Dog Behavior Blog

Con Slobodchikoff: How I Got Started With Dogs

I have always loved animals. When I was a small child, my father would bring home a variety of animals that he would find, that were injured and needed help. Because my grandfather was a surgeon who also liked animals, he would patch up these animals and they would wander around the house briefly or sit in makeshift cages until they could be released again (there were no veterinarians where I was a small child).  I remember seeing a variety of birds and some larger animals such as rabbits and foxes. My father would also bring home a variety of insects for me to look at. I still have a scar on my thumb from a huge (for a 3-year-old child) Indonesian praying mantis that I unwisely grabbed and got my thumb slashed with the mantis’s front legs.

My parents had a small black dog, a toy English Spaniel, who was called “Little Fly” because she was marginally bigger than some of the flies that would occasionally invade our house. Little Fly hated children. At some point when I was too young to remember, one of the neighborhood children picked up Little Fly by her tail and injured her spine. Although her spine recovered after that experience, it cemented in her mind that little kids meant pain and trouble.

I loved Little Fly. My first practical exposure to applied dog behavior (as a 3 and 4 year-old) was to try to figure out a way to make Little Fly love me. This required a lot of patience and learning that when she would growl at me, I had to back off and let her see that I meant her no harm. Gradually, through approaching her slowly, offering her treats, and not pushing the issue until she was ready to trust me, I got her to like jumping into my lap and being stroked. She still hated kids in general, but I was an exception in her mind.

Little Fly died of old age when I was 10, and I went through a dogless period where I mostly played with my parents’ friends’ dogs. I seemed to have an intuitive feeling for what was bothering the dogs, and I always made suggestions to my parents’ friends about what they could do to improve their dogs’ lives. This was a time when people thought that training dogs had to be done with some brutality, and most of the time my suggestions of treating the dogs kindly, with love, affection, and treats fell on deaf ears. Occasionally someone would try my suggestions, and then would marvel to friends what a changed animal their dog had become.

My formal exposure to the world of training dogs occurred when I was in my mid-20s. I had just received a Ph. D. from the University of California at Berkeley, where one of my fields of study was animal behavior, and got a job in another state. Although I had been living in Berkeley for a number of years, my parents lived in San Francisco and were used to my dropping by for dinner on a weekly basis. To lessen their separation anxiety, I got them a Miniature Poodle puppy. My mother immediately immersed herself into training the puppy, taking classes in dog training, having training sessions with friends, and showing the dog at dog shows. When I visited my parents, which was fairly often, I would go along to the training sessions and the shows to watch what was happening.  I was particularly impressed that many of the people that I watched seemed to love their dogs, but also treated them without a shred of kindness, yelling at them, jerking their leashes, and often treating them as objects rather than as sentient beings. The priority at dog shows often seemed to be that the dogs should win a ribbon, rather than that the dogs were happy.

This experience caused me to study all of the dog behavior and dog training books that I could get my hands on. I was already well-versed in animal behavior and learning theory from my undergraduate and graduate studies, and I tried to find out how people were applying learning theory on a practical basis. I could see the parallels between the animal behavior that I learned in my coursework and the practical manifestation of that in the behavior of the dogs that I was observing. However, I was amazed at the variety of advice that was provided in the dog training books, and how some of the advice was completely contrary to what people were finding with the behavior of other animals.  The more I studied the dog books and the literature on dog behavior, behavior problems, and behavior solutions, the more I realized that opinions varied all over the map and that the situation must be horribly confusing to people who want to do the right thing but don’t know where to go to find good information.

I started Animal Communications, Ltd. in 1993 as a consulting company with the goal of providing people with sound advice about the behavioral problems of their companion pets, based on my knowledge of animal behavior and on my practical experience with animals. Because even as a child I had been interested in communication, I found that I could always intuitively understand the body language of animals. Later when I was studying animal behavior, I found that there were solid principles behind my understanding. I applied this understanding to consulting with people about their companion animals, reading the body language of their pets to assess what might be the problem. Often I found that the people I talked to had a completely different perception of the problem than what I was able to assess. Once they understood the real problem, they could take the appropriate measures to ensure that they and their animals moved into living in harmony.

Along the way, I realized that many of the behavioral problems that I was seeing were the result of incorrect training methods. So I started offering dog training classes, based on the concepts of positive reinforcement, no punishment, and information about dog behavior. Because I thought that it was important for dogs to socialize, I always had several minutes of dog-mixers, both before and after class, where the dogs and the people could socialize. This created a friendly environment among both the dogs and the people, and everyone had a great time. Dogs and people always looked forward to class.

Now I am often asked by people how they can get into the field of applied dog behavior. My answer is for them to learn as much as they can about animal behavior, dog behavior, dog communication, and learning theory, and then work with dogs in practical settings where they can get experience solving problems. All dogs have a set of behaviors that are unique to dogs, and another set of behaviors that are found in common with other animal species, which is why it is important to study both animal behavior and dog behavior. However, within that set of behaviors, every dog is different according to his or her personality, and every dog has his or her own challenges. I believe that the more experience and knowledge people have, the more they will realize that a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all formula doesn’t work across the board for all dogs, and that practical solutions have to be tailored to the personality of each dog and the circumstances in which the dog lives. Above all, however, I feel that an important feature is that people who get into this field should like dogs, respect them as individual beings, and like the animals that they work with. Love and rewards go a much longer way than hate, distrust, and punishment.

--Con Slobodchikoff

Karen London: How I Got Into the Field of Canine Behavior

I frequently get asked how I got into the field of applied animal behavior. This line of work is unlike many others in which there is an established path to follow. Dentists go to dental school, attorneys go to law school, chefs go to cooking school, but all applied animal behaviorists have very different stories about how they came to work with animals in the way that they do. Here’s my story.

I was in graduate school studying animal behavior in the University of Wisconsin’s Zoology Department. I had already gotten my master’s degree studying a nesting association between two species of tropical social wasp that live together. My PhD work was on the defensive behavior of tropical social wasps. These topics may seem very different than my work with dogs, but they are actually not as different as it may seem at first glance.

The wasp projects I designed came from my interest in social behavior in general and from particularly strong interests in species that live together and in aggressive and defensive behavior. Dogs and humans are two species that live together and have done so for thousands of years. Despite the generally good relationship between our two species, there certainly exists some aggression. My interest in dogs, besides coming from a tremendous love for them, stems from my broader scientific interests in species living together and in aggression. It is amazing to me that individuals living together rarely, on the whole, physically hurt one another. Sure, it does happen, but considering how many interactions occur, only a tiny percentage of them are aggressive in nature. The inhibition exhibited the vast majority of the time is quite remarkable, and even more so when it functions in situations involving more than one species.

In graduate school, I was assigned to be the teaching assistant for a class called “Human/Animal Relationships: Biological and Philosophical Issues” taught by the well-known Applied Animal Behaviorist Patricia McConnell. Of all the fascinating topics in the class, the one that captivated my scientific curiosity the most was the biological miracle of the complex relationships between humans and domestic animals, including the dog. Here was the sort of relationship between species that I was always interested in, and lo and behold it involved my own species!

I began to volunteer at the local dog training classes run by Patricia McConnell with her business, Dog’s Best Friend. I spent one evening each week assisting trainers as they trained people to train their dogs using a combination of ethology, learning theory, and great coaching skills. I learned so much about how people and dogs interact and how best to teach both species new skills.

A little over a year later, I moved to New Hampshire with my fiancé (now husband) because he was starting his PhD at Dartmouth College. I investigated ways to work with dogs to continue to expand my skills in that area, and found that my options were limited. I spent the year learning about dogs in the most unexpected of ways—by grooming them! I am not a natural at grooming in any species, but I learned so very, very much about dogs. I encourage anyone interested in dog behavior to find some way to get hands-on experience with dogs to complement whatever knowledge they are getting from reading or course work. Volunteering at a local shelter or with a veterinarian are other options besides grooming.

Toward the end of my first year in New Hampshire, I began to teach my own classes, which were called Play Training and emphasized the use of play when interacting with our dogs, motivating them, and reinforcing them.

After a year in New Hampshire, I accepted a job offer as a behavioral intern in Wisconsin at Patricia McConnell’s Dog’s Best Friend. It was a tough decision to take this dream job because it meant that I would be living 1300 miles away from my husband for four years. I literally flew home from my Alaskan honeymoon to New Hampshire, packed up to move to Wisconsin, and said good-bye to my husband of three weeks. Opportunities to intern in the field of Applied Animal Behavior are so rare that it was worth the sacrifice, hard as it was. I love the work I do and would not have been able to do it without the proper training and education.

Sometimes people assume that I must be thrilled to have gotten out of the world of stinging insects. The fact of the matter is that I love wasps and miss my social insect days. Still, I love dogs, too, and I can’t help but enjoy the switch from wasps to dogs because dogs are less aggressive and much easier to work with.

--Karen London

When Two Female Dogs In The Household Are Fighting

When applied animal behaviorists get together, we are all looking for new information and ideas so that we can always meet our collective goal of improving the relationships between people and animals. At every conference I have ever attended, there are two questions that remain unsatisfactorily answered for many of us. One of these is: Does anyone have any new ways to try to pill a cat? The other is: Has anyone tried anything new and successful for treating aggression between two female dogs living in the same home? Out of all the behavior problems that I see, this particular issue is the one at which my success rate for solving the problem is the lowest, and this is the experience of every other behaviorist I know. There are several ways to approach this problem, but it is important to know that solving this problem involves a big commitment of time and energy, and that there are no guarantees.

The problem must be recognized before it can be improved. The signs that could indicate that there is a serious problem between one or more dogs in a household are many. They include: One dog regularly pushing another aside for attention, guarding food or toys from one another, the dogs are frequently up on their back paws while playing, the dogs are watching each other intensely or giving each other hard stares, the dogs maintain stiff postures when around each other, one dog bullies another by taking away all the toys and bones, one dog slinks around the house avoiding another dog or is kept from moving certain places in the house by that dog, the dogs threaten each other with growls, tooth displays and snapping or the dogs are actually fighting with each other.

Fights between female dogs in the same household are among the most injurious and long lasting. Fatalities can even occur, since many of the worst fights go on so long with neither party doing anything to stop the aggressiveness. In cases in which fights or other aggressive tendencies are occurring between members of the same household, it is essential that steps be taken to prevent any subsequent injuries and to protect and maintain a high quality of life for both dogs and humans. Each case is unique and therefore the specific treatment must be customized, but some general strategies apply. When dogs are having trouble getting along to the point of exhibiting aggressiveness within the household, treatment involves three approaches.

The first strategy is to manage the situation for safety so that there are not opportunities for threats, fights, or injuries. Such management may include walking dogs individually, feeding them separately, and taking away objects such as bones or rawhides that cause conflict. Avoiding trouble in these or other ways is not a cop out, but rather an active training tool that helps keep dogs out of the habit of performing unacceptable behavior. Prevention is an essential part of the process because every fight is a huge setback that only makes the problem worse and harder to change.

The second strategy is to teach all of the dogs that the way to get what they want in the house is to be polite and patient rather than being pushy and demanding. If you consistently reinforce polite, respectful behavior, the dogs exhibit more of it. Conversely, when the rude, disrespectful behavior is not reinforced, less of it will happen.

The third strategy is to work extremely hard so that every dog in the household becomes rock solid at performing basic behaviors on cue. In a house with any tension that could lead to aggression, there can be no trace of the attitude that, “Oh well, maybe she’ll listen and do it right next time.”  That way of thinking is a luxury that exists only in households completely free of aggression and any possibility of it occurring. The cues that dogs must be able to respond to in any situation no matter how many distractions exist are “Sit,” “Down,” “Stay,”  “Wait,” “Come,” “Back Away” and “Leave It” (which many trainers call “Off.”)

For now, this three-pronged approach is the best we’ve got. Hopefully, trainers and behaviorists will continue to try new techniques that will make resolution of the problem of two female dogs fighting in the home a more frequent occurrence.

-- Karen London