What's Worth Caring About?: How to Let Go of Some Behaviors

I’ve used this blog a lot to dispel the frustrations of dog owners because that’s what they seem to need the more than training. Like most of us during our struggles, we need to know we are not alone and that everything is okay and normal.

What I think gets people bent out of shape the most about their dogs is that they have such high expectations of perfection for their dog. Even with proper training of both the human and the dog, I still hear dissatisfaction among pet owners about the little things their dogs do.

I hear things such as “my dog pulls more at the beginning of the walk than he does at the middle or end of it and I don’t know what to do.” First, as with most dog behavior, ask yourself why your dog does this behavior. The easiest answer is that your dog is really excited to walk. I’m sure what the owner perceives to be annoying behavior started with just pulling the leash out.

Now we ask, is this behavior worth fixing? To me, and for Shimmer, it’s not worth fixing. The pulling lasts five minutes of our 30 or more minute walks. Those five minutes are when my dog is happiest while we’re walking and so I suck it up. She’s not a service dog or any sort of competition dog so I do not need to have my expectations set there.

Or another behavior I hear about often is that “when I come home my dog runs laps around the house and is super excited. How do I get him to calm down?” Let’s follow the procedure here. Why is my dog acting like a fool when I get home? First, and most importantly, the most important thing in your dog’s life was gone and has now returned. You are the center of your dog’s world, try not to forget that.

Next step in our procedure: is the behavior worth fixing? If you have lots of knick-knacks, have joint/balance problems, or any other reason then yes, a redirect for that energy is the perfect solution. Get your dog out to the yard quickly to run or put him in a down-stay for a moment to calm down. If there is no compelling reason though, enjoy the fact that your dog loves you so much that he can’t contain himself.

Let’s consider this final example: “My dog gets nervous when he meets other dogs and won’t play with them. How do i get him to play at the dog park?” Step 1: Why? Your dog could be nervous for any number of reasons. Your dog, like Shimmer, could just not really enjoy the company of other dogs.

Step 2: Is this worth fixing? I would say no, your dog not liking other dogs is not a problem worth fixing in almost all cases. (Note: there is a difference between non-social and anti-social here.) The most important reason I can see to fix a non-social dog is because the owner wants to be social with the dog. See how this is not a real problem that the dog has, but one that the owner has made up?

It comes down to understanding that there is no perfect, ideal dog. Going through these two questions really gets to the heart of how a dog owner and a dog’s relationship works. The self awareness is hard to just tell dog owners to have, which is why we go through this protocol every time a behavior comes up.

Family centered training can sometimes mean putting your dog’s needs before yours. And sometimes it’s just not worth it to change something. My sister’s gossip can bother me sometimes, but it makes her happy to do it at the cost of me being a bit annoyed. The positive outweighs the negative.

Treat Addiction: How to Redirect a Negative to a Positive

Like many of my blog articles, they are inspired by concerns I hear from clients. Today’s concern is “I don’t want my dog to only work for food.” I understand this sentiment, but only to an extent. I understand it from a financial perspective: if your dog doesn’t work for his normal kibble, then treats get expensive. I also understand that it can be a pain in the butt to always have treats and a treat bag on your person.

The converse of that concern is the implied idea that they want their dog to work for them because the dog loves them. Unfortunately, a dog's love for a human is not enough to get them to work for you. That is why we have treats, because food means more to a dog than love (most of the time). Your dog becomes obsessed with treats because it means more than you telling him he’s a good boy.

So once we get a dog working for food, we’ll see that dog only performing for food. Even basic things like sit and down will only be done for food. This frustrates the owner and then they in turn get frustrated with me because this is the exact problem they wanted to avoid.

Here are the mistakes that happen that lead to dogs not performing without food. The first mistake is that dog owners use food for everything. They’ve infact trained their dog to only sit and lay down for food. They’ve trained their dog this way because they’ve given food for every command the dog performs. Their dog has no reason to perform without food.

The next mistake is that they immediately use super high value food. I’m talking about using shredded chicken or super fatty wet dog food. If I was given this stuff and told to sit, I would only sit for the good stuff. This problem also relates to certain dogs not being food motivated at all. They get table scraps, which are very high value. The dog will the hold out until he gets the high value stuff.

Now that we understand a couple problems that people face in treat training, we can begin to change those behaviors. The first thing I would do is put the dog on what the textbooks call a “reward schedule.” What that means is we slowly taper off using food for certain commands. How we taper off food is by changing the criteria we consider worthy of giving a treat.

Let’s consider a basic sit. When my dog is first learning sit, I will treat every time his butt hits the floor. As he gets older, I will wait for his butt to be on the ground for longer periods of time. What I am doing here is expecting more and more from my dog. He doesn’t get to be lazy and only offer me a sit for a treat. He has to work for his food. Whenever my dog offers a better, newer behavior, the old behavior is worth less than it used to be. That means treating less frequently for a 2 second sit and treating more frequently for a five second sit. And once that five second sit is the best behavior, wait for a 10 second sit. Then that becomes the only behavior worth a lot of treats.

I do not believe that a dog owner should ever stop using treat training throughout the dogs life. I think once ideal behaviors become solidified, treats can be scaled back, but should never leave the picture entirely. They are too valuable of a tool to completely forgo. And if used correctly, can really create a positive, familial bond. Even children can use treats. It’s so easy there’s no reason not to.

Your Dog Cannot Do Good or Bad: A Flawed Moral System

One of my favorite dog related books I’ve ever read is titled “Culture Clash” by Jean Donaldson. The clash she speaks of is how we apply our human system of morality and social ettiquette to a species which has no clue about those things. The book covers many points but I feel as though the most important point she brings up is how wrong it is for a dog owner to say, “I can tell by that look that he knows what he did was wrong.

Attributing the words good and bad to a dogs behavior does not get the dog anywhere. It’s the same (to me at least) as saying a dog is dominant or submissive. Both attributes are based on flawed logic and misunderstandings. And both can be equally detrimental to how a dog is trained.

The reason why good and bad cannot apply to dog behavior because we are placing moral and ethical value on a dogs behavior. For the dog, a “good” behavior is one that allows the dog to receive the most reward and a “bad” behavior is one that a dog receives punishment for. Jumping, for instance, is a bad behavior by human standards, but it is an amazing and awesome behavior by the dog’s standards. He gets rewarded because people talk to him and play with him. It doesn’t seem like play to us, but pushing the dog around and touching him is play!

Where dogs derive their morality is from biology. Unlike human systems of morality, there are absolute ways to be good for a dog: remove negative stimuli and add positive stimuli. If a behavior does not offer a way to either of those two points, the dog will not do it.

Let’s consider the msot common real world example of how this plays out with people. Let’s say I walk into my house and see Shimmer is chewing on my shoes. If I did not know any better, I would yell at her. “SHIMMER! WHAT A BAD DOG YOU ARE!” and she would then sulk low to the ground, turn her side to me, and try to take a few steps away from me. This is most commonly interpreted as the dog “knowing they did bad.” If we go back to the two criteria, really see it from the dog’s point of view, Shimmer is offering that behavior to me because she knows it will get me to stop yelling and being mean. It’s an appeasement behavior to get you to go away. My dog, in this instance, views me as a negative force that needs to go away.

I want to reemphasize that point. When we apply a human system of morality to domesticated dogs, they view us as negative forces that distribute punishment whenever we see fit. They will view us as malevolent dictators. And that is the opposite of what I stand for. Dogs are family members and I would never want my mom or sister seeing me as a dictator.

The hard part about overcoming this is not the realization that it’s in poor taste. That’s easy to understand. Removing that behavior from yourself, actually practicing what you preach, is the hard part. Abrasive training can borderline on abuse because, if not done perfectly and with absolute purpose, it becomes a stress reliever for the person training the dog.

In grade school, we were taught to manage our stress by hitting a pillow or yelling into it. I tihnk those are both fine stress relievers. Just remember, there is a living being on the other end of the leash. You have your friends, work, and hobbies. Your dog only has you. Don't maar that relationship. Keep it positive. Keep it friendly. And most of all, keep from managing your stress by taking it out on your dog.

Multiple Dog Households Part 2: Community Play

One of the most hectic parts about multiple dog households is the down time when the dogs are playing and entertaining themselves. In order for dogs to be integrated into our lives, they need to be able to entertain themselves for a small period of time. This should not be the primary source of stimulation they get though, otherwise you can run into fence running and barking, resource guarding of rooms and furniture, and dogs that just don’t seem very attached to you.

The first thing to do is assess the number and variety of toys that are out. It also requires you to know your dog’s play habits.My variety of toys is having many different types of Nylabones laying about with all different shapes and textures. Since I know Shimmer very well,she will chew to pieces any Kongs, tug ropes, or stuffed animals I give her to play with. And like any good lab, she will eat them. These toys might be appropriate for your dog though, so experiment, with supervision of course. This will dictate what sort of toys you have down for them. I like to have about 3-4 toys per dog. To me, this prevents resource guarding and aggressive behavior around toys. If one of my dogs take a toy, they just move on to the next one. There are too many toys to guard so the stress of guarding them will make them give up easily.

Using toys that have food filled centers are not toys that dogs should have without supervision. This is once again to prevent any potentially aggressive behavior from forming. Most dogs also naturally put a high value on food which also makes it necessary to watch them. If you see snapping, hackles raised (hair on the back), or very stiff body posture, it’s time to remove that food stuffed toy. Deer antlers and other real animal bone products should also not be given without supervision. If I get deer antlers, my dogs are in their kennels chewing them, just to keep everyone safe and happy. A lot of people complain about the chemical treatments in rawhide bones, and while they are chemically treated all to hell, my beef with rawhides is that they are messy and make my dogs dirty.

Because most of your dog’s stimulation is coming from interactions with you and not this community play time we’ve been discussing, it’s not entirely necessary for your dogs to be free roaming. I’ve listed so many problems that can come with free roaming dogs that it almost makes it harder to let them free roam than it does to keep them contained. Consider using a kennel if you can’t directly watch your dog. Put a toy or two in with them so it is less like going to sleep and more like a different type of play time. I know most people still feel guilty about the crate (get over it!), so teaching your dog to lay down on a mat and stay there is another good alternative. Put some toys on the mat and now you have safe, unsupervised play time.

I would not consider it the end of the world if a multi-dog household had dogs that were not very attached to their people. Like most problems a dog is perceived to have, well intentioned people have actually taught that behavior. What two dogs being attached to each other more than people shows me is that those two dogs are not receiving enough stimulation or attention from their people. They receive more attention from one another, encouraging the bond. The easiest way to counteract this: do some more training and playing. Tug-of-war is my favorite team building exercise with dogs. You can even get multi-way ropes with three ends. This is a simulation of tearing prey apart, a group activity designed to make food easier to eat. Now, modern house pet dogs are not wolves and we should not attribute wolf or pack mentalities to house pet dogs. Tug is simply a relic from those thousands of years of breeding. Tug is not a dominance behavior and will not encourage your dog to “show dominance.”

This entry is shorter than the rest because it’s rather simple. If you trust your dogs unsupervised in the house, make sure there are enough toys to occupy them. If they make too much noise or they are untrustworthy, have them in a kennel with toys or on a mat with toys.

Know your dog. Just because you have an idea of what a dog should be doesn’t mean your dog is capable of that. Be honest with your reality and accept what your dog can do.

So You Want Your Dog to be a Therapy Dog?: Making the Right Decision for your Dog

There is a sudden rise in people wanting/needing therapy dogs. We have a few sources to thank for that. The first is that information is so accessible that people understand their own needs better. The second is that we better understand how dogs can play a role in a wider variety of contexts, such as psychiatric needs or handicap accessibility. The third, and I think most off base, is the jealousy a dog lover feels when they see another person with their dog in a public place.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s awesome that dogs are becoming more incorporated into people’s lives. Having a tool that doubles as a companion is really awesome. Part of what Concentric Dog stands for is attempting to incorporate dogs more into the community. The trouble with all of this is that everyone thinks their dog is cut out to be a therapy dog (which by the way is not a service dog) or some sort of service dog. Service and therapy dogs require a certain temperament, disposition, training, and most of all, competency from the handler. Willing your dog to be a service or a therapy dog is not enough and most dogs, along with handlers, are not cut out for it.

The reason I say most handlers aren’t cut out for it is mostly because there are rules and protocols to follow when training service and therapy dogs to perform their work. Most handlers do not want to follow these rules with their dog for one reason or another. And that’s totally fine. Service dog standards are quite high compared to a house pet and it’s hard to meet those standards. So here is where the handler can make a good decision for him/herself, and by proxy make a good decision for the dog, and avoid training to make a service dog out of a house pet.

Let’s remove the human side of the equation though because honestly, people love their dogs more than they do themselves and won’t consider what’s in their interest before their dog’s. What criteria should your dog meet before attempting some sort of service/therapy work?

The Humane Society of Southern Arizona has a visitation program that I like. They have partnerships with different hospitals and organizations that need therapy dog visits. These dogs need to walk loose leash, avoid eating food off the ground, sit, down, and stay. Those are just the commands for therapy work, which again is not service dog work.

For a therapy dog’s temperament, which in most aspects are also ideal points for a service dog, he should be as unreactive as possible to noises, to unwanted attention from hospital patients, and be comfortable being handled by anyone. We can summarize all of these main points by saying the dog should be calm, cool, collected, and confident.

Now imagine we’re in the grocery store shopping for the week. You bend over to check the price of beans and all of a sudden a pit/shepherd mix has his nose in your butt and a paw on your foot. You turn around and glare at the handler to which he responds, ”Sorry about my service dog.” My first instinct in this case would be to ask what service the dog is providing and the normal response I get is that the dog is a psychiatric service dog. Awesome! Someone who needs help has found a way to get the help they need. In this instance though, they aren’t doing anyone but themselves a service.

The point of bringing a service dog into public is so that the person using the service dog can function more suitably in a world that is not designed around their particular handicap. The dog should be such a seamless extension of the handler that no one should even realize the dog is there.

When a handler does not put in the time to train their dog, and when the dog does not respond to that training, it is a bad decision to try and force that dog to be something it is not.

In my time volunteering with Guide Dogsfor the Blind (GDB), I have heard a lot of their staff talk about whether or not a particular dog was meant to be a guide dog. Keep in mind, GDB breeds their dogs specifically to be guide dogs, and yet they end up with dogs who just, for one reason or another, would not make good guides.

This same sort of scrutiny should be applied to yourself and your dog when you are considering taking the plunge into therapy/service work. If you want to put in the work of training your dog and finding the right certifying organization, then that’s amazing. There is an obvious need for working dogs in many different fields. You can find trainers everywhere that can work with you on techniques for calming your dog’s temperament and helping with reactivity.

You should not look at this as an opportunity to just bring your pet dog into stores. Poorly trained dogs, or “service” dogs, in stores impair the ability of those with real service dogs to receive proper care and access when in public.

Please, just know your dog and know yourself. A trainer can only do some much. Sometimes when you want a therapy or service dog, you get a herding dog.

Multiple Dog Households Part 1: When You Come In The Door

One of my favorite things about pet parenthood is that no matter how my day goes or what I do, my dogs will always be excited when I come home. It makes my day better knowing that they’re waiting to greet me. What’s unfortunate is that I hear complaints about someone’s dog is that their dog acts like a psycho when they first get in the door. I hear that their dogs run around, knock things over, and even knock kids over. Obviously that is unacceptable and a lot of clients want this craziness to stop completely. What I try to convince them of is not to stop their dog’s exuberance. I push them towards ways of managing and redirecting that behavior. Here’s how we do it.

The first thing I do when I get home is get myself settled. I put my backpack down, get a drink of water, spend 5-10 minutes checking my phone/Facebook, then I let the dogs out of the kennel. See how I’m taking care of front door charging with the kennel? Once they’re out I say hi, tell them I love them, and relieve them.

Now let’s analyze how this routine works. I love having a routine with my dogs because they learn habits so quickly and it makes my life easier. So from the beginning I try to do the same thing each time I come home. The routine for them keeps them focused on what task is next and out of your face. As soon as I let Shimmer out of her crate she’s wagging her whole body on the way to the backdoor to be let out. Her excitement hasn’t been subdued as some of my clients ask for, it has just been redirected.

The reason why we chose redirection over correcting the behavior is because there is no need to stop this behavior. It is also the easiest path to travel. I am admittedly lazy and don’t want to do more work than is necessary. Taking the easy way out of something is not a bad thing. It’s just the more practically obvious choice. And when training a dog, keeping the client clam, patient, and overall sane is one of my goals. I’m not going to try to get a client to do something that I wouldn’t even want to do myself!

Another favorite redirect I have for multiple dog households is a simple ‘go lay down’ command. Eventually, given enough repetitions, whenever a dog gets excited, they will run to the mat expecting treats. This is awesome because you’ve diverted all the excitement into a learning experience. Your dog is problem solving and learning how to learn. All of this with treats and praise.

We’ve learned about what you need to do for your dog. Now the question is, what do you need to do for yourself? First thing is first, get yourself settled. If you have your dogs in crates, which I strongly suggest you do, then this part requires very little from you. If you don’t have your dogs in crates, then ignore them when you get home. They’ll jump a couple times and run a lap or two. Keep your arms folded and don’t make eye contact. Doing that will help you avoid giving any signs of play and keep you from putting more energy into the system.

All of this revolves around you being calm. Your nervous energy will trickle down into your dogs. Keep that in check and your excited dog won’t go further than you want.

Stop Touching Your Dog: Reading Your Dog and Interacting Properly

I love petting my dogs. I love petting other people’s dogs. And more often than not, those dogs love to be petted. It’s an innate desire not just in me, but in every other dog lover to touch dogs. And it’s not just touching dogs in general, it’s touching and rubbing their faces.

Let’s think about this for a moment. A stranger has come up to you and decided to rub your face. This area of your body is not only a source of communication, but it’s also the source of three of the five senses. It’s a sensitive area of any animals body, so why is it okay to touch dogs like that?

American dog lover culture will generally dictate that a good dog is totally okay with being handled each and every way. The best dogs love being roughed up a little bit. Dogs need to be loved physically. There are two things wrong with this pervasive line of thought. The first problem is that it is dangerous. Without reading a dog properly, rubbing a dog’s face could get you growled at in the best case, and bitten in the worst case. The second point is that it influences poor training protocol. It encourages a dog to be reactive and act what we perceive to be as foolish.

We all know the major signs of an unhappy dog. The most obvious are raised hackles (hair on the back) and bearing teeth. Dogs showing these behaviors should obviously not be approached.

Let’s pretend we’re at the dog park, for example, where every dog could be considered free game to pet. Every dog’s hackles are up and teeth are showing everywhere while they are playing with each other. “It’s a sign of play,” is the first thought. “It’s pack behavior,” is another explanation I’ve heard from other dog park patrons.

A strange dog approaches your dog (who is perfectly trained and wouldn’t harm a fly of course). My first criteria in determining whether it’s safe for me and my dog to interact is looseness in the body. This can most often be seen in a dog that wags its tail and the whole body moves with it. On the other hand, a less happy dog has stiff body language. The tail will be the only thing moving on that dog. Today at the park, a strange mutt approaches and stands like a tree next to your dog, only his tail is moving.

Well, alright, maybe the strange dog is trying to solicit play from my dog. Body language can always have different interpretations based on context. But this dog begins to illustrate the opposite of the criteria for a happy dog: an unbreakable fixation on the target, also known as keying.

You see the fight about to break out and unfortunately, so does the strange dog’s owner. He runs over and starts man-handling his mutt to move him away. Here he is, touching his dog. He’s putting energy into the system. And when he’s put too much energy into his already combustible dog, it explodes. The dog’s owner gets bit in the wrist with two puncture wounds and my dog gets a good bite in her hips.

Now this situation didn’t actually happen, but it raises a point nonetheless. Touching and physically handling a dog can worsen a situation. Now if the dog fight actually happened, how many dog park patrons would rush in to grab their dogs? Too many is the only answer I have. I’ve seen the smart ones throw tennis balls, handfuls of dirt, and even emptying water bottles on them. These are all much better solutions than risking your health.

Make sure to consider your own safety first. They teach in CPR training classes to make sure you are safe before taking care of someone else. They even teach that in airplanes you should attach your oxygen mask first. How can you take care of someone else if you don’t take care of yourself?

From a training perspective, I have this quick and unedited video of my Guide Dog puppy in training. It's a low quality video, but it drives the point home. In this video you’ll see a dog that receives only the input of my hand on her back and talking to her. That’s all I’ve done. I’m not even roughing her up.

She’s gone crazy here. First she spins in circles then she decided to initiate play with Shimmer. Just by touching her I’ve started this. Immediately following this video I had the dogs go lay on their mats to chew on bones to diffuse some of the tension.

Now here is a video of me doing the same thing to Shimmer. Let’s evaluate the differences here.

Shimmer, unlike my GDB puppy, is not nearly as reactive. She looks at me and wags her tail a tiny bit.

(For the sake of fairness, we had the GDB puppy right next to Shimmer, just like when it was the puppy's turn.)

The reactivity of a dog is an important factor to understand when developing training protocol. Shimmer on one hand needs tons of cheerleading as I like to call it. All I need to do is pet her and get her wound up before a good training session will happen. That is entirely unlike my GDB puppy. With her I can just look at her and her tail will start going. This difference in reactivity is the premise for discovering how to motivate and train a dog.

I like to talk about a spectrum of dog personalities that range from soft dogs to hard dogs. Dogs can be a mix of both, or one or the other.

Soft dogs, Shimmer being a shining example, cannot be reprimanded firmly (with a stern voice of course; nothing more), cannot be man-handled, and most certainly cannot be expected to have confidence in most situations. Here is a dog that works well with certain types of touch. If I tried to rough Shimmer up by rubbing her face, what would happen? She would shut down and training would be over. The most I can do is scratch her sides and butt to get her tail wagging.

What I’m doing is touching my dog for a reason. I have specific training goals and have determined that touching my dog is the only way to meet them.

Now, dogs that are more reactive or in the middle of the hard-soft spectrum (like my GDB puppy) require no touching at all. None of my training goals require me to touch my dog. I know touching her is a bad idea based on the previous video; she’s going to go nuts. And while I appreciate a dog who has energy and is willing to work, it’s impossible to get good training done with that sort of exuberance.

For the reactive puppy, the most she gets from me is verbal praise and treats. I can get her to do anything I need with verbal praise and treats. Seeing my dog’s reactivity to physical praise has me using a training protocol without that source of motivation.

I love my dogs just as much as the next dog lover loves their own. I understand that touching dogs is a hard habit to break. My struggle with it will continue forever. But for the sake of safety and training, please be conscious of how your touch affects your dog.