Big, good learning curve

OK, so a LOT has happened this week. We went and saw Lesley the dog acredited dog trainer two, nearly three days ago. Today I went to the first day of the Ian Dunbar seminars. And a heck of a lot of non-dog related stuff. I’m stressed but I’m just going to keep on trucking.

The session with Lesley was an eye opener. She’s a direct person, but at the same time I think that she has very good people skills and she handled ME brilliantly, never mind the dog.

The session was very low key from an actual dog training perspective. Here I was loaded with treats worried my dog would be fried before the first hour was up. Nope, this was different. Lesley wanted to see what Amika and I were all about. She told me a hell of a lot. Which is why I didn’t log it that day- needed to process.

From the moment she came out to the car to meet me, Lesley started gently coaching. I can’t put my finger on how the way she communicated was different from other trainers, but it worked well. I felt supported and she helped interpret my dog’s body language and how my behaviour is seen by my dog. That’s as good a summing up as I can do.

The session went like this:

• Get dog out of car and wait for her to stop barking at the alpacas;
• Walk her through to the training paddock, settle ourselves and see what the dog does on a 5m lead;
• Once the dog thinks the environment is OK, take her for a walk on the long lead, get a drink (OK- in Amika’s case, have a splash in the dam);
• I take the lead and walk the dog while Lesley goes and gets her dog;
• I plant my feet to keep from being dragged over to where the dog is parked, and the people swap places- Lesley takes Amika’s lead;
• The dogs are allowed to meet, we see what happens, I take the other dog away;
• Debriefing and more observation of Amika.

Some of what I took away is this: Amika circles and quarters, licks her lips and does some thing with her toungue (missed that bit) while checking out the environment. She checks in with me. The explanation I got here is that this is a dog who thinks that she is responsible for my welfare. This stresses her out. I’d got this before, right at the very begginging. What I didn’t get was that when she checks in, my response is seen as validation for this role- human pets dog is interpreted much as pup seeks reasurance from adult. And I always rewarded check-in’s because I thought her attention was a good thing.

The upshot of this is that we have a fundamental relationship misunderstanding. It affects how she feels and acts in all things. My job is not to “act like a leader”, it is more specifically to REact as a leader (with specific behavour) in response to a follower’s behaviour. Big, huge, enormous difference for my understanding. Not only have I got the observational skills to plug into a theory of “why”, but I have a set of behaviours to use to gain that elusive leader status.

In less conceptual terms, this is doing two main things. One is to ignore Amika’s inappropriate initiatives. She circles and checks in, I ignore it because I’m not in need of comfort or security from her. I also carry this over to what I call “mugging”- that attention seeking behaviour.

At the same time, I initiate all interactions with her, and end them. I’ve read / heard that one everywhere too. But it doesn’t work if I don’t have the ignore half- and applying that relies on my understanding of what is going on. This is where I have fallen down before.

Moving on to the d0g-dog stuff. What I saw was Amika straining to greet the dog. Pulling, wagging, bowing type stuff. Over the top, but looked basically friendly. The other dog was asked / allowed to approach and the did what I thought was a relatively normal nose to nose- for maybe a second. I didn’t see the trigger because it was fast, but Amika lifted her lip and offered to clean his clock and he jumped on her head. She yelped and curled and backed off- but only briefly. Then she was back at him, and this time she truly lost her mind. It was the monster that an ill chosen trainer had created by doing this over and over for an hour about a year ago. Lesley had her dog back off, since he is 11 and doesn’t need this sort of thing. My job was to take him back in. I think it must have lasted much less than 10 minutes.

So from dog reactive but friendly I have full on maniac. Lesley was kind enough to say diplomatically that this is learned behaviour and leave it at that, which makes me chuckle. The first trainer I went to see, while reportedly good, started off by putting blame on me, and it crushed me. I’m more resilient now, so I can accept that I am responsible for most of this behaviour.

The last bit of the session didn’t stick as well, I think because of my adrenaline levels. Amika was fried. It was a brief but very full-on flooding and it did, as Lesley said, take two days for her to come down. Me too- just like the horrible session last year, but without the physical exhaustion and painful muscles. Unlike that incident, this was useful- it supplied Lesley with the info she needed to be able to advise me.

Number one is relationship. Then we work on dogs being around. That, Lesley says, is still a long road for us. Only once we are OK with that will we try to work with other dogs around- and Amika may never be safe or enjoy being around them. I’m OK with that- as long as I know how to make her comfortable in the world and I know what to do to be out there with her successfully- not leaving her languishing in the back yard. I went looking for a dog I could take with me when I went out, and do fun stuff with. I’m not going to give up on that.