Shelter Tales
I’ve known for a long time that when it comes to working with dogs, predictability is key. Now I’m learning more about the importance of sequence in training sessions. And I know, without anyone telling me, that my own observations and problem solving are key to figuring out the best sequences. For instance, here’s a dog ready to solve problems - Bailey.
If you visited Bailey at the shelter and only saw her in her kennel, you’d get the wrong idea about her. She’s shy and stressed out when people look at her, and she’ll spin and bark and in general kick up a fuss that says “keep away!” But once she recognizes you’re not a threat, she’s a very different dog. When I’m working with her at the shelter, she does a nice job of waiting at doors, she knows the cues, “sit,” “down,” and “touch” and she knows to look at me when she’s trying to figure out what’s next.
She is also learning to bring the rope toy back to me if she wants to keep the game of fetch going, and not to grab for it when I reach for it. In other words, she’s very trainable, even in the less than ideal conditions of living at the shelter. I’d started other dogs on our few pieces of agility equipment, and it seemed like a logical next step for Bailey. Spoiler alert - it didn’t go exactly as planned.
Bailey settled down on the other side of the jump and got that look on her face, ‘Okay, what’s next?’ If I called to her, she simply walked around the jump to get to my side. So I tried something called “luring.”
In the photo, I’m trying to lure a very leery Bailey to jump over the hurdle. Much smaller dogs have been easily persuaded to go over, with a much smaller luring gesture. But starting out with this step was, looking back, a mistake on several fronts. Sure, a dog like my buddy Spot, who jumps for the fun of it, went right over. But Bailey isn’t Spot.
If I had thought about what I knew about Bailey, I would never have expected her to go over that hurdle. Here’s what I should have considered.
Bailey didn’t demonstrate any great affection for jumping. In fact, when I’d go to get her from the kennel, she jumped less than any dog I’ve worked with. A reasonable conclusion is that she’s not a natural jumper like Spot.
When I started bringing her to the second floor of the annex building, Bailey was very timid about climbing the stairs. I had to speak very soothingly and encouragingly and give her treats galore to convince her that taking the risk of that scary adventure was worth it. It took her about three visits to the annex before she approached the stairs without big trepidation.
So, what should I have taken from that very clear communication on her part? New experiences in a physical space can freak her out. Those two observations about her behavior should have told me she wouldn’t merrily jump that hurdle without lots of pre-training.
Bailey was attentive and happy to do other things, just not this thing. Given that information, I did what I have done many times before – I broke the behavior I was looking for into smaller steps. I’ve done this very successfully with other dogs and other behaviors. I’ve taught dogs who had no interest in running after a ball to enjoy the game of fetch. I’ve taught dogs who were afraid of being touched that gentle, predictable human touch was very nice. If I could do that, I could teach Bailey to go over the hurdle.
I lowered the hurdle almost to the floor. Nope. Then I took the hurdle bar off. Here’s the result:
As it turns out, Bailey didn’t even want to go through the uprights.
Having confessed to making a training error, I’ll give myself some credit for this: Bailey wasn’t unhappy at any point in my trial and error approach. As you can see in this photo, she’s not going to step over that bar, but she’s relaxed, and ready to interact: her trust in me is undiminished. My approach - be curious about her behavior rather than frustrated - helped safe guard our good relationship. I watched my sweet girl Bailey for clues, and she helped me figure out that walking between the uprights is where we needed to start.
Going forward, unless I find better wisdom in another approach, whenever I start a dog on the hurdles, I’ll use a more effective sequence. I’ll start out with just the uprights. It’s a quick test, and if that’s easy for them, I’ll move up the sequence to find their level of comfort and the place we need to spend some training time on.
That said, while training in shelter conditions isn’t optimal, it does have an advantage over training in the home or in a group class. It’s just my eyes on Bailey and hers on me. We’re not being watched by folks in a class, or visitors at my house, or people watching us on the sidewalk - there’s no peer pressure when it’s just me and Bailey working together in the shelter annex!
If you’re working with your dog where it feels like a public performance, try to be clear about your goals, and keep those goals in the realm of helping you and your dog have a better life together. I’m working with Bailey on beginning agility not because I’m hoping she’ll get up to competition level, but because I want to give her a learning challenge, and I want to increase her comfort with the physical world outside her kennel.
If public training makes you uncomfortable, I suggest you decide on a foundational training goal. With the shelter dogs, my goal is to help them become more adoptable. When I was working with my own two dogs, some of the best training I did was simply with the goal of soaking up their energy and keeping them from being bored.
Try out a goal and use it to focus in situations where you feel the eyes of the world are on you and your dog. Look at it this way, if you can pick up dog poop in public, you can probably shrug off attention your dog might get when they “misbehave’ or your training gets a little awkward. Stay curious about what you’re learning from your dog, adjust your actions to what you learn, and you might even find that training is a pleasure.
Resources
Bailey’s post at the Humane Society
The Potsdam Humane Society is located in Northern New York, and finds homes for hundreds of animals every year. Bailey’s puppies were adopted quickly, but she’s been there for months.
I’ve just discovered this resource, “Enrichment for the Real World” podcast series. It looks promising. Of course, I need to adapt what they offer and re-imagine it for a shelter environment. And you’ll probably find some things you like and some you set aside. That’s as it should be - we’ve all got different goals for our work with dogs, and different strategies will strike us as ones we can give a try.
Out in the Yard
My backyard faces east. In the winter, when the trees are bare, I have a good view of the sunrise. Some mornings the view is subtle, and I have to remind myself to pause and look out to appreciate the start of a new day. But other times, like this morning in late November, it’s a show.
Whenever I see a sky shot through with red, a phrase I learned decades ago crosses my mind, “Red sky at night, sailors delight; red sky in morning, sailors take warning.” The lines have such a jaunty air. And, as a kid, it had for me the romance of the idea of setting out on the ocean. But this tidy description of a sequence of events turns out to have a solid base in what we know about atmospheric conditions.
I often find meteorology mind boggling, but a book I bought in 1979 for $3.00, Weather Guide, written by Bud Hedinger, is refreshingly clear. At the time Hedinger was a weather reporter for a TV station in Syracuse New York. You can catch him these days as a voice for the news radio show “Good Morning Orlando.” According to Hedinger, the phrase’s reliability rests on the fact that most weather systems approach from the west. If the sun rising in the east reflects off clouds coming in from the west, the result is a red sky that offers an early warning of an approaching storm. When the sun sets, a red hue indicates the relatively dry air of a fair weather system moving in. That said, I confess that while I understand the red sky in morning part, I’m still baffled by the red sky at night description. I’ll study up on the information offered by the Library of Congress.
Resources
Library of Congress explains Red Sky at Night
With great photos and short paragraphs, the Library of Congress (LOC) takes on explaining just why there’s some truth in the old adage about the sunrise and sunset predicting weather. It’s already answered a question of mine - does this ‘weather from the west’ idea hold true globally? According to the LOC, “in the mid-latitudes, the prevailing winds are westerlies.” So at least in the belly band of the globe, the saying is worth knowing.
At the Writing Table
I’m working on finding an agent for my novel, Lucky. (That’s my rough idea for a cover, but I know I might have little to say about the cover unless I self publish).
It’s been a long and interesting path to get here. At one point I thought the way writing books went was something like this:
Get an idea
Write the book
Try to get it published
Now I think of it like this:
Get an idea
Write the book. Discover that your mother doesn’t think it’s done. Reluctantly admit she has a point. Write some more. Decide you still agree with her and write some more. Go to a conference, take a look around at all the others who also want to get a book published and decide not to slip into hopelessness. Take it to heart when an agent you pay to get feedback from says about a character, “Would he really feel like that in that moment?” Go home and get your money’s worth by applying that question to every character every time. Realize, eventually, that you’re still not done, and keep working. Decide the opening passages to four of the chapters should serve as models for the way to start each chapter and work on that. Keep going even when it gets to be a slog because you’re finally down to the chapters you kept putting off. Reread the whole book again, for the countless time, and decide that you’ve left some aspects about the characters’ past and their interactions unsaid when, seriously, the reader deserves to know more. Keep catching tiny errors and know that you’re building empathy for your students, who probably don’t believe you when you say everyone needs to keep working on their writing, even you. Decide the book needs more work and dig back in.
In short, it is far more circular a process than I expected.
Resources
The People We Keep by Allison Larkin
I’ll close with a nod to the book I’m reading right now, which I hope to use as a comparable title to my own novel. (Comparable titles let the agent know what type of readers you think will like your book. Finding comps might be the hardest part of the end game of trying to get a book published.) I’m on page 56 and I’m loving it.