Animals in Translation (25 page)

This will probably come as a surprise, but huge social animals like cattle are actually more dangerous to handle than big solitary predators like tigers. A bull can attack a person to achieve dominance, but a tiger won't, because a tiger doesn't care about dominance; constant jostling inside a social hierarchy just isn't part of a tiger's life. You have to be extremely careful not to trigger predatory aggression in any big cat, obviously, but that's all. Every year several ranchers and dairymen are killed by cattle challengers, and it's my opinion that the best way to prevent dangerous attacks on people is to raise highly social grazing animals like cows and horses strictly with their own kind. They should look up to people as a benevolent higher power. You don't want a cow directing any cow aggression at humans.

To help prevent attacks from orphaned male grazing animals, the animal should either be fostered onto a new mother or penned together with other young males. In both cases the young bull will learn that he is a bull, not a person. It is also important that the young bull be castrated at an
early
age. By early, I mean the animal should be castrated before he has matured physically. (Dogs are usually castrated after they've reached physical maturity.) Castration will greatly reduce aggression in grazing animals. If a bull calf is castrated at a young age he can be safely raised in your backyard. That's why kids in 4-H and FFA (Future Farmers of America) show thousands of steers safely every year. They aren't raising bulls.

S
OCIALIZING
A
NIMALS TO
P
EOPLE
: D
OGS

Domestic animals have to be socialized to people, too. We call dogs man's best friend, but one and a half million dogs get put to sleep every year because of behavior problems the owners can't live with.

A lot of those problems are dog bites. If you are going to get a dog, you can't plan on preventing dog bites by keeping your dog safely locked up in your house or yard, either, because dogs almost always bite people they know, usually people they know well. Around four and a half million people get bitten every year, and the Centers for Disease Control report that over 75 percent of the dogs in these incidents belong either to the family of the person who got bitten, or to a friend.
²⁰

Predator animals are built to hunt and kill, and they're less fearful than prey animals. That makes them
potentially
dangerous to people for two reasons: a person can accidentally trigger a predator's killing bite instincts through sudden movement,
and
a predator animal is less afraid of expressing angry aggression. Left to their own devices, dogs can become dangerous to other dogs, to cats, and to humans, and you can easily train a dog to be hideously ferocious if that's what you want. Dogs are so aggressive by nature that the Monks of New Skete say a trained guard dog is like a loaded gun, and families should not own them. Only a professional can live safely with a trained guard or police dog.

That fact alone tells you a lot about the difference between predator animals and prey animals. You couldn't train a horse to be an “attack horse” even if you tried, although a horse who feels threatened can be very dangerous. You can create an “attack animal” only out of a predator animal like a dog. So if you're going to own a dog, you need to teach him that it is unacceptable for a dog to threaten or bite a person.

It's especially important to socialize dogs to children. Most of the fatal dog bites involve young children, because they're low to the ground and they run around a lot. The dog mistakes the small running child for prey, and attacks.
All
predatory animals have to learn which animals are prey and which are not. A dog does not know that your two-year-old is not prey unless you specifically teach him this while he's still a puppy.

You also have to be careful to teach your puppy that
other people's two-year-olds
are also not prey. That's easy; you just have to make sure your puppy gets exposed to toddlers who don't live with you. Since a lot of toddlers love to run up to strange puppies and hug
them, you can accomplish this by taking your puppy for walks in parks where parents bring their children to play, or in neighborhoods with lots of families. After your puppy has met a few little kids on outings, he'll know that small children are not prey. I want to stress that it's essential to introduce your dog to other children in other families, because to a dog,
your
two-year-old and
the neighbor's
two-year-old are two different categories; they're apples and oranges. A puppy doesn't automatically generalize don't-attack-Johnny to don't-attack-Joey.

K
EEPING THE
P
EACE

This brings up the question of dominance.
All
animals who live in groups—and that is most mammals—form dominance hierarchies. Animals are not democratic and there is always an alpha animal, and often a beta animal, too. Dogs have an alpha male who is dominant over the others, as well as a beta male who is second in line to the alpha.

Dog owners must establish themselves as the alpha, period.
This is the one rule you must not ignore.
A dog who thinks he's the alpha in the house is dangerous, because dogs will fight any lower-ranked pack mate who challenges them. If the family dog becomes the alpha he's going to be especially dangerous around important resources like food and his resting place. He'll bite family members who come too near his dog dish or sit down too close to him on the sofa when he's taking a nap. He's definitely not going to cooperate with any trips to the vet, either.

This happens more often than you'd think. There are plenty of households where the dog is the alpha. You can't necessarily avoid the problem by getting a female dog, either. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, 80 percent of dogs brought in to see vets because of dominance aggression are unneutered males, but you can definitely have dominance aggression in neutered males, and in females, too, whether they're neutered or not. Actually, when it comes to females, Nick Dodman says that an aggressive female can actually get worse after she's been spayed, because she doesn't have as much progesterone in her system to calm her down.

Even though unneutered males are the biggest biters, neutering a dog once he's
started
to bite probably won't solve the problem. With animals, there's a huge difference between preventing aggression in the first place and trying to stop it once it's developed. Dr. Dodman says that in his experience neutering a male doesn't make him any less dominant, or any less likely to bite a
human.
Neutering an aggressive dog mainly keeps him from biting other dogs—but not because he suddenly becomes submissive. Neutering probably decreases dog-on-dog aggression only because the neutered dog stops smelling like a male to other males, so other males don't challenge him as much. It's not that the neutered dog is any less dominant after he's been altered; it's that other male dogs are nicer to him.
²¹

One of the most upsetting situations with an aggressive dog I've seen over the years happened to a family I knew with two very young boys and a father who wasn't very nice to the mom. The dad was always saying mean things to her in front of the boys and the dog. Then, when the boys were still little, the family broke up. The mom took the boys and the dog and moved to another state to start graduate school.

Not long after that the dog went crazy. He began threatening to bite the mom if she tried to pull him someplace by the collar, and he constantly tried to keep her from leaving the house. One registration day as she was getting into her car to go sign up for courses, the dog jumped in the back seat and wouldn't get out. He growled and snapped viciously at her face each time she tried to take hold of his collar to pull him out. He ended up sitting inside her car the whole day, until
he
decided it was time to get out. Things got so bad that the only way the mom could manage the dog at all was to trick him by throwing a piece of steak wherever she wanted him to go, then slamming the door behind him when he ran after it. Her friends were all frightened of the dog, and so was she.

Her boys weren't doing well, either, and the child psychologist she took them to see said that the dad had treated her so disrespectfully her sons didn't trust her to take care of them. They didn't think she could do it, and they were scared.

This was probably a case of disrespectful behavior inside the family affecting the dog as well as the children. The husband was probably the
absolute alpha in the dog's eyes. The dog may even have concluded that he was the beta animal, because the wife was so downtrodden. So when the husband disappeared the dog immediately challenged the wife for alpha status. That is always a dangerous situation.

I lost track of the family not long after the registration day incident, so I don't know whether the mom was ever able to get the dog under control or not. Things had reached the point where she needed to hire a trainer, but I knew she couldn't afford it. I hope thinks worked out for them, but it didn't look good.

Establishing dominance over a dog is easy. Many people think that exerting dominance means beating an animal into submission, but that's not true at all. I am totally against rough
alpha rolling of dogs,
which is still used by some police departments to train police dogs. In alpha rolling a person throws a dog over on his back and holds him down. Rolling over and exposing the belly is a hardwired instinctual behavior in dogs, and a well-socialized adult dog usually rolls over on his back to be petted. That's why you want your puppy to spend some time on his back looking up at you; just being in that position reinforces the fact that he is subordinate to you.

But you shouldn't
force
him onto his back. When two dogs from the same pack meet, the subordinate dog will voluntarily roll over; the other dog doesn't shove him over. When a dog is forced into this position by a human the hardwired submission behavior does get turned on, but when the dog stands back up he does not forget having been forced down. Someday, when your back is turned, he will bite you in the butt.

A much better way to train the dog is to make rolling over a fun game for him through tickling or stroking his chest or belly and offering food treats when he rolls over. This makes the dog get into the position of submission without anything aversive being done.

I also want to say something about the overall issue of punishment in animal training. I am totally against using punishment to teach an animal new skills. In almost all cases animals can be trained to do tricks or develop skills using positive methods.

The one exception is stopping dangerous prey-drive-motivated chasing of joggers, bicyclists, and cars. In this situation a shock collar may be needed. If you do have to use a shock collar to stop your
dog from chasing people and cars, it is important that the dog never figures out that it's the collar that gave him the shock, so you should leave the collar on for a few days before using it. When your dog receives a correction for chasing a jogger, you want him to think that the dog god did it.

The best ways to establish dominance are obedience training and making the dog sit quietly before he is fed. The dog should learn that he eats on his owner's terms. You can also do things like going inside the door first before letting your puppy enter, putting your hand in his food dish while he's eating, and playfully coaxing and rolling him over on his back (
not
throwing him over). Some trainers even recommend growling at your puppy like a mama dog and nipping him on the muzzle when you're giving him a correction. I know that sounds dangerous, but with a puppy it's not.

You also have to do at least some obedience training. Obedience training just means teaching your dog to obey a few commands. The commands can be anything you like. You could get fancy and train your dog to herd sheep, bring your slippers, or wear a tutu and spin around in circles; it doesn't matter. The important thing is that the dog learns to obey commands from his master.

You have to do obedience training no matter what your life is like. Even if you live on a great big ranch where your dogs can run free they still have to be obedience-trained, because your dog has to know you're the boss or you are creating a potentially dangerous situation. That's the whole point of obedience training—
obedience.
Not teaching your dog how to do tricks. Obedience training establishes the owner as the alpha.

It's amazing how easy it is to dominate a dog. When I was in college I went to visit a friend's house and they had a hound who had become totally dominant. If Bernie wanted the softest chair, that was the chair he was given. He was number one. He also had the disgusting habit of lifting his leg and urinating on every guest. Bernie was the king.

But there was one guest he never peed on and that was me. He also never growled at me, or asked for my chair. Maybe it was my posture and attitude, because I never did anything bad to that dog. It shows how tuned in to people dogs are. That dog just
knew,
prob
ably from watching me, that I would not tolerate being peed on, growled at, or any other obnoxious behavior.

P
ACK
M
ENTALITY

Even when you establish yourself as the alpha, you can still have problems with other dogs, either with dogs in the neighborhood or other dogs in the household. Dogs need friends, and if you're going to be away at work all day I recommend owning two dogs, preferably a male and a female. But I'd stop at two, because more than two dogs in one house can be a big problem if the dogs are too evenly matched in size, age, and strength. With closely matched animals the dominance hierarchy may not stabilize, because no leader is able to emerge and the dogs continue to challenge each other. If you're going to have more than one dog the best plan is to stop at two, and to have one dog of each sex.