Neil Sattin.com

Please note, all my dog training articles are now being published at naturaldogblog.com. 

Ever since the rise in Cesar Milan’s (“the dog whisperer”) popularity, the mantra among dog owners (and some dog trainers) has been “calm and assertive, calm and assertive, I must be calm and assertive”.  The problem is that not many people actually know what that means in terms of how to act with their dogs, and in terms of dog training.  Also, since Cesar talks constantly about being the “alpha” dog, most people seem to fall back on their ideas about what it means to be the “alpha” when they’re trying to be calm and assertive.  I am here to give you a NEW metaphor for “calm and assertive” – don’t be the alpha dog, be the MOOSE in your dog’s life.

Calm…assertive…moose?  You’re probably thinking that I’m a little crazy.  Well, maybe not – if you’re here reading you’re at least curious about how natural dog training works, and what it means to use the prey instinct to resolve problem behaviors in dogs and elicit obedience behaviors.  In the end, I think that you’ll find that “being the moose” will be a much more effective way for you to envision yourself around your dog, especially as you engage in training AND play exercises.  Also, once we start to talk about resolving problem behaviors in our dogs, you’ll see that there’s no other way to be.

Now…why a moose?  Why can’t I be something more graceful, like a gazelle?  Or nimble, like a jackrabbit?  A few reasons:

1. A moose is a high value prey animal.  The more effort that a dog (or pack of dogs) would expend on the hunt, the more satisfied they’ll be at the end of the hunt, and the “higher value” that prey animal becomes.  When your dog catches that jackrabbit, the whole process will have required less effort, satisfied less internal stress, and, ultimately, only offer a momentary fullness in the belly.
2. A moose also is big, powerful, and, if it’s staring you down, it has lots of PREDATOR energy as well.  Think about it…you’re walking through the woods, and you come upon a moose.  The moose is taller than you, weighs 10x as much as you, and is facing you, staring at you intently.  You stop, and you wait.  The moose keeps staring at you, and lowers its head.  Snorts a couple of times.  Then it starts taking steps in your direction.  Tell me that you’re not going to head for the nearest tree!
3. The moose also has characteristics that will be helpful for you, as you imagine yourself to “be” one.  The moose is strong.  The moose is rooted firmly on the ground – you couldn’t push a moose over.  A moose can be nimble when it has to be nimble, but it can also be a frightening adversary if confronted.

So imagine that your dog and a group of friends are hanging out, sniffing their way through the woods.  They come to a clearing, and there, in the middle of the field, is a big moose.  Slowly the dogs approach from the side, fanning out, and getting ready to make the kill (if your dog is a yorkie terrier this is where the story might start to amuse you, but please, bear with me).  The moose senses their presence and feels the energy of their approach, and at this point fight or flight takes over, and the path of least resistance is to flee.  The moose runs, and the dogs take off in pursuit. At this point, some of the dogs will attempt to flank the moose.  They’ll be running along, trying to get right next to the moose (herding behavior).  Meanwhile, they come to a rise, and the moose, feeling perhaps more desperate, quickly turns to face down the attackers.  The dogs scatter, circle back around, and hit the dirt (laying down), waiting to see what’s going to happen. 

Now the moose actually has the upper hand, and if the moose actually threatens the dogs by approaching them, they will probably, eventually, give up.  If the moose were to turn and run again, it would likely be only a matter of time before the moose, exhausted, meets an untimely end. OK, enough of the story. 

Take a moment and breathe, make sure that you’re still with me.  Did you notice anything about that scenario, anything strange?  The MOOSE was actually the one in control of what was going to happen.  The moose runs, the dogs chase.  Some dogs even try to run right up next to the moose…they’re HEELING!  The moose turns and faces down the attackers, and the dogs lay DOWN in anticipation.  The dogs are completely in synch with the moose, responding to whatever the moose decides to do.  Their behavior revolves completely around the moose’s actions.  Now, if only the moose understood that!  Maybe it does…

Another important thing for you to get is that the dogs “know” what to do automatically.  The alpha dog isn’t barking out orders, but the relationships between the dogs have some bearing on how they fan out to surround the moose.  So, basically, the dogs are acting in complete harmony with each other, intuitively, to accomplish a specific purpose, the purpose that they were born to fulfill.  This is the natural dog training definition of SOCIAL behavior.  Those dogs are way more attracted to that moose than they are attracted to each other.

Let’s think about it in human terms for a moment.  You have a smallish backyard, and it’s fenced in.  Your child is having a birthday party, so a dozen children arrive at your house, all looking for something to do.  You send them all out into the backyard, because you haven’t finished baking the cake yet.  The only thing is, there’s nothing for them to do in the backyard.  It’s empty.  No swingset, no sandbox, no tireswing…nothing.  How long do you think it’ll take for someone to start teasing someone else, or someone starts crying, or…?  Not long, I’ll wager.  That’s PACK behavior.  It’s what happens when a bunch of people are hanging around without anything better to do.

Same situation, only there’s a jungle gym outside.  A big jungle gym, with enough activity stations for everyone.  Think you’ll have a problem now?  It’s much less likely, as the children’s behavior will revolve around the jungle gym.  They have a common purpose, playing on the jungle gym.  The kids might even work out a way to take turns on the teeter-totter (do they even come with teeter-totters any more?).  Sound familiar?  That’s social behavior, and in this instance the jungle gym is like…you guessed it…the moose!  And those children are way more attracted to that jungle gym than they are attracted to each other.

Let me offer an additional point, something that I’m hoping will be obvious to you.  It’s not that your dog will want to eat you, like they want to eat the moose.

The whole idea is that by being like the moose you will: 

               
1. Be the most attractive thing in the universe to your dog.  Nothing is more appealing to your dog than the moose.
2. Engage your dog’s naturally SOCIAL instincts (along with obedience behaviors).  All of your dog’s behavior will revolve around you, and your dog will, eventually, look to you to resolve the FEELING that they get of wanting to “make prey” – on bike riders, other dogs, the neighbors children, squirrels, etc.
3. Develop facility with prey AND predator energy.  The predator energy is what zaps your dog into action – it’s what stirs up the stress inside them, gets the motor revving.  The prey energy is what allows your dog to resolve that stress, giving them an outlet for all of the potential revving up inside of them.
4. Most importantly, by “being the moose” you will also be able to break some of your habits, habits that you didn’t even know you had, but which are associated with “being the alpha”, and which might, ultimately, be unproductive in your relationship with your dog.  Being the moose allows you to see the world through a different lens, and you will start to notice different things about your dog’s behavior, developing different, more productive patterns of interacting with your dog.

One more important thing.  As humans, we already possess lots of “predator” energy in our dog’s eyes.  We walk upright, we have big hands, big eyes, big teeth (which we like to show off).  Throw in a few other things that people like to do, like making eye contact, chasing your dog – heck, even things as subtle as approaching your dog with your hand out palm down (your hands are like the talons of the eagle descending upon your dog’s head – palm UP is much easier for them to take) – and it’s a wonder that our dogs are attracted to us at all!

So you want to focus your time on developing more of that prey energy.  That’s another reason why “being the moose” is so important.  You need to become a high-value prey object in your dog’s life!  Practice things like:

1. During play, encourage your dog to chase you.  Entice them with a tug toy.  When they get to you:
2. Play tug of war with your dog and LET THEM WIN.
3. When you want to get your dog to COME to you, do that by…yep, encouraging them to chase you.  Move away from them instead of moving toward them.  Also, keep the energy level down…as in, don’t get all hyped up if they’re not coming your way.
4. Notice the difference between standing sideways to your dog and facing your dog – the first is much more prey-like, the second…predator.  There are times when each is appropriate, but you need to become aware of the differences that each produces in your dog’s behavior.
5. If you’re looking for ways of “kissing” your dog, just give them gentle massage to the chest, back, and sides.  Think of it as your mission to relax your dog as much as possible (we’ll talk about that some more in a later article).  Don’t actually kiss your dog, face-to-face interaction is very confrontational (predator) in dog world.
6. Instead of feeding your dog from their bowl for every meal, choose a meal and feed your dog by hand…OUTSIDE.  Give them some food, then move away a few steps and let them come to you for more food.  It’ll probably be helpful to have a feed pouch (I use an old LL Bean fanny pack).
7. Practice smooth, gentle, rounded motion when you’re interacting with your dog.  Bunnies bound away (prey energy), while tigers stalk toward you (predator).

In general, what you want to do is foster some of that calm, assertive MOOSE energy.  Breathe.  Use your newfound quietude to observe what your dog does, and ask yourself, frequently, if what you’re doing is making your dog more attracted to you or less attracted to you.  Ultimately, the explanations matter less than the actions, and it all boils down to the results.  In dog training, it’s important to slow down, relax, and, more than anything else – pay attention.  If what you’re doing isn’t working the way you want it to, try on a different perspective…one more “moose-like”.

When I watch Cesar Milan work, I often think that he’s actually being a lot more moose-like than alpha-dog-like.  Maybe he couches everything he does in the language of “alpha” because that’s easier, in some ways, for people to understand, despite recognizing that something else is at work? Or maybe he really believes that he IS being the alpha dog?  Perhaps one of these days I’ll meet Cesar (in fact, he’s good friends with the aunt of a friend of mine, so I might actually get that chance at some point), and we’ll be able to talk “dog” with each other.  I better work some more on my alpha roll. 

(just kidding – no alpha rolls here)

As always, let me know if you have any questions, and thanks for stopping by!

Please note, all my dog training articles are now being published at naturaldogblog.com. 

A recent query from a reader finds me musing on the subject of destiny…was becoming a dog trainer my destiny?  How did I end up where I am today?  Does a person have to grow up on a farm with a dozen “Lassies” to understand the canine species?

It is my hope that through these dog training related articles you will learn how to do what I do.  So, in terms of broadening your understanding, I figured I’d tell you a little bit more about how I got to be where I am today.

While being raised by wolves would have been a pretty thorough introduction to dog mind, it was not my introduction.  Neither of my parents had ever had a family pet, and it wasn’t until the summer after my 4th grade year that we got our first dog, a Cairn terrier named Sparky.  Now to say that we were totally unprepared is an understatement, and, poor dog, I think that our ineptitude made quite a dent in Sparky’s terrier brain.  He had QUITE the problem with other dogs, and if he had ever gotten off leash he would have run off into the wild never to be heard from again.  Still, that kind of behavior is often considered to be the way a terrier works, which made it excusable (albeit annoying) in the eyes of our friends and family when Sparky would, for instance, steal the napkin you had just dropped on the floor and try to basically kill you in defending it.  Many of my relatives have Sparky-induced scars on their ankles, making him an occasional topic of conversation ten years after his death.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, he was a very loving dog – when he wasn’t trying to kill you.

And for those of you who are keeping track of this sort of thing, all of the obedience training that we did with Sparky was dominance-be-the-alpha-dog based, with choke collars, alpha rolls, and, yes, biscuits, though it was mostly focused on “correcting” undesirable behavior.  We had classes, private instruction, read books, etc.  So, trust me…we tried.

Flash forward several years, to when another dog found her way into my life when I returned to the Northeast (I attended a University on the west coast).  She was full of energy, and her name was “Tootsie” (which I quickly changed to Nola, following the Monks of New Skete approach of giving a dog a name with open vowel sounds).  A brief history of corporal punishment from her previous owners left her rather skittish around other humans (except me, for some reason), she pretty much wanted to kill about 4 out of 5 dogs that we encountered, and she had a tendency to run off into the woods, leaving me wondering if I’d ever see her again.  Hey, but other than that – she was a great dog!  High drama, to be sure (remind me to tell you about the time that she was kidnapped), but a great dog – and, for whatever reason (call it destiny?), we had a bond.

But oh, those little quirks did demand some attention.  I attacked the problem with all of the fortitude and perseverance that a college graduate could muster.  Stacks of books, tips from other dog owners, advice from trainers, and hours of time spent together.  I quickly moved from my Monks-of-New-Skete approach to methods more focused on positive reinforcement (of course Nola was scared of the clicker, so I had to find a way around that problem).  Over time we got all of the obedience basics, but no matter what I tried I could not help her with her anxiety, or her seeming desire to hurt other dogs.  At one point I had a correspondence with a well-regarded dog trainer whom I contacted via the internet, and he thought that the solution to Nola’s aggression issues was to have her euthanized.  Well, yeah, I guess that would work!

At that point, I thought that Nola just had some issues that, for whatever reason, she’d never get over.  And I started to see that there were limits to what you could do with training.  Those limits become obvious to you when a technique just doesn’t work, or you notice your dog retreating emotionally, or the trainer suggests that you should kill your dog (or, more innocently, that there’s nothing they can do for your dog, because your dog is the way she is).  I did what any dog-loving dog owner would do in this situation…I coped.  And waited for destiny to work its magic.

Sometime during Nola’s sixth year I decided to foster another dog, Buddy, so that Nola could have a chance at some canine companionship (I was a bit misguided, but I’ll have to explain that in an upcoming article).  Now Buddy had an uncontrollable urge to chase anything that was moving (which was a problem if he happened to slip his lead, as we lived in the middle of the city), and for whatever reason, no matter what I tried, I just couldn’t tap into this primal urge of his to…make prey.  On everything.  It was back to Google for me, to try and find some solution to the problem.

That was how I stumbled upon Kevin Behan’s website.  Everything I read on his site made sense, not just in terms of how he explained dog behavior, but also in the way that his ideas just resonated with me on some core level.  What he described was a way of tapping into a dog’s deepest instincts and seeing the world through their eyes (or, more accurately, feeling the world through their heart). Rather than looking for ways to suppress a dog’s natural energy, he spoke of channeling it into obedience behaviors.  He had redefined (for me) how to harness a dog’s social energy, and I wanted to find out more.

I ordered Kevin’s book, and read it cover-to-cover.  We had some phone consultations about Buddy and Nola.  The two-dog thing wasn’t working out in my household, so Buddy ended up in a new home (not before making his mark – see photo); however, Nola and I made the trip to Vermont for a weekend to experience Natural Dog Training first hand.

In that weekend, I discovered enough to know that I wanted to experience more.  Kevin and I talked about the potential for an apprenticeship, and personally I decided that, even if I wasn’t “destined” to become a dog trainer, it would be worth it for me to spend as much time as I could with this guy, to absorb as much as I could about how he viewed the world (and how dogs fit into the big picture).  Kevin’s theories encompass the meta-physical, as well as the physical, and throughout my life, as I’ve encountered people who seem to know what they’re talking about in that department, I’ve learned to listen.  So many months later I found myself in Vermont with Nola, again – this time for an intensive, month-long, 7-days-a-week, 8-hours-a-day (with some breaks, of course) training in life and dogs.

It was an amazing month, to be sure.  While I did learn a lot of specific techniques, I also came to an entirely new understanding of how dogs experience the world.  Seen through this lens, certain behaviors that had perplexed me suddenly made sense, and I saw how dogs really were never “wrong”, how they were simply responding to the stimulation that the world was giving them.  As humans we tend to judge others (both within and outside of our species) through our own prejudices – dogs, on the other hand, while it’s arguable whether or not they can learn the difference between right and wrong (same can probably be said for humans, actually), they definitely know what FEELS right, and what feels, well, not-quite-so-right.  It’s through this understanding, and the way it changes our interaction with our dogs, that our dogs not only become more obedient, but also they become attracted to us – because WE know the best ways to make them feel good, relieved of stress, and satiated at the deepest level – something only a moose could have done before.

By the end of my apprenticeship, things had clicked into place.  Techniques were cemented, as was a new way of seeing the world.  I had worked with dogs of all shapes and sizes, including Nola.  And Nola was much more settled, much more attentive, and much better around other dogs – with the potential to be friendly with almost every dog we encounter.  She was, in a word: cured.  (yes, you CAN teach an old dog…)

Since then I’ve worked with many dogs, at times full-time, and at other times fitting in training around my “day job”.  I’m always learning something new from my canine friends and the people who love them. Generally, the dogs always get it – it’s the humans who often need a little more work.  But my clients who are open to looking at their dogs in a new way are successful, both in terms of overcoming issues that they were facing with their dogs, but also in terms of learning a way of interacting with their dog that makes much more sense – to both them AND their dogs.

So, how about YOU, my friends?  Tell me more about how you got to be where you are, in your life in general, and in your relationship to our canine companions.  And as always, if there’s something specific you’d like me to talk about in a future post, please let me know.