The Natural Dog Training Difference

Here's an in-depth look at how Natural Dog Training differs from the popular pack leader and positive reinforcement methods, including videos of all three methods in action.

The Natural Dog Training Difference

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I read something interesting on Kevin Behans’s blog the other day, about how nearly everyone who takes their first ride on a camel or elephant experiences motion sickness, but this doesn’t happen when people ride a horse for the first time. Kevin’s reasoning is that horses naturally know how to adjust their movements to incorporate the rider’s center of gravity.

In thinking about that, I realized that what’s missing from both the dominance and +R approach to training, and what we do, is that dogs really do have a sort of emotional center of gravity as Kevin postulates. And when we teach them to do an exercise like the heel, for instance, using thought-centric models of learning, such as dominance and +R, the dogs have to figure out, on their own, how to match their forward momentum and energy with ours. But when we teach them using Natural Dog Training, no matter how bad we are at it initially, if our goal is to teach the dog to be in-synch with us physically and emotionally (instead of teaching them to respect our leadership, or by rewarding their external behaviors), at some point we’ll find that we’re actually creating a feeling in the dog of a shared center-of-gravity, just like with a horse and rider. In that respect, heeling not only feels natural to the dog. It feels really, really good. 

To highlight these differences, here’s a video of Cesar Millan [note: this video has been deleted] solving a fairly simple behavioral problem of a great Dane who gets too energized when she goes jogging with her owner. She expresses this excess energy (which is essentially a nervousness about how to keep her desire to run full-bore in check) as jumping up. Millan interprets this as dominance, and teaches the dog to stay next to her owner by being “submissive.”

There’s so much wrong in Cesar’s explanation of the problem, not mention in how he solves it, yet it’s hard to dispute the visual “evidence” of the results.

So what, exactly, if anything, is wrong with Cesar’s approach? 

Well for starters, even without knowing that dominance is not a real character trait or behavioral output in dogs, it’s quite easy to see that the Dane is simply expressing a strong social attraction — the desire to connect to her owner — in an inappropriate way. She’s also feeling nervous because she's unsure of how to align her energy with the owner while they're running: faster forward momentum = a challenge to the dog's ability to feel or stay connected, so she’s jumping up to ground some of that excess energy. 

The thing is, you never want to punish or correct social attraction, no matter what form it takes. And you especially don’t want to do it by intimidating the dog, as Cesar does. If you watch his body language, and the body language of the dog very closely, you’ll see that Millan is actually acting very much like a predator in order to keep the dog in a “submissive” state. You can see this most clearly in the section where he first demonstrates the “touch” to the dog’s throat — which in the past he described as a “bite,” as in “If a dog can bite me, why I can't I bite him back?” — then moves into the dog’s space, making the dog even more nervous and unsure of herself.

In short, the problem is “solved” by repressing the dog’s energy instead of celebrating that energy and channeling it into a happy, joyous heel. (Personally, I probably wouldn’t take a great Dane jogging anyway; I don’t thinking jogging is a good idea with most dogs, particularly those with a big barrel chest and narrow waist.*)

But other than telling the owner to come up with an alternative exercise plan,** if we look at this as an energy problem, the way to solve it would be keep that level of energy active in the dog, but give it a different outlet without intimidating or repressing her drive to connect. In other words, keep the dog’s drive energy up but channel it into a heel. (After a while the Dane learns to do this on her own, but is still confused, unhappy, and not as energetic as before.)

Contrast the dominance approach with the traditional clicker-training and food-luring method, as shown by Nancy Cusick, a professional dog trainer from Texas who's been described (by herself and others) as The Awesomest Dog Trainer in Austin, which she may very well be. (I pulled this video at random from YouTube.)

I see several things lacking here. One is that the puppy is a bit too young for the exercise. She just wants to sniff and explore. Each time she does, Cusick redirects her with a kissing sound. That’s nice, and fine in theory, but by doing this Cusick slowly and inevitably becomes an obstacle to the puppy’s desires, desires that are being controlled more by the puppy’s developmental needs than by hunger.

Also, at one point when the pup sits while not in the heel position, the trainer moves her body next to the pup’s rather than using her own body language and energy to induce the puppy to move toward her and then sit. Then she clicks and rewards the dog for being in that position. This is based on the somewhat questionable idea that dogs learn through positive reinforcement: if the dog is reinforced while it’s in the proper position it will gradually learn to choose that position on its own. (Notice that despite the seeming validity of this idea, the more the trainer rewards the puppy for being in the heel position, the more the puppy actually wanders off to explore, and do other things on her own.)

Another problem is that when the trainer accidentally drops food on the ground, and the puppy goes after it, the trainer makes the kissing sound again to try to redirect the puppy’s attention back to her. Again, you can see clearly that the more the trainer does this, the less attention the puppy pays to the trainer. (At one point the trainer even jokes to the camera, “Attention doggie deficit…” and chuckles.) 

There is nothing inherently wrong with using a kissing sound while teaching a dog to walk next to you. The problem here is with the timing. Instead of making the kissing sound as soon as the pup loses focus, the trainer does it after the puppy has already projected its energy onto something else. So the kissing sound ends up feeling like a punishment to the puppy.  

Puppy loses focus ... finds something to focus on ... handler makes kissing sound.  

Puppy feels, “Hey, I was having fun!” 

Contrast that with making the kissing sound the instant the pup loses focus, before she finds something else to focus her energy on: “What can I find around here to focus on?”   

Puppy loses focus ... trainer immediately makes kissing sound.  

Here the puppy feels, “Oh, good! I can focus my energy on you! This feels great!”

See the difference?

I’ll give Cusick the benefit of the doubt (as I said, she probably is the awesomest dog trainer in Austin, Texas), and suggest that part of the problem may be she’s not just focused on training the pup, she’s also talking to the camera as she works: not an easy thing to do. 

However, in the end the puppy only has a “generalized” heel, whose focus is very easily broken except when doing the sit while in the heel position. The reason the puppy is focused then is because that’s the only time the puppy isn’t feeling a disconnect between its own body and the trainer’s. While they’re doing the heel the puppy is mildly interested in getting the treats, but can’t figure out how to match her body’s need for forward momentum with the movement of the trainer’s body and the food lure. And the trainer isn’t using the food to help the pup solve the problem, she’s only using it as a lure and a positive reinforcement.

To recap, in Cesar Millan’s mind the dog’s problem is “How can I be submissive to my pack leader?” which is based on a false premise. Meanwhile, the positive trainer sees the puppy’s problem as, “How can I get a reward? Maybe if I heel I’ll get a treat?” which is just as false. Both ideas require the dog to engage in a linear, rational, time-dependent thought process, and a) dogs aren't capable of rational or hypothetical thinking, and b) they live totally in the moment, without any awareness of linear, chronological time. 

In each case the real problem for the doggie is, “How can I get my body to feel in-synch with my handler’s energy and momentum while we’re both moving together?” 

Now contrast these two approaches with this video of Kevin Behan, working on the heel with a Doberman pinscher named Laszlo, using the natural approach. 

First of all Laszlo is no ordinary dog. His owner brought him to Kevin because she was having a great deal of difficulty with his overabundant energy. As she wrote on her own blog, Laszlo was so wired that “he wouldn't lie down. I don't mean on command — I mean, he wouldn't lie down. Such was his anxiety and vigilance.” 

Now, that’s a tense doggie! 

The first thing Kevin does with Laszlo in this video is the pushing exercise, where he gets Laszlo to push for food. He does it, among other things, to stimulate Laszlo's social attraction to him. To the uninitiated viewer this may look just like “luring” the dog with treats the way Nancy Cusick does, but there’s a lot more to it than that. 

How to Do the Pushing Exercise 

How and Why It Works 

After a bit of pushing, Kevin begins moving around, encouraging Laszlo to move with him. At one point Laszlo gets distracted by a puddle, but Kevin just keeps moving (no kissing sound), encouraging the dog to connect to him (and what’s in his bait bag). At other times Laszlo finds bits of food on the ground and Kevin waits a bit for him to finish eating them before he starts moving again. 

Once he’s got Laszlo moving with him he begins to oscillate between acting like prey and predator, moves that again, to the uninitiated, might seem to have no purpose.

“He’s just throwing in some silly tai-chi moves to impress people.”

They may seem silly, but if you watch carefully, you’ll see that each shift in Kevin’s body language creates an immediate, in-the-moment shift in Laszlo's behavior, his approach to staying in-synch with Kevin’s movements. Those “silly” moves of Kevin’s have nothing to do with tai-chi, per se, though they do create shifts in Laszlo’s energy (which, for all I know, may actually be one of the goals of tai-chi).

At a certain point, Kevin even gets Laszlo to hold a down/stay without even giving the command. (Kevin exhibits some interesting “marching band” moves during this sequence as a means of both enticing Laszlo to break the stay, and to keep him in it at the same time.) And you’ll notice that Laszlo’s ears never go down or back except once or twice, for a fraction of a second, and each time they do, Kevin compensates with food or with his body language to bring the dog’s energy back into to a more relaxed and confident state.

There is no intimidation or dominance and submission in anything Kevin does. (Kevin does occasionally touch Laszlo’s neck with the back of his hand, which is done to help ground the dog's energy a little and to “steer” him a little, the way you’d do with a horse’s reins.)

You’ll also notice (I hope) the way Kevin does the about turns, which gently induce Laszlo to stay in "the pocket." To help with this, he uses food as a means of keeping the dog’s drive-to-connect up and active rather than as a reward for any one specific behavior. It’s more like a dance, one that leaves Laszlo entirely under Kevin’s command with no punishment or bad feelings taking place. 

At the end, Laszlo is heeling off-lead, and his energy is totally plugged in to Kevin.

By the way, the movements that Kevin makes don’t need to be, and in my opinion, shouldn’t be, copied exactly by you or anyone else. Those particular “dance steps” are organic to Kevin’s emotional energy and personality. Think of Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire, and Bob Fosse performing the exact same dance sequence for a movie. Even seen only in silhouette, so you couldn’t recognize their faces, there would be no question as to which man was dancing during each sequence. By the same token, everyone will do the heel exercise differently, depending on how they naturally express their own energy through their own physical and emotional centers-of-gravity. 

LCK 
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Footnotes:

*Breeds like Danes, Dobermans, Dalmatians, viszlas, boxers, greyhounds, who all have a similar chest conformation, are designed to run hard and fast for brief spurts, not to jog slowly for long stretches.

 

**Working on the heel the way Kevin does will use up more of a dog's energy in 5 - 10 minutes than a 1/2 hour jog will. If you add playing tug, fetch, and push-of-war, the dog's energy needs will be completely satisfied.

Cesar Millan: Pack Leader or Predator? (updated)

This is an updated version of a previous post (now deleted), which includes a few more insights, and a helpful 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, anytime 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.

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.

Here's the graphic again. 
 
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 seen he doesn’t know how to teach a dog whose energy has been stifled to become un-stifled, or to teach a 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

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Cesar Millan: Pack Leader or Predator?

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

Chasing Squirrels

Here's another post from the Amazon.com vault. I promised a new client that I'd make this available again; her dog has an obsession with horses. It's much stronger than Freddie's fascination was with squirrels, but the principle still holds true: when you make yourself more relevant to your dog's prey drive, he'll be happy to give up whatever "prey" he's obsessed with, particularly if you let him finish the predatory sequence by biting a toy. It's really that simple (which doesn't mean it's easy).

Chasing Squirrels

I mentioned in a previous post the need to take charge of the dog’s emotional charge. You want to do this without attempting to become some mythical pack leader, of course (though Cesar Millan seems to be making a good living doing it). I’ve described this process in my work with Boomer, but another excellent example comes from my own dog, Fred, who used to love to chase squirrels in Central Park. At the time he was still having panic attacks on the streets, but was entirely calm in the park. In fact, I’d been trying to find a way to get him to play tug and fetch outdoors in order to cure those panic attacks, but his only way of expressing his prey drive was by stalking and chasing squirrels. Understand, I wasn’t as concerned with the fact that he was chasing squirrels; they were always too fast for him to actually catch. I was more concerned that he ignored me completely when he went into hunting mode. His attitude was, “I know you’re going the other direction. Don’t worry about me, I’ll catch up when I’m done here...”

So, one day I took some juicy pieces of chicken breast to the park. When Freddie spotted a squirrel and began stalking it—which he did by freezing, like a setter or pointer—I walked over and put the chicken in front of his nose to distract him; to try to get him to pay attention to me (or at least the chicken) and not the squirrel. He just ignored it. In fact, he kept moving his head around because my hand was blocking his line of sight. So I finally put it right into his mouth (which was open slightly). He let that juicy slice of chicken just sit right on top of his tongue for about half a second, then dropped it — ptaahh — onto the ground, keeping his eyes on the squirrel the whole time.

I was stumped. If I couldn’t distract him by putting a piece of chicken right into his mouth, how could I get his attention? Then it hit me: I would hunt squirrels with him. Maybe that would also solve my other problem; how to get Fred to share his prey drive with me. So, I put the chicken in my pocket, and later, while Freddie was sniffing around, I spotted another squirrel, one that he hadn’t seen yet himself.

In a hushed, highly emotionally charged voice I whispered, “There he is!” and began stalking the squirrel myself.

Freddie eventually picked up on my mood, and when he did, he saw the squirrel too, and dropped into his stalking stance. We were now hunting together. Fred didn’t know it yet, but I was now in control of the game.

We did this for a few days, then I added a new twist. We’d stalk a squirrel together but at some point, I’d make a quick move toward the squirrel, motivating it to run up the nearest tree. This always set Freddie racing off after the the little critter. While he did that, I'd pick up a stick, hoot excitedly and run away, waving it for Freddie to see.

Freddie would then be forced to choose between chasing the squirrel, and then circling the tree to no avail, or chasing me and the stick. In the beginning he always went immediately for the squirrel. But the thing is, the squirrels always went up a tree, leaving Freddie with nothing to sink his teeth into. That’s the critical thing here.

Meanwhile, I was still enticing him with a stick. Once he started to come toward me, I’d shout, “Freddie, come!” (while he was already running toward me). Then, once he got to me, I’d invite him to jump up on me and play tug-of-war. I either let him win, or, if he lost his grip, I immediately threw the stick for him to chase, which he did with the same intensity, more or less, that he had for chasing the squirrel. Once the stick was in Freddie’s mouth and he was able to lie down in the grass and crunch down on it with his jaws and “kill” it, he was truly satisfied. He never got that satisfaction from chasing squirrels because he never got a chance to bite one. After just a few weeks of following these steps, whenever Freddie saw a squirrel, all I had to do was whistle, or say, “Freddie, come!” and he’d immediately turn and run back to me for a game of fetch.

Of course, from the traditional standpoint, everything I did to change Freddie’s behavior was wrong:

1.) I encouraged him to chase squirrels, which squirrel-lovers disapproved of (I told them it was just a squirrel aerobics class)

2.) I encouraged him to jump up on me, and

3.) I was not only playing tug-of-war with him, I was letting him win!

These were all huge no-nos in the dog training world at the time. But doing each of these things helped me take charge of Freddie’s emotional energy. That was the whole point.

Here’s how and why it worked: when Freddie saw a squirrel he became filled with an emotional charge. He was so charged up in fact that nothing could get his attention away from his intended prey, not even a juicy piece of chicken sitting on his tongue! By immersing (or pretending to immerse) myself in the same emotions that he was feeling, I created a dynamic, magnetic charge between us. Then, by getting him to jump up on me and play tug-of-war, I decreased his resistance to my position as a vertical being and gave him the satisfaction of crunching something with his teeth.

It also helped that Freddie’s m.o. in hunting squirrels was to stalk them; to try to sneak up as close as he could. Then, when they started to run towards the nearest tree, he’d give chase. If he’d been an instant chaser like some dogs, this wouldn’t have worked.

Now, I’m not recommending that you chase squirrels with your dog. It just happened to work with Freddie due to a number of contributing factors that I was aware of at the time, and that you might not be with your dog. What I am recommending is that you find a way to take charge of your dog’s emotional energy, not so that you can always be in control of everything the dog does, but so that the dog can be in control of his own behavior, and doesn’t need you to constantly be telling him what to do (which is something some people seem to enjoy).

Here’s the thing: if you don’t have “willing” squirrels as your guinea pigs when teaching your dog to re-direct her energy into something safe to bite, and especially if your dog is more apt to go after children or skateboarders or other dogs, you have got, got, got to be able to get her addicted to tug before you put her in a situation where she’s going to come up against her biggest bite-temptation. Squirrels are wily and can run up trees. They’re safe (more or less). Kids and skateboarders and other dogs don’t have as easy a time escaping those teeth. So work on the pushing exercise first, then work on redirecting your dog’s energy into a game of tug, or just on heeling, or jumping up on command. 

The more you do that, the less tempting these other things will be.

LCK

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How to Do an Alpha Roll

There’s been a recent resurgence in the use of the alpha roll. But most people I’ve observed have been doing it all wrong. Hopefully some of them will get a chance to read this. If not, feel free to give them your input...

The Proper Way to Do an Alpha Roll

Don't worry. This isn't the right way to do it. 

Last week at the dog run at 72nd Street in Riverside Park, near where I live in New York City, I saw a dog walker actually pick up a dog, then throw him onto the ground as hard as he could from three feet up in the air! And the dog hadn’t done anything wrong, he was just acting a little too energetic.

Why did this idiot dogwalker think throwing the poor dog down on his back like that was the right thing to do? I can’t say for sure, but the guy probably thought he was doing an “alpha roll.” 

So what is the alpha roll exactly. And how is it supposed to work?

It’s a way of either pinning a dog on her back and forcing her to roll over on one side, or giving her the down command and then forcing her into a “submissive” position. It’s given the name alpha roll to suggest that it imitates the way an alpha wolf will discipline a subordinate pack member to establish his leadership. In dog training it is said to work by communicating your position as pack leader to a dog through his inherited instincts to obey the alpha wolf.

The technique was first popularized in the 1970s by the Monks of New Skete. Their version involved not only the simple movements described above, but grabbing the dog by the throat, throwing him down on his back and screaming “No!” in his face. (They’re lovely, those monks.)

In The Intelligence of Dogs, Stanley Coren gives us a kinder, gentler version: “You should deliberately manipulate and restrain your dog on a regular basis, placing it in a position that, for wild canids, signifies submission to the authority of a dominant member of the pack.”

The funny thing is, around the same time I read Coren’s advice I also saw a documentary about wolves on TV. At one point in the film a papa wolf (i.e., the pack leader), rolled over on his back, ‘signifying submission’ to his puppies, and encouraged them to jump on his stomach and chest and even allowed them to nip at his ears and nose. Right away I began doing this myself with my own dog. I got down on my hands and knees, did a play bow, started batting my hands at his body, getting him riled up and in the mood to play, then I rolled over on my back, pretending to be submissive.

“Oh no! You got me! You killed me! 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: cock his head, look at me, look back at whatever he’d been sniffing, and then slowly trot back to me.

Instead he turned and came running back to me at full speed, ending 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 dynamic between us. As a result he was immediately far more obedient to all my commands, plus his response time went from semi-lackadaisical to lightning-fast!
Over the next few months I tried my “submissive” act on some of the dogs I was training, including a great Dane. And in every single case it made them far more responsive and much quicker to obey. (Though I wouldn't try this with just any dog off the street—it has to be a dog I trust and who trusts me.)

So why did my acting “submissive” have the seemingly strange result of making all these dogs more obedient?

It might help us understand this better if we knew a little more about how a genuine wolf pack really operates.

There are 4 basic elements of life in the wild for a wolf pack:

1) The Hunt, where wolves work together as a cohesive social group in order to hunt and kill large prey.

2) Den Life, where the wolves sleep and rest up for the next hunt.

3) Play, which prepares young wolves emotionally, and to some extent physically, for hunting.

4) Mating, which is the process whereby new wolves are created so that the pack can continue hunting.


Do you see where I’m going with this? Everything in pack life is either directly related or eventually ties back to the need to hunt as a group.

So where does the alpha roll fit into these areas of life in the wild?

It doesn’t. There is a behavior called "pinning," which sometimes occurs in wolf packs. But it's usually part of a highly aggressive contest for physical supremacy, one that would be quite easy for a human to win if he or she were interacting with a small breed of dog, but could be very dangerous if attempted with a large German shepherd or Rottweiler. Even a Chihuahua is liable to bite back if treated this way. And even it weren't dangerous, it's not the best way to engender a spirit of cooperation between a dog and owner.

When dogs “misbehave” they're basically showing us that they don’t know what else to do with their energy. The alpha roll at its most violent teaches the dog to be defensive about how she uses her energy, and builds up feelings that in humans we would think of as resentment. Her energy may seem to be under the owner or trainer’s control, but will often simmer inside and come out as aggression toward others, or be directed inward, and express itself as fearful behaviors or a general lack of interest in life. 

 

But even when the alpha roll is done in its gentlest form, with the dog obeying the down command, and then being gently rolled over on her side (which is not a good way to reward her for obeying your commands, by the way), the exercise does nothing to teach the dog how to use her energy properly. It only puts a lid on it momentarily.
So what is the proper way to do the alpha roll?

If there is a proper way, this is it!

Technically, there is no proper way to do an alpha roll. If anything you should do the exact opposite, as I did with Freddie. 

However, if you want to be a true pack leader just imitate the papa wolf—have fun, play hunting games with your dog, get down on her level. Remember, wolves hunt by working together, which is one instinct that really does exist in both dogs and wolves. And as for exerting control in a pressure situation, a dog who routinely plays tug and fetch and chase me with her owners is far more likely to respond properly in a crunch than a dog who’s merely had a lid clamped down on her emotional pressure cooker and pushed over on her side in a nonsensical display of some mythical instinct that doesn’t actually exist.

LCK 
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Of Philosphers and Flatworms

This post is part of a blog carnival hosted by Neil Sattin. It was originally posted on Feb. 8, 2008. It was modified and re-posted later that week, on Feb. 15.

It’s In His Blood, It’s In His Heart:

Why the Wolf Model Is Still Relevant to Dog Training

I'm not a fan of the dominance or pack leader approach to dog training. I've been writing for years about its potentially harmful and unscientific nature. But in the past six or seven years, many in the positive training movement have been denying or denigrating the importance of wolf behavior when it comes to understanding dogs. On a certain level, this makes sense; there is a wide gulf, behaviorally speaking, between them. And yet the two also share a very long evolutionary history. And some of the traits, unique to wolves—hunting large, dangerous prey by working as a cohesive hunting unit, sublimating their urge to bite into ritualized social behaviors—are what enabled dogs to domesticate us (or vice versa), and helped them morph into becoming the most diverse and socially adaptable species on earth.

Do All Animals Learn the Same Way?

Behaviorist and positive training maven Patricia McConnell (who actually holds a degree in anthropology, not behavioral science) is among those denying the importance of the wolf model when working with dogs. (This despite the irony that one of her booklets is titled, How to Be Your Dog's Pack Leader!) She, and many others in the positive movement, have been putting out a continuous public relations campaign to try to steer people away from dominance techniques, and convince them to use positive reinforcement instead. That's a fine goal, but in my view, they're being deliberately dishonest about it. 

For instance, 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.”

Doesn’t that strike you as just a little bit off?

Of course, what McConnell means is that when an organism of any kind finds that certain behaviors produce positive consequences, that organism will have a tendency to choose those behaviors again and again (which is true—kind of).

The Torturous Origins of "Positive Training"
The idea that animals learn through positive consequences comes from experiments done by B.F. Skinner in the 1930s, where he half-starved some rats and pigeons, locked them inside boxes, then waited to see if they’d learn to press or peck a bar in order to obtain a food pellet. Eventually most of them pressed or pecked the bar, found out that doing so got them goodies, and began doing it again and again with the presumed expectation of getting more goodies.

Skinner called this “operant conditioning” and expanded on it by providing the animals with a “discriminate stimulus,” meaning the food would only be given when a light was flashing, for example, which is akin, on a very remote level, to linking a pup’s behavior to a verbal cue. (Remember, you’re not training your puppy while he’s locked in a box, in a controlled laboratory setting; you’re doing it in the real world with thousands of variables you’re unaware of, and your dog probably is).

Skinner was quite pleased with himself following one experiment where, after he’d stopped supplying food pellets to some pigeons, to see how long it took before they’d stop pecking the bar, even though the light was still flashing. The poor birds wore their beaks down to nubs. Skinner never achieved that same level of “learning” with rats, because for birds, pecking is a predictable fixed-action pattern (or modal-action pattern), related to food; it’s more or less stamped into their DNA. Rats, meanwhile, don’t have an instinctive “bar-pressing” behavior.

Another development came when Keller Breland, who studied under and later worked with Skinner, did an experiment with a group of animals who weren’t locked inside Skinner boxes. They were free to roam around a large, barn-like structure. He conditioned them to learn a simple behavior that gained them a food reward. And most, if not all, of the animals quickly learned to do whatever behavior they were taught whenever they were hungry. After a few days, though, a funny thing happened: the raccoons began “washing” their hands, the chickens began pecking at the floor, and the pigs began rooting around in the dirt. They all stopped producing the conditioned behavior in favor of their own food-related, fixed-action patterns, even though those behaviors weren’t rewarded. The real kicker is that the experiment with the pigs had to be stopped or they would have starved to death! As a result Breland said, “There are definite weaknesses in the philosophy underlying these techniques,” and suggested that animal trainers be on the lookout for what he called “instinctive drift.” (“The Misbehavior of Organisms,” American Psychologist, 1961.)

If we apply this lesson to philosophers and flatworms, we can see that McConnell’s idea really is off. Different species have different evolutionary histories, different morphologies, different develop- mental processes, different environmental stressors, thus different, fairly predictable predispositions to certain fixed-action patterns.

So no, they don’t always learn the same way.

“They Don’t Give These Shows to Chimps!”
It seems to me that the mindset that gives us McConnell’s logic, also tells us that the wolf model no longer applies to dog training. For instance, positive training guru Ian Dunbar says that since humans share roughly the same amount of DNA (98.6%) with chimps as dogs do with wolves, then, logically speaking, trying to train dogs by studying wolf behavior is like learning how to raise a child by watching chimps, to “see how they do it.” This despite the fact that a mere 12,000 - 120,000 years of evolution separates dogs and wolves, while 6.5 million years separates us from chimps. And even when you parse that comparison down by the numbers of generations rather than the number of years, there’s still a significant difference. And here’s something even more disingenuous on Dunbar’s part: we don’t, in fact share 98.6% of our DNA with chimps; we share 98.6% of our nucleotide sequence. And as cognitive scientist Daniel Povinelli, of the University of Louisiana, puts it: “New research has shown that rough similarity in our nucleotide sequences obscures the fact that the same genes may have dramatically different activity levels in the two species. So even where humans and chimpanzees share genes in common, it turns out that there are what can only be described as major differences in gene expression.” In other words chimps and humans aren’t anywhere near as alike as Dunbar would have us believe, nor even remotely as alike as dogs and wolves actually are to each other.

Meanwhile Dunbar’s analogy also crumbles when we consider that by some scientific forms of reckoning dogs are actually a sub-species of the wolf (canis lupus, canis lupus famliaris), while chimps and humans (pan troglodytes, homo sapiens) aren’t even in the same family. For instance, although I dislike Jay Leno*, I watched a wildlife segment the other night, just to see a gray wolf on The Tonight Show.

It was shocking to behold this gorgeous, majestic animal. We’ve all seen cheetahs and alligators and grizzlies on talk shows before. And they look dangerous and exotic and scary. But what was so shocking about seeing a wolf climbing into the chair next to Jay’s (technically Johnny’s) desk was that he looked very wild and yet very much like a cross between a big sweet German shepherd and a giant malamute. Leno’s wildlife expert even warned people not to try petting a wolf, if they should ever see one up close (presumably in a sanctuary; it’s doubtful you’d get a chance in the wild). 

The point is, we feel awed by something so wild and dangerous as a grizzly bear. The hairs on the back of our neck stand up when we see one in such close proximity to a human being. But while that same wild, dangerous energy is present in a wolf’s appearance and movement, he also looks so familiar and comfortable, like you actually could go up and pet him or kiss him on the nose. I think that’s what was so shocking about the wolf I saw on Leno.

Granted, you’d never mistake a pug or a dachshund for a wolf. But as Letterman likes to say, “They don't give these shows to chimps!” And no matter how much closer Jay Leno, for example, is to a chimp in both appearance and intelligence, than Letterman is (or Johnny Carson ever was), there’s still no danger of mistaking him, or any other talk show host, for a chimp the way there is of mistaking a wolf for a dog.

(I’ve gone off topic, but I did say that I dislike Jay Leno, right?)

The Wrong Model
Personally, despite what I perceive as Dunbar’s intellectual dishonesty, I agree, at least partially, with his point: that it’s perhaps unwise to try to copy wolf behavior when training our dogs, particularly when most of the behaviors we’re told to copy—the alpha roll, or being the pack leader—don’t actually exist in nature. (See “Is Your Dog Dominant, or Just Feeling Anxious?”)

Yes, some traditional trainers (like Cesar Millan and the Monks of New Skete) are still locked into the mistaken idea that dogs “think” they’re part of a hierarchy, and need an alpha wolf to control them. But that’s an outdated, and wrong-headed model. Hierarchical behaviors are only seen in captive wolves, and village dogs, etc., animals living under stress. Wild wolves don’t have pack leaders, per se, or form hierarchies; they’re more harmonious, less at each other’s throats, which is almost entirely due to the way they hunt together—something captive wolves are unable to do. This is true even at Wolf Park, where although the wolves are given an opportunity to “humanely hunt” buffalo (they’re allowed to chase them but never get a chance to bite and kill). As a result, even those wolves are often antagonistic to one another (i.e., they form what appear to be hierarchies based on captivity stress). That’s because they never get that final payoff through their teeth and jaws. That’s the ultimate stress reducer. And it’s why most dog owners have baskets full of bones and chew toys.

Who Knows, Maybe Dogs Domesticated Us...
In recent years a new theory about how dogs became domesticated has arisen, suggesting that dogs are not predators at all, that they became domesticated because they scavenged at human encampments, and somehow, through this kind of rat-like behavior of eating our shit and garbage, they somehow wormed their way into our hearts. Sounds lovely, right? (And a bit unlikely if you ask me.) It also denies a few simple questions that almost every dog owner inevitably asks: “Why does my puppy shake his head around when he has a toy in his mouth?” or “Why does my puppy chase leaves when the wind blows, or run after anything that moves?” or “Why does my puppy stalk the cat?”

The answer is that dogs are really predators at heart, and the heart of the puppy is the clearest window into that predatory nature. Think about it: a puppy is attracted to everything in the world through his teeth. He seems utterly driven to grab, bite, nibble, mouth, and chew everything he can. Do kittens do that? Gerbils? Nope, just dogs.

It’s true that wolves are generalists. They don’t just hunt large prey, they’ll also scavenge if necessary. So it’s not much of a stretch, I suppose, to think that it was only this aspect of the wolf’s nature that created the dog/human bond countless years ago. But I like to think that instead of individual wolves being attracted to us through our garbage, early man was attracted to wolves because of the way they hunted. After all, we were social animals, they were social animals. It’s a pretty good bet that we identified with them on some level. (The animal lore of many Native America tribes tell us that there’s a very strong likelihood that this is, indeed, true.) Even today dog owners form strong feelings of identification with their dogs.

There’s another element to this, by the way, which is that in most predator families the young animals are kicked out of the group once they reach adolescence; they’re not allowed to stick around with mommy once they’re big enough to take care of themselves. But wolf offspring don’t go out on their own until they’re at least 2 years old. If we look at the way wolves continue to nurture and take care of their young, we have to wonder why this is. What is the adaptive purpose, if any for this difference? It’s dangerous for most predators to try to live together; they have a tendency to attack one another. And what was the actual mechanism for the evolution of this continued nurturing behavior in wolf families?

I think the answer is simple: oxytocin, the nurturing hormone. I think it’s quite probable that at some point in time wolf pups kept producing this nonopeptide long after cougar and jaguar cubs did. This hormone, which also acts as a pheromone, is said to create feelings of trust and even love in others. And if our human ancestors were in an environmental niche where they had close contact with wolves, they would’ve been affected by it as well, which would also explain why we became so attracted to wolves intitially, and invited then into our campfires, etc.

So my theory is that in some long ago ecological niche, before humans thought themselves superior and separate from other animals, we were probably sharing a habitat somewhere with a group of wolves, whose young came equipped with strong doses of oxtytocin. This would’ve made us feel trusting of them, plus it would’ve given us an opportunity to observe the way they hunted together. If we were still struggling with the idea of how to create weapons to assist us in our need to hunt, and saw how wolves managed to kill large prey without them, and if we saw how successful they were at killing the kind of big animal with lots of meat on its bones that made our mouths water, the kind of animal we would have been hesitant to hunt on our own for fear of being knocked senseless by its hooves or gored by its horns, and if we were hungry, and out hunting rabbits one day, and saw how successful these wolves were at killing something that could feed our families for a week, there might’ve been a pre-historic light bulb that popped over our heads saying, “Oh, so that’s how you do it. You work as a team!”

It might have even taken us a few generations of letting the wolves do the work and then scavenging from their kill site. If so then the human/wolf dynamic as proposed by the current “dogs as scavengers theory,” would be totally reversed. We may have very well let the wolves do the killing, and even let them have the organ meat; we just wanted to scavenge that fresh, juicy muscle tissue (“Mmmm, juicy muscle tissue...”). Another possibility is that we might’ve even helped with the hunt. Being taller, with long arms what we could wave around in the air, we could’ve been very usefull at scaring the prey animals into running, one thing that’s sometimes difficult for wolves to accomplish. So we could’ve very well assisted them, rather than what was proposed in the old theory, that we taught them to hunt for us. But if the symbiotic relationship started because oxytocin made us trust them, which enabled us to we recognize that they had superior hunting skills and were primarily interested in organ meats, well, once they were through eating, we would’ve politely scared them off so we could take the rest. And they probably wouldn’t have minded too much. After all, that’s how symbiotic relationships operate.

So my theory is that we didn’t domesticate wolves, they domesticated us. (Though it was probably a two-way street, I like putting it the way I have because of how my own dog, Freddie, had such a domesticating influence on my life.)

Why the Prey Drive Is Important in Training
What’s so special about the prey drive that makes it important in dog training? Well, imagine that you’re a cheetah hunting an antelope. It takes a lot of focus and energy to take down your prey, plus an enormous amount of emotional flexibility. You have to be able to adjust your movements, your emotions, and your level of energy instantly whenever the prey animal changes course or the terrain goes from open plain to a riverbed or a stand of trees, etc. And when you get in close enough for the kill you also have to be extremely aware of the prey animal’s hooves and horns.

Now imagine that you’re a wolf hunting a deer. You can’t do it alone so you’ve got some of your buddies along with you. Unlike the cheetah you don’t have enormous muscular power in your shoulders and haunches, you don’t have claws, and even though you’ve got sharp teeth, your jaws aren’t as powerful as a big cat’s. A cheetah doesn’t need help with his prey, but for if you’re a wolf it’s very unlikely that you could kill such an animal on your own. (It’s been done, but only rarely.) So even one-on-one with the deer, you’re at such a disadvantage that your ability to adjust your movements and emotions, your focus and your energy, while hunting has to be double that of the cheetah if you’re to succeed. Now add the fact you’re hunting as a pack, which means you also have to focus on what everyone else is doing. The pack can’t succeed if no one is paying attention to how the others are behaving. You have to be able to adjust your movements, emotions, your focus and energy by another factor for each additional pack member involved. In terms of the level of energy exchange taking place and the emotional flexibility necessary to succeed, it could require ten times more than when a cheetah or other big cat is hunting its prey.

There’s another factor, too. Kevin Behan explains it this way in his groundbreaking book, Natural Dog Training:

“When I talk about flexibility, I don’t just mean the individual’s ability to react to change; I mean that all the members adjust to change as a group. This kind of collective coordination is the bedrock of sociability. Normally this might be thought to fall more under the realm of communication, learning, and intelligence than instinct. My premise, though, is that the prey [drive] coordinates behavior and controls the learning process. It exerts an influence that exaggerates slight differences in each individual’s temperament into gross differences of behavior, thereby producing the phenomenon of specialization. As an individual learns one role in the hunt, indirectly he’s halfway to learning another. Each job is not so much a skill as a different emotional state of uninhibited-ness. In such a flexible system of learning, where each job is emotionally linked to another, there can be social migration through ‘ranks,’ both upward and downward, as the emotional environment of the group adapts to retain the overall balance and synchronization. So while learning is dynamic and responsive to outside elements, it’s also predetermined.”

So viewed from Kevin’s perspective, the prey drive is vitally important in creating emotional and social flexibility in wolves. And if dogs share a genetic history with wolves, this should apply to them as well.

If you still believe the prey drive isn’t important in training, think of the way a dog behaves when he sits for a treat. He wags his tail and certainly acts happy, but his primary motivation seems mainly just to get the treat. Correct? How about a dog who obeys a command because he’s learned to “submit” to his owner. In that case you can tell fairly easily that his heart really isn’t in it. He’s primarily focused, at least more often than not, on avoiding a negative experience. Now think of the way a dog behaves when you take him to the park and he finds another dog there to play with. That’s pure joy. And think of the way your dog greets you at the door, perhaps with a toy in his mouth. He’s nuts about you. Or maybe there’s a dog you know who’s been trained with a tennis ball or Frisbee as his primary motivation and reward. In all three instances, as you look at each dog’s behavior, you can tell his heart is fully involved in what he does. That’s how obedience should be taught, in a way that energizes the dog and uses his whole heart.

Conclusion
While the dominance model of training seems to work for some people, and the Skinnerian model works for others, I think it’s important to look at this from a different angle. And despite the (yes) partial truth to Patricia McConnell’s statement, your dog is much more like a wolf than he is like a flatworm. I don’t know how anyone can contradict that. And contrary to Ian Dunbar’s argument, your dog is far more like a wolf than you’re like a chimp. Still, both Dunbar and McConnell are recognized experts in the field of dog training. They’re very good at what they do; they have much to offer. But the funny thing is, obedience training actually got its start as a way of duplicating some of the predatory motor patterns found in wild wolves. That’s a simple fact that McConnell and Dunbar seem unaware of: the down, the stay, and to a certain extent the heel and the recall, are all analogues to behaviors displayed by wolves while hunting.

Look, I’m not saying positive training can’t be a good thing. It’s a damn sight better than beating your puppy into “submission,” hitting her till she yelps in pain (as the Monks of New Skete once so cavalierly recommended), or stabbing him in the neck with your outstretched fingers. But has “positive” training really been “proven effective, scientifically” (as is often advertised)? Or does it sometimes work by accidentally activating a dog’s fixed-action patterns, the way Skinner did with his pigeons? I think it’s probably mostly accidental. But honestly? It could be a little of both. So why not do both? Use positive reinforcement if you like; but also use your dog’s prey drive. After all, for a dog there’s nothing more reinforcing than an opportunity to bite something in play. Besides, when you use your dog’s true instincts you won’t have to worry about “instinctive drift” or who’s alpha, etc. Your dog will simply obey you because he can’t help himself; it’s in his blood. And much more than that, it’s in his heart.
 
LCK

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*(Carson and Letterman went out of their way to help Jay Leno’s career, yet the first chance he got, Leno turned around and stabbed both of them in the back out of pure, naked ambition. Plus he's constantly stealing ideas from other comedians. In other words, he's the worst kind of show-business weasel. Plus, he's nowhere near as funny as he used to be.)