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Pushing Update 4: Hide and Seek

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some other hiding spots we found:

Behind the roots of an uprooted tree

Behind the roots of an uprooted tree

Inside a hollow tree trunk

Inside a hollow tree trunk

Behind some fallen trees that make a bridge

Behind the bridge of some fallen trees

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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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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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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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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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Home

October 25th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Dog Days | Travel - (0 Comments)

We went to Puerto Rico for a week. Our friend and professional dog-sitter, Jim, took care of the dogs for the first time since last April. He walks and feeds them twice a day, and the rest of the time they hang out in the house doing whatever dogs do when they are on their own—sleeping, barking at the mailman, sleeping. We started leaving the dogs home when we can’t take them with us instead of taking them to a friend’s house or kennel after our old dog Ubi got so stressed out at a doggy day care a friend took her to while we were away (this seemed like a good idea before we tried it) that she almost died. Literally. We came home to a quivering heap of fur and bones. Clearly, in her elder years, if she couldn’t be with us, Ubi just wanted to be at home, waiting for us.

I texted Jim a day or so after we left to make sure he had gotten into the house okay and he wrote back, “Everything is fine. Cholula is so mellow on the walk now!” Of course, this made my day. I know Cholula is generally doing great these days, so much better than last spring, but it’s hard to see it sometimes when it happens day by day, and it’s easy to focus on the negative—the time I pushed her past her capability and she charged a friend, the time she ran off (again) into the woods for 20 minutes before coming back.

But I had to wait until we got home to get the full story of Cholula and Pundit’s week without us. This was left for me by Jim on our kitchen table, one note per visit. Our family loved them so much I’m sharing them here, for your reading pleasure:

Friday morning:
We had a wet walk. Pundit and Cholula kept looking at me as if to say, “Where are the hot dogs?” (Last spring I was still using hot dogs on walks to get Cholula’s energy away from other dogs). We saw another dog across the street. Cholula hardly noticed!

Friday evening:
We took a leisurely walk. No issues.

Saturday morning:
Pundit and Cholula were on their best behavior with other dogs. I didn’t hear a peep out of either of them!

Saturday evening:
We had a very pleasant late evening walk. No poop.

Sunday morning:
Everybody was full of vigor this morning! Still no poop from Cholula.

Sunday evening:
Everybody ate. Everybody pooped! All was well!

Monday morning:
We had another very pleasant morning walk. Cholula was a bit more riled up, but I didn’t have any problems.

Monday evening:
Cholula came racing down to see me. Pundit jumped up out of the chair. Everybody was very, very excited! Pundit got some kind of bone on the walk and crunched it up before I could extract it.

Tuesday morning:
Everybody was in need of a good scratch behind the ears and some love, so I gave it to them.

Tuesday morning:
There were a lot of squirrels, cats, and other dogs about. Cholula got pretty excited, but I got her to calm down.

Wednesday morning:
We had a damp and rainy morning walk. Cholula was still looking for that cat! All business was attended to.

Wednesday evening:
We had a rainy walk.

Thursday morning:
We took a brisk morning walk. Everybody pooped. All was well!

Thursday evening:
I came bearing food! Cholula and Pundit were very, very excited!

And then we came home. And Cholula and Pundit were very, very excited! For a moment it was a toss up as to whether Cholula was more excited to see me or her rat holes in the back yard, which she hadn’t had access to all week—but then I won! Over the rat holes! Cholula pushed like crazy and raced like a demon up and down the yard jumping on me with full doggy joy while Pundit ran from one to the other of us barking like a maniac—and we were glad to be home.

If you live in DC and want Jim’s information for dog walking or sitting, let me know. He’s the best.

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There Is No Such Thing as Bad Energy

September 25th, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (2 Comments)

I know that most of the readers of my dog-related posts come to sweet slugabed through natural dog training in some way, but a few of my readers may not have this background, and I’ve been thinking I should try to articulate what natural dog training means to me. Of course, if you’re interested in learning more, you should also go to natural dog training founder Kevin Behan’s site, www.naturaldogtraining.com, and Neil Sattin’s site that includes some step by step instructions on some of the key techniques used in natural dog training: www.naturaldogblog.com. In addition, several commenters on my last post asked me to describe more specifically how I’ve been goading and irritating Cholula into responding to me, and while I certainly don’t feel qualified to tell anyone what will or won’t work, and I think this goading activity may be a tricky area, I realized when transcribing the statements from Kevin’s recent radio interview on “On Point,” below, which I think very clearly capture the essence of his methods, that they in part relate to this goading.

When Kevin was interviewed by Tom Ashbrook on “On Point,” on June 2, he articulated the difference between natural dog training and the “dominance method” (Tom Ashbrook specifically referred to Cesar Milan), by saying the following. (I’m paraphrasing slightly, cutting some things out, and putting together quotes from two different parts of the program that really spoke to me about what natural dog training is about.)

“Through my work as a police dog trainer, I came to recognize that states of dominance and submission are states of emotional insecurity, and we never promote emotional insecurity in a police dog. Moreover, trainers using the dominance model are training the dog to have reduced energy, and I always want the dog to have lots of energy, because when channeled properly, that energy always comes out with sociability. I learned through working with police dogs that the variation in a dog’s response to stimuli depends on how free flowing the dog’s emotion is. When a dog’s emotional energy is blocked, it comes out in negative ways, but when a dog’s emotional energy is open and flowing, the dog focuses on the positive, and its emotion is always social.

My basic mantra is there is no such thing as bad energy. Often, when we see a dog doing something bad, instinctively we try to control and repress its energy. In contrast, I’ve developed a series of techniques to encourage the dog to express more and more energy. This causes the dog to feel so released and safe and comfortable that the dog gives me credit for that release, and goes from wanting to bite me to wanting to be in harmony with me. From that mindset its very easy to shape and influence him and lead him to the answer, which is how to be part of a group for the purposes of a collective goal—not just to work to please somebody else, but to be part of a collective group, which is a goal the dog can put his heart into. That is why it’s so important to understand the hunting evolution of a dog, for the hunt is what he can put his heart into, and “the hunt”—whether it’s a car ride or chasing a Frisbee or agility training – can become anything that leads the dog to a goal that connects him to the owner.”

The other quote of Kevin’s I wanted to share is from his first book, Natural Dog Training. I was re-reading the puppy section the other day because a friend just got a new puppy, and I came across this sentence, which he had thoughtfully underlined in the book—“The more of the puppy that survives into adulthood, the happier and healthier the dog.”

To me, these concepts are so beautiful and powerful. The idea that you are working with your dog not to suppress its energy or to force your will on it or to squash its puppy energy but to bring its energy out to the fullest—its full, puppyish, uninhibited desire to explore and learn and work—while shaping its energy so that the dog responds appropriately to people and other dogs, and is fully obedient in that it will always come back when you call it—that’s a beautiful goal.

Moreover, having had my dog Pundit for 13 years now, the puppiest dog I’ve ever known, and now having had Cholula for one year, the truth of Kevin’s statement about wanting the puppy to survive into adulthood has become vividly clear to me. For Pundit’s ability to hold onto his puppy directness, his puppy love of uninhibited action, his puppy enthusiasm for pretty much everything even now that his spirit so far surpasses his hobbled body has made him a fantastic companion dog for our family. In contrast, I know so certainly that for whatever reasons, nurture/nature, etc., Cholula lost her puppyhood too soon, and that much of my work with her is trying to resurrect that puppy inside her adult body so that she can be with our family in a fuller and more open way.

So regarding my goading and irritating of Cholula, I think Kevin’s statements on “On Point” articulate a lot of why this works. When I wrote in my last post about goading or irritating Cholula, what I meant was simply this: often now, on our walks, when she gets over-focused on a dog across the street or on a rat in the bushes, focused so that her jaw locks and her ears are tense, she’s completely looking away from me, her body straining towards that other object in some combination of fear and longing, instead of waiting or jerking on her collar, I will grab her hind leg, or pinch her haunch, or if I can get to it, I’ll tug or pinch her ear or her cheek. Not enough to hurt her—I’ve never made her cry out from it—but enough to get her to whirl around to me, the “attacker.” And she whirls around with that same focused energy she’s been giving the other dog or the rat in the bushes, an energy she’s never willing to give me in any other circumstance, and when I’ve surprised her into showing me that fierceness she usually hides from me, I (doing my best to copy Kevin’s brilliant timing, use of body language, etc., which I can only roughly approximate), immediately soften my body, move away from her, praise her in a sing-song voice, and as she pushes against me, give her food (which I’ve been holding in the same hand that pinches her).

And Cholula loves it. It’s just as Kevin said to Tom Ashbrook, there is a palpable release and comfort and joy in Cholula when I catch her energy in this manner. And while I can’t say I’ve been completely successful yet in solving Cholula’s (or my) problems, I can say that the energy I’ve been able to release by doing this is a happy energy. It’s her puppy energy peeking out from the layers and layers of inhibition and control that have served her well up to a point but that also have been the making of her disastrous hostility towards other dogs and occasional outbursts in other settings as well.

I’m ending this post with a photo of Pundit. The photo itself is not of great quality—I actually stole it off my friend’s facebook page, and I think she may have taken a digital photo of a print in the first place—but it’s a beautiful photo—and when I was trying to come up with a photo that illustrated any of this, this is the photo I thought of. I believe it was taken when my oldest daughter was one and a half, so just about 6 years ago, when Pundit would have been about 7. What a great image of an adult dog with his puppyhood fully intact, fully energized in harmony towards a goal with his people. When I can capture Cholula in a moment of such harmonic joy with people—and this still a long ways from where we are now—I will know we have succeeded.

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One Year Ago

August 31st, 2011 | Posted by sweet in Natural Dog Training - (0 Comments)

Cholula, one year ago

This is Cholula on our camping trip last Labor Day weekend, one year ago. We’d gotten her from the shelter maybe a week earlier, and hadn’t fully realized the extent of her problems with other dogs. Overly optimistic, we took her on a camping trip to a Maryland state campground where dogs were allowed. They put all the dog owners in the same area, so tethered at our campground, Cholula was in a state of constant anxiety as dogs walked by us–and also when we walked her around, passing other dogs at their campsites. It seemed that every third dog staying there had issues similar to Cholula’s, which made for a lot of lunging and barking.

Now, a year later, we are heading to another campground that allows dogs, and again we are taking Cholula. This time, we’ll be in cabins, so she will get more of a break. But even so, I’m interested to see how she will handle being at a campground with a bunch of dogs, one year later, after all the work we’ve done. I’ll let you know.

Happy Labor Day weekend, everyone–

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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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