So there's hope for Rex. But is there hope for us, his broken and terrified humans? We have to start by reorganizing our home environment. The trainer laid out the plan...it includes completely unlearning everything we learned with Rex's previous trainer, an absurd amount of human food treats, an one other little detail...feeding him exclusively by hand?!?
"One of the worst things you can do for your dog is to feed him from a bowl, twice a day, at the exact same times everyday." My eyes widened in disbelief. I had long measured my daily good mom/bad mom quotient by, in part, my ability to feed my dogs at predictable times, from bowls (didn't think about that bowl part much to be honest...). While I furrowed my brow, lips purssed in the "w" shape for "Whaaaattt???", he explained. In Rex's new world, nothing is free. Rex should have to work for every single bite of food, and everyone and everything should control access to food but Rex. This means hand-feeding, feeding through training rewards, and feeding through food puzzles only. Okay, I get the logic. But a 100lb dog needs a lot of little pieces of food per day...and that's a lot of drool to contend with.
At first Rex was not interested in being hand fed his kibble. He snubbed me several times, which I was warned about. Appearantly in order to eat from my hand, Rex has to accept that he's not in charge. After one day and a grumbly tummy, he broke down. My hubby and I quickly realized the need to invest in rubber gloves for feeding...the drool is unimaginable.
The other change in our home circumstance was that all toys and bones are 'up', and Rex only gets to play with a tennis ball or chew a bone when I give it to him. Before he tires of the toy or bone, I am to take it away. For your average dog this may not be a big deal, but Rex has a psychotic obsession with tennis balls. When he has one in his mouth you can almost hear him saying,"my precious..." a la Lord of the Rings. We started out having the tennis balls and bones on the top shelf of a book shelf, but having his 'precious' in sight but unreachable proved to be doggy torture of the highest order. So now they all reside in a little lock box...and WOW. Rex is suddenly listening much better to our verbal commands in the house, and does so with less protest. This has been the most powerful change we've made so far, although it's really hard to take his precious away after we play, due to the well documented ability of dogs to be super duper cute when they want something that you have.
Next on the agenda? Rex's new protocol required us to put away the prong collar and clip on the harness...but walks are a little trying. I don't know how to keep him from walking out in front of me without correcting him, and I'm having a heck of a time getting treats through his muzzle on our walks. No to mention, we're now charged with finding a "high value treat?, ostensibly one that Rex prefers to biting people...
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Thursday, June 10, 2010
How to Train My Dragon: My Dragon's Backstory
Fall of 2006, just months after our wedding and a couple years after adopting our 'practically perfect in every way' dog Sheba, my husband Eli and I began the search for our next dog. After all, if one dog is good, two dogs will be awesome, right? We were bright eyed and bushy tailed- highly committed to rescuing a dog that no one else would want. I work with animals for a living so I was pretty confident that I could work a rescue dog through the behavioral issues that might otherwise make it un-adoptable.
Blurry-eyed after tens of hours on petfinder.com, and numerous evenings searching through our Dog Breed Encyclopedia, I found a Shiloh Shepherd breed rescue and a handsome 2.5 year old male Shiloh named Rex* was up for adoption in Maryland. The trouble was, Rex had bitten someone and his family had turned their backs on him. Something in his photo touched Eli and I, and I was on the next flight out to Maryland to take Rex home.
I did my homework. I met his breeder (I actually stayed with her!), I met his doggy mom, I had dinner with the human dad that was giving him up. I took a detailed history and decided this was going to a challenge, but one that I was up for. We had a plan; careful management of Rex's interactions with strangers, lots and lots of exercise, and an all raw, organic home-made diet. If this dog was a project in which you put in effort and get out progress, we would have hit the jackpot. But...
Within three days of his arrival home, Rex had bit a friend in our home, sending him for stitches. Within two months he had bit many others, many stitches, and we were going broke paying for it all. 99% of people would have put Rex down, and maybe we should have, but were touched by how gentle and loving he was with us and our dog, and by how much he seemed to trust us. We couldn't betray that trust without exhausting every possible option. We explored every possible medical cause. We explored every possible behavioral cause. Everytime we were sure we had identified his triggers and were avoiding them and working on them, a new trigger revealed itself, a new disaster took place. By January of 2007, I found myself skulking, tail between my legs, into the office of one of the two dog training facilities in the Seattle area that would even return my phone calls (I called about twenty-five trainers).
After a brief conversation, the owner of the facility looked at me point blank and said,"Why is this dog still alive?". I swallowed hard...good question, I thought. But then I answered,"This may not make sense to you, but I am not willing to take his life if the real problem is that I haven't bucked up to become the owner he needs me to be. If his biting is because of my short-comings, I can't put him down for it. I'd never have peace." She was quiet and taken aback. The silence was strained. I continued,"That's why I'm here. I am here so that you can tell me if he has a chance with the right training and structure. If you think it's just his nature, we'll consider putting him down, but if there's any chance it's not, we'll try to work through it." Quiet again. "Okay," she said,"in that case, yes I think you have a chance but you have a whole lot of work to do."
Rex went to bootcamp that week, for six weeks. We came to work with him once a week on Fridays, and we saw that progress was being made in his obedience. This trainer used aversive techniques with prong collars, and when we voiced our reservations we were told,"If you want this dog to live, you better stop feeling sorry for him, because feeling sorry for him will get him killed." Okay then. Rex graduated the program with a some well ingrained obedience, a steel basket muzzle for prevention, and we had high hopes. Unfortunately, after all of that and excessive modifications in the way we run our home, Rex still wanted to attack people in our home. Only now he would wait on a rug for 5 minutes before ramming them with his muzzle.
It was too late. We were already in love with this dog. Discouraged, we resigned to changing our lifestyle. No more visitors in our home. He could never leave the house without a muzzle. He would never be offleash outside of our yard again. He would never be within 6 feet of anyone but my husband, myself, or our vet, ever again. For 3.5 years we lived like this. With a dragon in our house. With us, in our home, Rex was sweet, charming, entertaining, gentle, and never even looked at us sideways- he was our adoreable little secret- a beautiful part of our lives that we couldn't share with friends and family. We began to live our lives around his problems, with the singular goal of preventing any possibility that Rex could get himself into trouble and get put down. And just when we had resigned Rex and ourselves to this life...the wheels started turning.
What if the approach had been all wrong? There has to be a better way. What if a different method of training could give Rex, and us, a chance at a normal life? I had a chip on my shoulder because the 'all positive' dog trainers I had contacted earlier in Rex's life had refused to work with us and told me to put him down. Not to mention my personal experience of meeting several dogs who were 'all positive trained' which seemed to translate to 'positively not trained'. But we had trained our perfect princess Sheba using all positive, and she was, well, perfect. The real question was, is there such a thing as 'all positive behavior modification'? I did a little research and contrary to what I had been told, the answer was yes. I started reading Patricia McConnell books and got a good feel for positive behavior modification...and it seemed logical to me: slowly changing your dog's response to stimuli through gradual, thoughtful, counter-conditioning.
So I made a call. May of 2010 we met with Jim Ha, PhD, from Companion Animal Solutions. The objective of our meeting was as follows: I'm concerned about Rex's quality of life, but I have to keep him and others safe. I just want to know, after meeting Rex and taking his history, if you think there's hope that we can get past this. If not, I'll just resign Rex to living out his life as he has been...but if there's hope, I'll pursue it. Jim met Rex. And the verdict was...
"There's hope...there's lots of hope...". OMG YIPPEEEE!!! Umm...now what?
Check in next week to follow our journey through all positive dog training with one of the toughest possible cases.
Alisa B.
*Name changed to protect the sweet but not so innocent pooch
Blurry-eyed after tens of hours on petfinder.com, and numerous evenings searching through our Dog Breed Encyclopedia, I found a Shiloh Shepherd breed rescue and a handsome 2.5 year old male Shiloh named Rex* was up for adoption in Maryland. The trouble was, Rex had bitten someone and his family had turned their backs on him. Something in his photo touched Eli and I, and I was on the next flight out to Maryland to take Rex home.
I did my homework. I met his breeder (I actually stayed with her!), I met his doggy mom, I had dinner with the human dad that was giving him up. I took a detailed history and decided this was going to a challenge, but one that I was up for. We had a plan; careful management of Rex's interactions with strangers, lots and lots of exercise, and an all raw, organic home-made diet. If this dog was a project in which you put in effort and get out progress, we would have hit the jackpot. But...
Within three days of his arrival home, Rex had bit a friend in our home, sending him for stitches. Within two months he had bit many others, many stitches, and we were going broke paying for it all. 99% of people would have put Rex down, and maybe we should have, but were touched by how gentle and loving he was with us and our dog, and by how much he seemed to trust us. We couldn't betray that trust without exhausting every possible option. We explored every possible medical cause. We explored every possible behavioral cause. Everytime we were sure we had identified his triggers and were avoiding them and working on them, a new trigger revealed itself, a new disaster took place. By January of 2007, I found myself skulking, tail between my legs, into the office of one of the two dog training facilities in the Seattle area that would even return my phone calls (I called about twenty-five trainers).
After a brief conversation, the owner of the facility looked at me point blank and said,"Why is this dog still alive?". I swallowed hard...good question, I thought. But then I answered,"This may not make sense to you, but I am not willing to take his life if the real problem is that I haven't bucked up to become the owner he needs me to be. If his biting is because of my short-comings, I can't put him down for it. I'd never have peace." She was quiet and taken aback. The silence was strained. I continued,"That's why I'm here. I am here so that you can tell me if he has a chance with the right training and structure. If you think it's just his nature, we'll consider putting him down, but if there's any chance it's not, we'll try to work through it." Quiet again. "Okay," she said,"in that case, yes I think you have a chance but you have a whole lot of work to do."
Rex went to bootcamp that week, for six weeks. We came to work with him once a week on Fridays, and we saw that progress was being made in his obedience. This trainer used aversive techniques with prong collars, and when we voiced our reservations we were told,"If you want this dog to live, you better stop feeling sorry for him, because feeling sorry for him will get him killed." Okay then. Rex graduated the program with a some well ingrained obedience, a steel basket muzzle for prevention, and we had high hopes. Unfortunately, after all of that and excessive modifications in the way we run our home, Rex still wanted to attack people in our home. Only now he would wait on a rug for 5 minutes before ramming them with his muzzle.
It was too late. We were already in love with this dog. Discouraged, we resigned to changing our lifestyle. No more visitors in our home. He could never leave the house without a muzzle. He would never be offleash outside of our yard again. He would never be within 6 feet of anyone but my husband, myself, or our vet, ever again. For 3.5 years we lived like this. With a dragon in our house. With us, in our home, Rex was sweet, charming, entertaining, gentle, and never even looked at us sideways- he was our adoreable little secret- a beautiful part of our lives that we couldn't share with friends and family. We began to live our lives around his problems, with the singular goal of preventing any possibility that Rex could get himself into trouble and get put down. And just when we had resigned Rex and ourselves to this life...the wheels started turning.
What if the approach had been all wrong? There has to be a better way. What if a different method of training could give Rex, and us, a chance at a normal life? I had a chip on my shoulder because the 'all positive' dog trainers I had contacted earlier in Rex's life had refused to work with us and told me to put him down. Not to mention my personal experience of meeting several dogs who were 'all positive trained' which seemed to translate to 'positively not trained'. But we had trained our perfect princess Sheba using all positive, and she was, well, perfect. The real question was, is there such a thing as 'all positive behavior modification'? I did a little research and contrary to what I had been told, the answer was yes. I started reading Patricia McConnell books and got a good feel for positive behavior modification...and it seemed logical to me: slowly changing your dog's response to stimuli through gradual, thoughtful, counter-conditioning.
So I made a call. May of 2010 we met with Jim Ha, PhD, from Companion Animal Solutions. The objective of our meeting was as follows: I'm concerned about Rex's quality of life, but I have to keep him and others safe. I just want to know, after meeting Rex and taking his history, if you think there's hope that we can get past this. If not, I'll just resign Rex to living out his life as he has been...but if there's hope, I'll pursue it. Jim met Rex. And the verdict was...
"There's hope...there's lots of hope...". OMG YIPPEEEE!!! Umm...now what?
Check in next week to follow our journey through all positive dog training with one of the toughest possible cases.
Alisa B.
*Name changed to protect the sweet but not so innocent pooch
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
