Posts Tagged ‘natural dog training’

The Oxford English dictionary defines nuclear as relating to the nucleus; the central and most important part of an object. Engineer is to skillfully arrange for (something) to happen. Working with Natural Dog Training is to be a Nuclear Engineer. One is always in touch with the central core of a dog; it’s energy. One is always conscious of how one’s behavior; body movement, voice, manipulation of a prey object is effecting the inside of the dog.
Sometimes this idea can seem esoteric; talk of energy can seem elusive. Most of the time I struggle with it myself. Thank goodness for ah-ha moments; those little dark light bulbs that once and a while flash on.
I had a wonderful light bulb moment the other day with Hero; the one that lead me to decide I am a Nuclear Engineer. Usually I walk her in the woods. The woods has sticks, leaves, mushrooms, running water; a whole myriad of things to absorb her energy. I do mean literally absorbing her energy by being bitten by her. Hero shakes, rattles and rolls herself through the woods. Anyone in the Northeast knows how rainy it’s been, so the first beautiful sunny day I decided to take Hero into the big open field to get some sun. Big mistake. Big nuclear energy mistake. Here’s what happened.
We walk into the field and all is good. Hero runs through the tall grass and bites some goldenrod. She finds an old fire pit and chews some coals. After catching some rays, I head back home. I’m in the middle of the field and guess what? No sticks. No mushrooms. No fire pit. Just me and my legs. My legs: there the only thing around that are; a)moving and b)crunch able. Uh-oh. The first words that come into my mind are “I’m dead”. I’m unprepared. I have nothing to give her to bite. Hero starts in to her “shake, rattle and roll,” bit. On my legs. A few things are going on inside my head but I see it; I see that she is a bundle of energy literally. There is no intention behind her biting frenzy; she’s not trying to show dominance, she’s not misbehaving , she’s not learning something bad. She is simply expressing her deepest energy; bite, bite, bite. She’s really going at it and I have no idea how to get out of it. Then I realize there is a God after all; I’ve left a gardening glove in my back pocket. The thoughts go through my head very fast; this glove was $7, is it worth $7 to get out of this? No question. I pull out the gardening glove; (the kind with the rubber coating) and hand it to Hero. Oh ecstasy! A rubber coated glove that she can sink her teeth into. She gets practically the whole glove into her mouth, she’s chewing it and running and I can see the whole body sensual pleasure she is feeling. I can see the glove literally absorb the energy radiating out of her center into her mouth.
Standing there in that field while Hero expressed her prey instinct visa vi my legs was a real eye opener. She was like a little hurricane, a tiny nuclear explosion; it was like watching a small sun being born. I had to engineer that energy, I needed to find a place for it to go. Thank God for gardening gloves that get left in pockets!

“That which we call a rose, by any other name would smell as sweet”, William Shakespeare.

The whole idea of a puppy learning it’s name and hence learning to come to it’s name, Max, Clyde, Fido,  is one of the most interesting examples of how dogs learn and what dogs learn.  Most puppy owners have been schooled to use the puppy’s name frequently, with great repetition, to teach the puppy its name. The premise is that by repeating the sounds that make up the name, the dog will come to know that the name means itself.

“Romeo, Romeo? Hey that’s me!”

This presupposes that dogs have a sense of self, separate from other things, which I don’t think they do.  To me, dogs and especially puppies, are totally connected to the entire web of life;  there is no way they can feel separate from anything.  They can’t step outside themselves like we can and understand themselves relative to other beings.  Therefore, they can’t know their names like we do.

Don’t we all remember as kids learning the alphabet and times tables through repetition? What tedious work, especially for those who didn’t have Sesame Street.

What was it like when you were out playing with your friends and your mother called you? Was anyone ever excited by that?  When I was in real trouble, my mother would attach my middle name to the “recall”, Yikes, I knew something very unpleasant was about to happen.  I wonder if this is how most dogs feel when they hear their name.

What I have heard over and over is that puppies that for months “knew” or “had” the recall down, suddenly reach a point where they no longer come when called.   Where as before they would eagerly run to the owner, now they “balk”.  This is often called “adolescence”, which is a way of explaining the phenomenon without explaining it. After all, when we turn 13,  do we  forget the times tables or rebel against them? If dogs learn through repetition how do they suddenly unlearn something so crucial and important as their name? Hmmm, very interesting.

Since I’m raising Hero the Natural Dog Training way, I never use her name. Never.   Instead, I go goofball.  She’s been called;  Little stink pot, Little tank, My little bear, Pumpkin, Ms. Mighty Bite, Ms. Shark,  Piranha Puppy, Poopsy, Tootsie roll, Puppsy Wuppsy, so and and so forth. I don’t use her name. I didn’t with her brother either (he still has a million names but I won’t affront his dignity by printing any), and his name, Athos, is the most riveting word to him in the universe.  It’s because his name means; “Come to the most exciting thing in the universe and all your deepest desires will  be satisfied”. ( Usually it’s a bite toy).

So instead of teaching Hero her name, I concentrate on being the most exciting thing in the universe. Right now, it’s a real ego boost because I don’t have to do anything. Sooner or later though, her attraction will begin to drift from me, and then I will have to work to keep it. That’s what happens when dogs who have known their names all along suddenly forget it. They don’t forget it, they just think it means,” Go to the most exciting thing in the world!” and guess what? It’s no longer the owner.

I will reserve Hero’s name for the time when she has totally committed all her energy to me and it will be a trigger to come and get it! She’ll feel her name as a release to fulfillment, not as a interruption to her fun. It will feel good; it will energize her; it will make her feel like a rocket ship taking off and zooming home.

Of course not teaching a puppy her name right away can be scary. We’ve all been told that we must be consistent and that we must imprint all these millions of things onto our puppies asap or they’ll grow up to be raving maniacs.  I know that not to be true.  That’s part of what this blog is all about. To raise a dog naturally, in accordance with a dog’s nature, and to document it.  The most important thing for me in raising Hero is to imprint her with the feeling I can be trusted.  In order to do that, I must trust the goodness in her; I have to trust her nature. And I do.

So think up all the ridiculous names you can think of and use them liberely. It’s fun. The puppy smells just as sweet.

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.

What?? You don’t have your puppy in the house? The questioner is truly incredulous; I am equally so. Lets imagine; what would it be like having Hero, aged 8 weeks, pure breed German Shepherd dog living in my house?  Favorite shoes chewed? Check. Hand hooked rug ripped apart? Check. Cat chased. Check. Oriental rugs peed on? Check. Puppy getting tripped over? Check.  Children’s ankles bitten and favorite toys destroyed? Check. Toilet water everywhere?  Check. Food stolen off the table? Check. People mad at puppy? Check. People yell at puppy? Check. Puppy feels….confused, scared and does not trust her owners. I must ask, why would anyone have a puppy in their house?

I think people really love their puppies, but are confused about what they need.  Puppies need quality time where they can be puppies uninhibited, safely and without incurring our wrath.  Since dogs have no sense of time, for a puppy, it only matters that each experience is like this; it makes no difference how long it lasts.  One bad experience; one scolding, one finger wagging, one grab from behind, damages a dog forever.   Protecting our puppies from these bad experiences is our number one job as dog owners.

Hero lives contentedly in her crate while she’s sleeping and when she’s not sleeping, she is playing safely and contentedly in her little yard, accompanied by one the family members. Here she is free to jump on us, chew our hands, chase butterflies, and bite whatever is available. She is safe from getting into trouble and from being yelled at for simply expressing her energy. She is learning that she is safe expressing her energy when she is with us, and that is the key to the training that will come down the road.
Who does it really serve having a puppy live freely in a house? It really serves the human. It harms the dog. I would say, from watching Hero, that trying to live in a house with a puppy is the number one cause of problem behavior. It is just plain not fair to put a puppy into a situation they are not mature enough to handle. It’s not right to expect them to act in any other way but like a complete chomping, ripping, jumping machine. I never let my babies play with knives but as adolescents they chop like chefs. I apply the same principle to the puppy. It really does amaze me that people think a puppy somehow suffers from not living in an environment they clearly can not handle. If I had to live with Hero, I would guess that I would mostly feel frustrated, angry, and guilty. As it is , she is the absolute apple of my eye. I adore her beyond comprehension. She also loves and trusts me implicitly, because I don’t have to man handle her, confront her, correct her, or get mad at her for anything. A dog that has never been confronted or corrected is a dog without problem behaviors.

I believe we all have a lot to learn by exploring the feelings we have about having a puppy be our plush toy, by needing to cuddle it, by thinking it needs to be with us all the time.  Dogs are in our lives to help us see ourselves better, what better place to start?

Really think about it.  Puppies don’t belong in a house.