get up, sweet slug-a-bed, and see the dew bespangling herb and tree
Header

A Month of Pushing

February 2nd, 2013 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (3 Comments)

 January has come to an end.  Once I started my resolution to push every day in January, I pushed every day except for two: one day when I had a stomach flu and the last day of January, when I was also under the weather—so I made sure to do a make-up day of pushing February 1 instead.  Here are some things I noticed about the month of pushing, and about the exercise of pushing every day for a month.

    cholu flopsFirst, it relaxed me to make daily pushing the goal instead of trying to measure progress by outcomes—is she barking on command yet?  Is she heeling? Did X exercise work?—I made the focus of my training effort getting to the daily push, and as long as that occurred, I logged it in my mind as an accomplishment in and of itself, regardless of whether it led to any kind of breakthrough or felt especially good or not.  (and I went easy on myself the two days I didn’t make it.)

    Second, the daily pushing became a base level of training connection between me and Cholula that laid the groundwork for the occasionally more exciting pushing moments where breakthroughs happened.  Some days, I didn’t have extra time or energy to give to the pushing, and so to keep my resolution I just pushed with her briefly out in the back yard for dinner, or took her food with us on our evening walk around the block and pushed at the bottom of the block.  Typically, nothing special happened those days, except that we pushed.  But I think that groundwork laid the potential for the days I did have energy to arrange hide-and-seek in the woods, as I’ve written about, or for the moment when, on a night I’d planned to give low-level pushing on the sidewalk, a rat ran across the sidewalk in front of us and turned things exciting for Cholula.  While these exciting moments were when I felt we were making real progress in terms of bringing Cholula’s energy to me and away from various problem areas (running away, hunting small animals), I think most of them would not have happened had I not established the daily practice.

    cutie choluAnd in terms of results with Cholula?  I don’t have a perfect metric to measure them (and part of the point of the daily pushing resolution was to intensify training efforts without adding the stress of success or failure), but all in all I think my whole family would agree that Cholula is doing fantastic.  I can’t completely separate out the last month from the long, slow transformation Cholula’s made from the repressed, stressed dog she was when we brought her home two and a half years ago through my ongoing efforts to use natural dog training, I’m not trying to overstate the changes of just the last month, but she continues to be a softer and softer dog—my husband enjoys taking her out these days, my oldest daughter sits next to her on the couch, snuggling into her warm fur while reading, I no longer cringe when I see another dog approaching on the sidewalk.  The past month has seen a flowering of all of these things.  The photos are of Cholula hanging out by the side of a playground on an unusually warm day last week, flopping on the grass while the children played.  Maybe, just maybe, she too will learn to play–or more precisely, as Lee Charles Kelly reminded me, remember how to play.

Pushing Update 4: Hide and Seek

January 28th, 2013 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training | Nature - (6 Comments)

The East Coast has had a cold snap, even bringing a tiny bit of snow to Washington, D.C. And Cholula and I have been out in the cold, pushing, keeping my New Year’s resolution. I’ve been mixing it up a bit, trying to increase the intensity of Cholula’s pushing. These are the events that successfully increased the intensity of Cholula’s push:

• A rat ran across the sidewalk in front of us late at night. When it disappeared, I pinched Cholula and she whipped eagerly around and pushed with at least some of the intensity she’d been sending the rat.

cholu on top of her nail trimming wall compressed • A nail trimming: inspired by natural dog trainer Kevin Behan’s recent blog post, in which he describes using a nail trimming to bring out the energy in a repressed (and therefore problem) dog, I gave her nails a long-overdue trim. To trim Cholula’s nails, I take her to a wall at the park where I can sort of copy Kevin’s wall method. (For more on Kevin’s method for using a wall exercise to trim a dog’s nails without trauma, see Cholula Meets Kevin Behan—Post #1-the Nail Trimming from my and Cholula’s visit with Kevin in Vermont (complete with video). The photo at the left shows Cholula standing at the spot where I trim her nails. Since I’m hardly taller than Cholula when she is on her hind legs, I have found that the best way for me to copy Kevin’s wall climbing challenge is for me to stand on the bench, giving me height over Cholula, while I pull her up the wall, simultaneously making it more challenging for her to get there. I can’t do it nearly as well as Kevin (see above link to my previous post), but nevertheless, in the excitement of making it to the wall, Cholula lets me trim her nails. By myself, with no restraint–in complete contrast to my horrific two other nail trimming experiences with Cholula detailed in the above link, where it took several people to hold down a wild, thrashing, beast in order to trim Cholula’s nails. This time, I brought my fanny pack and food, and immediately after the nail trim had her jump down and push. Sure enough, she pushed with extra excitement, happiness, and vigor.

M in a tree 2 compressed• Hide and seek. Kevin has recommended playing hide and seek with your dog in the woods in many contexts. The first time I tried it, I had Pundit with me, and since Pundit never leaves my side when we are outside, especially if I’m holding treats, his butt was sticking out of every tree I hid behind, but that didn’t seem to reduce Cholula’s excitement over finding me and pushing. It worked so well I went back a couple of days later with no Pundit, a hungry Cholula, and my son. We hid. Cholula found. She loved it! We loved it. And while M was disappointed that Cholula wouldn’t seek him separate from me—I’m not sure how to get her to see him as the prey to find—he had as much fun being out in the woods and looking for places to hide as Cholula did trying to find us. At one point, a massive, muscular dog whose bottom teeth stuck past her lips as she ran intimidated M, and he cried and backed up, which made the dog hone in on him with scary excitement. Cholula flew down the path to us and saved the day—not by attacking the dog but by turning herself into an irresistible prey dog, by racing towards the dog with a puppy zippy gait that made the dog chase her instead of my son. And then later it happened again, and Cholula did the same thing. I never know quite what to make of Cholula’s take on our kids. She has always been completely gentle with them, and yet this gentles is combined with a quietly insistent avoidance of too much interaction with them. Although she’ll stay on her couch if I sit on it, she usually jumps down if one of the kids gets on. And although she’ll sneak on my bed when I’m not around, she will never, ever, jump on any of the kids’ beds, even they are not there, even if we try to get her to do it. And one of the reasons I’ve been thinking of getting a third dog is that she won’t play with them (eg. My inability to get her to seek M). However, when M was emitting cries of fear at this big hulking dog threatening to run him down, Cholula came through. She usually won’t ever try to get a dog to chase her, and so I interpret her brief transformation into an irresistible object of attraction to that big dog as a selfless act to protect the family. Is this possible? What do you think? And how crazy an idea do you think it is to get a third, playful dog to play with the kids and hopefully bring out the play in Cholula?

Here are some other hiding spots we found:

Behind the roots of an uprooted tree

Behind the roots of an uprooted tree

Inside a hollow tree trunk

Inside a hollow tree trunk

Behind some fallen trees that make a bridge

Behind the bridge of some fallen trees

, , , ,

Pushing Update 3

January 17th, 2013 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (2 Comments)

So far, I’ve kept my resolution to push with Cholula every day in January except for one stomach flu day when I was mostly bedridden. I’ve been fitting it in at different times–sometimes before work on the morning walk, sometimes when I get home from work either on or after an evening walk–and every now and then I have to use my fall-back of pushing during our late night stroll right before bed.

And another wall has fallen. After pushing in the back yard one weekend morning, Cholula played tug with Pundit. And then a couple of days later, she did it again. I don’t have a picture yet–the two-dog tugging doesn’t last long, and I haven’t been in the right spot with camera at the ready when it happened, so I had to use this older photo of Pundit with his oldy besty BFF Callie to illustrate. I would looove to put up a photo of Cholula and Pundit tugging together soon.

I’ve written about Pundit and Cholula’s relationship on this site before. But basically, while Cholula and Pundit have always mostly gotten along okay, between Cholula’s fearful, high-anxiety and sometimes aggressive response to other dogs when she first came to live with us and my misunderstanding in the beginning of how significant her dog-aggression issues were, there were a few bad moments–maybe four–when Cholula attacked and pinned Pundit very aggressively after being aroused by something–once Pundit tried to hump her, another time the sight of a different dog by our front gate while we were out on the sidewalk so sent her into an aggression spiral that she attacked Pundit just because he happened to be standing next to her. Then there were a couple of food-related incidents. After that, they became very wary of each other for a while–while on walks they would sniff companionably, in the house they would not lie down in the same room or go anywhere near where the other one was eating. Slowly, over time, they have softened towards each other–Pundit will walk over and lick the corners of her eyes sometimes, or even play bite her shoulder, and she will lie calmly until she eventually walks away. But for them to stand eye to eye over a toy and tug–that is a whole new level of trust and intimacy for the two of them.

This is how it happened. Cholula has been becoming more and more interested in playing with me, and so I’ve been playing our funny, stop and start game of catch or tug of war with a floppy stuffed toy she has just about destroyed. In Natural Dog Training, Keven Behan recommends playing tug of war as hard as your dog will–and always letting your dog win. One of my first breakthroughs with Cholula, over a year ago now, was finally getting her to play tug. And I always let her win. But one of the challenges of creating the space for Cholula to play has been that Pundit, aged avid player that he is, always wants to play too, and he’s much better at all of it than Cholula–hones in the on the ball or tug toy with 100 percent of his attention and energy–and Cholula won’t compete. So I either have to put him in the house or play so they are taking turns–a throw in one direction for Pundit and then, while he’s chasing his ball, a throw in the other direction for Cholula. In the past, whenever Pundit has gone for the tug toy, Cholula has dropped it immediately and backed off. Game over. But this past week, Pundit grabbed my end of the tug toy, I let go, and Cholula hung on! Playing tug with Pundit! It didn’t last long. One thing about Pundit is that if he has the tug toy, he will never ever lose. No matter how strong the other dog is, Pundit will simply hang on and let himself be dragged around until the other dog finally gives up. He won every time last Christmas with his dear friend Callie (see photo). So Pundit hung on and Cholula let it drop. But she tugged it first–and then she willingly tugged with me again and then a couple of days later she held on again for a few rounds when Pundit grabbed the other side. Since Kevin suggests you always let your dog win at tug, and I know Cholula will never beat Pundit, I only let them play a couple of times and make sure to follow up with some rounds without Pundit where I let Cholula win.

It’s true that there is nothing especially useful about this new breakthrough–but it brings me great happiness because I did not think Cholula would ever be brave or relaxed enough to hold on when Pundit tugged. But maybe that is a key piece of the story for truly training and reforming a problem adult dog–to bring them to a place where they can discover that brave, relaxed platform–a space they may not have experienced for years– from which they can really, truly, learn new ways.

, , , , ,

Pushing Update 1

January 4th, 2013 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (8 Comments)

I’ve pushed for three days now. If nothing else, my New Year’s resolution to push with Cholula every day in January even if it means pushing with her at 10:30 at night has inspired me to find ways to push with her earlier in the day so I don’t have to do it when I’d rather go to bed. But there is something else–Cholula’s enthusiasm for the pushing has increased. This evening I pushed with her for her dinner in the back yard, incorporating some running away from her so she had to chase me down in order to push for the food, and with every push her tail was wagging hard and fast. Then when she came inside, she play bowed to me in the living room and rolled over on her back so I could rub her belly. This is how I’ve fit in the pushing so far:

Jan 1 (didn’t do it; I hadn’t started the resolution yet)
Jan 2: pushed with her around 10:30 as we walked down our main street. (When Pundit it with us, he always shares in her training, so he pushed as well; I just don’t let him push hard enough to get off the ground, as his hind legs can’t take it.)
Jan 3: Coordinated getting the kibble in the fanny pack before I took the dogs on a morning walk around the block and pushed with her as we walked. Then, because I ended up having to walk her again at night, I got the kibble together again and pushed again.
Jan 4: As my husband cooked dinner and the kids were watching videos or helping cook and I had a few minutes of rare early evening downtime, I realized that if I pushed with her then, I wouldn’t have to do it later before bed. So I put her dinner in the fanny pack and we went into the back yard and pushed.

I’d love to hear others’ thoughts, efforts, experiences. What has worked for you in terms of fitting in or enhancing the pushing or other basic training?

A New Year’s Resolution to Push

January 2nd, 2013 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (5 Comments)

Happy New Year! I have a lot of dog-related goals for the coming year—I’d like to get really Cholula playing ball! And able to hold a tug toy as she walks down the street! And I’d like to know that wherever we are, whatever we are doing, if I call, Cholula will come! And I would like to take good care of aging Pundit and never ever step on his sore, arthritic feet no matter how in the way he is! And I’d maybe even like to get another dog! But when I start thinking about when, realistically, am I going to make time for all of these goals, I get anxious, and fretful, and I know that’s never helpful when it comes to working with a dog.

So for January, at least, I’m stepping away from these end-point oriented goals. When I think about Cholula’s progress over the past year, amidst the limited effort I managed to put into training her, this is what I come up with: once or twice a week, on average, I worked with her on speak on command. This was the primary suggestion of my master dog trainer, Kevin Behan (www.naturaldogtraining.com) Cholula and I made some progress, as you can see in my recent post, Cholula Shows Her Speak; you can also see in my recent post that her bark is still not perfect.

The bark training led to some direct effects last year–first of all, finally, she (sort of) barks on command. Second, when we are out on a walk now and I see her getting stressed about another dog on a leash I can often get her to release the stress in a resounding bark and continue our walk in peace (this in fact was the main goal of the speaking on command and so this is something I am happy about indeed). But the biggest change that has happened with Cholula over the past few months is something seemingly unrelated to her speaking on command—it’s how she walks in the woods.

There is a triangular stretch of woods near our house with paths running through it; bordered on all sides by a neighborhood or a road, so it has clear boundaries. My husband often takes the dogs walking there on weekend mornings and lets them off leash; I take them there less often. Cholula often would bound off into the woods like a leaping deer, returning onlly when she was ready. We stopped bothering to call her because, really, there was no point to it. At least half of the time he went to the woods with her, my husband would come back irritated that Cholula had disappeared and he’d had to wait for her. I’d had the same experience, so I knew how irritating it could be.

But recently, my husband starting coming back from every walk to the woods in a good mood. He started saying things I’d thought I might never hear, things like “Cholula and I had such a nice walk this morning.” Over the holidays, I had the chance to take the dogs to the woods a number of times, and I saw what he was talking about. Cholula still bounds off, darting down the ravine or up the hill after squirrels she (cross fingers) never catches, but she circles back. In a loose, relaxed spirit, her forays down or off the path now seem to naturally lead her right back to us, so that when we want to put the leash on and head for home, she is there, panting, wagging, happy, and ready to go with us.

How did this transformation occur? I think it’s a side effect of the bark training. I think that what Kevin Behan sometimes calls the “softening” of the problem dog through things like bark training has softened Cholula’s huntress spirit so that while she still loves to hunt, she is less driven to forsake us. Sang Koh has also written about how when you focus on Natural Dog Training’s basics, a lot of problem behaviors that don’t seem directly related to the basic NDT exercises of pushing, barking on command, and tugging nevertheless melt away.

I’m going to keep up the bark training as I have been, mostly on the weekends. But my resolution for January is to go back to another one of Natural Dog Training’s basic practices, and push with Cholula. Every day in January, five minutes a day, push with her for food. Just to do it. Just to see.

I know that with my family’s schedule, this means that there will be days when I’m out pushing with her at 10:30 at night. But if I can’t find the time earlier in the day, I think I can commit to giving her 10:30 to 10:35 every day of this cold, quiet month. Does anyone else want to commit with me? Cholula and I would love the company, and I would love to hear in comments how it goes.

I’m going to try to post a video of me and Cholula pushing in the next few days, but until I can convince my videographer (aka 6-year-old daughter) to work with me, here is a good description of the practice from Lee Charles Kelley: Please join me and Happy New Year to you all!

, ,

Cholula Shows Her Speak

October 9th, 2012 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (5 Comments)

I’ve been wanting to post a video of Cholula speaking for a while. But with one thing and another–some technical difficulties and the fact that with my six year old as my videographer I had to wait for a break in her busy six year old life to get her to film me with Cholula–here we are. Finally, I have a video showing her progress. (As is typical in our training sessions, Cholula’s bark gets better as the training session goes on. If you make it all the way to the end of the video, you’ll hear her best.)

I’ve been working with Cholula on the speak command for over a year and a half now. Clearly, some of the slowness of her progress is due to my own ineptitude and inexperience, and the fact that I don’t train her every day. But I was able to get my other dog, Pundit, to speak in a few days, and recently, after all my practice with Cholula, able to get an uninhibited 8 year old lab to speak within a matter of minutes. But Cholula is different. For close to a year, Cholula would respond to my efforts with maybe a play bow, or a pawing of the air, or jumping up–but she would not open her mouth.  When she finally did start opening her mouth, she would curl her lips back and bite, sometimes quite ferociously, at the air, but with no breath. No breath at all. The breath still completely absent when the bite motion was there.  Then came the sneezes, the huffs, the moans, all of which are present still in our training, as the video shows.  And finally, the bark.  Not a perfect bark, but a bark. 

So a dog who it seemed might never bark finally does; what does it mean?  In my dog trainer Kevin Behan’s words (www.naturaldogtraining.com) “The point of training a dog to bark on command, is that it becomes a way to stress the dog, and then he resolves the stress by a clean, clear, deep bark. Why is this important? Because it gives the dog a way to express fear without having to act on fear. .. energy that moves is safe, energy that is being held back is always dangerous.”

While I can’t prove that the huge progress Cholula has made in leaving behind leash aggression and unpredictable aggression around other dogs (the critical problem that emerged when I brought Cholula home from the shelter and that brought me to my dog trainer, Kevin Behan, for help) this is what I have come to understand over the past year and a half that I’ve been trying to get her to speak.  Central to Cholula’s problems was that the survival mode she had worked out through whatever combination of nature and nurture she had grown up in prior to landing in the shelter and, eventually, with me, involved minimizing as much as possible any actual interaction with her owner.  While she might go into a frenzy barking at the neighbor or lunging at another dog, when it came to dealing with me and my husband, she held everything back.  Initially, she wouldn’t even eat when we put food down in front of her, much less take it from our hand. A dog this shut down might appear calm and sweet, but actually, she’s lost in her own world, almost unreachable, waiting for a perceived threat or prey to arouse the energy that otherwise she has bottled up. As Kevin described above, that repressed energy was unstable and dangerous. With such a shut down dog, it is very difficult to find a way into her such that she can actually engage in the training.  Sure, she might apathetically sit, shake hands, etc., but as long she is obeying commands as part of her ongoing project to avoid as much as possible any trouble with her owner, really, she remains lost in her own world, and no real progress is being made towards chnging her perception of the world such that she no longer felt the need to attack other dogs.

I’ve written about my journey to get Cholula to bark several times on this blog, but what I came to realize over time was that the speak on command was so hard for Cholula because it meant actually directly interacting with me.  Not just obeying me but responding to me with her full self.  I think you can see in the video the full-on body work Cholula uses to get her bark out–and the pleasure she gets from doing it and getting her reward.  Finally, we are face to face, and she is telling me how she feels. (I’ve also written recently about how now, in the presence of an actual trigger such as a dog or a skateboarder, I sometimes can get an astonishing waterfall of barks out of her, the full energetic expression of her emotional state).

For so long, I thought of the speak on command as an end goal. The slowness with which we moved towards that goal tested my patience–in fact, it helped develop patience, and, I hope, strengthened my ability to accept each moment of effort as progress and to keep the chains of frustration loose. Now, though, I see that the speak on command is an opening to something new. Far from closing in on our end goal, we are at the beginning of our real relationship, and I am wondering where we might go.

So here it is, Cholula, sort of, speaking on command:

, , , , ,

Step by step, the Release of the Bark

August 20th, 2012 | Posted by sweet in Dog Days | Natural Dog Training - (2 Comments)

The other night, we took a family walk after dinner.  The kids zipped around on scooters, laughing and racing in momentary release from the exhaustion and stress of their first weeks back at school.  The evening itself seemed to echo that release: the air was cooler and cleaner than it had been all day, large fluffy clouds clustered high above the various church steeples, and clouds and sky around them turned different shades of pink in a glorious sunset.   The sky in front of us, the eastern sky, was achingly bright with the sun’s last setting flare.  Just ahead of me, as I limped along with Pundit after a too-hard yoga class, my husband walked Cholula. Cholula’s leash was loose, her tail was high and dipped jauntily from side to side with each step, her ears splayed out sideways and her forehead was smooth, she snuffled and sniffed and stopped now and then to pee.  Watching her–”she’s acting like a regular dog!” my husband and I sometimes call to each other when we catch her in such moments– I remembered those early days of walking her, when she pulled so hard on her leash, an automotron on a mission that had nothing to do with us, her jaw clenched, her eyes locked on the horizon, constantly scanning for the next potential threat.  The more internalized stress she releases, the more she is able to be with us in the moment.  One of the great gifts of dogs is their ability to enjoy the moment; I’d somehow ended up with a dog who often wasn’t able to do so.

We get these moments with her now, thanks to other moments like this: Cholula and I, on our way home from a run, passed a guy skateboarding on an empty basketball court.  Cholula arrived in our lives with two major triggers to aggression: dogs and skateboarders.  Mostly, we have worked on healing her relationship with other dogs–we have another dog, our neighborhod is filled with dogs, Cholula’s dog problem immediately became our problem.  In contrast, our neighborhood doesn’t have many skateboarders, and so it’s been a less urgent issue to work with.  This guy wasn’t skateboarding particularly fast, but as we jogged by, Cholula’s shoulders stiffened and she huffed.  I stopped at the far corner of the basketball court and asked her to speak.  As the guy rode past on his skateboard, she let out a squeal and a high-pitched bark.  I pinched her and she barked again, louder.  I called to the guy a brief explanation–”My dog has a big fear of skateboards, so I’m asking her to bark at me to get her fear out,” and he said, “Cool,” so I continued.  I looked her in the eye and demanded that she speak.  It was as if I’d turned on a faucet: she released high-pitched squealing bark after bark, the barks gradually getting deeper and more resonant.  A couple of times, she broke from my gaze and lunged briefly at the skateboarder, a bouncy lunge, not her full-on-crazed aggression lunge, but a break from her focus on me.  I had her on the choke chain and so she bounced right back to me and I pinched her neck to re-focus her energy on me and demanded that she speak.   I wanted her to bark right in my face.  It would have been impossible for her to do this when I first got her two years ago, but this time, a torrent of barks came out, a lifetime of repression being released in barks that cascaded and crescendoed and then, finally, quieted.  The guy came over to ask me if I knew where any skateboard parks were.  I directed him to the one I know about a couple of miles away as Cholula watched us calmly.  And then I said, “Come on, girl,” and we ran home.

When you finally get a repressed dog to bark on command and they’re barking at a real trigger (a dog or a skateboarder in the case of Cholula) I’ve found that it’s sometimes shocking what will come out.  I’ll see what looks like a minor tension in her body at the site of a dog across the street and tell her to speak, at which point she might release a half-hearted moan, she might give a clear bell bark that lets me know she already had her reaction under control, or, occasionally, she makes a noise that is so hostile, so filled with aggression and fear, that I’ll think, wow, that was what was in her at the sight of that dog.  If  I hadn’t been able to get her to bark, I would never have known; that vicious fear would have remained inside her, repressed but closing her off from us, when we came home.

My father recently told me, “When you first got Cholula I thought she was incredibly stupid.  Now that she’s so different, I realize she’s not stupid at all; she was just deeply depressed.”  It makes me wonder if I spoke into my fears, one by one, really barked right in their face, what would come out.  And what would be left.

, , , , ,

How Natural Dog Training Has Transformed Cholula’s Relationship with other Dogs

May 31st, 2012 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (2 Comments)

A year and a half ago, or so, shortly after I’d brought Cholula home from the shelter, we were walking along the sidewalk towards our house when Cholula spotted a dog paused outside our front gate. I froze–Cholula went into such a frenzy that she viciously attacked our sweet old dog Pundit just because he happened to be standing next to her and she couldn’t reach the dog she really wanted to attack, the dog standing in front of our house. Pundit and Cholula’s leashes were tangled and it took me a horrifying minute to pull them apart. After that, for months, I always walked with my dogs’ leashes in separate hands to make sure Pundit could escape.

Last night, as we headed down that same hill, from just about the same distance, Cholula saw a dog  half way through our front gate, pulling on its leash to sniff inside our front yard. We approached, meeting the dog at our front steps. Cholula wagged and sniffed. The dog wagged and sniffed. That was all.

We went to West Virginia with some friends over Memorial Day weekend. The friends have a big dog who has also had some leash aggression problems. I was a little nervous about having the two of them together, but we introduced them in a low-key, Natural Dog Training manner—both dogs on leash, walking around outside for a few minutes away from the house—and they settled into each other’s company without incident.

Even their most charged moment was a revelation of how Natural Dog Training has transformed my dog. Cholula was on a long line because still, when she is out in the country, what she really wants to do is disappear on her own hunts (yes, we still have many unmet training goals, but that is for another post…). I brought over her tug toy, and she tugged it with me. The tugging excited our friends’ dog, Moose, and he came over, eager to tug. I turned from Cholula, curious to see what kind of tugger Moose was, and offered him her tug toy. He grabbed it with great enthusiasm and tugged—and Cholula went wild at the sight of Moose with her tug toy—but instead of going wild with fear or aggression, she went wild with play, giving play bow after play bow, bouncing around him with her tail high in the air, darting at him and daring him to chase her, asking him to wrestle with her—things she never, ever does. Why the sight of Moose tugging her toy brought out this intense playful energy from Cholula I don’t know, I’m sure Kevin Behan could explain it, but it was an unexpected and joyful glimpse into a part of her she still usually keeps locked up.

My family went to a swimming hole on the way home. Cholula was on her leash and had already agreeably jumped into the current with me and floated down the rapid several times when a couple appeared with two pushy boxers roaming off leash. The dogs, especially the male, came over to her several times, not quite aggressive or hostile, but very pushy, with a strident upward thrust to his shoulders I’ve come to associate with trouble. I flashbacked to a hike we took with Cholula shortly after we had gotten her, when some off-leash dogs riled the on-leash Cholula into a complete frenzy of lunging and barking, losing her mind in fear and aggression as I struggled to get her far enough off the narrow trail to wait it out until the dogs had safely passed. This time, at the swimming hole, my husband had Cholula. And what did Cholula do? She let the boxer push at her and then, like a full-fledged family dog, jumped into the current with my husband and girls. The photo I snapped makes me laugh—I didn’t even realize the pushy boxer was in the frame, but there he is, looking at me, as if to ask, “where did that dog go?”

She went with the flow, dude, she went with the flow.

, , , ,

Bit by Bit, the Bark

May 23rd, 2012 | Posted by sweet in Dog Days | Natural Dog Training - (2 Comments)


Cholula is so close to the bark on command I’ve been trying to get her to do for a year and a half. I keep thinking my next post on this will surely, surely be the video of the bark I’ve been working towards. But instead it seems Cholula and I are on one of those journeys where each step covers half the ground that is left, on and on into infinity.

Kevin Behan said recently, while trying to teach another dog to speak on command who kept glancing away from him, avoiding his look, “What we want is always the hardest thing, the path of highest resistance.”

With whatever combination of my ineptitude and Cholula’s avoidance-heavy temperament, bringing her along that path of highest resistance is indeed the hardest thing for her. But I don’t blame her. How many paths of highest resistance do I avoid in my daily life, in order to keep life running smoothly and easily, but at the cost of not working on the things that really matter? We are in this together, Cholu and I.

So, Cholula, tied to a tree in my back yard on a leash with a flat collar; me in front of her, plenty of dog kibble in my fanny pack, worn backwards so I can easily get it with my hand:

Me: “Speak!” (I draw myself tall, hand holding the food at my heart and jiggling. I pounce lightly towards her.)
Cholula: Snaps her teeth so hard they click, without letting any air out.
Me: “Speak!”
Cholula: Bows, shakes her head, sneezes.
Me: “Speak!” (jiggling the food harder. I used to feed every sneeze; now, at least once she is warmed up, I stretch it out, wait for the noise.)
Cholula: Sneezes harder.
Me: “Louder. Give me the noise. Speak.”
Cholula: Meets my stare, her ears flattening, and holds it (something she wouldn’t do for a long time).
Me: I open my eyes wider. “Speak!”
Cholula: Holds my stare, then turns her head away from me, as if to gather her energy (it may still be a kind of avoidance but it no longer feels like that; it is a deliberate, slow move of her neck, and once she is no longer staring at me, I can see her inhale), glances back to my eyes, and makes a quiet but distinct, quite deep, “HHHHHaaaaah” in the back of her throat.
That I feed.

, ,

Dogs, After the Creek

April 24th, 2012 | Posted by sweet in Dog Days | Natural Dog Training - (0 Comments)

The dogs don’t get any more relaxed than this. I’d taken them to the creek on a Friday morning with my son, an old ford that is deep enough in places for the dogs to swim, and that flows into rapids, and that has a bank of soft white sand. Kevin Behan suggested to me that Pundit’s insane love of water is a reflection of my own love of water, and maybe it is. There was a time, when Pundit was still in his prime and before I had kids, when I took Pundit to the Potomac River with my kayak. As I paddled the quarter mile upstream to the main rapids, he swam beside me. He ferried small rapids, pulled himself out on rocks, leapt to other rocks and back into the water to ferry some more, his small paws paddling rhythmically, his determined puffs of air as he swam making him sound like a seal. He has lost so much strength. I could see the little rapids of the creek pulling him downstream as he struggled across. He lost sight of the stick in the water and circled around, unsure. I threw him another stick and he got it, brought it back, and barked for more. I threw his stick in a few more times and he seemed to get his rhythm back, swimming more smoothly and doing better at finding the stick, sticks he once would have been able to mark and swim straight to. And then he took his stick over to a spot in the sand and contentedly chewed. Even there, I had to help him once, when a wood chunk got stuck between two of his old teeth.

Cholula is not especially comfortable in the water, but maybe again because she feels the draw it holds for me, she tries. She followed Pundit out into the creek, grabbed a stick, and brought it back, picking up her feet too high, stumbling a little on the pebbly bottom. Then her ears tensed into total prey mode as she honed in on some tiny bubbles that were floating downstream in a solid circle. She stalked that full moon of bubbles, poised as it floated towards her in utter concentration, and then snapped her jaws right onto it. She looked up at me with creek water running down her chin, surprised that she’d come up with nothing but water and air.

But that’s not why this photo, taken back in our yard after our morning at the creek, shows Cholula as relaxed as I’ve ever seen her. It turned out that the creek was the perfect place to get to Cholula’s bark and bite. After we had played at the water’s edge with the dogs for a while, we settled on the sand, warmed just to comfort by the sun. My son and I played with the sand, some rocks, and some fluffy seed things from the huge tree overhead, which he pretended were worms. Mostly, we had the place to ourselves. But from our perch we had a perfect view of not only our side of the creek and the dogs who occasionally walked by behind us along the drive, but also the other side of the ford, where a muddy bank led into a wooded path along the creek where people would walk by with their dogs.

Cholula, having staked herself next to us in the sand, interpreting the spot as our own, got a full-fledged charge every time she saw another dog, whether it was across the creek or alongside of us. I started goading her slightly and encouraging her to speak whenever she honed in on a dog, and a torrent of barks emerged, almost a rolling chant of barks, varying in pitch and measure–some high, some low, some clear, some gutteral, some more like howls and others more like whines, some with even a kind of yodel and a rolling growl. She barked right in my face and snapped her teeth at me, unconstrained. It sounded like she was accessing something deep in her soul. And for days afterwards, she was an especially sweet and mellow dog. I hoped that the experience might be our breakthrough for speaking on command. But in the yard, without the stimulation of those dogs looking her way, she’s still sneezing, rather than speaking, on command. I have a new respect for what she is holding inside, and a renewed hope that I’m going to get to it.

Another thought I had after that morning by the creek, that doesn’t exactly fit in this post, but I thought I’d add it anyway, is of two things I’m especially thankful for about Natural Dog Training regarding my journey with Cholula. The first is that in my first telephone conversation with Kevin Behan, Kevin released me from feeling guilty about not bringing Cholula on family outings she wasn’t ready for. For a long time after that conversation, over a year, I basically never brought Cholula with me in the city on hikes or walks in the park with my kids. When I didn’t trust her not to lunge unexpectedly at a random dog, having her along just made the experience more stressful for all of us, but before I spoke to Kevin I had this sense that I needed to bring her out with us, to give her as much stimulation and exercise as possible in the hopes of helping her calm down. Kevin explained that for a dog in her state of fearfulness and, as he called it, constant charge, stimulation– including the stimulation of exercise–would only make things worse. He released me from feeling guilty about not taking her on our family outings, and from worrying about giving her as much exercise as possible. As long as I ensured her morning and evening walk around the block, and a chance to pee before bed, that was sufficient–and the additional walks and hikes, and, as she improved, eventually jogs, my husband or I did take her on fairly regularly but without the kids, when we could fit them in, those were extra–not something Cholula had to have. This was good for both her and the family. And now, I am thankful that, due to the changes in her that have come about through my efforts to work with her using Natural Dog Training, I’m more and more comfortable bringing her along. She is so much less reactive, so much more relaxed, and I am so much more aware of what might set her off and how to handle it, that, slowly, the crazy shelter dog is becoming the family pet.

, , , , ,