It Takes Two to Tension: The Foundation of Good Leash Manners

A puppy-buyer emails to tell me that her puppy class instructor has recommended a "no pull" harness to correct her pup's leash-pulling.

Top of my skull shoots off.

I'll be shooting video of dogs hobbled by these canine straightjackets. Suffice it to say, I do not approve of this kinder, gentler method of destroying a young puppy's shoulder joints. Not to mention the all-positive nature of employing chronic pain as a management tool.*

Here's how you both prevent and correct leash pulling.

You go get the book The Koehler Method of Dog Training, and you follow the instructions in the first chapter. It's easily available on Bookfinder or at any public library where the book-banners have not gotten to it.**

To be clear, I am not a "Koehler trainer." Bit too cultish for me, to be blunt. But "The Foundation" is the pre-homework for my basic obedience classes, and I use it with most private client dogs and most of my foster dogs. And all lungers, leash-pullers, dingbats and thugs.

Here's the homework that my group class students get on the first night, the week before they bring their dogs to class. (They also have the exercise demonstrated, and then they practice hand and footwork with the help of one of my dogs.)

The Foundation

Before we train your dog to walk on a loose leash, come when called, heel, sit, down, stay, and more advanced obedience commands, you will provide him with one week of pre-training on your long line. This training will form the foundation of the rest of his obedience training by teaching him to be attentive and responsible to you, and by teaching you to be quiet and authoritative with your dog. It will also help you develop the physical skills that make leash-handling smooth, so that you don't confuse yourself and your dog later on. If you can do this exercise twice a day for 15 minutes, that's great; if only once a day, go for at least 20 minutes.

Day 1:

Make sure that your dog has not eaten within two hours, and has had a chance to relieve himself.

Take your dog to an open area that is free of obstacles, ice, mud, bad footing, etc. and is fairly level and smooth. Be appropriately dressed and shod. Suggestions: playing fields, church parking lots, mowed areas in office parks, large yards, fairgrounds. Avoid busy parks and places where it is likely that dogs or people will run up and try to play with your dog or otherwise interrupt your progress.

Fit the training collar† onto your dog, and clip the 15' long line to his collar. Hold the loop of the 15' line in your right hand as you practiced, and anchor it on your navel. Anchor your left hand over your right. Keep your left hand off of the rest of the leash.

Choose a target at the opposite end of the open area.

Tell your dog "let's go" and briskly set off towards your target, keeping your hands anchored.

Do not look at your dog to see if he is paying attention. Don't try to get his attention, cluck at him, tug on the leash or coax him along. Just go.

Your dog has 15' of leash slack to work with. Make sure he always has that full 15'.

If he shoots off in any direction, stop, plant yourself firmly, and turn away from him if necessary to keep a big dog from dragging you. Let him hit the end of the leash, but don't add any tugging to that. If he starts dragging you towards your goal, stop and plant yourself.

If your dog lags behind, keep walking briskly towards your target. Don't worry yourself if he screams, plants his butt, bucks, froths, bites at the line, or dashes in all directions. Don't stop to untangle him -- he has 15' feet of line, and can step out of tangles by himself. Keep your hands planted on your belly. If your dog trots along nicely with the slack of the line dragging between you, that's great -- but you still need to continue the exercise and repeat it each day.

Smile at your dog if he trots beside you and looks at your face. This should be the sincere kind of smile that starts at the eyes. He'll get it.

Don't say anything to your dog. Use duct tape if necessary!

When you reach your target, stop for 30 seconds and rest.

After your break, choose another target, and set off for it silently (no further commands) just as you did the first. Stop for 30 seconds when you reach it.

Continue this sequence for 15-20 minutes.

At the end, tell your dog "OK" and let him sniff around for a few minutes before heading home/inside. Don't make a big deal out of it, don't erupt into celebration or start a game of ball. Let your dog "process" what he's learned quietly. This is a good time to do your "Sit on the Dog" homework.

Day 2:

Exactly the same as Day 1. You may use the same training area, or move to a different one. Don't repeat the same pattern of movement.

Day 3:

Use one of the training areas you used on Days 1 or 2. Begin the same way, by walking briskly towards a goal. If you see your dog start to take off in a particular direction without paying attention to your movements, turn (away from the side the line is on, so you don't trip on it) and dash in the opposite direction, anchoring your hands firmly on your belly and heading towards a new target. Don't warn your dog that you are going to do this. Repeat as often as necessary. Be careful that you don't foul in the line and trip.

Day 4:

New training area, preferably with different kinds of distractions. Same as Day 3.

Day 5:

All week, think to yourself "What is most likely to tempt my dog into bolting?" On Day 5, set your dog up with one or more of those temptations. That might be another dog, a cat, children playing, an open gate, a family member, a radio-controlled car, food on the ground, a tennis ball, or a park full of squirrels.

Take your dog to an area with potential temptation(s). Place the temptations yourself before you bring out the dog, if that's what it takes. Put on the training collar and long line, and march your dog straight towards the temptation, with the full 15' of slack line available to him.

As soon as he heads for it or his attention becomes fixed on it, turn on your heels and run in the opposite direction. (Again, be careful -- stay within your physical capabilities here.) If you have done the groundwork for the previous four days, there's an excellent chance your dog will not hit the end of the line.

If your dog does give in to temptation, walk away from the "bait" until he is once again following along with you, then turn and walk directly towards it again, repeating the setup as often as necessary.

Day 6:

Same as Day 5, but change the location and possibly the temptation, depending on how well your dog did on Day 5, and how many things are especially tempting to him.

Day 7:

We'll evaluate your foundation on the long line as you arrive for class on Day 7. I'll ask you to walk to a target on the field outside the training building (be sure to be dressed for this, as the field can be wet). I'm looking for a dog who walks pleasantly beside or behind you with a nice loop of slack dragging behind the both of you. Remember that the kennel property is going to be full of wonderful distracting things. Don't flinch from the temptation setups on the previous two days, and don't cut your practice short.

Back before I could do video uploads, I had a Yahoo photo account, and posted these photos of my then-foster dog, Teddy, on Day 5 of his leash training (Day 6 of living with us). Yahoo photos went away, but I recently resurrected the files from an old external drive.

Since we were having a lovely blizzard, the photos aren't great, and my technique is somewhat hindered by bad footing and visibility. I more lumbered than ran when I about-turned. But Teddy was a great and willing student. You can see the difference between the first and second approaches to a great temptation in the photo sequence. More important, you can see the position of the trainer's hands, what the leash is doing, and how to make the turns so you don't end up face-planting and then hog-tied by a dog.

----

*Which is also the correct term for a "trainer" who is so effing lazy and useless that she straps these S&M gizmos onto dogs -- much less baby puppies -- instead of, you know, training them.

** That's not a joke. Wanna make a self-proclaimed "positive" trainer pop a vein? Just whisper "Koehler" under your breath as you walk by. I used to think that apoplexy was a quaint figure of speech that did not correspond to any actual physical state. Anyway, Bill Koehler knew how to jab 'em, and wasted no opportunity. In return, and in revenge for having their asses handed to them by his followers in competition obedience, they ban his books.

† For this exercise, this is either a properly-fitted traditional slip collar in chain, leather, or nylon, or a properly-fitted martingale collar. Do not use a prong collar for this exercise. It would be bad. Do not use a flat (static, non-constricting) collar for this exercise, or any kind of harness. And under no circumstances ever use a head halter for this exercise. Unless you are attempting to kill the dog via cervical dislocation. That might work well.

Brain Breakfast

Old wive's white-coats' tale -- you can't teach a puppy anything before his eyes open.

No less a pair of authorities than Scott and Fuller proclaimed it, more or less.* After all, neonatal pups are blind, hear poorly, and don't get around all that well. Terrible at mazes. Nevermind that their little noses can lead them to the biggest nipple in their dark, warm world. Humans are a bunch of sight snobs. Worse than our hangup about thumbs.

Michael Fox** discovered that neonates could be conditioned to localize the scent of anise, but essentially concluded that this was as far as it goes.

Jebus Christmas -- they are living, growing beings. They don't just wake up from a coma at three weeks of age. Shit is happening.

Differential equations and whistle commands -- save it.

Neurological connections, resilience, trust, persistence, scent-imprinting -- now we're talking.

While the neonates' nervous systems are pruning and strengthening connections, their immune systems are also beginning to develop under the protection of mother's magic colostrum.

Interestingly enough, the same kinds of mild challenges can strengthen both body systems, just as massive insults to one can throw the other out of whack. (The immune system/nervous system nexus is huge and unappreciated. The New Agers basically ate the white-coats' lunch on this one, and it will be a while before those who apply the scientific method sheepishly catch up and distinguish the valid information from the moonbeams.)

Our "program" for imprinting and stimulating neonatal puppies is mostly the terrible chore of picking up little grunting sausages for snuggle time every day. I know! What we breeders sacrifice. Zrrrbting pink bellies, nibbling tiny toes, smooching little schnozzes -- oh the humanity.

But we do some extra stuff, too. We get a head start on the "Rule of Sevens" and make sure that the pups experience different surfaces in the whelping box. (With this litter, Rosie is intent on making sure they experience four or five different dens in the first two weeks -- still fighting that battle.) We create little moraines under their blankets, so that puppies must climb obstacles to reach the milk bar. (Or Rosie bunches the bedding into Mount Pupali and really gives them a workout.) As soon as Momma allows, pups are touched and cared for by their relatives -- Gramma Pip and Uncle Moe are already cleaning pups. And we do "Superdog" early neurological stimulation -- a little first taste of challenge for the puppies' developing brains and nervous systems.

The neonatal exercises arose from the DoD's "biosensor" program -- an attempt to breed and develop a better military working dog -- in the 1970's. The "Superdog" breeding, developmental, conditioning and training protocols were mostly cloaked in obscurity -- possibly secrecy -- but a few consultants, including the late lamented Cap Haggerty, brought results and protocols out into the light. While the program itself was not a success -- whether due to errors in breeding selection, failure to follow up with appropriate socialization, training shortfalls, or the interaction of all three -- there was a general consensus that the neonatal conditioning, once initiated, improved the results within the program.

It takes only a few minutes a day. Used as directed it does no harm, and may do considerable good.

I've never seen photographs or video of the process, so here you go. Apologies for the poor video quality -- lighting is poor in our living room, and my video camera batteries were all dead, so we used my regular camera. Cutting off the puppies' heads is a YouTube issue -- they were properly framed in the original. My assistant didn't feel confident panning and zooming, so we put the camera on a tripod. And I wasn't sure that it was properly recording audio, so I didn't narrate what I was doing.

I know, I know -- paint drying. But it is fast-drying paint.

Some important points. No puppy is in any given position for more than five seconds. And you only do this once a day. (We couldn't do a second take yesterday for this video.)

One isn't evaluating puppies during this exercise. Whether puppy sleeps or squirms is of no consequence. This is neurological stimulation -- a little bit of challenge that the puppy would not normally get.

Two things I've noted over the course of five days:

• The puppies are responding much more vigorously to the head-down position, and are squirmier in general.

• The puppies are dramatically relaxing in the belly-up position, a little more each day. I don't know whether that can be attributed to the short stimulation sessions, or if it is due to all the snuggle time they spend in this position, in a lap or tucked under someone's chin. Their epic six days of experience on the part of the planet that is not the inside of their mother is already overriding their programmed reflex to right themselves when tits-up, at least when the touch and smell of a human being is part of the equation. This will stand them in good stead in their lives with people, no matter what jobs they hold.

_______________

* "Early in our observations of newborn puppies, we noticed that they did not seem to learn by experience. A puppy would fall to the edge of the scale platform, fall off, and begin to yelp in distress. When placed in the middle of the platform, it would do the same thing over again ... Some recent experiments (Stanley et al 1963) indicate that the puppy is capable of some degree of slow learning with regard to sucking. A puppy which is given milk after sucking a rubber nipple will eventually begin to suck more often than a puppy which is not so rewarded, and one that is given quinine instead of milk will eventually refuse to suck the nipple at all."

Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog, 1965, pp. 87-88.

** Before he went all woo-woo.

Not Your Stick

Ernie about to be introduced to a
hitherto obscure Law of Nature

Cole has taken on our latest foster, young Ernie, as an interesting project.

There wasn't much for him to do in the first week Ernie was with us. The New Guy was living a very restricted life -- tied to me, on a long line on walks, kenneled, in a crate, or gated into a room with me where my eyeballs were always on him. This is how it normally starts with fosters here.

Ernie got opportunities to play outdoors a bit, after dark, when the poultry had gone to bed. He and Cole played keepaway in the front, running round the landscaping bed that is overgrown with mint. In our house, only fosters wear jingly tags -- helps me keep track of them.

Without a sound cue, Ernie appeared to believe that every time Cole disappeared around the other end of the mint island and froze, he had disappeared off the face of the earth. He'd stand and whine until Cole would sneak around into sight and recommence the game.

On Friday, I took the leash off during daylight for the first time. All the dogs were hanging around near the two big maple trees above the house. No poultry close by, so I was confident I would have time to intervene if Ernie forgot the chicken manners he'd been learning while on the long line.

After a short romp, Cole settled down to enjoy chewing a stick.

Or so it would appear to the casual observer.

What he was actually doing was writing and executing a lesson plan, conceptualized in the form a game.

The name of the game is Not Your Stick. The rules of Not Your Stick are simple: That stick? Not yours. That other stick over there? Also, not yours. The stick so small you think I can't see it? Nope, not yours. (Click the little speech-balloon icon lower left for captions.)



To a decontextualized observer, what this looks like is just Cole being a little shit. And he is certainly capable of being just that.

Since Ernie landed in foster largely due to his previous failure to appreciate the twin principles of Not Yours and Keep Your Mouth off of Not Yours, I was more interested in seeing where this would go. I'd had several opportunities to correct Ernie for putting his mouth on things that did not belong to him in the house, and he'd taken the correction well, seeming to contemplate this new information without being overly worried or sensitive. And Cole not only stopped short of overt bullying; he gave the impression of conscientiousness in his titration of timing, pressure, and display.

After Cole explained the Not Yours principles to Ernie using four or five sticks in order to achieve generalization, he allowed Ernie to pick up a stick and retired a short distance away, and benignly observed him enjoying a good chew.

This lasted only a few minutes. All the during the lesson, my flock of curious, friendly, and exceedingly naive turkey poults had been working their way towards the field of play. This would be Ernie's first off-leash encounter with poultry.

He took the bait.

Just as I opened my mouth to correct him, Cole ran forward, blocked him, and sent him in the other direction. Cole is my turkey hound -- he not only herds the turkeys, drives the turkeys away from forbidden areas, plays a silly game with the adult toms, and brings the turkeys home when they stray, he protects the turkeys from predators, cars, and their own suicidal stupidity. Turkeys are his special responsibility.

Cole decided that young turkeys needed to stay in the shrubberies and were not to come out and mingle with dogs in the mowed area. He trotted the boundary until the turkeys relented and moved back into the weeds.

Ernie did not challenge the rule that these were emphatically Not Your Turkeys. He came back towards me and fawned on Pip and Rosie while Cole moved the flock.

He not only absorbed the lesson, he passed the pop quiz at the end of class.

A Bad Doggie Treat is Very Bland

Now a Good Doggie Treat

H/T to Carol Gravestock for this scene from the sitcom Modern Family.

(You can watch the entire episode at the link. This scene starts at about the seven-minute mark.)

A young entrepreneur is pitching his get-rich-quick scheme to a successful businessman and his soft-hearted wife

-- Are you aware, last year, Americans spent forty billion dollars on dog training?

That's not true.

-- I was surprised as you are!

We're surprised because it's not true.

-- What is this multi-billion dollar industry missing?

Multi-billion dollars.

-- I have devised a revolutionary way to communicate ...

Aaaggh ... I hate to interrupt your big pitch, but your dog is chewing my pillow.

-- Is fantastic.

It's not fantastic for my pillow.

-- It's the perfect opportunity for me to demonstrate ... the Good Doggie / Bad Doggie Training System!

Whoa, whoa, slow down -- what are we going to do about the pillow situation?

-- Watch and be amazed! Stella here is being a bad doggie ... Stella bad dog bad dog bad dog.

-- Now what does a bad dog get? A Bad Doggie Treat!

You're gonna give her a treat for doing something bad?

-- Ah -- a Bad Doggie treat. When she is good, she gets the Good Doggie treat.

Whoa wha ... What is the difference between the Bad Doggie treat and the Good Doggie treat?

-- Bacon. The Bad Doggie treat is very bland.

But she seems like she likes it.

-- Wait 'til you see the Good Doggie treat!

-- Stella sit! Now, a Good Doggie treat.

-- Yeah -- she's still full from the Bad Doggie treat. But there you have it! The Good Doggie / Bad Doggie Training System! Welcome to the ground floor!

Actually, she's peeing on the ground floor.

Quick, quick, give her a bad doggie treat!

I read the synopsis from Carol's blog to Perfesser Chaos in the car. He was using all his Powers of Spousal Listening, yet somehow missed the part where I told him it was a scene from a sitcom.

To him, the Good Doggie / Bad Doggie System seemed perfectly plausible in the context of the parade of rainbows and fairy farts training fads that shoplift the mantle of "science" while shaming owners until they are helpless milquetoasts and their dogs are rudderless terrorists.

I would like to give some Modern Family scriptwriter props for a consciously wicked sendup of stiletto-heel "dog training." One can only hope. As with other pop-constructed (non)realities, the best way to deflate them is for some ironic media hipster to find them mockworthy.

Take Two, They’re Small

It was a great compliment to a newly-minted dog handler to be asked by my training mentor to evaluate a litter of puppies to identify the search and rescue prospects.*

The big litter of superficially near-identical black German shepherds was from her own breeding, offspring of two SAR dogs. The buyers were a family from Pennsylvania who already owned two of her dogs, both operational SAR dogs. It was time for them to start bringing along a new pup to eventually succeed their oldest bitch.

After messing with the pups for the better part of a day -- observing the litter interact amongst themselves, taking them out one at a time for some formal puppy tests and informal play and mild stress, watching them move -- I arrived at the same answer that their breeder had. “Either of these two bitch puppies is an excellent prospect. And I can find no reason to prefer one over the other. I think they might be actual identical twins.”

A few days later Martha and Dan, SAR dogs JT and Schatten, and Martha’s two teenage boys arrived in an SUV the size of a city block, to visit for a few days, train, and choose their new puppy.

I liked them. We had a lot of fun navigating the baffling New Hampshire topography behind Annabella’s cabin. It was refreshing to cross-pollinate with handlers from another unit who were not using the interaction as an opportunity to gain local political advantage or attempt a mean-spirited alpha roll on the New Kid.

Martha agreed about the two bitch puppies. She spent three days with them, and could find nothing to favor one pup over the other. So she took them both.

Annabella tried to talk her out of this course of action, but in the end relented. Martha and Dan insisted that each one would train a pup.

Less than a year later, Perfesser Chaos took a new job. We packed up Lilly, two cats, all our crap, and the lives we had started in New England and relocated, Clampett-like, to Pittsburgh. We weren’t close enough to Martha to join her SAR unit, but it was nice having a friend and guide in the general area. Their spacious home, set back in the woods near the Laurel Ridge, was our rural refuge, as Annabella’s Unabomber cabin had once been.

Things were not going as one would hope with the puppies, Lauren and Danielle.†

They were still physically indistinguishable (to me) -- color-coded collars were a necessity. But one puppy (I cannot remember which one, seventeen years later) had taken on the role of leader, the other of follower. It was fortunate that the dichotomy was as strong as it was; that’s probably what spared that family the fun of littermate bitches deciding to kill one another at unpredictable intervals.** The fact of the relationship -- the absolute need that dogs have to define their roles relative to their packmates -- cause the identical puppies’ personalities to diverge much more dramatically than they would have under other circumstances.

I cannot remember a single dog who was raised with her mother to adulthood who could be successfully trained for a Guide Dog. Where two litter mates are raised together in the same home we have had the same results. Puppies raised in homes where there are dogs not related to them have never been affected this way by the association with other dogs ... In the case of two litter mates raised together, one becomes a successful candidate for Guide Dog work and one fails, even if their aptitude tests were equal.

Clarence Pfaffenberger
The New Knowledge of Dog Behavior
Howell Book House, 1964 (p. 125)

Lauren and Danielle presented a classic picture of this kind of squandered potential, except that neither were heading for the success promised by their early puppy profiles. They were co-dependent, whining and pacing incessantly whenever separated from one another, even if one of the other dogs was there. Their obedience and general response to human leadership was sketchy at best. I would not consider them housetrained. They barely paid attention to what their humans wanted. They lacked the aura of intelligence and awareness that JT exuded. And neither puppy was all that committed to working. The noses functioned, but the fire did not blaze.

Indeed, at a year of age, they were still “the puppies.” At two, three years of age, “the puppies.” No real progress towards operational status that I could see, and general arrested development compared to their own older dogs, and other SAR dogs of the same cohort.

One divorce and many life changes later, Martha and Dan split up “the puppies.” Each ex-spouse went away with one good older SAR dog and one unfocused, slightly neurotic, unfulfilled young pet. Neither ever fielded a second SAR partner.

Well what does all that matter to me? you say, I just want dogs as pets.

Two puppies will keep one another company, so I can go to work and not feel guilty. It’s a lot of fun watching them play with one another. And they never have to go through the full trauma of leaving their first family. They’ll be friends all their lives, so we don’t have to identify other dogs with whom they can socialize. Throw in a fenced yard -- no need for time-consuming leash walks.

Oh the temptations.

If I wasn't so aware of the number of hits this post is likely to receive from people looking for validation for a decision to buy two puppies, I'd give you the phone number of the clients who called me two weeks into their two-puppy adventure. They were "smart." They didn't buy littermates (partly because they had a thought of breeding the two German shepherd pups in the future.) They got a big robust bitch puppy and a smaller, more retiring dog puppy who was a week or so younger, from a different breeder. The two pups commenced ignoring every human directive, enticement, and entreaty, while the bigger pup began mercilessly bullying the smaller one.

When they called me, this couple who had successfully raised three children had not slept in a fortnight. I felt as if I'd come to help the parents of quadruplets who were both suffering from post-partum depression.

I was able to help quite a bit with puppy management, training, general stress levels. This was a couple who really wanted to do right by their dogs, had high expectations of them, and had found themselves completely unprepared for the onslaught.

I’m down to one Indiana Plague Puppy; Donna went home this morning. They are about 13 weeks old now, several weeks older than the optimum age for going to their permanent homes. Puppy care just got harder.

Four puppies was herding a troupe of striped-assed baboons. Two puppies are half as many as four -- half as much poop, half as much cuddling, half as much training, half as many little ferrets diving for the door or scattering like cockroaches when I needed to contain them.

Two puppies is not, however, twice as many as one. I haven’t yet suffered through a sleepless night of foresaken wailing. I could gate the two of them in the puppy-resistant kitchen for long periods and they entertained one another. I called the puppies, and if one was inclined to come to me, the other almost invariably followed. If I corrected a pup for mouthing me while she was in a ripping frame of mind, she just turned to her sister and piled on -- redirection always available..

In short, raising two puppies rather than one makes it easy and apparently consequence-free to neglect them both. It is the canine developmental equivalent of parking the toddler in front of Gilligan’s Island with a bag of gummi worms and a loaded diaper.

He’s not just less likely to get into Stanford in the long-term; he’s significantly more likely to treat you to phone calls from the school principal and later, the police chief. Or, better yet, to be living in the basement eating your Hot Pockets when he's 35.

I departed from the easy path in several ways. I separated the pups for some period of time every day, taking them each out for leash walks that were, from the standpoint of exercising puppies, entirely gratuitous. They ate from separate bowls, spent time in separate crates, had separate lap-times. But mostly, they were “the puppies.” Neither had launched out of her natal pack and into a new life in a human family.

There are things they ideally should have started learning at seven weeks -- the age at which they found themselves in the dog pound, riddled with cooties, and still a week from coming into foster care where we could begin to address their vetting and start matching them with potential adopters.

It’s neither wise nor productive to unleash two uncivilized puppies -- much less four of them -- into a non-puppy-proofed area of the house. While you are rescuing a shoe from one varmint, another one is behind the TV eating power cord. Whisk one outside when she circles and sniffs, and her brother is makes a deposit to greet you at the door on the way back in. So they lived in the kitchen and did not learn to leave my stuff alone and ask to go out.

One puppy sat sweetly for a treat or attention, another jumped on her head and started gnawing as the human reached down. Each learned that sitting sweetly for what she wants is asking for an ambush -- much better to keep leaping on my legs like a wild heathen.

Shout NO as a pup engages in suicidal or criminal misconduct, and his sister who was innocently playing with a new toy is hit with discipline shrapnel. Uh oh, maybe I shouldn’t play with my toy. Or, maybe this “No” thing is overhyped, and I can ignore it.

One puppy runs from the giant rattling monster garbage bin that is chasing her down the driveway, and her sister concludes that it must be terribly dangerous, and follows in retreat. The fact that the grown-up dogs and the human aren’t a bit worried about this thing doesn’t get through the collective puppy panic.

As a result, the last two girlpuppies were, as of 6 a.m., pig-ignorant barbarians compared to any single pup we have raised. The latest we have ever had littermates together was eleven weeks. At thirteen weeks, the girls were on the verge of overripe; when they had the rips, they were about as tame and approachable as these:


Which, frankly, they closely resembled in more ways than I care to contemplate.



The developmental window for primary socialization and learning has not closed. They will be just fine. And they are still miles ahead of our group-raised ONB puppies, some of whom were with their littermates to the age of eight or nine months.

One or two more weeks of litter-living, though, and these pups would be courting real developmental challenges.

Starting today I am sucking it up and raising one puppy properly, as if she was my own, until she goes to her permanent home. The adult dogs -- trained, civilized,‡ full members of a human family with all the privileges and duties attendant thereof -- act as uniform assets in the pup’s upbringing. They teach her things that can be best, or only, learned from another dog, and they reinforce the policies and procedures of the human household. But the real work will be down to me and PC. Little Susie is Canis lupus familiaris, not plain ol’ C. lupus. She needs to look to human beings for her physical needs, play, direction, leadership, an explanation of her world. As her foster humans, it's our duty to prepare her to keep doing that all her life.

And Miss Susie is already doing this; there is a dramatic change in her compared to last night. I liked her before; now I really enjoy her puppy company.

Here's some free unsolicited advice:

Never buy or adopt two puppies the same age to raise together. Especially littermates. Especially same-sex littermates.

Do. Not.

Here's some more:

If you are a breeder, or place puppies for adoption, never sell or adopt two same-age puppies to one home.

Never. Ever.††

You don't see that "never" here very often. Here's how important I think this is: It is more unwise to buy two well-bred puppies from a breeder who raises them skillfully and lovingly, and bring those puppies up together in the same household, than it is to buy a puppy from the deli case at Petland.

A breeder worth her salt knows this. She won't sell you a set. She most certainly won't offer, suggest, market, discount or hard-sell pups in pairs. Wanna test the balance between a breeder's behavioral savvy and her walletitis? Ask her to sell you two at once. If she says O-tay, walk away clean.

_______________________

* In retrospect, this may have been one of Annabella’s characteristically opaque Zen master lessons about what she thought I had actually done right with my first SAR dog, a truth that I later discerned about myself: I’m a fair to-middling-trainer. What I am good at is selecting puppy prospects who can withstand ham-fisted management, beginner’s mistakes, bad training methodologies, rotten timing, and the whole litany of handler incoherence -- pups who are nearly idiot-proof.

† Martha had a husband named Dan, a son named Dan -- why not just go with it again? Yell out “Dan!” and see how many beings answered.

** Two bitches in the same household who have each decided that the other needs to Go Away Permanently are among the least-favorite projects that face any dog trainer. When those two bitches are littermates whose owners earnestly believe they should loooove one another because they are sisters -- chewing up and swallowing a box of lightbulbs with a Betadine chaser ranks higher on the list of things to do today.

‡ And Sophia. Sigh. She is as God made her.

†† Of course not. Pack hounds. Buy whole litters of 'em and keep 'em in the kennel. It's all good. Carry on. I'm talking about pets, and working dogs that are not pack-hunting hounds.

Also, does not apply to cats. Kitten pairs work well, especially for owners who need them to be contented indoor latchkey kitties.

How Do I Become a Dog Trainer?

This is one of the most common questions I get in private emails from strangers out of the blue.

And though I'm pressed for time, I'm generally happy to tell them.

Typically -- not always, but most of the time -- I get a reply that makes it clear that I did not answer the question they meant to ask when I answered the question that they actually wrote down.

The questions that inquirers meant to ask are:

Should I enroll in this dog-training school?

How do I get my own teevee show and be a celebrity dog trainer?

What kind of instant credentials can I buy, since I already know everything about dogs due to loving them all my life?*

The question that I stubbornly answer is the title of this post -- and here is my answer, for those who are really interested.

First, accept that your timeline for professionalization is not days, weeks, months. It's not a year from now. It will take years of hands-on and book learning for you to earn the right to charge people money for your services, or for that matter, affect an air of expertise when slinging free advice.

There is no shortcut. I'm going to repeat that. There is no shortcut.** What we old farts still quaintly call a correspondence school will not make you a dog trainer.† A two week, six week, or six month training course will not make you a dog trainer. Dog training is a profession, a science, an athletic discipline, and an ancient art. You do not master any of the above via a crash course. (And if you think you can make up for a long process of assimilation, processing, drilling and cogitation on experience with fourteen-hour-day "intensity" -- ask me to translate some ancient Greek text for you without my grammar on one knee and a Liddell lexicon on the other.)

You must also accept that the fact that you want to be a dog trainer does not guarantee that you will have the aptitude to succeed at it. Even hard work does not get everyone there. Some people are born with physical gifts and qualities of perception that allow them to be effective with animals with little or no formal training. Most of us have more modest natural talents that we develop through study and practice. Some people are just not cut out for it. This is not a moral failing. The most common limiting factors are inadequate communication skills (with people) and physical limitations, including poor timing that does not improve acceptably with practice. (Many physical "disabilities" have workarounds, BTW.) On the plus side, fewer sincere efforts fail than in, say, professional sports, medical school, or rock 'n' roll bands.

If you are a young person, in high school or recently out, my most important advice is that you enroll in the best college that you can get into/afford, and pursue an expansive liberal arts course of study. Study the biological sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and anything else that piques your interest. Take hard classes from professors who will criticize you, and learn to accept that criticism and improve from it. Because you are not there to acquire a trade or inflate your self-esteem -- you are there to initiate a life's journey as a thinking adult who can grow and learn as a citizen, a professional, and a human being for the next sixty years. An education should be, among other things, an inoculation against the credulous acceptance of nonsense, fads, and superstition. If the college is any damned good and you aren't irredeemably stubborn, your unexamined prejudices won't make it out alive.

You are likely to come out of college with a different career goal than the one you entered with, too. That's fine. It's how it's supposed to work. I'm not here to evangelize to seventeen-year-olds, and you are not required to choose your life's work one bare decade after reaching the age of reason.

If you are a career-changing adult, well, we all need to fall back on what we have learned, both formally and in the course of life. You might consider some community college classes in any knowledge areas where you may have lacuna; that could be biology, ethology or something more skills-oriented such as public speaking. You are going to be fitting in your professional development around your other commitments. Don't quit the day job yet.

So, in no particular order, here are the elements of the education of a trainer, which you can fashion into a three-to-ten-year plan for yourself depending on your individual circumstances and goals:

Read

Read widely, read aggressively, read critically. Just because it's in print doesn't mean the author ever had a clue. Read new and old books; do not commit the error of believing that "new" supersedes "old," or that "popular" equates to "sound." (Conversely, "old" is not always "classic.") Read up on canine evolution, ethology, training, health, reproduction, development, grooming. Read books about breeds, because you should know dog breeds cold. Read about hunting, police work, search and rescue, service work, guide work, detection work, therapy. Read about behavior problems and pathologies. Read books written for professionals with doctorates and books written for schoolchildren. Read bad training books that are popular right now, because you need to know what's floating out there in the ether that your clients are going to inhale. Read about training other species. Read about counseling, pedagogy, personal safety, zen, marketing. Read scientific papers. Take notes. Buy the books you find most important and useful. You will continue reading aggressively forever

Train Your Own Dog(s)

I do not mean "Teach your puggle a parlor trick at home." (Though parlor tricks are a great skill for a trainer's personal dog.) You need to enroll in classes with the best local instructors, and achieve something with your own dog or dogs. Best student in your basic class graduation does not qualify you for anything other than enrollment in the next level of class.

Train your dog(s) to a high level of obedience. Compete and win titles, and/or qualify them and engage in real work. Your own dogs are your most credible credential. If the instructor's demo dog can't hold a down-stay during class, what chance do the students have with their animals? If the pro trainer hasn't been vetted through competition with hobbyists or an objective working-dog evaluation (not a CGC or the equivalent "therapy dog" test) then where does he get off taking people's money.

This is no place for jokes about the shoemaker's children. The trainer's dog is his advertising, his credibility, and his training partner. No excuses.

Explore different training venues as you train your own dogs -- local training businesses, obedience clubs, schutzhund clubs, etc. (Not big-box retail stores.) Observe the different instructors, their methods, their teaching styles, and think about their various strengths and weaknesses. Be a good student, be willing to give an honest try to each instructor's homework.

(If you are a young person, in college or your parents' home, or otherwise in a life situation where you cannot or should not own a dog for a while, then seriously, borrow a dog to train in group classes. You may be able to do this with a dog from a shelter or rescue who needs training to become adoptable or more easily adoptable. This is a great incentive to do your homework and pay attention in class; the dog is depending on you to get him a home.)

Apprentice

The apprenticeship is the cornerstone of a trainer's professional development. This could be quite formal, with one demanding mentor putting you through a progressive multi-year program, or informal, as you learn from a number of different experienced teachers. It is up to you to ensure that you and your mentor see the relationship and any mutual or reciprocal obligations the same way. It is up to you to find a mentor who can (and is willing to) share the skill and insight that you need to become a professional.

A mentor will help you with your reading list, introduce you to professional networks, and support your development with both encouragement and criticism. A mentor, or several of them, is your best resource for improving your hands-on dog skills.

Expect to put in a lot of grunt work for your mentor(s); however, if you are still scooping kennels (and doing nothing else) after six months of "apprenticeship," you are being exploited as unpaid labor, not educated. If you find yourself teaching your mentor's group classes for no pay, and he is not supervising and critiquing you and your students' progress systematically, then you are being exploited and the paying students are getting ripped off.

Seminars, conferences and workshops can also contribute to your education as a trainer and expose you to different ideas, tools, and techniques. Choose your con-ed investments of time and money with some care, as not all presenters are worth what it costs. Beware of becoming a seminar-junkie; wannabe trainers who hop from workshop to workshop, latching onto the Latest Thing like cultists until the next Latest Thing at the next seminar. (See above re: a good education as bullshit vaccine.)

Volunteer

Find a local 501(c)3 shelter, rescue group, service dog training organization, SAR unit -- all of the above.

Volunteer to do what is needed -- walk shelter dogs, home-check potential adopters, foster animals in your home, socialize pups, hide for search dogs. Don't expect to waltz in, proclaim your intention of becoming a trainer, and find yourself in charge of training. They've heard it before. If you prove yourself to be reliable and professional as a volunteer, you'll find opportunities to help train and finally be responsible for training.

You can learn a great deal by working with a wide variety of shelter dogs. They will be different ages, temperaments, breeds -- but almost all of them will be utterly untrained. Exploit the opportunities they provide for you, and keep ever-mindful that each dog will require slightly (or drastically) different techniques and test your skills in different ways.
Pro bono work is part of being a professional. Expect to volunteer in some capacity for your entire career. Research your options and choose well-run, focused, accountable animal charities that are fiscally responsible and as drama-free as you can find.

Network

Develop respectful, collegial relationships with other trainers and dog professionals such as veterinarians, groomers, ethical breeders, shelter workers. Join the appropriate professional organizations and training clubs, using the same criteria as you should for charities. Exchange information, insight, contacts.

You will notice that I don't have a subheading for credentialing or certification. That's because credentials are something you earn through your work as a professional; they are external validation of what you already are. They aren't magic charms that turn you into a professional. The "popular" ones are popular because they can be bought or easily gained, and tend to have the effect of convincing their bearers that they have more skill and knowledge than they do. I have chosen NADOI membership and endorsement, which is difficult, and encourage others who have met the requirements to do so.

______________

* Answers:

No.

Ask the Leather Queen. (I also suggest affecting an accent of some sort. Try Jamaican -- that hasn't been done yet. Miss Cleo doesn't count.)

Pay APDT a hundred bucks and stop bothering me. They will take your money -- I guaranfreakintee it -- and you didn't offer me any, did you?

** If I knew the shortcut, I would not tell you. But there is no shortcut.

† Anyone remember the comedian who had the bit about correspondence schools in which he did an impression of a terrorized dog living in the house where someone was taking the "vet tech" course by mail? Yeah, it's like that.

Woofers and Tweeters

Stick a fork in him, he's done

#1 Question people have asked me today at the BlogPaws Conference:

What is your url? Nope.

What do you blog about? Nope.

Who the hell do you think you are, anyway? For once, nope.

Can I Tweet this picture of your dog? Yep, that would be the one.

I decided to bring young Cole in his first prime-time appearance.

Other than some audible air leakage and excessive schmoozing during what were apparently very boring break-out sessions, he has been a Very Good Boy. Part of being a working dog is handling crowds and long days.

He's spent the day whoring for all the humans, and very appropriately meeting the other dogs and the nekkid cats in strollers. (No, I didn't get a picture. Everyone else did, though.)

I did not leave him at the very nice free dog-check at any point; we're very pleased with his lovely canine social skills, and will not be setting him up for any preventable relapses to the Old Way.

Anyway, I don't do da twitters and dunno how it works. Can someone translate it into middle-aged dog trainer for me?

Missing the Lesson While Learning It

The December 2003 Whole Dog Journal featured an interview with a pair of Sea World whale trainers.

Our friend and teammate Craig had a subscription, and handed me the issue when it was new. In one section of the interview, trainer Chuck Tompkins discussed the use of "negative punishment" -- e.g. withdrawal of food for noncompliance -- on the orca they were training. Here's the passage that I read aloud to him and Perfesser Chaos:

Tompkins: "Yeah. One of the first chances he got, Ramu showed us exactly how he felt about having things taken away from him, and how he felt about us.

"One of the first times I got in the water with him, he grabbed me by the waist, dragged me to the bottom of the pool, held me down there until I almost passed out, brought me up for a breath -- and then did it all over again. He shook me, tossed me around, raced around the pool with me in his mouth. When he had made his point, he literally spit me out onto the deck."

WDJ: "Yikes. and the conclusion you drew from this was?"

Tompkins: "I said to Thad, 'Oh my god! This whale hates me!' It hit us both like a ton of bricks. When push came to shove, we had no real relationship with that animal. It was a revelation."

WDJ: "And that's when you decided to try an all-positive training program with the whales instead?"

So, what became interesting about this passage were the different reactions the three SAR dog handlers in the room had to Tompkins' story.

• Craig was struck by how intelligent an animal Ramu had to be, to know just how long was almost, but not quite, long enough to drown a human being, and what it might mean to keep something that intelligent in a tank and make it do tricks.

• I marveled at how Tompkins missed the fact that the whale did not "hate" him. The whale held him in contempt, which is different. If Ramu had hated him, he'd have killed him. I especially liked the "spit me out onto the deck" image. Forbearance -- a mark of nobility. Also, "withdrawing rewards" as a form of "negative punishment" sounds very benign, until one reflects that it comes down to "Do as I say or I will starve you in this concrete tank, bitch."

• Ken -- the guy who cannot hear 90% of the simple declarative sentences that are uttered by his wife, the non-trainer who seems to be not paying attention at all most of the time -- Ken was the most astounded of us all, because it was obvious to him that the whale had trained all the trainers to behave exactly the way he wanted them to by administering one powerful correction to just one of them.

The humans failed to see that "punishment" was working very well on them, even if it hadn't been working very well for them.

In the aftermath of Tilikum's fatal attack on trainer Dawn Brancheau, the three human corpses floating in this whale's wake are being spun as "accidents" because the whale was "playing."

Some game.

The whale was not angry, vindictive, cranky, testosterone-poisoned, predatory, or yearning to breathe free. There is nothing to take away from Ms. Brancheau's death beyond no ponytails in the splash zone, and under no circumstances will Sea World take any steps that will cut into its $2.7 billion business. Tilikum is a $10 million commodity. As the Baby Daddy* to two-thirds of Sea World's tank-bred orcas, he may be the most valuable livestock in the industry. He stays in the bathtub until he dies.

But that long-ago warning shot by Namu -- "this whale hates me!"

Now, the trainers who obediently stopped withholding fish from their masterful human trainer and became "pure" positive continued to get knocked around. But Tompkins had an explanation for that -- it was due to the previous training regimen, natch.

Maybe so. Tilikum, however, was snatched from Icelandic waters long after all the whale trainers went officially "purely positive." All the overt force was front-loaded onto the bad guys who kidnapped the whales from their families, and the background coercion of the tank walls and the fish bucket pushed beneath the crust of consciousness. So I guess that excuse won't fly this time.

Later in the interview, Tompkins describes "going positive" in his personal life after the revelation in the bathtub.

"I realized that I had effectively trained my family to see my car in the driveway and be all 'Dad's home! Run!' Even the dog used to hide when I got home!

That wasn't what I wanted; I wanted my family to be happy to see me, to greet me at the door. To do this, I had to stop 'correcting' everything that I saw that was 'wrong' and instead start reinforcing all the good things I saw in my family. I had to practice being engaged and enjoyable to my family. Now when I come home, everyone says 'Yay! Dad's home!' And my dog doesn't hide anymore, either!"

WTF?

Over the years I've helped many clients who had who had poor relationships with their dogs, and a few who had fallen into a poisonously punitive spiral that was hard to break, and probably met technical thresholds for abuse at some point before they asked for help. But I have never, ever, met anybody whose dog runs and hides when he comes home. Most dogs that are frankly beaten still run to fawn over their abusers; they may be crouched and peeing on their own feet when they do it, but they are coming out to greet that person.

Is it any wonder that this guy was ripe for a conversion experience?

Furthermore, notice that this is all about what he wants. He wants Mom to meet him at the door in pearls and high heels and hand him his pipe, Rover to bring his slippers, and little Mikey and Sarah to jump up and down and yell Yay Dad. And he figured out how to get what he wanted.

Has Tilikum?

Does he even know what he wants?

Whatever it is, it isn't forthcoming when he positively reinforces his captors with his spectacular cooperation. And it sounds as if his other plan isn't working out too hot either.

-------------------

* Orcas don't have a Species Survival Plan. They are corporate assets. There is no conservation value to the captive breeding program -- its only function is to engender more performers, and boost ticket sales when there is an adorable orca infant for the gawking. Be that as it may, if one is going to create a catastrophic genetic bottleneck in the very first generation of a breeding program, one might at least mitigate the damage to the future character of the inbred gene pool by not using a sire who ices a human being once a decade.

Sea Wolves are not Sea Dogs

An experienced orca trainer died today at Sea World Orlando. The Shamu of the hour, Tilikum, a very large, very aggressive bull orca who lives in solitary confinement and performs in a "non-contact" capacity for the whale show, pulled her into his tank and killed her.







By request, then, and with a disclaimer, a reprint of a rant I posted to a trainers' list in 2004.

No, this is not by way of blaming the victim. Those who work with large animals -- horses, elephants, cattle, whales, sharks -- accept certain risks. The risks are greater when an animal is known to be intentionally aggressive, as Tilikum is, but they are always there, even with the most "docile" large animal. Animal trainers are big girls and boys. If they don't robustly understand the risks, then they need to get into a different business. I have no reason to believe that Ms. Brancheau did not accept the risks willingly. She has paid for what may have been a few seconds' complacency with her life; there but for the grace of God go us all.

Elephant handlers in contact management husbandry setups are often berated by the PROC* partisans for using "force" in training and handling. It's widely understood that the alternative to handling with an ankus and a certain amount of posturing by the human is a non-contact facility. Elephants who are not trained traditionally are simply too dangerous to have access to their keepers. Trained elephants are still dangerous, but much less so -- more on the order of a crabby stallion than a five-ton sociopath.

Trained elephants get to have more interesting lives than those warehoused or displayed in non-contact facilities.

The context was, once again, a PROC trainer's relentless claim that all dog trainers needed to do was emulate the photogenic folks in the shortie wetsuits at Sea World, and it will all be hunky-dory. That "you cannot force a whale" and "you cannot punish a whale" -- so whale training defines the desirable methodology and outcome of a training program for a domestic dog.

But dogs aren't captive whales. For which dogs -- and their owners -- have cause to be very grateful.

Thus, my rant:

* * *

Take for example, the killer whale. How would YOU get a urine sample from a killer whale with his cooperation?

Janey Shaddrick

Okay, first, I would hire men with powerboats and harpoons and nets to terrorize and kidnap the whale -- a powerful wild predator with complex social relations and strong family connections -- pull him out of the water, rendering him completely helpless, and take him away from his family and his home range of many hundreds of square miles.

Then I would put him in a tiny shallow sensory deprivation tank, full of stinking chlorinated water, where his sonar signals and all his distress vocalizations bounce off concrete walls and come back to blast him.

Then I'd deprive him of his natural food and opportunities to hunt and eat normally, and force him to eat the frozen chum that I provide, by hand. (Has the Geneva Convention kicked in yet?) After enough time he might be Keikoized -- incapable of catching his own prey, and so completely dependent on hand-delivered chum.

Then I'd make all access to that chum contingent on him performing the "behaviors" that I require of him. No trick, no eat.

I'd also make his access to any social interaction with other creatures contingent on these "behaviors." Ooh -- ever hear of the Stockholm Syndrome? Well don't trust it too far, because orcas as well as smaller ceteceans attack their handlers with fair frequency. A captive wild "trained" animal is not necessarily tamed, and is never domesticated.

And all access to a slightly larger sensory deprivation tank and opportunities to move, play, and exercise mentally -- also contingent on these "behaviors."

I'll declare 50-70% compliance with my trick cues to be victory -- a "trained" animal.

If, after many years of this brainwashing regimen, I try to transfer the pool tricks to "open water" and the animal actually declines to make for the horizon, or comes back when very hungry (remember, can't catch his own prey anymore -- too debased), I will trumpet my victory. This whale chose to stay with me! When, as is more likely, he disappears entirely, I will keep that as quiet as possible.

Want to know the rest, or has that been "gentle," "positive," and "kindly" enough for you?

I am so @!^%ing sick of the "whale trainers can't use force" argument. What is done to whales is the most sickeningly violent "training" in the universe -- no cattle prods required.

BTW, I have no trouble getting my dogs to provide a urine sample, and it didn't take a clicker or a single cookie to accomplish it.

Eliminating on command is pure classical conditioning, and the dog's "reward" during conditioning is the satisfaction of bladder relief. No +R or -P or any other jargon or gadgets or ideology enter into the equation. Just condition the pup to associate the word with the peeing, and be ready with a pie plate when you need a sample.

The mechanics of cetecean micturation are obscure to me and no doubt present practical challenges, but I'm sure it's pretty much the same training process, once the atrocities are done with and the animal is physically contained and subdued. Mostly.

What's the mystery?

_____________

*Positive Reinforcement Operant Conditioning -- i.e., people who claim to believe in the Behaviorist quadrant** schema of all animal learning, but who explicitly discard three of those quadrants and further claim that all animal training need be only in the form of "positive reinforcement," frequently in the form of "free shaping." Many accuse anyone who either uses the other quadrants, or rejects the Skinnerian paradigm altogether, of abuse -- even "torture."

** Often called the "four quadrants" of behaviorism. But really, how many quadrants are there gonna be?

______________

Update: Sea World snatched tragedy from the jaws of decency. Had anyone in the captivity industry wanted to repatriate Tilikum in 1992, it might have been possible. Instead, Sea World essentially goaded the government of Iceland to Just Say No to releasing Tilikum and any other whales in the waters from which they were kidnapped.

The article that dropped the scales from my eyes nine years ago.

What a Tyro Does ...

... when faced with a complex, important task that she won't admit is far beyond her capabilities, requires a knowledge set she has not begun to master, and is not susceptible to her pin-headed ideology.

Luminous Lunacy

Just about a month ago, Cat Urbigkit posted over at Querencia about some rough nights on the ranch, here. Wild things and tame, mooning about.

Last night the almost-full moon already presided, magnificently, as I took The Pack for a sunset pasture walk before dinner.

The Pack is not settled and orderly on a regular day. Wedging three special-needs fosters in with four not-uncomplicated beasts of my own has not always been a path paved with silicone. Cole wants to control Sophia and make her not an idiot. Rosie thinks Jasmine is unnecessary and has ideas about making her nonexistent. Jasmine doesn't know whether she is a party girl or a bitch on wheels. Pip disapproves on general principles. Moe is conflicted, and on cold, wet days, a wild card. Barry White tries to be invisible. Sophia just tries everyone.

Two weeks ago, we had 24 hours of Jasmine rampage at the dark of the moon. It started with a fiasco. Dogs asking urgently to go out into the pitch-black, early evening -- not barking, but whining and pacing. I send them all out, but instead of bursting bladders, the occasion was an invisible intruder. All seven roared down into the buttcrack just below the barn, and then (heard, not seen) hooked a hard right and chased whatever it was up into the hayfield to the west.

Nothing has ever run away that direction before. And the barking was angry and insistent, some of it (Moe, I think, and maybe Sophia) more of a roar. Not the usual sounding off at a raccoon wondering about chicken dinners, or deer at the apple tree. I put on boots and came outside, called them out of the hayfield. Six dogs came right back.

Up at the property line by the township park, Jasmine was yapping hysterically. The lights were on at the park (why?) and I could see her silhouette running the outfield fenceline. I could not tell whether she was inside or outside the fence.

I could hear people yelling, and another dog barking. Jasmine, whose recall is actually quite good and reasonably proofed at this point, was deaf to my calls.

I had to get a headlamp and march up there to get her. My plan was to leash her and then deal with the shrieking owners of the dog who had just been poking around my poultry. When I got close she got the fuck out of Dodge, ran back to the house. Too much adrenaline for her brain to process. I followed her back. She went around to the back door in what I'm sure she thought was a very guileful move to cover her tracks. Park? I was never up at the park ignoring your calls and barking like a damned fool. What would make you think that?

The idiots whose loose dog had bolted the park, crossed a couple hundred yards of hayfield, and come sniffing around my barnyard, continued to scream at their barking beast. I never saw them.

They are fortunate that my predator-control of choice is four-legged* rather than two-barreled.

The next morning, Jazzie ate a cardboard box in my office. I told her not to. She thumped her tail, apologized, and went and ate another as soon as my back was turned.

Rosie was looking like she might have a go at the little bitch. Sophia was antagonizing both Cole and Pip. Moe was red-eyed and crabby. Mommy needed vodka. Okay, just a break from the drama would do. Time for Jasmine to spend some time in the foster kennel and play yard. I took Barry White out to keep her company. I put Sophia in the indoor/outdoor kennel. I continued with my indoor work.

When Perfesser Chaos got home, he went out to do evening barn chores. I asked him to bring in Barry White and Jasmine when he was done.

Came back in a little later with just Sophia. Jasmine had poked her head out the kennel door and nailed him on the hand when he reached for the latch. Fortunately, the hand was encased in a leather work glove. This is exactly the kind of poor decision that landed her here instead of going straight to an adoptive home.

I went out to have a talk with her about it. She was skulking. Oh shit, what now?

She skulked inside with me. Chaos forgave her, gravely. You know that Foster Daddy would be a lot less sanguine about this if he hadn't been wearing gloves, don't you?

So she's on Jasmine probation now. No more freedom of the yard -- she gets put out on a cable for breaks, in the kennel for a bit of the day, and supervised walks. Lots of recall work on those walks.

Then last night, as I was walking seven dogs towards a nearly-full moon hanging just above the trees to the east, I could feel the crackling. My control was tenuous. The dogs were torn between the temptation of lighting up and their earnest desire for me to keep them in line. They bounced against their training and the notion of human leadership, testing to see how far it would stretch. Considering the option of becoming werewolves.

We'll walk twice for a while, four and four. Barry White can come on both walks, as he is invisible.**

Last night, when Rosie woke me up to tell me about another intruder, the moon, now low in the west, made the world of new snow luminous and bright. I stood out on the deck as she and Cole ran off the deer that had come to browse on the apple tree. The trees threw sharp shadows on the sparkling, swirling whiteness, and I could see all three animals emerge from the brush. The defenders stopped in the south pasture and watched the doe run, then turned and trotted back along the old fenceline, no confusion, no fog of battle, adrenaline well in check, duty discharged.

Dogs after all, even in the moonlight.

___________________________________

* Well, 28-legged on that night. The creature may not ever come when it's called, but I'm guessing it won't come around my barn again, either.

** I tried it today, and the crackling was inaudible.

Snapshot Sunday: Oh. This Again.

One of the things that is so cool about Pip is her ho-hum attitude towards most of the strange things to which we subject her.

She knows when she's in the driver's seat, and when she just needs to relax and go along for the ride.

Did I ever mention that I'm deathly afraid of heights and exposure?

I spent one morning atop the barn when we did the roof job before concluding that my place in this project was with two feet on the ground. No one argued with me.

I have been known to hug the ground when on a treeless mountaintop. No shit.

But hook me into a system that has been rigged and checked by my trusted Mountain Rescue teammates -- a system that I understand and have helped to rig -- and I don't give it a moment's thought. Seriously. The moment my harness is clipped into whatever part of the system I'm working on, the fear of falling is off the table.

Pip seems to have internalized this same trust. I don't know whether she understands the system. She doesn't have any thumbs, so she can't tie knots.

Thanks to teammate Dan Beckey for scrambling down into the ravine to get this shot. Mountain Rescue highline training, Allegheny Mountain Rescue Group, January 23 2010.

She's Baaaack!

Hooray!

Working Dog Diary is back!

Check it out.

She doesn't have a feed to update in a blogroll, so you just have to check it for yourself.

Now We See The Violence Inherent In the System

In a move that reveals recently unprecedented clarity of self-interest and public relations goals, the American Kennel Club has just announced that it will now permit the impure-of-blood to pay their fees and compete against those anointed by the right paperwork, in contests of obedience and agility.

Most AKC critics are applauding this decision as actually virtuous and good for dogs and their owners. Here's why I'm not joining them.

A couple years ago, ACK started sending up weather balloons about the feasibility of permitting filthy mongrels to compete in performance events.

AKC has always controlled virtually all the venues for formal obedience competition and titling in the US. Only properly-documented ACK-registered "purebreds" were eligible to compete in this red-headed stepchild of "The Sport of Purebred Dogs."

When I took my golden retriever -- an obviously purebred, field-line bitch -- to community obedience classes in the mid-70's, she could not prepare for any formal competitions because she came from the pound. No "papers." The instructor was kind but matter-of-fact in explaining this inflexible reality to the skinny kid who rode her bike* to class, dog galloping beside. Shannon's more accomplished son, who looked purebred, was not, and was also ineligible.

So there we were, alone at the fairgrounds and park, practicing retrieving over jumps and scent discrimination, just because.

In the 80's, they instituted a scheme called the "indefinite listing privilege," (renamed "Purebred Alternative Listing" two years ago) in which the owners of undocumented dogs that looked like a particular AKC-registered breed might pay a fee and send in some photos and proof that their putative purebred was surgically sterilized, and be permitted to slip in alongside the pedigreed elite in the pursuit of obedience and tracking titles.

Many a mongrel became a "Labrador" or "poodle" by virtue of a clever camera angle or strategic haircut, and once the Government of Dogs (G.O.D.) had so declared it, who was to say it was not so? And on the ground, who the hell cared? Obedience competitors are practical sorts, for the most part. The only complaint about an ILP I've ever heard seemed to have to do with someone winning too much, and with the pageant matrons of the breed club getting wind of it. That one provoked a special rule.

Meanwhile, an organization called the American Mixed-Breed Obedience Registry got going in the early 80's. They worked out a deal whereby mongrels could enter local "fun"** matches, the handler and judge could treat the run as if it were a trial and be scored accordingly, and AMBOR would issue titles.

Yeah, second-class citizenship -- but citizenship of a sort, even if not granted by the G.O.D.. Later AMBOR and the privately-owned commercial registry called the United Kennel Club worked out a deal that allowed mixed dogs into UKC obedience trials on an equal footing with UCK-registered -- with one caveat. The mixed-breed dogs had to be sterilized.

Keep watching that last clause, because it becomes important.

One big disadvantage of hitching up with the UKC was that there aren't a lot of UKC trials in most parts of the country. The owner of an AKC-registered dog or an AKC-anointed "ILP" dog could trial every weekend with moderate travel in most parts of the US. Nowhere was that true for those with dogs whose only venues were UKC shows. The advantage was that everyone in the class was really competing, so it was harder for snobs to denigrate the curs' achievements as just affirmative action grade-inflation.

Meanwhile, through the 90's, new, innovative dog sports not under the aegis of the G.O.D. were catching on -- flyball, agility, freestyle and rally obedience -- and venerable working tests/sports -- stockdog trials, schutzhund, earthdog trials -- were becoming more prominent. These events were, for the most part, sponsored and controlled by entities that did not limit entrants or prizes based on breed or registration or "purity." In the new sports, mixed-breed dogs were common and unremarked. In some cases, competitors started to deliberately cross-breed in order to develop competitive animals. Interest in entering dog beauty pageants was waning (even as more and more were televised and glamorized), and consumers started getting wise to the bad deal that "champion bloodlines" meant when they went looking for a pet. ACK registrations were in a clearly unrecoverable tailspin, due in part to the rise of the new puppymill registries, and in part to the indifference of pet owners who quite rightly could not be bothered to send AKC money in exchange for worthless paper. In a panicked attempt to keep the registrations rolling in, the AKC was grabbing "new" breeds right and left, against the increasingly righteous and organized resistance of their breed stewards.

Is it any wonder that the AKC also cast its lidless red eye on these new, and newly prominent, sports -- sports that had developed and flourished under a system of fair, equitable, open-to-all competition? Earthdog, agility, rally obedience, "herding" and lure coursing were soon appropriated, with varying degrees of success. In the wake of public interest in SAR dogs after the Oklahoma City bombing, a new variable-surface tracking title was, before the screaming from the public safety community, witlessly promoted as a search and rescue certification! ("The level of physical difficulty should be such that it will permit all AKC breeds and handlers of any age to participate.")

In the case of, for example, agility trials, clubs and venues that had previously hosted open-to-all, level-playing-field trials sanctioned by USDAA or NADAC in conjunction with their large dog shows and obedience trials now found themselves forbidden to do so.

In 1993, my SAR unit was asked to provide demos and a booth for an AKC dog show in Massachusetts. We'd done the same at an even bigger "cluster" of shows for some years -- a cluster that included an ARBA pageant and open-to-all agility. Good PR and education, sometimes a recruiting success, and a moderate fund-raiser.

But the hosting AKC club of this other show had one stipulation. Only search and rescue dogs that were AKC purebreds were invited to demonstrate or attend. The pit bull (gasp!) and the mixed breeds and their low-life handlers were not wanted. Not Our Sort, you know.

I was the unit's contact person for setting up this demonstration. My regular readers can probably fill in the wording and tone of my response for themselves.

The following year, AKC-sanctioned agility trials -- for registered purebreds only -- replaced those held by the USDAA or NADAC at AKC show and obedience-trial venues.

That's the mindset we are dealing with here, folks. It may have learned to keep its David Duke opinions about canine race under wraps a little better in the past decade and a half, but believe me, inside the country club, when the help is out of earshot, nothing has changed.

So fast-forward to around 2007, when the AKC started floating those weather balloons about the mutts. Eventually it belched out a survey directed at the members of the "Purebred Fancy" and the owners of impure performance dogs, asking under what conditions each group would find it acceptable for mixed dogs to compete in agility, obedience, rally, and tracking trials.

What they came up with, in an attempt to have/eat cake, was separate water fountains.

Mixed dogs could not earn the same exalted titles as the pure. They could never compete head-to-head for placements with the pure. They could not advance to AKC invitationals or the Nationals. They could not be entered into trials where a beauty pageant was being conducted at the same venue, else they might infect the Aryan dogs in much the same way that a rusty heap can profane a new Beemer just by parking next to it. And of course, they had to be sterilized.

Reaction from the owners of mixed-breed performance dogs -- particularly those that are tearing up the USDAA and NADAC agility courses around the country -- apparently sounded like this.

It appears that the reaction from the clubs that actually run the trials and shows from which ACK takes a cut for its "sanction" was also less than enthusiastic.

Prompting this new development frantic backpeddle:

While each club's participation in the AKC Canine Partners program will remain voluntary, clubs may now choose to allow mixed breed participation at any AKC Agility, Obedience or Rally event. Mixed breeds will compete in the same classes and earn the same titles as their purebred counterparts.

So, individual clubs may now ban the impure, but the G.O.D. is no longer mandating apartheid.

As long as the mongrels are sterilized!

The "Canine Partners" program is also open to "purebred" dogs of non-AKC breeds.

As long as the infidel dogs are sterilized!

Ruh roh, Raggy.

Of great note, the AKC's new-ish method of breed-takeover-by-attrition, the "Foundation Stock Service," comes into play here. Because if you own a dog of an FSS-listed breed, you can't access performance events through the "Canine Partners" scheme. You have to register it through the FSS -- the dog, and it's sweet, juicy pedigree.

Make no mistake that the AKC's latest policy move has nothing to do with what is good for dogs, what is good for dog breeds, or what is good for dog owners.

It is good for General Motors the AKC, period.

One aim is to destroy the largest of the level-playing-field, open-to-all competitive venues entirely. USDAA and NADAC compete with ACK for entry fees, publicity, and credibility, and they have to die. Same for APDT rally trials. What started when their trials (and the mutts that entered them) were banned from the same grounds as the dog shows is now meant to finish with the appropriation of all the entrants.

Another aim is to short-stop deliberate cross-breeding for performance and the development of new breeds for new roles. The G.O.D. that howls in protest whenever a mandatory sterilization law threatens to impact their revenues institutes the exact same policy against a subset of their "customers."

A third aim, largely dependent on the destruction of the independent sporting organizations, is to appropriate non-AKC breeds into the FSS, and thence on to full "recognition" as proper show dogs. So they can be improved, natch. And to keep those registration dollahs coming in.

There is no way for the owner of a non-AKC purebred dog to compete with him in AKC events unless the dog is sterilized. With the swamping of alternative venues, the ACK can increase the pressure on independent breed clubs to fold and be assimilated into the FSS, in order to maintain some access to events that can serve as thresholds for soundness and ability, and an engaging hobby for the owners of dogs who don't have real work to do.

The AKC spent nearly a century imagining itself to be the G.O.D. in the United States, and having that presumption continually reinforced by its toadies in The Fancy. Those it considers its rightful subjects have overwhelmingly been sniggering at its nudity or ignoring its existence and getting on with their lives with dogs without benefit of its rule for decades.



Since bringing down the hammer of "purity" backfired last time -- causing the puppymills to take their registration money and go home -- the putative G.O.D. is pursuing another favorite tactic of the failing tyrant -- expansionist warfare.

Fourth, the money from the individual enrollees could be significant. The fee for enrolling a mudblood dog or non-AKC breed as a "Canine Partner" is $15 more than standard registration. An extra ten-spot if you want to give him a particularly long and fancy name. Interesting differential, given that the AKC (we're just a registry, we keep the pedigree records) is not charged with the task of recording the pedigrees of these animals, nor will those pedigrees continue into the future.

More confusion. Although wolf hybrids of any percentage are strictly verboten from enrollment in the "Canine Partners" scheme, by the curious and physics-challenged requirement that the animal be "... not a wolf or the immediate progeny of a wolf-dog crossbreeding, in the past or in the future" the FSS happily enrolls these wolf-dogs as a "breed."

What it all adds up to is a grab for more power over American dogs and their owners, and especially the breeding of dogs and the development of breeds, presented in PR-friendly way. It's especially targeted at getting control of working dogs -- those breeds and types whose owners and breeders are most likely to seek outside validation of their dogs' trainability and athleticism. ACK has been trying for decades to take credit for working dogs, and accelerated their efforts after 9-11 in the smarmiest way.

What better way to associate oneself with the achievements of others than by killing off any alternative sources of external validation?

___________________________

*Purple. Hi-rise handlebars. Flowered banana seat. Plastic basket on the front. Yes, those are bell-bottoms caught in the chain. But no sissy-bar. Not a Stingray, either, what, were we the friggin' Rockefellers?

** Those not "sanctioned" by the AKC, and meant for people to practice before entering a sanctioned match or trial. Often hosted by obedience clubs, sometimes by training centers.