THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

Recently I had a discussion with good friends and colleagues about how to handle difficult cases in which two dogs have engaged in extremely serious fights in the home. We found ourselves sorting through what factors need to be considered if re-homing is on the table. This is a common problem brought to behaviorists; I must have seen hundreds of clients who had dogs who did not get along. At all. I don’t mean dogs who had minor tiffs, or dogs who were occasionally possessive-aggressive (“My couch! My human!), but dogs who had truly serious issues and were making life at home less than relaxing, if not downright dangerous. Sometimes they had serious, injurious fights, sometimes one dog lived in obvious terror of the other, even though actual fights were rare or non existent, and sometimes the owners managed the situation but the dogs could never, ever, be allowed to be in the same room with the risk of extreme stress or injury.

Some cases appear to be so serious that they call for the immediate re-homing of one dog, but that is a lot easier to do if you’re not the one who is in love with both dogs. Or can’t imagine either dog going to a good home if you decide to give it up. Or believe that it is never ethical to send one dog from one family into another. Cases like these can make the decision terribly difficult, which is why it is tremendously helpful to have a  template of questions to consider when faced with a difficult decision: Continue to try to treat the problem, manage the problem, or rehome one of the dogs? Here is my list, with gratitude to colleagues Kelly, Meg and Jamie for the inclusion of their wisdom and experience:

Job one is risk assessment. That is always true when one is dealing with aggression, and it is equally true here. First and foremost, you need to ask: How dangerous are the fights to the dogs? Noisy skirmishes are unpleasant and upsetting, but don’t always lead to any damage, either physically or psychologically. Have there been 5 instances of growls and brief tiffs, or have the dogs engaged in several fights in which one dog or both dogs were badly injured? I’ve had numerous clients who told me, with clear confidence, that one of their dogs wants to kill the other. I’ve had many clients whose dogs injured the other horrifically, and could barely be pulled off before the other dog was killed. I would never say never, but once things have escalated to that point, the odds of either dog being safe again is small.

In addition, what about the risk to the owners? We all know that breaking up a dog fight can be dangerous. I’ve had plenty of owners bitten by dogs while doing so. I well remember, how could I forget?, holding two fighting female Border Collies up in the air, each grasped by the base of the tail and lifted off the ground as advised by the books. (“If you lift the hindquarters from the ground the dogs will stop fighting.”) These visiting bitches (don’t you love that I can say bitch here?) had not read that chapter and were going at it like food processors on WHIP when my Great Pyrenees, Tulip, ran around the corner, leapt into the air with a roaring bark, scared the crap out of all three of us, and ended the fight then and there. But most of us don’t have a Great Pyrenees in our pocket when a fight starts, and can be at great risk when trying to break up an altercation. I’ve had client who were badly bitten by their own dogs, some who were seriously injured in other ways (injured knees, bad backs, etc.) and some who had to be hospitalized. There are ways to break up a fight that decrease the chance of being injured (don’t grab collars, grab the base of the tail or try to use a door or board between the dogs, etc.) but the fact is that there is always a danger, and it’s important to ask what is the chance that someone could be injured by one of the dogs.

Risk assessment is all about probabilities and consequences, and how willing people are to play the odds when they aren’t in their favor. Because a decision about whether to treat, manage only or re-home has to be based on the probability of success, there is something important to keep in mind: whether one will bet on relatively bad odds is always dependent upon the consequences. In other words, what would happen if management broke down, and someone forgot to close a door? Or there was a regression during treatment? How serious would a mistake or setback be? If losing the bet meant that the two dogs get into a short scuffle, some people might say “Well, if the odds are 5-10% it might happen again, that would be acceptable.” But if the consequence of a fight is a serious injury, several serious injuries to multiple victims, or even death (and yes, that is definitely a possibility in some cases), most people wouldn’t accept 10% odds, perhaps not even 1%.  A willingness to take risks is very personal, so each dog owner has to decide what level of risk they are willing, and comfortable, to take.

Management: Speaking of probability, what is the probability that management can be accomplished 100% correctly? If the dog isn’t re-homed, then management will be a key to safety, both during treatment or if the dogs are simply going to be kept separate for the rest of their life. Owners must realistically assess how likely it is that they can manage the dogs 100% of the time. That means no mistakes, no absent-minded forgetting to shut a door or drop food between the dogs. I’d estimate that a significant number of clients can manage things safely for a period of months during treatment, but very few for a the life time of the dogs. That is why one must ask: What does a regression look like? A horrific fight in which the two dogs both need medical care and the owner goes to the hospital? If things are that serious, the odds of of it happening again don’t have to be very high to suggest that re-homing should be high on the list of considerations.

Quality of Life for the Dogs: One very important question to ask relates to the dog’s quality of life. In many cases, the dogs have made it clear that they are extremely stressed in each others presence. In this situation, the dogs are absolutely aware that the other dog is living in the house, and that all it takes is an open door for one dog to attack the other. In other words, without needing the cognitive ability of a human, dogs can be well aware that they are living on the edge of serious injury or death at any given moment. I describe it to my clients as living in a house with a serial killer on the other side of the door, when you have no ability to control when the door is opened. A difficult way to live indeed.

Quality of Life for the Owners: And of course, an incredibly difficult way for the owners to live, too. I’ve had several hundred clients (over 25 years) in similar situations, and to a person they have told me that after they re-homed one of the dogs they had no idea, absolutely none, how exhausting it was to live with the stress of 2 dogs who wanted to kill one another until after one of the dogs left. I absolutely understand (been there, done that) how painful it is to re-home a dog you love. Truly, I absolutely get it. It needs to be acknowledged; it is like a death in a way. But if two dogs are truly hell bent on hurting each other, it is also giving life back to the dogs, and back to one’s self, given how stressful and exhausting it is to have one’s home the middle of a battlefield. One potential that has helped many clients is to board one dog, or send it to a friend (obviously this must be a safe scenario). Give it a 3 days, 5 days or a week, and see what life is like with just one dog. It is usually so very much easier to make a decision when the dogs are not sitting at your feet while you are talking.

It’s all about the dog. The toughest cases are the ones in which the owners adore both dogs, but the dogs truly despise one another. It happens, and it is heartbreaking, but in those cases, I would argue that love means putting the dogs first. I know, ouch. But better to make the tough decision and get it behind you than living every day in fear that something horrible is about to happen.

Remember here that I am talking about worst case scenarios. Many cases of dogs not getting along can be handled without having to consider re-homing. (See Feeling Outnumbered book and DVD for ideas about how to prevent and manage minor to moderate stress between dogs.) However, sometimes dogs dislike each other as much as some people do, and forcing them to live together can create serious problems to their and the owner’s safety. I hope you haven’t even been in that situation, but if you have, or have worked on this with clients, I’d love to hear from you.

MEANWHILE, BACK ON THE FARM: Several of my friends are at the sheep dog trial I’d be at if Willie hadn’t been recovering from an injury all summer. True confessions, I’m a little bummed that we’re not there ourselves. When the weather prediction was hot and humid it didn’t feel so bad, but today the weather is perfect and I’d love to be hanging out with friends watching great dogs work and–hope springs eternal–feeling good or inspired or educated–by our own run. But still, Willie got to move the sheep up into the pasture this morning, and maybe maybe, he’ll be healthy enough to go to a friends and work her sheep this afternoon. He worked the most ever (since early spring) on Friday, and he clearly needed a rest yesterday. So we are just taking it one day at a time. None of this bothers Willie of course, he is thrilled to be off leash and playing outside and romping with his rubber stick and getting to work sheep, even if not for very long. Right now he’s napping in his crate (door open, his choice, he loves it) and just looking at him makes me happy.

And then, of course, there’s food, always a way to make me happy. Yesterday was pretty much all about food. Not so much eating it, but processing the gazillion pounds of it that streams into the house this time of year from our CSA (Vermont Valley Community Farm), along with our yard and gardens of others. I made apple-pear-plum butter (plums from behind the farmhouse, apples and pears from a friend’s), put massive amounts of eggplant, broccoli and corn in the freezer, cooked up edamame beans and soaked black beans to make a bean/bean/corn salad today, cleaned and cooked up green beans with butter and bacon (I know, I know) for dinner last night with roast chicken and potatoes. What else…. ? Oh yes, I made Zucchini Yum again, which uses zucchini (thank god), tomatoes (praise be to heaven) and onions all at once, freezes really well and is, well, really yummy. Here it is before I popped it in the freezer:

The rest of the weekend has been about seeing good friends and gardening, (read: Trisha and Jim dig like field hands trying to re-establish gardens after major earth moving work done earlier in the summer), and processing food. I’ll spare you the photographs of ugly patches of dug up dirt and me looking like I crawled out of a ditch. Here’s something a bit better: A healthy bee in the garden.

Just one more thing. As much as I love having fresh, local, organic food, please do not mention the word “tomato,” “eggplant” or “zucchini” to me. I’m just saying.

On Friday I asked you what you thought was going on here, at least as best one could tell from a still photograph. I’m the first to agree it’s hard to say much from one brief moment in time, but it’s a great exercise nonetheless. It helps us all focus our attention and generate hypothesis about what might happen next. It would be perfectly reasonable to suggest several different scenarios…

Here’s the story in this case: These two dogs are great friends and play together often. The yellow dog is a 4 yr old GR/Husky cross, Tucker, who has a tendency to nip faces when he plays. The white dog in the red coat is Lily, a 2.5 yr old spayed female Dogo Argentino, owned by Katie Martz  here at McC Publishing.

Lily was responding to what appeared to be an inappropriate play action from Tucker (getting into her face in a way both Katie and I would call “rude.”). Katie’s interpretation of the event is that Lily, the Dogo, was irritated by the yellow dog’s behavior and was correcting him.

Immediately after this photo was taken both dogs paused, sniffed the ground and then resumed chasing and playing after a break. I take this as yet more evidence of the importance of pauses in healthy dog play… a chance to take break, take a breath, and decrease arousal levels.

Many of you were absolutely right on in your guess, good for you! (And to one commenter who bravely made a guess even though she was afraid she’d feel foolish if she was wrong… I love that you said out loud what many of us often feel. Good girl!) This is indeed play, as most of you guessed and Lily is, at least in my and Katie’s opinion, telling Tucker to back off. I think the most important visual signals here are the wrinkling over Lily’s nose and exposed front teeth, forward motion toward Tucker along with ears forward. Thus, I’d say she’s on offense and her wrinkled nose suggests some arousal and potential irritation. Tucker’s head is back and lateral, and his ears are back. He thus looks on defense to me, but note his high tail and hips leaning toward Lily… no shrinking violet here. I agree with some of you that he looks a tad surprised, (I want to say goofy but I suspect that’s not a technical term). It’s interesting that most of the responses on FB said the dogs were playing, but some said Tucker was on offense and some said Lily was. Given that the dogs are both pretty equally matched and that Tucker’s tail was high and he could have been hip slamming her at the time, not a bad guess!

Let me know if you think this is a fun exercise to do every once in a while. We could expand it to video… And I’d like to do some case studies here too. Like the idea?

Maybe not a 1,000 in this case, but what words would you put with this photo? What do you think is going on here? I’d love to hear what you all think. I know the dogs, the context and what happened before and after, so after I collect your input I’ll let you in on the story.

This might be a fun exercise for us to play every once in a while, yes? Let me know if you like the idea. I’ll write another post on Monday and describe the dogs, their relationship and what happened immediately after the photo was taken. But before that I’d love to hear how you evaluate what you are seeing.

And no fair cheating if you saw this on Facebook last week! It’s just such a great photo I couldn’t resist putting it out here. So… what’s going on here between these two dogs? What are the most likely things to happen next?

MEANWHILE, back on the farm: Glorious weather, lots of grass and happy sheep! And happy Willie too, because we’re managing the time to practice our driving skills (or lack thereof).  I’m thinking of entering him in a sheepdog trial this fall that will have a demanding course and difficult sheep, so we have lots of work to do. Tootsie is good too, although she wasn’t a fan of the thunderstorm yesterday morning, but she is already improving greatly with some counter conditioning and cuddles in the bed.

There’s a last chapter in the kitten chronicles too. You may remember that I spent weeks taming the wild things enough to trap them in a cage, took them into the house and began truly taming them in the bathroom converted to a kitty condo. Great homes were found right away for two kittens, and two others went to the good folks at Dane County Friends of Ferals. I kept Callie the Calico in hopes she could grow up to be a healthy, happy barn cat, and that her mother, who I trapped and had spayed, would stay around with her. You may recall I can’t have a cat in the house anymore and have a barn scurrying with rodents, so it seemed like a win/win. But, as often happens, life has other plans. Instead of staying around with Callie, momma cat began trying to lure her away into the woods. Callie, still a young kitten and too small to be spayed, was absent from the barn for increasing periods of time. Her mom was never in the barn anymore. Even when she’d been there with her kittens, she stayed in the upper hay mow and avoided the area in the lower level with the grain and thus, the mice. I actually was trapping mice for her and bringing them up to the haymow on the upper level of the barn and presenting them to momma cat. You may laugh out loud here, who could blame you?

After recovering from her spay surgery, momma cat began to move into the woods and lure Callie there with her. AT one point there was NO little kitten in my barn at any time during the day, except to come and eat dinner at nine o’clock at night. She came running down from the woods, presumably away from her mother, rubbed all over me and ate her dinner. (I should say here that I have no idea what exactly her mom was doing and even if she was still alive, I’m just guessing it was her mom who lured her away from the barn. I can’t imagine what else would have, and she always went in the direction her mom took in and out of the barn.)

That was enough for me. No way was I going to let a tiny, mostly white, hawk-bait of an unspayed kitten become yet another wild cat living in the woods and having litter after litter if she lived that long. The decision made, I went to the barn at 9 pm, ready to pick up Callie the Adorable, bring her back in the house and find her a safer place to live. No Callie. I called and called. No Callie. I walked back to the house, sick with worry, and back to the barn 15 minutes later. No Callie. This continued for a gut wrenching and endless 45 minutes, until she finally dashed toward me from the woods around 10 at night. I picked her up and carried her into the farmhouse, snuggling my face against her fur, allergies be damned. Dan Johnson, bless him, of Friends of Ferals came to pick her up the next day, and within  just a few more days she’d already found her perfect, forever home.

And here it is, with Veterinary Technician Jenny Maahs. She is as over the moon about Callie as one could be, and I’m thrilled that it has all worked out so well.

And here’s more good news: The remaining two kittens, the two little ginger girls Brava and Gabby, are available right now (Friday the 17th and Saturday the 18th) at the Catapalooza at the Dane County Humane Society in Madison, WI. Here’s my request: If you adopt one (or both?), please, please give Friends of Ferals permission for me to contact you and send you a present. If you’d like to come out to the farm and see where they were born I’m sure I could arrange that!

CAN DOGS GET ANGRY? Yup, I’m here to say that they can. Do they get angry as often as humans? Nope, and thank heavens for that. If they did, I doubt we’d live with them, given that they have carpet knives in their mouths. Just like people, they vary tremendously in how often they experience or express anger. I’ve known some dogs who appeared not to have an angry moment their entire lives. More commonly, I’ve worked with dogs who, on occasion, are clearly frustrated at not getting what they wanted or expected. And rarely, I’ve worked with a small number of dogs who appeared to live in a state of ‘road rage’ for weeks, months or years on end. So even though I would never say that anger in dogs is an exact replica of anger in people, both in its frequency and how we experience it, it is a basic biological fact that dogs are capable of experiencing anger. Here’s why:

Anger is as primal an emotion as fear, and if an animal can experience fear, then one is wise to assume it is capable of experiencing anger. The two, it turns out, go hand in hand. Both are mediated primarily in the amygdala and both evolved to protect us. Fear is the emotion that signals the body that it is in danger, and motivates us to take some kind of action to protect ourselves. Anger is the emotion that backs up fear when being on defense is not enough. Roger Abrantes tells a compelling story of when he was about to be in hand-to-hand combat as a young soldier. As he stood in a trench, watching the enemy soldiers run toward him with bayonets drawn, he was initially terrified. But at the last minute, just as the soldiers were within a few feet of him, he was overwhelmed with a burst of rage. That’s the emotion that poured energy into his body and allowed him to move forward to fight for his life.

That’s what anger does: it floods the body with energy, increases the heart rate, pumps blood into our muscles in preparation for action. Anger demands action; that’s why it can be so problematic. Have you ever done something you wish you hadn’t when you were angry?  If not, please consider either offering life coaching sessions for the rest of us, or ask your parents if you actually are an alien. Anger, at varying intensities, compels us to do SOMETHING, anything, and thus… we sometimes do something we shouldn’t and get ourselves in hot water until we learn to take a breath and let our emotions settle. The same thing can happen to dogs. If you’re interested in following this thread, I write more about the biology of emotion in For the Love of a Dog.

Dogs have all the same wiring (and external expressions) related to anger as people. They just, as I said, don’t seem to experience it as often as we easily-angered primates do. (Ever seen chimps lose their tempers? It’s common, and it’s not pretty.) Of course, like all emotions, dogs exhibit a vast range of intensities of experiencing anger, from being slightly irritated, to being truly frustrated, to downright mad to being in an out-of-control rage. All of those are manifestations of anger, just at different levels, and all are within a dog’s capability.  Of course, dogs don’t have the same complexity of cognitive overlays as we do; their experience of anger has got to be different in many ways than ours. But that doesn’t mean that we don’t share the basic, fundamental emotion of anger. As I’ve said before, glass half empty or glass half full, both are equally accurate.

Here’s a photo of a dog illustrating what I claim is an angry emotion. Note the furrowed brow, the offensive pucker and the hard stare. Any one of those things by themselves would not be enough to suggest an internal emotion of anger, but without the fur and black nose, this is exactly the face of an angry person.

ANGER MANAGEMENT? Here’s something else we share: a need to learn how to handle being frustrated or angry. Many of the behavioral problems I’ve seen in my practice relate to either dogs who have never learned how to handle being frustrated and lose their tempers when they don’t get what they want, or owners who, uh, have the same problem.

Dogs need to be taught to be patient and polite (the basis of the Feeling Outnumbered program), and we need to learn to take a breath, or two or twenty, before expressing anger or frustration at our dogs. I needed this advice just recently: until recently Willie had stopped harassing Sushi with his obsessive indoor herding, but after his long, long period of inactivity and Sushi now being inside more because of the weather, the problem cropped up again. I found myself starting to get truly frustrated about it, until I put on my behaviorist/trainer hat, took a breath and put Willie in his crate when I found myself unable to do anything constructive. (Things are improving again, whew.)

I’d love to hear your thoughts: How do you interpret the dog above? What are your best coping strategies for dealing with your own frustrations, and helping your dog through his or hers? Never happens at your house? Ever? Really? Wow. Can I come over?

MEANWHILE, back on the farm. Well, two steps forward physically, and four back behaviorally. Willie’s shoulder is doing well, really well.  As I said earlier, I’ve adjusted to a new normal, and have accepted that his shoulder will never be sound, but given that, he’s doing really well. He can play with his current favorite toy (Flappy) without any sign of regression, so that’s just heaven for both of us. However, last week he literally peed his pants (okay, he didn’t have any on, but you get the idea), barking in terror at a man he didn’t expect, standing in the kitchen. Granted the guy is tall, has hair like Einstein and was standing stock, staring, but still… Willie has never, ever reacted to a person like that. He became somewhat nervous around unfamiliar men when he was an adolescent, but it was easily countered by having guys throw ball for him every time we could arrange it. Willie has always adored people, guys especially, but as you may know, has had a lot of fears over the years, but primarily toward other dogs. A few days later another man came over. I asked him to sit down before I let Willie out. Willie didn’t bark as he did before, but he was clearly frightened of the man (who he’s seen at least 15 times over the years and always been fine with.)

I’ll write next time about the factors that could be contributing to his behavior (our hermit-like existence after his injury clearly being one of them, but I doubt that it’s the only one). There are at least 4, maybe 5 I can think of… I’ll discuss them, and our treatment program, in the next post.

Here are the noses of Barbie (on the left) and Butterscotch, one of the ewe lambs we’ve kept from this year’s breeding. It looks as though she did get bred by King Charles, so stay tuned to see if we have a teen0-aged pregnancy (that’s a good thing in sheep). The sheep must be loving the cool but not cold weather; who knows though, maybe they are yearning for snow?