For the Love of a Dog (34 page)

I show a videotape at seminars of a Border Collie named Ben, a masterful sheep and cattle dog owned by Beth Miller. I want the audience to see how he uses his mouth appropriately to get a steer out of a corner, showing complete emotional control while he nips it on the
nose. One quiet, measured nip, and it’s over. If I had to write a caption under the image to translate the message he conveyed, I’d write: “Just business, sir. Nothing personal; move along, please.” Compare with that my dear, long-departed Misty, who, when young, was so fearful of a face-to-face confrontation with sheep she’d panic in a stare-down, exploding toward the ewe, scrunching her eyes shut and grabbing onto a wooly ear. Eyes and mouth clenched shut, she’d hang on for dear life while I ran to disentangle the hapless ewe from the small, black dog hanging from her head. After I peeled her off, Misty’s emotional arousal would continue for five to ten minutes, her jaw chattering as if she was trembling from the cold. Needless to say, Misty’s technique didn’t get the job done, much less create the kind of peaceful management system I envisioned. I was inexperienced myself, and I cringe at the memory of our shared panic when we were in over our heads. Now, with many years of sheepherding under my belt, along with dogs whose genetics help rather than hinder, the days of herding with such unwelcome dramatics are behind us.
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The ability to control one’s emotions is an important part of managing anger, but even we humans aren’t born knowing how to do it. There’s a lot to learn about controlling one’s emotions; that’s why a large part of being a parent includes teaching your child just that. We’ve all seen a two-year-old shrieking about a dropped ice cream cone, his face red and twisted with frustration. We accept that behavior in very young children, but not from adults—unless, of course, they’re at a sporting event. Watching competitive sports is all about emotional arousal; that’s why it’s so much fun. It’s no less than a biological miracle that the fate of a small ball can send thousands of people into emotional overdrive, but it can, and it does. However, the consequences of those emotions aren’t always pretty. Recently I watched a tape of a near riot at a basketball game, in which players and fans began attacking one another for no discernible reason except an excess of adrenaline. There’s even a familiar saying that describes emotional arousal morphing into aggression at sporting events: “I went to a fight last night and a hockey game broke out.”

Usually this type of emotional arousal leads to only small problems, but sometimes it’s fatal; think of sporting events in which people have
been trampled to death by rioting fans. Even police officers can become so aroused they lose control—we’ve all heard of cases in which discipline has collapsed, and an “attempt to restrain” a suspect has devolved into a merciless beating. These tragic cases are almost always precipitated by long, highly arousing chases. By the time the police finally catch up to the suspect, they have so much adrenaline circulating in their systems that the thinking part of their brains has been overridden by emotions so intense they were out of control. OOC: there it is again, this time in our own species.

There are a lot of reasons why emotional arousal can interfere with the more rational parts of our brains and get us and our dogs into trouble. One is the way the brain is designed: far more connections run from the amygdala to the cortex than vice versa. That means it’s easier for our emotions to influence our decision-making processes than it is for our intellect to influence our emotions.
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But once emotions become extreme, decision making is impossible, just as when I was too scared to think on the day Luke was charged by the guard dog.

We have to practice keeping our emotions in check, and the more constructive practice we get, the better we are at it. Just like people, dogs can learn to control their own impulses and deal with frustration; or, alternatively, they can learn to get what they want by losing their tempers, throwing a fit, spiraling into a rage. You can prevent a lot of those problems by helping your dog learn emotional control as he’s growing up. Wolf experts tell us that the best pack leaders often use their position to influence the arousal level of the group, interfering when others begin to escalate their arousal. My attorney and I suggest you avoid the techniques of an alpha wolf (usually a bite to the muzzle that creates pressure but doesn’t injure), but you can help your dog learn to control her own emotions by adding some simple exercises to her daily life that teach her to get a hold of herself.

The simplest and most effective way to help a dog learn emotional control is to teach her to “stay” on cue. If you make stay training into a
game, she’ll learn to associate controlling her impulses with feeling good. If your dog already has a rock-steady stay, then go reward yourself with a piece of chocolate. Most of us have dogs who will sit and stay if we’re holding the food bowl in front of their noses in the kitchen, but who will dart off without looking back if we ask them to do the same when they’re distracted. If that describes your dog, you might want to work on stay as a way of teaching your dog what psychologists call impulse control in humans.

If you’re going to work on this with your dog, it helps to be realistic. Most dogs are relatively easy to teach to stay while all is calm and quiet, but that doesn’t mean that you can expect a six-month-old Golden Retriever to stay in place while you welcome company into the house. Staying in place when asked, no matter what else is going on, takes a certain amount of maturity. You wouldn’t expect a young child to be able to sit still for a long time in a restaurant, so don’t expect the equivalent from a young dog. Most of us have enough trouble controlling our own impulses in front of a tub of mocha fudge ice cream—we can hardly expect our dogs to have it mastered when they’re still just youngsters. Easily trained, mellow dogs may be able to hold a long stay at one year of age, but it’s not unreasonable for a rambunctious dog to need three solid years under her belt before she can control herself when she’s excited. Just like kids, dogs need practice and maturity to be able to control their emotions. Your job is to help them learn how to do it in a positive, patient manner.

Because this isn’t a dog training book per se, I have put detailed instructions on teaching a solid stay in an appendix in the back of the book.
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What’s most important is to remember to go step by step. People tend to practice their stays when nothing is happening to distract the dog, and then expect the dog to stay still while three other dogs leap over her back while chasing a live rabbit. Okay, I exaggerate, but keep in mind that since the exercise is about emotional control, you need to
help
your dog work up to that skill. It helps to remember that your dog’s arousal level isn’t always under her voluntary control, just as your own isn’t. (Do
not
be nervous when the dentist looms over your open mouth with a hypodermic…. Do
not
be excited if you win the lottery….) Help your dog out by gradually increasing the difficulty of the exercise, teaching her to be successful at controlling her impulses, rather than being set up to fail.

Remember that the idea is to teach your dog that it’s fun to stay when asked, and that you’re on her side while she’s learning. I’ve seen a heartbreaking number of dogs who were corrected with rough physical punishment for breaking their stays. All the poor things wanted to do was crawl away, because they’d learned to associate the stay “command” with fear and pain. Don’t let that happen to your dog. Think of staying on cue as a cute trick your dog is learning, rather than a test of your authority over your dog. Your dog will thank you for it, and reward you over and over again in the years to come.

Another helpful way to incorporate exercises in emotional control into your dog’s daily life is to ask her to wait before you let her run out the door. I use a mini-version of stay, in which I ask my dogs to “wait” before I release them. In that case, I don’t care what posture they’re in, or even if they move sideways or backward; they just can’t move forward through the door until I say okay. This prevents those mindless, headlong charges through doors that are sometimes amusing, often rude, and sometimes tragic. A dear friend lost a remarkable dog once because he’d learned to leap out of the back of her pickup truck when the door flap at the back opened. One horrible day it flew open while she was driving on the highway to feed sheep at another farm. Her wonderful, hardworking Border Collie leaped out as he always had—into the trailer attached to the truck going sixty-five miles an hour. A client of mine told a heart-stopping story of her little lap dog who jumped out of the car at a tollbooth when the driver opened the door to retrieve a fallen quarter. The dog survived unscathed, but the owner swears she lost five years off her life during the time she spent dodging semitrucks trying to get the dog back in the car.

You can teach your dog that everything comes to he who waits by saying “Wait,” when you go to the door of your house or car. If your dog pushes ahead of you and throws himself against the door, don’t open it. Your job is to encourage him to be polite—you can gently herd him backward with your body, you can toss a treat behind him, but
whatever you do, don’t open the door until he pauses, even just for a microsecond. The instant he pauses the tiniest bit, open the door and let him out. He’ll learn that controlling his excitement gets him what he wants, and he’ll get better and better at it as he matures. (Again, see the References for some good sources on how to teach this to your dog in detail.)

Dogs aren’t the only animals who can profit by learning frustration control. Our own species causes no end of trouble when we lose our tempers, and compared to dogs, we do it a lot. Years ago, I saw a sad example of that at a herding dog trial. Peter, as we’ll call him, was competing with a pregnant bitch just days before her delivery date. Swollen with puppies, Kit had no business being in a competition that pushes dogs to the limit of their abilities. She tried her best, but she was slow to respond to her owner’s commands, and even stopped to urinate at one point. Her owner was well known in the trial world as someone with a hair-trigger temper; most of us were careful to avoid him late in the evening, after his second or third beer. Rumor had it that he’d take his dogs behind the trailer and beat them if they didn’t perform as expected. We all talked about it on occasion, shaking our heads about how this “punishment after the fact” couldn’t possibly teach his dogs anything but to be afraid of him. I hadn’t seen an example of it myself— at least, not until then.

As soon as poor Kit dragged herself off the field, legs wobbly from exertion, Peter grabbed her collar and began to beat her with his crook, smack dab in front of a grandstand of onlookers. Some of my description of this incident is dependent upon the reports of others—I was otherwise engaged in the portable potty at the side of the field. Alarmed by all the commotion, I peeked out the tiny ventilation slit to see what was going on. Just as I did, I saw a woman less than half Peter’s size place herself between him and the dog, and let fly with her own invective. The woman was Mary Gessert, a veterinarian and dog lover as mellow and amiable as Peter was easy to anger. At least, Mary is usually mellow, but not this time. Enraged at Peter’s behavior, Mary chewed him up one side and down the other, while the rest of us silently cheered
her on. Mary’s bravery saved Kit that afternoon, but who knows what went on later that night or, for that matter, the rest of Kit’s life.

Humans get angry for the same reasons that dogs do—they get offended or frustrated—and if you combine that with emotional arousal, the results can be ugly. Anger is such a pervasive emotion in humans, it’s no wonder we think of dogs as saints. Surely the percentage of people who have been angered by their dogs is overwhelmingly larger than the percentage of dogs who are angry at their humans. We seem to be masters at anger, screaming red-faced on the interstate, furious when the referee makes what we think is a bad call. I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised—just look at one of our closest relatives, the common chimpanzee. Chimps, as I mentioned earlier, can throw operatic tantrums— becoming almost hysterical with frustration and fury. Regrettably, so can we, and our dogs suffer for it terribly
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One of my clients, George, came to me after dropping out of a training class run by another business. It seems the instructor had insisted that if his dog didn’t sit when asked, he should violently grab the dog by the scruff and yank his front legs off the ground while screaming into his face. George was to shake the dog as hard as he could for several seconds, shrieking “I SAID SIT.” Mind you, this was not military training for wartime, this was a simple family dog training class, in which people were being taught how to get their dog to sit, lie down, and come when called. When George refused to adopt this procedure, the instructor began to scream in anger at him. Wisely, in an excellent example of emotional control, George simply turned and walked out of the door with his dog.

Violent methods such as those described above were advocated at the first dog training class I attended, held in 1970 in Southern California. Even a flicker of hesitation on the part of the dog was to be taken as willful disrespect, and was to be handled immediately with a show of anger and intimidation. “Shock and awe” was the name of the game, and this “one size fits all” methodology was presented as the only way to get a dog to do what you wanted. I was there with Cosby, a floppy
seven-month-old Saint Bernard who was no more suited for Marine boot camp than I was. I hated class, but I had a dog who could eventually weigh as much as two hundred pounds, and it seemed irresponsible not to train him. On the third week of class the instructor borrowed someone’s Basenji (the Basenji is the African “barkless” dog) to illustrate how we should respond to disobedience. You need to know here that Basenjis do not behave like fully domesticated animals.
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Don’t get me wrong, they are amazing dogs. I adore them, but they’re much more like wild canids (such as wolves and coyotes) than like domestic dogs, in that they are independent animals who are happy to share their life with you, as long as it’s on their terms.