Untraining your puppy

Here in Southern Vermont there are a lot of alternative minded people; we have food co-ops, a socialist Senator, town meetings, bread and puppet,  Ben and Jerry’s, organic farms, cow parades, and a lot of homeschooling families. Many of the families “unschool” their children, a movement started by John Holt in the 1970’s. Unschooling means that the child leads the learning experience; the parent facilitates the learning of what they want to learn, when they want to learn it, in the way they want to learn it. To school your children in this way takes a huge amount of trust, and I’ve seen children raised in this manner turn out to be truly remarkable adults.
What Southern Vermont doesn’t have, what no place has, is “Untraining”.
It’s interesting that the mentor of the untraining movement, Kevin Behan, is a police dog and boarder control dog trainer who has spent his life with all the heavy hitters. Not even the hippies understand dogs.
To untrain your dog, as I am doing with Hero, takes a huge amount of trust. You must trust that a dog knows how to be a dog.  I hardly know how to be a human being let alone a dog. So I let the dog lead. I trust she will be a dog because she is a dog. For 100,000 years domesticated dogs have lived with humans and I don’t think it took puppy kindergarten to get them here.

All dogs know how to sit, down, stay, heal and come when called no matter what. Just watch them. Maybe they don’t do it for us, but they do it. Our goal in “untraining” is simply to work with the dog’s natural impulse to do these things; by the time my older dog was one year old I was able to elicit all these things without commands or corrections. I learned how to work with the dog’s natural drive; I trusted he knew how to do all things things without a human teaching him.

Raising  Hero can look simultaneously  permissive and militaristic.  She lives in a crate but can bite and chew us in the puppy yard at her will. We sit in  silent watchfulness ; there are no words, no commands, no teaching.  To a trainer we are missing our chance to teach her to obey, to the groovy person we are way too controlling.

Untraining just takes trust.  If we can trust our children to school themselves, then we can trust our dogs as well.