Oh Behave!

A new client dog who I’ll call Misty is very fearful girl with multiple fear triggers. Misty has growled, snarled and lunged at people in certain situations but hasn’t bitten anyone. Misty’s human definitely has her hands full. “I don’t want her to be the type of dog that bites,” she said when we first met.

I know what the woman meant but I explained to her that actually, all dogs are “the type of dog that bites.” Any dog in the right circumstances can bite.

Biting and other forms of aggressive behavior most commonly arise from fear. Dogs typically avoid engaging in physical combat including biting, because fighting is expensive behavior for the dog from a survival standpoint. In combat, dogs risk being killed or seriously injured. Rather than do battle when faced with an upsetting, threatening or scary situation, most dogs flee or use ritualized forms of aggression to diffuse the conflict and avoid fighting. In other words, most dogs try to get the heck out of dodge, or do things to get the scary thing to go away. Barking, lunging, snarling, and growling are some of the more obvious behaviors that in dog language mean, “Go away. Back off. You are seriously freaking me out.”

I think of bites as a dog’s last line of defense. It’s unusual for a dog to leap frog over warning signals and proceed to biting. Usually long before biting, the dog has been communicating his fearful upset state using subtle warning signals. Well-meaning humans are frequently unaware of the dog’s warnings. Humans don’t notice the signals or don’t know what they mean. But ignoring a dog’s warning signals is a good set up for a dog bite.

All dogs have bite thresholds – points beyond which they are likely to bite. Because every dog is a unique individual, bite thresholds vary from dog to dog.

A dog can be pushed over his bite threshold when multiple fear triggers are presented simultaneously. Think of each fear trigger as a rock. Exposing the dog to fear triggers is like putting rocks in a paper bag. The bag might stand up to the weight of one rock, maybe two, possibly even three. But the more rocks you put into the bag, the bigger the risk the bag will rip apart.

Misty is afraid of men, loud machinery, and strangers who reach towards her head. Misty could easily bite if a strange man tried to pat her on the head just as a noisy street cleaning machine was passing by.

Besides stacking several fear triggers together, another set up for a dog bite is to present a single trigger at a sufficiently high intensity. This is like “growing” the rock into a boulder and putting it in the paper bag. The bag may very well break. In the case of Sam who guards his bones from humans, Sam is fine if a human is 6 feet away while he’s gnawing on a bone. Put the human 4 feet away from Sam and he growls. Put the human 1 foot from Sam and it’s boulder time — Sam bites.

To avoid bites, take the time to “learn” your dog. Identify her fear triggers and pay attention to her body language and warning signals. Avoid putting her in scary upsetting situations in general, and avoid pushing her beyond her bite threshold at all costs. If your dog is showing signs of fear, listen to what she’s saying and get her out of the scary situation as quickly as you can.

Getting a dog out of an upsetting situation may calm the dog in the moment but doesn’t resolve the problem. Fears don’t dissipate on their own. Without positive training interventions, fear-based behavior often gets worse. An experienced positive reinforcement trainer — along with an owner’s diligent follow-through on training instructions — should improve the dog’s emotional response to and behavior around the trigger.

I’m opposed to punishment-based training, period. But I can’t emphasize this enough: punishment-based methods should never be used with a fearful dog, or to address fearful behavior. Punishment-based training will most likely to escalate the dog’s underlying fear and the resultant behavior.

Some excellent resources to address fearful dog behavior include:

• Help For Your Fearful Dog, by Nicole Wilde
• Click to Calm, by Emma Parsons
• Debbie Jacobs’ Fearful Dog Blog

Sometimes in the midst of group training classes, I wonder if anyone’s taking in anything that I’m saying. It’s been a welcome surprise to learn that in the Teaching Love & Compassion (TLC) program – an anti-violence humane education class in which I teach kids to train shelter dogs – the kids really have been paying attention to the stuff I say in training class.

Here are a few sound training tips my TLC students have shared with reporters and one another:

Work at the dog’s pace. Like us, dogs learn at different rates. Just because Max learns to lie down in response to a hand signal in one class session doesn’t mean Muffy will or should. A soild training plan is also a realistic one. It increases the difficulty of an exercise only when the particular dog is ready to go to the next level. Another way of saying this borrowed from my instructors at the SF SPCA’s Academy for Dog Trainers is, “Train the dog in front of you,”. . . not the dog as you think he ought to be, or the neighbor’s seemingly perfect dog.

If your dog isn’t getting it [i.e., the full behavior], do baby steps. Sometimes a dog won’t do a full new behavior right off the bat. This happens often when training a dog to lie down as well as to do more complex behaviors. If that’s the case, break the behavior into small incremental steps and train one step at a time. If Max won’t lie down in response to your well-positioned food lure, you may need to click and treat for lowering his nose to the floor; then nose to the floor with a slight bend in the front elbows; then nose to the floor with progressively deeper elbow bends; then chest lowered to the floor and so on. Training in this way takes time and patience but with a consistent, careful training plan, Max should eventually learn to do the full behavior.

If your dog is tired of training, stop and spend cuddle time with him. Just because you want to train for 20 minutes doesn’t mean Max can last that long. In fact, it’s far more effective to keep training sessions short — anywhere from 3-10 minutes at a time depending on the individual dog and what you’re working on. As for the reference to “cuddle time,” I plan quite a bit of that in TLC classes. Why? I’ll segue to the words of another student:

Dogs need love and affection. Indeed! Dogs are highly social animals. They need companionship, touch, affection and attention. Dogs are not furry robots on the end of the leash, stuffed animals or rugs. Cuddling with your dog deepens the trust you share, feels good to the dog, and does wonders for you such as lowering stress, anxiety and blood pressure.

There’s no point in yelling, cussing at or hitting your dog. That won’t teach him what you want him to do. A long time ago, someone who was trying to teach me to drive shouted at and berated me whenever I made a mistake, and was clearly angry and frustrated with me throughout the lesson. I was miserable, unable to focus on what I was supposed to be doing, terrified of making a mistake, and began to think driving wasn’t for me. I dreaded lessons with that person and eventually enrolled in a driving instruction class, which was a far more positive experience. (If you”re wondering, I became a very good driver!)

Similarly, getting angry at a dog, intimidating, scaring or hurting him are good ways to ensure that he doesn’t learn or doesn’t learn quickly or well. These tactics will likely cause the dog to fear the trainer, drive down the dog’s confidence, can cause behavior to worsen, and create a very negative association with training. Simply put, the dog won’t want to train.

In the TLC program I teach the kids to train the dogs using positive training, which rewards dogs for behaviors we like and want to see more of. It’s effective and fun for everyone involved and results in dogs who are eager and happy to train, and TLC students who as they put it, “had a blast” training their dogs.