Training Treat

Earlier this week I had a two vet visit day. Two different dogs, two different vets. While waiting in the exam room in both clinics I helped myself to some of the treats available on a counter (good treats at that, not just biscuits). I tossed them around the room encouraging dogs to ‘go find it’. I often use the isolated, quiet time to work on different ‘tricks’ with my dogs. It gives both of us something else to think about.

As it turned out Finn the border collie had gained seven pounds since our visit 3 months ago! The vet was not concerned and only suggested he lose 2 of those additional pounds. To see me in the exam room you wouldn’t be surprised that he’d gained weight, with all the treats that were flying around. The main contributor to Finn’s extra pounds was more likely caused by a change in his food. Since our last visit I’d had a nutritionist come up with a diet for him and I’d need to cut back on it. This is something I am more than happy to do. Not only do I think it is healthier for a dog to be at a good weight, it saves me money on food. Nothing wrong with that.

Both the vet and tech were very good about distracting and rewarding Finn while he was palpated, prodded and poked. At one point the tech asked me, “Do you give him treats like this at home?” Her meaning being, “Are you always handing out so many treats?” There wasn’t time for a proper response so I left it at, “No, unless I’m trying to teach them something.” The fact of the matter is that with four dogs I am usually always trying to teach one or the other something.

I’m a training opportunist, rarely setting aside time solely for training, but incorporating it into our day. At some point a behavior should be ‘trained’ and treats no longer needed, and for the most part that is the case. Do I ‘need’ to have food on me to get behaviors from my dogs. Nope. There are dozens of times a day I ask my dogs for behaviors and only reward them with either my thanks or nothing- come, sit, wait, shove over, off the couch, leave it- all happen without being followed by a food reward, or even the chance of one, countless times.

The resistance to using rewards to train dogs remains strong. I often hear a hint of pride in an owner’s voice when they tell me that they don’t use food to train their dog. We all need to continue to work on behaviors we want to become proficient at. I doubt you’d hear a concert pianist say about a piece of music, “Oh I know that one, I don’t practice it anymore.” There’s always room for improvement and one way to get it is to reward it. My dogs may never learn that going to the vet is a treat, but that doesn’t mean they can’t have a few when they’re there.

I Can Do That!

Owners of fearful or shy dogs are often told that they need to build their dog’s confidence, but just what does that mean? I start with the definition of ‘confidence’ which is to my thinking, the ability to reliably predict that your actions will have a successful outcome. A dog’s definition of ‘success’ will affect whether or not something actually helps them feel more confident.

Some dogs, like some people seem ready to plunge into life without a thought about potentially consequences (e.g., teenage boys), while others seem to hang back and need encouragement and time to try something new. Just watching another dog do something that is scary to a fearful dog is not enough for a fearful dog to feel confident enough to try it themselves. I could watch people jump out of airplanes all day and I probably never work up the nerve to do it myself. Anyone that thought that putting me in a plane and tossing me out, so I could learn how much fun it was, would earn a spot on my s**t list. Yet all too often this is how owners treat their fearful dogs. They may not be tossing them out of planes but they are making them stand still while a small monster pets them, or they are putting a leash on them and subjecting them to the attention of gangs of dogs that for all their dog knows, are out for his lunch money.

Toastmasters International is an organization dedicated to helping people learn the art of public speaking. Regular meetings help people learn how to construct interesting and informational speeches, while giving them the opportunity to stand in front of a supportive group of people and practice. Even with practice and a good speech, finding yourself on a stage with dozens of pairs of eyes staring at you can get your heart pumping and thoughts jumbling out of control. But with knowledge of how to deal with this physiological effect, it becomes possible to focus on your task and succeed. Each success leads to more confidence in your ability to perform in front of crowd.

To achieve more comfort in this situation you know your speech backward & forward. You practice at home in front of a mirror or with someone you feel comfortable with. You make mistakes and correct them, practicing until those mistakes are fewer and further between. You learn to take a few deep breaths, slowing yourself down before you jump into action. A good coach will remind you of this as you train. Bit by bit your physical response to being on stage begins to lessen, stage fright may never go away totally, but it becomes manageable. And if you make a mistake you discover that it is not fatal, you move on.

For some dogs much of the world is like a stage where their hearts race and their only thought of success is to flee the scene. By working with your dog to teach them skills they can use when faced with what scares them, they can begin to experience success in other ways. They don’t need to run away or snarl to keep scary things at bay, turning and walking away works just as well (and gets them a treat and some words of praise for a job well done).

Think about the skills you can teach your dog at home, with praise and encouragement, before you ask them to climb onto that big scary world stage.

Energy Wise

While I agree that our own energy has an affect on our dogs, I do find the focus on an owner’s energy to be at times confusing or just plain useless when it comes to training dogs. In Cesar’s Way owners are encouraged to imitate people like Cleopatra, John Wayne and Oprah. Huh? Now while some people out there might think they know what Millan means, how does someone really know what he means? You’ve got a self-absorbed Egyptian despot, a swaggering, gun-slinging film star and Oprah!

If you have spent a lot of time with dogs and are comfortable with them, the idea that your ‘energy’ affects their behavior may not seem so foreign, but for someone who is struggling to live with a dog with aggression or fear issues, who does not have a lot of experience with dogs, channeling Cleopatra is probably not the most helpful advice. Since each of us may have a different interpretation of what a good leader looks and acts like, the recommendation to ‘be’ the leader is not only not good enough, it’s dangerous. When some leaders don’t get what they want from their followers they can feel challenged and angry. Why set dog owners up for this kind of energy?

If you are working with a fearful dog there are actual training skills and techniques that you can use to help your dog understand what you want from it. Patience is probably more important than confidence when it comes to animal training, so don’t worry too much if you don’t feel like puffing out your chest and having your brother murdered so he doesn’t compete with your for the throne. If you are moved to channel anyone consider Mary Poppins, she was on the right track with that ‘spoonful of sugar’ idea.

How Realistic Are Your Goals For Your Scared Dog

Sunny pauses for reflection

If you’re an owner of a fearful dog you’ve heard it all before-
“He just needs love.”
“Give her some time.”
“Lots of dogs are shy at first.”
But you’ve probably discovered that it takes more than time and love to help a fearful dog.

If your dog is just afraid of some stuff, you may, with the understanding of counter conditioning and desensitization, end up with a dog that can overcome its particular fears. A dog that scurries away from the vacuum may decide it’s not all that horrible when it also means that cheese treats are doled out. Or a dog that believes that toddlers are some sort of alien beast (and some do seem to be) might be able to learn to see them as cookie dropping, ball throwing creatures they can enjoy.

But a dog that is easily startled and appears afraid of more things that it is not afraid of, is not going to ‘fix’ easily, or at all. It is possible to help a dog like this become more comfortable in its world, but owners and rescuers should remain cautiously optimistic for them. It matters because if the expectations you have for your dog are not realistic you not only risk disappointment you also risk losing valuable insight into the dog’s actual needs and abilities in your rush to find a cure for the dog’s behavior.

Fearful dogs like Sunny can have good lives. Sunny has many moments of sheer joy, if my ability to assess the emotions of a dog romping and rolling in the snow is accurate. I want to continue to help him increase his comfort level around people, since the world is full of them, but on a daily basis he is not required to face his personal demons so much that he is in a constant state of stress or arousal. My dog is a great companion to me and other dogs. He may never be a therapy dog or take home ribbons in agility, but he can come into the house when I ask him to, and even better still, wag his tail while he’s doing it.

Medications for Fearful Dogs

Whether or not to use behavioral medications to help your dog is a personal decision, but one which is often based on incomplete information. One comment often made by dog owners is, “I don’t like to drug my dog.” Fair enough. I don’t like to ‘drug’ my dogs either, but I’m sure glad that my dog with no thyroid function has a medication to help with that, and that my old cocker with heart problems has medications that have help improve the quality and hopefully the length of her life.

There are owners who will use herbs, supplements, and remedies without hesitation, yet balk when the suggestion of a tested behavioral medication is made. If we believe that a particular ‘alternative’ treatment is powerful enough to change our dog’s behavior why then do we not also believe that they are powerful enough to do harm to our dogs? Few of the products available to dog owners today have not been tested for their safety, whereas there are behavioral medications that have been.

Another misconception about the behavioral medications available today is that they are used to sedate dogs. While sedation may be a side effect of some of these medications, the reason for using them is not to sedate your dog. In many cases this effect decreases over time.

We know that behavioral medications can help with depression and anxiety in people, and many of these same medications are what are used with dogs. Their use in dogs is recommended along with a behavior modification program and enough of us have had success with this combination approach that it makes sense, to me, for owners to consider their dog’s behavioral issues and whether or not the addition of a medication to their program to help their dog may be beneficial.

We know that dogs get better at any behavior they repeat, inappropriate as well as appropriate ones. If the use of medications makes it easier for a dog to practice and repeat appropriate behaviors then it stands to reason that in the long run the dog will benefit by their use.

While it is wise to question the use of medications to help fearful dogs, it also is wise not to disregard them based on misinformation or the lack of information about them or a long held prejudice against them.

Just my thoughts.

Bad Advice

Advising someone with a fearful or shy dog to expose their dog to whatever induces fear in them, without encouraging owners to have an understanding of thresholds, counter conditioning and desensitization, is IMHO, irresponsible.

Every dog is different and just because someone has had success in improving fear based behaviors with their dog or even a number of dogs, using techniques such as flooding or ‘exposure’, does not mean that it is appropriate for many dogs. Forcing a dog to interact with or experience things that scare it can cause a dog to become more sensitive to their triggers (the things that scare them) increase their level of fear toward them and begin to behave aggressively.

I happen to enjoy swimming, as do many members of my family. The children all learned to swim at young ages and are comfortable and safe in deep water. It would be irresponsible for me to encourage any child or adult, to jump into deep water or dive into ocean waves if I am not familiar with their swimming ability. Neither should I advise a parent to allow their child to be unsupervised around bodies of water until they were certain that their child had the necessary skills to be safe in those situations.

Yet people routinely advise owners of fearful dogs to ignore their dog’s fears and put the dog in situations in which the dog does not have the skills to be safe and comfortable. Their intentions are well-meaning but without seeing a dog, the safest course of action for any owner of a scared dog to take is one which acknowledges the dog’s fears and follows a course of management and training that includes counter conditioning and desensitization. As well-intentioned as givers of this advice may be, they are often not there to pull out both owners and dogs that may find themselves in over their heads and struggling.

Go Ahead Comfort That Scared Dog!

Sunny my fearful dog

I’m not sure why it is people are so reluctant to accept that you can comfort, or reward a dog when it is afraid and NOT be telling the dog it’s ok to be afraid. Doctors give little kids lollipops, we hug people who are nervous, we hold the hand of someone who is afraid and we are not causing them to become more afraid. If we are we should rethink what we’re doing!

Some owners will say, “When I pet my dog, or comfort my dog when she’s afraid it doesn’t help, she gets worse.”

The conclusion they come to is that comforting doesn’t work. How about the conclusion that what they’re doing is not in fact comforting the dog, regardless of their intentions. If indeed they were actually doing something that did provide the dog with comfort or a reward that mattered to them, they would likely see an improvement in the dogs behavior. Why? Because anything that you can do to lessen a dog’s fear or anxiety is going to help them behave more appropriately, or learn how to behave more appropriately.

Studies dating back to the 1940′s proved that you do not reinforce fear by ‘rewarding’ it. It just doesn’t happen, our brains don’t work that way, and there’s a difference between how behaviors are learned and how fear is experienced.

Be a better trainer, not a stronger leader

At an agility meet over the weekend I met a young woman who ran a rescue organization. She was at the event to run her own dog, a small breed mix that should be auditioning for the next Disney film it was so darn cute. Between runs we met in the parking lot, she had a different dog, a pom/chi mix that was visibly nervous. It was relinquished by the owners because it had begun to show aggression toward the husband of the couple that had him. It was young and appeared to have a good shot at becoming a good pet for someone.

I chatted with the woman a bit and mentioned that it was lucky that the dog was given up at such a young age, too often people will tolerate behaviors from small dogs that they never would from a bigger dog, until the day they can’t tolerate them and the dog has had years of practicing an inappropriate behavior and ends up being impossible to rehome.

“Yes”, the woman agreed, “Why treat a small dog differently than a big dog”.

The woman told me that she was doing the ‘leadership thing’ with the dog and had not had any problems with the dog. At that point I could only guess what this ‘leadership thing’ technique looked like, but I was soon to see it in action.

Walking back into the building the small dog came nose to nose another dog and began to growl and back away from it. The woman bent down, grabbed the small dog and shoved it toward the other dog saying, “You’ll deal with it and be fine, that’s how you’ll learn.” I stopped, stared and my jaw dropped. Imagine grabbing your growling pittie or GSD and pushing it toward another dog that it was afraid of. Just because you can do something to a dog doesn’t mean you should.

There is no doubt in my mind that the small dog had no understanding that it was to learn that other dogs were not to be feared, or that it actually came to that conclusion. I will only surmise on a few lessons the dog did learn. Only time and the dog’s behavior will tell how that education affected the dog.

People are not to be trusted. The next time someone grabs you it might be a good idea to try to prevent that from happening.

Growling and backing away from something that scares you only makes you land in its face, try something else next time, biting might work or just give up and shut down.

Places where there are other dogs are where bad things happen.

The woman with this dog obviously cares about dogs and the animals that live with her are among the fortunate ones on the planet. But even skilled handlers still hold on to misconceptions about how dogs learn new behaviors and how you change the associations they have with things that scare them.

It’s not about learning to be a better leader, it’s about learning to be a better trainer.

How To Be A Friend To A Fearful Dog

Are there a lot of fearful dogs out there or am I just noticing them more? Since Sunny landed in our living room, and settled into the corner, my ‘shy dog radar’ seems to have been fine tuned. At the pet shop recently a young woman was browsing the dog treat section, her black and white dog, a young adult, was doing the same. When I turned to speak to the woman, making small talk about ‘kids in candy stores’ her dog took one look at me, ducked his head and stepped back, his eyes locked on my face. I’d seen that look enough to know that I should not return the stare and immediately turned my head. The dog resumed his sniffing of the various dried, animal body parts available to him.

“A bit shy isn’t he?”, I remarked.

“Oh he scares himself,” his owner replied, “Someone looks at him and he looks back and gets scared and starts barking.”

I tried to follow her line of reasoning (he scares himself?), but knew better than to spend too much energy on the task. The list of explanations that owners make regarding why their fearful dog behaves the way it does, and why the owner responds the way s/he does, is long, and might be funny, except that dogs are suffering.

While researchers and scientists may not agree on how animals experience emotion or which emotions those might be, it is accepted that dogs feel fear. Not only is fear biologically advantageous (do something or die), dogs that are afraid behave in ways that look a lot like the ways humans behave when we’re afraid.  We startle, we cringe, we turn away, we run, we scream, we shake- you get the picture.

When I was seven years old I jumped off of a high diving board for the first time. My family was on holiday and the hotel we were staying at had a pool. I watched other kids climb up the ladder, walk out to the edge of the board, leap off into space and plunge into the water below. My father asked me if I wanted to try it. Together we climbed up the ladder and as soon as I got to the top I turned and headed back down, weaving past the line of kids following us up for their turn. My father did not force me to continue.

Back in the pool I watched the other children jumping off and again my father encouraged me to give it a try. This time he said he’d stay in the pool and get to me after I splashed down. For some reason this made me feel more inclined to try it, so again I climbed the ladder, got to the top, walked out to the end of the board and leapt off, keeping my eyes on my father in the water below. I wasn’t in the water for more than a few seconds before I felt his hands on me, giving me support while I caught my breath from the excitement of it all. From that day on I have been a fan of jumping off high diving boards, rope swings, boats, ledges you name it, so long as I’m going to land in deep water.

I don’t share this story just to fill you in on my personal recreation habits or my childhood, but because it is full of lessons on how to work with a fearful dog. Two important components of this scenario which are applicable to the work we do with our scared dogs are these-

1. I had a trusting relationship with my father.
2. I had the skills needed to succeed at the task.
The person encouraging me to do something that scared me was my father. I trusted him. Believe me if a stranger had offered to take my hand and lead me up that ladder I would have been wide-eyed in terror, I might have even reacted the same way if it was my older brother. My father said I’d be alright and I believed him. He was not in the habit of putting me in dangerous situations and I trusted his ability to protect me from anything, in the way that only little girls can (and probably should) feel about their fathers. He had taught me how to swim and for years I had been jumping off the docks and piers a few feet above the surface of a lake where we spent our summers. I had the skills and experience to climb that ladder and launch myself into the deep end of a pool, I just hadn’t done it before.

Stand a 6 month old baby on their feet and let go of them and they don’t start walking, they fall down. Their brains have not developed the intricate and remarkable circuitry to control their movement and their bodies don’t have the physical strength. Someday though they’ll be able to, unless they never get the chance to practice (or have a physical or mental disability). Many dogs, especially puppy mill and pet shop dogs don’t get the chance to practice the skills necessary in order for them to be able to handle the social interactions, the delicate balance of acting and reacting, that a pet owner expects of them.

Some of them, with gentle guidance and coaching, in the hands of someone they trust, will be able to catch up and learn to enjoy being around the things that once made them uncomfortable (or flat out horrified them) but others will not, not ever. The damage was done, there’s no making up or repairing some brain development. All may not be lost, but for the average pet owner a dog like this is never going to be the dog of their dreams (unless they’ve dreamt of having a dog that prefers to live in the closet).

We humans tend to be an impatient bunch and rather than proceed slowly with our dogs, keep trying to make them stand up when all that happens is that they topple over, again and again. Some dogs will begin to actively resist our efforts, growling or snapping, others will give up. Though they may comply with what they are being forced to do, they are not enjoying it. And they are establishing negative associations with the experience, and the human forcing them into it.

It is possible to change how a dog feels and behaves around the things that scare them. And even a dog that isn’t exactly the dog of someone’s dreams can have a good life and provide their owner with companionship and joy. But making this happen usually means changing how we think about our scared dogs. It means questioning the things we’ve been told about dogs and how they learn new skills. It means that we stop tossing them off the high board and into the deep end and expect them to thank us for it.

Debbie Jacobs is the creator of the http://www.fearfuldogs.com website and the author of “A Guide to Living & Working With a Fearful Dog”.