For the Love of a Dog (49 page)

With any dog, the key to a good stay is to start by asking for “micro-stays,” in which you expect your dog to remain in place for the briefest of moments. Start by calling your dog to you and asking her to sit or lie down. Say, “Stay,” in a quiet, low voice and hold your left hand out facing forward, like a traffic cop stopping cars at an intersection. As soon as she’s settled, even for an instant, release her with a clear verbal signal, such as “Okay” or “Free,” praise her quietly, and give her a tiny, tasty treat with your right hand. Remember that the exercise is about emotional control, so don’t praise your dog so enthusiastically that she gets too excited.

If you think about it, she hasn’t done much, because if you were smart you released her before she was going to get up anyway. She has learned something, though—she’s learned that there’s a fun game afoot, and that the noise coming out of your mouth and the movement of your hand could be very interesting, indeed. After you’ve repeated this successfully two or three times, ask her to stay for one to two seconds. Now you’re going to give her a treat
while
she’s staying, because that’s the behavior you want to reinforce. Ask for the stay with your voice (low and quiet) and with the palm of your left hand facing toward her. Rock back one
small
step to give her a little room (looming over a dog can make her nervous). Then, keeping your left hand up to block any forward motion on her part, slide your body forward and with an underhanded motion, give her a treat with your right hand. Be
sure to move the treat all the way to her mouth, rather than forcing her to get up to get it. For some reason, most novice trainers stop short, and I routinely have to explain the importance of moving one’s hand
all the way
to the dog’s mouth. It’s one of the most common mistakes that people make, so watch out for it.

Some dogs will try to get up once they get the treat, especially if they’ve been taught that the treat is the end of the exercise. To be most useful, “Stay” should mean “Don’t get up until I say so,” so if your dog starts to get up after getting a treat, you should respond by rocking your body forward, both hands extended with palms forward in the universal “Stop” signal, until she settles.
¹
Use your powers of observation to watch for the slightest backward lean on her part, indicating she is responding to your signal. The instant she does so, immediately rock your own body backward and drop your hands to your side to take off the pressure. Wait a moment for her to settle, and then release her before she gets up again herself. This time, say “Okay” in a bored, bland voice and turn and walk away.

After she gets up, don’t pet her, fuss over her, or give her another treat. This is hard for people to do—they either want to pat their dog on the head (which most dogs hate) or praise her to the skies. But you’re trying to teach your dog that the fun part is staying still, not getting up when released, so give her treats while she’s staying still, not when she gets up. It doesn’t take long for dogs to catch on, and if there are no distractions you can end up with a dog who doesn’t get up even after you release her. That’s fine; your release should mean “Do what you want,” not “Get up this instant.” I love it when dogs stay in place, because that’s evidence they’ve learned that staying in place is a great thing to do. After all, that’s the whole idea, right?—teaching your dog that it feels good to control her impulses and stay still even when she didn’t want to at first. Once you get this habit established, it can have long-lasting effects in all kinds of situations, by helping your dog to learn to control her emotions when you want her to.

There will be times during practice sessions when your dog gets up and goes past you before you can respond. Just lure her back to where
she was with the treat, like someone luring a donkey with a carrot. Avoid repeating the word “Stay”—that just starts everything all over again, and doesn’t teach the dog what “Stay” really means. Not repeating the cue is also hard for people to do, so pay special attention to it when you’re practicing. See if you can get a friend or family member to watch you. We all get better faster if we have someone watch us and act as a coach. Once the dog is lured back to the original spot, ask the dog to sit or lie down by pantomiming a visual signal or tapping the floor in front of her. It’s also important to get the dog back to the original spot in which she was told to stay. I think dogs are conscious of their location in space at all times, and if a dog learns that “Stay” means “Stay still for a moment, then get up and sneak in a couple of steps before your owner can stop you,” you’re going to be in trouble down the road. Personally, I love dogs who test the definition of “Stay” by crawling forward with their bellies still firmly pressed against the floor. “I’m still lying down!” they seem to say as they and their Cheshire cat grins creep forward. I always grin back while I gently move into their space and use body blocks to move them back to their original spot.

This part of stay is easy and fun for most of us, unless we have one of those rocket-propelled dogs who can’t stay still even for a second. In that case, say, “Stay,” then release instantly with an “Okay” in the same breath, and immediately leave the room to search out a professional dog trainer. You wouldn’t think twice about asking a coach to work with your child if he or she wanted to learn a sport, so don’t expect yourself to be able to train an “advanced model” dog without help!

Lucky for us, it turns out to be trivial to teach most dogs to stay for a few seconds when you’ve got treats in your pocket and there’s nothing else going on. You can get that accomplished in a session or two with most dogs. This, of course, is how you should start, because you want to set your dog up to win so that you can reinforce her for the right response. But most of the effort of teaching a stay involves asking a dog to remain in place for gradually increasing lengths of time, or to stay while she’s distracted by something else. Staying for thirty seconds when the two of you are alone in the kitchen is one thing; staying for
five seconds while two other dogs romp together in the next room is another. I wouldn’t expect the best of dogs to be able to manage that much emotional control until they’d had months, or even years, of training. A stay with no distractions is a first-grade exercise, while staying in the middle of chaos is more like graduate school. Most of us tend to get dogs started in the equivalent of first or second grade, and then immediately expect Ph.D. work out of them, having skipped junior high, high school, and college.

Avoid that mistake by being thoughtful about what level of distraction your dog has mastered. Help her by asking her to stay during distractions that are gradually more and more difficult, always making her glad she stayed when asked. While you’re training, be aware that there are three different things that can make staying when asked difficult. Distinguish between the
duration
of the stay (how long she stays), the level
of distraction
(what’s going on around her to cause her to want to get up) and the
distance
between you (how far away you are from her). Spend the majority of your training time on distractions; that’s the part that is hardest for most dogs. Come to think of it, wouldn’t that be the hardest part for you, too? Most people expect dogs to stay in situations that their children couldn’t handle, so don’t hesitate to be constructively anthropomorphic and put yourself in your dog’s place when you ask for a stay. It’s worth the time and energy to write down ten situations your dog might encounter and rank their difficulty level from 1 to 5. Maintaining a five-minute stay in the family room during a quiet evening might be a “2,” while staying for two seconds when company comes might be a “5.” Be sure that you don’t ask for a “5” if you haven’t yet worked through “4.”

Your dog will learn fastest if you only push the envelope on one aspect of difficulty at a time. In other words, if you’re asking for a stay when there are a lot of distractions around, keep the duration short. Work on longer durations when there are few or no distractions around. Decide for yourself how important distance is—I don’t need my dogs to stay when I’m far away, so I rarely practice it, but it’s important in obedience competitions.

Always be aware of your dog’s current level of ability and, like any good coach, push her just a little bit beyond it in some sessions, let her relax a bit in others. Give her lots of reasons to try her hardest, and
don’t take minor setbacks too seriously. They happen to all of us. (Can soccer players always make the perfect shot, even after years of practice?) Eventually, work your way up to a dog who can do a half-hour down/stay in the living room when things are quiet around the house. Even then, continue occasional brief down/stays scattered throughout the day as a way of helping your dog calm herself
before
she starts to spiral up in excitement when visitors come or she’s ready to go on a walk. This can be especially useful during play sessions with other dogs, in which emotional arousal can turn into nasty playground fights. If you have more than one dog, or a household with one dog and young children, a well-placed down/stay can do wonders to calm everything down. (My next book will be about teaching down/stays to children. It will be very, very long.)

¹
In
The Other End of the Leash
, I talked in much more depth about using what I call body blocks as a way of influencing your dog’s behavior.

There is a rich and fascinating body of books and articles about emotions in both people and animals. Here are some of the scientists whose works I have relied upon: the biologist Marc Bekoff (see for example,
The Smile of a Dolphin
, a marvelous collection of stories from field researchers about animals and emotions, and
Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart);
the neurobiologist Antonio Damasio (see
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain);
Frans de Waal (see, for example,
The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist)
, Temple Grandin
(Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior
for a riveting comparison of the minds of typical humans, autistic people, and animals), and the books of the late Donald Griffin
(see Animal Thinking
and
Animal Minds)
. Griffin’s books are particularly good sources for some of the more radical objections to inquiries into the minds of animals. Equally valuable is Jaak Panksepp’s amazing book
Affective Neuroscience
. It will be a bit technical for some readers, but if you are seriously interested in the biology of emotion, it is a must-read. Diane Ackerman’s literary inquiry into the mind is also fascinating
(An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain)
. I am grateful to all those listed above (and to many others) for their thought-provoking inquiries into the emotional lives of people and animals.

There is also a legion of recent books that specifically relate to the mind and emotions of our dogs, and I highly recommend the ones below. I don’t necessarily agree with everything that’s in them, but then I don’t agree with some of what
I’ve written in the past either, so don’t let that stop you. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson’s book
Dogs Never Lie About Love
makes the case that
of course
dogs have emotions, and that it is our shared emotional life that binds us together. Three more recent books,
How Dogs Think
, by Stanley Coren;
If Dogs Could Talk
, by Vilmos Csányi; and
The Truth About Dogs
, by Stephen Budiansky provide excellent reading about the mind of a dog. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas’s beautifully written
The Hidden Life of Dogs
did as much to motivate others to write about dogs as Jane Goodall’s work motivated primatologists to study their subjects in the wild.

If you’re interested in reading a riveting historical account of early behaviorists like Watson and Skinner, and the controversial researcher Harry Harlow, don’t miss Deborah Blum’s book
Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection
. A book about the horse named Clever Hans is
Clever Hans: The Horse of Mr. von Osten
, written in 1911 by Robert Rosenthal and published by Henry Holt & Co. A later edition was published in 1965, by Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

Ackerman, Diane. 2004.
An Alchemy of Mind: The Marvel and Mystery of the Brain
. New York: Scribner.

——, ed. 2000.
The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable Accounts of Animal Emotions
. New York: Discovery Books.

Bekoff Marc. 2003.
Minding Animals: Awareness, Emotions, and Heart
. New York: Oxford University Press.

Blum, Deborah. 2002.
Love at Goon Park: Harry Harlow and the Science of Affection
. Cambridge, Mass.: Perseus.

Boakes, R. 1992. “Subjective experience.”
Review of Animal Minds. Times Higher Education Supplement
, November 22, p. 22.

Carruthers, P. 1989. “Brute experience.”
Journal of Philosophy
89, 258-69.

Coren, Stanley. 2004.
How Dogs Think: Understanding the Canine Mind
. New York: Free Press.

Csányi, Vilmos. 2000.
If Dogs Could Talk: Exploring the Canine Mind
. New York: North Point Press.

Damasio, Antonio. 2003.
Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain
. Orlando: Harcourt Books.

Darwin, Charles. 1998.
The Expression of the Emotions in Animals and Man
. Paul Ekman, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

De Waal, Frans. 2001.
The Ape and the Sushi Master: Cultural Reflections of a Primatologist
. New York: Basic Books.

Griffin, Donald R. 1992.
Animal Minds: Beyond Cognition to Consciousness
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kilcommons, Brian. 1992.
Good Owners, Great Dogs
. New York: Warner Press.

LeDoux, Joseph. 1996.
The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life
. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Mack, Arien. 1995. “Editor’s Introduction.” In
Humans and Other Animals
. Arien Mack, ed. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Masson, Jeffrey Moussaieff 1997.
Dogs Never Lie About Love
. New York: Three Rivers Press.

McConnell, Patricia B. 2002.
The Other End of the Leash: Why We Do What We Do Around Dogs
. New York: Ballantine.

Myers, David G. 2004.
Psychology
. New York: Worth.

Oshinsky David M.
Polio: An American Story
. New York: Oxford University Press.

Panksepp, Jaak. 1998.
Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions
. New York: Oxford University Press.

Ratey John J. 2001.
A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain
. New York: Vintage Books.

Vauclair, J. 1996.
Animal Cognition: An Introduction to Modern Comparative Psychology
. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

For accounts by field biologists about the expression of emotion in animals, see books, listed alphabetically by author: Marc Bekoff
(The Smile of a Dolphin;
Marc has written about emotions in all animals, but he has a soft spot for dogs), Gordon Burghard
(The Genesis of Animal Play)
, Frans de Waal
(Chimpanzee Politics, Reconciliation Among the Apes, The Ape and the Sushi Master, Our Inner Ape)
, Roger Fouts
(Next of Kin)
, Jane Goodall
(In the Shadow of Man)
, Thomas McNamee
(The Return of the Wolf to Yellowstone)
, David Mech
(The Wolf The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species)
, Cynthia Moss
(Elephant Memories)
, Shirley Strum
(Almost Human)
, Dorothy Cheney and Robert M. Seyfarth
(How Monkeys See the World)
, Sue Savage-Rumbaugh
(Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind)
, and Bill Weber and Amy Vedder
(In the Kingdom of Gorillas)
. Barbara Smuts’s description of the nasty baboon mentioned in Chapter
2 is in
The Smile of a Dolphin
, a great collection of stories by scientists about emotional expressions in animals.

I used two primary sources on facial expressions in humans. One was the extensive work of Paul Ekman, who for decades has studied facial expressions around the world (see below for a partial list of his books and articles). Several of his photographs are included in the photo section. If you’d like to improve your ability to read facial expressions, get his DVD “Micro and Subtle Expressions.” You can order it from his website,
www.paulekman.com
, and I guarantee it will entertain (and educate) you. I also relied upon David G. Myers’s introductory psychology text,
Psychology
. Don’t let the word “text” put you off—it’s full of fascinating information and very readable. John Gottman is the researcher who did the work on expressions as predictors of marital stability—you can learn more by going to
www.gottman.com
or finding the article listed below authored by him and Sybil Carrère. I first learned about his work in the book
Blink
, which I talk about more in Chapter 3. The information about our reactions to infantile faces came from an article by Berry and McArthur, listed below.

Animals in Translation
, by Temple Grandin, is an important and fascinating book about the inner lives of animals, and a must-read for animal lovers. See John Alcock’s highly readable text
Animal Behavior
for an excellent summary of visual communication in a variety of animals. For the expressions of dogs and their relatives, some good sources are:
Dog Language
, by Roger Abrantes;
Canine Body Language: A Photographic Guide
, by Brenda Aloff; Stanley Coren’s book
How to Speak Dog; Successful Dog Adoption
, by Sue Sternberg;
On Talking Terms with Dogs: Calming Signals
, by Turid Rugaas; Michael Fox’s
Behaviour of Wolves, Dogs, and Related Canines;
and Erik Zimen’s “A Wolf Pack Sociogram,” in
Wolves of the World
. Your best bet is to watch videos and DVDs of dogs, because photographs can never do more than convey a split second, while expressions are fluid and interactive. A great set of canine expressions can be found in the video
Canine Behavior Program: Body Postures and Evaluating Behavioral Health
, from Suzanne Hetts and Daniel Estep. Also see Dr. Emily Weiss’s
The SAFER Test
video, and Sarah Kalnajs’s
Dog Communication Skills
. I have a video on reading visual signals in dogs (the one in which a dog reacts to someone’s sunglasses); it’s called
Reading Between the Lines
. Two great sources for all these books and videos are Tawzer Dog Videos, at
www.tawzerdogvideos.com
, and Dogwise, at
www.dogwise.com
. Both sites list enough resources to keep you busy for years.

Abrantes, Roger. 1997.
Dog Language: An Encyclopedia of Canine Behaviour
. Naperville, Ill.: Wakan Tanka Publishers.

Alcock, John. 2001.
Animal Behavior
. 7th ed. New York: Sinauer Assoc.

Aloff, Brenda. 2005.
Canine Body Language: A Photographic Guide
. Wenatchee, WA: Dogwise.

Berry, Diane S., and Leslie Z. McArthur. 1986. “Perceiving Character in Faces: The Impact of Age-Related Craniofacial Changes on Social Perception.”
Psychological Bulletin
100, no. 1.

Burghardt, Gordon M. 2005.
The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits
. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Carrère, Sybil, and John Gottman. 1999. “Predicting Divorce Among Newlyweds from the First Three Minutes of a Marital Conflict Discussion.”
Family Process
38, no. 3, 293-301.

Cheney, Dorothy L., and Robert M. Seyfarth. 1990.
How Monkeys See the World
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Coren, Stanley. 2000.
How to Speak Dog: Mastering the Art of Dog-Human Communication
. New York: The Free Press.

Darwin, Charles. 1998.
The Expression of the Emotions in Animals and Man
. Paul Ekman, ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

De Waal, Frans. 1989.
Peacemaking Among Primates
. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

——. 1996.
Good Natured: The Origins of Right and Wrong in Humans and Other Animals
. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Dutcher, Jim, and Jamie Dutcher. 2002.
Wolves at Our Door: The Extraordinary Story of the Couple Who Lived with Wolves
. New York: Pocket Books.

Ekman, Paul. 1973. “Cross-cultural Studies of Facial Expression.” In
Darwin and Facial Expression: A Century of Research in Review
. Paul Ekman, ed. New York: Academic Press.

——. 1987. “Universals and Cultural Differences in the Judgment of Facial Expressions of Emotion.”
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
53, no. 4, pp. 712-17.

——. 2004.
Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life
. New York: Owl Books.

Fox, Michael W. 1978.
The Dog: Its Domestication and Behavior
. New York: Garland STMP Press.

——. 1984.
Behaviour of Wolves, Dogs, and Related Canines
. Melbourne, Fla.: Krieger.

Gladwell, Malcolm. 2005.
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking
. New York: Little, Brown.

Grandin, Temple. 2000. “My Mind Is a Web Browser: How People with Autism Think.”
Cerebrum
(Winter), pp. 13-22.

——. 2005.
Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior
. New York: Scribner.

Hetts, Suzanne, and Daniel Estep. 2000. Video:
Canine Behavior Program: Body Postures and Evaluating Behavioral Health
. Denton, TX: Animal Care Training.

Kalnajs, Sarah. 2003. Video:
Dog Communication Skills: Understanding What Your Dog Is Telling You
. Salt Lake City: Tawzer Dog Videos.

McConnell, Patricia. 2003. Video.
Reading Between the Lines
. Salt Lake City: Tawzer Dog Videos.

Mech, David. 1970.
The Wolf The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species
. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Moss, Cynthia. 2000.
Elephant Memories: Thirteen Years in the Life of an Elephant Family
. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Myers, David G. 2004.
Psychology
. New York: Worth.

Rugaas, Turid. 2006.
On Talking Terms with Dogs: Calming Signals
, 2nd ed. Wenatchee, WA: Dogwise Publishing.

Savage-Rumbaugh, Sue. 1994.
Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind
. New York: John Wiley & Sons.

Smuts, Barbara. 2000. “Child of Mine.”
The Smile of a Dolphin: Remarkable Accounts of Animal Emotions
. Marc Bekoff ed. New York: Discovery Books.

Snowdon, Charles T 2003. “Expression of Emotion in Nonhuman Animals.” In
Handbook of Affective Science
, R. J. Davidson, H. H. Goldsmith, and K. Scherer, eds. New York: Oxford University Press.

Sternberg, Sue. 2003.
Successful Dog Adoption
. New York: Howell Book House.

Strum, Shirley C. 1987.
Almost Human: A Journey into the World of Baboons
. New York: Random House.