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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.

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Marley and Me and NDT

July 17th, 2012 | Posted by sweet in Dog Days - (0 Comments)

I just finished reading “Marley and Me” by John Grogan (I know, I know, I’m behind the times here, but bear with me).  I really enjoyed it.  Grogan writes with heart and humor and I laughed out loud many times, including in the “quiet car” on the Amtrak train and next to my sleeping son, waking him.

Having worked with Kevin Behan’s natural dog training and having seen how natural dog training has transformed my dogs as well as some of the other last chance dogs Kevin was working with last summer when I took Cholula to him in Vermont, it’s very tempting to arm-chair NDT crazy, bad-dog Marley–clearly Marley had a lot of drive, among other things.  Grogan  describes in the book trying dominance training over and over again on Marley with little effect. He was just not a dog you could subdue into obedience.  I’m sure natural dog training could have helped Marley immensely (possibly to the detriment of the eventual book, however), but what I wanted to put down here is a quote from the middle of the book.  Grogan’s wife is going through post-partum depression after the birth of her second son and, deciding she has had enough of Marley, tells Grogan to get the dog out of their lives forever (spoiler alert: things work out in the end).  But in this passage, describing fearing having to give up Marley for the sake of his family, Grogan describes SO beautifully Kevin Behan’s concept in his book “Your Dog Is Your Mirror” that I just had to put it out there:

“As pathetic as it sounds, Marley had become my male-bonding sould mate, my near-constant companion, my friend.  He was the undisciplined, recalcitrant, nonconformist, politically incorrect free spirit I had always wanted to be, had I been brave enough, and I took vicarious joy in his unbridled verve.  No matter how complicated life became, he reminded me of its simple joys.  No matter how many demands were placed on me, he never let me forget that willful disobedience is sometimes worth the price.  In a world full of bosses, he was his own master.  The thought of giving him up seared my soul.”

By eventually writing”Marley and Me” after Marley’s death, Grogan did actually become his own master, able to give up his job as a newspaper columnist to become an independent writer.  It’s such a compelling example of the potential catharsis, wisdom, and value in doing what Kevin advocates and working to understand your bond with your problem dog–that somehow, there is a key in there to healing you both.

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Things a Kid Can Do on an Urban Walk

June 29th, 2012 | Posted by sweet in Poetry - (0 Comments)

Jump the sidewalk cracks.
Balance along the top of a brick wall.
Race to the corner.
Swing on a bike rack.
Spot a white van with a ladder on top
or a garbage truck
or a city bus.
Listen for a siren.
Chase the pigeons until they fly.
Rescue a worm by lifting it off the sidewalk and dropping it onto shaded grass.
Spot the cat in the bushes.
Wave to the dog on the front porch.
Watch a squirrel run up a tree.
Pick a dandelion.
Pull the nectar from a honeysuckle flower.

Say hello to the neighbors.

Blossoms: Hydrangea, June 9, 2012

June 9th, 2012 | Posted by sweet in D.C. Flowers - (2 Comments)

Generally, I’m not a huge fan of hydrangeas.  With their pom poms of flowers, they remind me too much of cotton candy and other pastel concoctions.  But I like the way this hydrangea bush owns its corner, highlighting the richness of the old red brick and metal bannister with contrasting paleness.  I like the way the bush overflows its corner and cascades along the stairs, sending almost a waterfull of puff balls against the straight lines of the row house, the ephemeral overtaking the solid, the lavish balls of flowers bursting forth from a corner of what is a very small front yard of a modest row house, as if to say, you can never have too much hydrangea.

Also, in this photo, I love the way the glass storm door reflects the turret of the row house across the street.  The details up high on these early 20th century small houses still celebrate their existence almost one hundred years after they were built, still demand that passersby  notice the sky.  And to see it here reflected in the door of the house across the street–a house that happens to have a particularly effervescent hydrangea–underscores the urban interplay of what is there in front of you with everything else that has been built or exists all around.

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.

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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.

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Cinco de Mayo 2012 on the National Mall, this Saturday

May 4th, 2012 | Posted by sweet in D.C. Life - (0 Comments)

This spring, my girls’ dance troup, the Micro-Monteros, who dance with the Maru Montero Dance Company, have gotten to perform in a number of places, including the rooftop of Univision, right across the street from the Capitol. Looking forward to Cinco de Mayo tomorrow, I wanted to re-post our 2011 Cinco de Mayo photos from last year in celebration of the upcoming event this Saturday on the Mall, at the Sylvan Theater near the Washington Monument. My girls will be dancing at noon and 1:45 with the MicroMonteros–there will also be crafts and games and horses and all sorts of things.

Also last year, I wrote about why and how I’ve come to love the Zapateado dancing my girls perform with the Maru Montero Dance Company.

We’d love to see you there –

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Blossoms: Rose, April 28, 2012

April 28th, 2012 | Posted by sweet in D.C. Flowers - (0 Comments)

A lot of D.C. rowhouses have a rosebush blooming in the front yard, like this one I passed on my way to work last week. Some of the rose bushes are carefully planted in fully landscaped gardens; others, like this one, exist as the yard’s sole decoration. If my experience is any guide, rosebushes in D.C., when planted in a place that gets enough sun, take some work the first few years–pruning, watering, smushing of aphids, plucking of diseased leaves–but then, at least in the spring before the pests wreak their havoc, they’ll thrive pretty much on their own. Whether perfectly pruned, or overgrown and straggly, they offer the sumptuous beauty of their flowers to anyone who passes by. It’s a gift, a thoughtless generosity, by multitudes of people who keep most of their treasures behind locked doors.

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.

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Blossoms: Iris, April 20, 2012

April 20th, 2012 | Posted by sweet in D.C. Flowers - (0 Comments)


The Irises have come out all over D.C. They are such an extravagant flower, like butterflies, their petals seeming to defy gravity as they unfurl, folding into each other in irregular carresses, shaped and re-shaped with every bump and breeze. When we first bought our house in 2000, the first time I had a yard of my own, I thought I might plant a vegetable garden. But I casually threw some sunflower seeds into the dirt, and the moment I saw my first blooming sunflower, I was hooked. I went through a few years of flower gardening frenzy, including some when I bought too many bulbs and planted them haphazardly everywhere there was free dirt. Then I had kids and more kids, and very little time to garden. But some of the bulbs still come up. This iris bloomed in a hazardous spot, right off our main path down the garden where strollers and bikes are daily wheeled up and down and children run with bats and sticks and backpacks hanging from their hands–and right by the rarely latched door that connects our yard to our neighbor’s, and that is opened and closed by kids’ hands and dogs’ noses with a multitude of reasons to hurry and few to be careful as they come and go. But so far, the iris stands, lovely in the sun and heedless of our chaos.