The second kind of Following, what I’m calling
Strategic Following, is in many ways the most complex and nuanced. I’m not blindly obeying Mum because it’s a habit
I formed when I was tiny or I’m utterly dependent on her for survival. I’m not being forced to follow by threats,
pain or fear. I’m Following because, in
some way or another, it serves my best interests. Calling this “Strategic” Following is probably a
mistake on my part, implying that the animal is making calculated decisions and
manipulations. They’re not, not
really. This kind of Following isn’t
strategic as in Machiavellian; it’s
strategic as in Darwinian. If a behavior enhances survival and
reproductive fitness, it’ll be in our behavior repertoire for use when the
circumstances call for it. The strategic
or calculated part is recognizing in what situations and contexts Following
will get us more bang for our fitness buck, something social animals are
extraordinarily good at. Adaptive Following might be a better
term. The thing is, the point of any
behavior is to enhance fitness, or, in simpler terms, to have things come out better for the animal, not worse.
And that’s a better (more
pleasure, resources or access to resources) according to the Following Dog, not
the Leading Human. Therein lies the
mess. Strategic Following comes in two broad flavors. The first is simple: Mutual Interests. I’m Following you because we’re already going
in the same direction, it’s more fun or safer or more effective to go together,
I like company, I’m social and why not?
We’re both going out for pizza, let’s car pool. You just happen to be a bit more energetic,
have a better car, or care about it more, so I let you drive. No fight or quarrel from me—I will follow
your lead because you’re taking me where I already want to go. Or, I just like you and enjoy the ride. In this flavor, Follower/Leader may be a
loose relationship that depends pretty much on a spatial or temporal
dynamic: who goes or gets there
first? Some days it might be me, some
days it might be you. I see this form of Following often in feral cat colonies: one cat starts heading for the bushes and two
more get up and tag along. Why? Maybe it got too hot on the porch and the
sight of the first cat moving inspired the others to wake up. Maybe cats Two and Three are merely curious
and want to see what First Cat is checking out.
Or maybe they just like hanging out together. It seems like a weak kind of Following—First
Cat isn’t making the other cats do
anything—but if the learning conditions are right, it can acquire an almost
magical power. It’s simply this:
if Following First Cat reliably
and predictably leads to pleasurable
things—cool napping spots, fresh drinking water, a nest of fallen birds or a
package of catnip mousies—First Cat will acquire Followers. Just like a hot movie star, a well-written
blog or an amusing Facebook page will acquire Followers. It’s
not the authoritative version of “Lead” we’re used to thinking about in a dog
training context. But anyone who has
ever watched old news footage of thousands of hysterical teenagers greeting the
arrival of the Beetles can tell you—Fandom
can be an extremely intense form of Following.
Some of those sobbing children would have quite literally died for their favorite Beetle. I can think of famous people I’ve never even
met to whom I would, without hesitation, happily offer the proverbial shirt off
my back, because their writings or music or science took me to places of pleasure I couldn’t reach on my own. I Follow them not because they demand it but
because I love where they take me. There can be a Dark Side to this kind of Following,
sure—stalking in fans, separation anxiety in dogs—but on the whole, I think the
Pop Culture notion of dog training radically under-estimates how important this
kind of Following is. If I could hit
the reset button, my message to pet owners might be something like this: less Pack Leader, more Rock Star. Or more First Cat. If we reliably and predictably take our dogs
to places, activities and resources they love, they will Follow us. They will become
our very best Fans. The second flavor of Strategic Following is also
based on mutual interests, but there’s a more obvious Follow/Lead dynamic for a
very simple reason: one of us is either better or more competent at something or
one of us has access or control of resources that the other one wants. If I’m hungry and you’re the one with the
directions to the pizza place, I will Follow you. If I’m the one with the good singing voice,
I’ll get nudged into leading Happy Birthday at the party. If my car has a flat and Joe knows how to fix
a flat tire, I’ll gladly take his direction.
If you are the millionaire, you may acquire an entourage of flatterers
currying your ego in the hopes of scoring some cash. We do this all the time: if we know someone is really good at
something or has control of something we dearly want, we’re usually happy to
let them Lead or become Followers.
Usually. There are conditions,
though, and they’re interesting. In the first variation—that of greater expertise--while
most of us are perfectly delighted to defer to greater skill and experience, we
won’t Follow very long if it turns out that we’re mistaken. If we grant
someone the Leader position, we expect
them to be able to deliver the goods.
If it turns out that they’re a crummy Leader—they don’t know where the
restaurant is, they don’t know how to fix the toilet, they don’t know how to
set up the tent—we will re-evaluate. If there are no major social side-effects (like
offending our boss or hurting our best friend’s feelings), we may simply flip
on our Garmin or grab the crescent wrench or tent poles and assume the Lead
ourselves. Rarely is this because we
really want to be Alpha; what we really want is dinner, a toilet that flushes
and the tent up before nightfall. If we
refrain from taking over—and some of us will bite our tongues and inhibit—it’s
often because being “nice” and socially accepted is more important to us than
the immediate outcome. Or because we
completely lack the needed skill set and simply can’t take over. In either case, we’ll stash the experience in
our learning file: don’t Follow that person again. Either find another, more competent Leader or
DIY. Or, in matters of small importance
or when maintaining the social component is huge, we may continue to bite our
tongues and Follow—it’s called humoring, which can be gracious or grudging. As a general rule and absent those pesky
social complications, the better and more confident we are at something and the
more we care about the outcome, the fussier we are about who we’ll Follow. If we’re good at the task, our expectations
will he higher: ineptitude will be painfully obvious. In the second variation—control of resources—the
terms are very much the same. If we
Follow someone because they control access to desired resources, we expect them to pay up. At least often enough, and generously
enough, to make it worth our while. If
they don’t, if it turns out that they’re a stingy
Leader—they never share, they never really give us what we want or they make us
work too hard for too little—we will start looking for work-arounds. Maybe we need to work for another company,
find a better Boss, find an indirect way (cheating, sneaking) to get to the
resources or learn to get the resources ourselves without help. The general rule here is—the more valuable the
resource is and the harder it is to find, the more guff we’ll take from whomever
controls it. But very few of us will
take infinite amounts of guff. We may
stomach a tyrannical Captain Bligh if he’s a good captain and leads us to glory
and treasure; we may continue to stomach him if we’re under fire and he’s an
excellent fighter who protects us during battle. But if he’s a tyrant and an idiot and a lousy
fighter, we will start planning our mutiny at the earliest opportunity. Of course, if he’s Captain Jolly who dishes out
extra rum, we may Follow him even if he’s a bit of an idiot—until war breaks
out and his idiocy puts us at real risk.
Then, we’ll probably try to be nicer
about how we conduct our mutiny, since we like the poor guy—but we’ll still
mutiny if we feel our lives depend on it. The first flavor of Strategic Following—the one
revolving around the perception of expertise—is less commonly considered in dog
training than the idea of controlling resources. But I have to say, it worries me a bit. See,
if I had the magic machine that could ask my dog Tinker what was most important
to her in her world-view, I have a
nagging hunch the answer would revolve around a sun other than lil ole me. My hunch is, it would be something like,
“Sniffing. Hunting. Critters.
RACCOON ON THE FENCE!
Sniffing. Sniffing. Hunting.”
Nothing lights my Catahoula mix up like the raccoon on the fence—the
intensity of it vibrates through every muscle, the dead-still focus of her
point, her gaze, the explosion when she judges the moment is ripe to have a
go. It’s got the feel of something very
old, very elemental. In that raw primitive
way, it’s beautiful to see. It is also, of course, a complete pain in the behind
in a pet dog that’s supposed to be obedient to me, not her inner predatory drummer. So I should be the Leader, yadda yadda,
except when it comes to that, we’re not even marching in the same parade. When it comes to providing expertise in the all-important skill-set
of hunting, I suck. I suspect Tinker—who is not stupid—knows that
I suck. My nose is worthless, I’m
pitifully slow, I never try to bite anything—golly, it’s like I don’t even care about getting that raccoon in my
teeth for a meal. It would be one thing
for Tinker to Follow me if I was the
better hunter. But to Follow me when
there’s a raccoon on the fence and the path is Don’t Hunt…? How would she
wrap her mind around that? How could
she? Telling her, “No, stop!” isn’t Leading in this
context. If we are clear on nothing
else, we must be clear on that. It’s abandoning the field, refusing to
participate in what to her is the Greatest Game Ever Played. Being a great Leader of the football team doesn’t
mean pulling out sets of knitting needles and telling all the linebackers, “No,
stop, don’t tackle, make baby booties.”
If we look at Strategic Following, Adaptive Following, it’s not blind. It’s situational, contextual. It’s Following not for the benefit of the
Leader, but for the entire social group Team.
Critters that Follow the Leader down a primrose path over a cliff on the
Leader’s every random whim may be marvels of obedience but there aren’t many of
them around: they go splat! or starve
before they reach reproductive age and pass their genes along. It’s easy to be seduced by the dark side of Be the
Leader with these dogs—we want so desperately for our linebackers to mend their
ways, to no stop don’t and take up
gentile pursuits like knitting baby booties or coming when called. The flaw in the thinking is that many of the
behaviors that I see distressing pet owners the most are entirely natural,
common doggy behaviors. Perhaps a few
ticks more intense than the human is used to but normal. The conflicts that ensue often don’t resemble
a frustrated owner trying to establish “Leadership” over her dog, but a
bewildered owner trying to morph an energetic, highly active social predator
into a completely different animal. And that’s not what Strategic aka Adaptive
Following does. When we ask our dogs to abandon behaviors that they really care about and that they’re really good at in favor of behaviors
that our human sensibilities find more appealing that they don’t care about and
aren’t good at… hmm. If someone asked me
to give up something I that dearly mattered to me—some talent core to my
being--out of my “love” for them, I would wonder: Do you know who I am? Are you
appreciating or connecting to me as an individual with talents and desires and
needs of her own? Dogs of course are not
philosophic or conceptual about this.
Tinker is blessedly straightforward:
there’s a Raccoon on the Fence, she really cares about it, she’s really
good at it and if I have nothing helpful to contribute, she’ll flip on her own
Garmin and DIY. “No” is not
Leading. It’s being a killjoy. And she would be fair to ask, like many dogs if they
could ask, “If you don’t like my hunting
(herding/drooling/digging/shedding) why the hell did you get a Catahoula
(Border collie, Mastiff, Terrier, Shepherd etc.)?” The fact that I thought I was adopting an adorable little Australian Cattle Dog puppy
is no fault of hers. It leaves us with a challenge, but it’s not
the challenge of Who’s the Boss? What I need to find with Tinker—as with any
successful long-term relationship--isn’t control. It’s compatibility. When it comes to Strategic Following,
important in the design is—mutual interests,
mutual goals. Wanting the same things. Being headed in the same direction. Wolves and coyotes and foxes have no problems
with this with each other: they are the same species and the compatibility is
fundamentally shared. They don’t tell
each other, “Don’t hunt, don’t roll in stinky dead stuff, don’t dig.” Their Strategic Following is about joining up
with great hunters, tagging after the critters that know where the best stinky
stuff is to roll in and learning from experts how to dig even better. To the degree that owners have or can cultivate core
compatibilities with their dogs, the relationship will flow like a dance,
effortlessly and easily. To the degree
that the core compatibilities are missing, or missing in extreme—well, it’s
just hard. Couch potato person with
Energizer Bunny Dog is the classic bad fit; there are others. These are folks and dogs I see at the shelter
and they break my heart. Lovely people,
lovely dog, absolutely the wrong match. If
the gap between behavior reality and owner expectation isn’t too extreme, for
certain training can bring dog and owner closer together and reduce
tensions. The wider the gap, though, the
more work it will take to get them on the same path. If the gap is a yawning chasm, it may be
impossible, not because the dog can’t learn and the owner can’t learn, but
because there’s too little positive reinforcement present in the relationship
to motivate them to do the work. The other trap is that we tend to work the problem
from the wrong end: we stand in our
frustrated and disappointed expectations and try to drag the dog across the
chasm to our side. In wide disconnects,
though, the distance is too far and the ropes of the relationship too thin to
take the strain. Good training always
starts on the other end: in the behavior reality. The dog is here. I have to stand next to
the dog, connect to that dog, that place.
Only then can we, step by step, start working our way across the gap. In the next blog, I’m going to bounce ahead and talk
about the last type of Following, Forced Following, and then return to that
staple of dog trainers everywhere, encouraging Strategic Following by
leveraging resources. Until then, a
couple of take-aways. The good news about Juvenile Following is that very
young puppies are often delighted to let us chose the direction, the path, the
game itself: they haven’t been around
long enough to have developed strong preferences. We can and should take advantage of this
period to establish good habit patterns from the start. The bad news is—most of the time, Juvenile
Following fades with maturity, and if we didn’t
establish the habits, we’ve missed a boat that’s not coming back for us. And if we acquired an older dog, an adult dog
from a rescue, say, the boat may be long far gone. Not always—there are some lovely dogs that
retain the puppy-like ease, or that seem to slide from Juvenile Following to
Fandom with few glitches. They are compatible with us and our human ways,
and living with them is rarely a struggle.
A lot of dogs are just like that.
But it’s not a guarantee, not part-and-parcel of every dog. There are dogs that come to us, whether puppy or
adult, with some potentially very powerful behaviors pre-installed. Hunting, herding, being sensitive to sound or
movement, nervous of novelty, fearful of strangers, inclined to “think” with
their amazing noses or dig lunar landscapes in our gardens--we don’t teach them
this stuff. We can if it’s moderate make
it better or worse by reinforcing it, or preventing repetition and
practice. Not always, though. My darling Corgi Fox needed no practice, no
repetition, no prior history to turn on like a light bulb and starting herding
his first-ever seen sheep. Tinker knows
exactly how to drive a raccoon up a tree.
These “hard-wired” behaviors can usurp
the Juvenile Following tendencies at a very young age because they’re supposed to: they are what the dog or the dog’s ancestors
were bred for. And for these behaviors, Strategic Following via greater expertise is counter-indicated, so to speak. Because for these behaviors, unless we really are taking our dogs herding, or
hunting, or sledding, or to earth dog trials or lure coursing or any of the
sporty versions that harness and work with these “drives” rather than against them--we
can’t Lead. We don’t know how to
Lead. We have no skills, no wisdom, no help
to offer. We stand on the sidelines going,
“No, stop, don’t!” We’re killjoys, not
experts. Worse, we’re upset, frustrated
and ineffective killjoys, waving knitting needles and baby booties in the
middle of a football field while our pumped-up linebackers run amok. From a cost-benefit Strategic Following
standpoint, the dogs are absolutely right
to ignore us: we have no mutual interests. We’re not even playing the same game. Does that mean we throw up our hands in despair and
abandon all hope of ever getting our dogs with us? Heck, no.
It does mean—you start with the dog you have. In behavior reality. Because if you want to train or teach or lead
effectively, you have to know the animal,
what matters in their world. Tinker and I are a work-in-progress, and I have a
goal for us. When she looks at me, there’s
something I want her to see. Not a Great
Leader, not the Boss, not the Alpha.
When she looks at me, I want her, on whatever level her doggy mind
processes it, to know this: Tinker, I feel you.
I see you. I will always see you. |