 |
| Cesar trains owners Adir and Anastasia Ionov. |
“I tell people, ‘You know, we all have baggage, and some dogs do too. No dog is going to be perfect,’ ” says veteran trainer Joel Silverman. “People constantly come up to me and say, ‘Joel, you know I want to get a dog, but gosh, I just don’t want to go through it barking and lunging and running out the door. I mean, I just don’t know if I want to deal with all this stuff.’ I say to them, ‘You know, I have a great suggestion for you.’ They perk up, ‘What?’ And I say, ‘You need a potted plant. Put a potted plant in the corner, water it, it will grow beautifully for you, and I promise you it will stay right there.’ A dog, like a human, comes with baggage, and you need to understand, and be prepared for that.”
Dogs are social, living beings—animals with a history and an evolution so closely intertwined with our own that they can read our faces and gestures better than our closest genetic relative, the chimpanzee, can.1 But you can’t forget that they are a separate species, with their own individual psychology. Just as you can’t expect a dog to be as predictable as a potted plant, you can’t expect him to be a furry human with four legs either. And you really can’t expect a dog to read your mind. To teach your dog anything, from simple manners to complicated tasks or tricks, you need to build a relationship with him that honors the animal-dog that he is.
And most important, you need to look within yourself and follow some basic rules whenever you work with dogs.
RULE #1: BE CALM AND ASSERTIVE
As any regular viewer of Dog Whisperer knows, I credit the power of calm-assertive energy as the key to many of my own successful interactions with troubled dogs. Though calling this steady, confident, relaxed way of being “calm-assertiveness” may have been my idea, it’s not some sort of New Age concept that I just pulled out of my hat. Throughout the years I’ve been informed by professionals in many different fields—from biology to psychology to medicine to management science to law enforcement—that what I’m talking about has a very real basis in science.
“Calmness and assertiveness are the energies of the two main branches of our autonomic nervous system,” writes Sung Lee, MD, of the BrainWell Center in Sedona, Arizona, a clinic that specializes in cutting-edge, computer-assisted biofeedback therapies. “Assertive energy is the energy of our sympathetic nervous system. This is the energy of our ‘fight-flight’ response, which keys up the heart rate and blood pressure, releases energy stores, and prepares us for action or to handle a perceived threat. Calming energy is the energy of the parasympathetic nervous system. This is the energy of our ‘rest-digest’ response. This system builds up our energy stores, and also regulates and fine-tunes the fight-flight response. It allows us to manage our assertive energy in the appropriate way for a given situation.
“Many researchers have concluded that imbalance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic branches is a major contributor to human disease including heart disease, digestive disorders, chronic pain, immune dysfunction, psychological and neurological disorders, and others. It seems we can add ‘more likely to have an unstable pet’ to the list of challenges associated with imbalance in the autonomic nervous system.”
To project calm-assertive energy to your dog, you must be aware of how you are feeling and what energy you are projecting in every interaction with your dog. Every aspect of your relationship with your dog is determined by your own integrity and your connection with your own true self, because dogs are nature’s best lie detectors. Your dog is watching you every moment, noting the subtlest changes in your expressions and smelling every change in your body chemistry. Your dog knows who you really are, inside and out, weak and strong, good and bad.
“Dogs can read owners like a book,” Ian Dunbar agrees. “If an owner gets out of their armchair, the dog can tell in a second whether they’re going to the bathroom or going to get his leash. They just read the demeanor and they say, ‘Oh! We’re going for a walk.’ Or, ‘He’s going to take a leak again.’ So they don’t have to get up that time. And it’s so important to realize how different the dog’s brain is from ours. Because it is a source of a lot of frustration, and when dogs don’t behave, people do get frustrated, and that’s when dogs get a lot of abuse.”
Bob Bailey may have trained thousands and thousands of animals over the years, but there was one animal in particular he tried to avoid having to work with. “I have seldom worked with pet dog owners,” he told my co-author. “My hat is off to anyone who wants to spend the time and effort working with pet dog owners, because they don’t always tell the truth. I have worked with quite a few pet dog trainers over the years. And it has always been the case that it’s not the animal that has the problem; it’s the trainer working with the animal, because they haven’t taken time to actually analyze the behavior and what they are doing in response to the behavior.”
The moral of the story: if you want to teach your dog anything or influence her behavior in any way, then, “trainer, train thyself” first.
RULE #2: BE SELF-AWARE
Like children, dogs are always watching us and learning from our actions and reactions. If you shout at your spouse or the kids, your dog will learn about you and how you operate from that behavior, even if it isn’t directed at her. If you feel irritable or sick and take it out on your dog, she will remember the body language and the repercussions.
“It is important when we are with a dog to realize that they are always learning,” says Martin Deeley. “They are watching our movements, listening to our sounds, and, I am certain, sensing our emotions. So if you are feeling a little under the weather or getting a little irate, put your dog somewhere she cannot get into trouble and not be the recipient of your mood. Or if she is the one that can calm you, sit nicely with her, breathe deeply, and let each of you find calmness together.”
“To me, anger has no place in dog training, no place at all,” Ian Dunbar insists. “If you’re angry, go and hit or bite a pillow, or hit the wall with your fist or something. But don’t take it out on the dog, because you’ll go backward in training so fast.”
It’s important that you be yourself when you are with your dog, especially if you are trying to influence her behavior. You cannot lie to a dog about who you are or how you are feeling. So don’t try to copy my way of being or that of someone else you’ve seen on television or even at your local dog park. Learn your skills from the best teachers, from as many teachers as you can, and practice these skills thoroughly, but when you are applying them, be yourself. In the words of Hollywood trainer Mark Harden, “Be your best self.” Think about it this way—the chance to share your life and work with an animal that can bring out the best in you is a wonderful opportunity!
RULE #3: POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT BEGINS WITH YOU
I am constantly amazed at the attitude of some “positive reinforcement only” trainers who say hateful things in the press about those they don’t agree with—including, and sometimes especially, me! I try really hard not to take it too personally because I believe America is all about being entitled to your own opinions … but come on! Aren’t these the same people who are supposed to be all about changing behavior through rewards and not through punishment? Doesn’t that apply to human beings as well as dogs? I believe that when you use positive reinforcement or any kind of behavior modification method with your dog, the key to your success always starts with your own state of mind. To influence your dog’s behavior, you must always begin by being a positive, confident, calm, and assertive human. This is the definition of true leadership.
One of the most important things I want my clients to understand is that true positive reinforcement should not just be considered food rewards. It is also a matter of being in the right state of mind—a positive, open state of mind—whenever you work with a dog. You must be mindfully aware of your own feelings and energy, as well as the dog’s emotions. You should touch the dog only when she’s in a calm, receptive state—and reinforce her positive state with your own. If you are starting off with any kind of frustration or anger or negativity, if you are putting a stopwatch on your dog when she is trying to learn something new, then you are not practicing true positive reinforcement, no matter how many treats you might throw.
Positive reinforcement and the many different things that motivate your dog can come from anywhere in the environment, not just from a kibble box or a packaged toy. In LOSING THE LEASH - Dr. Ian Dunbar and Hands-Off Dog Training, Ian Dunbar talks about his concept of “life rewards,” which I love. As a reward, you can use a tree or a bush that a dog loves to explore to shape her mind. A tree doesn’t have to be just a thing that a dog uses for peeing, if you choose to see the tree’s potential. A simple stick lying in the backyard can easily become a dog’s favorite thing in the world, and that can become your reinforcement and the dog’s motivation in that moment. In this way, you are honoring who your dog is and what she really wants and needs, not just trying to manipulate or bribe her to get your own needs met.
The ultimate positive reinforcement is using other dogs—the power of the pack—to reinforce or to create a behavior. In Viper’s case, I used Daddy to inspire a formerly terrified Belgian malinois to want to come out from hiding and join me and my pack. Later I used not only Viper’s dog pack but his temporary human “pack”—my sons—to help him get through his fears in formerly scary situations. In one Dog Whisperer episode, I used a parrot to help me influence both Maxwell, an aggressive Welsh Sealyham terrier, and his owner, since the parrot was the only one in the whole animal-human pack that was practicing calm-assertive energy. When you draw on your creativity and find ideas from the world around you, you are empowering yourself to believe that you can influence your dog no matter where you are or what you have to work with—even if you have forgotten your clicker or your pouch of treats or left all your leashes and collar back at home.
Our dogs can teach us a thing or two about how true positive reinforcement works. Here’s an example that most dog owners can relate to. Your dog wants to go outside and pee. He sits by the door. You open the door. The dog walks out, but as he passes by you, he looks up at you for a moment and makes eye contact.
He just rewarded you. But he didn’t give you a cookie.
To me, positive reinforcement means the human-dog bond is so strong that we each do things to make the other happy, but we don’t have to give each other a cookie.
RULE #4: START WITH THE BOND
Although we don’t have to have an emotional bond with a dog in order to teach it something, the fact is that our close connection to our dogs can be a unique advantage and a motivation in itself. Building a bond takes time and patience, however, and trainer Joel Silverman finds that some dog owners attending his seminars don’t want to fit that part into their busy schedule.
“People can be impatient,” he says. “They’ll say, ‘I need to be the leader,’ and they want that to happen right away, but I tell them that the most successful dog trainers across America are the people who understand that the best thing you can do to build a great relationship with your dog is to get to a place where your dog really wants to please you and wants to make you happy. Then training is a hundred percent easier.
“I suggest taking two to four weeks,” says Joel. “And there are three steps to that process. That first step is getting to know your dog, just like a human being. You didn’t become best friends with your boyfriend or girlfriend, husband or wife, in a day. You’re just going to live with your dog and expose her to all these different situations, places, toys, and treats. Does she have a high prey drive because she’s going crazy over the treats? Does she like certain toys? Does she like taking walks? Does she like people? Does she like other dogs? Those first four to seven days you’re also going to see the things your dog does not like. Maybe she gets scared around moving objects, for example. Just observe and take note.
“The second step is developing a relationship. It’s real simple. You’re just going to incorporate the things your dog likes. All those things your dog liked, you just pick out those activities, treats, and toys, and people, but things she doesn’t like you just eliminate for the next week and a half, two weeks.
“Which gets you to the last phase, which is building the trust. That is where you actually begin dealing with some of those issues, maybe those fear situations like moving objects or people. You start gradually—thirty feet away from the moving object, and maybe we’ll hang here for like twenty minutes, but tomorrow we’ll go twenty-five feet away, and the next day we’ll go twenty feet away. And this works you up to get ready to actually start training your dog.”
As I wrote in THE BASICS OF BALANCE - The Foundation of Training, to my mind, balance is a more important element for a dog than training, and a balanced dog is a dog that is ready to be easily trained.
“Many times when I get a dog in for training, the first few days are the days I am working to find out what I have in my ‘canine student,’ and many times I find it is a complete mess of emotions and understandings,” Martin Deeley relates. “The dog does not know how to react, when to react, or who to even react with. This is usually a result of the mixture between the dog’s personality and the ‘training’ interaction with people and other animals it has had before. I work at building routine, understanding, relationship, and clarity of command for four days. This is done to clear the mind of all past incorrect learning. After about four days I often smile and claim, ‘Now we have a true dog. We can begin to build a real dog.’ Nervous dogs become more sure; aggressive dogs become more accepting and confident of being able to handle situations without resorting to aggression. But most of all, they get confidence in me guiding and leading them. Consistency throughout is essential, and a fair, patient approach, with understanding of their balance problems, is the way forward.”
RULE #5: START YOUNG AND PREVENT PROBLEMS
Back in the 1970s, veterinarian and behaviorist Ian Dunbar was doing postgraduate research on dog behavior with Dr. Frank Beach at the University of California–Berkeley. In this work, Dunbar observed a puppy named Sirius go from being a total bully with other puppies in one-on-one situations to an easygoing, socially appropriate pup when placed with a larger group of puppies and twelve adult dogs. Sirius’s transformation taught Dunbar that what might first appear to be fixed personality traits in a dog can actually be quite malleable in young pups. This means that early temperament training can go a long way toward creating a dog that is people-friendly, dog-friendly, and safe (acquired bite-inhibition), with the canine social savvy to become a relaxed, confident, and well-behaved adult dog.
In 1981 Ian got his first puppy, an Alaskan malamute named Omaha Beagle. Armed with his scientific knowledge of dog behavior, he set out to find a class for his young pup to attend. He was appalled to discover that every obedience school he visited made the claim that they never trained pups under six months old. Ian set out to change that ridiculous practice and designed his own class in conjunction with the Marin Humane Society. Thus, SIRIUS® Puppy Training, the first off-leash behavior class for puppies, was created.
For all dogs, what’s called the socialization period—from about three weeks old to twelve weeks old—is a crucial window for learning. During this time, social play with littermates and guidance and discipline from the mother (or human pack leader) help to shape the proper behaviors for a well-behaved adult dog. Dogs that are handled and petted by humans regularly during their first eight weeks of life also make the best pets and have the best lifelong interactions with humans. Those trainers who turned Ian Dunbar away were dead wrong—puppies can begin learning commands and tricks as young as eight weeks of age.
According to Ian Dunbar, there are three important reasons for puppy classes:
1. To teach bite inhibition, or gentle jaws—hence the puppy play sessions and dog-dog socialization
2. To teach a puppy to enjoy interacting with and being handled by people, especially children, men, and strangers, and thus be safe in people-dog socialization
3. To teach reliable off-leash obedience so that the puppy promptly and willingly responds to verbal commands even when distracted—hence the many training interludes integrated into puppy play sessions
Unlike so many commercial puppy classes that are just free-for-alls—a group of unrelated puppies and owners get together in a room and play in an unstructured, undisciplined way—Ian Dunbar’s puppy classes are fifty-five-minute play sessions that are regularly interrupted (every minute or so) by short training interludes. The goal is for the puppies to learn to respond quickly, reliably, and happily to their owners’ requests. Every time the play session is interrupted—perhaps by a sit-down-sit sequence or a ten-second down-stay—the puppy is then told “go play” again as a reward. Thus, playing with other dogs is used over and over as a reward for training, rather than becoming a distraction that works against training. Ian warns against the tendency some people have to just let their puppies play in their presence without some sort of structure; he feels that this approach leads to a dog that won’t reliably obey in adolescence or adulthood.
“What I’m doing with puppies is so blindingly simple,” Ian Dunbar told me. “Prevention is a million times easier than cure. Prevent the problem when your dog is a puppy.”
“A critical time in a puppy’s mental development is between the ages of seven weeks and approximately twelve months, depending upon the breed,” says Bonnie Brown-Cali. “This period shapes the puppy’s responses for survival. Whatever he learns during this time will affect him for the rest of his life. I teach a head-start class for puppies between the ages of ten and twenty-four weeks. There’s a little bit of a calculated risk because the puppies have not completed their vaccinations, but all puppies are required to be under veterinary care. The training class is indoors, on a clean tarp, and the puppies are allowed to socialize freely for short durations. This gives me the opportunity to teach clients about dog body language: when to ignore their puppy and let them figure life out, or when to step in and redirect behaviors. It is crucial that a young puppy learn how to ‘speak dog,’ interact with a wide variety of people and other animals, and feel comfortable in a variety of environments.
“Over the years I have trained numerous dogs with overly reactive and potentially dangerous behaviors. A dog that has bitten has learned that he can control a situation by biting. It is self-rewarding, and when it happens a few times, it becomes a shaped behavior. Do I think that means the dog is a lost cause? No. Can I take away the fact that he knows he has made people go away by biting? No. But, I have successfully taught dogs what are acceptable behaviors and what behaviors will exclude him from the pack. By teaching the dog that his owner is in control and that it is less stressful to perform an alternate behavior, I can help the dog be less likely to be reactive and bite. But, I can never take away the fact that he knows he can bite. He will always have to be managed.”
TRAINING SUCCESS STORY: BOOT CAMP
MPH Entertainment vice president of finance Catherine Stribling—who’s also a Dog Whisperer writer—always thought she was a good dog handler until she got Duncan. This hyperactive yellow Lab, now five years old, has been a challenge since Catherine got her at nine weeks. Walking on a leash was never a problem until Duncan came along. A hardheaded bundle of energy and nerves, Duncan forges ahead even if she doesn’t know where she’s going, impervious to direction or correction, exhausting Catherine mentally and physically without ever tiring out herself.
 |
| Catherine and Duncan with Jill Bowers |
Frisbee throwing, treadmilling, doggie day care—Catherine tried everything. Duncan may have been tired after these activities, but she was no better at understanding her owner’s rules, boundaries, and limitations. “Duncan wants so much to please,” Catherine says, “but she never could figure out how to do it. What we had was a failure to communicate.”
Fast-forward six months. “Everyone in the Dog Whisperer office notices how much calmer and more obedient Duncan is. When they ask how, I say, ‘Thank Dog! Bootcamp.’ ” Owned and operated by Jill Bowers in Burbank, California, Thank Dog! Bootcamp marries human boot camp to basic dog obedience. Jill is a certified human trainer and dog trainer, incorporating basic obedience commands such as “sit,” “stay,” “come” from a distance, and “go to your place” into heart-pumping cardio routines; the dogs learn to sit quietly by the owner’s side during the weight-training portion of the class. “Once I matched the activity to Duncan’s energy level, she began listening.”
Catherine is the first to admit that she’s a calmer owner now that her own nervous energy has an outlet. “Energy really does travel down the leash.” Because Thank Dog! Bootcamp has a revolving group of dogs and owners, Duncan has the ideal place to learn how properly to socialize with other dogs. Most important, Duncan and Catherine have forged a bond with their shared activity. “Whenever I would walk Duncan, my other dog, Rupert, would come along. Thank Dog! Bootcamp is our special thing. It’s where we learned to work as a unit.”
RULE #6: OLDER DOGS LEARN NEW TRICKS TOO
Of course, it’s ideal to catch a dog when she is in puppyhood and we can mold her into the perfect dog, but what about older dogs, especially those that end up at shelters or rescue organizations? Can they learn too?
“Older dogs are no less teachable than older people!” says Kelly Gorman Dunbar, dog trainer and founder of Open Paw, a program to help educate pet owners so that fewer dogs are relinquished to shelters, but also to help shelter dogs become more adoptable. “Behavior is always in motion, always adapting, changing. Older dogs may have formed habits or certain associations that must be overcome in order to progress, but with a basic understanding of how dogs learn, it is possible to change behavior.”
Kelly is passionate about educating people about the unique issues that shelter dogs face. “A shelter dog might get passed over for many reasons: it might not be as cute or as dynamic as a younger dog, it might be depressed to find itself in a shelter at this point in life, it might be frightened by the environment and not displaying its true personality, it might not be house-trained and therefore sitting in its own excrement in the kennel, or it might be coping with the stress by outletting—by barking, pacing, growling.
 |
| Older Daddy |
“All of the roadblocks to adoption mentioned above and more can be addressed by classical conditioning and basic training. Shelters can be overwhelming for both the resident dogs and the humans who come to visit them. If dogs in the shelter are clean, calm, quiet, approachable, and pro-social, the shelter will be more pleasant for everyone involved. Realistically, dogs only have fifteen to thirty seconds or so to make a good first impression on a potential adopter, to draw them in, so they’d better have the skills to impress the heck out of people!
“First on Open Paw’s agenda is to lower the stress level of the resident dogs as much as possible, which enables them to learn. A dog that has pent-up energy or is stressed and in fight-or-flight mode will have a very difficult time learning, as taking in new information is nearly impossible under those conditions. Teaching dogs to offer pro-social, human-desirable behaviors such as approaching the front of the kennel, wagging, soft eye contact, sitting politely, play bow, shake, gently raising a paw to the fence via reward training is low-stress on the dog [shelter dogs do not need more stress or pressure in their lives] and increases the likelihood of the dog catching the eye of passing humans.”
I’ve seen dozens of cases in which an older dog surprises everybody with its ability and eagerness to learn. My late best friend Daddy was learning new things and helping me with problem dogs right up to the day he died at sixteen years of age. When Daddy began developing the many unique issues related to canine aging, I made sure to carefully document every stage he went through, so I could learn to help others with senior dogs in the future. The Senior Dogs Project is a wonderful organization that promotes and educates dog owners about the special needs of senior dogs and, more important, the many wonderful things older dogs have to offer. The Senior Dogs Project maintains that dogs can be taught complex new behaviors at any age, and they share many case studies to prove it.
One example was a husky/shepherd mix named Autumn, who was the ripe old age of ten years when she was adopted by Laura Eland in Ontario, Canada. “When Autumn was turned over to me, I was told that she had no training, had never worn a collar or leash, and that her nickname was ‘Stupid,’ ” Laura wrote the Senior Dogs Project in 2001. “At first, when she came to live with us, she would sit in a corner most of the time, staring at the wall. She would also growl when I touched her or her food dish. I called a local trainer, who designed a program for Autumn and me to follow at home. After just the first session, I could see Autumn’s personality changing. She stopped staring at the wall and started to trust me as a leader. The nickname Stupid was replaced with comments like, ‘Autumn’s the smartest dog of the whole pack.’ At fourteen years of age, Autumn behaves like a six-year-old. She’s the oldest in her class, but also at the top of it.”
RULE #7: LEARNING ISN’T A RACE
Just like people, dogs have different learning abilities. Some dogs learn quickly, some learn slowly, and some learn at different rates depending on many factors, including what you are attempting to teach them.
You should never compare your pup to another of the same age. Even if they are from the same litter, their learning ability can be very different. The most important thing you can do is spend time with your pup and watch how she learns and is developing. Watch for a willingness to work with you, watch for independence and willfulness. Look for sensitivities, and identify what pleases and rewards her after a behavior.
“There will be times when your dog will be distracted, times when she will decide not to obey, and times when she will not understand what you feel is a familiar command because of the situation. Believe that your dog really wants to be good and do as asked and help her through it,” says Martin Deeley. “Even the most clever dogs can encounter difficulties which slow down the learning process. These can be caused by disruption, the particular activity you are teaching, or the tools you are using, because of unfamiliarity, fear, frustration, or simply distractions that take the dog’s attention away from you. Even dogs that pick up certain commands quickly may have problems with others.”
Consistency throughout is the secret. Even if you are not doing much formal training, you can think of every activity as an opportunity to teach. “If you do this as a matter of routine,” Martin promises, “one day someone will say, ‘What a well-behaved dog,’ and you will say, ‘Yes, she was a natural.’ ”
RULE #8: TAKE BREED INTO ACCOUNT
You will sometimes hear an owner brag about his dog by saying something like, “She’s a collie, and that’s the world’s smartest breed.” Everybody wants to think that their dog is “smarter” than any other dog, but what do we mean when we say “smart”? How do we know what makes one animal smarter than another? We can’t give animals IQ tests or ask for their SAT scores. Even if we could sit a raccoon and a pig and a crow all down at three desks, give each animal a number-two pencil, and start them answering questions on a timer, we still couldn’t compare their responses because, practically, they would all need to take different tests. Nature built a raccoon for a totally different purpose and ecological niche than it built a crow or a pig.
It’s no different with dogs. Although breeds of dogs are all the same species, Canis familiaris, human beings have genetically engineered most dogs for specific purposes as well. So we can’t really compare the imaginary IQ test scores of a greyhound to those of a beagle or a Labrador retriever. These three breeds are genetically designed to do different jobs in the world, so they have different built-in strengths and weaknesses that usually have very little to do with “intelligence.” Is a car mechanic smarter than a Nobel Prize–winning poet? Maybe the poet has a higher IQ on paper, but if your car breaks down, you don’t call the poet to come fix it.
Intelligence is a matter of perception, and the question to ask is: What does “smart” mean to you right now, for the job you need to have done? You may think your high-energy, agile Australian cattle dog is the most intelligent dog in the world, but if you are lost in the mountains and rescued by a slow-moving, sad-eyed bloodhound, then I promise you that you will be wanting to give that bloodhound an honorary PhD while your cattle dog is still going around and around in circles trying to find you. It’s all a matter of figuring out what your needs and perceptions are.
In terms of obedience and trick training, of course, herding dogs tend to do very, very well, and people perceive them as smarter because of the way their intelligence manifests itself. These are the dogs that can learn “math”—as in one finger means one bark, two means two, and so on. But the capacity for understanding “math” is part of the herding dog’s genetics. Herding is an incredibly complex task that involves acute awareness of movement and distances, spatial learning, lightning-quick responses, and even the ability to strategize. A herding dog is very sight-oriented and is always on the alert for visual cues and movements coming from the humans and the nonhuman animals around them. When people say to me, “The herding dogs are the smartest breeds,” they are also saying that the intelligence those dogs display most closely resembles human intelligence. To my mind, the jury is still out on whether human intelligence is all it’s cracked up to be.
Of course, training is all about helping our dogs flourish and become the best they can be, using all the skills and smarts that come built into their DNA. For instance, to watch a group of well-trained cattle dogs work a herd of sheep is to witness an intricately choreographed performance that is better and more seamless than the most amazing ballet ever staged at Lincoln Center. But you are not going to see a border collie looking for bombs. Their best assets are not their noses but their eyes, their acute perception of movement, and their reflexes. As a breed, they’re not going to be able to perform as sniffers as well as breeds such as the bloodhound, the basset hound, the German shepherd, the Belgian malinois, and the Labrador.
Likewise, when we returned to check on Viper the cell-phone dog—a Belgian malinois—after his two months of rehabilitation with us, Harlen Lambert gave us a demonstration of how well the new, balanced Viper could work. When I watched him do his thing and find all those tiny hidden electronic components, I felt like I had a ticket to the best detective film Hollywood ever made. You may not be sending a Newfoundland to sniff for drugs, but if you want to see one of the most heroic feats in the world, watch a well-trained Newfie do a search-and-rescue in the water. It’s like an action movie. Witnessing any dog work at the peak of its abilities is better—for me anyway—than any man-made form of entertainment on earth. And that’s what training a balanced dog can do for you—give you a free lifetime pass to Mother Nature’s multiplex.
Choosing the wrong breed for the job can definitely get in the way of the training you want to do. “Here’s a little war story,” recounts Bob Bailey with a chuckle. “We were doing work for a military group, and one of the animals they selected for us to use was the American basset hound. Now, his was a pretty high-energy job of having to go out and detect mines, and you had to go through obstacle courses and that kind of thing. If you know an American basset, I mean, they look up at you with those sad eyes, and they just give you this look of agony. Anyway, we could not believe their choice, and we said right from the very start, ‘This is not a good selection. You must have meant the English basset.’ There’s a world of difference—the English basset is definitely a working dog. It turns out that really was the problem. But we worked six months with those American bassets, and we were in hysterics, because they ended up doing what we wanted, but it took a long, loooong time.”
A skilled trainer, however, can overcome such obstacles, in Bob’s opinion: “A lot of people would say, ‘This is going to be a slow-moving animal,’ so they themselves move slowly. And the dog just moves slower, and so the person moves slower, and then the dog moves slower, and that’s not the way it should be. You can almost always perk up these supposedly slow dogs by working faster. If you don’t do it within a certain period of time, the bar is closed. You can’t expect too much at first, but over a period of time the animal changes what you might call work ethic.”
Beyond specific breed-related abilities, all dog breeds are capable of learning basic obedience. They can all learn to respond to commands and even to do tricks, depending on the limitations of their bodies, of course.
Bonnie Brown-Cali trains dogs to do search-and-rescue and to identify environmental scents for conservation work. She takes breed-related characteristics into account in selecting candidates for training. “For search-and-rescue, I look for a dog that’s a little bit obsessive,” she says. “One who likes repetition, has a lot of play drive and a little bit of prey drive, but a lot of just work drive, and who likes to interact with the owner.
“A simple test is to see if a dog will have the drive to search for a treat or a toy, first without distractions, then with distractions. I prefer to work with Labradors because of their retrieving instinct. They are happy doing repetitive work. However, there are many dogs, including mixed breeds, that are driven to do the same work over and over. It is not about the breed, but about the instinctual behavior and the task to be performed. A dog that is play driven but easily distracted by prey is not going to be focused on the work at hand.”
In other words, there is a training exercise and even a job just right for every dog—including yours.
TRAINING SUCCESS STORY: ANGEL’S AGILITY
“I got miniature schnauzer Albert Angel from Cesar when he was about eight months old,” says SueAnn Fincke, Dog Whisperer’s producer and director. “Raised for the book How to Raise the Perfect Dog, Angel was all that and more. But after a couple of months I wanted to pursue an activity with Albert that would not only challenge him but also strengthen the bond between us.” When SueAnn asked me about agility, I told her it was a great idea. Terriers like Angel can make wonderful agility dogs, and having raised Angel from puppyhood, I knew him to be a dog that needed lots of mental and physical challenges to be happy and fulfilled.
 |
| Angel and SueAnn on an agility course |
SueAnn called Cara Callaway, the owner of Jump City Agility in Van Nuys, California, and registered for a series of beginning classes. They met once a week at a local park.
“The course looks a bit like a circus ring—with tunnels, A-frames, tires, and teeter-totters,” SueAnn recounts. “Agility training is all about positive reinforcement. Albert Angel gets rewarded every time he completes one of the obstacles on the course. You simply keep trying to do the obstacle until you succeed, and you always end with a reward. Since Albert and I are still beginners, his reward is food. But I don’t just give him dog treats. Albert gets the real deal—small pieces of meat or maybe salmon. And because he is rewarded so much in the two hours we are training, Cara recommends not feeding him dinner on our training day.”
Agility training is all about you and your dog progressing as a team. Patience is key. You work one obstacle at a time—over and over again, always motivating and encouraging your dog along the way to finish the task. “You learn voice commands, so that once you have advanced to doing the whole course, your dog knows what obstacle you want him to complete,” SueAnn says.
“Cesar was right, Albert Angel loves agility. And it turns out that he is actually very good at it. We are still in the beginning stage, but I look forward to running a whole course with him someday.”
RULE #9: SMALL SUCCESSES BUILD BIG REWARDS
The brain of a puppy, and even that of a mature dog, will get tired more quickly than the body. Training and practicing new behaviors can be a great way to drain energy, which is another reason training your dog is a great way to keep her life challenging and fulfilled. But to build a solid foundation of learning, it’s best to work gradually in small increments, keeping sessions short and sweet. “Too often we expect our dog to be in university when she has not even graduated from kindergarten,” says Martin Deeley. “It is better to succeed slowly in small steps than to try big steps and fail.”
Nothing succeeds like success. Not only is it important to end every training session on a winning note, but it’s up to you to always be thinking ahead to find ways for your dog to be successful. Doing the wrong things could be self-rewarding, or you could indirectly reward without knowing it. “One good example,” says Martin, “is we love puppies to run up to us and jump at us—we then pick them up and cuddle them. Next they are sixty pounds of muscle and doing it to everyone. What was okay as a pup quickly becomes not okay as a big dog, or even as a small one which is overexcited.”
Ian Dunbar agrees. “What’s the dog’s only crime? It grew up.” It is far easier to instill good habits right away than it is to try to break them down the line, no matter what age your dog is.
RULE #10: BE CONSISTENT
The objective of this book is to offer you a wide variety of techniques and tricks for creating a well-behaved dog. Once you have chosen the way that feels right and doable for you, it’s best to stick with your strategy until you can make it work. “When I first began training dogs, there was one training standard, the Koehler Method,” explains Bonnie Brown-Cali. “With the advances in animal behavior studies, we have a better understanding of how dogs learn. I travel all over the world to learn from and work with a variety of trainers. I have found if you pick a sound training philosophy that fits your dog and your goals, and you stick with that program with repetition and consistency, you are going to have positive results. But if you start bouncing from one training idea to another, you are going to be confused, and so is your dog.”
Cesar Millan with Melissa Jo Peltier.
0 comments:
Post a Comment