It’s hard not to stare at the woman heating up in the obedience competition. He has a handsome Malinois on the lead and walks back and forth. Step, step, step, step, JERK!—as he turns 180. Step, step, step, step, JERK! Over and over again.
I stopped fighting myself and watched. His face was full of anger as he jabbed the dog’s collar in rhythm. And it’s rhythmic, because often, the dog’s back is turned before he pulls on the leash. She was jerking to her own beat which had nothing to do with the dog’s behavior. The face was full of anger.
At another show, in the crating area, I watched a woman return from the Open competition with her retriever glaring. He turned to his companion’s crate. “He changed me again!” Returning to the dog, he interjected, “Just watch. I’ll give your breakfast to your sister! You might starve.” He made sure his dog could see as he fed his other dog. Perhaps it was for the sake of the human witnesses as well.
Anger as Part of Traditional Training
I remember the first time someone told me that anger should have no part in training. That if we get angry for any reason, we should stop practicing immediately. This is news to me, as a newbie to positive reinforcement-based training. Before, I had the impression that I must to get angry!
Fifteen years later, I think about it again. In the positive reinforcement training community, we often discuss problems with force-based training. The dominance fallacy. Misunderstandings of how dogs learn. The damage. Abuse, intentional or through ignorance. But what about anger?
The emotion of anger makes the habits of force training more “sticky”.
Anger is built up inside. A punitive mindset breeds anger. This anger is considered righteous and appropriate by some trainers. I’ve seen it myself, and I’ve heard them speak openly about it. They consider it part of “showing the dog who’s boss.” In the world of obedience, and in US culture in general, hatred of dogs often garners social approval. Lack of it invites social criticism and pressure—people who walk even the weakly reactive dog in a hurry find it.
We humans believe that anger is an appropriate response to being wronged. I agree. There are many things in this world to be angry about. The problem is directing that anger at dogs and other creatures we control. We are led to believe that dogs are doing us harm, and that the appropriate responses are anger and punishment.
Women in particular are not “supposed” to express anger about many things. But dogs are fair game.
Physical behavior
I wrote this post after responding to someone on social media. They asked for advice about changing their mindset as they transitioned into positive reinforcement training. This brave person wants advice on how to stop pulling the leash and yelling at their dog. They have a lot of kind and helpful advice.
I got to think about learned behaviors than mindset, and here’s what I wrote (lightly edited for this post).
You asked about mindset but I’ll talk about the physical aspect in a minute. If you’re trained to pull a dog’s leash, like me, that’s some big muscle memory stuff you have to overcome. It doesn’t happen overnight, no matter how much you want it to.
Think ahead and make a plan for what you will do when your dog does something like pull on the leash or any of the things that would normally trigger you use force.
It’s hard to think of anything else to do when everything is new to you, but it’s almost impossible at the moment.
I can’t go into a whole set of instructions (and I’m not the best person to do that) but you can make it your goal to gently remove your dog from situations where he can’t handle it (or as we. are pointed out, “was not well behaved”). And try to keep him out of those situations in the first place.
If your dog is pulling on the leash, you can stop slowly (don’t do it suddenly as this is still equivalent to a leash jerk) and take a deep breath. Then you can implement whatever training plan you can come up with for that situation. Again, I can’t tell you a training plan here; I’m just suggesting that you shut down your own impulses.
I hope I didn’t make any inappropriate assumptions here. This is something that has been difficult for me, on and off.
Stop and breathe instead of yelling too, if you can.
It is a wonderful thing that you seek to change your behavior about it. It gets easier as you go along, I promise.
Eileen Anderson on Facebook, September 2023
Old Habits die harder than I thought
So yes, I, too, was taught that when my dog was acting as an independent being, with his own motivations and responses to the environment, he was “bad.” That the appropriate response was for me to angrily push or shake him. In the examples I saw around me, anger infected human behavior: angry voices, frowns, cruel gestures.
Growing knowledge led my emotions and behavior to change as I crossed over, but these things die hard. That makes sense to me. Some old mistakes in my life can still trigger me. And I haven’t ridden a bike in decades, but I’m sure I can ride and do it. I’m glad I didn’t practice jerking my dog around as much as I did on my bike.
I would say that I have lost my harsh handling habits. It had been so many years, and I never felt like taking out anger or frustration on Summer, Zani, or Clara. Then Lewis came along, and I learned that habits aren’t dead.
I don’t have much of a temper. I am tolerant of dog behaviors that annoy many people. I am the gentle offspring of gentle parents. But when Lewis takes Clara, that old anger returns.
Fortunately one of the first things I taught Lewis was a positive interrupter. (This is a dog training term, not from behavior analysis as far as I know. It is a discriminative stimulus for the dog to orient and approach their handler, moving away from whatever they are doing.) Used I did it so well that Lewis got used to, um, different tones of voice on my part. So no matter what tone I use to say that cue or his name, he happily comes to me. Same thing if I yell “Hey!” Lewis’s confident and eager demeanor as he arrives to collect his deal often relieves my anger.
But the tendency to get angry has spread to other situations. Lewis is crazy. He’s persistent and always hurts me or my partner (unintentionally). He forces Clara. For the first time in my life, I investigated anger management. I seriously don’t want my dog to lose it.
I haven’t pulled Lewis’s leash yet. But the desire is still there. So far, I have won that battle. And that’s where my words came from the person on Facebook. Take a breath. It’s not just for dogs.
Different Motivations
I had some interesting discussions when planning this post. I have watched many videos of some of the more brutal and abusive trainers out there. But I rarely see the anger that I saw in real life. More often than not, I’ve seen blank faces from these trainers as they coldly, deliberately, and repeatedly hurt the dogs. These are not the trainers who deny that they hurt the dog. They are the ones who say they know they have succeeded in correcting if the dog yells. I don’t know if anger is included in what they do. I don’t want to speculate what’s going on inside.
But also, one does not have to angrily hurt dogs in the name of training.
My colleague Elizabeth Silverstein of Telltail Dog Training in Little Rock points out that a lot of physical abuse in dogs stems from shame on the human side. We feel ashamed if we do not control our dogs. I mentioned this above about social pressure. Elizabeth and I had a great discussion on anger and she wrote an insightful post on the topic. Hope you check it out.
Elizabeth is right. Embarrassment isn’t one of my big triggers, but I knew exactly what he was talking about. If I am with Clara or Lewis, and they first interject a dog passing on the other side of the street, my impulse towards my dog is born of strong habits. I took them out of there and gave them a calming spray of Easy Cheese. But also, I’ll say my dog loudly and happily for the sake of the person across the street and say something like, “Oh, you’re stupid.” I definitely feel that social pressure. But I learned an alternative behavior to jerking my dog around.
I applaud that anonymous Facebook poster for trying to create and solidify new habits. I also learned when first working with my dog that it is not only acceptable, but appropriate to express anger when training them.
Copyright 2023 Eileen Anderson
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Pointer photo is from Canstock Photo. I didn’t put personal photos in this post because my heart doesn’t want me to associate my dogs with the content.
