Field Trip: SWOAM 2011 Field Day

Posted on October 31, 2011 by annieriecken

On a sunny September day Chico and I went over to Brunswick, Maine, quite near the coast, to the member education field day of the Small Woodland Owners Association of Maine (SWOAM www.swoam.com). This is a chance for people who own land in tree growth in the State of Maine to get together and learn about forestry management, meet their peers, and honor the achievements of small woodlot owners.

It was a very informative morning for the humans and Chico enjoyed walking through the woods, though he might have preferred more walking and less talking. He ran into two other dogs and neither time was he super friendly, but things didn’t ever get out of hand aggressive either. (Chico’s dog aggression was a symptom he developed on coming to me and it’ll be discussed in other entries.) He did find the seminar on pruning quite compelling, he found a shady place to lie down and kept his eyes on the speaker.

At around noon there was a luncheon. With a little juggling of leash and plate we went through the line, got some human food, and sat down in an empty spot near the end of one of the tables. Chico lay down at my feet and waited to see if anyone dropped anything.

After lunch there was some speechifying and some awarding of plaques and certificates. With speechifying and awards come applause. When people started to applaud, Chico started to bark. He barked his sharp, shrill, excited-bark for exactly as long as people applauded. He barked every time there was something to applaud for, always only as long as the applause lasted.

When leaving, we returned to the field where everyone had parked and I let Chico off the leash because no one was around. I was busy looking up directions to the Bowdion College art gallery (where there was a show of Edward Hopper paintings. Five miles between this day of woods education and the works of one of my favorite painters – just how great is the Great State of Maine?) and Chico started to bark his look-what-I-found bark. He was barking at a tall, slender, older man, who said in his beautiful French-Canadian accent “You zihnk you scare me? You don’t scare me. And I like zee way you applaud.”

This is a cheater picture, I didn't take any pictures at the SWOAM field day. This is Chico and his friend Sophie at Wonalancet Brook last summer.

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The socialization mission

Posted on October 29, 2011 by annieriecken

When he lived in Washington, Chico was part of a multi-member family. When he moved to New Hampshire it was just “me and he.” I had a full time job and, outside work, I moved around a lot. So, I started taking Chico places with me. If he couldn’t go inside, he still seemed to prefer waiting in the car ** to staying home without me.

Then Julie explained to me that taking Chico places and exposing him to new things was an important step in overcoming his fear (and thus his fear aggression). “If he understands that no matter what the situation, you’ve got it covered, he will be able to stop trying to take care of things and start to let you do that. Remember, the only way he knows how to take care of things is to come at them looking as fierce as he can. Taking him places with you is an excellent idea.” Here was my trainer telling me that there was a really good reason to do what I was already doing. I took to the idea like the proverbial duck taking to water.

In the ten years I spent living in the Netherlands and traveling around Europe, I saw dogs go what seemed like everywhere. Dogs come to the office, they go to cafes, they go into shops – they get to be participate in human activities (and after all, that’s what thousands of years of human-canine relationships have been about: them going places with us and helping us do what we do). The Dutch dogs seemed to be so well socialized. They didn’t pull on their leashes, they were agreeable to each other and to strange people – they were happy members of the community. That seemed so civilized.

So in the spring of 2010, in addition to taking Chico into pet stores and feed stores, when I was invited somewhere, I started asking if it was possible to bring Chico. My friend M was particularly welcoming, always including Chico in her invitations to me. And her husband J was quite gracious whenever Chico barked like a maniac at the poor man when he was coming into his own house. We’d go to their house for a glass of wine and dinner, J would return home after a day at work and Chico would leap to manage the situation by running to the door barking furiously. During the first visits, Chico paced around the house, he was nervous; he wouldn’t eat the dinner I had brought for him. After we went there a few times, he understood what was happening and he started to lie at my feet. After six or eight visits, once I settled into a chair he was able get far enough away from me to go to a corner, lie down, stretch out and go to sleep. Huge victory.

** I didn’t want him to feel abandoned by leaving him home, alone in a still-strange to him place, and he seemed to know that I would always come back to the car. Early in our time together I was at someone’s house and Chico was uncomfortable – pacing and whining and such – inside, so I put him outside on their dog’s tie-out. In about 15 minutes, Chico started to bark. I went to look and found him on the tie-out, sitting in the open back of my small station wagon, apparently wondering why the heck I hadn’t joined him outside.

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It snowed last night

Posted on October 28, 2011 by annieriecken

Yesterday’s rain turned to snow at dusk, and there was just enough to coat the grass but not the roads (which is nice because I’m not quite ready for plowing and shoveling season). Overnight it cleared up and stayed cold, making for quite a beautiful morning:

Looking back across the field at my neighbor's barn.

Chico thinks snow is pretty cool stuff, so he was thrilled, running and rolling and bouncing:

I’m betting that by mid-February, neither of us will feel the same about snow as we did this morning.

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Weave poles

Posted on October 27, 2011 by annieriecken

Weave poles are a set of twelve vertical poles, 2 feet apart, that the dog has to weave through. For the dog they most unnatural obstacle in canine agility. Jumping and climbing over things and going through openings has something to do with daily life, but in the normal course of events, there’s nothing a dog does that has the same wiggle factor as the weave poles. As the dog weaves his spine is bent in two or even three directions at once. It’s quite amazing to see a lithe border collie whip through the poles like this:

Chico was slow to get weave poles, lots of dogs are, but now he approaches them with a wagging tail and is starting to speed up quite a bit. And he almost always does all the poles. Here’s a little video I shot at class the other night using Dennis’s Flip placed on the railing at the edge of Julie’s arena.

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This blog has a grown-up URL now

Posted on October 26, 2011 by annieriecken

Chico is barking in excitement about the new URL.

This morning I went ahead and bought the web address “canibringthedog.com” because it is more manageable and I feel it shows commitment to this lil’ project.

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The dog I was dealt

Posted on October 24, 2011 by annieriecken

Before he lived with me, Chico had at least three other homes. A family in the Washington, DC area gave him to the Humane Society for adoption and I’m not sure how long he was there before my sister’s family took him home. He was about one and a half when he joined their family. When he was five, he came to me, his home number four. At my sister’s I’d always found him sociable, but not extremely well mannered. He tended to bark at passersby, so he spent most of his time in the back of the house where he couldn’t see the sidewalk. He got pretty excited at the arrival of pretty much anyone, so if there was a big family dinner, he went to doggie daycare (where he was, I’ve heard, very well liked and well socialized) for an overnight. They worked with a dog trainer, but different family members asked different things of him, and I think sometimes he wasn’t always sure exactly what behaviors the humans really wanted from him.

There was a period of almost a month, between the time my sister’s family moved and the time I was able to get Chico, when he lived alone in their old house. He had food, he had water, he had a chew-bone, he got let out several times a day, but he was alone almost all the time. His people were gone, the furniture was gone; I wonder what he must have thought.

It’s understandable that after his stint in solitary he attached to me quite quickly and that makes life both easier and harder. To this day he still believes that he owns me and that makes him sometimes dog aggressive. In Chico’s mind, no dog ought to get closer to me than he is. But, the same attachment means he can go off leash in the woods and fields without running away. He’ll run like the dickens across a field, but he won’t go off after a deer or to see what’s on the other side of the hill.

My sister was always saying “Chico is a big wuss,” and I didn’t really get it until he came to live with me. He’d bark furiously, ferociously (teeth bared, spit flying) and uncontrollably at anything that could be interpreted as being even the teensiest threat of any type. And that, it seemed, was pretty much everything. His list of triggers included, but was in no way limited to: anyone that came to the door, motorcycles, pickup trucks, 18 wheelers, the UPS man, and anyone who walked up to the car to talk to me. He lunged at cars passing us on the road when we walked. He picked fights with other dogs. If something or someone surprised him he reacted with “the best defense is a good offense” behavior – looking as scary as he can. Which is moderately scary, with that wolfish pointed nose of his. And at a furry 40 pounds, he looks big enough to back up his “words” with painful action.

That’s when I learned the phrase “fear aggression” and that I could do something to help him be a braver dog.

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Because I am better at words than at pictures

Posted on October 22, 2011 by annieriecken

They call me "Word Girl" for a reason: sometimes I forget that type isn't always enough. Chico & me at the Four Corners on a nice fall day. Photo by Tim Price.

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The last five minutes

Posted on October 21, 2011 by annieriecken

Our first lesson with Julie was on a cold January morning. After two-plus hours, I had a whole new tool kit of dog management tools to master, a list of things to work on, and a fried brain. I opened the door to leave and Chico charged out. I stood there with him at leash’s end and said, “I’ve been watching Cesar Milan. He and others say it is essential that the human ALWAYS go through the doorway first. Is that really so important?”

“Oh, no. As far as I am concerned, that’s not at all important. BUT, he also shouldn’t do what he just did. Bring him back in and shut the door. Now, tell him to wait and open the door.”

Did that. As soon as the door opened, Chico charged out. Julie leaned across me and pushed my leash arm back and at the same moment grabbed my other hand (still on the doorknob) and pulled that back to shut the door right in the dog’s face. So here’s the scene: it’s 26 degrees outside, Chico is outside looking in, and he has about 8 inches of leash out there with him – not nearly enough allow him to do anything fun like smell around.

“Don’t look at him, I will tell you when it’s time to open the door.”

In about 90 seconds Julie said that Chico was thinking he had made a pretty bad choice. He had decided that it looked a lot more interesting and comfy inside than out (and besides the humans were still in there), and we let him back in.

Again, I told him to wait and opened the door. Again he blasted past me to get outside. Again I shortened the leash and shut the door in his face. This time, it took about 30 seconds for him to look like he wished he’d made a different decision. In he came.

For a third time, I said, “Wait” and opened the door. He sat there looking at me. He didn’t move a muscle towards the outside. It had taken under five minutes to modify his behavior. If I could do it once, I could do it again.

In that moment I was sold on this woman’s method of dog training. And since she was advocating it for my dog, I decided I might find it useful to inform myself as to just what canine agility is.

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Finding Julie

Posted on October 20, 2011 by annieriecken

So, here I am, with this dog that I have no idea how to control, a dog that my vet says could be a real problem, for himself and for others. What have I gotten myself into? How much does dog training cost, how will I pay for it? What to do?

N&L adopted a troubled dog a year or so in the past, what had they done?

“Oh, we went to this wonderful woman, Julie Daniels, in North Sandwich. We spent an hour with her and she taught us a lot. After a year of hard work we have a much better dog. She’s pretty expensive, but it was well worth it.”

So, I took this lady’s contact info and dropped her an email, explaining my situation. After asking me if my dog had ever used his teeth to break someone’s skin (the answer was no), Julie agreed to meet with us.

This is an aside, but an interesting one. Dogs, it turns out, have a very precise understanding of exactly how hard they are biting down on something, hence their ability to use their teeth to do everything from carry puppies to tear out the throat of a prey animal. Asking if Chico had bitten anyone was one question, asking if he had broken skin was another question. Thank goodness I had the answer that showed her he was a troubled dog, not a dangerous one.

Our first one hour session with Julie lasted two and a half hours. I can no longer remember exactly what I learned that day about clicker training Chico, but I do remember the last five minutes.

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I never wanted the dog.

Posted on October 19, 2011 by annieriecken

I never wanted the dog. Don’t misunderstand, I love dogs, pretty much all of ‘em, but I was so sure I wasn’t (at 53) grown-up enough to have a dog. I rent my abode (more about that later), I am single and childless. The thought of being responsible for a dog was just overwhelming. Impossible.

Then my sister’s family moved from a house with a yard to an apartment. They weren’t able to take Chico, my niece’s dog, he weighs 40 pounds and the cut off for dogs in the building is 30 pounds. Since there were no likely takers near them in DC, I said I would find him a home here in my small town in New Hampshire.

That (no surprise) is not how it turned out.

On our first visit to the vet, Chico snapped at her and wouldn’t back down. “You can’t give this dog to just anyone,” she advised. “He needs training or he could turn into a dog that will have to be euthanized.”  OK, I just couldn’t let that happen to my dear niece’s dog.

So I decided to find a trainer and keep the dog until he calmed down a bit.

It’s been almost two years and we’re still together. In fact, my mission has become to see how many places I can go with this dog. How big can I make his world? How well can I socialize him?

This blog tells our story.

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