unique perspective. It may be true that all animals learn the same way, but that way isn't through operant conditioning; it's through the way emotional energy either flows or gets blocked. The satisfying release of emotion is what reinforces behavior and creates learning. Sometimes operant conditioning imitates that process, sometimes it doesn't. Dogs are the clearest window we have into this phenomenon.

LCK

How to Redirect Behavior Using Distractions

2009-10-18T10:24:00.001-07:00

Here's another puppy tip:

“Distract, Praise, Focus”

When your puppy is about chew something he shouldn’t, make a neutral sound distraction, like a whistle, clapping your hands, etc. Don’t do it too loudly, just loud enough to make the pup stop what he’s doing. Immediately praise the puppy vocally in a high silly voice. This should make the puppy drop what he was doing (or chewing on) and come racing toward you. Keep praising him. When he gets to you, tease him with a toy, then toss it a few feet for him to chase.

Here’s how this works. The puppy is emotionally attracted to an object, like your shoes or the remote. He’s plugged his energy into it, or is about to. Your sound distraction should be loud enough to make him unplug his energy from it on his own. (If it’s too loud it’ll scare him; if it’s not loud enough it won’t have any effect.) Once he’s unplugged his energy from your shoes, etc., you praise him, which will cause him to feel attracted to you. He’ll come running so that he can plug himself into your energy circuits. Then you tease him with the toy (getting him to focus his energy on it), until he’s crazy to bite the toy, then you throw it a few feet and he’ll plug his energy completely into the toy.

If you do this correctly 3 or 4 times, with a particular object, like a shoe, on the 4th or 5th time you do it the pup will go toward the shoe, then stop short, as if he’s been shocked. Then he’ll turn and come running to you. (Pretty cool, huh?)

If you try it and it’s not having the effect described, you may not be giving enough energy in your praise or in your distraction. It helps to use a different sound distraction each time you do it.

This exercise works very well for new puppies. But if you’ve been scolding your pup or taking things away from him, he’ll be more resistant to the exercise.

(For more info, read William Campbell's Behavior Problems in Dogs.)

LCK

Puppy Training, 8 - 12 wks.

2009-10-18T09:50:00.000-07:00

I'm adding a new folder, just for puppy stuff. Here's the first installment:

Training for Puppies, 8 to 12 Weeks

Puppies need to either be closely supervised¹ or confined behind a gate in kitchen, bathroom, or hallway, or in a puppy pen, with a water bowl, chew toys, a comfortable bed² inside an open crate,³ with wee-wee pads covering the floor.⁴Puppies take great delight in exploring everything in their path through their teeth and jaws⁵. They will stop to pee or poop whenever the urge strikes them⁶. They will bark and cry when left alone⁷. They will get tired very quickly, but quite often they won’t realize how tired they are.⁸

(Some puppies may be lethargic for the first few days. This is usually temporary and due to the shock of adjusting to a brand new environment, but you should consult with your vet to make sure there isn't an underlying medical problem.)

Puppies need to play more than they need structured learning. In fact, the more structured learning you impose on a puppy, the more you open the possibility of creating learning deficits, limit his social and emotional development, decrease impulse control, and guarantee that your pup will be unable to learn as many things as quickly compared to puppies who are given every possible opportunity to engage in unstructured play. The puppy's brain knows naturally what it needs in order to grow and develop. Most dog trainers are not as smart as Mother Nature in this regard, and there's not a dog trainer alive who has more experience than she does.

You’ll need to spend a lot of time down on the floor, playfully interacting with your pup, but the kind of games you play shouldn’t be forced on the puppy. Within reason, the puppy should choose which games and activities feel most important to him at any given moment, and you should follow the puppy’s lead. By the way, doing this will make the puppy feel more open to doing what you want him to do. It will not make him “dominant.”

Try as much as possible not to pick up the puppy, especially if you’re doing it to satisfy your urge to kiss the pup,⁹ or to stop the puppy from doing something he “shouldn’t” do or getting into something he “shouldn’t” get into by zooming toward him with your outstretched arms looming down at him, and then physically restraining him. And under no circumstances should you ever scold, reprimand, or correct a puppy for anything. You will pay for it dearly when he grows up. So always remember:

don’t correct — Re-Direct!

If you can’t watch the puppy closely, he should always be in his quiet area.

Cuddle time is important too, but don’t overdo it. There are two questions to ask yourself when it comes to cuddle time: “Am I doing this to satisfy my emotional needs?” and “Am I reinforcing too much neediness in my pup by cuddling when he ‘demands’ it?” You have to strike a careful balance. Puppies need affection and physical comfort, but don't give too much unless you want to spoil your pup.

Footnotes:

1) Notice the word, “closely.” This means you’re paying close attention to the pup at all times. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO MULTI-TASK! Your puppy’s health, safety, and proper emotional development come first (meaning no yelling at the pup because you weren’t paying attention and she got into something she shouldn’t have).

2) Use light blue towels. Light blue is a relaxing, calming color. And puppy beds are destined to be soiled, chewed, or ripped up. Towels are an inexpensive alternative.

3) Keep the crate door secure so it doesn’t bang shut or hit the wall, etc. For now, going inside the crate should be the pup’s choice, so make it as stress-free as possible. You should also consider putting her dinner bowl inside at breakfast and suppertime.

4) Put newspaper or wee-wee pads on the entire area except for the bed and water bowl. After a few days you’ll see that puppy generally chooses to go on one particular are. Over time you can slowly take up all the other wee-wee pads until only one is left.

5) To ensure proper emotional development, puppies should not only be allowed to do this, they should be encouraged to do it. They should especially be encouraged to mouth your hands, but only at times when they’re feeling relaxed and quiet. (See, “How to Stop Puppy Bites.”) However, there are some things they shouldn’t be chewing on, like electrical wires. The best solution is the puppy-proof your home. Bitter-Apple Spray (or other brands) can be applied to things your puppy shouldn’t chew on. Electrical wires should be placed out of reach, and if you have expensive rugs or carpets, take them up for now and put them in storage. They will get peed on, pooped on, and have their edges chewed when you’re not watching. (See footnote 4, and the “Distract, Praise, Focus,” formula for redirecting your puppy’s teeth away from danger.)

6) Do not ever stop your puppy from relieving herself by peeing or pooping on the wrong spot. Once she’s already in the act, you have to resist the urge to run over and grab her. Take a deep breath, count to ten, then quietly clean it up. Interrupting a puppy while she’s being controlled by a strong (and to her at this age, uncontrollable) urge, will do little to teach her how to go in the right spot, and will do a lot of damage to her ability to trust you.

7) As a general rule, when a new puppy comes into the home they’ll cry when you put them behind the gate, especially at night. You have to ignore the crying or you’ll reinforce it. It may take 45 minutes the first night, 30 minutes the second, and 20 the third night, but eventually the puppy will stop crying out of loneliness. If you give in and try to assuage her loneliness, you’ll only be guaranteeing that she’ll bark and bark and bark whenever she feels needy. You have to tough it out those first few nights.

In case you haven’t figured it out, this means you cannot and should not let a new puppy sleep in bed with you. Make sure you give her plenty of play time about an hour or so before bed, with a 20 minute cool-down period. If you want to cuddle with her on the floor, or hold her in your lap while she falls asleep, that’s fine. But once she’s making ZZZs, gently pick her up and put her behind her gate, turn out the light, and pray.

8) Overtired puppies are very similar to overtired kids. They just need an enforced nap.

9) On an unconscious, knee-jerk level, dogs react to a big head coming toward their head as a potential act of aggression. It’s okay to teach a puppy to give you kisses, but the pup should also come toward you to do that. It’s better not to move your head toward the pup. Few puppies are going to actually bite you over this, but it does create unconscious feelings of nervous tension toward you. So try to remember not to kiss your puppy; let your puppy kiss you (if she feels like it).

LCK

Why Do Dogs Like to "Kiss" Us?

2009-09-22T11:39:00.000-07:00

The following is taken from my column at PsychologyToday.com.

Why Do Dogs Like to "Kiss" Us?

They're sublimating their urge to bite.

In the Mike Nichols film, Wolf, Will Randall, a meek, downtrodden book editor (played by Jack Nicholson), is bitten by a wolf one winter night and finds himself becoming more and more in tune with his primal nature. He can smell things like tequila on a co-worker's breath from clear across the building. He can hear people talking from several floors away. He can read and edit whole manuscripts without his reading glasses.

Worried that the changes he's experiencing may have also caused a nocturnal blackout, Randall goes to see Dr. Alezais, an expert in animal lore. Toward the end of the interview the aging Dr. Alezais reveals that he's been told that he's dying. However, he thinks that if Will Randall were to bite him, he might become strong like the wolf and live forever.

"I can't ask you to transform me with your passions," Alezais says.
"I can only ask you to honor me with your bite."

My dog Freddie was punished for biting when he was a puppy. This created some behavioral problems later on (severe panic attacks) that took me a while to unravel. However, once I did, I observed a funny, and very sweet side-effect to the new emotional freedom he felt once his fears were gone. Before that, whenever we came home from our walks, he would wait at the top of the first landing, and as I came up and got close to him, he would lick my nose in a kind of ... what, a "submissive greeting?" Perhaps, though he really wasn't the submissive type.

But oddly enough, once I'd helped him resolve his fears, whenever we came home and I got near the top of the landing, instead of licking me he'd slowly incline his head toward mine and use his front teeth to lightly pinch the tip of my nose. The experience was thrilling; it often gave me goose bumps. He used his teeth so gently and so precisely, it felt to me as if he was re-establishing an emotional connection between us that had previously been lost.

Wolves make a living with their teeth. Predators aren't designed to be social animals because their urge to bite has to be kept under lock and key around other members of their group, otherwise there'd be bloodshed. And yet wolves are very social; they live together in almost complete harmony and are extremely cooperative when hunting. They even have the ability to share food, eating side-by-side, once their prey has been killed. This is pretty remarkable given the Darwinian view of nature as a cut-throat enterprise, even among members of the same animal group.

To me, all canine behavior is essentially a process of tension and release. When emotional energy builds up in a dog's system, it creates tension which then needs to find a release point through behavior. For wolves the most complete and most satisfying release of tension comes either through biting prey (during the hunt) or copulating (during mating season). In other words nearly everything a wolf does is a sublimation of his urge to bite (his prey drive), or his urge to mate (his sex drive).

One way of sublimating the urge to bite is "submissive" licking, commonly thought to be how a wolf appeases a more "dominant" pack member. But a) dominant and submissive behaviors are so rare in wild wolf packs as to be virtually non-existent, and b) if a wolf's emotional energy is geared to always be expressed primarily through biting, and c) if he also wants to maintain pack harmony at all costs, he may very well lick his pack mate's lips or chin, instead of biting them.

Submission? Probably not.

Sublimation? Probably so.

It's been suggested (I think by Desmond Morris) that when dogs kiss us (which is anthropomorphic, since a kiss involves puckering the lips, and a dog's lips don't pucker), they do so because that's how wolf pups get their parents to regurgitate a meal when they come back to the den.

This doesn't make sense to me. It's like taking a decal from one behavior and sticking it onto another. Dogs are very practical and context-oriented. It would be very unusual for a dog to take a behavior specifically related to her parents, and somehow apply it to human beings. For one thing dogs move through space on the horizontal axis. Humans are vertical. There's no way a dog could mistake a human being for another dog. Also, dogs don't just lick our lips, they lick our noses, our ears, our hands and feet. And the more stressed a dog is, the more he tends to lick. Plus dogs lick us a lot more when they're puppies than they do when they're adults. Why? Puppies feel a lot more oral tension than adult dogs do.

There's one more thing to consider. When humans smile it's considered a signal of good will. But to a chimpanzee a smile communicates fear. Similarly, when a puppy sees your big human head coming toward him, a part of him reacts with fear, and that part wants to bite you. But unlike wolves, dogs make their living with their hearts, not their teeth. They have strong feelings of love and affection for their owners. Plus, they retain the genetic knack of maintaining group harmony at all costs. So when your dog sees you come leaning in for a kiss, he sublimates his urge to bite, and licks you instead. Then, over time, as he accrues more and more feelings of trust on top of the love he already feels, he finds that licking you actually feels good, not just because it releases his nervous tension, but also because of how it makes you feel. (Our feelings are very important to our dogs; they're like the sails and rudders they use to navigate their way through their relationships with us.)

That's the simple, dog-centric genesis of why dogs lick us: it's a way of sublimating their urge to bite. That's why Freddie licked me when I reached the top of the stairs, back before his fears of being punished for biting went away. It's also why he replaced the less satisfying release he got from licking me, and started giving me those tender little love bites on the tip of my nose. He finally felt free enough to share a tiny bit of his deepest and most primal nature with me.

He honored me with his bite.

LCK
www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
"Changing the World, One Dog at a Time"
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The Canine Mind Doth Make Fools of Us All

2009-08-13T12:03:00.001-07:00

The following is taken directly from my PsychologyToday blog...

How the Canine Mind Doth Make Fools of Us All

In an earlier post -- "From Pavlov to Pauli..." -- I wrote that, scientifically speaking, all canine behavior can and should be explained from an emotional/energetic point of view rather than a mental framework. I even kind of bragged, perhaps foolishly, that I could do just that.

In my most recent article -- "Smart Pooches or Dumb Science?" -- I critiqued a recent spate of online articles and TV news blurbs in which psychologist Stanley Coren quite wrongly states that dogs are better at math than 2-year-olds. Here's CNN's version of one "study" supposedly proving that dogs can count and perhaps even do arithmetic: "Counting ability is tested in drills such as one in which treats are dropped, one at a time, behind a screen. When the researcher either sneaks away one of the treats or stealthily adds an extra before raising the screen, the dog will wait longer -- appearing to puzzle over the bad math -- before eating the treats."

In rebuttal I gave some of the scientific evidence for the idea that all animals, not just dogs, have an innate number sense, which enables them to know when the general amount of salient things in their environment has changed: robins and their eggs, for example, or dogs and their treats or toys. (This "number sense "can also be found in 4-and-a-half-month-old babies, by the way.)

However, I think the concept of animals or even babies having a "number sense" is inaccurate because understanding numbers -- 1, 2, 3, 10, 3/5ths, pi -- is language dependent. Without the use of words, animals and babies can't put names to abstract numeric concepts, or even to concrete objects like eggs or toys. It seems to me that the thing they're actually aware of is the changes that take place in their environment: the absence or presence of things that were or weren't there before. And I think they calibrate these changes viscerally, via the changes in own their internal energy states.

Since in my "Pavlov to Pauli" article I proposed the idea that I could explain any and all behavioral phenomenon in dogs from just such an energetic standpoint, I'll attempt to do so here.

Imagine you're at a party. Your mind is full of thoughts: "God, those cheese thingies were good, I wonder if they have any more," or, "Hey, Shelia looks good in that," or, "I hope the kids aren't terrorizing the babysitter," and possibly, "Uh-oh, there's that awful bore, what's-his-name? I hope he doesn't try to harangue me again with his theories about how dogs have better math skills than toddlers."

These are all thoughts. But beneath these thoughts your body is busy accommodating its inner "radar" to the underlying press of stimuli around you: the buzz of conversation, the brief bursts of laughter, the tempo and level of the music, the clinking of ice in glasses, and the almost constant sense of kinetic energy, people shifting between groups of 2 or 3, etc. You're not thinking much if anything about all this, but your body's internal radar is. It's constantly calibrating and recalibrating itself to accommodate these fluctuations in energy. (Since a stimulus is, by definition, anything that increases the energy in an organism, that's exactly what your body is responding to: fluctuations in energy.)

At some point you ask the hostess if you can use her bathroom. She nods, points the way, you go down the hall, make a left, go inside the bathroom, start the water running in the sink, etc. And, while you're thus engaged, a large chunk of people decide to go to another venue: perhaps they go out back to see the pool, perhaps they all have theater tickets. It doesn't matter. Approximately half the people, let's say, are suddenly gone, disappeared.

When you come out of the bathroom you go into a mild state of shock. Your first thought is, "Wow, where did everybody go?" though you don't really care where they went, you just want to know how they all disappeared so quickly. And the reason you're shocked is that your unconscious mind has to re-calibrate itself viscerally to this sudden change in the environment, this huge shift in energy. (This is not a mental process, by the way; the mind rarely concerns itself with fluctuations in energy, but the body is always doing so.)

Okay, now back to dogs.

Remember, the researchers showed the dogs in their study a certain number of treats then dropped the treats behind a screen, added or subtracted some, then revealed the new "amount" to the dogs.

Coren interprets all this as follows: "Now we're giving [the dog] the wrong equation which is 1+1 = 1, or 1+1 = 3. Sure enough, studies show the dogs get it. The dog acts surprised and stares at it for a longer period of time, just like a human kid would."

The dogs "get it?" Right. Except that from the dog's point of view this is more like three-card monte or a magic trick done by an annoying relative -- pulling a quarter from a kid's ear or doing the "where'd my thumb go?" trick -- than actual arithmetic.

Now put yourself in the dog's shoes. You're in place where there's food and people, sort of like a party. Humans are showing you some treats, so you pay attention. Those treats are magnetic to you. They're buzzing with all kinds of potential energy. As far as your body is concerned, they're the most salient feature of your environment. Then these humans do a magic trick where one of the treats is suddenly no longer there or another one is suddenly, inexplicably present. And like the partygoer coming out of the bathroom, you go into a mild state of shock: you have a look of "surprise" on your "face." But it's not because you've done any mental arithmetic. It's because your body's awareness of its surroundings is forced to make a sudden adjustment. In short, you've been fooled.

Stanley Coren has had a long and distinguished academic career. His research on sensory perception is top notch. His paper "Sensation and Perception" is required reading on the subject at university levels. He's a bestselling author, and has also written some very interesting articles on dogs here. So I have to wonder why he sometimes seems totally incapable of using any kind of real critical judgment when it comes to the subject of canine cognition. He can't really believe this stuff, can he? If he does, I guess it's true that when it comes to dogs, even the smartest people can be very easily fooled. I think that says less about Coren, though, than it does about what truly amazing animals dogs are.

They can fool even the best of us without even trying.

LCK
www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
"Changing the World, One Dog at a Time"
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Smart Dogs or Dumb Science? You Do the Math...

2009-08-10T14:18:00.000-07:00

I'm sad to have to report that AOL, MSNBC, and CNN have all proclaimed in their headlines this weekend: "Dogs Smarter than Toddlers, New Study Shows" (AOL), and "Your family dog may be smarter than your toddler!" (CNN). I'm sad because it's been my experience, as a dog trainer, that the more that "science" tries to prove how "smart" dogs are, the more dogs suffer as a consequence. (See my article at PsychologyToday.com, "How Dogs Think: The Debate Between Emotion and Logic.")

Smart Dogs or Dumb Science? You Do the Math...

Here's the opening line from AOL: "The canine IQ test results are in: Even the average dog has the mental abilities of a 2-year-old child."

Really? That's interesting. According to what scale? Stanford-Binet? Or Bichon-Frise?

"The finding," AOL goes on to say, "is based on a language development test, revealing average dogs can learn 165 words (similar to a 2-year-old child), including signals and gestures, and dogs in the top 20 percent in intelligence can learn 250 words."

Oh, I see.

First of all, that's not only not true, it's not even news. That information (or disinformation) can be found in Stanley Coren's first book on dogs published 15 years ago. Coren (both in that book and in the recent online articles) somehow equates a dog's ability to respond, behaviorally, to cues of any kind -- including words, hand gestures, whistles, even just picking up its leash -- with the ability to both understand the meanings of words and to actually use them in speech. And many two-year olds are not only able to speak, they're also capable of using words in new and unexpected ways. Plus, on a basic level they inherently understand that words are symbols; they represent things. I love dogs, but they don't have anything close to this kind of linguistic aptitude. So comparing simple behavioral responses to verbal or visual cues with actual linguistic ability is not just like comparing apples and oranges, it's like comparing apples and a recipe for apple pie, or what might be even more appropriate, comparing apples and "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

The recent online articles go on to claim that dogs can also count, add and subtract, and can do simple math much better than a toddler.

Again, really?

From CNN: "Counting ability is tested in drills such as one in which treats are dropped, one at a time, behind a screen. When the researcher either sneaks away one of the treats or stealthily adds an extra before raising the screen, the dog will wait longer -- appearing to puzzle over the bad math -- before eating the treats."

"Now we're giving him the wrong equation," Coren says of the final part of the study. "The dog acts surprised and stares at it for a longer period of time, just like a human kid would."

The implication here is that the reason the dogs are staring is because they've added up the number of treats in their heads before the screen was removed and have now discovered that some are either missing or that new ones have magically appeared.

But which is more likely, that dogs are able to feel an emotional attraction to certain things in their environment -- toys, treats, other dogs -- and can therefore "sense" when something's missing (or has been added)? Or that they engage in some form of mental arithmetic and count out, by number, how many things were there initially and either do addition or subtraction to "figure" it all out?

Here's an idea: what if the study had been done with objects that didn't interest the dogs? Toddlers can be taught to count on their fingers and toes, or to count the number of cats in a drawing, or to count spoons or matchsticks or cracks in the sidewalk or other items that wouldn't interest a dog in the slightest. Plus, how do the researchers know the dogs were really surprised when the screen was removed and weren't just feeling uncertain as to what the researchers wanted them to do next? To me this "study" seems to be a perfect example of confirmation bias, and as I wrote in a recent article here, "Dogs are confirmation bias with a tail." They'll do pretty much whatever you want them to, especially if there's nothing else very interesting (to them) going on at the time.

What Coren (and the "reporters" at AOL, MSNBC, and CNN) have failed to mention is that all animals, including rats and even some insects, have a basic "number sense." It's innate, it's hard-wired, it doesn't require arithmetic. Never mind toddlers; even 5-month old babies have this ability. So no, dogs aren't better at math than toddlers. Far from it.

In Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being, George Lakoff, a cognitive linguist, and Rafael E. Núñez, a psychologist, argue that even the most abstract mathematical constructs arise from how the brain and physical body interact together with the world. They write, "Animals have numerical abilities -- not just primates but raccoons, rats, and even parrots and pigeons. They can subitize [instantly and fairly accurately perceive the numbers of things in a very small collection, as a robin might do with her eggs or a dog with his toys], estimate numbers, and count [just] as four-and-a-half-month-old babies can." (p. 21)

However, Coren insists, "These studies suggest dogs have a basic understanding of arithmetic, and they can count to four or five."

First of all, having an innate sense of quantity -- again as a robin would with her eggs or a dog would with his toys -- and having a "basic understanding of arithmetic" are two entirely different things. We're back to comparing apples to ... I don't know, multiplication tables. We could carry Coren's logic even further and ask: when a dog catches a Frisbee in mid-flight has he done some form of differential calculus in his head in order to predict the object's trajectory? Of course not; it's a simple sensori-motor skill. (Maybe not so simple, but the dog's behavior is not based on math or other feats of intellect.)

And while it may be true that dogs can be taught to "count to five," their ability to do this is not in the same ball park as a toddler's: not even close. (Remember, dogs don't have the ability to use language, therefore they have no words for numbers.)

In 1930, mathematician Tobias Dantzig first proposed the idea that animals and humans have a kind of mental accumulator, giving them what he called a "number sense." This is not the ability to count but a natural sense of knowing when something has changed in a small collection of items. In The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, modern French mathematician and cognitive scientist Stanislas Dehaene writes: "Whatever its exact neuronal implementation, if the accumulator model is correct, two conclusions must necessarily follow. First, animals can count, since they are able to increase an internal counter each time an external event occurs. Second, they do not count exactly as we do." (34) (Dehaene may seem to disagree with Dantzig about what "counting" means -- but remember, one was German the other French.)

It's true, though, in a way. I taught my own dog Freddie to "count" to 5 many years ago: I would give him a number between 1 and 5 and then give him a treat if he barked 2, or 3, or whatever number of times I asked him to. But I didn't reward him if he barked out the "wrong" number. And sure enough, after repeating this procedure over and over many times, Fred learned to bark in accordance with the number given. The thing is -- and maybe it's just because I have a different sensibility than Coren and others -- I never got the impression that Freddie understood what he was doing. It was purely a rote behavior; he wanted that treat. That's light years away from "having a basic understanding of arithmetic."

So are these recent articles really a case of smart dogs? Or is it just more dumb science?

I'll let you do the math.

LCK
www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
“Changing the World, One Dog at a Time”
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How to Use Your Voice When Training Your Dog

2009-07-14T09:49:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-08T08:33:00.000-07:00

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

2009-07-01T06:36:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-26T08:08:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-18T08:08:00.000-07:00

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
Follow Me on Twitter!

An Open Letter to New York Dog Trainers

2009-06-17T14:14:00.000-07:00

Don't be intimidated by the title: this blog post is for all dog owners, and all dog trainers.

An Open Letter to New York Dog Trainers

I would like to introduce you to a wonderful training technique you might find useful in your training practice here in the Big Apple. It’s particularly valuable for solving behavioral problems. Here are some examples:

Case Histories

Ginger: I got an e-mail from a veteran dog trainer of 35 years who started out using “pack leader” methods but switched several years ago to an “all positive” approach. She wanted to know how to get her “shy,” 11 month-old Jack Russell terrier Ginger to stop eliminating in the house. Since the little Jack wouldn’t play, I suggested that the woman spend some time on the floor every day, letting the dog jump on top of her, and that she hand feed all her dog’s meals outdoors, using what we in Natural Dog Training call the pushing exercise. Within a week the little doggie had not only stopped eliminating in the house, she was much less shy and actually began bringing her owner a toy so they could play together.

Ba’sia: Some members of an online behavior board read about the pushing exercise here on this blog, and several of them tried it, just to see what changes if any it created in their dogs. Within 4 or 5 days the owners of a Belgian shepherd named Ba’sia, whose only real behavioral problem was that she loved to chase the Frisbee but wouldn’t bring it back, began bringing it back to her owners, on her own, with no prompts. She just suddenly “felt” like doing it.

Fancy: When Fancy, a boxer, was a puppy she was sick for several months and had to be kenneled at the vet’s office. As a result she had trouble interpreting social signals from other dogs and was getting into skirmishes a lot at the park and at the dog run. I did the pushing exercise with her for a few days, and she slowly began to learn how to play nicely with other dogs. There was one unanticipated side-effect, though: Her owners called me about four days in to my work with their dog to ask if I’d also been working on her fear of sidewalk grates.

I told them I hadn’t. I hadn’t even known about the behavior.

“Why do you ask?” I said.

“Because she’s no longer afraid of them!”

Interesting, I thought.

Kyla: A German shepherd mix (mostly shepherd) named Kyla had a very “dominant” temperament, and one problem she had was that she could not be bribed, cajoled, or coaxed with treats away from her intense focus on squirrels. She also pulled constantly on the leash, ignored her owner’s commands, constantly got underfoot at home, was always jumping up on the bed or the couch, barked incessantly at other dogs at the dog run, and scavenged like there was no tomorrow. But Kyla slowly and gradually became a totally different dog. She now loves to obey all her commands, she no longer pulls on the leash, she still shows a strong interest in squirrels, but is easily called away, stays off the furniture, and no longer scavenges. Why? Because of the pushing exercise.

Caleb: A Welsh springer spaniel named Caleb, who sometimes stays with me overnight, was starting to exhibit a very severe form of resource guarding whenever other dogs were staying with me as well. At meal time he felt he had to attack any dog who came near any food, even the food in their own dinner bowl. All food was his! This was an otherwise wonderfully social dog who had a knack for making almost any other dog love him, no matter what it took. But at meal time, with other dogs around, he became a monster. So, as an experiment, I did the pushing exercise with him for 2 days, and guess what? He never showed any signs of resource guarding ever again.

Muskoka: This is a Westie who had 2 problems — leash aggression and an absolutely frantic fear of walking anywhere near West 72nd Street between West End and Broadway (in other words, the general location of her vet’s office). She’s now no longer leash aggressive, and is slowly getting used to walking nearer and nearer the dreaded place where she gets her shots and examinations, and has her toenails clipped.

Dudley: He’s a cocker spaniel who’d had separation anxiety for several years and during that time had also forgotten how to play. He was so frightened of being left alone, he was found by his owners several times, trembling in a corner covered in his own excrement, his eyes practically spinning with terror and despair. It took much longer to bring this poor little guy back to normal, but one of the primary ingredients in his turnaround was — you guessed it — the pushing exercise!

How is it possible that a simple exercise — whose only point seems to be to teach a dog to be pushy about eating — have such diverse effects, one of which is that it actually makes dogs less pushy?

If your background is in dominance training (or being the pack leader), this exercise would make no sense to you for a lot of reasons, the main one being that by simply allowing (not to mention outright encouraging!) a dog to push into his owner to get his meals every day you would be setting up the exact opposite dynamic of what the pack leader culture believes in. You would in the clearest of terms be allowing your dog to “dominate” you. And yet the exercise makes dogs more, not less obedient. It makes them less pushy about food. It makes them more likely to stay off the furniture, come when called, and less likely to get into fights or engage in resource guarding. In other words, it makes them less “dominant.”

If your background is in the “all positive” approach, the exercise probably makes no sense to you either because from a learning theory perspective all the exercise is doing is reinforcing a specific behavior, pushing for food. And yet it makes dogs less pushy!

How is this possible?

Working for a Living

Dogs are designed to work for a living. Pet dogs no longer have the utilitarian function in our lives that they once did. They don’t have to hunt, herd, or guard our flocks for us to get their daily provender. Their expectation (learned and reinforced by their owners) is that a bowlful of food will appear in the kitchen or on the back porch 2x a day, and that’s pretty much it. Oh, sure, sometimes they might have to perform tricks to get an extra treat now and then, but for the most part all the energy they’re designed by evolution to expend on working for a living goes into, what? Playing with other dogs at the dog park? Going on long walks? Playing fetch with a Frisbee or tennis ball? Patrolling the back yard for gophers? All worthwhile pursuits, but hardly dirty-fingernails, blue-collar, working-class stuff.

If they’re lucky — and if they’re suited for such tasks — they might get a chance to do Schutzhund or go to agility trials and dance through some weave poles. But again, it's hardly the real 8-hr. day, punching the time-clock down at the elk herd type stuff, is it?

Meanwhile our species, the human animal — who also used to hunt (and gather) for a living — now expend much less of our physical energy toward putting food into our dinner bowls. Sure, some of us still farm the land and pull nets full of fish out of the sea. But the difference (or one of them) is that those of us who engage in that kind of hard, physical labor on a regular basis don’t need gym memberships. Most of the rest of us do.

Why is that? Why do we go to the gym, or the golf course, or go hiking or kayaking or play tennis or go skiing?

Because pushing feels good. Whether your thing is lifting weights, jogging on a treadmill, doing pilates, playing golf or tennis, hiking, kayaking, skiing, or going to a spin class, you’re pushing against something to get a result. And the pushing feels good.

Think about it: in a spin class you’re pushing the pedals on the bike. In tennis you’re pushing your back, leg, shoulder, and arm muscles to go after the ball so you can put the right force and spin and velocity on it to “push” it back over the net. In golf you’re using those same muscles to put enough force against that little ball to drive it (push it) down the fairway. If you’re on a treadmill you’re pushing your leg muscles to work past your own internal resistance. If you’re doing pilates you’re pushing against your core.

Why is Michael Phelps the best swimmer in the world? His physical gifts are part of it, but there are other swimmers with his height, his reach. Why does he consistently perform better? Why do some football teams always seem to come from behind in the final minutes to win a big game while other teams tend to fade in the clutch? The kind of athletes who come through in the clutch when others can't usually do so because they’re good at pushing past their own internal resistance, past that internal voice that says to the rest of us, “I can’t do this.”

Do dogs have such an inner voice?

Not exactly. But if the dogs I described in the case histories I cited above could talk they might very well say things like this:

“I can’t hold my bladder muscles until I get outside the house!”

“I can’t bring the Frisbee back to my owners!”

“I can’t walk on sidewalk grates!”

“I can’t control myself when I see other dogs eating!”

“I can’t obey commands or not chase squirrels or not be dominant!”

“I can’t walk down 72nd Street!”

“I can’t be left alone in the apartment!”

Well, my little doggies, the truth is, “Yes, you can!”

You just have to learn how to push past your own internal resistance. You just need to have someone with a nice big pouch of food, take you outdoors, and teach you how to push for your dinner. You don’t have to push very hard at first. You don’t even have to push at all if you don’t want to. But slowly and gradually, the more you learn how hard you can push, and how good it feels to push that hard, and then even a little harder, and a little harder after that, you’ll start to realize that you can do anything.

And guess who’s the one teaching you that wonderful lesson?

That’s right. It’s the person who loves you. He or she is the one who’s like Michael Phelps’ trainer, or Tom Brady or Joe Montana, the one person who knows you can do it. That you can come from behind, you can get out of the hole you’re in, and prevail! That you are a strong doggie with a wonderful, wild heritage. And that you can do anything.

All you need is a little push…

LCK
My Website
My Psychology Today Blog
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The Natural Dog Training Revolution

2009-06-11T15:07:00.001-07:00

This seems to be year that the Natural Dog Training revolution finally takes off. Neil Sattin has produced two great Natural Dog Training DVDs (available soon). As most of you know I now have a blog on PsychologyToday online. And the best news of all (at least so far -- there's more to come!), Kevin Behan has re-vamped his website and is now writing a mind-blowing blog there on canine behavior. It's very innovative, very in-depth stuff.

Here are the links:

Kevin Behan's Blog

Neil Sattin's DVDs

My Puppy, My Self

Pass it on!

LCK

"Wait..." and "Okay!"

2009-06-06T09:38:00.000-07:00

Here are a few of the many ways you can teach these "commands" to your puppy.

“Wait…” and “Okay!”

Two of the most important words for new dog owners are “Wait…” followed by “Okay!” They set up a particular dynamic for puppies of learning to pay attention and focus on you when their instincts and developmental urges are telling them to do something else. The act of waiting momentarily, just for a second or so, is then rewarded by being given access either to the thing they originally wanted (or wanted to do), or to something even better. As these two simple words became part of your dog’s daily vocabulary, the word “Okay!” on its own takes on a huge importance in terms of how your dog relates to you and how quickly he or she obeys.

Most owners of young puppies teach their pups to wait for their dinner. They put the bowl down, tell the pup, “Wait…” and then when the pup shows the ability to hold his urges back for a fraction of a second or so, they’ll say, “Okay!” and let the pup run to the bowl and eat, praising him as he does. (Praise is also very important.)

That’s the essential dynamic to using these signals with your dog. But there are other ways to do it. (And this has nothing to do with being your dog’s pack leader; the reason you want your pups to learn these words is not so that they will see you as a mythical animal that doesn’t exist in nature, but as a kind of gateway to what’s good and fun and happy in their lives.)

When it’s time to go for a walk, have your dog wait at the front door before you open it. And once the dog shows an ability to control his urge to scratch at the door, or pull on the leash, or to just stop whining or wiggling, say “Okay!” and immediately open the door and let him go through. The more he learns to hold still a bit longer each time, the more you can stretch out from just a fraction of a second to about 5 seconds, which is about the maximum amount of time I recommend.

You can do the same thing at the dog run when you get to the front gate. Or, if you take your dog to the park, have her wait before you unleash him. Say, “Wait…” and allow her to settle for a fraction of a second or so, then say, “Okay!” and release her.

Many people also do this when waiting for a light while standing on a street corner. That’s not a bad idea, but it’s not as important as this next scenario. This is one situation where using these two words really starts to pay off big with a young puppy.

Your pup sees another dog coming toward him on the street. He gets excited. He wants to get to his new friend as quickly as possible. You hold him back, saying, “Wait…” Then as soon as he shows any signs of holding back his energy, even if it’s just the tiniest amount, you say, “Okay, say hello!” and let him make contact with the other doggie. It helps if you do this as a pre-arranged set up with the other dog’s owner, but I often teach clients how improvise with the dogs we see coming toward us on the streets of New York. This can end up being a bit hit-and-miss, but if you can hold your dog back while signaling to the other dog’s owner that you’re training your dog to learn how to say hello, they’ll often be happy to help you out.

(There’s a second part to this exercise, described below.)*

The fact is, most dogs know what “Okay!” means, even if their owners have never done any of these exercises in a formal way. The owner grabs the leash. The dog wags his tail, acts excited. “You ready to go for a walk?” The dog jumps around, the owner puts the leash on, and says, “Okay, let’s go!” Or they meet another dog on the street, and without doing the formal exercise I described above (or below), once it’s time to move on the owner will say, “Okay!” and the dog is ready to go.

After your dog learns the “Wait…”—“Okay!” dynamic a funny thing starts to happen. The word “Okay”—just said on its own—begins to have tremendous power to change your dog’s state of mind under a lot of different circumstances.

I had a training session years ago with a producer at CNN. She had two dogs, one was a female mixed-breed, about a year old,who had been traumatized by the move from Atlanta, and then had a scary incident in Central Park where she ran away, and was lost for several hours.

I took Fred with me to the session. The producer’s other dog, a male corgi, was older, and had a bit of an aggressive attitude toward most other dogs, especially intact males. But because the younger dog was new to the city, and because Freddie had such a calming effect on a lot of the dogs he met (and because he was usually able to deflect any aggression situation with a dog like the corgi), I brought him with me, something I ordinarily wouldn’t have done.

We left the corgi at home and spent some time walking through Central Park where the younger dog got to feel Freddie’s calming effects. We also did a few playful exercises designed to reacquaint the young doggie with the concept of having fun in a somewhat natural setting. It was a good first step for her.

It was a hot August night, so when we got back to the owner’s apartment on Lexington Avenue, Freddie was very thirsty. The problem was that the only way for him to get to the water bowl was to go past the corgi, who didn’t want to let him. “Uh, uh. My water bowl.”

Normally Freddie wouldn’t have made an issue out of it. He would’ve just let the corgi have his way. But he was really, really thirsty. So after trying to find an alternate route (it was a small apartment), he tried going straight toward the corgi.

The corgi growled and did a lunge and jump back maneuver at Fred. Fred looked around the room to see if he’d missed seeing another way around him, but he was trapped.

I was ready to step in and pull Freddie back when the two corgi really lunged at Fred’s neck, and Freddie dodged him, but his teeth came out. He got ready to defend himself.

Cut to: Five seconds later. The fight had been averted. I led Freddie around to the water bowl, let him drink while the corgi stood panting and watching us. As Freddie drank I said to the owner, “Did you notice what I said to stop the fight?”

She shook her head. “I don’t remember what it was, I just remember it thought it was very odd.”

“But that one word stopped the fight, right?”

“Yes, clearly,” she said, miffed at my Socratic approach. “So what was it?”

“Okay!’”

“Wait. You said, 'Okay?' How did that stop the fight?”

“Because for one thing most dogs have a strong positive feeling associated with that word. The other is that it sort of means: ‘what we were doing is over, now we’re going to do something fun.’ That’s what stopped the fight.”

My reason for explaining it to her in this way was to show her that it was possible to change an unwanted behavior by using something other than punishment or scolding, which is what she’d been doing with the corgi, and which either she or the young female dog’s previous owners had done with her.

The reason for telling the story here is to illustrate how powerful the word “Okay!” can be, even with dogs who haven’t done the exercises I recommend. In fact, any time I sense a bit too much tension building up at the dog run (and this is almost always with dogs I don’t even know), I’ll say something like, “Okay! That’s enough,” and it almost always changes the emotional dynamic between the dogs who were in conflict. It can be quite comical, too. One second the dogs are ready to attack one another, then they hear a stranger say, “Okay!” and the next thing they know they’re all shaking themselves to get rid of that excess tension.

One word of caution about “Okay!” If you’re expecting a pizza delivery, and you put your dog in a down/stay while you answer the door, don’t say to the pizza guy, “Okay, what do I owe you?” Your dog may come running!

Try to say, “All right, what do I owe you?” instead.

LCK
www.LeeCharlesKelley.com
“Changing the World, One Dog at a Time”
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The 2nd part of the exercise is that when you feel it’s time to end your pup’s friendly encounter with another dog on the street, you say to her, “Okay, say bye-bye!” in that same happy tone of voice, and walk away at a brisk, playful pace. Do that enough times and the word “Okay!” will soon be enough to make the pup instantly stop trying to mount or mouth or wrestle with the other dog, and you’ll both be on your merry way.

Cesar Millan: Pack Leader or Predator? (updated)

2009-05-22T06:36:00.000-07:00

This is an updated version of a previous post, which includes a few more insights, and a very helpful (I hope) graphic.

Cesar Millan: Pack Leader or Predator?

One of the constant bits of advice you’ll hear from Cesar Millan on The Dog Whisperer is: “you have to be your dog’s pack leader.” In fact on his website he even sells T-shirts and hoodies with Pack Leader printed on them. Millan is not alone. This is a popular notion among a lot of trainers, and has been for years.

This idea has a lot of appeal for most people. “Yes!” they think. “That’s what’s wrong with my relationship with my dog. He doesn’t see me as his pack leader!”

Here’s the problem though. According to David Mech, the world’s leading experts on the behavior of wild wolves, real wolf packs don’t have pack leaders. The idea that they do came from studies done on captive packs, culled from various sources, who didn’t know one another, and behaved more like rival wolves than true packmates.

Here are some facts about wild wolf behavior:

No wolf always walks ahead of the group when they’re traveling. They take turns. That’s a fact.

No wolf always eats before other members of the group. That’s a fact.

No wolf always goes through an opening or crosses a threshold before other members of the group. That’s a fact.

No wolf ever puts one of his packmates in an alpha roll. That’s a fact.

No wolf tells his packmates how to behave. That’s a fact.

Dominance displays are rare in wild wolf packs and usually only take place between the mother and father over how to disburse food to their young. The female almost always wins these battles by acting “submissive,” which would mean she’s supposedly subservient to the male, when she’s actually almost always victorious.

These are all facts. And here’s what they all add up to:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A PACK LEADER.

Yes, it’s true that in any animal group there will be one member who is more experienced, more knowledgeable, and who has more animal magnetism than the others. And most members of the group will tend to be drawn to or gravitate toward him or her. But animal magnetism—which is felt on a visceral level—is something quite different from rank, leadership, and authority—which are purely mental constructs.

There’s another factor. In wolf packs it was long believed that the alpha or leadership role changes hands during the hunt. We now know, through the principles of emergence theory, that the reason this seems to happen is simply because one member of the pack will have a better skill set for a certain type of terrain at some point during the hunt, or another wolf may have more emotional flexibility for adjusting to the changes in the prey animal’s energy during that part of the hunt, or what’s even simpler: one wolf may suddenly be in closer proximity to the prey at certain points, giving the impression that the others are now “following” his leadership when in fact the hunt is always led by the prey.

Going back to dogs, in any situation where dogs are in conflict it’s always about who has control over resources, i.e., things in the environment. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but you automatically have more control over your dog’s environment than he does. Who has the keys to the car and the house? Who knows how to operate doorknobs? Who knows how to use a can opener? Clearly, if a dog is capable of perceiving things like leadership or superiority, your dog already sees you in that light.

So why doesn’t your dog listen to you the way the dogs on TV listen to Cesar Millan? Well, for one thing there’s a lot of stuff Millan does that ends up on the editing room floor. (I know for a fact that this is true.) Plus, to his credit Millan always seems to act fairly cool under pressure (as long as you don’t look at the anger sometimes simmering in his eyes). But ultimately he acts more like a predator than like a pack leader.

A predator?

Yes. The spatial relationship between two dogs or wolves takes place on the horizontal. Their eyes face each other. They’re on the same level. But the spatial relationship between dog and human is quite different. We move through space on the vertical. Our eyes are far above theirs. They look up at us, we look down at them. Spatial relationships—which are concrete and visceral—are far more important to dogs than intangibles like leadership or status—which again are more abstract and conceptual in nature.

This brings up an interesting point about wolves, which is that in the wild the only animal that poses serious threat of deadly harm to a wolf (other than homo sapiens) is the same animal the wolf usually hunts: elk, moose, deer, bison. These animals have sharp horns and hooves that could easily kill or maim a wolf. When a moose, for example, is running away from the wolf, the wolf is energized by its movement, and is highly attracted through his desire to chase and bite. But if a moose finds itself cornered, and as a result he turns and stares down at the wolf, brandishing his antlers, the wolf will stop dead in his tracks.

In the wolf’s experience the prey has now become the predator.

Note the similarities in the spatial dynamics between the moose and wolf on the left, and the dog and man on right. Then note how different they are in comparison to the spatial dynamic of the two wolves in the center.

I’m not suggesting that a dog thinks his owner is a moose. What I am suggesting is that even there were such a thing as a pack leader in wild wolf packs (which there isn’t), and even if dogs had inherited that behavioral tendency from wolves (which they haven’t), there is no way a dog could confuse a human being for another dog, i.e., his “pack leader.” It simply could not happen. As I said before, the relationships between objects in space is concrete while the idea of the “pack leader” is more abstract and cerebral. So when you add yet another cerebral element—that the human owner or trainer is a stand-in for or symbolizes the already abstract idea of the pack leader—you’re getting into mental territory that is way beyond what a dog’s brain is capable of.

The facts of nature and evolution strongly suggest that wolves, and by extension dogs, have a long adaptive history of being cautious about any animal whose eyes are set in a large head and are looking down at them from above, particularly when that animal is facing them directly. They would feel even more fearful or cautious if that vertical being happened to be coming toward them.

Now think of the way Cesar Millan acts when he enters a room and believes he’s being a “pack leader.” Picture the way he stands and stares down at a dog. The level of gaze he has seems “magnetic,” correct? The dogs are on their “best behavior.” Is that because they see him as a pack leader? Of course not. The spatial dynamic is nothing at like that between a supposed pack leader and another dog or wolf. But remember, when a moose suddenly turns and looks down at a wolf, the wolf stops dead in his tracks. And that’s exactly how most misbehaving dogs act when Cesar Millan enters a room. So the feeling Millan is actually stimulating in dogs is the polar opposite of magnetism or leadership.

It’s really just a form of fear or intimidation.

Another way to look at it is that when Millan acts the way he does the dog isn’t thinking, “I respect your authority and position of leadership over me, so I will do as you ask.” It’s far more likely that the dog is thinking,“What can I do to survive this moment? Show me how I can prevent myself from being killed.”

So why does Cesar Millan (and others like him) get results?

This “pack-leader” act essentially stifles the dog’s energy. Then, once that excess energy is contained (i.e., the dog is no longer bouncing off the walls), Cesar takes the dog on 2 - 4 hour walks, sometimes forcing the animal to wear heavy weights, or he puts the dog on a treadmill for several hours to burn off all that energy.

Is there a better way to teach a dog than by stifling his energy and/or wearing him out?

Of course. The more intelligent and effective option is to give the dog a positive outlet for his energy and emotions. That’s kind of what the long walks do, except that while long walks may wear a dog out, they don’t really satisfy his true energy needs. That comes through playing games that stimulate and satisfy his hunting instincts. For example, 5 - 10 minutes of playing tug-of-war—where you always let the dog win and praise him enthusiastically for winning—is roughly equivalent to a two hour walk in terms of the amount of energy expended. Plus, when played correctly, tug always has the positive side-effect of increasing a dog’s desire to learn and obey you. The same can be said for playing fetch for about 20 minutes or so.

Cesar does sometimes play fetch with his dogs, but from what I’ve observed he doesn’t know how to teach a dog whose energy has been stifled to become un-stifled it and or to teach the dog how to release his energy through play. From my perspective that should be the first order of business when working with any behavioral problem: teaching the dog to play.

Max von Stephanitz, one of the originators of SchutzHund, wrote, “Before we teach a dog to obey we must teach him how to play.”

There’s a great documentary called “In the Company of Wolves,” where Timothy Dalton goes to the Arctic Circle with David Mech and observes these wonderful animals in their natural habitat. (By the way, if you’ve seen footage of the wolves in Yellowstone, keep in mind that those wolves were taken captive in British Columbia, drugged, outfitted with electronic monitoring collars, and forcibly relocated to a completely new, and in many ways, quite foreign environment. So while they’re still living in the wild, Yellowstone is not really their natural habitat; not yet. So their behaviors are sort of halfway between those exhibited by a truly wild pack and a group of unrelated wolves held against their will in captivity.)

At one point in the Timothy Dalton film a papa wolf (i.e., the pack leader), rolls over on his back, “signifying submission” to his puppies, and encourages them to jump on his stomach and chest and even allows them to nip at his ears and nose. In other words, he’s playing with his pups. (Do you ever see Cesar encourage a dog “dominate” him like this? Why not? If his intent is to be a true pack leader why wouldn’t he want to imitate what a real pack leader, i.e., papa wolf, does?)

Immediately after I saw this documentary for the first time, which was in 1995, I decided to imitate what the papa wolf did with my own pup, an unneutered male Dalmatian named Freddie.

First I got down on my hands and knees, did a play bow. Then I started batting my hands at Freddie’s body, getting him riled up and in the mood to play. Then when he was really in the mood to play bite, I rolled over on my back, pretending to be submissive.

“Oh no! You got me! You killed me! You’re alpha! You’re the king dog!”

He loved it! First he jumped on top of me. Then he tried to get lower than me! Then he began to twist around the way dogs do when they’re rolling around in the grass on a nice spring day. When he was done he raced to find one of his bones and began chewing it, quite happily.

Later, on our evening walk—as he wandered a bit too far ahead of me—I sort of absent-mindedly gave him his recall signal, expecting him to do his usual routine, which was to cock his head, look at me, then look back at whatever he’d been sniffing, and then slowly come trotting back about halfway or, if I was lucky, a maybe a little more.

That’s not what happened.

As soon as I called him he turned on a dime, and like a shot, he came running back at full speed, ending up in a perfect sit right in front of me.

I was astonished! I tested him further by quickly giving him the down command. He dove into position as fast as he could, eager to hear what I wanted him to do next. This was totally amazing and unexpected. I had no idea why this happening until I realized that for some reason, when I’d acted “submissive” toward him a few hours earlier I’d changed something about the emotional dynamic between us. As a result he was immediately far more obedient to all my commands. Plus his response time went from semi-lacksidasical to lightning-fast!

Over the next few months I tried my “submissive” act on most of the dogs I was training (you have to know how to choose which dogs are ready for these kind of shenanigans and which aren't). And in every single case it made the dog far more responsive and quicker to obey.

Why? Because I did what a true pack leader—a papa wolf—does with his pups. I got down on their level and let them “conquer” me.

And here’s the real distinction, which goes back to the dynamic between the wolf and the moose. Remember, when the wolf is chasing the moose he’s releasing his energy in the most optimal way possible. It’s what he was genetically engineered to do. But when the moose stops and turns, the wolf is suddenly like a deer in the headlights, in fear for his life. He’s not a happy camper. So when Cesar Millan thinks he’s acting like a “pack leader,” he’s not only stifling the dog’s energy, he’s instilling a lot of fear into that dog, which would be fine, I suppose, if fear had a positive effect on learning. Sometimes it does (very rarely), but for the most part it creates an inability for the dog to learn anything new.

But when you become a prey animal, by getting down on the dog’s level and playing with him—which is closer to the way dogs learn naturally—you’re opening up an enormous encyclopedia of learning that goes far beyond anything that Cesar Millan or others with the pack-leader mentality could possibly imagine. (Maybe Cesar will get there one day, but he’s not there yet.)

If you want to be a true pack leader, just imitate the papa wolf. Get down on your dog’s level, act submissive, and encourage him to play with you. (Please be careful and use common sense though; don’t try this with just any dog, particularly one you don’t know very well.)

LCK

Cesar Millan: Pack Leader or Predator?

2009-05-15T13:07:00.000-07:00

This post has been updated. To read the newer version, click here.

Leash Training, 102

2009-05-04T13:28:00.000-07:00

This exercise is meant to be done after you've done Leash Training, 101. It's very useful if done correctly, but please follow the instructions carefully and don't overdo it.

The Beginner’s Frankenstein

I got an e-mail today from one of my clients. She has a chocolate Lab pup who’s a little over 4 mos. old. She’s been doing the Leash Training. 101 exercise, but wrote the following:

Hi, Lee! I was just thinking of you this morning as I was struggling to get Lucy to move along nicely during her walk. She just wanted to sit on the corner and wait for other dogs to come along (she loves meeting w/ other dogs). I tried treats and a squeaker and trying to get her to chase me but nothing seemed to work. I will read through the piece on your site to see if I can figure anything out.

Here’s my reply:

The reason she’s waiting for other dogs may have something to do with the way dogs play together, which is quite different from the kind of spatial dynamic we have with dogs when we play with them.

Spatial dynamic?

Yes, dogs move through space on a horizontal axis. We move through space on the vertical. This can create problems because no matter how much our dogs love us and trust us, they’re genetically engineered to have a knee-jerk, nervous reaction to anything with a vertical axis of symmetry. (We are too, by the way; it goes back to when our ancestors were struggling to survive and had to be careful around anything vertical, especially it it was moving towards them.)

I would do one of two things: I might come down to her level, maybe sit next to her, or get down on my hands and knees (silly situation) and do a play bow. In other words, I would act preylike, I'd behave as if I’m something she’d want to chase and bite. This will re-energize her in a way that you become more magnetic to her instincts. In other words, if her problem is that she’s looking to plug her energy into something in the environment, preferably another dog, and you’re there, trying to distract her away from her goal, you need to become the thing that she wants to plug her energy into.

The other, simpler, and probably better alternative is the beginner’s version of what I like to call the Frankenstein exercise, where you act momentarily like a predator. It goes something like this:

She lies down and won’t move, won’t listen to you, won’t be teased into playing.

“I won’t walk! I want to lie her until we meet another dog!”

When this happens I might step back, as far away as the leash will let me, but I’ll keep my body facing hers. Then I’ll hunch my shoulders a little and stare at her, making my eyes appear as big as possible to her. I’ll lean in from the waist. I might make a sudden move with my arm. My eyes will get wider. I’ll move slowly toward her as if I’m stalking her and as if I might just kill her. I’ll even growl menacingly, followed with a little soft praise to let her know it’s a game.

Of course my goal isn’t really to terrify her, it’s more like what you do with a kid on Halloween. You scare them a little so that they shriek with a combination of fear and glee. It’s also similar to a play tactic dogs have with each other. “I’m stalking you now. Am I going to kill you or are you going to chase me?” It’s a game.

One thing that helps her understand it's a game is the low growl I mentioned, followed by the soft “Good girl...” (Repeat as needed.)

People will think you’re crazy, of course, but she’ll love it. And it should make her lock on to you and create a sudden surge of energy directed your way.

Too much energy and she’ll jump up and start zooming around in crazy circles. Just the right amount and she’ll just jump at you, which is what you want.

Once she jumps at you, that’s when you can either give her toy and play a quick game of tug, or just run away, getting her to chase you. Once she becomes energized like this you can then resume your walk, but in a more energetic, playful way.

By the way, it should only take 5 - 10 seconds to get her magnetized to you, and you can then use that magnetism to keep her walking, at least for a while.

Let me know if you have any questions or problems,

LCK

Leash Training, 101

2009-04-20T07:38:00.001-07:00

Check out the latest issue of DogWorld Magazine! There's an article titled "The Importance of Play," by Lisa Hanks. I'm quoted extensively on this important topic. As for today's blog entry, this is another one for our online Natural Dog Training manual. It's a more comprehensive version of an earlier article on training a dog to walk nicely on the leash. Enjoy! Print it out for personal use. E-mail the link to friends!

Leash Training, 101

Equipment:

A 6’ leash, preferably latigo leather, or if you have a puppy who might chew his leash when you’re not looking, use a sturdy nylon leash. (Cheaper than buying gallons of BitterApple or a new leather leash every other week.)

A flat, buckle-style collar, as wide as possible. Make sure the leash is tight enough to that the pup’s head can’t slip through it, but not so tight that there’s no “play” at all. Do not use a choke collar, prong collar, or Martingale collar. And under no circumstances should you use a head harness like the Gentle Leader. With young, large breed puppies you may want to use a harness to prevent the pup from putting all his weight against his throat. Just be advised that the harness was designed for pulling. So that will be a bit of a disadvantage. And the harness should be temporary. Once the pup learns to stop pulling, use a flat collar.

You’ll also need either a vest with a large, open pocket, or a bait bag from a dog training supply company, or a nail bag from the hardware store.

Pre-Game Show:

Always let your puppy do his business before you start doing any leash training.

The first thing to remember is that until your dog is trained to walk next to you without pulling ahead or lagging behind, every walk is going to be a training walk. There’s no, “I’ll take my puppy to the dry cleaners,” or “I need something from the convenience store; I bet my puppy would like to come.” Yes, he’d probably like to come, but you can’t train a dog and carry groceries or dry cleaning at the same time. On the other hand, once the dog is trained to walk next to you, you’ll be able to take him everywhere.

Have some tasty treats readily available in a large pocket or “bait bag.” By readily available (notice the bold letters) I mean that you should be able to grab one instantly. I prefer to use cubed bits of cheddar or muenster cheese; they’re easy to handle, the puppy doesn’t have to chew them, and they’re generally not a problem for doggies with digestive issues. Use what your puppy likes, but keep those three criteria in mind. (Don’t use liver treats; they’re too rich and may give your pup diarrhea.)

Hold the 6’ leash in your right hand, putting your right thumb through the permanent loop, but make a temporary loop by “choking up” and holding that part of the leash in the palm of your right hand. Let me repeat: right thumb through the permanent loop, the temporary loop in the palm of your right hand. This gives you much more control over the dog’s movements than if you put your wrist through the permanent loop and wrap it around your arm or wind it around your fist. The temporary loop should give you the same distance between your hand and the dog’s collar as if you were walking him on a 4’ leash. That temporary loop is important, so don’t use a 4’ leash!

While you’re walking the leash should fall naturally across or in front of your hips. If the puppy moves ahead to sniff something or say hello to another doggie, you can let out some slack so that he doesn’t feel any pressure on his collar. Pressure is the enemy. That’s why we use a 6’ leash. Whenever a dog feels pressure on his collar he’ll automatically pull forward. This is an unconscious behavior called the opposition reflex. So your primary goal is to walk him in such a way that there’s as little tension on his collar as possible.

Your left hand should not touch the leash, except when you need to choke up to make that temporary loop. The dog should always be on your left side while walking, and the optimal position (the “heel” position) is with the dog next to you, in “the pocket,” close to your left leg, with his head and shoulders about even with your left knee. If the dog moves out of the pocket, make a kissing sound to get him to focus on you, then reward him with a treat when he does.

Here are the 2 ways a dog will move out of the pocket:

He’ll stay on your left but his head and shoulders will move forward past your left knee.

He’ll lag and then try to come around behind you, veering off to the right.

Training Environment:

Once your dog has finished doing his business, find an open, distraction-free environment to do your leash training. If you live in an urban area you may have to improvise. That’s okay, just find the best possible spot you can.

Starting the Leash Training:

Start each session with your dog sitting next to you in the heel position. It’s probably a good idea to motivate the dog to sit by showing him a treat. This will not only get him to sit, it will also make him realize that you’ve got a pocketful of treats with you.

Once the dog is sitting, say “Ready?” then, “Okay, let’s walk!” and begin walking, praising the dog as you go. Praise is not necessarily being used to reward any behaviors yet. You simply praise him to keep him in a group mood. Since dogs and humans walk at different paces, and have different agenda, he’ll slip out of his group mood pretty easily. Praise is one tool that can help sustain that mood a bit longer than normal.

Pay attention to where his focus is. And once he slips out of his group mood—eg., he moves his head and shoulders ahead of you, or he just starts to lose focus on you—make a kissing sound. With some dogs you may have to do it a few times before they respond. Don’t worry about it, just keeping doing it. When the dog does respond, immediately pop the treat into his mouth, but only while he’s in the pocket.

You’re also going to have to train yourself to reach for the treat (or have it ready), do the kissing sound, and let the slack out of the leash all at the same time. It takes a little time to learn this but it’s important to always keep a slack leash as much as possible.

If you’re too late with your timing of the kissing sound, and the dog veers across your path in front of you, or off to your right, that’s okay. Just make the kissing sound, then make an easy, gentle about right turn, maneuvering your body so that the dog ends up back on your left again. Keep making the kissing sound and showing him the treat until he’s walking next to you in the pocket, then give him the treat. He should only be treated while he’s either already in or moving into the pocket.

You’ll now be walking in the opposite direction, so if you want to continue going the same direction you were originally headed, just continue making the about right turn until you’re headed back in the previous direction.

If the dog decides he wants to veer to the right behind your legs, do an about left turn so he’s once again on your left. Make the kissing sound, lure him into the pocket with the treat, keep circling to the left until you’re going the original direction. This maneuver is usually a bit more difficult to get the hang on. But once you realize that that’s the case, you can take a little extra time and thought to teach yourself how to do it.

As you make these gentle “corrections,” followed by a treat while the dog is either in or moving into the pocket, you’ll find that he’ll start to almost prefer to walk next to you. He may even start looking for a treat without hearing the kissing sound first. When he does he should immediately get a treat then as well. (Yeah, you’re going to use a lot of treats, but remember, until the dog is trained to walk next to you, every walk is going to be a training walk.)

Time Frame:

Keep the sessions short (about 3 mins., followed by a play break, then 3 more mins., followed by another break, then 3 more, and you’re done). Don’t worry that you won’t be making progress quickly enough. The slower you go initially, the faster you’ll get there in the end. Just trust that when you do this properly, without stressing the dog, she’ll begin to automatically gravitate to a spot next to you on her walks.

Each session should end with a rousing game of tug or fetch. Remember, the dog thinks she’s on a hunting expedition. Walking next to you feels unnatural to her, so her hunting instincts need to get some sort of payoff at the back end.

Also, be on the lookout for any signs that the dog is bored, anxious, stressed, or losing interest. If so you can either take a break for some nice, easy massage. Or if the dog seems really stressed—panting, unable to focus on you—try stroking her very firmly down the topline, from the base of the skull to the tail, as if you’re pushing excess nervous energy out of the spinal column, releasing it through her tail (but don’t massage her tail). Do this three or four times and the dog will usually either yawn or shake herself. You could also do some gentle massaging of her shoulders and haunches.

After three or four days you should see some definite progress. But remember: this needs to be done as a training session, not part of a trip to the bank or the copy store, etc.

Variations:

After three or four days you can add some variations. One is what I call the “kiss-n-tug” where you give a tiny, almost imperceptible tug on the collar, followed by the kissing sound, which is then followed by a treat. You can also do a “kiss-n-walk” where the kissing sound is followed by the words, “Let's walk!” Then you can start doing both of these exercises together. Pretty soon the tiny tug on the collar is a signal to the dog that walking next to you, and focusing on you, is a pleasant experience. (This is not a real, obedience-level “heel” by the way; it’s just one way of keeping the dog walking next to you, in the pocket.)

Praise:

I also talk to and praise the dog continuously while walking (at least in the beginning). Remember that the dog’s agenda is different from yours. He wants to move ahead, toward some release of his prey drive. Praise will bring him back into a group mood and make him feel that his hunting needs will be satisfied soon enough (by playing fetch and tug when the session is over).

And if the dog stops to sniff something, I let him. If he keeps sniffing and I want to keep moving, I’ll say, “Oooh! Is that a good smell? Oh, you like that smell! What a good doggie! You’re such a good smeller!” Then I change my tone slightly, and say, “Okay...” and he’ll immediately start walking with me again.

If the dog can’t pay attention at all on your walks, you need another exercise: “Walking Nicely on the Leash, 201,” which will be posted here soon.

Happy leash training!

LCK

Why You Should Always Praise an Aggressive Dog

2009-04-14T08:32:00.000-07:00

I have great news. I just started writing a blog for Psychology Today online. It's going to be a different kind of blog: a bit more technical and more focused on dog psychology than training ideas, so I'll keep writing my training tips and explanations of the Natural Dog Training approach here as well. But I invite you to click on the link above and come visit me there.

Why You Should Always Praise an Aggressive Dog

Praise is one of the most important training tools we have. Dogs love feeling connected. Most of them even like the feeling of connection they get with practically anyone they meet. The reason praise works as a training tool is because it satisfies that deep social need in dogs.

Since underneath it all, every dog wants to be friends with everyone she meets, aggression is not a normal behavior. It’s a sometimes neurotic, sometimes borderline state that feels totally unnatural unless they feel they’re in danger. Praise can often remove that feeling of danger, which is why your first approach when working with an aggressive dog should always be to lavish her with praise.

You have to remember, though, that praise isn’t being used here to reward the aggression. That’s a key element. Praise works as a positive reinforcer for some behaviors because it makes a dog feel good, makes her feel connected. You also have to remember my little mantra:

All Behavior Comes From Emotion
So When You Change a Dog’s Emotional State
You Automatically Change Her Behavior

Praise is one tool to change a dog’s emotional state, even if you’re praising a bad or unwanted behavior.

I lived for a while in Marble Hill, the northernmost neighborhood in Manhattan. Many of the houses are on hillsides with garages below the house, like in San Francisco. Years ago it was an Irish neighborhood, but now there’s a mix of third or fourth generation Irish households—mostly old ladies—and first and second generation Hispanic families.

Though it wasn’t on my usual route to the subway station, I used to sometimes pass by a certain house, where there was a Doberman pinscher kept behind a chain link fence, with signs saying "Cuidado—Pero Malo".

The first time I walked by, the pero malo charged the fence and scared the bejebus out of me. I caught my breath then said, "Good girl!" She continued to snarl and snap. I praised her some more and sort of she quieted down a little. Then I put my hand up the fence to let her sniff it. I was glad the chain link was there! I would've lost a finger!

Over a period of several months every time I passed by—which might have been once a week or once every three weeks—I praised the dog (whose name, I eventually discovered, was Willow), and she barked and snarled and snapped, yet I continued to praise her. Occasionally I’d put my hand up to the fence to see if she'd try to bite it; she usually did.

Over time, though, her aggression began to diminish in small, almost imperceptible increments. And I began to get the impression that she was always curled up at the top of the steps, waiting for me to come by. Then, when I came around the corner and she heard my keys jingling (I wore them hooked to a belt loop), she would race toward the fence and give a few peremptory barks and growls, but she’d also wag her tail. I continued to praise her and let her sniff my hand, still keeping it safely on the other side of the chain link.

Then one day, when I put my hand up to the fence, she licked my fingers! Ah-hah! A breakthrough! So I carefully pushed a few fingers through the chain link, and she nibbled on them happily, the way puppies do when they use your hands as a pacifier.

It turned out that Willow wasn't a pero malo at all. She was a cupcake. From then on, every time I passed by she ran down the steps from the upper level and wagged her tail happily, hoping—or so I imagined—that I'd poke my fingers through the fence so she could nibble on them and be my friend.

The next story starts with a phone call I got from some potential clients with a female Rottweiler who’d been exhibiting severe aggression toward the skateboards, roller bladders, joggers, and cyclists in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. From what I was told she seemed to view these people as prey animals, in desperate need of killing.

I was a bit distracted when I arrived for my first visit at their 1850s era, but recently remodeled two-story house. Normally if I’m dealing with an aggressive dog I’m very careful about how the first meeting takes place, particularly in terms of my entrance through the door to the dog’s “den.” I like to meet such dogs out on the street. But since Twyla’s aggression was supposedly only directed at joggers, skateboarders and the like I mistakenly thought my entrance into Twyla’s den wouldn’t be a problem.

At first it wasn’t.

The husband opened the door. Twyla was sitting obediently by his wife at the back of the entry, next to a set of stairs leading up to the second floor. Her leash was on and she was “happily” wagging her tail.

“Hi, Twyla,” I said, in my friendliest voice.

She pulled the leash out of the wife’s hand, ran to me and jumped up, with her front paws resting on my shoulders. She was a big girl. That hundred pounds didn’t contain any fat at all. She was long and lean and lanky. And huge!

I usually see jumping up as a sign of friendliness, a desire to make social contact. And that’s what Twyla seemed to have in mind too. That is, until I leaned my nose close to hers, expecting her to lick my nose.

Rookie mistake.

Her face turned into a horrible mask of terror and aggression. A low, throaty growl came through her lips, parted now into a vicious snarl of fury. Her teeth were less than two inches away from my nose. She was ready—given the slightest provocation—to rip my entire face off.

Did I mention her teeth were two inches from my nose?

My heart did a funny thing, though. It did nothing. It didn’t skip a beat. If anything it seemed to slow down. Sure, a part of my brain was wondering how much of my face Twyla would be able to tear off and eat before her owners could finally grab the leash and pull her off of me. But for some reason that didn’t faze me.

Instead, I did something I’d trained myself to do over the years. I broke eye contact and praised Twyla vocally in a soft, yet very warm and friendly voice. “Good girl… good girl…”

There was a brief pause, then Twyla jumped down and started licking my hand.

Five minutes later we were all safely inside the house and the dog was lying next to me on the couch, flat on her back, with her legs in the air, using my hand as a pacifier. Just by praising her softly I had changed Twyla from a potential killer, ready for blood, to a complete pussycat.

I’d also saved my face from being severe damaged.

I’m not recommending that you walk up to any dog on the street and try this. In Willow’s case there was a chain link fence between us. In Twyla’s, I did a dumb thing by leaning my face toward hers, which dogs perceive as an act of aggression. Please don’t ever do that!

There’s another aspect to it too, though: sincerity. If you try this with your dog (because again, I do not recommend doing it with a strange dog), your praise has to be sincere, and you can’t have even a single trace of fear in your body. And remember: it might not seem to work initially, as happened with Willow. Then again, you might see results right away, as I was lucky to have done with Twyla.

Just remember: no dog wants to be aggressive. It goes against their nature.

LCK

Tuning In to Your Dog's Emotions

2009-02-11T14:12:00.000-08:00

Something that came up in the comments section today made me realize this topic is one I haven’t discussed here. And I think it’s pretty cool, and kind of important.

Tuning In to Your Dog’s Emotions

One of the most important aspects of dog training—and it’s one I personally think gets overlooked far too often—is developing the ability to tune into your dog’s emotional wavelength.

What do I mean by this, exactly?

It’s pretty simple. Whenever your dog is doing something that stirs up positive emotions in him, even on a minor scale, you simply pretend that you feel the same way about whatever he’s doing or experiencing. It has to be something that’s not too disgusting, of course. You don’t want to make him feel that you share his feelings about raiding the litter box for some tasty “kitty fudge,” for example. But if he’s happily chewing a bone, though, you might say, “Oh, is that a GOOD BONE? Is that a good TASTY bone? Ooh, you LOVE your bone!”

You have to say it in such a way that he doesn’t feel like you’re interested in the bone yourself, of course, just that you share his feelings for it.

Another great example is when a dog is out for a walk and he “gets stuck” on a smell. We all have agendas in these situations. Our agenda might be to get somewhere, even if it’s the same general agenda our dog has: to get to the dog run or to the park. But when a dog stops walking and keeps sniffing and sniffing and SNIFFING the same damn spot and won’t move, our tendency is to tell him to knock if off and get him to keep walking.

My dog Fred was doing this one day, sniffing the same spot over and over. And that’s when I discovered this simple secret about dog training. At the time I had decided, as an experiment, to do things backwards to the way I would normally do them, or the opposite to what all the training books say, just to see what would happen. So instead of pulling Freddie away from this “wonderful” smell and getting him to continue our walk, I said, “What do you SMELL?” in an excited tone of voice.

He wagged his tail.

“Oh, is that a GOOD smell?”

He wagged his tail harder.

“Oh, Freddie! You’re such a GOOD SNIFFINGdog! You’re the best sniffing dog in the WORLD!”

Strangely enough, he decided he’d had enough of that smell and we continued on our walk. (I still use this technique with all of the dogs I work with; it works every time...)

I soon began incorporating this concept into a lot of the little things Freddie did. When he woke up from a nap, for instance, and began to stretch I would stretch my own muscles a bit too (to help me get into the mood) and say, “OHHH, stretch…GOOD stretch, that feels GOOD…”

He would usually come over and lick me on the nose (once he’d finished stretching, of course).

This approach to changing a dog’s behavior is not dissimilar from consciously doing something that most of us do in our relationships; we make an effort to understand and share our loved one’s interests. You don’t necessarily have to take up knitting (if you’re a guy) or memorize hockey statistics (if you’re a gal). Just the fact that you’re willing to make an effort to understand and appreciate the other person’s point of view makes them feel better about you, about themselves, and about the relationship.

It isn’t always easy, of course. Quite often the other person knows you’re only pretending to show an interest in the ballet vs. a monster truck rally, and they may feel that you’re only patronizing them when they know you like Steely Dan and hate Alanis Morrisette yet they see you stop yourself from flipping the radio dial to look for "Do it Again" or “Deacon Blues” the second “Isn’t it Ironic?” comes on.

Dogs are much simpler. They’re easier to fool. And you have to fool them sometimes in order to make them feel that you understand their plight.

What is their plight, exactly?

Well, they’re essentially wild animals living in a “civilized” world. Never mind the fact that they’re one of the primary civilizing influences on the evolutionary development of the human race (in my opinion). They still need and want to do things that we find inappropriate, not to mention downright disgusting (like raiding the litter box).

On the other hand, our desires are very important to our dogs. It’s part of what feeds them, emotionally. And it’s where the old canard that “dogs want to please their owners” comes from. Dogs don’t actively set out to try to please us. That would require having a Theory of Mind, the ability to be aware of one’s own thoughts, sensations, and feelings and to be able to project those same qualities onto others, along with the ability to know that the other person’s thoughts, sensations, and feelings may be quite different from their own. That sounds like a pretty complicated set of thought processes for a doggie to manage.

On the other hand, one of the most amazing things about dogs is that they’re actually capable of experiencing—on a very real, very palpable physical level—what other members of their group are experiencing in-the-moment. Watch dogs at play sometime. When one dog is really into a game with a dog he likes, it’s almost as if the two are connected magnetically. They’re as one. Time disappears, everything just flows. It’s quite fantastic.

To understand this ability dogs have, and how it’s so often misunderstood or misinterpreted, there was a recent study done at the “Clever Dogs Lab” in Austria, purporting to show that dogs are capable of knowing when they’re being treated unfairly.

The dogs were taught to give paw for a treat, then divided up in pairs. The researchers set up a pattern of rewarding the dogs with bits of sausage (or bread) for obeying the “give paw” command. Then after a while, they deliberately stopped rewarding one of the two dogs. When this happened the unrewarded pooch stopped cooperating, and even showed physical signs of unhappiness in terms of facial expressions and body language, which the researchers eagerly interpreted to mean that the dogs felt as if they’d been treated unfairly. Why else would they look so glum?

I’ll tell you why: because they were part of a group activity and were suddenly excluded from it. And I don’t just mean that each of the dogs felt he was one separate, individuated part of the activity. When the feeling of desire is strong in dogs and there’s a group dynamic going on, they feel unindividuated, as if they’re at one with the other dog, at one with the researcher, and at one with the bits of sausage. (This is the way dogs feel when they’re playing together and are in-the-moment, as I described above.) This unindividuated state of desire, especially a desire they’re confident is about to be fulfilled, is one of the most pleasant states a dog can be in. (Kevin Behan goes into much further detail on this in a recent article, available on his website.)

So to be in that enormously pleasurable state while giving paw with your pal and eating sausages together, and then to have the researcher exclude you from the game; it’s like being punched in the gut or having the rug pulled out from under you. You go from feeling totally connected, both emotionally and physically, to feeling totally separated, isolated, and alone. And according to a 2003 study done at UCLA, feelings of social exclusion are registered in the same part of the brain that controls physical pain. This is why separation anxiety is so strong in most dogs who have it. They’re not just feeling lonely, they’re feeling actual physical PAIN.

So when the desire these dogs had for continuing to play the “give paw” game (and the piece of sausage that was part of it) was suddenly squelched, and they were denied the completion of their desire, they went from a feeling of “Isn’t this great! We’re giving paw! We’re eating sausage!” to suddenly being told, “Get out of here! You don’t belong!” And that’s why they exhibited that sad body language and those glum looks on their faces. Their reaction wasn’t one of, “Hey, that’s not fair!” but “Ow! That hurts!”

It’s important to realize that dogs have two distinct ways of interacting with us and with their environment (though when you think about it, we’re probably biggest part OF their environment). One state of being is where they’re in a group mood, and the other is when they’re flying solo. They’re like emotional photons in this way: sometimes they behave like an emotional particle (individuated, separate, alone) and sometimes like a wave (UNindividuated, totally connected physically and emotionally to everything in their environment). So when we do something as simple and as stupid as telling our dogs that they’re the best sniffing dogs in the world or stretch when THEY stretch, it means a lot to them. It makes them feel even more connected to us emotionally than they already do. And the more emotionally connected a dog feels to his owners, the happier and more obedient and responsive he’ll be. It’s automatic.

Don’t just take my word for it. Try it. You’ll quickly see the difference it makes in your dog’s feelings toward you. Not to mention how it will increase his willingness to listen and obey.

LCK

For the record: I’d rather be in a relationship with a dog who occasionally raids the litter box than with someone who thinks Alanis Morrisette has “talent.”

My Dog Hates the Rain and Snow

2009-01-27T14:31:00.001-08:00

I have a client/blog fan whose dog, a Jack Russell terrier, is showing signs of what might be called weather aversion. He’s refusing to walk when the streets are cold and covered with snow and ice. This article is for him, but it’s also useful for anyone whose dog hates inclement weather of any kind.

My Dog Hates the Rain and Snow!

It’s been a pretty harsh winter in New York. And we’ve had it easy compared to the Midwest! A common complaint I hear from dog owners this time of year is that their dogs refuse to walk in the rain or snow. Some dogs can be perfectly well-behaved and well-trained, but any inclement weather changes things dramatically. A lot of people just accept this as part of their dog’s “personality,” figuring there’s nothing they can do about it.

Is that true?

I don’t think so. Do wolves refuse to go hunting when the weather’s bad? Do all dogs naturally hate the cold and snow and sleet and rain?

I got an e-mail the other day from a woman in Saskatchewan. Now there’s a cold weather spot! She told me that she and her husband found a shivering dog roaming around their neighborhood. They made a shelter from the wind for the doggie, who was initially very wary of them. They then spent several days offering her food until she finally took some from them. Then they put some more food inside the shelter so that she would go in there and finally come in out of the harsh prairie wind.

This took several long days.

So here we have the flip side of the belief that “it’s natural for dogs to hate the snow.” This dog was so wary of strangers she would’ve preferred to stay outside in the wind and snow rather than even be fed, at least in the beginning. Following some advice her new owners found on this blog, they not only fed this poor doggie but were able to teach her to play.

Here’s part of the last e-mail they sent me:

“Lee - thank you again for responding to my email. We will continue to take it slowly. Friday we are getting a larger pen, and that will allow her more room to run when we play with her. I read several of your online articles, and the more I read, the more it made sense. We've been using the 'tug-of-war' game to help build her confidence; she is getting happier and more willing to engage in play.”

Of course, I would like to see them be able to get this doggie to come inside the house at some point, but they’re now working slowly to simply get her to accept any human contact. They won’t even be able to take her to the vet until they can gain a lot more trust, get her used to having a leash and collar on, etc. However, in terms of the subject of this article, the point is that disliking the rain and snow is not natural for dogs. It’s purely a matter of context.

So what do you do if your dog hates the rain and snow?

Simple. Change the context!

One of the primary rules of dog training is that you can’t just train a dog in one environment with one particular set of circumstances and except to obey under any and all conditions. It’s true that initially you want to do your training where there are as few distractions as possible. But once a behavior is learned, you have to begin to slowly add distractions so that the dog can begin to cross-contextualize his lessons.

(This isn’t the same thing as “generalizing, by the way, which requires intellect. Dogs think viscerally and emotionally, not through intellectual abilities like abstract thought, which is one of the prerequisites to having the ability to generalize things. Personally, I think cross-contextualization is probably an evolutionary, cognitive pre-cursor to that higher level ability.)

Adding distractions doesn’t just mean that the dog sits, no matter what else is going on. It also means that you want the dog to be able to “weather” all kinds of stimuli. And the best, most positive way to do that is to make play a fundamental part of the training process. This is what my e-mail pals in Saskatchewan are learning. Their dog is becoming more and more comfortable with them because they’ve been getting down on the dog’s level and encouraging her to play. Food has been a great help, but it can only go so far. I think play is the real clincher.

Freddie Tackles a Green Bay Packer

When Freddie was a pup, and we went out for a walk in his first snowstorm, he hated it! And New York is an urban setting so there was also a lot of salt and other snow-melting chemicals on the sidewalks. He not only refused to walk because he was cold and wet, he actually cried about it, partly because of the salt, but also because he just didn’t like being out in the cold.

So what did I do?

Well, first of all I did my best to keep the area between his pads free of any icy build up. Every time he lifted one of his paws up and limped along on the others I bent down and cleaned his “hurty paw” of all the excess snow and ice. But I also saw the snowstorm as an opportunity to change Freddie’s outlook on all inclement weather; I took him to the park and played with him in the snow. And I mean I really played with him, I didn’t just stand there and wait for other dogs to show up. I ran around myself, teasing him with a stick, and encouraging him to bite the stick and come after me with all his might to get it.

Once I could see that he was crazy to bite the stick, I ran away. Then I zig-zagged, stopped and started, changed directions, faked left and went right, faked right and went left, threw in a stutter step, etc. I even fell down in the snow and let him jump on top of me. Then I jumped up and ran off again. I was like a running back for the Green Bay Packers (except for the falling down part; that made me more like one of the Detroit Lions). I did this for about 20 secs. or so, until he was absolutely crazy to catch me and sink his teeth into that stick.

Then I encouraged him to jump up on me and we played tug-of-war, then I threw the stick. He chased it, killed it, then lay down in the snow and chewed it into sawdust. No resistance to the cold and snow at this point. He was covered in it. In fact, he was lying down on it, with the “evil” snow right up against him, chilling his belly. But he loved it. He was in his “zone,” his happy place.

The next time it snowed a funny thing happened. He not only didn’t mind the snow coming down on him and getting his coat wet, he was also less affected by the salt and ice on his paws.

So as I tell my clients, it’s important for you to always set the emotional tone for your dog. No more thinking: “It’s snowing? Ah, crap!” Instead, you have to think, “Yay! It’s snowing! Let’s go play!” You have to think like a happy little kid, not like a grumpy grown up. And the same thing holds true for the rain, which is usually a much less pleasant experience for adults than being out in the beauty and romance of the newly falling snow. So I think playing with your dog in the rain may be even more important than playing in the snow.

I’ll give you an example of a dog who hated the rain, and how rolling around with him in the mud not only got him past his disdain, it actually improved his ability to obey in any weather.

Acting Insane in the Rain

It was an October evening, an hour or so before sundown. I was out with Freddie and Mack, a Jack Russell terrier, on the Great Lawn in Central Park. Mack and I were playing fetch and Fred was sniffing around. The leaves had changed colors and the sky was turning dark and ominous. A light drizzle started to fall.

I knew Mack didn’t like the rain, but I didn’t realize how badly until I threw the ball and he just watched it roll off into the grass. I shrugged and went after it myself. But when I got to it and turned around, I saw that Mack was on his way home. He’d apparently decided that he didn’t want to play in the wet weather and had just started trotting back toward West 85th Street—which is where he lived—intending, I suppose, to somehow magically cross those four lanes of rush hour traffic on Central Park West without getting run over. Yikes!

I gave him his recall signal and he turned and came halfway back before remembering that I didn’t have any treats with me, just a tennis ball. He turned around again and started for home. I called him again, this time he didn’t even turn around; he just threw a look over his shoulder as if to say, “It’s too dark and damp; I’ll catch ya later,” and he continued to trot home.

I realized that I’d been a little lazy with Mack’s recall. In the beginning I’d always used a tennis ball or a stick as the focal point for motivating him to come to me as well as a reward for obeying. But out of laziness I’d switched to using food rewards and now—in a crunch situation—Mack knew I didn’t have any treats with me and so he wasn’t interested in obeying.

I quickly remembered that I had never used food for training his down-at-a-distance command. I had always drilled him on it with his bite reflex fully aroused and subsequently satisfied.

By now he was about fifty yards away, with his back to me, totally intent on getting out of the rain. I shouted out the down command: “Mack! Go down!” He instantly dropped into the down position. Then I told him to stay, walked over to where he lay in the grass waiting for me like a good boy, and hooked him up to his leash. Then I whistled Freddie over, and the two of us, the sensible ones, walked Mack safely home across those four lanes of rush hour traffic.

The next week, during a Nor’easter, I took Mack out with a 50' longue line and a tennis ball and we played and rolled around madly in the pouring rain and mud and he chased the ball and re-taught him to come in the most insanely intense manner possible. Please understand that I actually got down on the ground and rolled around in the mud, in the pouring rain, encouraging Mack to jump on top of me. Why on earth would I put myself (and my wardrobe) through that? Because I knew that in order for this particular dog to come when called under all conditions I knew I had to teach him to not only tolerate the rain but actually love it, I had to use every technique in my bag of training tricks to make the experience as vivid and exciting for him as possible.

And it worked. After that insane day in the rain, Mack never showed the least resistance to his recall, in any kind of weather. In fact, just a week or so later, we were on the Great Lawn again, and for the first time in his life Mack started chasing a squirrel. I had never seen him do this before so I just stood there, kind of befuddled. Finally, when the squirrel was about halfway to the nearest tree, which was a hundred yards or so away, I shouted his recall signal. He turned on a dime and ran back to me even harder and faster than when he’d been chasing the squirrel!

I had a pocket full of treats but wisely threw a tennis ball instead.

LCK

By the way, it helps if you know some of my other tricks for getting a dog to play when he doesn’t feel like it. Some of them can be found in Jump Starting the Prey Drive. But the main thing is that you have to kind of piss the dog off, make him want to bite you. Most dogs won’t bite you, of course; they’ll want to bite the tennis ball or stick instead. But you have to behave as if you’re another dog who’s trying to get a reluctant playmate to engage in a game of chase. This may include getting down on your hands and knees and doing a play bow, or whatever other crazy-ass thing you can think of. But as my friend Jason often says, “If nobody thinks you're crazy when you’re doing this stuff, you’re probably not doing it right...” Other people will think you’re crazy, but your dog won’t.

The Three Big Questions (A Dog's Job)

2009-01-23T11:23:00.000-08:00

A bit of a departure today from my usual, lengthy posts...

The Three Big Questions

Whenever you’re training your dog, or even if you’re just out walking or playing with him (or her) in the park, there are three questions you can ask yourself that will hopefully make you a better dog trainer, a better owner, and maybe even a better human being:

What can I learn from my dog today about dogs and training?
How can I tune into my dog’s energy and use it in teaching him (or her) how to obey me?
Is there anything my dog’s behavior can teach me about myself so that I can become a better trainer or owner?

If you ask me, dogs are the real experts on dog training. And I’ve found that if we can just get quiet for a moment or two, get rid of our own agenda, and come down to their level, they will always show us what to do, and how best to train them. They’ll even show us how to be better human beings if we let them. That’s what they’re made for. That’s their job in life.

LCK

How to Manage Your Dog's Energy

2008-12-15T19:45:00.000-08:00

Those of you who’ve listened to Kevin Behan’s radio interview heard him talk about the two types of energies operative in canine behavior: electricity and magnetism. Some of you may have also read the comments section of my last post, where I gave a response to Summer’s mommy about a problem she’s been having in getting her dog to do any off-lead heel without vocalizing. This post begins with part of that exchange:

How To Manage Your Dog’s Energy

Summer's Mommy: One question, sometimes she gets so riled up with the exercise that she wants to bite my left arm. I think it’s somewhat cute, but in competition that would lose me some points. Also she can get quite vocal (growling, short staccato barks) when she's in drive in the heel. Again, more areas where I can lose points. Do you have any suggestions on how to convert that drive that's being manifested into the biting/barking/growling and channel into just the act of heeling itself? I don't want to punish her or say no, but even as I praise her when she does it, she doesn't stop the behavior even with praise.

Here's my reply:

LCK: I would say that the biting is a result of a strong attraction (magnetism) while the vocalizing is an expression of nervous tension (electrical energy). She's also trying to "tell" you something. (What that is, I don't know.)

Remember, when she stayed with me I got to see her behavioral idiosyncrasies up close, and I said I thought that even though she's a bit tightly wound, she's also a very sensitive doggie. So it might also help to do more "chase me," "hup!" and "dance with me," and less hidden pops.

In other words, more magnetism, less electricity.

LCK

PS: Now that I think about it, the "chase me" will probably create more of a likelihood that she'll grip your arm while heeling, so while I might still do that, I would also probably give her some leash corrections whenever her teeth stray onto your arm. You have to be very fluid about it, and you can't pop her too hard; it should be just enough to damper the energy a little, but not hard enough to make her lose interest in chasing you.

Another way to work on this would be to do very short "chase me" sessions using a ball or tug toy as the focal point, and quickly end each go-through with a game of tug. Then gradually increase the length of the game, but then turn it into a "game" of off-lead "Heel!" And follow that with a ball throw or a game of tug, whichever she prefers. If she's still too bitey during the off-lead heel, go back to doing it on lead with the leash corrections to inhibit her from biting during the heel. The idea is to let her know that she can't bite while heeling, but that she'll get a big old payoff once she's finished.

I hope that helps!

Okay, so what do I mean exactly when I say more magnetism and less electricity? I’m essentially describing the difference between drive energy (i.e., desire/connectedness) and an overload of nervous tension (i.e., neediness/feeling disconnected).

The body of any animal has two basic energy systems. The nervous system (which includes the brain, the spinal cord, and all the neurons, axons, and dendrites), and the emotional system (limbic system, endocrine glands, sexual and sensory organs). Both types of energy are necessary. For instance, you can obtain a great deal of knowledge about a person’s in- ternal organs through an MRI machine: a magnetic resonance imaging. But it doesn’t work unless you plug it into the wall first.

As I’ve been thinking over Jacinta’s and Sang’s problems with their dogs, Summer and Roxy (Sang complains that Roxy gets overstimulated, which basically means she’s got too much electrical energy running through her system), and it seems to me that there are four basic ways to use, manage, control, and modulate your dog’s natural energy.

First let’s talk about the differences between electrical (neediness) and magnetic (desire) energies.

We all have survival needs, and the survival instinct exists to ensure that we act to protect ourselves from danger, drink when we’re thirsty, eat when we’re hungry, etc., etc. Sometimes, however, we attach survival feelings to something unrelated to our actual survival needs. How many times do we tell ourselves that we “need” to get to work on time, or that we “need” a raise or a new car. Another example is the kid, like Ralphie in The Christmas Story, who thinks he’ll die if he doesn’t get the air rifle he wants for Christmas. When we attach neediness—survival energy—to non-essential things it screws us up, it puts stress on our bodies and actually makes us less efficient at getting what we really need. It also makes us feel unconnected from our co-workers, who—come on—aren’t going to kill us if we’re late to work, or our bosses, who are not going to kill us, and it makes us feel like our parents “don’t understand” us when they say it won’t kill us to not get exactly what we want for Christmas.

But what do we say? “You don’t understand! If I don’t get it I’ll die!”

Yet, here we are. We’re all still alive.

On the other hand, when you have a strong desire for something—and I mean pure desire, without any neediness attached—you often feel a sense of steadiness and calm as if your desire has created a direct link to whatever it is you want so badly. You are connected.

Desire is governed by the sex instinct; never mind the actual act of mating, the sex instinct governs the creative aspects of life, in all its forms. When you’re in a state of pure desire you almost know you’ll get what you want eventually, you have new, unexpectedly creative ideas on how to do things. And if you hold on to that feeling of desire—that fire in the belly—it will almost always bring some kind of positive results. It sets things in motion. This is what I mean when I say that desire has a kind of magnetic energy.

So electric energy runs your survival needs; it has a choppy feel, it makes you feel alone, disconnected, it’s chronological, meaning it makes you feel the pressure of time, and it also causes the bad kind of stress on the body. Magnetic energy is desire; it has a smooth rhythm to it, it makes you feel connected, it’s timeless, and creates mostly the good kind of stress.

I think this is a helpful model in learning how to manage your dog’s energy. And as I see it, there are four basic ways to do that.

The Four Ways to Handle Your Dog’s Energy

One: Give your dog a satisfying “ground wire” to offload excess energy.

Ground wires include tug-of-war, fetch, play sessions with other dogs, the “eyes” exercise, and even taking your dog on long walks in nature. (Believe it or not, trees and grass are natural ground wires for a dog’s energy.)

I’m trying to codify everything here, but a lot of what I “know” about this stuff is intuitive or comes from my subconscious mind. I’ll give you an example: The other night I had a session with a new client. They’ve got a pit bull named Latte who was found on the street, emaciated, over a year ago. She’s reportedly been a lovely girl since then, very affectionate indoors, very obedient and willing to learn, but she’s started exhibiting occasional leash aggression recently.

When I came in and sat down, she was unable to settle down. We tried giving her a bone or a ball, but nothing seemed to work, so while I was discussing options, describing the possible source of the dog’s behavioral problems, and she was still at it, trying to jump all over me, I put my fingers between her teeth, hoping to give her a chance to ground her energy by mouthing my hand. She pulled away, zipped around the room a little, then settled next to me on the couch again and kind of “sneaked” in close and started to nibble my fingers, hoping I wouldn’t notice. I let her do that. Five minutes later she was sound asleep.

I didn’t even pay attention; that kind of thing happens a lot with the dogs I work with. But in a subsequent conversation with her owner, she told me she thought it was amazing that Latte had been so relaxed that she’d fallen asleep next to me on the couch. That’s when I remembered what I had done with my fingers, and by doing that what I had, in essence, given the dog permission to do: to use me as a ground wire. And that’s why she fell asleep.

Two: Upgrade the dog’s “wiring/hardware.”

This will give your dog a better ability to handle his excess energy levels on his own. Instead of just plugging him into a ground wire (like a tug rag), this would be similar to replacing old corroded wiring with newer, stronger, thicker wires. It’s also analogous to removing emotional blocks. This is where the pushing exercise comes in handy. Also, certain training exercises where the dog has to change emotional gears quickly—things like the “off-lead heel” or the “down-while-running” and conflict training—would also fall into this category. They make the dog’s energy system more productive and less wasteful.

Finally, the fasting exercise, described in Kevin’s book, and what I call the Frankenstein exercise is also helpful at removing emotional blocks in the dog’s system and getting it to run smoother. Kevin has a couple of versions of the Frankenstein exercise, described on Neil Sattin's blog.

Three: Drain the battery/shut down the system.

This is where a crate comes in handy. Another thing that helps is not feeding into the dog’s nervousness. That’s part of what worked with Latte the other night. If I had reacted to her energy with any kind of “dominance” or fear, she would’ve had even more trouble settling down. If the dog has no excess energy from you to feed off she’ll be able to calm down much quicker.

Four: Provide a transformer.

This is where praising the dog to settle his nerves works wonders. When a dog has too much nervous energy and you praise him, this will often help him relax. I’ve described this in more detail (excruciating detail, some might argue) in my article on praise. But in terms of energy exchange it works like this: the dog is nervous (electric energy), praise makes him feel connected to you (magnetic energy)—you’ve transformed that excess buzzing of electrical energy—which eventually has to find a way to ground itself, come hell or high water—into smooth magnetism, which has more of a gentle, steady hum to it. Make sense?

Interrupting the flow of electricity by applying light shocks on the collar, a well-timed throw chain; all of these things have a tendency, when applied to an overly nervous dog to shift her focus from choppy/disconnected/solo mood type behaviors to something more like a group mood feeling. Again, you have to be very careful and not apply too much pressure or you’ll get the opposite result.

I’m still working out the various ways of describing this stuff. As I said, so much of what I do is so deeply ingrained into my subconscious mind that I rarely pay any attention to what I’m doing anymore. It happens naturally, like breathing. But I hope this helps you understand the basic premise of how Kevin’s model—of the dog as an energy system—works.

I look forward to hearing everyone’s feedback and ideas on this.

LCK

Conflict Training, 101

2008-11-30T12:06:00.000-08:00

I got a request this week for help from a woman with three dogs: a Rottweiler, a female Malinois, and a beagle. The behavioral problem was that the Malinois had developed a fixation with eating the Rotti’s feces. I asked a number of questions about the past history, the type of training, exercise levels, etc., and there didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary that could be causing this behavior. My suspicion was (and is) that the dog’s prey drive wasn’t getting enough of a workout. The owner had done some drive training, but in my view, it wasn’t precise enough for this dog (or maybe for this breed). Also, part of my suspicion is that the dog was acting out to reflect something she felt was lacking in her relationship with the owner. The owner had also been given the suggestion of using an electronic collar, but was hesitant about it.

Conflict Training, 101

The way I see it all canine behavior—whether learned or instinctive, normal or abnormal—is done in an attempt to reduce or release some kind of internal tension. When you think about it, even breathing is a matter of tension and release. When too much tension builds up inside a dog’s system, that’s when we tend to see abnormal behaviors.

The normal way for a dog to reduce tension is through some activity related to the prey drive. Looking at the wolf model, we can see that wolves are an anomaly in the natural world. They’re one of only three types of mammals that routinely hunt animals that are larger and more dangerous than them- selves: CANINES hunt bison, elk, and moose, while ORCAS and other species of dolphin hunt whales. The third mammal in this category is HOMO SAPIENS. All three species originally hunted large prey by working cooperatively, though humans later developed weapons, so we no longer need to hunt in groups. (Someone ought to tell that to Dick Cheney.)

The bottom line is that a wolf’s social instincts are based on their need to hunt large prey. For instance, wolves who settle near a dump don’t really form packs. They have looser social arrangements. It also turns out that coyotes—whom it was thought for years did not form packs—actually do, but only when they need to hunt large prey.

(I’m getting to the point, trust me.)

Bison, elk, moose, etc. have horns and hooves. It’s very dangerous for an individual wolf to hunt one of these large animals, so they also evolved strategies like scavenging, hunting small prey, and will even at times eat vegetation. The survival instinct sort of dictates that they not put themselves in harm’s way by hunting large prey unless they are absolutely driven to do it.

This is where Nature becomes a clever taskmaster. If she wants wolves to hunt large prey she has to design a strong enough motivation for them to leave the safety of the den and foray into the path of those hooves and horns. And the basic underlying mechanism for motivating wolves to hunt large prey is a build-up internal tension or stress. When the pack gets hungry enough, the prey drive starts to kick in. Once it’s strong enough to override the need for safety, the wolves are driven to hunt. That’s not entirely accurate, though, because it doesn’t reflect the wolf’s actual experience or point of view. What these animals are really driven to do is to simply get rid of their tension. Think of the way a male dog goes after a female in heat. If you look at it from this angle you can see that he’s not interested in mating per se, he’s really only interested in getting rid of the overwhelming levels of tension and stress he’s feeling. The higher the stress levels, the more driven he is to complete his “task.”

Another factor for wolves in particular (and dogs to a lesser extent) is that at every step in the predatory sequence—the search, the eye stalk, the chase, the grab bite and kill bite—a wolf's body produces endorphins, providing internal rewards for each behavior phase of the sequence.

So in nature (and no matter how domesticated they are, dogs are still a part of nature), the ultimate release of stress comes through acting on the prey drive with no (or very few) inhibitions. And the primary reason stress builds up in the first place is because the animals are inhibited about acting on the prey drive because doing so is dangerous.

So when I hear of a dog like your Malinois, whose behavior is outside the normal range (and coprophragia is normal in puppies, but not in a two- year old), I automatically see it as being related in some way to a blocked flow—an inhibition—of the dog’s prey drive.

So how do we fix it?

I don’t like to use punishment in cases like this, because in order for the punishment to successfully override an instinctive, compulsive, or habitual behavior, it has to be so strong and so severe, that you run the risk of making the dog shut down in other ways. True, an electric shock can accomplish that goal, and may do so safely in some cases. But even if it were to work, there’s a downside to it, which is that the nervous system runs on electricity, and one of the last things you want to do is download more electric energy into a dog whose nervous system may already be overloaded.

In general terms what I might do in this type of situation is put the dog in conflict between something that she wants to do vs. obeying my command. In Natural Dog Training we call this “conflict training.” You don’t necessarily have to use the Rotti’s poop to do it, as long as it’s some activity that your Malinois has the same or a similar level of attachment or attraction to. Once she’s developed an ability or skill-set to give up one attachment in favor of obeying you, others will start to naturally fall into place.

Something similar that comes to mind, which illustrates this approach, is a compulsive behavior my own dog had years ago of digging in sand boxes. He particularly liked to “bury” his favorite toy—an empty soda or Poland Spring water bottle—in the sand. Conflict training is basically what I sued to cure him of his compulsive digging. (Now that I think about it, he used to love to eat wino shit in Central Park, too; but after I did the sandbox exercise with him, it was much easier to call him away from that unappetizing habit; and calling him away—followed by a game of chase—cured him of his coprophragia, so it might very well work for you!)

Here’s what I did:

I put him on a long leash, in a down stay near a sand box and put a soda bottle close to him, but off to the side a little, at an indirect angle to him. Then I walked away, backwards, facing him directly the whole time, hold- ing the end of the leash. Then when I got to the end of the leash, I called him to me: “Okay, Freddie, come!” If he went for the bottle instead of running to me, I ran over and without saying anything used the leash to put him back into his original position, using short, fairly hard pops on the collar*, acting as if we were both in a dangerous situation the whole time. Then, once he and the bottle were back in the original position, I reminded him, “Stay!” and did it all again. *(You have to be careful that the pops don’t cause him to lose focus on you; they should actually motivate him to work harder with you.)

Once we got to the point that he ran straight back to me on command, instead of going for the bottle, I rewarded him with another bottle I had hidden in my training vest, though I didn’t just give it to him: I made him chase me around first for about 15 secs., then I threw it for him to chase on his own. (I had put a small amount of water inside so I could throw it farther than if it had been empty.) It also helped that his other favorite activity was de“cap”itating those bottles. So even though he had an impulse to take the bottle back to the sand box and bury it, all I had to do was say, “Take the cap off!” and he would settle down with the bottle and take the cap off with his teeth.

He was a Dalmatian, so it took a while before he “got” the “point” of the game. And I had to do it with him holding the stay at various places around and even inside the sandbox so he could cross-contextualize it. Once he got it, he actually “locked-in” to me. And I only had to re-acquaint him with the exercise once the next day after that first session. He never showed any interest in digging again. (And as I mentioned before, it was instrumental in stopping him from eating human feces in the park.)

Now going back to what I said up top, here’s my point: digging is actually one way a dog has of sublimating his prey drive, meaning he’s expressing it in some “safe” way that doesn’t involve chasing and biting a prey object. For whatever reason Freddie had inhibitions about chasing and biting in play. Now your dog doesn’t seem to have the same inhibitions that Freddie did, but my suspicion is that she does have some because scavenging and eating feces are also ways a dog has of circumventing and only partially satisfying their prey drive. In my scenario, once Freddie’s inhibitions were resolved he no longer had a need to dig in sandboxes or eat feces.

Another approach I’d take with your dog is I would hand feed her all her meals outdoors, using what’s called the “pushing exercise.” I’ve posted a link just below. One thing I didn’t describe in the sandbox exercise was the fact that I had taught Freddie to jump up on me on command, and that was part of the “chase me” game I played with him when he obeyed the recall. Jumping up basically causes a dog to plug a lot of her energy into you. It overcomes some of those natural inhibitions dogs have about seeing us as “prey” in the same way they see a Frisbee or another dog they like to play with as something to chase. The pushing exercise accomplishes the same goal as jumping up but without some of the drawbacks. So print out the article found in the link below and follow the instructions carefully. It will increase your dog’s levels of social attraction to you, which will increase the reliability of her recall, and might even reduce some of her need to eat feces in the first place.

http://www.tiny.cc/SwimUpstream

Doing the “eyes” exercise (below) may also help. You may have already taught it to her as “watch me,” but I think this version has a wrinkle or two that makes it stronger. Basically dogs alternately see us—or I should say they feel, us on a knee-jerk level—as either prey and predator. The more prey-like we become, the more interested in obeying us they are. However, to some extent, the more predator-like we are the more that increases their obedience skills too. The difference is that in the first case the dogs obey us willingly, because it makes them feel good, it makes them feel connected to us in the strongest way possible. But the more predator-like we are, the more their obedience is based on fear. (This is why dominance training works; it’s also why dominance trainers think dogs see them as the “pack leader,” when they actually sees the trainer the way a wolf sees a moose who suddenly turns and brandishes his antlers.)

http://tiny.cc/TheEyesHaveIt

If I were you, I’d wait a few weeks of doing these two exercises before attempting the conflict training. Remember, I had already done the jumping up with Freddie.

One thing that will give you a clue as to how this is going to help is that after you do the pushing exercise, you may find that your doggie plays tug- of-war with a lot more energy and focus; she’ll probably bite and pull a lot harder than she did before. You can also integrate the pushing dynamic into your games of tug, which will up the ante considerably. And always remember, the key to reducing tension in the canine species comes primarily through chasing and biting.

Sorry for the lengthy reply. I hope this helps!

LCK

A Post About Dogs and Doorways

2008-09-10T15:39:00.000-07:00

This entry starts with a trip down memory lane and the opening section of Chapter 7 of my second Jack and Jamie novel, Murder Unleashed (in blue). It's currently out of print but I'm going to republish it starting next year. Jack has driven Jamie to a crime scene where a boxer named Roarke is inside a dead man's car, snarling and growling, preventing the police investigators from getting inside. Jack offers to help out. The police think Roark killed the man, but Jack isn't so sure.

The reason I'm re-visiting this bit of detective fiction now is that it illustrates the energy dynamic behind a common household behavioral problem: dogs who jump up, bark too much, or want to bite when anyone who comes over to visit.

Dogs and Doorways

Unlike Jamie—or any woman who’s angry at her mate—most dogs will bite only as a last resort. It’s kind of a paradox, too, since the urge to bite is at the core of a dog’s most positive social instincts. This idea flies in the face of conventional wisdom, of course, which says that a dog’s social instincts revolve around issues of dominance and submission; who’s alpha and who’s not. But in my opinion—and in the opinion of more and more experts these days—there is no such thing as an alpha dog. No canine has any desire to be alpha, and no ability to form a social hierarchy based on concepts like rank and status. (Dogs don’t think conceptually.) My belief is that the pack is actually a self-emergent heterarchy, in which the behaviors of the individual dogs create the social structure, the social structure doesn’t control the individual behaviors.

Besides, all dogs really want to do is to chase things and bite them, which is the foundation of their prey instinct. And canine social behavior is inextricably linked to prey drive, particularly the need to hunt large prey. If wolves and dogs didn’t hunt in packs, they’d be more like foxes (who never hunt large prey and therefore don’t need a pack instinct).

Think of it like this: When a lone wolf bites into a fleeing rabbit the crunch of bone and flesh between his teeth and jaws is a highly pleasurable thing. But when that same wolf--working in glorious synchronicity with his packmates--bites into a galloping deer or a cornered elk and feels the moist, hot, massive flesh tear away from the animal’s heaving body, while his packmates are all emotionally aligned to the same purpose, and are all filled with the same wild emotions, that, my friends, is pure ecstasy.

I should know. I was a wolf in a former life.

This didn’t make my journey across the road to Judge Merton’s Cadillac any less nerve-wracking. I’d dealt with aggressive dogs before. I’d even been bitten four or five times, though most of the incidents were accidental; a high-strung standard poodle named Ozymandius once tried to grab a tennis ball from my hand and bit me on the thumb instead. A poor, neurotic boxer named Spike did the same thing to my arm. (Either I moved at the last second or he had bad aim.) My saving grace with Roark was I knew that he liked to play fetch, which is why I had a tennis ball in my pocket just in case I couldn’t lure him out of the car with the liver treats.

I had another thing on my side—a sensible caution based on a studied understanding of a dog’s den instincts. You see, there’s this thing about dogs and doorways. The dominance crowd believes that a dog who goes through a door ahead of you is trying to be alpha. Supposedly one of the perks of being the top dog is being the first to go through any opening. This is total nonsense of course. The truth is much simpler (it always is): Whenever a dog senses movement at the threshold of the den, his bite reflex is automatically stimulated. Why? My theory is that crossing thresholds is a risky business; there might be danger just outside of the den door when, there might be danger lurking inside when you come home. A canine’s bite reflex has to be right up on the surface, available to use, whenever he leaves the den or whenever someone else comes in. This is the only reason some dogs and wolves snap at others who go through a door ahead of them. It has nothing to do with being alpha. It’s just that the bite reflex is always stimulated around the den door. And for some dogs, movement around a car door or window is much more stimulating than movement around the front door of your house or apartment.

I remembered all this as I approached Roark, ending up about four feet from the passenger side of the car. By this time, he was a barking, snarling maniac—just as Flynn and Quentin Peck had described him. The car door was the same for him as the door to a wolf’s den. He was ready to guard it with his life. Any attempt by me, or anyone else, to get inside that car, or to even put a hand through the door, would result in bloodshed. Offering him a liver treat would lose me a finger. Teasing him with a tennis ball, then throwing it across the ice would have no effect. The question was: How could I entice him to get out of the car voluntarily?

I couldn’t. I realized I’d have to force him out somehow. I wished for a moment that I’d waited for Animal Control. Having a padded suit on, even wearing just the arm pad, would certainly help. I had quick mental image of Roark grabbing hold of my padded arm with his teeth, the way attack dogs are trained do, and that’s when it hit me; tug-of-war. Screw the liver treats, screw the tennis ball, screw the army blanket. All I needed was something Roark could sink his teeth into. Then—once he was fully committed to playing tug-of-war with me—I could yank him out of the car and onto the ice. Presto!

I searched my pockets for a tug-toy or a bandana. Then I noticed the tassels of the ragg wool scarf Jamie’s mother, Laura, had given me for Christmas and thought, “Shit, there goes a perfectly good muffler.” I untwirled it from around my neck and had a [nearly] perfect tug toy.

I opened the door, and as soon as I did, Roark faked a lunge at me, but stayed inside, as I knew (or hoped) he would. I began teasing him with my makeshift tug toy, waving it around the door, trying to entice him to grab hold of it. He was more intent on growling and snarling at me, though, so I began praising him as I danced the scarf in front of his nose. The praise was not to reward him for trying to kill me, but to make him feel that we were on the same side; that we both wanted the scarf ‘dead’. I even threw in a few fake growls of my own, to let him know that the two of us were killing the scarf together.

It worked. He stopped focusing on me and grabbed the scarf and pulled on it, hard. In fact, he pulled so hard he almost yanked me into the car. I don’t know how, but I managed to stay upright. We played tug for a few seconds, me praising him and doing my fake, ‘play-growl’ the whole time, and then I used the scarf, and leverage from the open car door, to pull Roark’s ass outside and onto the icy ground. He lost hold of the scarf, then grabbed it again. What a silly goose. He wanted to kill me a moment earlier, now he was helping me ‘kill’ my muffler.

I let go of the scarf and praised him for beating me—which is how all tug-of-war games should end; you always praise the dog for winning. Then, while he shook his head around as if breaking the neck of the fallen scarf, I took hold of his leash, which he’d been wearing while he was in the car, and began to lead him gently up the side of the ditch, stopping for just a moment to take a look inside the vehicle. Just as I’d thought, there was almost no blood visible on the judge’s spent air bag. He’d been murdered before he got behind the wheel of his car, and the killer wanted to make it look like Roark had torn the judge’s throat to shreds.

I was startled by an unfamiliar sound. I looked across the road and saw that everyone was standing outside their vehicles, applauding.

Okay, so what does this have to do with controlling your dog’s greeting behaviors? It’s pretty simple, really. One of the reasons dogs jump up on guests, or bark madly, or spin in happy circles, or even nip their sleeves or bite their butts is because of this atavistic impulse that gets switched on anytime there’s movement around the den door, particularly if it involves a non-pack member coming through that opening. These behaviors are simply various ways a dog has of offloading the energy behind that urge to bite in more socially acceptable ways.

What do you do to stop these behaviors? That’s pretty simple too: you teach the dog that when the doorbell rings, or the buzzer sounds, or there’s a knock at the door that her job is to first sniff the person, then go grab a toy and bring it to the door with her. If she’s a fairly typical dog, the feeling of having that toy in her mouth will satisfy that urge to bite and totally offset all the other behavioral quirks she may have previously exhibited.

LCK

Boywunder posted a link to a radio interview with Kevin Behan in the comments section, but you have to cut and paste to get to it. Here's a direct version of that link.