Jake's Progress

Last weekend I spent all of Saturday and Sunday at a Turid Rugaas seminar. It was the most awful gusty windy icy weather all last weekend, so my fellow domestic mammals barely gave me a backward glance from the sofa as I set off to find out more about how dogs communicate.

I first came across Turid Rugaas's short book on canine calming signals at a point when I really badly needed to understand more about how dogs communicate. So I had to go to a weekend seminar in my home town. People had travelled from far and wide - from Yorkshire to the north of Scotland. Me, I had a short bus ride through the Edinburgh suburbs to a space-age lecture theatre at Napier University.

TR says her philosophy is "use your brain and use your heart," and that it's unethical to make dogs afraid of us. She also talked a lot about general principles for being with your dog(s). A lot of it seemed like common sense to me, but I know from reading and from watching various TV programmes here in the UK that not all dog handlers agree. She was completely down on the idea of dominance (alpha) pack dynamics - she said that current research into wolf packs in the wild was starting to show that wolves naturally live in small family units, and there is no alpha-dominance behaviour there; she went so far as to say that a lot of observations of wolf behaviour is based on wolves in captivity, where behaviour is as distorted as human behaviour is when in captivity. With all that said, she then talked through some of the 30-or-so calming signals, and how they are used, with some great images to illustrate. If you've never read Turid's books, they are the best place to start. She believes that these signals are so ingrained that they will always re-emerge given time and enough space - and if necessary, a socially skilled dog to help. She gave a lot a practical advice on how to do this - which was all about reducing (if not actually removing) the possibility of negative experiences during the rehabilitation. We also got a lot of information about barking, and what that means. (TR has published a book about that, as well). I was able to translate the barking types pretty precisely into Jake's "singing" - he's never been much of a barker, he prefers to vocalise in a rich tenor. Like Anthony Hegarty, but without words. (Imagine Anthony and the Johnsons singing movingly about how it's surely time for tea, and how they are never fed, and you're pretty close to how Jake sounds.)

I have pages of notes ... but what really stuck in my mind were some of the things I need to bear in mind when I'm out and about with Jake, particularly in the small spaces between rings at agility shows, or in the queue at a show when I'm on edge myself! For example - Jake is sometime faced between the dilemma of being "obedient" to me and to calming down an interaction with another dog. I do try to be aware of where other dogs are and what's going on at knee-level, and I do already walk away from situations where I can see we might be too close to other dogs. Humans often scold the dogs for reacting to other dogs or situations when the reaction is a quite natural response to something that makes the dog fearful. "Try to think yourself into the animal's position," was TR's advice. I thought with shame of how I've sometimes walked Jake through a narrow passage of gee'd up agility dogs, all in his face - and then told him off because he growled at another dog. TR would say that the growl is a healthy communication signal to back off. To be fair to myself, I avoid those situations now unless it's completely unavoidable. And there usually is a way out of "those situations."

The take home point for me would be - watch out for when the dog becomes ALERT - and then act on this information - move away from the stressor, give the dog a signal that you'll handle it and so on. It all seems so obvious ... but as we know, in reality ...



TR says, like Lesley McDevitt and others I've read, that it's more helpful long term to teach your dog strategies for coping with stressful situations than to teach them to look at you while you go past them. For example, Jake has been wary of boxers for a while, we think it dates back to a time when he saw one have an epileptic fit. I keep him close to me when boxers are around, on lead if we're in a close situation - and I've been following Lesley McDevitt's plan and click-treating Jake for playing the "look at that boxer" game. TR agrees that dogs need to learn to cope with being near others and acknowledging their presence (not ignoring them by constant focus on their owner). If I understood TR correctly, she wouldn't reward Jake for a calming signal, as some dog trainers advocate. She advocates slow, relaxed parallel walking of dogs, moving gradually closer and closer until the dogs are calm together. In my own life, I'd say time spent with other dogs in a controlled environment works - all that hanging round at agility club on lead round other dogs (including boxers!) has worked wonders for Jake.

There was a heated debate with obedience competitors about her recommendations for frequency of training. TR advised once or twice a week as plenty; and several people took issue with her. Later we were given some very detailed information about scientific research about the effects of stress on the body. She drew an analogy with Olympians, saying "did you ever see so many sick and injured people?" The two sessions about stress were fascinating and I'm still processing the information, to be honest.

One of the things I love about dogs and dog training is that nothing is static. There is always something new to observe and learn. Turid Rugaas was a very stimulating speaker, and I for one learned a lot, even if I won't put it all into practice! Cheers to Action 4 Dogs, who organised the seminar.

Labels: Training