My Most Embarrassing Dog Incident (AKA The Beginning of the Beginning)

Lots going on at the moment! Perrin continues to enjoy running with his brother on the farm and doing a bit of fitness course work. His inability to wait his turn while I am working with other dogs has become painfully apparent, so that will be a big skill to work now and after the puppy gets here!

In lieu of training notes, I had some more musings to share. In this case, what I feel was the most embarrassing event in my life, and the time I failed Perrin in the biggest way. The therapy test. Before I knew anything at all about dog training, before I even got Perrin, I had decided that I would train my dog to the ‘therapy dog standard’. I really wanted to train and to have a well behaved dog, but didn’t know where to start. The therapy dog standard gave me a direction and a goal. So when a group arrived in Grande Prairie to do testing, and Perrin was old enough to test, I jumped on it! We had been working with a local coercion trainer for about 6 months, and I was pretty happy with Perrin’s skills overall. I almost threw up before the testing started, but that is pretty normal for my performance anxiety nerves.

It was truly the most embarrassing experience of my life. I was sure everyone else was looking at us thinking “Wow, she is a pretty big moron if she thought THAT dog could pass a therapy test!” and/or “What a horrible dog!”. And that mattered to me, what other people thought. Perrin could have passed the test, his skills were great! As long as he had a job to do, he did well, but being able to wait his turn around other dogs? That was another store entirely!

The barking. The lunging on the leash. The frantic games of leash tug. The whining. The rolling around on the ground. The jumping and biting my clothes. The barking.

To make a long story short, although Perrin’s skills were fantastic, we were dismissed before lunch due to the disruption he was causing. I managed to be gracious to the evaluators and hosts, and almost made it to the car before I started crying. Then I quit training for 4 months.

In hindsight, the idea that an adolescent intact male might have difficulty focusing in a room full of other dogs is to be expected under the best of circumstances with a well prepared dog and trainer. And these were not the best of circumstances, nor were either of us well trained. As I learned more after the fact, and looked back at this situation, the more I saw the piling on of factors that made this a recipe for disaster:

• Perrin was 18 months old at the time, right in the midst of adolescence. Not exactly the best known developmental period for impulse control and attention span, let alone around other dogs! And I had never worked on calmness that close to other dogs. I just expected that because he knew the skills, he should be able to ‘behave himself’.
• I had no idea about over-arousal or how to deal with it. Everything I did just upped Perrin’s frustration levels and made things worse.
• There was no treats or toys allowed in the the testing room. That was where we waited, as well as where the examinations were conducted. This worked out to HOURS without classical reinforcement, and I didn’t even know the concept of personal play as a reinforcer at the time, let alone actually having had worked on it. That is a much longer time period without any classical reinforcers than any dog sport venue I am aware of, and there are entire courses devoted to reducing reinforcement schedules for the duration of a ring performance. I was expecting WAY too much here.
• I was a nervous wreck, which only got worse the more Perrin acted poorly, and I’m sure that directly translated to Perrin’s frustration levels. I was by far the youngest person/trainer in the room and didn’t have the emotional maturity to deal with what was happening, or to understand that I did have an option to end things: I could have left! I could have walked out the minute it was clear I was just stressing Perrin out. It never once occurred to me that I could leave the room and quit the test, and I didn’t yet have the knowledge to understand Perrin’s behaviours as an expression of stress. I just thought he was being ‘disobedient’.

I really didn’t understand any of this at the time. I was angry, and upset with Perrin because he had embarrassed me by behaving so badly in such an inappropriate situation. And I was angry and upset at myself for being mad at my dog because I knew the whole thing was my fault and not his, I just didn’t know how. And not knowing how, or how to fix things made me angry and frustrated and sad and feeling like a failure. Failure has never been something that I deal with well. To this day, I have never been back into that training building or its associated pet store. I quit working with Perrin altogether for months before either of us felt like working together again.

BUT over a year and a half later, I can look back and have an infinitely better idea of what went wrong, how it could be fixed if it were something that we wanted to pursue again in the future, and how to better handle a similar situation if it ever happened again. I can see how much personal growth I needed to do before I could get to where I wanted Perrin and I to be. I can also see this disaster of a day was the catalyst for all of the wonderful things that have happened for Perrin and I since. That incident led me to pursue a different way to train. I never wanted to feel so angry with my dog again, like he was a failure who was acting poorly just to make me look bad. I wanted us to be a team, and enjoy working together. I wanted to have fun with my dog, and for training not to be a chore that left me crying after every session.

Less than 4 months after that test, I took my first online course in shaping, and through that I discovered a new way to train and have a relationship with my dog. A way to train that fostered the relationship with my dog that I always wanted to have. Changing the question from “What is my dog doing wrong?” to “What am I doing wrong?”, and having the knowledge to answer that latter question changed everything fundamentally. I wasn’t just picking on behaviour of Perrin’s I didn’t like and putting the entirety of the responsibility on him. I was acknowledging how I may have set him up for failure, or how I could make the path to success more clear to him. We were a team working through puzzles together, and the only thing that mattered is how we both felt about doing so.

I also got introduced the great wide world of dog sports. I realized that I didn’t even WANT to do therapy work, it was just the only guideline I knew of for training a ‘pet dog’, and what I wanted to do was have a relationship with Perrin. Once I found out about all the other goals we could have, therapy completely dropped off the radar for me. Not because we did badly once and I am afraid to go back. I am confident that I could build a proper training plan, and with the right amount of time, and careful selection of the organization in which we would test (to ensure I agreed with their testing set-up), that Perrin would pass with flying colours. It just doesn’t fall that high on my training priority list anymore (I dont even like people!). That test was leading me to other things: to a better way of life for us. I’m glad to say that I haven’t cried over dog training since!

 

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June 7th Training Log

Perrin is starting to get settled into the city after the big move and then testing life as a farm dog. Our morning walks have consisted of going to the busy park across the street during rush hour and watching all the people, bikes, skateboards, kids, and dogs go by; just generally getting used to the noise and movement of the city again. In the afternoons we have been doing more serious ‘downtown’ walks that required thinking of Perrin. This has been lots of loose leash walking, heeling tightly, waiting to sniff until cued, not being able to pee on every blade of grass, sitting at crosswalks and lights, and being resilient to all the crazy city noises. He has done so well and blown me away with what he remembers from being a puppy in the city. Navigating the busy city seems to have taken all his brain capacity, as today was the first day since we have been here that he wanted to do some brain work.

Today we worked on sit-to-stands on a couch cushion for an unstable surface. After 3 months I am still waiting for the fitness equipment I want to come back into stock with the Canadian supplier, so until then we are improvising.

We then worked on a new shaping trick: unrolling a yoga mat. This was a completely new behaviour that I had never worked on shaping before. Perrin has never been taught to roll anything with his nose. The whole process is below, unedited, so it is full of my mistakes. Well, its mostly unedited, I pulled out the part where I ran out of treats and ran to the kitchen to get more.

Then we worked on putting ‘be sad’ (laying down with his face on the floor) on cue, then called it a day when Jake got home from work. It has only been three nights, but Perrin absolutely knows who is coming up the stairs after the buzzer to the apartment goes off.

 

Training Priorities/Honouring the Dogs Aptitudes and Desires

Perrin is enjoying his life as a farm dog at the moment. We have been working on bits and pieces everyday, but I haven’t been documenting lately. I figured I would post some thoughts I wrote a while ago but hadn’t gotten around to posting.

Once I dove into the world of behaviour theory and training, then saw how much Perrin and I love training, my training list suddenly became very long! I want to figure out how to train THAT, and THIS, and ooh, THAT too! I very quickly had a list of behaviours to train that was longer than my arm. And while I could still use some more focus and priorities when it comes to that list (I am very guilty of flitting from one thing to another), there have been many things that have naturally fallen to the bottom of the list.

One of the items that has fallen to the bottom of that list is skijoring. It was something I wanted to try with Perrin since he was little, so when he was the right age I bought the equipment and started desensitizing him to the harness and introducing him to pulling. He took to pulling in no time, loving both his cart in the summer and the toboggan in the winter. Here Perrin is with his home made cart:

This winter, I felt like he understood pulling well enough to try him out on the trails. And he bombed!

When in the woods, Perrin likes to noodle about and sniff EVERYTHING. This was not terribly conducive to pulling straight ahead of me, and led to many line tangles, me falling down and much cursing. It sucked the joy out of both skiing, and being with my dog so I ultimately just let him run beside me on leash. He happily trotted beside me, but at no time did he want to line out and lead.

Many people at the ski club who skijor were saddened by my news that Perrin didn’t naturally take to skijoring (who has heard of a dog who doesn’t want to pull?!?!). “Can you train it?” They asked. I’m sure that I could! In fact, I have several half baked training plans in my head to do just that.

But you know what?

While I could train him to lead out and run ahead of me, it would take a considerable amount of time for something that is just not important to us. We have found that we both have a much better time when we ski un-attached. He can sniff around and keep up to me, I can ski unhindered and we can both enjoy our time together out in the woods. I have other things to train, and there are lots of things that Perrin actually enjoys. So we move on to other goals, while enjoying skiing together but unattached, and that is just fine with me!