One of my colleagues recently wrote this (paraphrasing):  Attempts at dog training often fail because the owner isn’t suffering or hasn’t suffered enough.  It’s a harsh statement, yes.  Nevertheless, it’s often quite true. Complacency inspires nothing, and nothing is quite as inspiring (and reinforcing) as suffering interrupted. My colleague is spot on.  Action is often borne of agony.  We trainers know the technical term for this: Negative Reinforcement.

We hear our clients begging for it all the time.  Make my dog stop (you fill in the blank).  He’s aggressive.  He’s out of control.  He has ADHD, dominance, and stubbornness.  At some point the labels we slap on things aren’t enough to ease the pain.  We call out for help.  We’ve suffered enough and it’s time for something to happen.

I work with people whose dogs have bitten people or other dogs.  If they haven’t bitten, they’ve growled or snarled or lunged.  These are good people; many are very good people.  They love their dogs.  “He’s a good dog,” they tell me.  Their voices are soft, pleading.  They mean it.  “I love him.  I just want him to stop this.“  And then they ask me why.  Why does he act this way?  Why is this happening?  Some cry.

Suffering shines a harsh light on things.  There is the world the way we hoped it would be.  Then there is the world the way it is.  Sometimes the two match up.  More often they don’t.  The humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers called this incongruence.  We form an ideal self, a perfect life; and then we struggle to conjure it into reality.  So I listen to people who love their dogs tell me about the life they dreamt.  “I got him for my son,” they say.  Or, “I just wanted a running buddy.”  Or, “I want to pet him, and cuddle.”  They pause.  “But ….”

Incongruence.  Suffering.  The dog bites, growls, lunges.  He won’t be touched.  He is not like the last dog, the perfect dog, the one from childhood.  This dog doesn’t match up.  “I love him.”  But.  More tears.

My colleague is a trainer emeritus of sorts.  Though not yet retired, he’s taken on the title early, a plainspoken Texas Man who’s found wisdom helping folks with their dogs over the past twenty-some years.  It’s strange, though no less profound, what we can learn from people and dogs in their living rooms.  Life is suffering.  The Buddha’s First Nobel Truth is frequently misunderstood.  The literal translation of suffering (dukkha) takes us a bit further than mere discontent.  Life’s pain is the hinge of change; it is temporary and conditional.  Incongruence, for Carl Rogers, was one of the first keys to change in our lives.  The beginning, not the end.  It puts us on notice that life is not what we expected or dreamed of, but that it is nonetheless our life.  For the Buddha it’s also about contrast.  Suffering leads us to compassion.

There are steps to helping dogs who are frightened and angry as a result, the ones who bite and all the rest.  They are not all that unlike the steps we take to help our fellow humans, small steps, gentle.  We begin wherever we are and move forward as best we can, slowly at first.  There is always a helper, a trainer like me or my colleague, friends.  And yes, there are the dreams for which we still reach, or the memories of the last dog, the perfect one, the one we mourn in the face of the one we have.  The wish.  The reality.

The lessons, taught well and practiced faithfully yield results.  The pain eases and the hinge moves more freely.  Behavior changes.  The dog does stop (fill in the blank), and new behavior replaces old.  Life imagined more closely matches life at hand.  People smile.  I wish them well and eventually move on to the next dog, to the next living room.

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll stay at this as long as my senior colleague.  It’s been nearly 30 years for him now.   Perhaps like me, he is drawn by what he learns as much as by what he teaches.   Life is dukkha.  Only when it’s crushed and ground does wheat transform to flour; and before it becomes bread flour is put to flame.  The work is hard at times.  I’ve cried for clients, even with them.  The lesson is compassion.  What else is to be learned from unavoidable suffering?  Smile kindly at the client who is pleading and questioning.  She is your teacher.  Love the dog who wants to hurt you.  His suffering is teaching you to care more effectively.  It is the grist that eventually feeds us.

Michael Baugh CDBC, CPDT-KSA teaches dog training in Houston, TX.  He specializes in counseling families with fearful and aggressive dogs.

We all do it: fuss at our dogs, yell at them to stop doing this or that.  More often than not our rants begin with a sharp stern “NO!”  The funny thing is with most of our dogs the “no” results in nary a pause in the action, a look of glum recognition followed by more of whatever it is we wanted him to stop doing.   The sad truth is, “no” is a nonstarter.  It doesn’t work.   And yet we keep barking away.  “NO!”

The main problem with “no,” of course, is that it’s devoid of any instructive content.  What does “no” mean?   If a dog is jumping on our guest, for instance, and we yell “no” what are we communicating to the dog?  Maybe we’re letting him know we’re angry, but we’re not conveying even an inkling of what we want him to do.  Part of the reason is because “no” means so many things to us.  We yell it when the dog is jumping up, but also when he’s running away, digging, barking, and pulling on his leash.  It’s too vague.  It also violates one of the golden rules of dog training:  a command can only have one meaning, not many.  Inference, creating meaning out of context, clues, and the subtleties of language is a uniquely human quality (and not always one of our best).

Of course, we humans are clever.  So we add the offending behavior after the word “no” to help our dogs understand our indignation.  We say “no jump,” or “no bark.”  In my many years as a dog trainer, and the many more as a human being on this planet, I’ve never heard a dog use a verbal language.  The idea that our dog understands our particular meaning of the word “jump,” much less its antithesis, is a huge leap of logic (pun fully intended).  They are linear, not relational, thinkers.  Plus they follow visual cues better than words.  Never mind the minutiae of behavior science.  Yelling no-anything just makes us sound like cartoon cavemen.  It’s silly.

So what are we wordy creatures to do?  We just want our dogs to STOP IT (whatever it is).  Are we hopeless?  No.  Let’s try this instead.  What do we want our dogs to do?  When our dog is jumping, what would we prefer he was doing?  Sit, perhaps.  We can teach that.  “Sit”, when taught properly generally has one meaning (place bottom on ground).  Awesome!  I can teach my dog to sit, and if he jumps on a guest I have something clear and meaningful to yell at him.  “Sit!”  His bottom hits the ground – jumping ceases.  It might take some practice, sure, but the meaning is clear.  Do this, not that.

Some of us will still yell out “no” in anger (move me to the head of the mea culpa line).  That’s okay if we just remember this.  Follow up with a clear instruction.  If we see a dog digging a hole in the back yard, we might bark out “no” in our justified anger.  But then what?  Add meaningful instruction.  “Stella, come.”  Stella is my dog’s name and she has a pretty decent coming-when-called.  It’s liable to get her away from the hole, at least long enough for me to get her on to a new task.  “No” is quickly forgotten.  The instructive part was calling her to me.

Try this, too.  When your dog does something right, pick a word that means they’re getting a tasty bit of food.  The word should be short and crisp, timed exactly with the good deed to let them know a food reward is on the way.  That’ll get them learning.  Actions result in delicious consequences.  The word marks the moment of success.  Of course, I have a favorite word for this kind of teaching.  “Yes.”

Michael Baugh CDBC, CPDT-KSA teaches dog training in Houston and Katy, TX.  He specializes in behavior related to canine fear and aggression.

Michael Baugh CDBC, CPDT-KSA

Maybe it’s a guy thing.  It could be that whole a boy and his dog ethos.  There’s just something different about how we guys bond with our dogs.  Don’t get me wrong.  I know women love their dogs too.  It just seems like many men take the connection past special into the realm of mythical.

Stella! Photo courtesy Robyn Arouty Photography

I teach dog training in Houston and in Katy.  As it turns out, I have a lot of male clients, and have been thinking a lot recently about dogs and the men who love them.  I don’t know what it is, but we do love them differently.

Part of it, I think, is the shock. I met a guy recently who had a new puppy. It was clear to me right away that this man did not like the puppy, who was biting him, barking, and misbehaving in all the typical ways.  Puppies can be annoying, but this man was beyond annoyed.  He was mourning.  It turns out his last dog had died only a few months prior.  A well-meaning friend bought the puppy as a “replacement.”  During our coaching session I asked the man to call the puppy to him.  Without thinking, he called out the name of his late dog.  His chin quivered and he said, “damn.”  The sadness is not surprising. The shock is how deeply the loss resonates, how powerfully he’d attached to his old dog.  His buddy.

They find places in our hearts we didn’t know existed.  A lot of us guys play our cards pretty close to the chest.  That’s especially true for a veteran I had the pleasure of working with.  He has post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  One day he asked me to take a picture of him with his dog, but he warned me he never smiles.  It’s part of the condition, he said.  I played along.  Truth is, I’d seen him smiling at his dog more times than I could count. The dog was reaching into places no psychiatrist or psychologist could ever reach.  He was touching the man’s soul.  Healing him.

We are defenders of our dogs, sometimes to a fault.  I know a man whose hard lines soften every time he looks at his Chihuahua mix.  It doesn’t matter that the dog pees everywhere in the house.  The dog is special.  One of my dear clients is spending his senior years with a Papillion in an assisted living facility.  The dog bites strangers, including the man’s caregivers.  That doesn’t matter.  He’s going to make sure the dog is with him to the end.

Maybe it’s not a case of men being different than woman.  We all have the capacity to fall for our dogs, and fall hard.  It just seems that men live the story a bit differently.  We are so surprised when these dogs break through to find the men we never knew we could become. Once they’re in our hearts, we elevate them, make them into a dog like no other, and tell stories about them.  Write novels, memoirs and movies.

I don’t know.  Maybe it is a guy thing.  The boy and his dog, but in this story the boy is all grown up.  The dog, it seems, is usually pretty much the same, a hero rescuing him from the deep well of his day-to-day life.  It’s the mythical dog incarnate, real, right here, right now.

Houston Dog Trainer Michael Baugh specializes in behavior solutions for fearful and aggressive dogs.

If you spend any time on Facebook you’re going to see the pictures – people hugging their dogs, kissing their dogs, lounging on their dogs, even kids riding dogs.  The human faces are all aglow with rapturous bliss.  More often than not, however, the dog looks like he just wants to get the heck out of there.  Of course, most of us are oblivious.  Let’s not forget that ignorance is part of what makes the bliss so wonderful.  I mean that in the nice way.  We love our dogs.  We just don’t seem to know what they like and don’t like.

 I’ve been guilty myself.  That picture of me and Stella is the most glaring evidence.  I’m all this is great.  She’s all please just let this be over soon.  Look at her face, the eyes, the way she’s actually leaning away from me.  Her ears are pulled back, too.  That’s another sign.  You don’t have to believe the picture, though.  Right after that shot was taken Stella started to wiggle her way free of my loving arms.

Nobody wants to be a party pooper, but here’s the bottom line.  Dogs and humans don’t exactly show affection the same way.   We drape our arms around the shoulders of people we like.  To a primate (including human primates) nothing says you’re special like a hug.  To a dog, it can feel like a threat.  Watch what happens when a dog drapes his head over the shoulders of another dog.  Trouble.  That’s not to say dogs don’t learn to tolerate our hugs; they do.  But it doesn’t come naturally to them.

Author Patricia McConnell (The Other End of the Leash) was one of the first to point out this kind of miscommunication between people and dogs.  Humans are all about reaching with arms and touching with hands.  Dogs have neither.  They greet with noses, mouths, tongues and teeth.  It’s an odd pairing, no doubt.

Still, all is not lost.  There’s lots of evidence to suggest that dogs love to be touched.   In fact, the sense of touch is among the very first senses to develop in newborn puppies.  They root to nurse.  Feeling is essential to surviving.  That lives on in their relationships with us, and many dogs are quite cuddly and enjoy a good evening on the sofa with their favorite person.

Like people, though, dogs are individuals.  Some have sensitivities to being reached for or touched, much less hugged.  Many dogs have little or no experience with the way we humans show affection.  Our ways may be scary to them even if our hearts are in the right place.  A child lounging with his head on a dog’s chest may look postcard cute.  But for the dog it might be more than a little freaky.  That, along with hugs, can get a child bitten.  I know.  I’m the guy people call when their dog bites their child.

So what are we to do?  We have so much love to give and so do our dogs.  Here are some tips for a good, affectionate relationship with your dog.

Listen to your dog by watching your dog.  Your dog’s language isn’t verbal; it’s visual.  When you initiate some sort of physical interaction with your dog, watch to see how he responds.  Does he snuggle closer, or does he walk away?  If he does the latter, that means he’s not comfortable.  Wide-open frightened eyes, ducking head, ears pulled back flat are all signs too.  Some dogs also wrinkle their foreheads when they are worried.  Notice those things and then give your dog a break.  He’s communicating with you.  You’re his friend so respond by giving him a little space.

Let your dog make choices.  If your dog doesn’t want to snuggle and chooses to walk away – let him.  It’s not personal.  Try this.  Begin some sort of physical contact, like petting your dog’s face, and then stop.  What does your dog do next?  Does he nudge your hand for more petting?  That’s a choice that says more please.  Let your dog make choices and respect those, especially if his choice is to disengage for a while.  Never force physical contact.   He’ll come around.

Be your dog’s advocate.  Not every dog will want to interact with every person.  This is especially true when it comes to children.  If you notice your dog trying to communicate that he doesn’t want to be touched or approached, speak up on his behalf.  It’s okay to ask a person to stop petting your dog, or even to step away from your dog.  It’s is essential that you interrupt a child who is making your dog uncomfortable.  That’s a safety issue.

If a dog is really uncomfortable, he will let us know in all the quiet ways we see in those facebook pictures – wide eyes, clenched jaw, tense or leaning away.  If we ignore those, a growl or warning snap may follow.  And yes, people do get bitten by their own dogs.  It’s children mostly, hugging, kissing or riding the family dog.

We teach our dogs how to deal with our quirky human ways.  We have to really.  While hugging and having their head patted may not come naturally to most dogs, many still learn to tolerate it – even like it.  If we’re lucky we learn each other’s limits and work it out.  If we’re very lucky we get some of those amazing moments that only dog lovers understand, magical instances where we really connect with our dogs.  Sometimes it’s just a look. We’re not even touching at all.  If only someone had a camera.  We’d show the world.

  Originally published in Houston PetTalk Magazine, June 2012