Oh boy. In
the last part, I talked about the two flavors of Strategic Following: Following because someone has greater
expertise, and Following because someone has control of desired resources. And I sort of left us in a pickle: taking advantage of Juvenile Following can be
time sensitive and often requires a relationship; getting mileage out of the
first flavor of Strategic Following typically requires that the interests be
mutual or compatible and that we actually have some expertise to offer. In dog training, this can take some finesse
that a lot of perfectly wonderful pet owners don’t have and aren’t interested
in acquiring.
When folks say they want to or think they should Be
the Alpha or the Pack Leader, what they seem to mean when I get down to it is
something very simple: they want their
dogs to listen to them and do what they
say. Preferably all the time, every
time, and especially in situations where the dog is excited, distracted or
otherwise ill-behaved. And many people
seem to believe that dogs do this naturally, or should do this naturally—all
that wanting to please us and so on .A dog that doesn’t
naturally want to please us is somehow bad—a
bad dog. And it’s okay, maybe even right, to punish bad people and bad dogs. Or “correct” them so that they’ll learn to be
good. All of this leads to what I’m
calling Forced Following—which the more I think about it, the more inclined I
am to consider an oxymoron if ever there was one. There’s a quick distinction to make here, because it’s super helpful: most dogs
are inclined to be naturally social. I myself was not inclined to be naturally
social when I was young, but I seem to have acquired a taste for it in
maturity: I like people. I like
you. I want you to like me. I am delighted
if I can brighten someone’s day, get a smile out of them, leave them feeling
better than they did before. I also
prefer to avoid conflict when I can, to play, to laugh, to have good time in my
encounters with other creatures. That does not, however, mean that I want or am
willing to take out your trash, wax your car or lend you money. Or do anything or everything you say. Cheerful, friendly, inclined to avoid
conflict and reasonably tolerant doesn’t equal obedient, “submissive” or any
shape of doormat. I mean you no
harm. If I can please you in some small
or large way without sacrificing my own
best interests or well-being, I probably will. I will likely be true to the nice little
social conventions: hold the door if someone is carrying groceries, give up my
seat to an elder, say please and thank you. I also have boundaries. And limits. When it comes to dogs, I think we confuse this all
the time: we mistake their willingness
to be friendly, to tolerate us, to play, to greet us effusively, to mean us no
harm, for a burning desire to take out our trash and ignore squirrels at our
bidding. But sociable (seeks out and enjoys friendly contact) and biddable (easily accepting of another’s
direction) are not the same traits. Most biddable dogs are highly social, but
plenty of highly social dogs aren’t particularly biddable. I have one.
Heck, I am one. The second layer of confusion in the Wants to Please
premise is in some ways harder to detect, since it tends to swing in a more agreeable
direction: mistaking our old friend compatibility
for obedience or biddability. I see this all the time—owners and dogs
fitting each other to a tee. They get
along famously, the relationship works, they adore each other. And it’s not because the dog is especially well-behaved by any objective measure of
behavior—often, the dog “listens” not one bit, has no training to speak of and
has plenty of behaviors that would drive another person mad. But the owner thinks—and more importantly, feels—that the dog is perfect. The best dog ever. But well-matched
isn’t the same as obedient, biddable or recognizing the owner as
Pack Leader. If we both want to the same things, what’s to bid, obey or lead? When dog and owner share mutual interests, no one is conceding their will to another. My
darling Corgi Fox was a dreamboat around squirrels and always responded to my,
“Fox, leave it.” Of course he did—he
didn’t want to chase them in the first place.
It made me look good but confusing it with obedience or biddability is falling
for an illusion. If I tell the dog to do
what he wants or to not do what he doesn’t want to do anyway, I’ll get amazing
“obedience”—as long as we don’t pay attention to the funny little man behind
the curtain. If we do, the Great and
Powerful Obedience Oz isn’t quite what he seems. There’s no place like Compatibility, truly. When someone comes to me seeking help for a dog,
it’s always for one of three reasons. 1)
The dog is losing sociability in
certain situations or with certain creatures—becoming fearful or aggressive,
lunging at other dogs, trying to bite the mail carrier, cowering from men. 2) The dog and owner are having compatibility breakdowns, usually
expressed as the dog being “too” something—too hyper, too noisy, too
rough. 3) The owner wants the dog to
learn how to perform a behavior the
dog doesn’t know how to do—which might be anything from walking nicely on a
leash to cute tricks to becoming competitive in agility. So if you ask me as an animal sheltering
professional what works in pet dogs
living with people, it’s 1) sociability
(being friendly to people and other animals) 2) compatibility (having similar energy levels, mutual interests,
shared pleasures) and lastly 3) performance
(specific behaviors the owner likes, if any).
If a dog is friendly, affectionate and responsive, we’ll be far more
tolerant of little bumps in compatibility.
If the dog is in the compatibility ball-park, there won’t be too much
energy or too many annoying behaviors (present or absent) to sweat over, and
the behaviors we do want or don’t want will be easy to train. Performance
is for many pet owners a take-it-or-leave-it affair: given friendliness and compatibility, nice
household manners, a useful Sit and a cute shake-a-paw have been the sum total
of many a beloved pet’s training to no ill-effect at all. The point is, the whole notion of Leadership rarely even comes up until
there’s an issue in one or all of the above.
With most pet owners, the problem is usually the appearance of
aggression or fearfulness in older (post-adolescent) dogs and the various
compatibility shipwrecks of adolescence, when they realize the dog has become
“too” something for their lifestyle.
Only a small percentage of dog owners who use their dogs for work
(hunting, herding, search and rescue, service, etc.) or sport (agility,
obedience, show, etc.) consider “performance” itself to be a real problem or
even that interesting. Really, most of us regular
pet owning janes and joes don’t rush out to seminars or break into a cold sweat
if our dogs forget to step in the yellow part of the agility obstacle or sit
with their little rumps cocked to one side.
Which takes us to the probably oxymoronic notion of
Forced Following: making someone do what we want them to do, whether they want to or
not. Typically not, obviously—if we want to do something, we usually don’t have to
be forced. What I'm calling Forced Following here means using pain,
fear or the threats of pain and fear to make an animal do something or stop
doing something: the dog must obey or else.
And here it gets kind of odd. Forced Following is promoted all the time under the
Be the Pack Leader banner: all manner of
physical or emotional coercion employed in the name of “training,” from
electric shock to collars designed to cause discomfort to screaming, hitting,
kicking, poking, shaking, rolling, etc. These
tactics are often justified as being the only
way to build sure-fire, guaranteed reliability and performance in
working or competition dogs. In fact, a
lot of the Be the Alpha stuff seems to trickle down from certain professional
dog trainers or high-end amateur competitors in dog sports—people who, by all
rights, the regular pet owner has every reason to believe know what they’re
talking about. The dogs must do what we want, they say, or else—if we don’t enforce, something worse might happen. We’ll lose our Leader status, the dog will no
longer “respect” us, no longer perform for us, and we’ll be bad, over-indulgent
pet parents failing to provide our (secretly) eager to please dogs with the
Alpha figurehead they need and crave. These folks have titles, decades of experience, surely they must know what they’re talking about. Except… a little critical thinking goes a
long way here. First, working and competition people don’t have our dogs. They don’t have pet dogs. Folks that
seriously need dogs for serious jobs start with dogs that are purpose-bred for the destined task. Guide Dogs for the Blind doesn’t visit my
shelter and grab any old litter of whatever/ Labrador mixes to train up—they
carefully breed their own lines. The
world’s greatest Agility or Schutzhund or Obedience competitors don’t select their next
world champion prospect from a box in front of Wal-Mart. They pick their pups from purpose-bred
champion lines specifically for the traits they want: biddability, toy drive, conformation, energy,
ability to tolerate pressure, etc. They
start, in short, with dogs that are already
highly compatible with the expected work or competition. Second, even with those purpose-bred dogs,
even with World Class trainers—behavior is never 100%. Performance is never 100%. If it were,
they would score perfectly every time they walked into a ring. Every
dog they put to the task would be brilliant every
time. Instead, even the best of the best
lose more often than they win: it
wouldn’t be a competition if they didn’t.
Plenty of the dogs end up not thriving in the rarefied air and wash out,
despite being careful bred or chosen. And
it’s not because the dogs and the trainers aren’t magnificent: it’s because
what they’re being asked to do isn’t easy. Every dog and every handler has skills they’re
good at and skills where they could use more work; every dog and handler has
strengths and weaknesses, limitations and bad hair days. Everyone makes mistakes, in competition and
in life. Consider, say, college football
coaches, many of whom could be poster men for Alphadom. Being a fabulous Leader of the Pack isn’t
enough if the opposing team has a better quarterback and an all-star offensive
line. Behavioral expression—which is to say, performance—is always a stew of more
than one ingredient: how the dog feels, how
motivated they and then that last pesky detail—how skilled. One of my favorite
analogies illustrates this: if I go to
take Tap Dancing lessons, it takes me no time at all to figure out who’s in
charge of the class—the Instructor, duh.
He or she may be a larger than life personality, domineering, a
wonderful Leader, etc.—and I’ll bet it won’t take me long at all to recognize
the Instructor’s experience level, motivational style and various glowing
virtues or flaws. At the end of that 30
seconds, I will still have utterly no clue where to put my feet. I may be bowing to the great and glorious guru
of Tap, but I’ll still need to learn how
to dance. In terms of skill in performance itself, Leadership
turns out to be pretty irrelevant compared to, say, practice, repetition and
experience. Where “Leadership” may count is getting through all that practice and repetition—the other two behavior
ingredients: how the dog feels and how motivated they are. It’s here that Forced Following is a curious
can of worms. Of course, force can certainly work as a motivator. Most of
us will obey, or try to obey, if someone puts a gun to our heads and we have no
other choice. But this presumes that we already have the required performance
skill: if I really don’t know the code
to the safe or how to speak Esperanto, screaming at me and waving the gun won’t
help. All too often, dogs end up being yelled
at in a language they don’t understand for doing behaviors that are entirely
natural to them and not doing behaviors that they haven’t been taught. The equivalent
of me telling you, @&^#$ &**#%! %^@! and expecting you to get it right—or else.
You and your dog may eventually figure it out—if only by doing nothing
or avoiding me when I sound like that.
But there will be a toll. When pet owners get seduced by the Dark Side of
Forced Following, it’s almost always because they’re at the end of their
tethers with behavior issues stemming from—you guessed it—breakdowns in
sociability, compatibility and performance. Desperate for relief, they hear some palatable
version of the Be the Leader story and believe that they need to become more
forceful, Alpha, leaderly, etc. in the Do
What I Say half of the equation.
That if we stand taller, deliver our cues with greater conviction or
thunder them more loudly, the dog will recognize our authority and get with our
program. Since many dogs are sensitive to our
body language and tone, that can certainly, in certain situations, arrest their
attention and get us some better behavior. But for other dogs or dogs where the behavior stakes
are higher—Tinker with a raccoon on the fence—the Do What I Say part isn’t likely to make much difference, and it’s
not the part trainers themselves really rely on. The part that counts is the second half of
the equation, the timely and firm application of the Else in Or Else. Simply, the dog is punished in some fashion.
That’s the part that does the job:
the yelling (causing fear), the choking (discomfort, fear or pain) or
the electric shock (discomfort, fear or pain.)
And using punishment well turns
out to be incredibly difficult—playing with discomfort,
fear and pain in an animal’s brain without causing damage or setting off a cascade of icky side effects takes a very high
level of skill. The obvious problem
is that these Elses aren’t friendly
or likely to nourish friendliness, do nothing to foster mutual interests or compatibility,
and if a dog doesn’t understand #$&^#! or know how to do #$&^#!, do #$&^#! or Else contributes little
or nothing to his learning or performance. We
might get a few behaviors—or more likely the suppression of a few behaviors—here and there, but we might also
make the dog worse in ways that
matter more deeply. The Do What I Say or Else of Forced Following is hard to use,
likely to backfire and can utterly trash our relationships with our dogs if our
timing, our choice of punishment or our technical skills are just a little bit
off. Are there people who can probably pull it off? Sure, just like there are people who can
carve elaborate ice sculptures with chain saws.
Their fails—and oh boy are there fails as well as successes--involve blood,
teeth marks and bad things happening to the offending dog. Which brings me back to the various dog training
gurus who are either seeking or promising the training Holy Grail--instant,
100% guaranteed performance from the dogs.
It doesn’t exist, of course. We can get 100% perfection from some dogs with
some behaviors some of the time, and roughly 80-90% from most dogs with many
behaviors most of the time, but we can’t get 100% from all dogs in all
behaviors all of the time. What we can get from the vast majority of our
pets is improvement in the specific behaviors that matter most to us—and the
start of that improvement begins with our own skill as teachers. In the next section, I’m going to talk about
specific, concrete things we can do to improve our skills as teachers of our
dogs. We can call it being better
Leaders, though I’m not sure the term helps.
What I am sure of, though, is
that there are giant piles of improvements that we can make long before we
consider turning to the Elses of
Forced Following. We can take on a
practice of simple, kindly things that are easy to execute, offer little danger
of icky side effects and can make huge differences in your life with your dog. Part 6 coming soon! |