When love becomes irrelevant

Every dog loves his/her owner. If you disagree, you may want to stop reading. Every dog loves his/her owner and that is just a given.  But can love, all by itself, really conquer all?  I say no. (Sorry Virgil!)

Hero is now six months old and I am no longer the center of her universe.  She has discovered life beyond her puppy yard.  She is especially fond of cat poop.  It is her favorite delicacy. And who can blame her? It’s readily available and puts up no resistance to be taken into her mouth.  She is  also unabashedly courageous;  she will go where ever her nose leads her.

The popular model would tell me she has hit the adolescent faze;  she is rebelling, she is testing the boundaries.  But since she is not disobeying any commands for the sole reason I have never given her any, this just doesn’t make sense.  The only thing that does make sense is that as it stands, cat poop is just more attractive than me.  What can I say?

I think most dog owners are surprised when one day their dog all of a sudden prefers another dog, a car, a squirrel, to them.  It used to surprise me. It makes us mad; it touches our ego and it touches our heart. Wait a minute, I thought he/she loved me!

The reason this happens is because there is something much more profound than love that our dog needs from us.  Our dog needs to trust us.  Missing this; we miss everything.

If we scold our puppy for getting in the garbage, she doesn’t trust us. If we teach sit for the food bowl and hold back basic sustenance from her hungry belly, she doesn’t trust us. If we take him everywhere and put him in situations that saturate his being with fear, he doesn’t trust us. If we our honest with ourselves, we do these things because essentially; we don’t trust him.

So what to do? Back to Hero’s new culinary desire.  The first thing I do is going into puppy owning knowing that someday, should I do nothing, other things in the environment will begin to out weigh me as objects of desire.  (And  when I get mad that she is driven to the “place most frequented by cats” it tells me something important. ) When this begins to happen, I know the real work must begin.  Something bigger than having her love me,  because her love for me is like oxygen; it just is. I must earn her trust. That takes work.

I begin to carry food when ever we go for a walk.  She comes outside and boom! I zing her with some food.  I use Kevin’s pushing technique to deliver her breakfast as we move  past the “cat place”.   She pushes for food all the way into the woods. She pushes HARD.  She is learning that she can give me all her energy and not get in trouble.  Trust is beginning.

As she runs through the woods doing all things doggy; I watch her closely. If she leaves my orbit, I quickly hide behind a tree.  I sit patiently until she notices, comes to find me, and I zing her again with more food.

I take her on walks with my children and we play hide and seek through the woods.  One boy holds her as I run away and hide. He lets her loose and the game begins. She finds me and I whoop in joy! I give her more food to add to the joy. We do this back and forth for a good fifteen minutes.  This begins to be what a walk in the woods feels like; orbiting me, hunting for me, and with the pushing technique; expresses her deepest energy in my presence and giving it to me.

How many of us has seen our dog chase a squirrel, a deer, a turkey, or anything, and had the instant judgment that somehow that is bad? I know I did.  That is why our dogs don’t trust us.  They express their deepest desire; to hunt, and we say; bad.  When we do that, they don’t trust us, and love becomes irrelevant.

This whole situation is avoidable and rectifiable if we just begin to see the dog’s hunting drive as a powerful and awe inspiring  expression of the heart’s desire.  We can easily channel it to us where it becomes a powerful tool in forging a bond with our dog.  First we must get comfortable with it.  We must trust it.  It really is just desire.  Doesn’t it make us feel really good when we see someone with a lot of desire use it as drive and achieve something amazing?  Like Michael Phelps perhaps.  What would have happened to him if his mother had judged his drive? “My God Michael, what is wrong with you, all you want to do is swim?”  And who did the camera show after every single race he won? His mom. Because she trusted his desire, nurtured it,  and made all his dreams come true. Dog training should be just like that.  All dog training is;  trusting your dog’s desire and  making your dog’s wildest dream come true.

Trust outweighs love in my book a million to one.  Many people love me. How many can I trust? How many people can I expose my heart’s desire to and have them hold it safely, not judge it, and not take any of my power away? Not many.  It’s a hard road to trust and it’s much harder than love, but what else do I have to do? I will work hard to earn Hero’s trust and I will be worthy of hers. I hope this will give me the courage and ability to be trustworthy with those I love because I know;  dog training isn’t about dogs at all.