Dog Behavior Blog

What Dog Sports Do For Dogs

Note from Con Slobodchikoff: This is a post by guest author Nancy Frensley, CPDT, CAP2, who is Manager of Behavior and Training at the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society in Berkeley, California. She will write periodic posts about the behavioral challenges and joys of shelter dogs.

For centuries the dog has been considered to be mankind’s working partner. From ranchers whose shepherd dogs beat them to the pickup truck to work the livestock every morning; to the soldiers who depend upon military working dogs to help detect dangerous explosives – people still work in partnerships with canines. But today, in many countries dogs are more likely to be family members than working partners.

 

Through centuries of selective breeding for work, dogs are still equipped to be

working partners. They can always do some things better than us humans. They take up where we leave off in speed, movement, scent detection and the ability to cover distances. Moreover, within just about all of them lies some instinctive urge to do the work for which they were bred. Even Poodles, with their dressy haircuts and smart looks, were originally developed to hunt birds in water. Recognition of the canine’s inherent need to work has given rise to dog sports as a solution. As a result, many pet parents have discovered the sheer joy of having a working partnership with their dog by participating in dog sports. 

 

As a dog behavior consultant at the Berkeley-East Bay Humane Society and an avid dog agility competitor with my own dogs, I am in an ideal position to advise people who are adopting a dog about the value of getting their dog into a sport.   

 

Sports for dogs include much more than agility and obedience competitions (though these are the most common and plentiful). Most of the sports offer both competitive and non-competitive venues. Tracking and other forms of nose-work challenge a hound’s scenting ability while giving the human partner a hike. Field trials and Dock Diving channel a dog’s drive for hunting and water work. Lure coursing and Earth Dog contests give sight hounds and terriers a way to work off their mutual need to chase (and all a handler needs is a chair and umbrella!). Dogs bred to pull can enjoy sledding and its relatives, ski-joring and bike-joring. Bully breed types are awesome at weight pulling (the most famous of these appears in Jack London’s, White Fang.) Stock dog types can engage in competitive herding if their human partners are willing. Any and all of these are great fun to try whether a dog is a mixed breed or purebred. And, on a personal note, if you haven’t been knocked down by a small herd of sheep your dog just drove up, you haven’t lived!

 

Besides being exhilarating to try, dog sports do a lot for dogs and their people. 

Participation builds a solid and trusting relationship, enhances communication and builds courtesy, understanding and common goals among the dog-lovers’ community. They develop the dog’s intelligence and problem solving abilities while channeling natural instincts into structured activities. Both dogs and people stay fit and out of trouble when active in dog sports. Whole families that compete seem to have special bonds around the sports. Channeling instincts into a sport helps to prevent aggression and builds confidence in shy dogs. And lastly, people increase their skills at training and handling their dogs.

 

To find a sport that suits a dog it takes no more effort than internet searches for the various dog sports mentioned above. Dog sport enthusiasts have clubs, classes and lessons available that allow anyone interested to try that particular sport.        

      

 

Puppy Mouthing and How To Stop It

When puppies are still with their littermates, they use each other’s bodies as toys. Therefore, it is hardly surprising that they use their mouths on us—most frequently on our arms, hands, and clothes. Though this is natural dog behavior, dogs must learn to interact in ways that are appropriate in the human world. Since mouthing people is not acceptable, what can be done to stop this behavior and teach our dogs that this is unacceptable behavior?

One useful method is to startle and then redirect the puppy, which is an ethologically useful technique, because it is based on puppies’ natural behavior when interacting with littermates. When littermates play together, they use their mouths to tug or gnaw on ears, tails, paws, and loose skin anywhere. If one puppy mouths too hard, the puppy that got hurt will yelp and move away from the puppy who was too rough. The puppy who was too rough has to go find someone else to play with, but has started to learn that mouthing too hard results in playtime being interrupted.

To simulate this behavior with a puppy, if a puppy mouths too hard, simply yelp with a puppy-like sound (Aaarp! is the closest description of this sound that can be spelled), and then, when the puppy releases its mouth from the person, immediately put something that the puppy can chew into its mouth. Possible objects for redirection include bones, rawhides, Kongs®, Goodie Balls®, squeakie toys, and stuffed animals.

A common mistake when using this method is making the yelping Aaarp! sound and then failing to redirect the puppy’s mouth to something appropriate. In most cases, the sound will startle the puppy, who will stop mouthing the person, but then will go right back to the inappropriate behavior unless given another, more appropriate object to chew on.

Over 90 percent of puppies respond to this method to stop puppy mouthing if it is used consistently over several weeks, but the remaining few dogs seem to get worse in response to those high-pitched yelps and are not responsive to attempts to redirect them. If after three or so attempts with this method, it becomes apparent that the dog is responding to the yelps by getting even mouthier and more revved up, don’t keep trying it. If it doesn’t work right away, it is not going to work at a later point, and it’s time to try something else.

Some dogs respond to being startled and redirected as long as the startling sound is not a high-pitched “Aaarp!” but rather a deep-voiced sound such as “Hey!” or “Stop!” Otherwise, the technique of interrupting the behavior and then redirecting the dog’s mouth to an appropriate object is the same. If the yelp does not work, this deeper-pitched startling vocalization followed by a redirection is the very next thing to try.

There are many suggestions for stopping puppy mouthing that I would never recommended either because they are inhumane, ineffective, or both. For example, do not hold the muzzle closed, yell at the dog, jam fingers into the inside of the dog’s mouth, or swat the dog. Basically, this comes down to one piece of general advice: Don’t do anything that involves any kind of physical punishment, pain or frightening the dog.

 --Karen B. London

Psychic Dog Saves People

This is the story of how my dog Nenkin saved my family.

A number of years ago, I was living in a house that had a small porch in front of the main door. The porch had a screen door that I usually kept locked. When someone came to the door, they would ring the doorbell and I would go out on the porch, greet them, and unlock the screen door to let them in. My smooth collie-mix Nenkin would usually accompany me out on the porch. She loved people and loved to say hello to anyone coming in.

One summer evening the doorbell rang and I went out on the porch. Standing in front of the screen door was a clean-cut man in his 30s. He explained that his car had broken down, and could he come inside to use our phone. This was prior to the general availability of cell phones, so his request sounded reasonable.

As I was about to unlock the screen door, Nenkin appeared at my side. She took one look at the man, and her hackles rose. She bared her teeth and started to bark furiously. I couldn’t believe that this was the same dog who lavished love on everyone coming into the house.

I grabbed her collar to keep her from lunging at the screen door, and regretfully explained to the man that I was sorry, but I couldn’t let him in because there was something wrong with my dog. He was clearly frightened by Nenkin’s barking and went away quickly.

The next day I read about this man in our local newspaper. It seems that he went a couple of blocks down the street, knocked on a door with the same story, and a kindly elderly couple let him into their house.  He overpowered them, tied them up into chairs, robbed the house and stole their car. He was stopped for speeding some 150 miles away, and because his name did not match the car’s registration, the police because suspicious and detained him. They called our local police department, asking an officer to check on the car’s registered owners. Because there was no response to a phone call, an officer went to the residence of the elderly couple, found them tied up and set them free. Without this chain of events, the couple could have died before anyone found them.

So my dog somehow sensed that this was not a good person, and saved us from possibly having the man rob us.

Was she psychic? Maybe.  Rupert Sheldrake, in his 1999 book, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, And Other Unexplained Powers Of Animals, documents a number of unexplained abilities that seem to suggest a psychic nature. One of his chapters deals with dogs and cats psychically picking up the intentions of the humans around them.

But there might be an alternative explanation. Recent research is showing that dogs are very attentive to human body language and very subtle cues that we humans don’t even notice. Perhaps there was something about the man’s posture that gave him away. Or perhaps Nenkin smelled a scent of fear from the man, or a scent of rage. I never saw her do this behavior again toward anyone else.

Whatever it was, I was very grateful to her.  Psychic or not, she saved the day.

--Con Slobodchikoff