Training VS. Management
2017, the year of having no hair and working in the swampy heat of north central Florida with a bunch of confiscated fighting dogs who I loved and learned so much from.
A mentor of mine met me after I had been studying dog training (focusing mainly in behavior modification) for about 5-6 years and she told me “you’re a great dog handler, but I want to help you become a great dog trainer.” I was furious. I had worked so hard to learn everything I could about dogs and wanted to be acknowledged for this, but working for her in a shelter environment she continued to stress the importance of knowing the difference. Handling a dog meant I was well versed in the realm of behavior management. I knew how to keep dogs under threshold to set them up to be successful in the behaviors we were teaching them, but my mentor’s definition of training was “Will that behavior generalize to another person handling the dog?” If the answer was no it wasn’t training. In shelter and rescue dog training this is incredibly important to consider because you’re working with the goal in mind of handing the dog off to an adopter. As much as I didn’t like feeling like the goal post had been moved on me I’ve grown to love and agree with this standard of “what is training?” and use it as a personal metric in my work often. A lot of times though it means I’m not really doing proper dog training.
Transitioning into private dog training I’ve found that I am teaching the human clients the dog management skills that made me a good dog handler because they already own the dog and the need for generalizing behaviors to achieve the client’s goals isn’t so much about generalizing to different handlers as much as it’s getting the dog comfortable about different scenarios and environments. A lot of times I compare owning a behavior dog to owning a service dog. Either because I’m suggesting you protect your dog from the world like they are one or using it as a metaphor to explain that with a behavior dog your job is to take an active role in your relationship with your dog as their service animal to help them navigate the parts of the world that are trickier for them. Ultimately I’m teaching humans how to show up intentionally in everything they do with their dog and that has very little to do with the dog generalizing anything.
So what does management look like?
The first step is getting the human side to recognize those situations their dog struggles in as pressurized. You can’t help them if you aren’t tuned in to how they experience discomfort in the scenarios they struggle in. From there we find ways to depressurize the situation by showing the dog controlled versions of the pictures they dislike broken down in to more tolerable layers. For example if you have a dog who’s reactive to guests visiting your home we bring a new person into the house, but they aren’t allowed to look at, talk to, or try to touch the dog. These boundaries build a bubble around the dog allowing them to take things in at their own pace and make for a great opportunity to show the dog that we are not only aware of how this situation effects them but that we will protect them from it reaching a place of overwhelm. From there we can give the dog a diluted version of the trigger to work around as we begin to introduce patterns dialed down to a level of distraction that’s manageable for the dog to continue to learn in the presence of the pressure of the situation. Over time this pressure becomes tolerable to the dog and we are able to proceed into a more complex version of the picture adding more layers of pressure back as we see our dog able to think through it.
When it comes to a dog’s level of tolerance for pressure it varies greatly. Often if we are dealing with serious behaviors then we’re also working with a dog with a low tolerance for pressure. Maybe not leash pressure or pressure in the form of a correction, but pressure navigating dealing with new people and all the nuances that come with it. This work to me often times feels like the priming and prepping a dog mentally needs so that obedience can eventually be achieved in high distraction environments, but for me “sit”, “down”, and “stay” are never the true goal. If you look at modern takes on puppy socialization the handler is instructed to reward engagement in the presence of distractions. A lot of times the work we do is the exact same except we are dealing with an adult dog with a fully formed opinion about the distraction and their opinion is not positive where as puppies are typically learning that the distraction isn’t relevant to them and it pays to remain glued to their handler. This was very important for me to wrap my mind around in my own journey, because for many years I compared myself and my dog to people training dogs that were purposefully bred to compete in dog sports and competitive obedience. My dog was some random pitbull mix shelter dog of unknown genetic origin who came preloaded with a suspicious demeanor and a very green owner. We had a lot of things that stood in our way of being at a level playing field and I had a hard time recognizing it. We aren’t all starting at the same starting line with the same level of experience and equipment, so a lot of times the work in behavior modification is just working our dogs to get to a place where they can even approach the starting line for other types of training.
The engagement work for BMOD dogs becomes a version of counter conditioning that relies heavily on the dog experiencing the scenario in a different way than they are anticipating which is often hinging on the handler showing up to manage the situation differently. Sometimes that looks like knowing when to catch your dogs attention to capture engagement again when you see them stiffening up in response to the trigger. Other times it’s using leash pressure to help move them past something they may otherwise dawdle and get stuck staring down. When you take an active role in these moments that your dog starts to sink into reactivity you’re helping to push their brain back below threshold, interrupting that fixation and the building pressure with a nudge to help them tune back into being with you and out of the tunnel vision and anxiety of the thing approaching.
Playing this active role of managing your dog around triggers helps capture the vibe of being a leader and is the intentional participation in the relationship you have with your dog that I’m always trying to coach people towards. If you didn’t step in to manage a situation like this and instead sink more into the fear you feel personally of the possibility of your dog reacting you are far more likely to experience that blow up because your fear validates your dog’s anxiety about the situation. Exuding calm to show them things are under control at the very least doesn’t add to their brains argument that something is amiss. “Exuding calm” of course sounds easier than it is and this is why people struggle so often with reactivity, because in order to work through their dog’s issue they have to simultaneously work through their own anxiety they’ve adopted about the trigger. The best advice I can give is to practice becoming mindful of your emotions in those moments. Catch yourself when your breathing speeds up and the pitch of your voice raises and take some deep breaths. Slowing down and speaking in a bored tone is at the very least not adding anxiety to the information your dog is taking in about the scenario and hearing your own voice sounding bored can do wonders for tricking your brain into going “Wait. Is this boring?” It’s most definitely not boring, but eventually it can be if you can harness that panic and begin to control it!
This is all not technically dog training even though it changes my clients lives to put it into practice. They get so much of their lives back implementing consciously and intentionally showing up to help their dog through life and guiding their dog’s focus by finessing situations like a dance. Meeting their dog’s discomfort with minor tweaks to body language, leash handling, tone of voice in order to lead them to a more neutral outcome. It makes everyday people awesome dog handlers and realistically I think that’s all dog owners ever really need to aspire to be.
Ok, so what about dog training?
Dog training through the lens of the definition I provided in the beginning of this blog is a little more straight forward. Patterning behavior, reinforcing what you want repeatedly, correcting what you don’t want repeatedly and with consistency gets you reliable behaviors that will generalize to other people, places, and situations you may not even practice with the dog in. That’s dog training, and it’s a undoubtedly a piece of what we do. A tool we utilize often in our lives with dogs, but it’s not everything and a lot of times it’s not the goal at all to help a behavior dog. “I just want to be able to walk past this person/place/thing without my dog freaking out” are the kinds of goals most of my clients have.
So where does dog training fit in to the work we do?
Obedience training isn’t always easy to generalize, but for the dog and human sides both it’s the clearest way to create patterns of repetition and get a behavior from the dog that can be elicited by foreign handlers. Sometimes this is all you need for a dog to feel safe around new people is a common language for the two of them to use to interact in a structured manner. Other times the dog is too thrown off by some other layer of pressure in that scenario to get in a headspace to comply. Reinforcing things like finding a dog bed to lay in or an obedience position to perform in a situation where they normally try to harass a guest gives the dog some clarity about what their “job” is and can clarify to the dog about what to expect in the future.
Toad and I in ~obedience mode~ 😜
The obedience command isn’t the goal in the behavior modification work I do, it’s a means to an end. People struggle with that. Some people have the ego-based perception of liking the look of controlling another living being with a word. Don’t get me wrong, done well with a dog who is enthusiastic that really is a beautiful thing. Done poorly and with no relationship in action it’s heartbreaking to watch. Others though are just so scared of the dog making a mistake that obedience feels like the only way to control the situation. Again, not totally incorrect, but if we’re trying to teach this dog a genuine life skill of tolerating levels of pressure they’re not comfortable with, being able to adjust how they feel about the pressure and showing them it will pass can achieve the picture of obedience, but from a place that’s more reliable than a dog who’s pressured into compliance. We just have to get them to trust that the situation they are in is a nonthreat. You have to show the dog it’s beneficial to them to find and assume that position you want. Even more importantly though is that you should only want that position out of them because it will help them cope with the pressure better. If they equate our requests for obedience with us helping advocate for them instead of despite their discomfort and get them to a place of safety in a situation that typically makes them feel unsafe that is reinforcing beyond any treat. If we don’t show them safety first before we demand control we are much less likely to build trust and therefore unable to push the dog to build more tolerance in pressurized situations. How far would you follow someone you trust versus someone you don’t?
How much that behavior transfers beyond the primary handlers of the dog I don’t personally worry about when the dog is owned. The reality of this approach is that some dogs reach a place where they are able to overcome their low tolerance for pressure to a point where that can begin to generalize to other people handling the dog with the same result. Others don’t. Technically I think that means I’m only a dog trainer part time and a dog handler trainer the majority of the time. Maybe that by definition also means that some dogs can’t be trained? But they absolutely can be managed. I used to be really hurt by this, feeling like I wasn’t living up to a metric of what I’m supposed to be achieving with dogs both personally and professionally, but I think it’s all important to consider in order to realistically manage our expectations of ourselves and the dogs in front of us. I wanted for years to be recognized as a dog trainer, but struggled to find the place where intense levels of obedience did the trick with me and Toad’s issues. Nowadays I’m ok with it if I’m not technically dog training, not to settle or find some loop hole out of doing the work, but because I care way more about staying aligned with what I’m actually passionate about which is helping dogs, not helping dogs help me boost my ego.
