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About a Frisbee-playing Pit Bull; Highlights of Wallace, by Jim Gorant

September 25th, 2012 | Posted by sweet in Dog Days - (0 Comments)

I just read Wallace, by Jim Gorant, subtitled The Underdog Who Conquered a Sport, Saved a Marriage, and Championed Pit Bulls–One Flying Disc at a Time.  In summary, Wallace, a pit bull, was rescued from a shelter by a young couple named Roo and Clara Yuri.  Roo had hoped to be a professional soccer player, but by the time they adopted Wallace, he had given up that dream.  Wallace, with his incredible drive and energy and problems with aggression with other dogs, as well as his breed,  was considered a problem dog at the no-kill shelter where Clara worked and where she and Roo had gotten to know Wallace.  In fact, the shelter personnel were initially uncertain that they would let Wallace be adopted. and he could easily have been euthanized.  Instead, with Roo and Clara’s help, Wallace became a frisbee champion and ambassador for pit bulls.

I’ve never worked with a dog that was anywhere near as challenging as Wallace was described to be in his youth.  Jim Gorant describes Roo’s handling and training methods in some detail.  Some of them–in particular Roo’s ability to tap into and work with Wallace’s drive–are very aligned with natural dog training, others less so, and I couldn’t help thinking while reading that if only Roo and Clara had known about and been able to work with Wallace with natural dog training methods, they might have been able to save themselves and Wallace a lot of stress and trouble.

Regardless, the story of how a pit bull, with his heavy, muscular body and large head, ends up succeeding in a sport where lighter, more agile, swifter dogs usually win, through a combination of Wallace’s intense drive, Roo’s creativity, and the dynamic relationship between them is a fascinating story.

Two quotes: first, the Your Dog is Your Mirror moment: “Roo loved playing disc with Wallace.  He loved how much Wallace loved it, and he loved how it showed that Wallace had been worthy of their effort to save him. … In a deeper way… he’d come to identify with Wallace.  As a soccer player he’d been discounted and overlooked, too…. most coaches looked at him and saw only a kid who was a step slow and about three sizes too small and worte him off….  Roo knew about being prejudged based on appearances and assumptions and left for dead.”

The second quote I wanted to share is from Roo’s sometime training and competing partner, Josh.  In addition to competing in singles freestyle events with Roo, Wallace also competed in pairs freestyle events with Roo and Josh.  Gorant describes one of their early pairs competitions thus: “The music kicked on, the discs began to fly, and Wallace did the rest… As the routine progressed, Roo felt that sensation, that connection and singularity of purpose that had struck him during the earlier competitions.  He could sense that Josh felt it too, and the three of them worked in perfect synchonicity, sharing an instant, almost nonverbal communication…. [Later, Josh told him] `That last round with Wallace… That was one of the greatest experiences of my life.’”

I’ve never competed in anything with my dogs.  While some of my dogs have had athletic talent–Pundit was amazing when he was young, and who knows, maybe he could have competed in a freestyle competition–I’ve never had anywhere near the athletic ability to be able to carry out the person side of a frisbee routine.  Nevertheless, Josh’s statement resonated with me.  Some of the greatest experiences of my life have been moments with my dog.  My husband and I moved to New Haven the same fall that my mother-in-law died very suddenly from cancer.  We were grieving in the midst of settling into a new city, with new friends, new work, new routines.  It was a hard fall.  But we had our dog, Ubi, then in the prime of her middle age, who had happily moved with us from New York to Minneapolis to New Haven. I remember walking along some of the quiet Yale campus lawns in early night that fall and winter, playing ball with Ubi.   I would throw the tennis ball into the darkness and watch her take off, following its arc until it disappeared in the night.  Then I would see flashes of her working the field, nose to the ground, tail high in the air, until she honed in on the ball, grabbed it, and raced back to me so I could throw it again.  We played night ball that year in a quiet, intense, joyful connection.  It is one of my happiest memories of that sad time.  Dogs offer that to us–you don’t have to compete at the highest levels of a sport, as Roo, Josh, and Wallace did, to experience synchronicity with your dog.

Finally, here’s a video clip of Wallace and Roo competing.  Gorant does a good job of describing the intense quality of Roo and Wallace’s routines, but there is no subsitute for actually watching one.  I like how this video (it’s easy to find more by googling ”Wallace the Pit Bull,”) highlights how Wallace races back after catching the frisbee with equal enthusiasm and speed as he runs out to get the frisbee, in complete commitment to the game.  Gorant describes this as one of the key features that sets Wallace apart from the other competing dogs.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k1qXdfGXHKI&feature=relmfu

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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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Disappearing

December 3rd, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Dog Days - (2 Comments)

Cholula in our back yard. I took the photo through the window because I figured, rightly so, that as soon as I opened the door she would move and lose that perfect stillness and rapt expression.

This fall, Cholula’s deer nature, identified by Kevin Behan when he met her, has been on full display, along with the falling leaves, now brown, curled, and crisp, the clear, cool days and chilly rains, the inexorably diminishing hours of daylight. In photos of her in the woods, I’ve been struck at how she melts into autumn’s landscapes. In the midst of the leaves and dappled light, the dappled dog gazing out over the horizon or sitting perfectly still in our yard is not fully among us, she is just about as invisible as the two bucks she flushed from the woods across the creek one day while we were running together.

I stopped briefly during a run to catch this shot of Cholula among the leaves.

At other times, she has literally disappeared, leaping over fallen logs down and across ravines while the other dogs off leash in the same woods wander around each other and their people companionably. At these moments, there is nothing to do but wait until she comes back, and come back she always does, eventually, her body so supple and graceful as she leaps back up the ravine with the same speed and certainty she took off with, a huntress perfectly attuned to her landscape.  She seems to simultaneously embody the deer and the huntress at these moments, and yet when she races up to me and pushes enthusiastically into me, it is as if she is re-entering a force field of domesticity and her wildness falls from her as if it was a dream.  Sometimes she returns stinky and I have to bathe her before letting her in the house. If it is my husband she has run from, I get a lecture about my terrible dog, and what good is a dog who—okay, granted, no longer presents much danger to other dogs, but who runs off without a backwards glance or a hint of remorse, who loses herself to the woods.

Cholula in the woods where we let her run free

We don’t let her off leash for these adventures very often—once a week or so. And after her latest, we agreed to stop letting her off leash at all while I try to get through the training I still need to do before getting her to come when called. I haven’t tried to get her to come when called yet, because we haven’t gotten there. She’s got a great heel and a good sit and stay. We are working on the down. I hope to get to the come by New Year’s.

When I run with her, I don’t let her off the leash at all. We enter the woods together, and run side by side, longer than I’ve run comfortably for years, five or so miles. She’s not a perfect running companion—in the beginning of each run, I still often struggle to get her in tune with my gait rather than pulling on the leash, which is disheartening after all this time—and occasionally a squirrel or deer will cause her to veer wildly off course, once straight across my legs, which resulted in me flying over her and landing on my chin.

But there are moments these days, on pretty much every run, where we disappear together. Where, instead of being on a run, we simply are the run, she and I, as one. That’s what it feels like from the inside. From the outside I imagine it looks like a woman is running happily with what at some moments appears to be a dog and at other moments might just be a shadow thrown across the path by the few remaining leaves rustling on the trees.

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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 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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Cholula Meets Kevin Behan—Post #1-the Nail Trimming

July 26th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (9 Comments)

I took Cholula to Vermont for two days to work with natural dog training founder Kevin Behan. It was a tremendous experience, and I hope to put up several posts about it, but instead of describing the work Kevin did with us chronologically, I thought I’d start with something that happened right towards the end of our second day’s session—because it was so dramatic, because it so beautifully illustrates Kevin’s brilliance at using a dog’s energy to produce incredibly positive behavioral changes, and also because it’s the one thing I captured on video.

Cholula has extremely long nails that sit up high on her paws. When Kevin was working with Cholula, he noticed that she was very sensitive about her nails, and he asked me how she was about getting her nails trimmed. As I told him, the two times I’d had her nails trimmed rank among the worst experiences of our year together—only behind her attack of a little dog.

The first time, I took her to a Petco. The 300-pound groomer that day confidently got Cholula up on the table, slipped a collar over her neck to hold her there, got her in something of a headlock, and, joking about her lion paws, clipped one of her nails. He clipped too high, the nail bled, and Cholula went nuts, yanking her paw from his hands, whipping her head back and forth, and wrestling herself away from him so that it was impossible to hold her still. He called a young woman over to help and as the two of them attempted to hold her down, he tried to continue clipping. Cholula writhed like a wild beast, so violently that that the blood from her nails was flying across the table and over the floor, and the groomer was sweating and swearing and repeating, “This dog is strong, man this dog is strong.” She fought him like a wild animal. I was terrified that she was going to bite him or that all of the work I’d done to get her to trust me was going to be erased by the horror, and called it off before all of her nails had been trimmed.

After that, I basically decided to just never trim her nails again—they ride so high on her paws that even though they are startlingly long—in truth, they do look like a lion’s nails—they don’t tend to scratch against or even touch the floor when she walks. But when I took her to the vet, the vet recommended trimming them because she said that sometimes when a dog’s nails are that long, one will rip while she’s out running, and that can cause serious problems. I said okay. This time two young women techs were there, as well as me. They asked me to hold her head and another one of them held her head too, while the third worked at clipping her nails. They were comparatively gentle and skilled—none of the nails that were clipped bled. This time, however, Cholula sank way into her passivity panic mode until she couldn’t take it any more and suddenly whipped her head around so fast it flew out of my hands and she nipped one of the techs. The tech pulled back, unhurt, but still—Cholula is not a dog who is ever aggressive to people, that is not her problem—but the panic over nail clipping caused her to attack. Again, I left hoping that I would never have to have her nails trimmed again.

Once Kevin had affirmed with me that Cholula was very sensitive with her nails, he purposefully aggravated her at times by pulling and squeezing on her feet. While he wasn’t doing anything rough enough to actually hurt her, she often squealed when he did that, as if he was hurting her. I didn’t know what to make of it; Kevin’s interpretation was that when he squeezed her nails she was actually feeling the painful clipping again, the one that drew blood.

At the end of our second session, Kevin asked me if I wanted him to tackle the nail trimming. I said yes, of course. So Kevin took Cholula over to a high rock wall, and with her head in a high collar—a choke collar pulled forward on her head so that it tightens just behind her ears and around her jaw, he pulled her up as if trying to pull her up the wall. Although it was a wall that she should be able to jump up if she wanted, she struggled mightily, pushing and clawing at it with her paws, at one point, swinging all the way around as she hung by her collar so that her back was momentarily to the wall and then, when her paws swung back against it, she struggled even harder to claw her way to the top.

Later, Kevin explained that he was simultaneously pulling her up along the wall so that she saw reaching the top of the wall as her salvation, but at the same time he was holding her back so that she couldn’t easily climb the wall and had to fight with all of her might to get up there. Of course, as with all of natural dog training’s corrections, he said nothing as he manipulated her against the wall so that she didn’t attribute any of the difficulty to him—it was just a situation she was in—a wall she had to climb, that she couldn’t climb, that she fought to climb against an unknown resistance, and eventually succeeded. When finally, after, I don’t know, 20, 30, 40 seconds? Of struggle, he let her get onto the wall, she stood there triumphant, and he stroked and praised her, increasing the thrill of her triumph.

And then, this was the amazing part—he picked up one of her forepaws and started to clip her nails. And she sat there, panting from the climb, and let him clip them. I swear, there was a smile on her face. No one else was touching her, no one was holding her head still—in fact, no part of her body was being touched, except the paw that Kevin was holding in order to trim the nails. Not only was Cholula not panicking, not fighting, not biting, she actively looked happy as he clipped away. I would not have believed that this could possibly be her experience of nail clipping if I wasn’t seeing it unfold.

Unfortunately, the first time Kevin did this, he hadn’t fully explained to me how the process was going to work, and I didn’t understand that the fight to get up the wall was the fight, was the intense part of the process—I was waiting to see what he did with the nail clipping to begin filming, and since all he did was clip her nails as she calmly sat there, that part was completely anti-climactic. But as he clipped, he noticed a slight panic start to build, and so he did it a second time—more briefly and not as intense, but the same process—before continuing with the nail clipping. I did film most of that, and I’m posting it below.

Why, why don’t more vets and Petco dog nail trimmers use this method? Cholula can’t be the only dog that panics over the trimming of the nails, and while the experience was certainly infinitely preferable to me and Cholula than our other two nail trimming experiences, I really believe such an experience would also be preferable to the 300 pound guy at Petco and the women techs in the vet’s office.

Cholula was empowered by Kevin’s nail trimming—he suggested that she now associates the trimming of her nails with the triumph of scaling the walls and that he has replaced an extremely negative association with an extremely positive one. I don’t know if it will hold forever, but I do know that when I bug her paws like he did during our training sessions, she no longer flinches—her paws just do not seem sensitive like they used to. Since I don’t think I’ll be back in Vermont any time soon, I’m planning to get a nail trimmer and trim her nails myself next time—near a wall for her to scale, in case she needs it.

Here is the link to the video: Kevin Behan trims Cholula\’s nails

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Pundit and Cholula: a Tale of How Not to Bring Two Dogs Together

May 25th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (0 Comments)

Pundit and Cholula in the Early Days, Before They Stopped Playing

I didn’t get Cholula at an especially good time to bring a new dog into our lives. I’ve written about that experience earlier on this blog, but basically, I brought home Cholula last August mostly because it was no longer quite a terrible time to bring a new dog into our lives. For example, my baby was a year and a half old, so I was no longer completely sleep deprived (but I still had three kids under six! And my year-and-a-half old was still not sleeping through the night!) We’d just returned from our two-week summer vacation (but I was heading into a busy work season! And we were going to have to bring the strange dog camping with us over Labor Day after she’d been with us only about a week!) But ever since my old dog, Ubi, had died at age 18 about a year earlier, I’d yearned for a second dog. There was no rational reason for it, but the only thing that kept me away from the shelter even as long as I stayed away was the overwhelmingness of caring for an infant. So last August, along with my year-and-a-half old baby, I went to the shelter and met two dogs. A couple of days later, my oldest daughter and I went back to the shelter and brought home Cholula. I’d done nothing to prepare—I didn’t even have a collar for her. The sweet look she’d given my baby at the shelter proved to be prescient—from the beginning, she was amazingly gentle with the kids. But given that she turned out to have aggression issues with other dogs, the relationship I really needed to manage was between her and our beloved 12-year-old dog, Pundit. This, I could have done so much better—and if I had done it better, I could have spared Pundit some pain and, I’m convinced, with Pundit’s help, brought out Cholula’s repressed playfulness more easily and quickly—a playfulness I’ve worked for months now to bring out because I need it to get her past her problems. But I learned some lessons from the experience, which I’m happy to pass on:

LESSON NUMBER ONE: WHEN INTRODUCING A STRANGE DOG FROM THE SHELTER TO YOUR BELOVED AGING FAMILY POOCH, DO NOT BE THE ONLY ADULT IN THE HOUSE WITH TWO DOGS AND THREE YOUNG CHILDREN BEFORE YOU HAVE FIGURED OUT HOW YOU ARE GOING TO GET EVERYONE OUTSIDE: My daughter and I arrived home with Cholula when my husband was still at work, and neither my other children nor Pundit had seen me all day. Initially, Pundit and Cholula did okay, sniffing and circling each other in the living room. But Pundit needed to go out, and in the chaos of trying to get shoes on the three kids and convince everyone we were going to take the dogs out, Pundit mounted Cholula. I later learned from Cholula’s previous owner that having another dog mount her is one of Cholula’s biggest fears/triggers for aggression. Pundit mounted Cholula. Cholula attacked. The kids screamed. I carried the kids out of the room as Pundit squealed, and by the time I got back in, Cholula had pinned Pundit and the two dogs had separated. They stood panting and looking nervous. Pundit was not obviously hurt, although with his arthritis pain it can’t be good for him to be thrown down like that. And my daughter S, who had initially said she loved Cholula, for weeks afterward refused to befriend Cholula because Cholula had attacked the family pet.

LESSON NUMBER TWO: IF YOUR SHELTER DOG IS UNSTABLE, MAKE SURE YOUR BELOVED OLD FAMILY POOCH HAS AN ESCAPE ROUTE: Pundit’s a lover, not a fighter, and Cholula, although her leash aggression became more apparent to us each day, is generally calm in the house, so again, the dogs were doing okay together, until a few days later. Coming back from a walk, I had both of their leashes in one hand, partially twisted together, when just as we approached our front gate along the sidewalk from one direction, a dog came towards us along the sidewalk from the opposite direction. It was bad timing—that dogs’ innocent blocking of our way into our house triggered one of Chlolula’s unhinged lunging attacks—but with Cholula on the leash, she couldn’t get to the other dog, and in blind fury she turned on Pundit, who was trapped with her by the leash and again suffered, squealing, until she pinned him, when I managed to pull her off of him. After that, I still hold the dogs’ leashes in separate hands, ready to release Pundit if I need to let him get away.

LESSON NUMBER THREE: SUPERVISE TREATS: As I’ve written previously, when we first got Cholula, she was anorexic and had to be coaxed into eating. One of Pundit’s few sins, on the other hand, is gluttony—he’ll eat almost any amount of anything. For a while, when Cholula was still so nervous about living with us, she’d leave a lot of her food in her bowl, which Pundit would immediately eat if we didn’t pick up the bowl—and as it was one of the few benefits Cholula’s arrival had bestowed on him, we didn’t make a big deal out of it. One of the highlights of Pundit’s day is also eating whatever dinner scraps we offer him as we’re doing the dishes, while in the beginning (and even now) Cholula doesn’t usually follow us into the kitchen after dinner. But one day, she was there, and we had leftover meat which I divided into two bowls and gave one to Pundit and one to Cholula. Pundit inhaled his while Cholula daintily picked at hers. I turned my back, and Pundit went for Cholula’s bowl. Cholula, for the first time ever defended her food, attacked, and again threw Pundit down on the hard floor. And then immediately released him and slunk away. The last fight they had was over a raw hide that Cholula wanted to hold onto forever and Pundit wanted to eat. We don’t offer either of them raw-hides anymore.

Cholula never drew blood in any of her attacks on Pundit, and Pundit was never obviously hurt. But it can’t be good for an old dog who limps a little even on his good days to be thrown down like that so forcefully—and I could avoided all of these situations—and helped them get on the right footing so much faster if I had handled the moments better. Also, before the fights, Cholula would run with Pundit in the back yard or on walks, and even try to play with him (as illustrated by the photo)—but after they’d had these bad experiences, she, seemingly as eager to avoid them as Pundit, refused to engage in any kind of play with Pundit, which set back some aspects of my training with her.

Once they stopped fighting, for a while, the dogs circled each other warily and stayed out of each others’ way, except on walks when, except for when Cholula is freaking out about another dog, they’ve always been companionable sniffers. Slowly, however, their relationship has improved. If I take one out without the other, the other will come sniff the first all over when we get back in the house. Pundit will nuzzle Cholula’s face, sometimes, and Cholula will let him. Recently, revved up by a delayed dinnertime, Pundit initiated play wrestling in the living room. I know wrestling inside isn’t a good idea, but since they haven’t been playing at all, I waited to see what would happen. Cholula bounced back at him, and they were batting their paws at each other playfully until Pundit got overexcited and mounted Cholula. My heart stopped. But this time, Cholula stayed completely calm. She just turned her head and looked at me as if to request I get the bratty dog off her. Which I did, immediately, thrilled to see that even with my many missteps, their relationship has come this far.

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Teaching Cholula to Walk

May 10th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (0 Comments)

Cholula still doesn’t bark on command. Instead, now that the weather is nice and we are all out in the back yard more, she barks too much at the neighbors. She occasionally digs holes along the edge of the back yard, and when we left the front door open by accident (while dealing with a minor child emergency) she frightened a flower delivery man up onto the recycling bin. She’s a work in progress, this dog.

However… however… and I almost hesitate to commit this to writing for fear she will backtrack—we seem to have crossed a tipping point regarding other dogs on leashes, at least when they are across the street. At the first sight of a dog on the horizon, her ears still pop forward, and a visible charge still runs along her body. But then she turns to me and pushes for her damp kibble (I don’t need hot dogs anymore); she jumps on me hard with little whinnies, bites the food from my hand and shows me her teeth. Even if the dog across the street lunges and barks at her, she will commit into the push towards me. Her energetic commit to me now seems to grow stronger each day. In that, she’s left behind the inhibition with which she arrived at our house, and much of the heaviness she seemed to carry within her. She seems younger.

So I decided to start working on her leash walking skills. When I first got Cholula, I got her a prong collar, and that’s what we usually walk her in. One of the first techniques I learned from dog-trainer Kevin Behan’s first book, Natural Dog Training, was to use a prong collar as a training aid, the key to the training method being to jerk the collar without any verbal indication of correction and, if possible, in such a way that the dog doesn’t realize it is you jerking the collar, at the same time you praise the dog, so that ideally the dog associates the shock of the prong collar with the unwanted behavior and your praise with the stopping of the unwanted behavior. Ever since we used Natural Dog Training to train my first dog, Ubi, back in the early 1990s, my husband and I have affectionately referred to this as the “jerk and praise.” So, although the generally applied “jerk and praise” has kept Cholula from pulling too much on the prong collar, when I tried to switch her to a flat collar she pulled really hard, and I realized I needed to do more focused leash work with her.

So I got out my old copy of Natural Dog Training and looked up the exercises that had been so effective with my two prior dogs, Ubi and Pundit. This book led me to Kevin Behan’s training methods, back when I first got Ubi in New York City. She was a stray that a friend had found and couldn’t keep. My friend drove her into Manhattan from Brooklyn; we met in Central Park and I walked her home from there. She was about 8 months old, a sleek, black pup who weighed thirty-three and a third pounds when we first got her and eventually fluffed out to 45 pounds; she had a patch of white on her chest and a pencil mark of a white line down the center of her nose, long, soft ears, and a plume of a tail she carried high as she danced along beside us.

She loved to play with the dogs on the Great Lawn in Central Park. For a while, she was willing to be the one dog chased by the whole pack; she would race in a swooping circle with a line of dogs following her, so swift and free. However, she stopped coming when I called her. She never ran away, but she would bounce around me, just out of my reach, and not let me catch her. This wasn’t okay in Central Park where, if I wanted to let her off the leash at all, I had to be able to get her back fast, right away, or I’d face leash fines and potential danger.

So I bought a few dog training books and started reading through them. None of them spoke to me. Some seemed too simplistic, the steps so easy to get the dog to follow—when the dog felt like it—that I didn’t trust they would teach the dog what to do in a moment of crisis. The Monks’ book took such a sexist tone towards female dogs I couldn’t even finish reading it. My husband picked up Natural Dog Training on sale and brought it home.

I read it, and I started trying the exercises Kevin describes in that book. I know his training methods have evolved quite a bit since he wrote the book, but thing that pulled me in was not only his philosophy, but the way that, although some of the exercises are really complicated and involve getting a friend to help out and a fair amount of preparation, including memorizing precise steps, when I managed to do them as he had described, they instantly transformed Ubi’s behavior. Kevin has such a perfectly distilled understanding of what drives dogs’ behavior that these exercises work like magic.

In Natural Dog Training, at the beginning of the leash training section, Kevin states,
“Now we need to select a target (distraction) that will be the focal point of the group’s activity…What I use most often is a doorway. I collect the dog into a sit at the door and pause for several moments as I praise him and reward him with food.

Holding him at sit with my left hand, I open the door with my right, and while praising him, I release the lead. He will, of course, bolt through the door, but as he heads in that direction, I move away from the door and give him a crisp shock. I intensify my praise and encourage him to make contact. Next, I run in and out of the door several times, with lots of rewards, praise, and stroking”.

The doorway seemed the perfect place to try this with Cholula because whenever I opened the front door—always after Cholula is on leash after the horror that happened when she ran out into the front yard just as a dog walked by, and attacked it—(put in link)— she would race out of it, pulling me behind her.

I had to read the passage several times before I had a firm sense of what to do, but eventually I broke it down like this:

1) Have Cholula sit at my left by the front door, and praise her and give her some kibble.
2) Open the door with my right hand
3) When she charged out, as assuredly she would, back away from the door, jerk her prong collar hard, praising effusively, and then get her to jump up on me or “push” into me.
4) Run in and out of the door several times with Cholula by my side, while praising, so she gets the feeling of moving through the door with me and my movement, while praising.
5) Repeat several times.

Then I did it. I had Cholula sit at my left by the front door, praised her, and opened the door. When she charged, I moved back, shocked, praised, and had her jump up on me, and then we ran in and out of the door several times. And just like with Ubi, the exercise instantly transformed Cholula’s behavior at the beginning of her walks. After her first charge, jerk, backpedal, praise, and jump up, she moved with me smoothly in and out of the door, completely focused on me, and completely happy.

Since that first time two days ago, at the beginning of each walk, I’ve repeated the exercise—even adding in Kevin’s suggestions for the more advanced version that includes counterclockwise spins and more prolonged travel towards the door—but she hasn’t charged out the door since—instead she waits for me. Even as Pundit runs past us and out the door, she sits without me asking and looks to me so that we can walk out together, leash loose. The real beauty of Kevin’s training exercises is that when they go well, the dog is so happy to present the desired behavior—there’s no hesitancy, no reluctance, no sense that while its following what you are asking of it, it’s secretly rolling its eyes at you crazy human. Instead, just as with the pushing, which has become his central training technique (and which you can read about on his website www.naturaldogtraining.com) the exercises convince the dog that you are the answer to what it is searching for. And I’m hoping that moving forward with this leash training with Cholula will reinforce the pushing work we’ve already been doing in integrating Cholula’s energy and drive with mine so that she thinks of our walks as an adventure we take together rather than the means by which she hunts that which she most wants and fears (other dogs), with me an ancillary presence holding her back from where she is trying to go.

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More Unconventional Advice from My Dog Trainer Kevin Behan

April 4th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (6 Comments)

Two other pieces of unconventional advice my dog trainer Kevin Behan (www.naturaldogtraining.com) gave me when I asked him in November to give me a training program to change Cholula’s dog aggression were (1) don’t give her too much exercise, and (2) avoid other dogs.

The first one shocked me. I’ve always worked to give my dogs a lot of exercise, and I’ve always credited those efforts as being key to why my dogs Ubi (who died a few years ago, still beautiful and unbelievably limber at age 18) and Pundit (still chasing balls at almost 13, in spite of arthritis) were always so calm in the house and so healthy to good old dog ages. Both of those dogs came into my life as very high energy puppies and stayed high energy, happy, and nondestructive-to-the-house dogs with almost always at least an hour of hard exercise a day until they became quite old. And yet here was Kevin telling me I was giving my stressed-out, young adult dog—who is unpredictably aggressive to other dogs and who has dug the stuffing out of the one couch she is allowed on as well as deep holes in the yard—too much exercise. Before I talked to him, I thought the more exercise I could give her, the better. But his concept is that whenever she is out and about, all of the smells, sights, sounds, unpredictable dog encounters, and perhaps even the actual physical movement itself is charging her up internally, adding to her central problem, as Kevin sees it, that she bottles that energy up inside herself, represses it hour after hour until it unpredictably comes out as unhinged aggression in those overloaded moments when a dog on a leash approaching us triggers the release of all that inhibition she’s spent her life practicing.

His second piece of advice (avoid other dogs) was something of a relief to me because I’d already had enough bad experiences with Cholula around other dogs to grow wary of walking her too close to them. Not only did Cholula attack a little dog outside of our front yard (I wrote about this on this site before), but another time on a walk, her prong collar opened when she lunged at a chow mix and she ferociously raced into the street after it. Fortunately, the chow’s owner heroically caught Cholula, lifted her 70 pounds into the air, and threw her back at me, at which point Cholula returned. After these two incidents, even though I know it’s counter productive for me to get stressed out about other dogs out on the sidewalk when I’m with Cholula, I inevitably do. However, I often hear from people that I should “socialize” Cholula by taking her around other dogs. I know that when Kevin works with dogs with aggression problems at his farm in Vermont (he writes about this in Your Dog is Your Mirror), he does do exercises that involve the dog interacting with other dogs, so it’s not like he doesn’t think that bringing the dog into contact with other dogs is not part of the puzzle. However, what he told me was that I needed to focus on softening Cholula, helping her release her energy through sniffing and pushing and biting food (and preferably a toy too, although she won’t) while walking with me, and that just as with her getting too much exercise only 1,000 times more intense, at this point, every time she encounters another dog on a walk, even when she doesn’t react aggressively (because many times she doesn’t) she’s building up that charge that she holds inside her until at a certain moment, something in another dog on a leash provokes her to let it out all at once in an attack.

So Kevin advised me to find a regular walk where we would run into as few dogs as possible and as few unpredictable circumstances as possible, and to do that walk with her every day, avoiding the dogs that came our way. For the most part, that’s what I’ve done since then. I don’t have a perfectly closed system—I usually take her for a longer jog once a week or so, and my husband and my father periodically take her out for longer walks as well. While I always try to keep a street between me and the other dogs we see (because we always see dogs, there is no walk in my neighborhood whereby we can completely avoid dogs), my husband and father do not cross the street—they let her approach other dogs and my father even occasionally takes her to the dog run, which I won’t do, although as it’s dogs on leashes that inspire her aggression, he’s never had a problem with her at the dog run.

But generally speaking, since I spoke to Kevin, Cholula has had considerably less variety in her daily walks and considerably less exercise. Is this working? I wish that, 4 months later, I could say with more certainty that it is. I know that, generally speaking, she is now more “with” me on walks – more relaxed, spends more time sniffing with her ears out to the side and less time anxiously scanning ahead, jaw locked and ears cocked directly over her forehead. Cholula’s ears are an absolute barometer of her stress level. As shown in the photos with this post, ears to the side, good. Ears drawn completely forward, bad (the “bad ears” photo occurred because as I was taking photos of her relaxed in the back yard, a dog barked out front). Kevin added to my barometer that sniffing is good—a sign that she is taking in input about other dogs in a relaxed manner, while scanning the vista with her eyes while she strains forward is bad—a sign she is stressed and looking for a menacing dog to unload it on.

In general, things seem somewhat better. We have had many fewer incidents of her lunging at other dogs recently (although that is partly because I always keep a street between us). I’m increasingly able to avoid there being any moment when she is straining against the leash to get to another dog because I’ve gotten her to push towards me instead before she sends all her energy out towards that dog she’s glimpsed across the street. However, there are still moments where my timing is off and I lose her attention to a dog, where it is only the collar and leash keeping her from a potential attack. My husband has had some good times with Cholula recently too, where they’ve run into other dogs and she’s been relatively relaxed around them. However, every now and then he comes back from a walk furious, and I know without asking that Cholula lunged, catching him by surprise.

I was hoping that by now she’d be better than she is. I was hoping that by now I would have been more successful at training her past this problem. But I do my best to accept that we are where we are and to work with where we are, because I know that getting frustrated doesn’t help either of us. On each walk, and for each training session in the back yard, I try to forget about the setbacks or progress that may have occurred the walk or training session before and to focus on how I can positively work with her energy in the now. In that, dog training is like so many of the more difficult, more worthwhile things in my life—child rearing, for one—each moment that you have with that other being is a chance to positively connect and move forward, and no matter how many chances have been blown in the past, the now always holds the potential to get it right.

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What Happened to Cholula?

March 25th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (0 Comments)

I know more about Cholula’s past than is typical for a shelter dog. First, there are these scars on her back right leg. Are they from a dog attack that led to Cholula’s problems with other dogs? I don’t know, but she carries on her body this evidence of trauma, which must have hurt a lot and frightened her terribly. One of her front leg tendons also is injured, although this injury doesn’t have scars or affect her in any obvious way. Sometimes I stroke her scars. She doesn’t seem to mind.

The other reason I know more about Cholula’s past than is typical with a shelter dog is that I talked to her previous owner. I’m going to call her Anna. At the shelter, the staff told me that Anna had come in with Cholula (then called Mia), sobbing. She had told them that she could no longer care for the dog because she was ill, but she had provided them a history of Cholula on a flier she’d put up when she’d been trying to find Cholula a new home on her own, and she had given them her phone number and told the shelter staff to pass it own to the dog’s new owner, that she would be happy to talk to them.

The shelter staff had lost the flier by the time I met Cholula. If they hadn’t, I probably would never have picked that dog, because although the shelter staff had posted on Cholula’s cage that she was good with kids, cats, and dogs, the flier (which Anna sent me later, after I talked to her) provided a full description of her problems with other dogs and even cautioned that bringing her to a home with another dog might not work.

In any case, I left the shelter with Cholula, without the wisdom on the flier, and didn’t call Anna until my husband and I realized that Cholula had some problems. Specifically, as I’ve written earlier, leash aggression—she would unpredictably become unhingedly aggressive towards other dogs when out on a walk.

When I called Anna she told me that she had rescued Cholula from the same shelter (via a friend who had fostered her) about two years earlier, when Cholula must have been about a year and a half old. Anna said that Cholula had been brought to the shelter skin and bones, 45 pounds instead of the slim 70 she is now, and that she had the scars and injuries. That’s all she knew about Cholula’s life before her first shelter visit.

At Anna’s house, Cholula lived with two cats, and she always let them eat from her bowl before she would eat. In fact, Anna said, sometimes it was annoying the way Cholu would not eat until the cats had finished, because Anna would be trying to shoo the cats away so Cholula could eat and Cholula wouldn’t eat and the whole thing could take some time. Anna several times said that Cholula was more like a cat than a dog. Sometimes I tell Pundit he needs to teach Cholula how to be a dog.

Anna loved Cholula, but due to a chronic illness and a difficult treatment for it, she didn’t have any energy for the dog, so after trying unsuccessfully to find a new owner for her, she’d taken her back to the shelter. She told me that the treatment was going to go on for two years, and she kept thinking that two years for her was 14 years for Cholula, and she didn’t want Cholula to spend the next 14 years of her life in a situation where she wasn’t getting the life she deserved. Also, she said that Cholula was so sensitive to Anna’s health and emotions that when Anna was sick, Cholula got depressed.

Anna took good care of Cholula. She trained Cholula at an obedience school. She had talked to several trainers about Cholula’s problems with other dogs, and one trainer had recommended that she squirt Cholula with water when she got aggressive to other dogs, and that was the one thing that had worked, had worked to the point that Cholula was even able to befriend a couple of dogs in the neighborhood she’d been aggressive to before. Although I bought a water bottle to try this, I couldn’t figure out where to keep it so I’d have it ready right when I needed it (what with Pundit and sometimes a stroller taking up my hands on our walks) and so I actually never managed to even try it. In any case, my dog trainer Kevin Behan recommends against that, as (I believe I’m stating this as he would) while it may be effective in inhibiting any aggression, it’s actually counterproductive to natural dog training in that it’s teaching the dog ever more entrenchedly NOT to let its energy out, rather than helping the dog figure out how to handle the energy rush it experiences from other dogs.

Anna also warned me that the one other thing that could unhinge Cholula was skateboarders. As there aren’t that many skateboarders in my neighborhood, I hadn’t experienced that yet when I talked to her, but eventually I did, and it was quite dramatic, and I was glad to have heard from her before hand so I knew what was going on. Anna took good care of Cholula, and then, via a week or two back in the shelter, Anna passed her on to me.

And so all of this, the good and the bad, Cholula somehow carries inside her. I would love, one day, to see her with some cats.

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