Over these next few days Trisha is out of town and so I’m taking care of Hero and she is one intense little puppy. If she perceives something as having one iota of preyful essence then it’s meant for her mouth only and must be brought to ground. She goes from point A to point B at the speed of light and knows how to shift tectonic plates when access is denied. She was bred for work and would be every canine handler’s dream dog, and yet could just as easily be fodder for the euthanasia meat grinder that is the American pet marketplace. So what to do with this little furry ball of caged lightening? Of course, no training, no walk; let’s get some wood. The day before I had dropped a dead ash in the lower field so I loaded up my chainsaw, splitting maul, gas and oil in the tractor and off we went. Hexi is in heat so our logging party comprised of me, Hero and Hessian.

I spent an hour or so sawing up the limbs and trunk, getting the brush out of the way and then splitting the slugs into cordwood, all during which Hero and Hessian had their own private little adventures that radiated from the job site as epicenter of their synchronized orbits, Hero covering twenty paces for every one of Hessian’s (he’s nine years old now). There is a relatively busy road a hundred yards away but I knew that Hero’s drive to make contact is so strong that what is a problem in one context is an asset in a supportive environment. She was at the center of the only universe that mattered to her so there was nothing else out there.

The tree I was working on fell at the edge of a small thicket of white pines and poplar saplings where the woods were beginning to encroach on my field (next summer’s project) and on one of Hero’s sorties I saw her coming out from under the pines with a big chunk of frozen something buried so deep in the back of her mouth I knew the attraction was primal magnetic. I assumed it was a chunk of a deer that a coyote had taken down and eaten most of and now Hero had found its remains. It might have been a section of the skull and there were wads of fur still stuck to it. Hessian too could see the primal importance of her discovery and was soon trailing in her wake and sniffing at her mouth and this allowed me to see just how great Hero’s temperament is. Even when she lied down to concentrate on her meal, and with Hessian crowding her muzzle and milling around to get a good whiff of what was going on, nibbling on the crumbs and flecks in the snow by her paws, Hero never growled or interrupted herself to deal with Hessian. She wanted that carcass with every cell in her body and Hessian could feel it so there was absolutely no tension between them even though they were check to check and jowl to jowl. It was a powerful experience to watch them achieve reconciliation over a potentially charged moment and completely via their own resources. I cringed thinking how so many such incidents in a domestic household distort the cooperative faculty that every dog is born with when two dogs find themselves in a comparable situation before this faculty has fully evolved.

But the dog trainer in me couldn’t resist the teachable moment so I called Hessian, had him lay down by the tractor and then approached Hero and knelt down about twenty feet away. “What a goooood girl, she’s sooooo boootifulll, Heeerroooo, yea, looook at that fluffy, furry wabbittt you’ve got there. Hero got up and came toward me and so I stood up and began to slowly backpedal while I increased the volume of my cooing. Hero proceeded to circle me and so I knelt down again and with her leaning against me, I gave her a good rub-a-dub along her topside and flanks and she all the while continued to hold the carcass calmly in her jaws. Perfect, she was giving me her energy. What a temperament.

An hour later when I was stacking wood in the shed behind the house, Hero found an old marrow bone in the yard and so to build on what had happened earlier I asked her to Hup while I patted my chest. To my delight she did. And why not, when you love what you’re doing, it’s all in a day’s work.

Related posts:

1. New NDT Blog!
2. Kevin Pushing and Pulling with Hessian
3. Kevin Training Hero

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. Pushing with a Pit Bull
2. Kevin Training Hero
3. Kevin Heel Training with Laszlo

So the handler sends his dog at me and I catch the dog. Then I become still with dog locked on grip. As the handler approaches the problem dog begins to growl, shake and thrash with more conflict then before, as it is tensing up with the approach of its handler. When the handler arrives I ask him to take his time, pet and massage his dog while he’s biting my arm and then begin to sweet talk with that prey-like patter. The dog is now able to feel attracted to his handler because of the preyful energy the handler is putting out with his tone, touch and words.

You can see the dog begin to soften and for the first time the dog can sense that I have become still, subdued by the strength of its bite. (Sometimes I will renew the fight with even more intensity and then become still again to increase the dog’s power of discrimination between the on and the off position of the helper. I do this a number of times. I also want to become increasingly intense and violent as a way of absorbing the intensity the dog is experiencing from the approach of handler and the physical memory of having been interrupted by incorrect out training that caused the sudden jarring and stripping of the emotional gears. Paradoxically, dogs that don’t Out well are holding back an emergency reserve and until this is cleanly released in the bite, the dog won’t release cleanly the sleeve, and so the more intense the helper gets, the more the dog releases this reserve energy.)

When the dog becomes aware of the on/off modes, he can begin to sense that its energy is impacting the helper, especially the release of that emergency reserve, and thus it begins to feel more in control of what is happening to it and this has a calming effect. In other words, the dog gets into conflict with approach of handler; the helper becomes more intense and struggles to get away, so the dog perceives that a state of conflict towards handler allows its prey to get away and so it gets more focused and learns to discard the old memory of interruption by arrival of handler. As the dog calms because it is more and more focused on holding the subdued helper in position, it can now feel that its handler (the one with whom it’s bonded) is present, rather than some guy trying to fight him over the sleeve just as the helper is.

The handler is on his side so to speak. Then with the dog able to discriminate between helper on and helper off, I go as limp as possible while remaining upright, and when the dog is beginning to soften with the handlers’ words and tone, the handler says “Out” in a firm but completely composed if not gentle manner and the dog comes off easily. (If the dog is still too charged to Out, we let the dog run it off with the sleeve in its mouth and then come back to the helper, and now the handler holds the dog with sleeve in its mouth and massages and coos to it while I begin to crowd them, this then induces the release of the sleeve.

Sometimes I’ll have a second sleeve in front of where dog stops and begin to steal it rather than putting it into conflict about the sleeve that’s in its mouth and this will induce the dog to let go of sleeve in mouth.) Whichever way the dog comes off, the moment the dog Outs I begin to tense up into the poised position, but just below what would trigger the dog to strike, and as the dog gets ready to strike his handler now has a chance to get on board with the dog’s feeling of getting ready to go as well and speak whatever command he uses, “Watch Him” or “Pass Auf” to associate these words with reanimation of helper.

Then I make a move and the dog bites and so now the dog is learning that the handlers’ words control the helper. So “Out” doesn’t end up meaning let go because the handler commanded it to let go, but rather that it’s time to get ready to bite again. In other words, there’s an even better bite available and the handler knows where it is. This is an important distinction because a dog must always learn something as a function of attraction. This progression leads to the dog feeling attuned to its handler because the handler is demonstrating that he knows where more prey is, or to put it another way, how to reanimate the prey that was just dead. So the dog always stays focused on the helper-as-access-to-the-bite, but paradoxically it is therefore easier for the dog to be aware and responsive of its handler as access-to-the-helper without having to directly focus on him. He becomes receptive to auditory input. (The reason a dog is in conflict is because there are competing “negatives” of equal intensity, helper and handler and so the dog has to divide its attention between these.

Ideally, a dog shouldn’t feel different when the handler approaches; the handler should only serve to strengthen the existing feeling. So we want to straighten this conflict out to be the feeling that the handler (-) equals-access-to-helper (+) imprint, rather than dog in effect fighting the resistance of two negatives, handler and helper.) Also, it’s important to say that when the feeling is straightened out so that handler-leads-to-helper and helper-leads-to-bite- and-OUT-leads-to-more-bite –therefore the dog isn’t suffering any loss in “emotional momentum” even though it is being required to suddenly stop doing something that it was previously fighting to sustain.

In fact, even though it’s doing the exact opposite of what it was doing a second before; it nonetheless feels it’s nevertheless moving in a straight line because it can always feel potential energy inherent in the next sequence of events. It actually wants to subdue the helper to get to the Out command so as to reanimate the subdued helper. My premise is that the ultimate reward for a dog isn’t something material and tangible, i.e. the sleeve in its mouth, but rather is “potential energy” i.e. the prey poised to move again. Dogs are consumed with potential energy and so are always motivated by body postures indicating energy is about to move, from owners about to suffer epileptic seizures, other dogs about to eliminate or ready-to-fight, earthquakes, tsunamis, full moons animating prey, and so on. In the way the canine mind is constructed, it seems the moral of Aesop’s fables is wrong. In the animal mind the bird-in-the-bush must always be worth far more than birds-in-hand because otherwise nature can’t evolve.

Animals are always moving toward potential energy. So the dog never gets the idea of listening to its handler per se, rather, the words of the handler always lead to potential energy, and this singular feeling is what construes and holds a complex chain of behaviors together.

Related posts:

1. Isn’t Encouraging Prey-making urges dangerous?
2. The Mind of Squirrel Dog
3. Why Do Dogs Wag Their Tails?

“upon adoption [he] instantly manifested all the most disturbing rescue-dog behavior problems you could conceive: unhinged aggression towards dogs, unpredictable edginess with people, jumping up, pulling like a sled dog on the leash, shoe-eating, leash-eating, wanting to eat the cat, wanting to bite our visitors, wanting to destroy the house…you name it.”

In this clip, Kevin works with Laszlo on the basics of heeling.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Related posts:

1. Kevin Plays Tug with Laszlo
2. Pushing with a Pit Bull
3. Kevin Training Hero

Dogs get into trouble with their human companions due to the canine’s natural tendencies and inclinations: their wild instincts. These instincts would be completely appropriate and normal if the dog were living in the wild and so it is to be expected that dogs become excited at the arrival of strangers or at the return of their owners. It is natural behavior for a dog to be destructive when left alone, or to pull rambunctiously when walked on/lead. So the problem isn’t that our pets are acting abnormally and that we’re bad dog owners, these behaviors are inborn traits. The real problem is how we perceive a dog’s behavior and then how that perception influences the way we present training problems to our dogs.

What this boils down to mean is that rather than saying to the dog; “don’t pull on your lead,” we need to say instinctually; “be attracted to me even though there are powerful distractions about.” Rather than commanding a dog not to jump on strangers, we need to train him how to make contact with strangers. We can’t tell a dog not to bark, or to cease being a pest, but we can train him to have an unswerving focus on an objective and through such a focus, a dog can be commanded to settle down. Ultimately, the dog can develop so much patience that whenever he wants something, calmness rather than nervousness will be his habit for success. So if we analyze what we’re trying to accomplish in those everyday situations that require manners from our dog, we’ll find that we actually want to train our dog to do things. Therefore, our correction should have the effect of stimulating the dog towards whatever action we want him to perform.

This may at first seem contradictory but once again we can ask, if we have to correct a friend, a child, or a co-worker, what is the best possible outcome of such an interaction? Do we want the person who is criticized to have any defensive reaction towards us and thereby to become subdued? Or, is it not much better to leave them feeling powerfully motivated to adopt our suggested course of action? The answer is obvious, in the final analysis: we truly want the one just criticized become excited. So completely enthusiastic about doing things our way: that they hold nothing back. On the other hand, the degree to which the person, or dog, were to become defensive, may prove to be the degree of unreliability we can expect from them when we’re not around.

Related posts:

1. One Problem To Solve: An Introduction to Training
2. Born Wild, Trained to be Free
3. Pet Training 101: Good Dog

Dogs see the world in their own way. When we humans think of dog training, we think about our dog learning all kinds of skills such as heeling by our side, listening to commands, doing this or not doing that. We think in terms of teaching the dog a wide range of rules. It appears to us as if the dog has dozens and dozens of things to learn. Meanwhile, the dog only has the one issue of energy in his heart. No matter how different one situation may look from another to us humans, to the dog they all involve the same question: What is he to do with his energy?

Regardless of how well we may think we have taught our dog to heel, or to sit, and what the rules of the house are, if we haven’t addressed this fundamental concern of the dog, he will never be 100% reliable. In fact the likelihood is that he will never have learned how to be under control in the first place and that a great degree of resistance between dog and owner will lay unresolved and brooding towards future encounters or nervous outbursts. So instead of trying to solve a thousand little problems without regard to an overall balance, (which would be like building a house without consulting a blueprint), I suggest that we break each problem down to its most fundamental element as it pertains to the flow of energy, which as I have outlined earlier, precisely conforms to the parameters of the hunt. We’ll find at the core of every problem, the same central element and by taking heed of this standard, every area of our training will be in balance with every other area. Each step will dovetail neatly into the next step on a smooth and steady progression with social resistance melting away in seemingly unrelated areas of the dog’s life.

When we arouse the dog and then channel its energy appropriately, the dog is put into a mood of calmness and this is the only condition in which he is ready and able to learn what a command means. The traditional way of commanding the dog and then trying to show him what the command means is the wrong way to train one’s dog. It causes the dog to associate the command with the shock or discomfort of having to change moods. Before the command to heel for instance, the dog may have been in the mood for examining buttercups. Arbitrarily changing the dog’s mood without a good instinctual reason grates on his nervous system precluding his ability to learn in a positive manner.

Behavior flows from a mood (not a thought!!) and so we must first use the flow of energy through a dog being in drive toward its owner, and then this automatically creates an appropriate mood relative to the situation. Once the mood is established and the desired behavior is elicited, the dog is NOW ready to have the command associated with this flow of events. We’re looking for straightforward expressions of drive so that the dog works in a straight line, in parallel with his handler. Also when drive flows directly, his behavior is pure and so he works with a happy attitude, and so these are the moods that we want our commands to evoke. To meet these criteria, training must always be approached from the issue of drive so that energy can flow.

In dog training we need to answer these questions: If we want to train the dog to our command, how are we going to first attract his drive? And, if the dog’s drive is already aroused, how are we going to permit the dog to find relief?

We also have to consider that there are certain situations so unnatural that an evolved instinct isn’t available to handle the flow of drive. A stranger knocking at the front door is a highly charged event and the social instincts of many dogs can’t plug in here so that drive can be calmly fulfilled. Excitement turns to nervousness if a course of action isn’t clear while they’re high in drive. The dog just can’t have energy once he has been energized: he’s stuck with it like a car approaching a curve at high speed. What is such a dog to do with his energy? In this case, the owner needs to deepen the group mood through praise and constructive obedience work so that drive will flow into a calm resolution of the moment.

Dog training is channeling drive away from a wild-like direction into an appropriate, domestic direction. To do this we have to develop the harmonic pathways so that drive can be steered smoothly in the direction the handler wishes.

The first step is for the handler to be able to attract his dog’s drive, not just some or the majority of it, but all of it. A simple test is to try to get your dog enthusiastic about you, or something you have, when in a new place or around strange dogs. If he can do it, next, observe the length of time the dog can sustain an active form of interest. The longer the interest, the greater the flow, and the greater will be the dog’s ability to resist something naturally appealing as another dog or a cat when the owner requires control. Many dogs considered well trained, will fail this test miserably.

Dogs don’t choose to ignore their owners: they are forced to because they have been trained to relate to their owners via their pack instincts. A pack instinct is designed to store stress, and to set overload thresholds, not to conduct drive in a calm manner. Through constantly being rebuffed when excited, the dog learns that he can’t be with his owner whenever he’s high in drive. His drive can only be expressed in the pack through warped distorted behaviors as his mind and body is clouded by the survival instincts. This precludes our control in a critical moment because if the owner is a source of nervousness, how can the dog be attentive to him? And if the dog is nervous, how can he be controlled? The truth is: it’s impossible to control nervousness.

Unless the dog is in a group mood, he can’t be both attentive to his handler and willing to calmly admit strangers, whom his natural instincts have defined for him as “trespassers”, into the family group.

Related posts:

1. On Training a Dog to “OUT”
2. CORRECTION: Why Do We Correct a Dog?
3. Born Wild, Trained to be Free