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Pushing Update 3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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Cholula Shows Her Speak

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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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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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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Cholula and the Bogeyman

March 29th, 2012 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (3 Comments)


Recently, something strange started to happen. My kids pointed it out to me—“Mama,” my oldest daughter said to me one day, laughing, “Cholula’s not just scared of the hallway to the kitchen, she’s scared of the stairs and the hall upstairs too.” “Yeah,” said my other daughter, “she’s scared of the whole house.” It was true. In direct contrast to continuing progress in her training outside, Cholula was getting stuck at various points all over the house, so stuck that she would whine from her various perches until one of us went and either walked with her past the frightening spot or called to her until she got so excited she could dash past the spot all skittery nails and splayed limbs. I wrote to Kevin Behan on his website and asked him about it. He responded (in short), the entire exchange is here—

I suspect you’re now dealing with the first instances of fear in her life as [she looks] to find a predator to justify the release of pent up energy. The bark will be really important to get her to release her fear. She’s processing fear outdoors (i.e. her improved abilities and behaviors outside represent a new ability to move through her fear) but still experiencing it, and so it needs to find an outlet and so [she] concocts a predator from innocuous stuff within a context from her past.

I’ve been continuing to work on the bark on command. This too is quite something to see—she will curl back her lips, gnash her teeth, shake her head, sneeze, emit a short growl—watching her these past weeks work to try to find the noise and not quite get it, I’ve realized that to ask her to bark on command is to ask her to give up everything she learned about life before she came to our house, when unhinged barking at real or imagined attackers was a primary means of stress release, while silence and subduedness in the face of her owner was how she avoided trouble. Although, of course, she didn’t actually avoid trouble with these coping strategies—in fact, she became trouble, ending up in the shelter twice and then attacking a dog outside my house shortly after I brought her home.

Her newly neurotic behavior has mostly faded in the weeks since I wrote Kevin. Cholula is back to her old way of being now, with only the one hallway between the dining room and kitchen still bothering her. It is quite something to see her trot up to it, come to a sudden, foreleg-splayed stop, turn around and tiptoe backwards through it, lifting each leg higher than necessary as if pulling her paws out of something sticky. While Kevin gave me some tips to help her through it, I think her neuroticism in the house subsided largely because we are at something of a new plateau. That is, when she first mastered her calm sit/stay, when she started reliably sneezing on command, with her corresponding increased ability to handle and even play with dogs we meet out and about, she was living in the outside world in a mode past her comfort zone, and it freaked her out. As Kevin wrote above, it freaked her out so much that she manufactured bogeymen all over the house to take out her fear on. Now, we have been doing these things long enough that we have established a new comfort zone. And so she’s back to her one old fear in the house and the rest of the house has returned to innocuousness. For now. Until we make another leap. I’m still working towards that real bark.

Working with Cholula’s fear has helped me understand how I get caught in my own. I know her feeling, of moving forward in one area only to find that other, previously easy tasks have become seemingly insurmountable. Take my website redesign. I’d been wanting to redesign my website for a long time, and because I don’t have many technical skills or much time, I’d decided I should hire someone to do it. Both committing the money to it and finding the right person were hurdles that kept me from moving on this for a long time. But recently, through a combination of readiness and chance (a post for another time) I got it redesigned. The redesign is almost everything I hoped for. But I found myself obsessing over minor details that bothered me and, even worse, feeling on the one hand filled with new content-related ideas for the site and on the other hand, having a new difficulty finding the time to create any content at all for the site. Following through on my own commitment to improve the look of the site pushed me out of my comfort zone and sent me into my own neurotic panic. And part of coming out of it is accepting that, like Cholula, I don’t have to—and maybe I can’t—make the whole transformation at once. I can pause at this new plateau, and practice, and trust that eventually, I’ll be ready take the next step.

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The Bark and the Breath

February 7th, 2012 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (3 Comments)

When I had my first telephone consultation with natural dog training founder Kevin Behan after Cholula attacked a little white dog, his primary advice was to teach Cholula to bark on command. As I remember it, he told me that if I could get her to bark on command, I could have her bark as soon as I saw her getting anxious about a dog, and the bark would release her fear and dissipate her need to attack. Or, as he put it in a recent blog post, “The point of training a dog to bark on command, is that it becomes a way to stress the dog, and then he resolves the stress by a clean, clear, deep bark. Why is this important? Because it gives the dog a way to express fear without having to act on fear.”

So it’s over a year later, and I still haven’t been able to get Cholula to bark on command. However, recently, after a hiatus of many months, I’ve started working with her again on this skill. Just about a year ago, I wrote about my earlier efforts. I didn’t seem to be making much progress, and so I eventually stopped working on it, except that during our walks, when she got overexcited about another dog approaching, I would bug her into pushing for food and as I did so I would say, “speak.” Just recently, a couple of times, when she was VERY excited about a dog on a leash, when I did this she let out a bark—not the full-fledged bark I’m looking for—more of a tortured, high-pitched “I’m freaked out and want to go attack that dog,” kind of bark, but it was a bark nonetheless, and so I realized that there was a little bit of energy flowing out of her into a bark and it was time to start up the bark training again.

During my early attempts to get her to bark on command—and these efforts went on for several months—she would stretch, paw the ground, and jump up on me in response to my command, but she never really opened her mouth. A combination of believing in Kevin’s theory and seeing Cholula’s efforts led me to visualize a blocked pipe running through Cholula—a pipe that should be open for her energy to move freely through her body into a bark but that was blocked with something like sandbags, bottling up her energy until it burst out unpredictably in moments of aggression, and keeping her from being able to translate my command into any kind of vocalization.

And then suddenly I realized that what I was visualizing was nothing more or less than her windpipe. That asking a dog to bark on command is asking a dog to control its breath—to breathe in and then breathe out in a bark rather than simply releasing air through its nose. It’s one thing for a dog to bark instinctively, and quite another for it to be able to respond to a command to produce a bark.

We’ve all heard of the many studies showing that breath work—through such efforts as meditation or yoga, for example, or even natural childbirth breathing techniques—can be key to reducing stress in people. In fact, last week in my yoga class I was trying to do something at the limits of my yoga abilities, and just after I’d made it up onto my hands, my yoga teacher said, “Now do it again without clenching your teeth.” She was completely right—my jaw was aching—when I’m trying to do something hard that makes me nervous, I have a tendency to clench my teeth and even hold my breath instead of working with the breath. Which is exactly what Cholula used to do when she saw a dog on a leash—I believe Kevin called it “lock jaw” when I first described to him how she would silently and with utter focus gaze at the oncoming dog, her entire face clenched.

Breath control, as I now think of bark on command, is much easier for some dogs than for others. Pundit is an example of a dog who picked this up with relative ease, even at the age of 12. But for Cholula, with her extreme inhibition and generally quiet nature, to ask her to bark on command is to ask her to leave all of her past coping mechanisms behind. To ask for transformation. A transformation that, as Kevin has said all along, could be key in truly resolving Cholula’s problems. Which is why I’m so excited about our recent progress.

I’m including links to three video clips below. (Note: my daughter filmed the clips of me working with Cholula, so you can hear her commentary in the background. Also, I’m fully aware these clips also show the limitations of my training abilities—I’m no expert, and my timing is not always right, etc. However, I want to share them not only because I think they reveal Cholula’s progress, but also because I think that Cholula’s extreme difficulty doing this and her slow progress towards it illustrate how, as Kevin Behan claims, getting a dog with aggression problems to bark on command gives it a way to release its stress without aggression and thus can resolve the aggression problem.

Video 1: Pundit Barks: One challenge I’ve had with training Cholula is that Pundit is fully aware that when Cholula and I go into the back yard for training, there are treats involved, and he wants to be part of it. While sometimes I can accommodate him as a training partner, with the bark-on-command work, it really doesn’t help Cholula when Pundit is only too willing to bark every time he hears me say “speak.” But when I put him inside, he stands at the back door and barks like a maniac until my irritated husband throws him back out with us. The only way I’ve found out of this cycle is to bring Pundit out with us, and then rotate the commands “bark” and “quiet” as I walk Pundit back towards the door. Eventually, I open the door, put him back in the kitchen, give him his “quiet” command and treat, close the door, and like magic, he waits for us inside without barking. So in case you are interested, here is Pundit barking and being quiet on command (what I hope eventually Cholula will be able to do). It also the method I’ve been able to use to enact Kevin’s promise that if you can teach a dog to bark you can teach him to be quiet.

Video 2: Cholula Working on Her Bark: This clip is from early in the training session. I include it because it shows some beginning steps she has to take to bark—she opens her mouth, she wrinkles her nose, she breathes out of her mouth—all pieces of the breath control she needs to bark—and all things that were beyond her last year.

Video 3: Cholula Getting Closer: This clip is from towards the end of the training session. Warmed up, she is actually huffing—that is, while it’s not quite a bark yet, there are times here where she opens her mouth, wrinkles her nose, and makes a noise! She is learning to respond to me with her breath. Also, at the end of the video clip I ask my daughter to back up so you can see Cholula’s body. This is because in this recent work with Cholula I’ve been goading her to get her to bark by lightly pinching her cheek. As she started opening her mouth in response to this goading in earlier training sessions, it actually appeared to me up front with her head that she might bite me—the wrinkling up of her nose, the opening of her mouth—the expression on her face was that of a dredged up frustrated hostility that she has worked to inhibit for too long. While it didn’t make me give up, it definitely kept my hands moving quickly. But then at some point I noticed that while her face was reflecting this intense struggle to release something she usually holds back, her body and tail were smooth, supple, excited, wagging. There is something about this work, hard for her as it is, that simultaneously gives her joy. And so we continue the work, in the hope of fully unlocking her heart.

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