Nothing is something

I've found this to be one of the most counterintuitive concepts in training, but also one of the most useful: the absence of  behavior is a behavior (sometimes it's actually a whole set of behaviors), which means that it can be effectively captured and shaped. This is an especially valuable perspective in training excitable, reactive, hyperalert dogs. We can take advantage of the fact that outward physical states mirror internal feeling states, and vice-versa: just as you can give your mood a boost by placing a pencil between your teeth (thereby drawing your mouth into a smile), so can you help your dog find calm by marking and rewarding the visible signs of that invisible feeling.

If you were training a dog to sit, you might not give much focused thought to the question of what "sit" looks like unless your unconscious expectations were disappointed, and the picture in your mind (e.g. upright, alert, eyes on you, butt settled, back legs neatly folded) conflicted with what your dog actually gave you (e.g. slumped posture or levitating butt, attention roaming, one or both back legs akimbo). Similarly, you might have a vague sense of what "calm" looks like, but if you want to train it as a behavior, specificity is your great friend. Some of the picture's details will be particular to your desires, your dog's idiosyncracies, and the circumstances of the moment, while others will appear on many a canvas. But this is an instance when you'd be wise to let your dog guide the brush.

Take a couple of days to observe all the varied ways that your dog expresses a sense of relaxation. Some will involve the whole body (e.g. the "shameless hussy" pose demonstrated by Barley above**), others will appear as small shifts in the position of the ears or the muscles around the eyes (e.g. Pazzo's "dreamboat" gaze). Take particular note of what your dog does at the moment that he or she "switches off." If your dog has alerted to something (or spun into action), watch for the first signs that he is settling again. What happens physically when your dog loosens her focus and becomes persuaded that there's nothing she needs to do and nowhere she needs to be but here with you, enjoying a suspended moment of peace?

Maybe your dog has yet to be persuaded that peace is an option. Maybe you have trouble believing it yourself. (I know I sometimes do.) No matter. Start where you are. Even if your dog now operates within a narrow band of the relaxation spectrum (the bit that spans "wired" to "berserk"), you'll always find some variation. If you regularly reward any "power down" behaviors you see, they'll become more frequent, and eventually the band of available light will widen.

This may sound nuts to any of you with tightly wound dogs, but if you meditate, invite your dog to join you. The first few times I tried this with Pazzo, the results were predictably disastrous, but I persevered until we acquired the shared habit of quietly breathing together for a few minutes in the morning (post-breakfast and post-walk, or I'd really be pushing my luck). Even if things disintegrate from there for him or for me, we get a temporary toehold on nothing, and that's something.

A note: Marking and rewarding calm - especially when you're trying to sustain calm that's already established - can often best be done with verbal markers and relatively low value treats like ordinary kibble, or secondary reinforcers like praise and touch, since unusually tasty treats are naturally stimulating, and mechanical markers become strongly conditioned to heighten excitement and sharpen focus.

**Despite the gravitational disadvantage of a deep, heavy ribcage, Kili taught herself to imitate Barley's hussy pose when she saw that it led almost invariably to belly rubs. It was not in the beginning a relaxing posture for her - she wobbled and worked hard with her tail to keep from tipping over - but after a few months, she got the hang of it, and she now loves to loll regardless of whether belly rubs are on offer.

Comments

[lawrence]

Humans are smarter than dogs. Yep… no offense to dogs, but even the dumbest blonde you know is smarter than the smartest dog you know. That’s good news, because if you want your dog to be a good student—to learn to sit, stay, heel, come, fetch; in short, to obey your every command—you have to be a good teacher. To be a good teacher, you have to understand how your student thinks. Because you’re smart, this will be a breeze.

[Gretchen Icenogle]

Thanks for the comment, Lawrence, also for the generous assessment of my intelligence! ;-) But I have to admit that a lot of the pleasure I take from dog training comes from the fact that it's rarely a breeze - it offers endless challenges and opportunities for creative problem solving. And I think many of those challenges arise from the ways that dogs' innate abilities and learned skills are superior to mine. Their social intelligence is a particular wonder to me - granted, I'm not the most socially graceful of humans, but I don't know many people who come anywhere near dogs in their ability to read body language and emotional states, not only in their own species, but also in our weird two-legged one. Then there's the whole matter of smell, the amount of information dogs literally inhale. Whether we consider this a form of intelligence or merely sensation, there's no doubt that in this arena we are woefully underdeveloped and unsophisticated relative to our "dumb" canine friends (be they blonde or otherwise).