THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

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!

Apologies for not writing sooner, but I’ve just come out of one of those “work tunnels” that we all experience from time to time.  What a joy to have come up for air and work Willie on sheep, rub Lassie’s creamy soft belly and go on a bike ride with Jim.

But, there’s so much to tell you about the Association of Pet Dog Trainers Conference last week in Kentucky.  I was only able to attend for two days, because I had to get back to give another speech on Sunday. I know I missed some great talks the last days at APDT, but I want to tell you about some of the great information that was presented at the Symposium on Play on Thursday. An entire day was devoted to the topic of play, and it was a joy to be able to go into a topic in depth.

(Truth in Lending: I’m not objective about this at all. I suggested the idea of a day-long symposium on play to APDT, after attending the Ph.D. defense of Camille Ward in Ann Arbor, Michigan last summer. She did her research, under the mentorship of Dr. Barbara Smuts, on play in domestic dog pups. I was on her committee, and was so inspired by her research that I starting thinking about what a huge topic play is, and how it deserved an entire day at a conference.  The folks at APDT (thanks Ian and Marion!) liked the idea and off we went designing a day of speakers…

So, I’ll give you a summary of each of the talks for the next couple of days, beginning with a few points from my Introduction to the Symposium, if you’ll bear with me. Tomorrow I’ll tell you about Camille’s research findings, and later about Pia Silvani and Karen London’s excellent talks. Ian Dunbar wrapped it all up in a bow at the end of the day, although he owes me big time (I’ll tell you why a little later on in the week. Stay tuned.)

Today I thought I’d mention one of the points I made early in the day, which is that one of the most important aspects of healthy play is that the stronger, faster individual self handcaps, or inhibits their speed and strength to match that of their partner. We humans, at least if we are polite ones, do this as a matter of course. What would you think of a mother who smashed a serve toward her seven-year old child who was just learning to play tennis, or a father who used all his strength when play-wrestling with his five year old?

Dogs do it too, as was illustrated in videos I showed of Lassie and Willie playing tug.  The first video was when Will was about 9 weeks old, and 12 year old Lassie not only plays tug with clear inhibition (she pulls back with less strength than she had, she shook her head from side to side with much less torque and speed than usual), but she moved the tug toy back toward Will’s mouth the few times she pulled it out of his mouth. The next video showed Will and Lassie playing tug just a few months ago. Will is two years old now, and so strong and fast I get a great workout playing tug with him myself. This time, at fourteen, Lassie is the weaker one. And yet, there’s Will, carefully pulling just hard enough to keep Lassie engaged in the game. He rarely shakes his head from side to side, and  he pulls just hard enough to make it a game,  even though he could rip it out of Lassie’s mouth in a micro second. It’s a lovely example of self handicapping (and why it makes me feel a little bit sentimental, I can’t say. There’s something so endearing about it….).

But here’s the challenge: self handicapping requires a lot of emotional control, and the irony about play is that part of its fun is that we can throw aside some of our inhibitions and lose a little bit of control. I suspect this is where a lot of dogs get into trouble. Playing, which often involves the same actions as fighting, can result in high arousal and a lack of inhibition… and spill over into aggression a bit too easily.  “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out” applies to dogs as well as people. Dogs need to learn to self regulate as they grow up, and I think we can  help them by teaching them games that involve learning patience and emotional control. For example, Will has learned to stay in a down-stay while I throw the ball for Lassie a few times, that’s just part of the game. He’s learned that being patient and polite leads to more play for him, and so is used to getting reved up, but calming himself down at a moment’s notice when asked.

I’m also a believer that it is good to interrupt dog play when it becomes a bit too energetic, especially when dogs are young, and especially when they don’t live together. There’s nothing wrong with helping dogs to learn to calm themselves, just as we do young children. (One of the tapes I played at the conference included the voices of a child and parent watching prairie dogs at the zoo. The adult’s voice, even when excited, stayed measured, but the child’s voice was a prime example of ‘emotional arousal.’ It was adorable really… “AH! There are NINE!!!!!! prairie dogs” the child shrieked when yet one more prairie dog came out of the burrow. His voice was so excited you could feel the arousal, and catch some of it yourself. After the child literally shrieked “NINE” at the top of his lungs, his good parents quietly said “Shhhhh..,” teaching the child to monitor his arousal level in certain situations. I think we owe the same to dogs, without being too protective or hovering over them.

I like what Pia Silvani and trainers at St. Hubert’s Animal Welfare Center do in puppy class: if it looks as if one puppy is getting out of control or starting to bully another, they calmly and gently take the potential offender by the collar and separate the pups. If the other one comes back for more, then it’s great to let them begin playing again.  If not, then it’s time to end the play session between those two pups. As we all know… it’s only really play if both participants are enjoying themselves.

Here’s a lovely play bow for you, sent to me by a super photographer…