Working at the awesome facilities of hogdogproductions.com/in Millersville, MD Mark's client booked a private session with the facility (really inexpensive to be able to use these great resources in a relaxed, private time). In this session we are really focusing on the handler learning advanced techniques of planning, focus and execution for competitive exercises. Toby is having a great time learning and playing and his mom is doing such a great job of learning to be her own coach and trainer!
Mark talking with Toby's owner about the principles we just worked on up on the dock. To make the most of each training session it is vital to review, in your own mind or with a training partner, what you just did. What worked well? What needed improvement? Where are you going next with your training plan...you have one, right? If not, you're planning to fail or at the very least taking waaaaaay longer to make the progress you want with your dog and you are probably repeating a lot of mistakes, missing opportunities for advancement and very likely making training far too repetitive for your dog and boring for both of you!
Professional coaching can tremendously speed up your training, make it much more fun for you and your dog and of course help be far more competitive and do so with a positive and playful spirit.
One of the
biggest areas of challenge for pet owners and trainers is dealing with dogs who
are fearful, anxious or aggressive. It is very common for me to meet with a
client or talk to another trainer and hear about how unchangeable these kind of
problems are, especially when aggression is clearly a result of fear or
anxiety. I often hear people talk about success in terms of relatively small
changes over fairly long periods of time, such as 6 months to several years and
these “improvements” tend to only be toward well known people such as “Well,
Princess has really gotten a lot better with everyone in the house and she's
even coming around some with my mother in law” but don't seem to affect new
people, places or events.
The dogs
typically, often even with quite a bit of training or effort on the part of the
owner, are still just as challenged by new people or circumstances as they ever
were. In truth they have only acclimated to very familiar things but have not
been fundamentally changed at all. Why is that?
In my opinion
this has largely to do with the dog's perspective on the world, it's
expectations. A dog who is fearful or anxious is a pessimist. In any situation
with which they are unfamiliar, and often even with those which they are quite
familiar, they expect unpleasant outcomes. They typically go into many or even
all situations basically on the edge of their fight/flight response, ready to
run, duck, submit or bite at any moment.
Imagine for a
moment that you go out to dinner and as you walk through the door to the
restaurant you duck in reflexive worry that something is about to strike you.
The owner comes up to greet you and sticks out his hand to welcome you and you
shy away. As you follow him to your table you are constantly turning and
looking behind and around you, worried that any one of the guests or staff
might at any time do something harmful or unpleasant to you. You get to your
table and the owner pulls out a chair for you...and you jump back five feet and
then only slowly regain some semblance of composure and creep back to the
chair, only after the owner has moved to the other side of the table to seat
your partner. The bus boy comes along to fill your water and you fall over
backwards from your chair trying to move away from him reaching around you to
your glass. This continues with the waitress who freaks you out by looking
right at you waiting for your order.
Finally your food
arrives but your stomach is in such a knot from all the fear and worry you've
been experiencing over the last 20-30 minutes that you can't even eat much of
it, you just pick at it and eventually take almost all of it home. Once home,
in the comfort of your own space on your couch watching your favorite show you
devour the food and then fall asleep from the exhaustion of being so on edge
and stressed for so long. That's the good version. In the bad version even
after eating the food you get into some repetitive, self destructive behavior
like chewing your nails till they bleed or pulling one strand of hair out after
another.
Now imagine this
kind of thing going on ALL day, EVERY day. That's how life is for many dogs
living with fear and anxiety. And even worse they owners often look at their
quaking dog and say, “She's ok, she's just a little nervous but she'll get over
it once you've been here awhile”. Not really the most empathetic response.
Personally I
believe the primary reason so many owners respond that way is not really that
they are so numb that they really don't care about their dog's discomfort but
actually has to do with the fact that they either don't believe the dog can be
changed or have no clue how to help the dog change.
The answer is
actually fairly simple and straightforward, at least as to the overarching
concept, you have to teach the dog to be an optimist, to expect good things
from situation, including totally new situations or people to which the dog has
no previous exposure!
The typical
answer we're given to what a dog like this needs is “socialization”. S/he needs
to be socialized more. What does that mean? In typical use what is meant is
really just “exposure”. You are being told that you dog needs to be exposed to
more of the stimuli that it has a problem with. I often refer to this idea as
alligator swimming lessons.
Suppose you never
learned to swim and you were afraid of water, leaving aside the possible
chicken and egg discussions of which came first. Someone comes along and says
“I can teach you to swim in one quick lesson. Meet me at my boat tomorrow
morning.” You show up and go out on his boat. He drives you to a lagoon and all
around are alligators. He points to a dock a hundred feet away and says if you
get up on there the alligators can't eat you....and then shoves you in and
takes off with the boat. It's quite possible that you will learn to swim and
make it to the dock alive but if you do so do you think you will now feel
better about water? Will you have less fear of water or perhaps might you have
an even more intense fear of water? Initially you may have had no clear or
particular reason to fear water, you just did, but now you have a really good
and concrete reason to fear water, you are absolutely certain you almost died
in it and have a strong association with water, alligators and fear.
This could be
true even if in fact there were no alligators at all and you just imagined they
were there. It may well be that the boat owner knew full well there were no
alligators at all and wanted to show you that swimming was safe. He may even
have tried to tell you, in a language that you didn't understand or were just
too afraid to panicked to listen to, that not only were there no alligators in
this lagoon but also that the water was shallow enough that you could stand in
it and that you didn't have to get to the dock to be safe but just that it was
a nice place to relax and sun yourself after a swim.
If you are truly
panicked about the water all of that could be completely lost on you and you
would see the water and the whole experience through your own lens of fear and
anxiety. You likely wouldn't care that five other people joyfully got off of
the same boat and had a great time playing in the water and that nothing bad
happened to them, you were controlled by your fear and in your mind the whole
event was a near death experience that you only survived because you
frantically scrambled for the deck and by shear intensity of your action you
managed to get out of the water alive.
This is what
happens with the most challenged dogs when people try to “socialize” them. All
they are doing is repeating bad experiences for the dog. A question I like to
ask owners and trainers who are doing this is, “Think of a food or a type of
music that you really hate. How much of that food would you have to eat or how
much of that music would you have to listen to before you would like it?” Of
course people look at me with confusion or like I'm nuts. The question is
absurd, everyone knows that repeated exposure to that food or music only makes
them more convinced that they hate it.
So why would this
be different with the dog? Why would Rover all of a sudden decide that
something s/he really didn't like was all of sudden (or gradually) actually
good and enjoyable? And of course that brings up a really important point, the
best you could reasonably expect from this kind of repeated exposure in most
cases is acceptance, not that the animal would actually come to like the
stimulus, just as would probably not come to like that food or music that was
repeatedly forced on you, at best you might just learn to tolerate it.
For me, this is
not a good result for our dog. I want the dog to move from fear and anxiety to
comfort but even further to joy and happiness. I want the dog to learn to not
just become some degree of comfortable with the things s/he used to be afraid
of but get to a point where s/he likes and looks forward to those things.
To do this the dog
must move from pessimism to optimism. The dog must get to where it expects good
outcomes, even in new situations with things or people to which it has not yet
been exposed. That means it can't only be good with something because it has
seen that thing or that person or that dog many times but we must develop a way
to communicate to the dog that something good is about to happen and that there
will be a safe and desirable (from the dog's perspective) outcome of the new
encounter.
This is not
actually that hard to do but like all good training it begins at the beginning,
not at the end. This means that we as owners have to first learn the tools and
process of how this can be done and then we have to teach these tools and
process to our dog in the simplest, least stressful situation possible and only
increase the challenges as the dog has success with the prior level of
challenge.
It turns out this
work can be done surprisingly quickly when done correctly and the dog can move
forward quite rapidly. The most exciting part for me is when we see a dog
encounter atotally new challenge but
through communication with the owner and trust in the process engage it in a
completely optimistic way, fully expecting a pleasant and rewarding outcome.
Once the dog
becomes an optimist the reasons for fear, anxiety and any associated aggression
are simply not there any more and the dog can now truly enjoy a full life and
his/her family can experience the joy they intended and expected in bringing
their furry friend into their home.
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