of the Dog - Association of Pet Dog Trainers

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Teachihg Classes dogs and humans safe in a training environment. Invite students to come to class with safe equipment. Collars that are too big or too loose can lead to disaster if the dog is over-stimulated at the first class. My preference became The Premier Collar: an adjustable fabric collar with two rings, so that a dog with a narrow head can’t do a duck/flip to escape. The leash should be comfortable in the students hands. We always had loaners available to assist those who showed up with “dangerous or inadequate” equipment. At registration either have students leave the dog in the car while they enroll or, when interviewing over the phone, get an e-mail or address and forward a registration form they can fill out and return along with proof of shots. Once enrolled, ask students to position themselves around the training area with at least 1-½ dog lengths between each dog. Small, nervous dogs were placed away from the larger dogs in the beginning. Teach focus and attention first. This is simple using the food lure to teach the dogs to pay attention to the owners who are keepers of the rewards. Stress the fact that preventing the dogs from making eye contact will prevent confrontations. Each week remind the students to position themselves and the dog in a different spot in the training area. Dogs have shown me that three times in the same spot or corner of the training space translates to ownership for the dog. We humans are creatures of habit—we will gravitate to the same spot class after class. The dog then defends that spot. With volatile or nervous dogs, the barrier of a blanket or sheet draped over chairs or an X-pen, will prevent eye contact. It doesn’t take long to get focus and attention and then the barrier can be removed! I also, teach students to move backward and have the dog facing them so that they are not focused on a neighbor. I never begin moving exercises until the owners have the undivided attention of the dog. This includes such focusing/control exercises as watch me and leave it! In the event that a dog exhibits strong dog aggression and we are working in a large space or outdoors with enough room to keep the dog at a distance from the regular class, I will have the insecure dog and owner work at a distance at which the dog is relaxed. Once the dog has learned to respect the owners’ leadership, I will have the team begin moving closer in toward the rest of the class. It only takes a few weeks before the dog is comfortable working within the class and around the other dogs. Children have always been welcome in my classes, however I insist on rules. If they are working with the parents, they remain with the parents. If the parents are working with the dog, the children are expected to remain on the sidelines and out of the training area. I suggest they bring chairs or a ground cover when working outdoors. When I had the training building I provided a small table and chairs with colors and coloring books for younger children. I also taught all the children the sit/stay command! Which always works well when coming from the class leader. I was also the leader of the “kid-pack.” What worked was that I always issued directions with a smile! And when we were done with class I would spend some quality time with the kids and their dogs so they felt included as well. Maintain a sense of humor and stay calm. There is never a guarantee that all classes will be perfect and stress free. I always remain calm in a class situation. When the dogs and people are gone, then is when I vent. Never in front of a class! And, if you can’t do the above, it may be that the class environment is not for you—it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. My daughter, the groomer, is a wonderful trainer! However, she does not enjoy working with the people! As a groomer, she can focus on the dogs and that is her niche. Mom, on the other hand, thoroughly enjoys watching the relationship develop between dog and owner or family. I continue to train with hopes that more dogs will remain safely in their home and not end up relegated to the yard or worse yet, a shelter or on the street! Just keep in mind that we, as trainers, have an obligation to provide a safe working environment for our students. When people and dogs are put together, anything is happen and, sometimes does! APDT charter member (#46) Joan B. Guertin resides in rural East Texas with 7 Corgis & a 3-legged long-haired Chihuahua. Even though semi-retired, she remains busy with a few training classes and lots of private work in both obedience and conformation. Showing the Corgis is still a passion, along with presenting Responsible Dog Ownership and Dog Safety programs for area school children. Still admits that she will never quit training as long as she can educate humans in order to help keep dogs in happy home. She’s a member of The Pembroke Welsh Corgi Club of America and Dog Writers Assoc. of America where her work has been honored with three Maxwells. 24 w The APDT Chronicle of the Dog w November/December 2008 www.APDT.com
Creative Canine: Original Intentional Canine- to- Human Communication This is the second part of a series on canine-to-human communication research. The first part “If A Dog Smiles” appeared in the May/June issue and provided an overview of current research in canine communication. My M Sheltie Kayla adores tummy rubs. She rolls onto her back exposing her pink underside in solicitation and purrs like a cat when her humans comply. Often, we do not adequately satisfy her craving, so she invented a unique strategy to request extra massages: She puts both front paws together and waves them vigorously in the air, an action we immediately understood to say “more, please.” I never trained Kayla to offer this “more” signal nor any similar gesture. She seemingly devised her “more” motion as a creative way to request a specific action from me. Soon, I realized Kayla expressed many desires with distinctive, usually non-vocal signals. On walks, she sat to emphasize a desire to head in a different direction than the one I intended. To solicit fetch, she glanced at me, then her ball, while prancing on her front paws. A hard stare with a sit necessitated a potty break and a howl meant urgent. Canines and humans share closer bonds than perhaps any other species. Dogs live in a human world. Humans bred wild canines for both utility and affiliation, and we continue to fine-tune our dogs’ phenotype to our fancy. The human family became the dog’s pack, human society its environmental niche. 1 Dogs and human culture entwined and co-evolved. 2 Dogs have been selected for adaptations to human social life, and these adaptations have led to marked changes in their communicative, social, cooperative and attachment behaviours towards humans. 3 Vilmos Csányi, author of If Dogs Could Talk 4 and ethologist at the Loránd Eőtvős University in Hungary, suggests that this joint culture allowed our canine www.APDT.com Audrey Schwartz Rivers, MS companions to acquire “a remarkable number of mental traits that closely resemble our own” which include “remarkable interspecies communications skills.” Csányi notes, “... they can predict social events, they provide and request information, obey rules of conduct, and are able to cooperate and imitate human actions ... This is not a little thing because they must pay attention to the person’s actions, remember them, and then apply them to their own body ... No other animal could do this” 5 Experiments by Csányi and his colleagues demonstrated that dogs developed a complex two-way communications system with humans: 6 Dogs are sensitive to human gestural communication, and they are able to use different types of human directional gestures (pointing, bowing, nodding, head turning, and glancing gestures) as cues. In addition, it was revealed that dogs are also capable of intentional, functionally referential communications with owners. 7 Humans also understand dog vocalizations and even non-dog people can identify various emotional inflections in specific dog barks. In addition, dogs combine various actions particularly vocalizations, gestures and gaze, for their communications with humans. 8 I suspected other dog people experienced similar interspecies communiqués from their canine companions. I wondered if dogs also created, non-trained behaviors to communicate specific intent to their humans and, if so, how their humans interpreted these distinctive signals. So, armed with curiosity and naiveté, I decided to conduct a survey about creative and intentional canine-to-human communications. Methodology I posted my research survey questions on an Internet web site from January through March 2007. 9 Participants were recruited with announcements on 12 dog-related news groups and I encouraged them to spread the word. The survey involved three sections. Two of the sections asked multiple choice questions about general information about the dog and owner. The third section provided two open-ended questions for the respondent to elaborate on the creative communication behavior of the dog10 and what the person believed the dog’s message 11 to mean. (For a copy of the survey, you can e-mail the author at the address provided at the end of this article.) I reviewed each behavior essay response and assigned each a behavior category. I did the same for the message essays assigning each a message category. I based these categories on two ethograms—a fancy term for a list of categories and their definitions. Figure 1 shows the behavior ethogram and Figure 2 the message ethogram. I counted each of the behavior and message categories, then calculated the averages for each. 12 Those averages became the behavior average (Figure 3) and message average (Figure 4) for comparative analysis. From the multiple choice answers, I came up with a list of variables for the dog and the human13 . I calculated the behavior [continued on next page] November/December 2008 w The APDT Chronicle of the Dog w 25
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Page 17 and 18: “Give Me a Break!” Recently, a
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