Don't Dump The Dog (10 page)

... teach the dog to sit.

The collective “Huh?” that just escaped the lips of the audience was expected, so never fear, Randy is here, with an explanation almost as simple as the solution itself: Since leaders control the resources,
you
must control the resources. If you control the resources, you are by definition the alpha, and the dog’s dominance aggression disappears.

What are the resources? The things your dog wants (food, toys, and access to the yard).

How do you control the resources? Teach him to sit before he gets them.

Before the dog gets food, he sits. Before he goes outside, he sits. Before you pet him, play with him, or even glance in his direction, he sits. Every time. For every resource.

Three important distinctions need to be made at this point. One is that you are not
forcing
your dog to sit; you are
teaching
him to sit to get what he wants. If he doesn’t sit when you ask him, he doesn’t get access to the goods. It’s as simple as that. You don’t yell at him or coerce him to sit. He sits, period. If he doesn’t sit the first time you ask him, you walk away and he doesn’t get what he wants. There’s no emotion involved whatsoever, which is important, because alphas don’t humor anybody in any way. (Just had a flashback to Sister Agnes; maybe she was a werewolf.)

The second distinction is that leaders initiate and followers react. This is a well-worn, classic concept, but as the alpha, you must initiate access to resources rather than your dog. So, for instance, if you sit on your couch and the dog comes up to you looking for attention and you pet him, he initiated and you reacted. If you sit on the couch and the dog comes up to you looking for attention and you ask him to sit, he sits, and then you pet him, guess what? He still initiated and you still reacted. If, however, you sit on the couch, the dogs seeks attention, you completely ignore him until he walks away, and
then
you ask him to sit, he sits, and you pet him,
you
have initiated and
he
has reacted.

The third distinction is that this is not a power struggle you are required to win every time. Case in point: You bring a new, adult dog into your life who growls if you get too close to him while he’s eating. This isn’t a fight worth fighting, believe me, and it doesn’t make sense to try. Even omega wolves growl at alphas if they invade eating space. The important point is that the alpha gave the food in the first place. The alpha controlled the resource from the start. If it weren’t for the alpha, the omega wouldn’t be eating. So if your dog is protective of his food, leave him alone while he’s eating, but
make sure he sits before you give him the food
. In time you can desensitize his food aggression by feeding him out of your hand. I recommend to everyone who has a puppy that you feed the animal from your hands, and pet, touch, and talk while the li’l guy is eating, for this will save you from writing me in a year with a stitchedup finger.

Okay, let’s say you’ve just brought home your new pack member, a cute, little, yellow dog named Omelet, and for a week or two, he’s a great dog: He’s house-trained, he fetches, and he loves your attention. You in turn are a great parent: You buy a wicker basket for his toys, so he can play with them whenever he wants; you leave a full bowl of dry food out so he can eat when he’s hungry; and, you give him comfy spaces on your couch and bed and pet him whenever he wants, so he feels loved.

But then one day, you try to take Omelet’s stuffed purple octopus away, and he growls and maybe even snaps quickly in your direction. Depending on your personality, either you yank your hand back and say, “I’m sorry,” or you grab the stuffed octopus out of his mouth and yell, “BAD OMELET!”—both normal reactions based on fear, but both inappropriate, because they show Omelet your loss of emotional control.

Then Omelet starts growling whenever you walk within twelve feet of
his
wicker basket. He starts growling when you get near
his
food bowl. Then Omelet starts growling when you give him a bath or clip his nails, because you’re invading
his
personal space.

And then one night, Omelet jumps in
his
bed, but when you follow, he growls. Again, depending on your personality, either you sneak a pillow off the bed and sleep on the floor, or you threaten him with the pillow and eternal damnation. When Omelet reacts by snapping the air in your direction, you fall completely off your rocker and grab him by the throat, drag him onto the floor, hold him down, and hiss something alpha-esque, like “
I am the boss
,” while staring him directly in the eyes, and Omelet, who thinks you’re threatening
his
life, defends himself. (All very reminiscent of my last relationship; which, my editor is quick to point out, is beside the point.)

Now, before I tell you what an idiot you were, I must clarify that many dogs, especially timid ones, will thrive on love and affection. As long as they show no dominance aggression toward you, love away. If, however, they are like Omelet and
do
have dominance tendencies, then you’ve basically handed them the resources and the leadership perks that go with them. You gave him endless toys, unlimited food, and unconditional access to your attention, all with no strings attached, which Omelet read as, “We’re idiots. Please lead us.”

So, you made some mistakes. Here’s how you fix them:

1. Stage the Coup
   

   Have someone take Omelet for a walk. While he’s gone, throw away the wicker basket, hide all of his toys on the top shelf of the hall closet, and pick up his food bowl and hide that too.
   

2. Commence the Transition
   

   When Omelet gets home, ignore him. Don’t greet him at the door and don’t pet him for the rest of the day. He’ll probably pace around looking for his stuff, and when he doesn’t find it, he’ll whine and demand your attention. Pretend he’s not there. Don’t feed him, and don’t give him his toys. When he needs to go out, have him sit first, give him one small treat—don’t say “Good boy” or in any way praise him—and then let him out. That night, do not let him in the bedroom.
   

3. Take Control of the Resources
   

   From this point forward, act aloof around Omelet and have him sit before you give him anything, including your attention. Since you gave him no access to food the day before, he’ll be hungry, so start with a simple request to sit while you’re holding out a treat. When he sits, give him the treat but don’t say anything to him. Act aloof. Now, take out his leash and have him sit before you open the door. If he doesn’t sit, say nothing, and show no emotion; just walk away and try again five minutes later. Eventually, he’ll get the idea and sit. When it’s time to eat, take out the food bowl, put food in it, and then ask him to sit. If he doesn’t sit, walk away and try again later, though he probably will, because he’s pretty hungry by now. By the time you’re ready to give him a toy, he should know the drill. It’s your toy now, not his, and if he wants to play, he has to request permission by sitting when you ask.
   

Then, for the rest of the day—and for the rest of his life—repeat these actions before you give him anything.

Happy Endings for No-Win Situations

• Never take the food bowl away from him while he’s eating. Once he sits and you reward him with food, it’s his.
  
• Don’t let him sleep on your bed at night—period. This helps avoid any misunderstanding about who’s boss.
  
• Don’t pit yourself against your dog with weapons such as nail clippers or running bath water. Why do you think God created grooming shops anyway? Let the groomer be the bad guy and you the hero when you pick him up, all nice and clean.
  

D
ear Readers, someone hand me a noose, please. Don’t worry—I’d never use it, because along with aeronausiphobia (the fear of vomiting on airplanes), taeniophobia (the fear of tapeworms), triskaidekaphobia (the fear of the number 13), pupaphobia (the fear of puppets), and medomalacuphobia (which is too embarrassing to define here), I have also been diagnosed with thanatophobia (the fear of death), and something that hasn’t been named yet, as far as Dr. Gupta knows—the fear of dying and not being found for several weeks and totally grossing out whoever finds me—which he thinks is a self-image issue rather than a phobia.

Anyway, the point is that I understand fear, and I understand why dogs like Splinter with fear aggression bite people. I fantasize about it all the time. The big problem is that it’s hard to distinguish fear aggression from dominance aggression, which we treat very differently, so here are some visual clues that indicate fear versus dominance when she lashes out at you:

• He lowers or completely tucks his tail (dominant dogs raise their tails);
  
• he pulls his ears back horizontally (dominant dogs raise their ears);
  
• he looks away from you (dominant dogs stare you in the eye);
  
• he growls and snarls as a warning before he bites (dominant dogs usually don’t bother with the warning); or • his fur stands on end, and he salivates and/or urinates (sure signs of fear not displayed by dominant dogs).
  

Fearful dogs are usually either those who didn’t socialize with people when they were puppies, who experienced abuse, or who have painful physical ailments. You can tell the difference this way: Unsocialized dogs are afraid of things in general, like all men and all children; abused dogs are afraid of specific things, such as belts or raised hands; and dogs with pain are afraid of being touched.

It’s a fight-flight-freeze thing (from this point forward called the F-Word Syndrome) that Dr. Gupta described as “an acute stress response involving an intense discharge of the locus ceruleus that activates the sympathetic division of the automatic nervous system,” which I asked him to write down, because I also have Hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia, which is a fear of long words.

According to Dr. Gupta, dogs, people, and most other animals on earth (including some unfortunate rats born in laboratories) respond to threats by challenging them, running away from them, or freezing in place in an attempt to hide from them (my preferred method)—all
appropriate
responses when triggered by long-winded physiological things going on in the nervous system, triggered themselves by
real
threats like charging grizzly bears. Those of us with F-Word Syndrome, however, respond in
inappropriate
ways to
imaginary
grizzly bears and end up in city pounds or on therapists’ couches.

Believe me, fear is a powerful motivator—I’d rather build an entire lock-and-dam system with my bare hands than drive over a bridge—but before you turn your snarling, slinking, snapping dog in to authorities, remember that fear is also controllable.

Case in point: Splinter.

Splinter terrified me from the day I met him. All five pounds of him. Someone dumped him on Stray Rescue’s doorstep in the middle of the night, and not only did he look scary—imagine a cross between a Brillo Pad and a dust mop—but he wore a diaper and made these weird hissing noises that I quickly learned (when I tried to remove his diaper) were warning snarls emitted before he bit. Under normal circumstances, a five-pound toy dog would be easy to adopt out from our shelter, even one that looked and sounded like a rat with emphysema, but Splinter was too much of a little (I have to spell this out to avoid censure by the editor) s-h-i-t to just hand over to anybody unless you really, really hated them.

So he comes to
my
house to live for a while.

From the start, Splinter intimidated everyone in the house, including me; Charley, the sixty-five-pound pit bull; Horsey, the hundred-pound chow/rottweiler mix; Hannah, the schizophrenic; and Satan the Cat. On his first day, Splinter sat in a corner of the kitchen and established a twelve-foot safety perimeter around himself, which if crossed, initiated a volley of hissed insults followed by rapid-fire lunges and snaps that sent everyone running for cover. No one went into the kitchen that day, and despite my fear of drinking from the tap and eating fast food, the dogs, cats, and I guzzled bathroom water and dined on carry-out Thai while Splinter had food tossed into the kitchen followed by a quick door slam.

The next morning, in my usual un-caffeinated fog, I forgot about our houseguest and walked straight into the kitchen to make coffee as usual. Out of nowhere, this thing, this hissing, self-propelled dust mop that at first I mistook for an alien hedgehog, darted in my direction from the recesses of his universe. Need I tell you how painful it is to get from the floor to the countertop in just one leap? Meanwhile, my other dogs, my spineless, sissy, scaredy-cat companions, just stood at the threshold of the kitchen and stared up at me in sympathy.

“Wimps.”

But it was from the vantage point of the countertop—upon which I spent a considerable amount of time crawling around on all fours, making coffee—that I devised my plan of attack.

It seemed pretty obvious that fear ruled Splinter’s passions. Whenever we got near his safety zone, he turned his head away from us, raised his upper lip until his miniature yellow fangs showed, and then hissed his weenie version of a warning growl. When I approached him with bite gloves to take off his diaper, he flattened his ears horizontally and hissed, and when I used a broom to push his food bowl toward him from a safe distance, he raised his hackles and attacked the handle, intent on making it extinct. This told me he’d probably suffered abuse at some point in his life, because people’s hands and objects freaked him out. In addition, he was a toy version of something or other, which meant he was probably reared in a puppy mill where he’d received no human attention or affection during the first critical weeks of his life. He was, in short, a homicidal, socially maladjusted, post-traumatic stress victim.

(Many of the dogs we work with at Stray Rescue are feral, meaning they grew up in the urban wilds and experienced little or no contact with human beings until we trapped them. These are special cases—equivalent to socializing wild wolf pups—and I’ve included information about them at the end of the chapter.)

Unlike Splinter, most family dogs with fear aggression only display one or two symptoms, such as snarling at strangers—especially men and children, or men who act like children—who try to pet them. If that’s your case, consider yourself lucky, because dogs like Splinter with paranoid Napoleonic issues require all kinds of affection that’s hard to give, because for several weeks, it’s not reciprocated. Don’t be dismayed; being super-nice to a creature who tries to bite you all the time teaches all kinds of useful life lessons, such as how to fake being nice to people you yourself can’t stand. Thank you, Splinter.

Anyway, back to the countertop, where, in a cross-legged position and sipping my hard-won coffee, I mapped out Splinter’s therapy: hot-dog counterconditioning, followed by several games of Circle People Who Owe You Money.

The first stage—hot-dog counterconditioning—teaches the dog a new way to respond to fear. The only hard part is getting from the countertop to the refrigerator to retrieve the hot dogs. If the refrigerator is aligned with the counter, it’s simply a matter of stretching your leg out, latching onto the handle with your big toe, and pulling the door open. If your refrigerator sits across the room from the countertop, however, as mine does, you’ll have to wait for the beast to retreat to his corner, and at just the right moment, rapidly jump off the counter and land on one foot while swinging the other foot up toward the top of the kitchen table. Once on the table, you can push the chairs out to form a path toward the fridge, and once you have the hot dogs in hand, you can fling one to the far end of the room (no dog can resist chasing a flying hot dog), which allows you time to escape.

To start the actual counterconditioning, teach your dog to sit and relax using cut-up hot dogs as a reward. I suggest hot dogs because it’s important to use a treat that dogs can’t resist, and hot dogs never fail me. What’s even more important, though, is to remember not to reward the dog for sitting or staying, but for
relaxing
. You are trying to teach the dog to relax, not to sit, so he must believe the two go hand in hand if he’s going to get his treat. Every time you ask him to sit, he must associate happiness and relaxation with doing the deed.

So, take the dog to a safe place that doesn’t freak him out and ask him to sit. Then, wait for him to relax, and when he does, give him his treat. Repeat this over and over in different places, inside your house and out, and when he’s mastered the art of chilling out, you’re ready for the desensitizing game, Circle People Who Owe You Money.

There are many forms of fear in dogs, but since we’re dealing with fear aggression toward people in this chapter, you’ll have to find human volunteers to play this game. While you can use younger siblings, employees, or people who want you to like them, I suggest people who owe you money, because you can use them over and over again and not feel guilty,
and
they’ll probably pay you back before the game is over.

I started by asking Splinter to sit at my feet while I called Jerry-the-friend-who-borrowed-$100-from-me and asked him if he could do me a small favor.

“Sure, of course—whatever you need,” he said with saccharine enthusiasm.

“Great. Can you come to my front door, ring the bell, and then just stand there for a while?”

“Uh, sure, of course ... uh, whatever you—”

“I need you to just stand there,” I said. Splinter yawned at my feet, so I tossed him his hot dog. “No matter what.”

“Uh ...”

“No matter what.”

Later, when Jerry rang the bell, I put a leash on Splinter, asked him to “sit” about nine feet away until he relaxed, and then I gave him a piece of hot dog. Slowly, I walked over to the door, telling Splinter to “stay,” then I opened the door (I have no screen door), and when Jerry smiled and said, “Hi,” Splinter stood up, his ears went sideways, his tail tucked, and he hissed his alien-rat-with-emphysema warning growl.

“What the hell is
that
?” Jerry said, but I slammed the door shut in his face.

“Sit,” I told Splinter, who sat, but took a much longer time than usual to relax. When he finally did, I gave him his treat. In the meantime, Jerry knocked softly. Splinter stood up, but I told him to “sit,” and when he did, I gave him his treat and slowly opened the door.

“Hi,” Jerry said again, but this time when Splinter stood up and went into his defensive posture, I told him to “sit.”

“What ... ?” Jerry asked.

“Shhh,” I commanded as Splinter sat. “Just stand there and don’t say anything.”

It took a long time—maybe five minutes or more—but slowly Splinter’s ears and tail relaxed, and the second they did, I gave him his treat. Remember, I was rewarding Splinter for sitting and relaxing in a stranger’s presence—not just for sitting—and until he did, he received no treat.

Once Splinter had chilled at a distance of nine feet, I told Jerry to step inside the door.

“Is that thing going to bite me?”

“Don’t say anything. Just step inside the door.”

“But . . .”

“And whatever you do, don’t
look
at him.”

The point of Jerry not looking at Splinter was to reduce any perceived threat or challenge. It’s really important to take this phase of the game s-l-o-w-l-y so as not to overwhelm the dog with fearful stimuli, and that includes the stranger looking, reaching, or talking to the dog. When I rescue dogs, I often wear sunglasses even on rainy days—not to be hip, but to reduce the dogsanxiety levels. You are not trying to force him to like this stranger; you’re forcing him to sit and relax when the stranger is at a far distance from him. The game then proceeds by strategically moving the person closer and closer to the dog while repeating the sit-and-relax exercise each time. Conversely, you could keep the dog on a leash and move the dog closer and closer to the person.