Some dogs are just born like that

mellow dog

What’s most important about my beagle lab rescue dog is not where she ranks in the pack, but her mellow temperament.

If you’ve paid any attention, over the past decade or so, to dog training theory, you know that tossing labels like “alpha” and “beta” around is a dangerous thing.

We don’t just do it with dogs, of course. We also do it with humans — see for example Dr. Helen’s observations about a recent Science study. She ties the media reports on the study to a trend to paint alpha males as “dysfunctional.” I happen to be in accordance with her on that point. “Alpha traits” are critically important to human society, culture, and survival. We need them. We need to admire people who exhibit them.

But there’s another problem with the media’s regurgitation of this science. The issue at hand is that being an alpha is stressful — meaning, being alpha is associated literally with high levels of stress hormones. The question then becomes: is it healthier to be a beta?

Here’s the thing. If you’ve known more than one or two dogs in your life, you know that their “aptitude” (for lack of a better word) for a given rank in the social hierarchy is to some extent inborn. I’m not saying here that individual dogs are Destined for a particular social rank. But from puppyhood, it’s obvious that some dogs have what it takes to be alpha and some will inevitably default to somewhere lower in the pack.

Yes, social rank is also predicated on behavior as well. Dogs can acquire the skills they need to climb up. They can also sink in rank. (As can baboons, the subject of the Science study.)

The challenge is to tease out the why’s.

I’ve blogged here before about my dogs. My current dog is a Beagle-Lab mix. My last dog was a purebred Corgi. Both dogs exhibit(ed) a ton of “submissive” behavior — things like rolling over on their backs etc. when I approach them. But my Corgi was also a bundle of very unhappy nerves, whereas Tessa is extremely, extremely mellow (and incidentally a lot nicer to be around).

And guess what. They were each “born that way.”

No doubt if you’d drawn blood from the Corgi and tested it, you would have found high levels of cortisol. They wouldn’t be there because she was an alpha. They’d be there because she was born with a tendency to be excitable and anxious. (Incidentally, I suspect this unfortunately sets up a kind of biological feedback loop. Trainers have noted for instance that dogs sometimes appear to excite themselves by their own barking. So excitable=barking=more excited . . .)

This is one of several reasons why we need to throw out the “alpha” and “dominant” and “submissive” labels when we adopt companion dogs — because when we use those labels, we miss looking for what’s really important about dogs’ temperaments.

My hunch is that we have to be careful with these labels when it comes to people, too. My hunch is that if we looked, we’d find “alpha males” with very low levels of stress hormones, and “beta males” who are as crazy unhappy as my poor little Corgi was.

Assigning moral values to such labels only makes it that much harder for us to understand what’s going on with our bodies, let alone what makes for a stable, high-functioning society.

It’s official

I’ve adopted the dog.

Her name is Tessie now. Here are some pics!

Tessie on the couch

I’m more than a little amazed that I happened upon a dog that meets my ideal so quickly. She’s the most agreeable little thing you could imagine, a total cuddler. Pretty much house trained from day one. She tends to be slightly on the cautious side but if you give her time to get used to something she comes around quickly.

Her only real “issue” is that she seems to be afraid of certain types of other dog (big ones)–we see them from time to time when we’re out on walks. But I’ve been using the “open bar” conditioning technique (I basically offer her treats by the handful the whole time the scary dog is in sight, so that she comes to associate seeing big dogs with positive things) and it’s having a visible effect: she will now calmly watch a dog on the other side of the street, where a week or two ago the encounter would leave her trembling and pulling to be taken back home.

I can only speculate as to the reason for her fear, but she did have a scab below her left eye and another on her neck when I first brought her home. I’m told that this isn’t unusual in rescue dogs: they are sometimes crowded together in runs with other dogs without consideration for whether the matches are appropriate. Fights break out, and dogs get hurt . . .

Tessie with a Kong

As a shelter dog, Tessie was also ignorant about things home-raised dogs take for granted. The most pervasive was that she had no idea, at first, that when I talk to her it means something. Finally after a couple of weeks she learned that “do you want to go for a walk?” is reason to get excited. But it was odd at first to realize that she was used to being around humans, but not being addressed by them.

It’s affected our obedience training, because she also has no framework for understanding that certain behaviors will earn rewards. I use clicker training for the basics and when I got my Corgi, I had her doing sits & downs within 48 hours. But with Tessie, progress is much slower. She tends to just stand perfectly still and study me–the notion that she can “earn” a treat is completely foreign to her. So I’m focusing, at this point, on showing her that “clickers & treats” is a fun game and that “doing stuff” is how a dog activates the human treat dispenser. I see some progress–she’s no longer a total statue during our games!

One other thing that I speculate is a consequence of her being a shelter dog: she seemed to have no concept of what it means to have space to let go and just run. I have a portion of my back yard fenced in; the first week or so, when I took her there and let her off leash, she just stood and looked around — if I walked the perimeter, she’d join me, at a walk, sniffing anything that smelled interesting on the way (she’s got that Beagle scent tracking gene for sure!)

Then, one day when I was out walking her on leash, she started giving these little hops, like some puppyish exuberance was starting to bubble out.

Tessie on the couch

I took her to the yard, and let her off leash, and she ran full out for the first time, dashing to one end of the yard and then back again.

For another week or so, that was all she’d do. Then one day, something clicked — and now she’ll tear around that yard for as long as I’m content to hang out there with her. It’s a delight to watch! Pure puppy exuberance :-)

I’m a foster mom

first puppy picture

What you can’t really tell from the picture is how tiny she is. She weighs 20 pounds.

She’s about 6 months old–she has her adult teeth.

She came from a kill shelter in Ohio with two litter mates and her mom. A Beagle-Lab mix.

I’ll post more about her soon but at this point I’m too busy pinching myself. I never thought I’d luck into such a sweet thing so quickly . . . I thought when I submitted an application (to Black Dog, Second Chance, a local rescue organization) I’d be put on a waiting list, behind all the other approved applicants looking for dogs, and have to wait . . . But the fact is there are so many like this little girl who need homes, they were thrilled to give me first dibs on her . . .

Where to look for a new dog . . .

I’ve lived with three dogs in my life. The first was Biddy, the dog we had when I was growing up. I’ll let my dad blog about her if he likes–she was his dog, and he used to hunt with her–but suffice to say, she was a dream dog: gentle and smart. An English springer mix, black and white, slender and more slope shouldered and more mellow than show Springers.

My next dog was a Dobie mix I picked from a litter of puppies in Vestal, New York, when I was 19 years old. I had her for 14 years, living off-campus while I got my BA so that I could have her with me, and on through the ensuing years, through many moves, some important relationships with (thankfully dog tolerant) people. She was a wonderful dog in many ways as well: strong, relentlessly upbeat, absolutely devoted to me. She was also a highly active dog, and when circumstances found me moving from the country to the burbs, the adjustment we had to make was a jarring one. I didn’t even own a leash for the first 10 years of her life, for instance. Let alone have a clue how to train a dog to walk on one.

Laykey was my crude attempt to find a dog who would fit better into a suburban environment. Corgis were bred as all around farm dogs–yes, for herding, too (droving, to be precise)–but they don’t have that need for hours of high-intensity exercise of say a Border Collie. They were more general purpose dogs. (And tell you what, nobody could come anywhere near my house, when Laykey was alive, without my knowing it. She raised plenty of false alarms [SQUIRREL ON THE PORCH! SQUIRREL ON THE PORCH!] but that’s an acceptable trade-off, IMO, for knowing I had a keen extra set of eyes & ears watching my property.) Corgis were bred to stick around the house, keep an eye on things, push the stock around once in awhile if asked to, lay low otherwise. Literally ha ha ha.*

So I knew Laykey would be happy in a world where leash walks, not hours-long rambles in the woods, counted as exercise–and I was right.

Where I missed the dingy was in considering other aspects of temperament.

Some might say that my fundamental error was in picking a purebred dog, and in some respects that’s a valid assumption, although not for the reasons most people have in mind. When I handed that substantial sum of money to her breeder, I rather thought it would buy me a certain sort of experience. Silly me.

I still believe that finely bred dogs can be excellent companion animals–it wasn’t the purebred/mutt choice that got me, but the lack of guidance. Laykey’s parentage didn’t let me down–her breeder did.

That said, I’m not going to do a purebred next time. Or I should say, purebred isn’t the spec. I’m going to choose my next dog by the company she keeps. I’ve begun, already, by looking into a couple different local rescue groups, and in a more-or-less random act, picking Black Dog, Second Chance. There are others, and if you’re looking for a dog, check Petfinder, you’ll find some in your area as well.

Here’s why I’m doing this. First, by working with a rescue organization I’m supporting people who place dogs that would otherwise, quite likely, be euthanized. So there’s the doing-the-right thing aspect. (This particular group focuses, although not exclusively, on black dogs, because they tend to be harder to place; according to their website, black dogs on average languish in shelters three times longer than light-colored dogs–which, if it’s a “kill shelter,” is tantamount to a death sentence.)

Another plus: rescue organizations, at least ideally, are staffed by people who want their dogs to be a good fit with the people who adopt them. This isn’t about finding a home, any home–this isn’t a game of “you touched the dog last, now he’s your responsibility.” BD,SC isn’t going to try to persuade me to take a dog that I’m not 100 percent comfortable committing to–in fact, I have the option of fostering a prospective adoptee for a week or two to see if she’s a good fit. That’s advantage number three. Even if I don’t ultimately adopt a particular dog, Ill be contributing by giving someone else’s future canine buddy a place to camp for awhile. I don’t have to feel badly, no matter what the outcome–I’m doing the dog a good turn.

I feel good about this.

There’s the issue of timing. Laykey hasn’t been gone very long. I still find myself expecting to see her. Expecting her to pounce, thrilled, on a bit of lettuce I’ve dropped on the floor. (Lettuce, really!)

I still get weepy over her–I saw one of my nextdoor neighbors for the first time since Christmas yesterday, and broke up when I told her Laykey is no more.

On the other hand, there are dozens of dogs in the Rochester area who need homes. And I want a dog. And when it comes down to it, I don’t think it’s disrespectful to take another dog in while still mourning a bit. One doesn’t take away from the other.

So if the right dog becomes available, I’m going to move on it.

I’m making a few preparatory arrangements. The most important: I’d been considering, for years, fencing in a portion of my yard–not for “dog storage” but as a place for supervised play and off-leash training.

Laykey would have adored it.

Add that to my regrets . . .

I’m not going to make the same mistake twice. I’ve gotten a quote and it’s a reasonable one, and being winter it shouldn’t take long to get the work done.

It means I’m giving up, for the next few years, my other fancy–the backyard vegetable garden. But I’ve lived without a garden for a long time now; I can manage a little longer. And if I don’t put in the garden, there’s no need to remove the massive silver maple someone planted smack dab in the middle of my back yard 50 or 60 years ago–little realizing it would one day render that space unusable for anything except . . . maintaining a massive silver maple.

But. It is a big old tree, a certain Englishman voted last summer to spare its life, and it’s got this huge leader (think “a second trunk that starts partway up”) that is dead–and the woodpeckers love it. There was a red-bellied woodpecker on it just the other day, when I walked back to consider it again.

An arborist took the same walk with me today and agreed the leader isn’t particularly dangerous–if I want to leave it for the woodpeckers, I should leave it for the woodpeckers.

Good. The tree stays, the garden idea gives way to the doggie play yard idea, and the woodpeckers will give my next dog something to bark at. If she’s a “looking up” sort of dog. My Dobie mix used to look up–if I said “birds!” she would look up and bark at birds flying overhead. Silly dog.

I can’t imagine living without a dog.

*This is a “Corgi’s got short legs” joke . . .

Good-bye, little dog

My dog was hit and killed by a car yesterday morning.

It was my fault, of course–one big long “I shouldn’t have” with a dead dog at the end.

She didn’t suffer for long. She was dead by the time I got to her.

There wasn’t a mark on her, either. Makes you wonder if it wasn’t the shock of being struck that killed her.

That would have been in keeping with her temperament, in fact. She’s what they call, today, a “reactive” dog. It’s a label, and by necessity hard to define exactly, like when you call a person charming or sexy or diabolical. Yes, you can point to a set of behaviors, and behaviors are external, and so ought to lend themselves to objective description. But when you sit down to actually try it, you discover how slippery it is. You discover that, to define such a quality, you have to use subjective words–adjectives. A “reactive” dog is actually a dog that “over-reacts.” Its responses to stimuli are “exaggerated.” Only, of course, they aren’t exaggerated to the dog. But they sure as hell seem exaggerated to the people who observe them.

Put another way, we know they are exaggerated because of how we are forced to accommodate them.

My shorthand, for people who weren’t familiar with the “reactive” notion, was to say “she is the kind of dog who, if she walks into the living room, and there’s a paper bag on the floor where there wasn’t a bag before, will startle and shy away from it.”

That was my dog. Actually the bag didn’t have to be new, even. She was forever catching sight of something out of the corner of her eye that had been there since forever and jumping out of her skin.

Another way to express the same thing: perhaps you’ve seen film of the kinds of tests they do to sort puppies being considered for use as assistance dogs. They’ll bring a puppy into a room and then suddenly open an umbrella. The puppy’s reaction will fall within a broad range of potential behaviors. One pup might will notice the umbrella, and respond by approaching it to investigate. Another will hesitate longer before deciding the umbrella is okay. And then there are the puppies that will start, and shy away, and will refuse to be coaxed anywhere near that awful scary thing.

There’s my dog.

These are issues of temperament.

Temperament is the thing we should all mind when we go out canvassing for a dog–a pet dog, a companion dog, to bring into our homes. It’s far more important than breed, although breed is often used as a kind of proxy for temperament, because so often breeding has been used to select for temperament–often because certain classes of temperament correspond to a dog’s inclination to certain categories of behavior. The classic example is the border collie, which has been bred to an almost other-worldly herding drive; this drive is what, on a sheep farm, is the breed’s most prized quality. Plop down the typical border collie in a middle class suburban home, on the other hand, and you have invited a canine Loki into your midst. Nobody can know, in advance, what tricks the dog will invent, but given its tools–its raw persistent unflagging energy, it’s teeth, it’s claws–the picture will settle, most likely, into one of several cliches. Chewed up furniture, chewed up shoes, chewed up whatever-else. Children being chased and nipped.

And yet, I know someone who has a laid back border collie. The dog is calm, and quiet, and compliant, and has fit perfectly into a middle class suburban life, needing no more exercise than a daily walk, no more stimulation than an occasional living room romp with a plastic squeak toy.

People talk about dog training, but the average dog owner has a fuzzy idea of what is meant. There is the training of behaviors: teaching a dog to sit, or lie down, or stay, or come. That, it turns out, is the easy part. Any dog that is not sick can be taught these types of behaviors, with some degree of success, by just about anyone. My dog had a respectable repertoire, taught mostly via clicker and treats: along with the standard sit etc. she could roll over, she could sit up and wave, she could play dead. We owe this not to our cleverness at all but to the dogs themselves, to their inclination to take cues from us, however clumsily they are communicated.

But a dog who knows how to sit, then eats couch cushions for amusement, isn’t a dog that one could say fits into an average human household. Which brings up the other side of “dog training,” as the average dog owner would think of it–the aspect of “dog training” that is intertwined with the concept of temperament.

Not recognizing how they are intertwined sets up a great fallacy. Those dogs in the animal shelter that have been turned in because their humans have given up on them–those are the dogs I mean. Under the right circumstances, they could be marvelous companion animals, most of them, maybe all of them. But somehow, in so many cases, it doesn’t play out that way.

Again, it is a continuum. At one end, you find the dogs who are docile, pliant, calm; you find, if your search is marked by a rare grace, a dog who are all those things and quietly confident as well (incidentally, throw away the idea of “submissive” and “dominant” — highly overrated terms; a dog that is submissive but fearful–my dog–is not a dog you want in your home). At the other end, the opposite extreme, are the dogs who, if human, would be labeled sick in some way: we’d say things like “obsessive-compulsive” or “anxiety disorder” or “poor impulse control” and write a prescription or hire a therapist. And we have come up with labels for these dogs as a matter of fact: “separation anxiety” for example. And we are drugging them.

Little wonder. Adopting a dog is, for most of us, an inherently rash act, because judging temperament isn’t something most of us can do in the few minutes we spend scanning that litter of puppies or crouched on the concrete floor of an animal shelter. Yet temperament is, in the end, what makes the difference. The dog that is by nature docile-yet-confident is the dog who could be “trained” satisfactorily by anyone, even the least skilled of us–while at the other extreme are those dogs who would be a challenge even for professional trainers, people who have practiced on hundreds of dogs, who have made it their life’s work to understand what levers might be pushed on what sort of dog to get the results they want.

Most dogs and most dog owners fall, of course, in the middle, and fall as well into an uneasy compromise. In the current lingo it’s called “management,” meaning you control how much trouble the dog can get into; you give up the fiction that your dog will ever stop chewing your shoes, and instead crate him when you’re not home to stand guard over the family footwear. Yes, there’s someone out there who could train your dog not to chew your shoes, but that person isn’t you, and you have a job, and kids, and need a bit of downtime in the evening, and are subject to all the other demands and pulls of your busy life, and you give up–you put the dog in the crate. Or remember to keep the bedroom door shut. Or make whatever changes you have to make, in your life, so that the dog and the shoes are kept apart.

In the four years since I wrote a dog training book, I’ve on many occasions been solicited by people to offer dog training advice. The requests come by email, and are accompanied invariably by unhappy back stories: dogs that have bitten, dogs that just aren’t working out. I’m quick to tell these people that I’m not a professional trainer, and although I don’t say so, it may be that my advice is couched in more empathetic language because of it. Many professional trainers don’t know, or have forgotten, how baffling dogs can be to those of us who haven’t had a chance to practice on dozens or hundreds of them. Or maybe “baffling” is the wrong word, because I can tell you, I understand how to train dogs–in both senses of the term–I know how to elicit behaviors and how to modify them–I know the concepts, I’ve put them into practice, I have seen them work.

But I still felt overwhelmed by my dog: the enormity of “training” her overwhelmed me. It’s not the concept but their application.

So I can relate to how so many other dog owners feel when they realize they have a problem animal: a dog who has exceeded their capacities as a trainer.

The fact is that for my dog to have achieved a semblance of what we might call a “suitable companion animal” the investment I would have had to make would have been enormous: hours a week, for her entire life.

Take the unexpected bag on the living room floor. I know a couple different tools for innocculating a dog against such things; without going into too much detail, one is to pair the “notice the bag” event with something positive, such as treats. Eventually, the unexpected bag would have been associated with good things, enough so that encountering it would have become a different sort of experience to the dog.

All I would have had to do was repeat this, dozens of times a year, for a variety of different objects–bags, coats, boxes, new items of furniture, suitcases, Christmas trees, toolboxes–any object that might, under some conceivable circumstance, end up in my house in a spot where it wasn’t normally stowed.

A silly example, perhaps. Who cares if she shies at a suitcase?

So consider this. My dog was extremely sensitive to pain; she was extremely sensitive to any physical stimulation, so much so that it was hard to know, sometimes, if she was in pain; she acted as if things hurt when one suspects they didn’t. And so, if you touched her from behind, on her hindquarters, she would react to it by whipping her head around in alarm; as she got older she started to also, at times, snap, and then came the day the snap connected, became a nip.

I wondered at times if her hips hurt her at times, although she didn’t yelp.

Regardless, this is the sort of thing that can create huge problems in a human household, because it might one day be a child who touches her in the wrong way–and although her jaws weren’t very strong, her nip was just a nasty pinch, it hurt me, and would hurt a child more.

So I worked to modify this by touching her with a hand full of kibble. When she whipped her head around I’d open my hand and let her help herself to the food. It didn’t take too many sessions of this before the inclination to snap faded. I had “trained” her to associate being touched suddenly on her hindquarters with something positive.

But I still don’t know whether I could have ever fully exorcised the baseline behavior–the whipping around of her head–because I didn’t put in enough time and effort into it to find out. She exceeded my capacity to train out that behavior–and moreover, it’s highly likely that in time she would have reverted again to snapping, if I didn’t periodically repeat the touch-treat exercise. And of course, if she did develop hip pain–a highly likely thing, she was a Corgi, with that breed’s relatively long back and relatively weak hindquarters–all bets would be off. Like many reactive and fearful dogs, she had selected aggression as a suitable way to protect herself. Wise dog trainers repeat a truism popularized, I believe, by Jean McDonald, or maybe Ian Dunbar, along the lines of “all dogs bite, it’s just that some dogs are quicker to do it than others.” My last dog, a big mixed breed, had a high tolerance for pain–she once drove a stick through the webbing between her toes and barely seemed to notice it, let alone warn me away from it. Laykey, on the other hand, bit me once hard enough to break the skin, because she had a hurt somewhere, apparently, and I, not knowing it, had tried to pick her up.

We expect, when we bring a dog into our homes, to put in a sizeable amount of work. We know dogs need to be fed twice a day, and walked, and groomed, and played with, and petted. They truly are like toddlers that never grow up, that will always need close parenting.

But what we may not realize, or permit ourselves to acknowledge, is that a good percentage of the dogs from which we select our companions–perhaps a large majority–will have what we call “problems.” They aren’t impossible to address–far from it; the practice of behavior modification is enjoying a kind of golden age; the dog training genre is replete with accessible how-to’s able to guide any literate human in how to solve any problem dog behavior. Where it gets sticky is when you consider the size of the investment required. My dog’s “problems,” although they had a common source, took form in dozens of ways–and the investment I made in one place had no payoff anywhere else. If I was able to dampen her reaction to being touched on the hips, it had no effect on her tendency to snap at other dogs, or scream when given a shot by the vet, or show her teeth if approached by a strange child–behaviors which in some cases she exhibited from the day I brought her home, and which in other cases she began exhibiting as she got older, as if her estimation that the world was a dangerous place best kept at bay seemed to solidify or even escalate as she grew older–and she wasn’t even old enough yet, at eight, to be excused as truly cranky.

Don’t leave me training advice, please. My point is not that I didn’t know what to do with her: I did. I spent years studying dog training; I immersed myself in it; during the period I co-wrote Outwitting Dogs, I had the opportunity to pick the brains of one of the best professional trainers alive today. I did all the right things with her from the beginning, starting with puppy kindergarten and socializing and foundation obedience. Nor did I assume that her training would one day “be done”–I knew full well that it never is. My point is that she needed, as it turned out, more than occasional refreshers: to make her a “suitable companion” would have been a part-time job, for the rest of the dog’s life–hours a week, literally. An enormous investment on my part, of time and money and ingenuity. And had I taken a break at any time, slacked off my effort at all, she would have immediately begun to backslide–because at bottom the problem was her nature, and my “training” was an effort to counter her nature, to brace her world continually against it. Which can be done. But the effort required is constant and enormous.

So I compromised, like most dog owners with “problem dogs” do. I crated her when children came over to visit my daughter. I kept her away from other dogs. I accepted the fact that I would probably be bitten again, at some point, probably more than once, as she aged and developed the inevitable aches and pains, which I wouldn’t discover until I touched her in the wrong place, in the wrong way.

I knew also this made me a failure; with my advantages, I should have been able to shape my Laykey into that perfect companion, and could have, if I had been more . . . something. But she exceeded my capacities; she required someone with more time, with more skills, someone more willing to commit more than I was.

Some might say she exceeded my capacity to love. I guess it depends on what our dogs are owed. I took care of her physical needs; I fed her human-grade food, I made sure she had chew toys always on hand; I got her vet care when she needed it; when she came looking to be petted I petted her. And you know, within a dog’s world, absent pain or thirst or hunger things are generally just ducky; so I think I’m on solid ground to say she judged her life to be a good one, insofar that dogs can judge such things. After all, if she objected to having her hips touched, it wasn’t her that was bothered by it, it was me. For her it was a fleeting thing, over as soon as it was over–it was me who brooded on it, and on my own inadequacies, and her breeder’s, and the notion of purebred dogs, and the lack of a roadmap that would help us amateur dog people negotiate the process of adopting a dog.

I started this post by confessing that her death is my fault. As it was. Such is the bargain we make when we take an animal into our lives: everything that follows becomes our responsibility, every pain they suffer becomes our fault, and more than we would wish the decision that they will die, when the time comes, is more or less in our hands.

For all that, the pain I feel isn’t guilt. It’s grief. I lost my little dog yesterday. She’ll never look up at me with her bright eyes and pricked ears again. I’ve no reason any more to singsong her name, Laykey Laykey Lou Lou, Laykey Laykey Lou Lou.

It hurts. It hurts and shows no sign of stopping.

I’m sorry, little dog. Good-bye, little dog. I’m so sorry.

Laykey. Rest in peace.

I was just on the radio!

That was awesome — I just did a radio interview about Outwitting Dogs for WBER, Rochester’s alt music radio station. What a kick. Thanks Joey & Sgt. Pepper!

Anybody who stops by, the book is available on Amazon.

Other resources I mentioned on the interview. If you’re looking for a Rochester area trainer, Cindy Harrison at SeeSpotThink is terrific. (Many of the photos in 101 Dog Training Tips were taken during classes at her training facility here in Roch.)

Terry Ryan, the trainer who was the real brains behind Outwitting Dogs, is online at Legacy Canine.

If you want to polish those dog training skills

Terry Ryan, the most excellent professional dog training who I collaborated with on Outwitting Dogs, has asked me to help spread the word that she’s got openings in a couple of the courses she teaches.

She writes that there are a few openings in her two-day survey courses in June.

She’s also got openings in August in a couple of courses she teaches with Bob Bailey. These are the famous “chicken training” courses that Bob ran with his late wife for years. Terry’s got some background on them on her website here.

Bob’s the person who introduced me to Terry as well :-)

[tags] dog training, Bob Bailey, chicken training [/tags]

Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli

Dontcha love the language academics use to title their papers?

Saweeeeeeeet.

lol

The stuff inside this particular one is even better, though — as reported by the NY Times:

When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.

It happens just today I was thinking about symmetry and the human body — how there is apparent symmetry externally, but the internal organs are not symmetrical.

Which got me thinking specifically about the heart. Why is the heart on the left? Always on the left? Why aren’t there mirror people with right-sided hearts? Would a human with a heart exactly in the middle be . . . different? How? A different species? And I wonder what would it feel like, emotionally, to have a heart smack dab in the middle?

Don’t ask me why I was thinking all this btw. I have no idea. Now if I were a sci fi writer . . .

Anyway, I’m not, so back to the Times article — this biased whole tail wagging thing is because our brains (“our” meaning a whole lotta higher critters) aren’t symmetrical either. And of course the brain’s asymmetry casts a shadow visible on our external bodies, if you know where to look:

Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate.

At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system.

Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body, such asymmetries are usually manifest in opposite sides of the body. Thus many birds seek food with their right eye (left brain/nourishment) and watch for predators with their left eye (right brain/danger).

In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain).

But that’s not all. Get this — one researcher speculates that the asymmetry of the brain evolved because of the asymetry of the internal organs:

The asymmetry [of the brain] may also arise from how major nerves in the body connect up to the brain, said Arthur D. Craig, a neuroanatomist at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix. Nerves that carry information from the skin, heart, liver, lungs and other internal organs are inherently asymmetrical, he said. Thus information from the body that prompts an animal to slow down, eat, relax and restore itself is biased toward the left brain. Information from the body that tells an animal to run, fight, breathe faster and look out for danger is biased toward the right brain.

My speculation about how a person with a heart in a different spot might feel different doesn’t sound quite so weird now, does it ;-)

(Humor me, please! LOL)

It really IS her dog!

outwitting dogs cover

When someone wrote an Amazon review that she’d bought Outwitting Dogs because her dog was on the cover, I assumed she meant she owned a Jack Russell terrier and bought the book because there’s a Jack Russell on the front.

Doh!!!

It really IS her dog on the cover!!!

camilla, the dog on the cover of Outwitting DogsSusan has sent me some more pics of Camilla to post here. Look at that sweetie! She doesn’t look at all like a dog who would chew a slipper now, does she!

And isn’t this cool? Turns out the book’s cover model is a hard-working industry professional with a massive portfolio — who hobnobs with some of the most famous dogs in the biz!!! Lassie!!! Beethoven! The Taco Bell chihuahua!!! Air Bud! And that’s Bullseye, the Target Bull Terrier, in the sunglasses, right?

camilla, the dog on the cover of Outwitting Dogs

And look at this one — you can see why this dog works a lot. Doesn’t that make your heart just melt?

camilla, the dog on the cover of Outwitting Dogs