THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

We’re working on a new website, and anyone who has been there knows that it’s like building a house: the number of decisions needing to be made becomes ridiculous after awhile. That’s the bad news, but here’s the good news: I have the luxury of your feedback to help us make one of the decisions.

Here’s the question: What do we call the new section of the website that is a compendium of things I’ve written or taped that are available by the click of a mouse? It will include my Bark articles, blog posts and videos, all organize by topic. At the bottom of the ‘page’, if it’s relevant, we’ll include links to books, booklets and DVDs available for sale from the shopping cart.

We are all excited about having this new part of the website available, but would love your thoughts on what to call it. We have been referring to it as The Learning Center, but have some concerns about expectations. Although we are planning to add to it as we can, and keep it growing and expanding, when we launch this summer it will primarily consist of material already written or taped. Here’s how it will work: When you click on this section (whatever it is called), you can then choose from “Training Your Dog,”  “Solving Behavior Problems,”  “Behavior & Health,” or “Finding Resources”

If you click on Solving Behavior Problems, a list of problems will come up, including, for example, Separation Anxiety. Click on that and you’ll see pdf’s for any Bark article I’ve written on the topic, links to any blog post I’ve written about it, and a link to the book I’ll Be Home Soon available in the SHOP section.

We were thinking of calling the section The Learning Center (as you can see below), but are concerned about the expectation that suggests. Given that every topic won’t necessarily have a specific “lesson” on how to train X or Y, or how to treat problem A or B, we are concerned that people will expect that and not get it. Here are favorite choices for the section’s title so far:

The Learning Center

The Library

The Media Library

The Resource Center

Which one do you think best describes the content?  Expectations are so important in behavior (all dog trainers know that, right?!), and we don’t want people to expect one thing and not get it. BUT we’re super excited about having this new section on the website that will provide a number of resources that haven’t been on the website before. We would all (that’s me, Denise, Katie and Lisa at McConnell Publishing) would be very grateful for your feedback.

Here’s a sneak preview of the home page in progress. Wheeeee! (Did I say we are excited?) The pictures at the bottom will line up, I promise, there will be a lot less of Willie boy in the photos and the text and individual photos will change (the photo at the top will be a revolving one, along with different text focusing on a book, upcoming seminar, Bark article, toy, etc) but you get the idea. It’s the “Learning Center” at the bottom we’re not sure of… do we really have the right title?  THANKS!

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: The seasonal temperatures and plant life are still 5-6 weeks out of alignment, and so the plants are where they normally would be in early June, but the temperature is right on schedule. Thus, a couple of times a week we get heavy frosts, and each time my poor plants suffer some more. I covered them for 5 nights, but ran out of steam last week. And I can’t cover everything, so there are several areas, and plants, that I’ve just got to accept are not going to make it. (No apples or plums this year? Probably not, but maybe…? Hope springs eternal, right?!)

But Willie is wonderful, worked sheep at a friend’s beautifully, and seems as sound as I expect he’s ever going to be. We still do some exercises and his stretching, and he’ll never be allowed to jump up to catch anything, ever, but he’s happy and I still sometimes have to pinch myself that the year from hell is over. His year of constraints definitely had a price–a new fear of men and a lack of confidence on sheep that no doubt was the result of being badly injured and then confined for so long. My most aggressive ewe, Barbie, chased him away a few days ago. Granted, she’s extra protective now with her lamb, and has always been the most difficult ewe to work, but he’s always been able to face her off once her lamb was old enough to work. Not this time. I didn’t force anything, although I gave him a few more tries, but then finessed things so that he moved the entire flock without having to face off Barbie. I suspect it’ll be an entire summer to get his confidence back up. But the lambs will grow and Barbie will become less protective, and I have dear friends with sheep who Willie and I can work who are flighty and not confrontational.

Every day I put Willie on a down/stay and hide his floppy disc. Searching for it avoids his ‘short stopping’ and straining his shoulder. He loves the game. When he finds it he leaps and runs and shakes it like a terrier with a rat (sorry rat lovers!). Here he was this morning, so proud he’d found it yet again. And no, he doesn’t want a new one. He has new ones. He likes this one. I call it his Binky.

Balance is a term used by sheep dog handlers, but I find myself thinking of its value in so many other contexts related to dogs.

In sheep herding, “balance” refers to a dog’s ability to place itself exactly where he or she needs to be to take control of the sheep without frightening them. It refers to two things really. One is the distance between the dog and the sheep. Too far away? — no control, no pressure. Too close? — forces the sheep to run away in a panic, or to turn and fight. Just right? Exactly at the point at which the sheep will turn and move away from the dog without panicking.

The other aspect of balance is side to side, left to right. For example, does the dog stop at exactly the right place on an outrun to move the sheep directly toward you once he begins to walk directly toward them? Novices tend to believe that a dog should always stop at 12 o’clock, but that’s not always true. If the sheep want to go to your left (as you face the dog and the sheep), then the dog needs to stop at 1o or 11 o’clock, not 12.

Dogs can learn better balance, but there’s little more valuable than a dog who just “has it,” and early in training, finds for him or herself that perfect position to manage the sheep. The perfect position is different for every flock, in every context and even at different times of the day, so it’s not easy at all. It just looks that way when a dog is really talented, just like great dancers and ice skaters make it look effortless.

But easy it’s not, it takes skill and experience. And while thinking about balance (see the photos below), that finding it in many other contexts isn’t so easy either. That’s as true in dog training as it is in sheep herding (not to mention the rest of life). And as with sheep dogs, some balance is innate and some can be learned. Over twenty three years of working with aggressive dogs helped me find a balance between reinforcing good behavior and practical, humane ways of inhibiting ‘bad’ behavior (often just management, but if we’re talking about biting people, the word “just” should be deleted).

Here’s another example: I’ve learned that Willie needs a balance of quiet time and exercise, more so than any of my other dogs. Too much fetching, for example, not only hurts his shoulder, but it makes him overly aroused, rather than relaxed. Too much stimulation (for example, leaving him loose to bark at noisy trucks passing by when I’m gone) makes him crazy; too little makes him fearful and neurotic. Granted, Willie will always be my special needs dog, but I think this general concept applies to all of our dogs in some ways.

I also need to balance my voice with Willie. Sometimes Willie needs me to use my voice to quiet him down, and so I speak with a low voice, either quiet, long words like “Slooooooooow” or “Eaaaaaaasy”. Other times I need to speak sharply to stop him (“Whoa!”) because, well, he’s being an idiot and about to get himself hurt. Other times, he needs encouragement, and I’ll use a completely different voice, higher pitched, more modulated and often short, repeated notes.

What about you? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this: Take the word balance and play with it awhile: What have you found you needed to balance with your dog? Yourself? Your methods? Open ended I know, but sometimes that leads to the most interesting conversations. (And if you have figured out the whole “work-play balance thing,” let me know how you found it.)

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: The unseasonal heat has left (yeah) but now the frosts are back a few nights a week. It got down to 24 F last week, low enough to cause some serious damage. But it’s lovely even in the rains we’ve had lately, and feels very spring-y indeed. The lambs make it even more so, here’s Rosebud’s triplets a few hours after birth. I’ve just dipped their umbilical cords in iodine, you can see them still attached:

And here’s Willie (if he’ll forgive me for advertising his error), illustrating a glitch in the balance I was talking about. I sent him around to the right to bring the flock to me. This was the first time I’d worked him on the flock since they lambed. I don’t work a dog on the sheep for the first 2 weeks after lambing, the ewes are understandably too protective around their lambs and it causes fights that I think are unnecessary. The ewes below have lambs over 2 weeks old, but are still willing to give Willie a hard time. He knows that, and in addition, Willie has lost confidence on sheep since his injury, surgery and lack of work for over a year.

Is that why he stopped short here? I don’t know, but you can see that he did. I sent him and waited to see if he’d pick the right place to stop and walk in on the sheep. He didn’t. He stopped short; see how the sheep are still heading toward the left? Some have turned their heads at least, but the dark one in the  middle, Lady Godiva is still facing left, and she and Barbie are the 2 leaders.

I stayed quiet, and Willie balanced himself, moving counter clockwise to get into the correct position. You can see how some of the sheep have already begun responding.

And here’s where he choose to walk in again. This time it was perfect. See how the sheep are facing me head on and walking directly toward me now? Good boy Willie.

You might have noticed that 2 of the sheep have their heads down grazing. That’s because I asked Willie to stop so that I could get a photo. His stopping took the pressure off, so they put their heads down to eat. Always a good choice (eating) as far as I’m concerned. Time for me to go do that now! As always, I look forward to your comments.

Last  Saturday my teenage ewe, Butterfinger, had her first lamb. I found her in the barn pen, licking off a slippery package of skin-covered bones covered with tiny whorls of wool and placental slime. Even though she was a first-time mom, she was a good one. She attended to her lamb just as she should, licking off the sack and clearing her head and nose first, nickering to her repeatedly, and standing patiently during the lamb’s first wobbly attempts to find the faucet. After I had seen that things were going well and the lamb looked hardy and healthy, I dipped the umbilical cord in iodine, and my guests and I left them alone and walked up the old farm road to visit the rest of the flock grazing in the breeze at the top of the hill.

When we came down the lamb seemed a bit weak; she’d stand up to nurse and then lie down before getting any milk. It was sunny and warm, and because young animals don’t thermoregulate well, I wondered if she was getting overheated. So I picked her up and and moved her and mom into the shade inside the barn. My guests and I went into the house, and I didn’t get back to check on her for over an hour. When I did, I found the lamb dead, sprawled on the ground beside her mother, who was still nickering and nudging in a futile attempt to rouse her newborn.

It’s hard to articulate what it’s like to walk into the barn and find that one of your sheep is dead. It’s a shock of course, but there is so much more that I struggle to translate. It was alive, and now it’s dead, and “dead” is just too damn final to deal with when it comes out of the blue. “Wait!” I want to say… roll back the clock a minute and I’ll come to the barn sooner and do something to save the lamb and then this won’t have happened and the little life that spent five months growing inside Butterfinger will still be here…. If only, If only, If only.

But that way lies madness, and I know it.  I’ve raised sheep now for over 20 years, along with ducks and dogs. I’ve been a zoologist for just as long, and have thus seen numerous animals dead or dying and in all states in between. And although I felt physically sick for the rest of the day, I also realized that is this is why I love my farm so much. I imagine that sounds strange, at best, and at worst, an indication that I have indeed gone mad — “I love raising animals because they die” is not an easy line to explain. Bear with me.

It is easy to be disconnected from “life” in our culture. I mean “life” in the sense of “life on earth,” or the complicated all- encompassing web of soil and worms and birds and pollen and dogs and pine trees and streams and flowers that surrounds us whether we focus on it or not. And after living in the country and raising animals, I know now at some primal, atavistic level that you can’t separate out “life” and “death.” They are part and parcel of the same thing, two sides to the coin, the night that defines the day. And as hard as it often is, there’s something about this awareness, this being forced to deal with the shock of a dead newborn lamb along with the joy of watching healthy ones frolic, that gives me comfort. It helps me to feel centered, with the earth holding me up and the land surrounding me, with something bigger and better than my own little life.

And this is also part of why I love dogs so much. What better animal to keep us connected with other species, other realities, the joys and sorrows of biology? Here’s how I expressed that in The Other End of the Leash: “We humans are in such a strange position–we are still animals whose behavior reflects that of our ancestors, yet we are unique–unlike any other animal on earth. Our distinctiveness separates us and makes it easy to forget where we come from. Perhaps dogs help us remember the depth of our roots, reminding us–the animals at the other end of the leash–that we may be special, but we are not alone. No wonder we call them our best friends.”

Last week I spent many hours trying to save my perennial flowers from the inevitable hard freezes we all knew would come after the unseasonable warmth caused them to grow as if it was May instead of March. One evening, as I piled on mulch and covered plants with old towels, I groused in anger about having to spend my time doing this, when what I really wanted to do was “garden.” And then I began laughing at myself, because how else would you define what I was doing, except by calling it gardening? Of course I was gardening, but the weather and the plants got to define what that meant, rather than me. Gardens, and dogs, and the sheep in the barn have their own agendas. We are wise to understand where each of us, just one little life on earth, fits in. Sometimes we get to write the agenda, or direct the traffic. Sometimes we are merely along for the ride. It’s good to remember that, no matter where you live.

Here are some photographs taken by one of our visitors on Saturday. He is a far better photographer than I (and Jim and I lusted after his 500 mm lens), and he graciously agreed to let me post his photographs. Thank you, Rob, I love being able to post these pictures.

This is Butterfinger and the lamb that died a bit later. Butterfinger is doing well, by the way, she called for her lamb for about two days and now is quiet. She stays close to her mother and her sister, Oreo, who has a two-week old, healthy lamb. I’m afraid I am going to have to change her name: although I’m not giving her any supplemental food, Butterfinger is downright fat. After a few more days of sympathy, I’m going to start calling her Butterfat. (And by the way, just in case you’re not used to seeing them, newborn lambs come out little more than bones and skin, so this little lamb looked perfectly normal compared to the rest.)

Here’s her sister Oreo and her black and white lamb. The other 3 lambs are solid white (2) or black (1), it’s just this one who is replicating a Border Collie. We’re still waiting on Spot and Rosebud, who must not have been bred the first time they mated with King Charles. He was a young ram and I suspect his sperm just wasn’t up to it. Ewes cycle every 17 days, so we’re hoping for some more lambs this weekend.

And here’s a photo of me and Willie boy. He’s a bit out of focus, but after a year of his severe exercise restrictions, it still makes my heart sing to see him run.

We just released a DVD of the seminar I did in Naples, Florida on Animal Assisted Therapy and Activities, “Lending a Helping Paw.” I’m excited about it, because it gives me the opportunity to help individuals and organizations who want to help others. It is an example of an activity we can do with our dogs that is a triple win (for us, our dogs, and people who need some oxytocin and/or physical therapy). Because of that, old social worker that I am, it’s near and dear to my heart.

Speaking of hearts, and what fills ours with happiness, the question arises about how effective AAT (Animal Assisted Therapy) and AAA (Animal Assisted Activities) really are. I remember a conference put on by the Delta Society many, many years ago that included a controversial study. It showed that, in this study anyway, the greatest benefit was to the owners of the dogs, not the patients in the facility. Whoops. While the audience greeted the news with a disapproving silence, I was cheering in the wings, because it’s good to examine the issue objectively, rather than just following our hearts in this case.

Indeed, the study was very useful and no doubt had an impact on “best practices” as currently defined. It found that the teams in this case had just walked into people’s rooms without asking permission. No surprise then that the residents weren’t all in favor of the project; they’d already lost so much control in their lives that the last thing they needed was to lose more. That’s why good programs like The Delta Society and TDI emphasize the importance of putting the patient first, and letting them drive the system.

But the question remains: Is AAT and AAA really effective? First, we need to distinguish between AAT and AAA. Much of what people call AAT isn’t truly therapy in the medical sense of the word.  To be labeled as therapy the interactions need to be directed or delivered by health and human service professionals, with goals set, treatment plans written and progress carefully recorded. Animal Assisted Activities, on the other hand, include visits, petting, games and tricks.

Here’s the good news for those of us who want to believe that AAA and AAT are beneficial to the recipients: There is indeed research that shows it’s efficacy in several modalities:  Two studies that I can think of off the top of my head found that visits from dogs decreased the perception of pain after surgery. One study asked children to rate their pain (Robbins et al, J of Holistic Nursing, Vol 24, No 1, 206) and another looked at the amount of pain medication used after joint surgery, which is a good, objective and quantifiable measure (Kaplan, AAT Conference Abstract 2004). A third study found that walking with a dog significantly increased compliance with physical therapy programs and increased ambulation exercise: 28% refused to walk without a dog, only 7.2% with a dog. In addition, steps walked more than doubled once patients did walk (Abate et al J. of Cardio. Nursing 2011).

This is not surprising to those of us who are aware of the impact of dogs on our oxytocin levels, and the impact of oxytocin on pain perception (it decreases), immune responses (it increases) and affect (it tends to make us feel safer and more secure). But we do have to be careful here: Not everyone benefits from visitations or therapy from a companion animals. You have to like dogs to get an oxytocin rush from them. (Most “therapy” animals are dogs, but some programs have cats or rabbits for selected patients. No reports of sheep yet….) Awhile ago I visited a senior center with a good friend and her dog. I’d guess about half the people we saw were interested in interacting. The rest appeared to be either neutral or clearly avoiding an interaction. My friend knows what she is doing, and was careful to not impose her dog onto anyone who wasn’t a dog lover.

This all gets back to one thing I emphasize in the DVD: The patient is the star of the program. Not your dog, not you. As much as we love our dogs, if we do this right we’re doing it for people who aren’t as fortunate as we are, and don’t have the opportunity to interact with dogs as we do. It’s all about them, and keeping that in mind is critical to a program’s success.

Other aspects of AAT and AAA are essential too: The Lending a Helping Paw DVD has an extensive section on what dogs are suited for therapy work, and how to ensure that your dog is really enjoying the process (these are the 2 most common problems that professionals in the field encounter). It discusses organizations that certify teams, what is required to obtain certification and how to work with facilities in a professional and pro-active way.

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Instead of playing with the lambs or gardening, last night I went to a senior facility outside of Madison and delivered copies of the DVD to one of the stars of the show: Ruth Trameri. She’s the lovely lady on the right of the cover, with my good friend Beth Viney’s (on the left) and her certified therapy dog, Czar. (Czar was an early admirer of my Gr Pyr, Tulip… that’s actually how Beth and I met.) Here they are,  gracing the cover of the new DVD:

And here’s a video from the DVD of Tootsie’s first visit to a facility. We used her (and Willie and 3 other dogs) to evaluations of  potential therapy dogs. (Tootsie passed, Willie… no surprise here, does not: too enthusiastic). This video segment is testing for one of the most important qualities of a good therapy dog — sociability. Dogs need to be interested in everyone, true social butterflies, but calm and respectful at the same time. Watch how Tootsie tells us where she’d most like to be…. (and feel your oxytocin levels rise?). Thanks to Beth Viney, the Director of Pet Pals in Madison WI, Dr. Linda Sullivan, and Pet Pals volunteer Diane Peltin and Ruth Trameri for helping with the evaluation section of the video, we all had a great time and it resulted in some very instructive (and, I might add, amusing) videos.