My Training Philosophy
Nothing written here is very original; I want to be clear about that. This is simply my understanding of things that many other people have observed and written or spoken about.
The more I read about, observed, and worked with dogs, the more I was pulled in different directions, convinced by disparate and seemingly conflicting ideas eloquently or logically expressed. Even ones own common sense pulls in various directions at various times. Just today however, I came to a point where my philosophy of dog training is on the track of becoming clearer.
It is the New Year and my wife and I have been talking about what it is that sings to our hearts, about how we can live in accordance with that. In a few years I will be approaching half a century on this earth and am only just now beginning to understand what this means. It that same understanding that interests me with regard to dog training, or with regard to my other avocations, Aikido and visual arts – but this is about dog training.
It is possible to train a dog to do exactly what you want it to when you want it too. Many people feel that a dog that is difficult to convince to do things their way is less intelligent than a dog who is easy to train. With enough perseverance, repetition, coercion, conditioning, and/or whatever, most any dog can be convinced. Once trained, most any dog can be shown off as being highly intelligent. But do we keep dogs for their intelligence? Is that their value? Their reason for existence? Does trainability even have anything to do with intelligence? Did you know that chickens can be trained far beyond the level of most family dogs? http://www.dogsrdogs.co.uk/clicker_training.html No, intelligence is not the root of our relationship with dogs. I’m not even convinced the word as commonly used, has a meaningful referent with regard to dogs, or any animal not bound up in the grammar of the human world view.
This is not what interests me, not what sings to my soul. What does is finding and interacting with what, if you will, sings to a particular dog’s soul (or, if you won’t, what speaks to its heart, what expresses its genes, what calls to its instincts, what touches its nature, what fits its physical form.)
This means that if I ever develop a coherent system for training a dog, it is unlikely to produce consistent results in obedience trials, for that is not my purpose. My purpose is to come into line with the dog’s purpose. I want to see the light of fulfillment in the dog’s eyes. The shining glow of ineffable contentment that comes of knowing it’s natural job, it’s purpose in life, is on the road to completion. I want to see the same sort of sacred aura I look to find in my wife when she I doing what she is perfectly suited to doing on this earth. The same knowledge of ones own place and purpose we expect to find in a great genius of his own field, in the winner of a Nobel Peace Prize, or in a poor man who through love, devotion and perseverance is able to create a good life for his children.
Of course we are talking about an animal here. There is no question of great human accomplishments at stake. What there is however, is the finding, observing, and interacting with the real true nature of the beast.
Is this possible? More particularly, is it possible in the context of human society, outside of what we usually think of as nature? I think it is. While this philosophy is dependent on the particulars of the particular dog, there are commonalities of behavior that make a dog a dog and not a wolf for instance. Just as humans have broad flat nails, dogs differ from wild animals in that their natural landscape includes human beings (1).
Dogs pay attention to humans. We are part of the landscape that they consider home. This is documented by Raymond and Lorna Coppinger in their work on dogs that live on the fringes of human habitation but whom never had a human caretaker, whose parents and grandparents never had a human caretaker, dump dogs, the village dogs of Pemba, Egypt, and other areas. It can be seen in my own dogs, at least one of which was “rescued” from a situation of benign but near complete neglect by the human owners of its mother.
My pup did not have the ideal socialization for becoming an ideal companion dog. She was not given human attention during that important period before weaning. After 7 weeks she was taken in by a rescue group, treated well within the limitations possible for these overworked but dedicated people, shuttled around to different homes a bit and kept mostly in the company of other dogs.
Still, at nine weeks when we got hold of her, she had as sweet and attentive temperament towards humans as you could ask for. She followed us around, attended to our approval, disapproval, posture, words, expressions, actions, and social situations.
That is not to say that she was without problems, at least from our point of view. She did not know how to handle much of the list of things she attended to about us. She also attended closely to our older dog. She would clamp on to his lip and hang there in an effort to connect. No amount of reprimand from him would dissuade her. She related to almost everything through biting, and biting hard. Her biggest happiness was to resist any sort of discipline. She wanted to learn about the entire world, and her best way to learn about the world was to bite it.
You could say that what called to her heart were her teeth. But she was a puppy. She wanted to bite more than the object of her enamel thirst wanted to be bitten. She was less interested in what called her heart than she was in what her heart desired. The pressure on the permeable membrane of her soul was all from the inside out. She had yet to develop the facility to listen to what was singing to her.
Only now is this beginning to change. She now hears, among other things, the call of the basketball. An object that runs from her, an object to be stalked, chased, manipulated and controlled. Where I can teach her control of her response to this call is where my training interests lie.
I’m talking about the kind of control that a gymnast might have over his flight through space, not the kind of control a master has over its slave. But there is also (at the least) a second component. That is the song of a social place. Part of what makes her a dog is that she is a social animal. She has the need to fit into a society, to find a home in relationship to others. And, as a dog, humans are a part of the landscape of that home. How large a part people play may well depend on her experiences. Certainly the exact part we play, friend, teacher, hero, foe, will depend on experience.
Training will largely be about how we interact with her response to what is beautiful to her heart. Will she perform for us, to please us as well as herself?
Can I train her in such a way that her desire to please is not as a slave desires to please his master. Not to avoid punishment or to garner reward, but as a dancer desires to please her audience. To please because the social connection is part of the performance, because, knowing that the performance was wonderful, a dancer wants to see that wonder embodied. If she knows it was bad performance, wonder on the part of the viewer will only produce contempt for the viewer. If she knows that the performance was good but it produces no appreciation, this too will engender disdain. But, knowing the performance was great, and that it came from the soul, and that the audience truly saw that it was so, appreciated it, understood it… This will inspire greater and greater things to come. This will produce satisfaction of spirit, a place in life, a confidence and contentment and peace that will make the dancers life a joy to live, and a joy to behold.
That is the ultimate object of living with dogs. Though to a shepherd or a guard a dog may seem an expediency, a tool of survival, that is the reason for using this particular tool rather than doing it another way. And to achieve that end, it is not so much necessary to train the dog, though that too is needed, as it is to help the dog to hear the right songs, and to train oneself to appreciate her dance in response.
(1) This is expressed beautifully in chapter 4 of the book “Bandit” by Vicki Hearne Harper Collins 1991,
see also
Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior & Evolution, 2001, Raymond Coppinger and Lorna Coppinger
The New Work of Dogs: Tending to Life, Love, and Family, Jon Katz, Villard; 2003
Why Does My Dog Act That Way? Stanley Coren, 2006
Click for Joy, Melissa C. Alexander Sunshine Books 2003
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