Owning a dog is about a lifestyle of constant learning and new challenges, if it is a good one. The gift of having a dog in your life not only lends to giving your life more structure, but also lends to find new adventures, new places to go and things to do. These two seemingly diametrically-opposed ideas are the very foundation of why dogs are used for therapeutic purposes for PTSD, phsyical or mental disabilities and recovering from various kinds of emotional trauma.
We get structure because the dog needs structure. Regular walks, evenly spaced meals and time for training and play, the things the dog needs to be fulfilled seems to also be things we need to be fulfilled. We’ve never been so reminded of this as we are now during this time of quarantine and massive shutdown. Being out of work, revising our work schedules, being out of school and other drastic changes in our daily routine that we have to face as caused to think about how much we miss about what used to be the mundane. The coping mechanism to routine changes is often to create a new routine, albeit temporary. Likewise, life with a dog needs a routine too. And, yes, changes in those routines are also healthy things to explore for your dog’s sake.
Along the line of breaking routines, mental and emotional growth in your dog also happens when there are changes or surprises. This can be as simple as changing the times and/or routes of the walk, occasionally driving to new locations or maybe even taking a car ride since in many states, we are not even allowed to step out into an empty park with our dog. At the very least, your dog is getting used to listening to you through a mask.
Outside of this Covid-19 outbreak, we should consider taking moments to change our routines once or twice a week. Can we change things up in terms of environment? Can we work on basic obedience again or learn new trick behaviors in challenging settings? I know for a fact that making time for these kinds of little challenges leads to a happier life for you and for your dog.
Little challenges. That’s the key wisdom behind training dogs to do tasks that are more complex, require more endurance or concentration in various environments and distractions. When the mundane little changes are made regularly, challenging your dog to sit and stay on a subway grate while people walk past, rewarding a down under a chair at your favorite coffee shop and teaching them to ignore people and crumbs on the ground. Little by little, you can build up the tolerances and skills in your dog so you can take your dog anywhere on the spur of the moment without having a negative experience. Rather you can marvel at your dog’s magnificent, seemingly out of nowhere, superpowers of handling almost anything you ask them to handle.
And there is a typical order of challenges that work best for dogs’ learning capacities, although this typical order is not set in stone.
Duration
Distance
Distraction
Each of these 3 D’s, as I call them, are to be built in your dog’s repertoire one at a time as best as you can. If you work on duration, avoid being far away from your dog or expecting them to leave your side to a distance and try to use the least distracting environment you can choose. Then when you build duration of a behavior while being very close to your dog, you slip in a little distance building. When they’ve nailed some duration and distance for a behavior in a non distracting environment, then you take that behavior to a more distracting environment but you then make the duration super short and the distance very close again. Each environment has a new start to the behavior slowly building duration and then slipping in distance. There are exceptions to the rule with very timid dogs or aggressive/super-distracted dogs, you would work more environments with no building of duration or distance for a very long time until the dog associates new environments with work time/fun time/eating time.
An example of this kind of “little challenges” training is in production training where animals become “actors” for film, television, commercials and print productions. Most of the training is just getting dogs to do normal dog behaviors on cue at a distance, in distraction and with duration…and hopefully take after take. To get such stability for everything from a running leap from one point to another or a slight eye movement from left to right all while staying still with people or carts or smells of food walking by and blocking their view of the trainer. The kind of confidence in those behaviors is all done with months and years of little challenges added up and mastered in levels where a dog can run sequences of behaviors take after take, staying motivated when their belly is full and when they are extremely tired for all the concentration.
WHAT a dog is trained to do is important, but a dog trained to WANT to do it every time it is asked in any situation is where our building blocks of “little challenges” lead to an amazingly well-architectured resume of skills. Isn’t this also what we want our dog’s obedience to look like too? I’ll answer that for you. Yes, we want obedience in our dogs to be not only specific behaviors, but doing those behaviors on the first or second ask in any situation because the dog really wants to do it. That is what I call “work ethic” and every dog’s soul has it in them. Tapping into that work ethic makes them complete as social/pack animals. It’s why when people see how hard working dogs actually work, there is a tendency for less educated people to see this as potential cruelty. The reality is the dogs when trained and developed properly thrive for this kind of hard work.
There’s a very famous tagline that is true of all beings of intelligence: A mind is a terrible thing to waste.
It’s true for dogs too. Routine is good, so are variants in routine because they create “little challenges” that make the mind feel fulfilled in the dog.
Now…enjoy the work of 5 years of training my dog Yonkers and the amazing talents and hard work of the entire crew, writer & director Tane McClure Arendts, producer Cheryl Richardson, musician Dirk Etienne and Tracey Bregman as Yonkers’ voice for the purpose of promoting pet adoptions. Remember, everything Yonkers does in this film was done by building her work ethic, giving her little challenges over time and encouraging her drive, her natural work ethic, to do it over and over just for the love it. I present to you the short film, “Hungry Dog”.