Good Dog, Bad Dog

Look at me, not writing for a whole month again. I meant to write at least once every week, if not more often! I could excuse myself with something about a new roommate moving in a week early – there are now five adults, two dogs, and a demon cat living in the house – and helping said new roommate settle in to a new state, sell work at her first art show, start a new martial arts class, change churches, resume classes at GCU…you know, life. Life changes at a whirlwind pace, or not at all, and there are some things worth pursuing for consistency. Turns out writing is very cathartic for me (like I haven’t “discovered” that a few dozen times already) so it ought to be one of the consistent things, even during a whirlwind phase. So here I am, writing.

First off, another Greta picture. This is me and a couple friends and Greta at our favourite coffee shop, and a demonstration of exactly what service dogs are supposed to do at restaurants. When my friend went up to the counter to ask for a little dish to give Greta some water, the guy behind the counter couldn’t see her under the table, she was being so still and calm, that he actually didn’t believe there was a dog in the restaurant! I got that all the time with Prada, and now with Greta, in restaurants, on planes, at church…service dogs at rest ought to be quiet, tucked out of the way, unobtrusive. Just like this J

 

Now for what I really want to write about. I promised updates on my knowledge of dog guide training. Lots of updates. It’s one of the things that people ask me about the most, how the dogs are trained, how I’m trained, how we communicate. At TSE we receive several lectures on how dogs’ senses and brains process information, so it can be pretty easy to take for granted the excellent system of communication we develop with each dog, but as a first-time retrain, for the first time making that transition between a dog that knew my every look and tone change to a dog that doesn’t know me at all, I have a whole new respect for all the nuances of training and communication development – language learning, really – that takes place over a working team’s lifetime. I could “ahem” at Prada, and she knew exactly what to stop doing. Greta hardly notices. I could call Prada anything and she came, she knew I meant her. Greta only answers to “Greta” and “Little Monster.” No “sweetheart” or “little miss” or any of the other endearments I use. We’re getting there, but it takes time.

One of the biggest changes in my understanding of canine psychology was learning the limited range of dogs’ tonal comprehension. When you want to tell a human to stop doing something, you have a range of tones to use. It’s hard to demonstrate that over text, so I’ll use an ever-increasing grade of vocabulary and you’ll just have to imagine my tone growing increasingly angry as I go along.

      “Can you not do that?”

      “Please stop.”

      “Stop that.”

      “I said stop that!”

      “Hey, knock it off!”

      ‘If you don’t stop that right now, I swear I’ll – “

      “GET OUT OF MY ROOM!”

Dogs can’t hear the subtle tonal variations between a request and yelling. They have a total of three tones which they understand: Positive, command, and negative. Translation: “good dog!,” “do this,” and “bad dog!” While going straight from “we’re ok, having a good time” to “bad dog!” might seem rude and unreasonable, even abusive, to a human, anything in between those two ranges confuses the dog; he doesn’t know what you want him to do. It is imperative that you communicate clearly what you want the dog to do, or not do.

Thing is, it’s not just me that needs to know that. Greta still persists in trying to greet her friends when she’s off harness by giving them full-body hugs. She gracefully rises up on her back paws and braces her front paws on her friend’s chest, then slides them around to hug and leans in for a kiss on the nearest available surface. This is an unacceptable behaviour for a service dog, but it is one of Greta’s primary means of showing affection so it’s been difficult to train her out of it. It’s even harder if my roommates are laughing as they tell her “off.” She doesn’t understand that they don’t want her to do that; she interprets laughter as positive encouragement, not a correction. I’ve had to coach them in going straight to angry “bad dog’ voice when she does that, and to encourage her not to by lifting a knee into her chest and using both hands to push her off. It’s a work in progress, one which I might have to find an even more aggressive means of discouraging. But my point is, if I’m going to maintain her behavioural standards at home, I need to educate my roommates in canine psychology so they can help me enforce good behaviour. Right now I’m pretty sure I’ve convinced my roommates that ‘off’ is a command tone, not a positive tone. We need to step it up to “bad dog” tone, but it is really hard to convince nice people to pretend to be angry at a cute furry dog that just wants to be loved simply for the sake of communication. Good news, I have cool roommates. Bad news, they’re speaking Gaelic to my Latin-speaking dog.

The other major thing – there were a ton of minor things – that I learned about corrections is that I was doing them backwards. There are two kinds of on-harness corrections that we do; we correct for distractions and work errors. It’s counter-intuitive, but we are actually supposed to correct harder for distractions than work errors. A work error doesn’t necessarily indicate distraction, but distraction means the dog is no longer paying attention to me, the route, and threats on our route, which is dangerous. A work error means something like running a crosswalk (not stopping at the curb) or running me into something, whereas a distraction is sniffing something, scavenging stuff off the ground, paying attention to a person or a dog. Yes, you read that correctly; I should correct less for getting run into something than for sniffing a bush. If the dog runs me into something it might be because she’s distracted, or it might be because she’s thinking about a different obstacle, whereas the bush means she is not paying attention to me at all. I am not good at remembering this or enforcing that balance. I hope writing about it will help me remember in the field. I always remember things better when I’ve written them down.

I’ve got a lot more to write about a lot more subjects, but I think that’s a pretty good sample for now. I’ll finish it up with some personality quirks I’ve discovered in my new partner.

Greta doesn’t like to climb into running cars. She flat-out refuses sometimes, and just balks other times. I’ve actually had to ask people to turn their vehicles off so I can get her into the car. This is a quirk I encourage; a healthy respect for running cars is a good thing.

Greta also appears to have problems with motorcycles. It’s not likely that she saw many up close, given her training was in winter in New jersey, so when she sees these huge metal person-beasts flying down the road, she gets very upset, caught between her protective instinct and her fear. In order to solve this problem, I called up my local Harley Davidson dealership and asked permission to bring her down to introduce her to some motorcycles up close and personal. The best way to allay a dog fear is to introduce the dog to the scary thing and prove to them it’s not scary. The staff at the dealership were absolutely delighted with the prospect and were incredibly helpful when I brought her to their showroom. See my brief Facebookpost on the subject for details.

And finally, Miss Greta apparently loves escalators. Any time I pass one she pulls toward it, tries to line me up to go up or down. On the few occasions when I’ve needed to take said escalator, as soon as we finish our ride she turns right around and wants to go the other direction! While exercising her at the mall today (nobody wants to walk in 95 degree heat and 95% humidity while wearing a fur coat!) I think we went up and down escalators six or seven times, and she still wanted more! I don’t know what it is, if she’s just really pleased with her ability to execute that task or she likes watching the world go up and down while she sits still, but she really, really likes escalators. I foresee many many escalators in my future, and a very happy doggy.