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One Year Ago

August 31st, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (0 Comments)

Cholula, one year ago

This is Cholula on our camping trip last Labor Day weekend, one year ago. We’d gotten her from the shelter maybe a week earlier, and hadn’t fully realized the extent of her problems with other dogs. Overly optimistic, we took her on a camping trip to a Maryland state campground where dogs were allowed. They put all the dog owners in the same area, so tethered at our campground, Cholula was in a state of constant anxiety as dogs walked by us–and also when we walked her around, passing other dogs at their campsites. It seemed that every third dog staying there had issues similar to Cholula’s, which made for a lot of lunging and barking.

Now, a year later, we are heading to another campground that allows dogs, and again we are taking Cholula. This time, we’ll be in cabins, so she will get more of a break. But even so, I’m interested to see how she will handle being at a campground with a bunch of dogs, one year later, after all the work we’ve done. I’ll let you know.

Happy Labor Day weekend, everyone–

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Cholula Meets Kevin Behan, Post 4: Building the Bark

August 22nd, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (2 Comments)

How did Kevin Behan reform my dog, Cholula? Basically, he bugged her into attacking him, and instantaneously softened, praised, and offered her food when she did so. Over and over again, interspersed, at carefully chosen moments, with introductions to other dogs, most of whom were staying with Kevin because they too were in various stages of working through aggression problems.

Specifically, the steps he took included the following:

In the “schoolhouse,” as he discussed his theory and how it related to Cholula’s problems, every now and then he would look at Cholula, raise his hands up chest high and slightly move them towards her, and stamp, and she would bark, once even charging him as she did so, which he immediately responded to with a complete softening of his body and posture, effusive praise in a gentle, soft, high sing song voice, and the offering of more food. Sometimes he would “bite” her with his hand on her neck or body, or tug at her paws. After he had gone through this several times, he had me stroke her on her head and down her back and praise her as well after she barked or charged. He brought out a large stuffed bunny and teased her with it, but although he had elicited the bark so easily, he wasn’t able to elicit much of a bite. Once, she bit the toy but immediately dropped it. He put long pauses between his “attacks”, and I noticed (especially later in comparison to other dogs he was working with) that he did not push her too hard. What he said about this was that Cholula’s energy is so blocked that even when she does bark, it doesn’t produce a smooth momentum rhythmic wavelike motion that builds on itself and would let him work with her extensively immediately. Instead, the bark collapses her energy, and from a long association of “bad” or “negative” with barking at people, she collapses into herself again and he has to give her time to be able to bark at him again. I don’t know how he discerned this in her, or how this exercise would play out in a dog that is less inhibited.

Then he left us in the school house and came back with a dog. A dog who had been left with him for several weeks for him to train her out of attacking other dogs. When the dog came in, Cholula barked! A good bark, a normal dog bark, not the aggressive, unhinged lunging and barking she sometimes does. Kevin offered her food, which she may or may not have eaten.

Then Kevin and I walked her over to what I think of as the zip lines. There are two long lines running parallel to each other, and a leash hangs down from each, so that a dog can run up and down the zip line while still being secured, watching another dog, if there is one on the other line, without being able to reach it. He also has another clip set up by the tree that holds one end of the zip line, so the dog can be secured in one spot.

Dogs on the Zip Lines

We went there with Cholula and the other dog. Kevin had noticed that Cholula has “balance issues”—i.e. she gets nervous about her balance, which he sees as somehow part of her problem with other dogs–and so he tethered her to the line that was on a slight rise, where she would have to work harder at balancing than if she were on the other line, which was on flatter ground. He mostly worked with the each dog one at a time and let the other one wait. His main prop was a big flat rope doubled over and knotted at various places. He swung the rope toward Cholula and around her legs gently (he never did anything with the rope that would hurt her), trying to bug her into “attacking” him back with a bark or a bite.

At first, Cholula went through a tremendous effort not to attack back. She shrank away from the rope and Kevin, pulled back one way and then the other to avoid him and then, panicking, jumped up on her hind legs, swinging and lunging and jerking her head in avoidance until she briefly hung herself, after which she managed to pull her head out of her choke collar. (Kevin said he’d never seen a dog get out of that collar before). So Kevin put her in a double collar and let her wind herself around and around the rope the next time she panicked, unable to twist free.

As we watched this, Kevin said he could tell that she had learned that panicking works for her, and we had to move her through an understanding that panicking didn’t work anymore and that what worked was standing her ground and letting her energy out in a bark. I asked him, she’s learned that panicking works for what? He said it works for her to release her pent up energy. When she’s afraid, she panics, the energy is released, and the moment passes. In other words, when she’s afraid of a little white dog across the street, she panics and lunges in blind fear and fury at the dog, the energy is released, and the moment passes. Kevin said that from her perspective, this sequence has taught her that the panic has successfully resolved the situation.

So Kevin would swing the rope at her legs, she would panic, Kevin would ignore the panic and bug her with the rope again. Cholula, after repeated unsuccessful attempts to flee from the rope, followed by new rope “attacks”, finally stood her ground and barked. Immediately, Kevin softened and praised her effusively, and rubbed her fur, and threw down food, which I was interested to see she did not eat (still holding back). From that moment on, Cholula stood her ground more and more certainly, and her bark became fiercer and fiercer.

Cholula stands her ground

Eventually, Kevin brought over a new dog, another of the problem dogs he is working with—and Cholula barked!—her tail wagging. And the dog looked at her calmly, and then they stood there wagging their tails. Looking back, I think this was the bulk of the progression that occurred—that the rope sequence, followed by the successful introduction of the other dog, which he repeated the next day, transformed the way she views the world when we walk down the street in Washington, D.C. Kevin said that he was trying to make the rope her worst nightmare, a more intense threat than another dog. Then, when he brings a dog over, the threat of the dog is lesser in comparison to what the dog has just faced down with the rope. And somehow, having faced down that rope, Cholula just doesn’t react to dogs in D.C. with the intensity that she used to.

Cholula did not fully bite the rope as Kevin would have liked her to do. I watched him with another dog, who had come along further along in Kevin’s program than Cholula, and this dog was joyfully grabbing the rope with her mouth, leaping and writhing in the air as she tugged the rope from him, giving her completely uninhibited energy to the rope and him—that is much closer to the ideal than where Cholula got. However, the journey he took her on not only enabled us to walk by other dogs without crossing the street, but it has given me the chance to work with her newly unlocked intensity and drive, an intensity and drive I could not get her to direct towards me before Kevin helped her gain the confidence to do so. Maybe, eventually, she will play tug of war with all her heart, like the other dog did, and maybe, eventually, her confidence will grow until we don’t have to approach each dog gingerly, until she is willing to do more than stand her ground calmly, but also to show her soft side to an excited dog, to play, to yield. We’re not there yet, but we’ve gotten closer.

The Boxer Bites

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Cholula Meets Kevin Behan Post 3: The Transformation

August 10th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (1 Comments)

Cholula at the Kevin Behan Academy in Newfane, Vermont

Besides my fascination with understanding more about how Kevin Behan’s natural dog training method works, there were two reasons I went to Vermont—two related but distinct areas where, after almost a year of working with Cholula, I was stalled. The first was in our general training work—there was a limit to the energy I could get out of her most of the time. She would push with me reliably on walks and in the back yard, but except for moments when somehow her deep energy got triggered (such as after the vet visit, which I wrote about recently) there was a tepidness to her pushing—yes, she would jump up and push into my hand for her food, but I got the feeling she was doing it because she knew I wanted her to and after all it wasn’t so bad—she was not pushing with her real true energy, the energy of the hunt. I’ve seen her hunt, mostly for rats in the neighborhood, and the dog has drive. But I wasn’t seeing this drive in our training work. Similarly, I’d started to work with her on heeling, and while she was doing okay, she was hanging back slightly when I walked, and I couldn’t figure out how to shake that off. In his first book, Natural Dog Training, Kevin writes about the heel training, “If there is no resistance in the dog’s system, you can sense a certain bounce to his gait. It’s helpful if the handler tries to “catch it” and match it with his own stride. If you are able to get in sync with your dog in this way, your verbal praise to celebrate the event will become a very powerful motivation to your dog.” The bounce was missing.

The second issue was that she still had a rush of anxiety pretty much every time we passed a dog on a leash. The rush rarely turned into any kind of a lunge anymore—partly because I was better at managing things—always crossing the street, always ready with food to get her to push and praise her for it—and largely because even if it was slightly tepid, the pushing would lessen her focus on the dog until the dog had passed. But nevertheless, the charge was clearly there, and as long as it was, I feared that aggression could come out of it—and so I still wasn’t able to have what I would consider a relaxing walk with my dog—one where I didn’t have to cross the street every time another dog came towards us—at times dragging three small children with me—where I didn’t have to get in front of her to peer around every corner to make sure a dog wasn’t going to surprise us, where I didn’t have to choose my routes so that I wouldn’t be trapped on a narrow sidewalk on a street too busy to cross at a second’s notice. There are several nice running routes in the park I wouldn’t take her on because in places the path runs narrowly along a creek and a busy parkway and I didn’t want to be trapped with her where we could not put space between us and an oncoming dog. This was not the life I hoped for us to have.

I had quite a lot of faith that Kevin in person could help me with both issues—after all, these are among his areas of expertise—but I didn’t know exactly how he would do it. Looking back, I think I imagined something cataclysmic that involved a whole bunch of dogs—fur flying, gnashing of teeth, dogs trying desperately to kill each other until, unable to do so, they gave up forever. That’s not what happened. The reality was simultaneously more subtle and more intense than what I had imagined. And it worked. Even with Cholula’s (still present) limitations, it worked.

Since we’ve been back in D.C., Cholula has

(1) Pushed with a happy, tail-wagging joy I’ve never seen from her before.

(2) Played tug of war, both with me and a 12-year-old boy she’d just met who was remarkably good at teasing her bite out.

(3) Made friends with THE DOG—whose owner was out walking in ON A LEASH! At the owner’s invitation, I crossed the street to bring Cholula over and after a few tense moments, released my tight grip on her choke collar so she could freely sniff the dog and then the grass alongside of her former nemesis.

(4) Remained so calm in the presence of another former nemesis of hers—a small three-legged dog whose lurching gait seems to bring out aggression in all the neighborhood dogs—and who was barking at her (!) that its owner commented out of the blue, “Wow, that’s a well-trained dog.”

(5) Passed numerous dogs on the same side of the sidewalk without incident.

(6) Calmly greeted a dog as she entered a friend’s house where there never has been a dog before who surprised her by poking her nose right into Cholula’s at the front door.

None of these things—and especially the ones related to other dogs—were even remote possibilities prior to our visit to Vermont. In my next couple of posts I’m going to try to describe what Kevin did to bring about this transformation, this wonderfully new and improved Cholula, but there are so many pieces to it, and they are so subtle, and I don’t fully understand why or how they worked, that I fear I may not be able to accurately describe it. But I will try, because I hope it will help other people working with their dogs, and because its an amazing thing in and of itself to see such a transformation occur.

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Cholula Meets Kevin Behan–Post 2: Cholula the Deer

August 4th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (4 Comments)


One of the great pleasures of taking your dog to Kevin Behan for training sessions is getting to see what a master trainer, who has worked with thousands upon thousands of different dogs, thinks of your dog. Especially with a problem dog, who has resisted your efforts to become the dog you want it to be, whose issues have turned you into a constant amateur animal-mind reader, constantly straining to anticipate and handle your dog’s reaction to otherwise innocuous obstacles ahead—a dog, a squirrel, a cat, or, in my case the other day, a skateboarder careening by us out of nowhere the wrong way down a one-way street—getting this window into your dog’s soul is fascinating and illuminating.

Kevin, as he, Cholula, and I walked briefly in the woods by his training compound before starting the real training program, remarked that Cholula is like a deer. Kevin also remarked in those first minutes with Cholula that she’s not fully civilized, that you get the sense that if she had to, she might make it on her own in the woods in a way that most dogs wouldn’t. In fact, he called her feral.

Of course Cholula is not literally feral—she lives with us, eats out of my hand, runs with her tail wagging to see me when I first get home, and occasionally snuggles next to me on the couch. However, I think Kevin was identifying a wildness at the center of her heart. When Cholula enters the woods, she blends into them like a wild animal, and her eyes get a far away look that has nothing to do with me. When she first got to Maine for our family’s two-week vacation, she slipped out of the house at dusk and disappeared for over an hour. When she returned from whatever hunt she had been on, she came up to me and pressed her muzzle against my lips firmly, an unusual gesture for her, which I can only interpret as her way of saying, “Thank you, thank you for bringing me to this place where I can be free.” She disappeared repeatedly after that, drawn into the woods in a way none of our other dogs ever has been, until I realized that since it was hopeless to enforce keeping all of the doors of the house closed, I had to put her on a long leash whether she was inside or outside. (She didn’t fight the leash, so that worked fine.) When she is outside, even in our little back yard in D.C., she never comes to the door with begging doggy eyes to be let in as our other dogs always have. Instead, I have to go get her.

Kevin said that the problem with dogs with such a feral nature is that it is hard to make them want the food, the toy, the bite, the bark, enough to overcome the resistance they’ve built up to giving people their full energy. It’s easier with a dog whose energy is more at the surface and more people oriented, even if that energy has been used for destructive purposes. He also remarked that the deer is known as an incredibly stoic animal—able to take incredible pain when attacked without reacting.

He told me that it is very hard to get a rise out of a deer, or out of such a dog, and Kevin’s methods depend on getting that rise out, getting that energy out, so that it is not stored up to be released in a sudden, uncontrolled, and possibly dangerous way later, such as an attack on another dog. He told me this as Cholula politely refused the food he offered, even though she hadn’t eaten anything for a day and a half, and later, when she politely stood back rather than drink water next to another dog, even though she hadn’t had any water all day and had been working in the sweltering woods.

So Kevin articulated the challenge of my particular dog, and his articulation both provided relief—in the sense that it made it easier to put some of the difficulty I’ve been having with Cholula into perspective—and a clearer vision of where I’m trying to get with Cholula. He also warned me that a dog’s temperament is its temperament, and while its behaviors will hopefully change, you can’t ask that its essential temperament alter.

That said, Kevin had little trouble getting a rise out of Cholula. After he chatted with me for a while in what he calls his one-room schoolhouse while Cholula sat beside me, he stood straight and still, stared at Cholula with wide, wild eyes of his own, and then stamped his foot and made a slight forward chop with his hands—and Cholula barked. And Kevin immediately softened his whole posture and praised her for it. He did it again, and Cholula barked again. And again. And again.

Later, when I told my girls about it, it sounded so improbable to them that they immediately raced over to Cholula to try it. Neither they, nor I, have been able to get Cholula to bark by imitating that motion—and in fact the kids now refer to Kevin as “the magic dog trainer” on the basis of this one anecdote alone. But while this was not the greatest of Kevin’s accomplishments with Cholula, and in fact more of a test, a first step in what was to come, it has stayed with me as I continue to try to imitate his perfect choreography and timing as I work to bring out the dog in my deer.

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