What Toddlers and Puppies Know

I took Bagel to visit my sister and her family in West Virginia, and we were all relaxing by the pool. I had given him an old flip flop to run around with and guard as his prize, but my two-year-old niece thought he shouldn’t be allowed to have it.

Sloan would approach Bagel to try to take the flip flop. Bagel would face her and gaze at her, perfectly still, calculating how close he could let her get and still get away. At the last possible moment, he would dash off with a flourish, making Sloan throw back her head and laugh. Then she would run after him and try again. It was fascinating to watch them play this game, both instinctively knowing rules that neither had been taught.

The beauty of the game was that they both loved it, and they both wanted to play it forever. At nearly three years old, Sloan is at the age where she likes to ask the same question, watch the same movie, hear the same story, fifty times in a row. At nine months, Bagel is at age where he wants to play “chase me for my toy” fifty times in a row. At this moment in their lives, they are right on the same wavelength. They can communicate beautifully because Sloan hasn't yet learned all the words and complicated ideas that dull our animal instincts.

Back home in Alexandria, I have taken Bagel to play with toddlers at a nearby park, to get him used to small children. The game they always come up with is "chase the puppy for his ball," and it's fascinating to watch how Bagel dashes off to a safe distance, and turns and faces the kids; they approach and instinctively slow down as they get closer, and fan out to surround Bagel; Bagel hunkers down and scans the wall of children for a gap, and dashes out at the last moment, making them all laugh and chase him again. He even runs slowly, so they can keep up.

The game goes on and on with its unspoken rules, leaving me to wonder how both puppy and toddlers know exactly how to play it.

If Lions Could Speak

The Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein once said, “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him.” (I wish I could say that I knew that quote from having studied philosophy, but I actually heard it on the Ricky Gervais show.) But it was a fascinating idea to me, and it got me thinking. Is it true? What would a lion say if it could speak? Why couldn't I understand it? Would there be "cultural differences" that would make communication impossible?

To be sure, I have encountered cultural differences among people so great that communication was impossible, even in a common language. When I arrived at the high school in Japan where I would teach for two years, I was shown a picture of all of the teachers. Among them was a lady in her fifties who looked just like Aunt Bea from Andy Griffith. I said I was surprised to see that there was another foreign (i.e. not Japanese) teacher at the school. I was told that there wasn't - I was the only one. I pointed to the lady in the picture, and I was told that she was Japanese, even though she clearly wasn't. Incredulous, I asked if one of her parents were from the West, and was told no, she was 100% Japanese, just like everyone else. The truth was that I had stumbled into a complex web of social mores, etiquette, political history, and acute sensitivities that I knew nothing about. (Fifty years before my arrival, southern Japan had been home to thousands of American GIs, but it wasn't something that people liked to talk about.) The teacher was really saying, "Change the subject, because you are prying into an embarrassing detail of her personal life that we, as her friends, collectively pretend not to notice." He was speaking my language, but I couldn't understand him.

Would talking to a lion be like that, but even more so? Cultural differences, multiplied by species differences? I've thought about it a lot, and I really can't believe it. Lions already communicate very clearly, if you know what to look for -- posture, movement, breathing, muscle tension, eyes, mouth, tail. "My food." "My female." "My cubs."

Language is almost like a code that humans use to encrypt information before sharing it. If that Japanese teacher had given me The Look -- the look that our cat Rosco gives Bagel when Bagel gets too close to Rosco's food -- I would have stopped asking questions immediately. I would have understood that my curiosity was not welcome. But because his message was encoded in language, I used more language to dispute the point, and we missed each other completely.

People would also be more aware of what they are really communicating -- as opposed to what they think they are communicating -- without words in the way. After a recent dog training session, I watched parents plead with their child to give a dog toy back to me, while the child merrily ignored them and did what he pleased. I approached the child with a serious face, strong posture and steady gaze, and said quietly but firmly, "My toy." Of course, he gave it to me immediately. The irony was that I had just taught the parents the exact same technique for use with the puppy, and they had done it beautifully. But when language came into the picture, they lost track of what they were really communicating with their faces, bodies and voices: "I'm weak and losing control! If I agree to let you be in charge, will you do what I want?"

In short, I believe that lions -- and cats and dogs -- often communicate much more clearly without language than we do with it. And if a lion could speak, I don't think it would change things much, because lions already communicate everything they have to say. That’s what makes working with animals such a delight: they are completely present and completely transparent. Their bodies are mirrors of their internal states. And I think people can understand them, if they take the time to learn their language.

The Reluctant Retriever

Our dog Bagel is a yellow lab mix, and it has galled us to no end that he is not a natural retriever. Chase the ball and keep it? Yes. Chase the ball and bring it back? Not so much. We would see the labs at the dog park faithfully fetching their tennis balls, and we’d look at Bagel and sigh.

But no more -- I finally solved the mystery of how to get Bagel to fetch instead of play keep-away.

My inspiration came from Patricia McConnell’s excellent book, The Other End of the Leash. In the book she talks about a seminar where she has her dog drop a ball, and then pets and praises the dog for doing it. She asks the audience to grade her on how effectively she reinforced the dog for dropping the ball. They gave her an A, but she gave herself a D. Why? Because, as she was petting the dog, he was ducking his head, annoyed, while he kept his laser-like focus on the ball. The thing he wanted most in the world was to have the ball back. She was illustrating that sometimes the best reinforcement for a successful “drop it” is to just give the dog back whatever he just dropped.

Aha! The thing that Bagel wants more than anything in the world after retrieving a ball is to (1) keep the ball, and (2) have us chase him for it. That was the reward he would work for, not food. Now I just needed to teach him that if he brought the ball back to me and dropped it, I would give the ball back to him and chase him for it.

But how to bridge the gap? Like so many retrievers, when Bagel fetched the ball, he would only come back within 20 feet of us and dance around, trying to get us to chase him. I had already tried giving him a treat for bringing the ball back, but that only worked once - he wanted to keep the ball more than he wanted any food. Plus, right now he’s not allowed any treats -- even chicken - until we figure out his food allergies.

I solved the problem by filling a squirt tube with some of Bagel’s canned hypoallergenic food. When he brought the ball back and did his dance routine, I stayed still in my crouched position, holding the food out in one hand, and my clicker in the other. Bagel danced all around and taunted me with the ball, but I stayed still and quiet and stared straight ahead. After a minute or two, he came over to investigate. When he smelled the food, he dropped the ball to eat it. I instantly clicked my clicker, gave him the food, gave him the ball back, and got into my exaggerated cat-stalking pose to let him know we were playing chase. Then I chased him all around until he lay down -- his signal to me that he’s had enough chasing.

It took a few times before he got the idea of bringing the ball right to me and dropping it immediately. (On the first throw, he still prefers to dance around with it for a minute or two by himself, but that’s okay. I just stay crouched and wait for him to bring it to me.) After a few days, I was able to eliminate the food -- when he dropped the ball, I clicked, and launched right into the game of chase.

Voilà, a perfect fetch.

And a few useful pointers if you want to try this yourself:

Unless your dog feels the need to retrieve, keep it brief - I ask Bagel to fetch three times max.

Experiment with not throwing the ball again right away. We used to take the ball from Bagel and throw it again immediately, and I think that’s why he gave up on fetch to begin with - it was all work and no play. The part that’s fun for him is getting chased once he has it.

Let your dog have a way to signal you that enough is enough. When Bagel lays down, I walk over and sit down with him and we take a little break.

Chasing your dog in play can be dangerous if your dog can’t distinguish between when you are initiating a chase game and when you are grabbing her in an emergency. To avoid this, you want to have a very clear signal for starting a chase game, and very clear body language when you are playing chase. When I’m playing chase with Bagel, I stare right at him and use my exaggerated-slow-motion-cat-stalking walk. When I’m not doing that, Bagel knows not to dash away from me. (Some people try to trick their dogs during chase games by wandering up to them casually, and then springing at them at the last second. That’s a bad idea though, because the last thing you want is your dog diving away from you playfully if you are trying to get ahold of him in a dangerous situation.)

Also, every dog owner should own and practice the technique in Leslie Nelson’s excellent DVD, Really Reliable Recall, available on Amazon.com.

Cognitive Dissonance? In a dog?!?!

I had Bagel in the vet’s office today, and I was trying to keep him interested in a Kong stuffed with his wet food, but he wasn’t having it. There were just too many other sights and smells to distract him, and the result was a lot of squirming while the vet was trying to examine him.

I decided to try something based on what I had learned about cognitive dissonance in college. The theory goes something like this:

Suppose you put a lot of time, money and energy into something (for example, our trip to Flo

rence), but it doesn't turn out well (massive crowds and 100 degree weather). The disappointment of having wasted your resources is too painful to bear. So your mind basically revises the outcome and tricks you into believing that it was somehow worth it ("... but just seeing Michelangelo's statue of David made it all worthwhile!").

(By the way, I really do think that, but having spent several thousand dollars on the trip probably gave David a little extra sheen.)

I remember reading about experiments were subjects were asked to fill out surveys to benefit cancer research. Some people were given quick one-page surveys, and others were asked to fill out tedious 20 page surveys. Afterwards, the people who had filled out the longer surveys rated the cause of cancer research as more important and worthwhile than people who filled out the shorter survey on the same thing.

I wanted to see if I could use this principle on Bagel. If I asked him for an obedience command and offered him a bite of food as a reward, would he be more interested in taking the food than when I had offered it to him "for free?"

I asked Bagel him to touch my hand with his nose. When he did it, I offered him the food. Sure enough, he started eating -- the same food he had rejected as uninteresting a moment before!

I asked him for more touches, and each time he did it, I rewarded him with a little more food. In this way, I was able to keep him still until the vet was done with the examination.

Was it the fact that he had to work for his food that made it seem more worth eating? Was it that the game of touch interested him and distracted him from his overstimulating environment? Or was it simply that taking away the food made it seem suddenly valuable?

I don’t know. I suppose I could design some experiments to find out. But if I were to guess, I'd say that the same principle was at work in Bagel that made the statue of David one of the most stunningly beautiful things I've ever seen.

Petulant Sighs and Air Kisses

I have a dogs and cats calendar that gives a quote, ostensibly by Shakespeare : “Me and my dog, we speak the language of love. I understand his kisses, and he mine.” I don’t think Shakespeare really said that, but I love it all the same.

After I read that quote, I wanted to know, did Bagel really understand the meaning of my kisses? Do they convey an affectionate bond, or are they just an irritation to him?

In her wonderful book The Other End of the Leash, Patricia McConnell describes how primates (like humans and chimps) crave the ventral-ventral contact of hugs, but canines don’t. She has a funny and enlightening spread of pictures that shows how miserable most dogs look when they are being hugged, in spite of the rapturous (and oblivious) faces of their owners. So I try not to hug Bagel too much, with mixed results.

I decided to try a little experiment with Bagel. I kissed his ears, and Bagel smacked his lips -- he opened his mouth ever so slightly, and stuck out his tongue just a little, as though he were trying to lick his nose but only made it part way.

I waited a few seconds. Nothing from Bagel. I kissed his ears again, lip smack. Kiss, lip smack.

Bagel was air-kissing me back! The way my best friend Carla and I do when we are trying to be exaggeratedly elegant - - “Mwah! Mwah!” He was showing me that he shared the sentiment, without taking the trouble to connect all the way with my cheek. Or, as I’ve noticed since, sometimes he will actually lick my face the first time I kiss him, and then settle for air kisses the second, third and fourth times. If I continue, the lip smack is eventually reduced to just opening his mouth slightly and making the noise with his tongue.

I had noticed the lip-smacking behavior before when Bagel was being submissive, but I had never realize the one-to-one correlation with my kisses before.

He also does these moody little sighs like a teen aged girl. If he wants something from me and he’s not getting it -- for example, if he wants some of my food, and I give him a strong look -- he turns his head away with an irritated look and does a sharp little sigh, with a loud breath on the way in as well as on the way out. All he needs is to is cross his arms and roll his eyes, and he could be me, circa age fifteen!

I tell clients to always be aware of the “energy” that they are communicating to their dogs - - breathing, facial expression, posture, movement, muscle tension and voice.

The more I observe the micro-elements of Bagel’s energy, the more I discover a rich language that is communicating much more than we primates usually realize.