Dog training is sexy

Tonight I tweeted: “Dog training is sexy. I wish more people understood how cool it is to train.” And then I thought: but who better than me to tell them?

So why is dog training so sexy?

• Dog training is communication with an alien being. Dogs really are “other nations,” as Beston’s famous quote goes. They have their own understanding of the world. In fact, the world they live in is not the world we live in: they live in a completely different mess of colors (fewer) and smells (many many many more) and sounds. Their understanding of the world is different from ours, and we still have no real idea how they perceive things or what is going on in their brains. But we can communicate with them by gentle pairing of signals (“sit”) with actions (their butt goes on the floor) and consequences (cookies). And once we become really good trainers, we can start exploring their dictionary, maybe discover that the translation isn’t what we thought it was (we think “ball” is a noun, meaning that spherical thing, while they think it is a verb, meaning to get something throwable). We get insights into their brains, and maybe they get some into ours.
• Dog training is brain remodelling. When I am desensitizing my shy dog to the presence of strangers, I am actually helping her form new connections in her brain. In fact, I am influencing which new connections form, and which old ones atrophy. I am modifying her brain. I am a brain architect!
• Dog training is an art. My shy dog is afraid to leave the house, so we take very short walks on which I reward her a lot and make sure she doesn’t become overly stressed (in dog training geek talk, I am trying to keep her “under threshold”). She can be unpredictable, and some days keeping her under threshold is difficult. So I try different approaches: more food, more sniffing of grass, not so far from the house, moving more, moving less. I don’t know what is going to work for her on a particular day. Sometimes I don’t even know why I stop trying one approach and switch to another. It’s a gut feeling. I have been working with this dog for so long that it isn’t just an intellectual exercise. It is the art of playing with my dog.
• Dog training is a science. In years past, we didn’t think of training as a science. We approached it with Just So stories, such as “Dogs evolved from wolves, and wolf packs have a dominance hierarchy, so the trainer should make sure to behave like an alpha wolf.” But then science started making itself heard. Trainers started geeking out on learning theory, using terms like “the four quadrants of learning” and “extinction bursts.” Read Don’t Shoot the Dog by Karen Pryor if you want a digestible but fascinating introduction to learning theory. Or Excel-erated Learning by Pam Reid. You can’t remodel brains without the proper tools, after all. You need good tools to create fine art, too.
• Dog training deepens your relationship with your best friend. That is, if you do it right. Good training is fun for you and fun for your dog. It is not a chore, used temporarily to create a good dog and then set aside. It is an ongoing, integral part of a relationship that is built on communication between two very different species.

Training improves my life and the lives of my dogs. I love training my dogs, and they love being trained.

Links post

Dog stuff

• Mandatory spay/neuter laws: Follow the (lack of) money (Pet Connection): Why mandatory spay/neuter laws for pets are a bad idea, even though spaying and neutering is a good goal to have.
• Canine Dominance: Is the Concept of the Alpha Dog Valid? (Psychology Today) Article by Stanley Coren, PhD. He has written some great books about dog behavior and cognition; look him up if you want more on this.

Local food/food safety stuff

• Faeces and flies “found” at US egg farms tied to illness (BBC News): “Officials say chickens’ contact with animal faeces and wildlife are among the main causes of concern as they investigate the source of the salmonella outbreak.” I really hope this story is not spun into “chickens are healthier in cages where they can't come in contact with wildlife.” Infectious disease is a problem when animals live in too-close quarters. Well-managed farms can balance allowing chickens room to move around with disease management. I assert that I am safer eating eggs from backyard chickens (plenty of room to move around, plenty of grass to clean their feet off on, where one sick hen is not going to make all her neighbors sick, because they are not crammed together), even if those chickens interact with wild birds, than eating eggs from factory farms. I don’t have scientific evidence to support this because the studies have not been done (and are hard to do — there are a host of different factors between those two environments to control for).
• ButcherShop (Sugar Mountain Farm): Creative solutions to the lack of slaughter facilities in the Northeast: “We are building our own USDA/State inspected on-farm slaughterhouse and butcher shop... Since banks have not been lending we are bootstrapping the construction from our own cash and selling CSA Pre-Buys where customers get free processing in exchange for buying early.” Lack of local slaughter facilities for small farms is the major impediment to an increase in the number of farmers producing humanely-raised meat in the Northeast. Read more about shortage of slaughterhouses, particularly in the Northeast.

 
Meta-science stuff

• How to make a difference – Responsible vaccine advocacy (Science-Based Medicine): Nice article about how to approach the problem of spreading your viewpoint, recognizing that repeating facts over and over is probably not very effective.
• Good example of a tag cloud for blogs. This is the interface I really want to see on a larger scale.
• Online science blogregator
• Peer Review and the Internet (Science-Based Medicine): “Imagine an alternate process by which an article is published online, either on an open site or a secure site that only experts have access to. Then dozens or hundreds of experts can comment on the paper, providing feedback directly to the authors in addition to the editors, who can also respond to the commenters. The result would be more of a dynamic conversation than you get with the current review process. But most importantly, in my opinion, is that you would get a broader range of opinions, and a far greater chance to detect error or bias. An editor or editors can oversee the process, and once it has played itself out the final version of the paper can be published to the public, and become part of the official literature.” Sounds great. One question I have: how do you know when “it has played itself out”?
• Asking “Who’s a journalist?” is so 2007 (Global Vue): Proposes a list of questions we should be working on now. (It’s nice when posts don’t just explain why a question is a bad one, but constructively offer alternative questions that we should be asking.)
• Supplementary Information: should I stay or should I go? (Martin Fenner): Nice collection of the blog posts about supplemental information and the implications of the Journal of Neuroscience's recent decision to stop accepting it. Fenner comments “This is a perfect example for why we need better systems to track blog posts relating to an article.“ I concur.
  

Miscellany

• (Proposed) World Veterinary Year 2011!

Seeing it their way

This weekend, I attended a seminar with Patricia McConnell, Ph.D., CAAB. The “CAAB” after her name means that Dr. McConnell is a behavior specialist who works clinically with dogs who have behavior problems. (The difference between a behaviorist with a Ph.D. and one with a D.V.M. is sort of like the difference between a psychologist with a Ph.D. and a psychiatrist with an M.D.) She is a great public speaker, and if you are interested in this kind of thing and have a chance to go hear her, I highly recommend the experience.

Dr. McConnell spoke about why we have reason to believe that dogs have many emotions similar to ours. She showed some fascinating pictures and videos of canine body language and talked about how to interpret it. And she worked with two dogs, demonstrating both classical and operant conditioning as tools for helping fearful dogs become more comfortable.

One specific part of the day serves, for me, to illustrate some skills I’d particularly like to learn, and they weren’t dog training skills. McConnell showed the audience video recordings of a dog with a resource-guarding problem being trained using an aggressive dominance-based approach. Resource-guarding dogs don’t like to give up their possessions. My dog doesn’t much like to give up his toys either, but he never growls or tries to bite when I take them away, and that is the difference between a dog who has a resource guarding problem and one who does not. So the danger when you’re working (or just interacting) with a dog like this is that you might get bitten.

Now, this was an audience of dog people. We all knew a lot about dog body language (and had learned more over the course of the previous few hours). As we watched the video, we were all flinching repeatedly, anticipating that the dog was going to bite, based on his body language. The woman in the video clearly wasn’t seeing what we were seeing and did not perceive any danger, even putting her face next to the dog’s mouth several times (yikes).

There was a lot going on in this bit of the seminar. First of all, a lot of trainers and behaviorists would have taken the opportunity to mock the woman on the video for her lack of understanding of the situation. There is one dog trainer whose book and seminars I otherwise very much enjoy, but who seems unable to refrain from shaming the clients she works with when they appear to know less about dog training than she does. Instead, McConnell emphasized what a good job this woman had done. She did exactly the right thing: she took her dog to a trainer, and she followed the trainer’s instructions to the letter. She was the ideal client. It would be very easy for someone who knew more to get caught up in anger about how an inappropriate training method was making things worse for the dog. It is so important, and so difficult, to instead see things from the other person’s point of view, and this was a great example of doing just that.

Secondly, rather than just focusing on teaching us about dog body language (preaching to the choir), McConnell repeatedly pointed out specific ways in which the general public tends to miss some messages that dogs give us. It’s rewarding but not useful to just fine-tune the abilities all day of a group of people who are already self-selected to be pretty good dog trainers. It’s much more useful to help them learn to see what the problems are in the community of dogs and humans around them. Maybe if more dog trainers knew what information the public was missing about how to read their dogs, they would do a better job of instructing people who come to puppy class. (I am not bashing trainers! Lots of them do a spectacular job. But we can all do better, because too many people get bitten, even by their own dogs.)

McConnell’s well-known book, The Other End of the Leash, tries to help people see things from the point of view of their dogs. But she is also good at trying to help people see things from the point of view of other people, and that’s invaluable. Hmm. Where should I go to school to learn that skill?

(For more on McConnell, try her books, The Other End of the Leash or For the Love of a Dog, or read her blog. You can also download old episodes of her radio show, Calling All Pets, to listen to her demonstrate her lovely verbal judo, in which she is able to basically tell callers that they are completely mistaken, without in any way making them feel bad.)

Letting go of dominance theory

Recently I took my dog Jack along on a visit to a friend who was dog sitting. My friend’s resident dog has always gotten along with Jack pretty well, but this guest dog, Ally, had the habit of rushing at Jack when he entered the room, barking at him and generally behaving in a manner that alarmed all the humans involved. Ally was also hesitant around strange humans, in this case myself and my boyfriend. She would come up to us only gingerly, and was easy to scare away with sudden movements or loud noises.

My friend theorized that Ally’s issue with Jack was that she wanted to be the alpha dog, because dogs see the world in terms of a pack structure, like wolves. He felt the way to fix the problem was to let Ally know who was really boss, so whenever Ally rushed at Jack he would yell at her. The idea that a problem in dog training can be solved by asserting dominance is known as dominance theory; use of dominance theory has been publicized recently by Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer. A recent article in the Boston Globe addresses the controversy about Millan’s approach, and has this quote from Karen Pryor, who popularized clicker training, which is a very different approach:

...while his critics dispute Millan’s claim that domestic dogs are pack animals and should be treated as such, Pryor proposes that Millan’s hard-line message speaks to the real pack animal in the room. “We’re the ones who care very deeply about who’s boss and we don’t want to stop believing that humans are superior,’’ Pryor says. “We’re primates that have gone strongly in the direction of hierarchies. Dogs? They don’t care about that at all.’’

This quote really tickled me, even though in my opinion it goes a little too far. No offense to Pryor; I think her book Don’t Shoot the Dog should be required reading for any pet owner. But I think saying dogs don’t care about hierarchies at all may be overstating the case. In my house, it’s clear which dog is in charge, though the other two don’t seem to much care who comes second and who comes third. When I sat in on sessions with a veterinary behaviorist last year, I saw dogs diagnosed with dominance aggression, and I agreed with the diagnosis.

However, I do object to the blanket application of dominance theory to all problems in dog training. Wild dogs don’t run in packs the way wolves do; even if they did, to say that dominance issues are the answer to every canine behavioral problem is silly. Dogs are more complicated than that. In Ally’s case, I don’t think she was trying to show Jack that she was in charge; I think she was scared of him, and trying to deal with the situation in the best way she could come up with.

And who developed the idea that yelling is what makes a good leader? Are managers who regularly yell at their subordinates considered good bosses? My favorite bosses were always people who helped me solve my problems, not people who got angry at me when I couldn’t find a solution on my own.

The American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior has a position statement on dominance theory, in which they provide a good framework for approaching its use in training. I do believe that overuse, or misuse, of dominance theory will gradually fade from the way we as a society manage our dogs, but for now, it seems to be hard for us as humans to let go of it.