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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!

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Why I called Kevin Behan

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

So far, the low point with Cholula, the point after which I decided to call Kevin Behan for specific advice, came Thanksgiving weekend. We had been feeling good about Cholula—she’d been settling in, getting along fine with Pundit, and even accepting a new dog—my sister-in-law’s lab, just down for the weekend—into the house without incident. Things had been going so well I was feeling more relaxed than I had since we’d gotten her, and didn’t check that the front gate was closed before I let her out the front door, expecting to put her leash on on the front porch before we left the yard.

The gate was open. At the very moment Cholula leapt out the front door, a woman was walking by on the sidewalk in front of our yard with her two small dogs. Tiny dogs. I’m talking about 5 pound dogs. I will still on the porch when the unearthly beastly screams and the woman’s hysterical screams began. The sidewalk is lower than our yard and from the front porch I actually couldn’t see what was going on—when I got down to the sidewalk, the little white dog was lying on her back wailing as if it was about to die and Cholula, already off the dog, was standing on the sidewalk. I grabbed her and pulled her inside and then ran back out.

By then, neighbors had arrived and were comforting the woman, the woman had picked up her dog and was saying she didn’t have a vet, I called my vet, which was about to close but gave me the info for the after hours vet clinic nearby. The woman tried to put down her dog, who howled and collapsed, unable to walk. I panicked. I offered to drive the woman and her dog to the vet. I offered to pay for anything. I offered to do anything I could. I apologized profusely. As the woman calmed down, she noticed that Cholula had bit the dog’s shoulder, said she didn’t see anything else obviously wrong with her dog, said her dog was very dramatic, and that probably it couldn’t walk because the bite on its shoulder was hurting its leg, and that it would probably feel better in the morning. She also said that this little white dog that Cholula had attacked was actually her nightmare aggressive dog (5 pounds of aggression against other dogs, no match for 70 pound Cholula), and that because it always attacks other dogs, she usually picks it up when they approach other dogs. But that of course, with Cholula descending like a flash from the yard, she hadn’t had time. I kept apologizing, explained that I’d recently gotten Cholula from the shelter, kept offering to do anything she wanted me to do. She decided she wanted to wait and see. I gave her all my information, but she didn’t call me. I called her a couple of days later, and she said she had taken the dog to the vet the next day, the vet had prescribed antibiotics to make sure the bites didn’t get infected, and that the dog was doing fine now. She also said that Cholula had bitten through the skin on both shoulders. She refused to let me pay for anything. She was incredibly reasonable. I felt horrible—still feel horrible about it. My husband was ready to return Cholula to the shelter.

I had already re-read Kevin’s dog training book and read the articles on his website, read the training articles on Neil Sattin’s website (who gives me hope because he found natural dog training when he used the methods to solve his adult dog’s dog-aggression problems), and tried to implement the training methods and suggestions there. I was not ready to return Cholula anywhere—she is so lovely with the kids! So appropriate with friends in the house (as long as they are people)! So beautiful! So good with Pundit! We had bonded. But I decided three things (1) For obvious reasons, I now keep her leash in the house and do not let her into the front yard until the leash is on and I am holding it; (2) I now limit her time outside in the backyard without us—I called it putting her on lockdown, because my interpretation of Kevin Behan’s teachings is that she needed to have less recourse to ways to satisfy her energy needs outside of our training, an (3) to pay for a phone consultation with Kevin. I wanted him to give me a specifically tailored program for me and Cholula. I wanted to explain to him my limitations (little time, little kids, urban living), Cholula’s issues, and have him tell me what to do.