Sigh.
Yesterday was…strange. Caspian impressed me, and in very good ways. Kaia and I had an up and down day yesterday, but I do have to say that there were more ups than downs.
First, the good: Kaia and I graduated Canine High School yesterday, tied for 1st place with 4 of our 5 classmates. I love the graduation games we play there: we’re given a task (can your dog crawl 5 feet forward, will your dog maintain a stand stay while you hop on one foot 5 times, can your dog stand on his hind legs for at least 1 second) and we have a limited amount of time to achieve it. Each dog/handler pair who achieves the goal gets a point, and we move onto the next goal.
If the behavior is on cue, then it’s easy peasy. If it’s not, you can get creative with ways to elicit the behavior. Any form of gentle (or non-gentle) physical manipulation is out, but anything else is allowed. Lots of us lured our dogs to weave through our legs, for example. To be perfectly fair, Kaia and I had an advantage: with so much more experience in training classes, many of the tricks given as challenges were things she already has on cue. I’m also completely thrilled with the reliability of her ’stays’ and ‘freezes,’ she aced those challenges completely.
All right…now that I’ve had a nice brag, trouble with Kaia (and bizarreness with Caspian) will follow the jump. Our class began with Kaia jumping on another dog in class. She has a long history of eyeing this particular dog with great interest, and I have suspected the whole time that this is a dog she’d dearly love to start trouble with. This particular dog is a very wiggly, rather oblivious juvenile golden retriever. He’s never shown any sign that he notices (or cares) that Kaia is giving him the evil eye from across the room. He certainly didn’t notice her tense, forward stance and straight-on stare as he pranced right over to us yesterday.
Now, I have to stop and rant for a moment. This scenario has occurred every single week of class that Kaia and the golden have both attended. In previous weeks, I have called for help soon enough that our instructor or assisstant can run over and catch the golden. Then, every week, the instruct or assistant has taken said golden back to his owner, and delivered a gentle but firm lecture on the importance of not dropping her dog’s leash during class.
They have said, every week, that Kaia is known to be unreliable around other dogs and needs to have her own space. They have also said that it is a good rule of thumb always to ask permission before allowing your dog to greet another dog. It is a question of safety, they’ve said, and also of common courtesy. And every week, this client smiles and nods and says she understands, only to return next week and drop her leash within the first 5 minutes of their presence in the room. Now, I’m still very sorry that Kaia jumped on her dog. But I’m also a little annoyed, and I suspect that this is understandable.
So, golden approached, still wiggly and playful despite Kaia’s questionable stance. There ensued a 1-2 second quiet nose sniff, followed by a 2-3 second scuffle in which Kaia made a lot of noise (and, I’d guess, produced a lot of slobber) but did no actual damage, and the golden stood there looking perplexed. At that point, our instructor reached us, pulled the golden away, and delivered another firm (and slightly less gentle, but still quite appropriate) lecture to the owner. Who left, and never came back.
Now, there are bad and good points to this interaction. The worst, in my mind, is the fact that my instructor appears to have lost a client due to the behavior of my dog. This is upsetting, but such things do happen. The other bad is, well, the fact that Kaia jumped on this dog. I had hoped that her increased interest and excitement around dogs, as opposed to her past care and intense scrutiny, had meant that she may be changing her opinion of strange dogs. That may still be true, but it clearly is not true enough to have spared the golden.
There are, however, numerous goods. The first is that my instructor handled the whole thing with aplomb and professionalism, never making me feel remotely at fault for the incident. She also calmly explained to the rest of the class that Kaia had not done any actual harm, and that this only reinforced the usual message that one really ought to ask permission before allowing one’s dog to roam free and approach another dog.
The second good is that the rest of my classmates were remarkably sympathetic about the entire thing. Several of them made a point of giving me encouraging smiles and friendly overtures, and one or two of them have commented to me in the past that they have previously owned dogs who were also not entirely dog friendly. It’s always nice not to get glared at after an ordeal like that.
The third, and most important good, is that Kaia did no damage to this dog. She delivered a non-damaging, loud, and scary-looking correction. Now, it wasn’t an appropriate correction. The golden wasn’t being terribly polite, but he certainly didn’t do anything to merit that level of correction. But Kaia used to attack silently and with serious damage, without even as much provocation as the golden gave. So I’m extremely pleased with her acquisition of self-control and communciation methods.
Kaia and I can go on walks. We can go to training classes. We could probably attempt a competition environment, if I wasn’t such a chicken. And that’s a heck of a lot better than where we started. That’s encouraging, despite how upsetting it is when she isn’t the picture-perfect friendly dog I wish she was. So, that’s the update on Kaia. Some bad, some good, but still pretty goodoverall.
Now, Caspian. Caspian has baffled me consistently lately. We went for an appointment with the trainer, to go in view of a dog park so she could see how he did. He was stressed and whiney and lacking focus, but he was not the ballistic, noisy, explosive dog I expected him to be. In fact, while he barked once or twice in excitement when we first got out of the car, he did not bark at a dog a single time while we were there. We were probably within 50 feet of the dog park by the end of an hour, and we had been within 20 or so feet of several individual dogs on a few different occasions.
So once again, I don’t know why he’s better. But he is. And yesterday was another shocking improvement. For the last two weeks, I’ve kept Caspian in a kennel at the training facility while Kaia and I have class. It’s too hot to leave him in the car, and he does better left alone there than he does left alone at home. One of the big rooms used by the daycare doesn’t usually get used on Saturday afternoons. That room also has several ‘hidden kennels,’ kennels that have a wall between them and the playroom. It’s a flimsy wall, but it’s still a visual barrier. So, Cas has been spending an hour a week in one of those hidden kennels.
This week, the daycare had to make use of that room. I don’t know why they didn’t just ask me to go get him, but they let a group of dogs into the room where Cas was in a hidden kennel. This means he could hear and smell a great many dogs very near him, though he couldn’t see them. I heard barking from that room (not his) and realized what had happened, and braced myself for the sound of lots of furious barking on his part.
The barking never came. He was, in fact, no more excited when I came to get him yesterday than he was the week before, when there weren’t 14 dogs on the other side of the wall. So again, I am baffled but pleased. But very, very baffled.The next question is, was he quiet because he was so afraid? Or simply because the visual trigger was absent? I think it’s the latter, but I’d like to be sure before I figure out if I can use this to my advantage when working with him.
One thing you might try with Kaia is, when another dog approaches her, get between them and chase the other dog away. I’ve gotten much better at “you’d better leave my dog alone!” spoken fairly firmly (not screamed) since my old girl went blind. This may tick off the owner of the other dog, but they’re probably not going to be my friend anyway. This lets your dog know she doesn’t have to deal with rude bouncy dogs in her face–you’ll take care of that for her.
It doesn’t sound like Kaia was all that inappropriate. Some dogs are not going to be social, and that’s ok, that’s who they are.
Oh, and if you can find an APDT rally obedience trial, check it out. It might be a nice venue for Kaia, very laid-back and there are no group exercises.
Liza Lundell and the (protected) basenjis
August 25th, 2008 at 10:36 amYep, that’s exactly what our instructor recommended if it happens again. Either that, or just throwing a handful of treats toward the other dog and making our escape while he pigs out. I know that tightening Kaia’s leash when she’s near another dog can set her off, and for some reason I got so stuck telling myself “don’t pull on the leash, don’t pull on the leash” that I couldn’t think what else to do. Not my best thinking under fire, but at least there wasn’t any real harm done.
No, Kaia wasn’t all that inappropriate. Especially considering where we started, I’m thrilled with her current level of bite inhibition and self control. I just sometimes wish I had even one dog with whom I could enjoy life without always looking out for possible points of conflict, and that’s not currently the case.
I do love the APDT rally exercises, but taking her to a competition environment just sounds too scary. Group classes are about as close as I think we’ll ever come, and I’m okay with that. We can have all sorts of fun in group classes without either of us having too much to worry about.
August 27th, 2008 at 8:35 pm