The other '99

Jamie was born in 1999, one of a special group of puppies of different breeds born that year who came to be known among my friends as "The '99s."

The '99s got OTChs, MACHs, CHs, group placings, tracking titles, went to the National Obedience Invitational, agility nationals and brightened people's days as therapy dogs. Many of them have crossed the Bridge, many of them are still with us, a little deaf, a little creaky, but still enjoying life.

But wait. There is another '99.

Winnie The Cat was born in April 1999, one of a litter born to Critter, who was given to the Farmer and I as a wedding present. She is 14 years and 7 months old (3 months older than Jamie) and has lived an absurdly blessed life for an outdoor farm cat.

She comes onto the back porch from time to time, to hang out on the old couch and eat from bowl that she doesn't have to share. 

I am trying to update my rogue's gallery of cat pictures. The Adorables are easy to photograph, providing I can get them to leave me alone long enough to do it. Newcomers Bonus and Wild are a little more difficult, given that they are not convinced Phoenix is not going to eat them. Phoenix has discovered that having this many cats on the place means there is much more cat food available and his focus seems to have switched from pursuing unauthorized cats to stealing their food.

It's loose!

If you have sensed a disturbance in the Force, Phoenix has been granted loose-in-the-house-during-the-day-when-no-one-is-home privileges. He will turn 7 next month.

These privileges have been a long time coming. For most of his life, I doubted this day would ever come. My previous dogs all had free run of the house by the time they were 3. There was occasionally some minor collateral damage as they adjusted to unsupervised freedom but it was no big deal.

I knew from day one things were going to be different with Phoenix. He was a . . . busy . . . puppy.

Busy. Yes. That sounds nicer than feral cat on crack.

Before Phoenix, I scoffed at people who told tales about their dogs tearing up things in the house or stealing things off the counters. That would never happen in my house, I thought smugly. Everyone knew you had to keep an eye on young dogs to teach them house manners and prevent them from committing transgressions.

In Phoenix’s case, you had to keep both eyes, both hands, a collar and a six foot leash on him. And never turn your back on him. And never assume anything was “safe.” And still his list of transgressions continued to grow.

People who owned his littermates posted on the email group about how well-mannered their puppies were. They had full house privileges at 6 months of age. They were unsupervised during the day and slept on the bed at night. I shuddered in horror at the thought. If Phoenix was loose at night, I was pretty sure there would be no sleeping for any of us.

His reign of domestic terrorism continued. Even with humans around to keep an eye on him, his level of criminal activity escalated as he grew bigger, faster and  . . . busier.

I remember chastising the Farmer once for letting 3-year-old Phoenix steal laundry out of the hamper and run amuck with it through the house.

“You were supposed to be WATCHING him,” I said.

“I was watching him,” the Farmer replied. “I watched him run into the bathroom and grab your bra out of the clothes hamper. He’s really fast.”

Phoenix didn’t care if he was being watched or not. He delighted in committing crimes right under my nose. He didn’t care what he took, the reward was simply in the possession: socks, books, magazines, cooking utensils, tubes of hand lotion, entire boxes of kleenex, the TV remote, shoes, training gear, CDs, pens, pot holders, house plants. Anything he could grab off any surface was fair game.

I quit counting how many tubes of lip balm were sacrificed to his eternal thieving quest. Once I pried my little point and shoot digital camera out of his mouth. (It had been allegedly “safe” in the middle of the kitchen table.) Another time, it was the 14K gold chain and pendant I’d bought to commemorate the American Belgian Tervuren Club national where Jamie went High In Trial.

Then there was the honey incident. The Farmer didn’t get Phoenix’s crate door latched after taking him out to potty and he spend the afternoon in a merry romp through the house, culminating with the theft of a plastic squeeze bottle of honey off the kitchen table. I came home that day to find honey liberally applied to the floor in every single first floor room.

There was no way I was ever leaving this dog loose in my house unsupervised.

Never.

Ever.

When I left the house, Phoenix went in his crate. I could rest assured the house would still be standing when I got home and that I would not need to buy more lip balm.

Years passed. Phoenix’s thievery continued but now he stole things and brought them to me to exchange for a cookie.

“If you wouldn’t feed him for bringing you stuff, he wouldn’t keep doing it,” the Farmer said.

“If I wouldn’t feed him for bringing me stuff, he would take it where I couldn’t see him and chew it up,” I said.

I started to give Phoenix tiny tastes of freedom while I ran outside to help the Farmer with one chore or another. He worked up to being loose for a couple of hours while we went out to dinner. I tentatively started letting him stay loose with full run of the house when I had to be gone in the evening for work, cautioning the Farmer to, “Please watch Phoenix while I’m gone.”

“What am I supposed to watch him do?” the Farmer asked.

A couple of years ago, Phoenix graduated to sleeping loose at night. Once it was established that the bed was for the humans and the thick fleece pad on the floor was for him, it was all good. Granted, Phoenix tends to do a fair amount of nocturnal hunting and I’m still trying to convince him that barking at the top of his lungs and throwing himself at a window because there’s a bunny on the lawn at 3 a.m. is not acceptable behavior.

During the short daytime intervals when Phoenix was loose in the house, a pattern evolved. To his credit, by now he was no longer stealing things and munching them up. He just stole them and re-purposed them. I usually found any purloined objects scattered in front of the living room picture window.

“He starts as soon as you turn at the end of the lane,” the Farmer told me. “He goes and gets stuff and piles it in front of the window. Then he sits on it and waits for you to come back.”

Well. That seemed relatively harmless and oddly sweet. 

As this continued, a new pattern formed. When I came home, I would greet Phoenix in the kitchen and ask, “What did you take?” Phoenix would race off into the living room and return with a shoe or slipper or random piece of my laundry. I collect the item and ask if there was anything else. There usually was. He would bring me everything, I’d put it away and life was good. But I still didn’t trust him for longer than an hour or two, with or without the Farmer’s questionable supervisory skills.

When I was home on leave after surgery in September, Phoenix was with me 24/7. For 4 weeks, he never saw the inside of a crate in the house. When I returned to work, I only went back for half-days at first, and decided Phoenix could be loose in the house for the 4 hours I would be gone each morning. He proved trustworthy, still collecting one or two shoes for his stash in front of the living room window.

When I returned to work full time, I put him in his crate before leaving that first day. He looked at me like. “Seriously? I took care of you for a month and this is what I get?” I relented. What the hell.

He’s been loose during the day since then, carefully gathering shoes and bringing them to me when I come home from work. 

Renaissance

For Team Phoenix, the 2013 obedience trial year is over. We’ve shown the last two weekends in a row, with mixed but optimistic results and are ending the year on a high note of achievement and discovery.

2013 was not a year of dazzling glory for us. It was more like a roller coaster ride of random delight and head-banging frustration. If I had to pick a single word to describe this year, it would be renaissance. The classic definition of renaissance is a revival or rebirth, characterized by learning.

This year I learned that a lot of popular training methods, although sparkly and inviting on the surface, just didn’t work for me. I learned that some methods worked wonderfully even though they were deceptively plain, without much whiz-bang surface appeal. I learned to sift through the mind-numbing amount of information available to trainers and to find peace in knowing I’ve chosen methods that are right for me and my dog. I learned about fixing problems with our foundation work and continue to be amazed both at what my previous dogs learned in spite of me and at Phoenix’s ability to learn foundation elements I had overlooked and to incorporate them into current behaviors.

This was the year I stopped running agility for several reasons, the main one being to concentrate on our obedience training. When we quit running agility in the spring, I was under no illusions that we would magically start earning 200s. Our obedience issues were grounded in a lot of mis-communication and unrealistic expectations on both my part and Phoenix’s. Our road to confident, happy, trusting teamwork has taken us over some rocky ground. We still stumble and take unplanned detours but I’m feeling better about the journey than ever before.

In obedience training as in life, very few problems have a quick fix. Truly fixing something takes time. I learned that many of our problems were based in a lack of some basic fundamentals - things I thought I’d taught but which Phoenix apparently had not learned. I learned more about understanding drive and how it can be a double-edged sword. I learned the dog determines the motivator.

I learned about the importance of making our training look like showing, of finding a balance between working on individual skills and building mental stamina to perform formal exercises in the ring. I learned (again!) the value of my wonderful friends and mentors in this sport who continue to give endlessly of their time to help me brainstorm and problem solve and keep saying, “He can do it, I know he can, he’s going to be awesome.”

This year we earned 2 U-UD legs. We added an AKC Utility win to our hard-fought collection, bringing us about half way to completing his OTCh. UDX legs remain a hit and miss proposition because I pulled Phoenix out of Open B for about six months to work on out-of-sight stay issues. Happy to report we were 2-for-2 on his debut return in the Open ring last weekend. Is the problem fixed forever? Probably not. Will it require constant maintenance for as long as I continue to show him? Probably so. But dang, it was a rush to come back with the other handlers and see my dog sitting confidently in the line up, not being held by the steward.

Phoenix is not an easy dog to train. If I ask him for 110%, he demands I give it in return. He is brilliant, independent, pushy, headstrong, sweet and funny all at once. He gives nothing for free. He is renaissance all wrapped up in fur.

Can you be more exciting than a squirrel?

Over the years, I’ve been told repeatedly that I need to be the “most exciting thing” in my dog’s life. If I can be “exciting,” my dog will ignore everything else and work happily in the face of any distraction. I overheard it again at a recent trial, as someone gave a newbie trainer advice on how to handle her highly distracted dog - “You need to be more exciting than anything else in her world.”

Exciting is probably not a word anyone would use to describe me. I am a relatively quiet kind of person. Even after a couple of cups of coffee and multiple corner pieces of MACH cake with inch-thick frosting I still wouldn’t register very high on the excitement scale. Focused, organized, optimistic, driven? Yes. Exciting? Not so much.

So after being told for the umpteenth time a few years ago that in order to get Phoenix to work with me I needed to be more exciting than a squirrel, I stopped and thought about it. No. No, I don’t.

First of all, I physically cannot be more exciting than a squirrel. Even on my best days I cannot mimic a furry little  three-pound rodent who can do acrobatics through the branches and run up and down tree trunks both forward and backward. Nor can I make those annoyed squirrel noises.

Second, if I am to prove myself more exciting than a squirrel, I will have to compete with said squirrel. I choose not to do that. The squirrel would win and I would look like an idiot. And probably get hurt.

Oh, I’ve tried. I’ve cheered and waved my arms around and made funny noises and offered toys and treats and run around until I was sweating, exhausted and couldn’t breathe. When it was all over, Phoenix just thought I was weird and maybe a little unstable and he still wanted the squirrel.

What I can do, however, is be the most important thing in my dog’s life.

There’s a difference. It’s not a whole lot easier but it is a whole lot more realistic.

As with most things, it’s taken me a while to learn this. Being the most important thing in my dog's life means he is empowered to make a choice between me and the squirrel without me being required to behave in ways that would attract odd stares at best and men with butterfly nets at worst.

I’ve seen a T-shirt with the slogan “I’m not crazy, I’m training my dog.” If you ever train in a public place, you know what I’m talking about. While even “normal” training involves a degree of odd (from a John Q. Public standpoint) behavior, I am not extroverted enough to act like an escaped inmate from the asylum every time my dog faces extreme distractions.

I would prefer my dog be able to make the choice by himself: squirrel or me. Just plain ol’ me. No bells and whistles. What you see is what you get. This is the me you get in training and in the ring.  I’m not going to lure or bribe you, because the minute the lures and bribes disappear and the erratic behavior ends, the squirrel wins. And that makes me tired.

Sounds great on paper. How to make it happen?

Obviously, by consistent training using a sensible and realistic plan of working closer and closer to things your dog may find very appealing (sight, scent and noise distractions - which one does your dog find most enticing?) By managing a long-term training plan, not just by managing the moment. By rewarding engagement and showing your dog what options ARE available if he chooses to engage (chase games, tug, goodies, etc.) and also by helping him learn that the squirrel will never actually be available. (If my dog wants to chase squirrels on his own time, that’s fine. But he doesn’t get to check out of a training session and leave me in the dust to do it. Although I will admit it has happened. Bad trainer. Needed to be more forward thinking and set up for success, not hot squirrel pursuit.)

A simple exercise is to have someone else offer your dog a cookie while you are engaging with him. The helper will never allow the dog to actually get the cookie. What happens if your dog tries to get it? Does he look back to you when the helper closes her hand over the cookie? Yay! Reward! The goal is for your dog to choose YOU over a cookie he will never be allowed to eat. Eventually, the squirrel will become the cookie he is never allowed to eat.

But beyond that, build your importance by helping your dog understand you control access to everything he wants (treats, toys, other dogs, the back yard, the recliner, etc.) AND by using genuine, sincere, honest, heartfelt praise BEFORE shoving food and toys at your dog as a reward. Let your dog know he (and his behavior) is important to you before you deliver the goodies.

Over the years, I have had students whose dogs lived in homes with doggie doors so they could go in and out as they pleased. They were free-fed from bowls that were never empty and they had a huge collection of toys at their disposal to entertain themselves with. They were allowed access to the furniture as they pleased, never waited at doors and charged out of their crates the second they were opened. Then the student wanted to know why her dog wouldn't listen to her.

Why should he? In the grand scheme of life, he probably loves his owner but she’s really not all that important. While it’s possible that she might be able to make herself more exciting than a squirrel at any given moment, when it’s all said and done, he can still let himself in and out of the house, feed himself and entertain himself while enjoying all he comforts of his owner’s home without any interaction with her. Or without any sort of rules governing his "pack."

The “be more exciting than anything else” premise works only as long as you are able to become exponentially more exciting than anything that comes across your dog's path at any and all times for as long as your dog’s career lasts.

Being the most important thing in your dog’s life is a commitment you will have to work at every single day of your journey with your dog.


Enjoy the journey.

Rain, cats and go-outs

Since my plan to win the lottery and build a state-of-the-art training center is not moving along as quickly as I’d hoped, Phoenix and I train outdoors a lot. Since I'm back at work full time and it's late October and gets dark earlier and earlier, we train outside when we get the chance.

Which explains why we were working go-outs last night. In the rain. In 37 degrees. This was clearly not a formal run-through session as Phoenix and I haven’t worked a lot of blank wall go-outs. Although nearly all of the sites we show at have gates along the back of the Utility ring, we are showing at a site in November that presents only a blank wall, not even an electrical outlet to provide a visual mark.

Last night I used food on a semi-hidden (in the grass) target next to the outside back wall of the garage to give Phoenix a reason to run straight at solid cinder blocks. Tonight I will be using a different method to provide better control of A) the reward and B) the kittens. Which are not the same in spite of Phoenix occasionally thinking they should be.

Our training session went like this:

Give kittens a big bowl of food inside the garage so they will leave us alone. They find training very entertaining, especially when it involves food on targets. Phoenix is used to having them appear in the middle of whatever we are doing. Sometimes he can deal with them. Sometimes he can't. I don’t get on his case about it, we just work through it.

Place target on ground and put food on target. Mark Phoenix to target and send, let him get the food, call him back.

Run out and put food on target. Run back. Mark Phoenix to target, which is being approached by a kitten. So much for thinking they would stay in the garage and eat their own supper. What - and miss the floor show?

Shout at kitten. This does no good. Send Phoenix fast.

Too late. Kitten is faster and is eating the food off the target. Phoenix decides it is not possible to do go-outs under these circumstance.

Take Phoenix by collar and run to spot to show him that a 5-pound kitten is not a clear and present danger and that he is still expected to go to his spot. Scoop up kitten from spot so she doesn’t get sat on. Praise Phoenix for overcoming the Threat of Cat. Gently toss kitten out of the way with suggestion she go play somewhere else.

Turn to walk back across yard. Feel sharp pain in my leg. Remove kitten from leg (it’s Siren, the leg climber). Set Phoenix up and mark him to the target, which now contains no food but two kittens. He looks at me like, “Are you serious?” I remind him the kittens are not treats.

Farmer comes in from chores, squints at me through the mist and asks if I don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain.

I tell him if I had my own building I wouldn’t have to train in the rain. He gives me the “I married a crazy woman look” and goes in the house.

Send Phoenix. Kittens scatter. Sit! He sits. Kitten pounces on his tail. I reward with hazardous duty pay.

Run back across the yard. Set up. Mark Phoenix. There are now three kittens between him and his go-out spot. I send him. Kittens run left. He runs right, in avoidance. Collar hold and run to spot. Show him the cookie he could have had for going straight. Decide it would take too much time to round up kittens and shut them in a crate.

Set Phoenix up. Peel Siren off leg. Stuff her under my arm. (I should have documented the amount of training I’ve done this summer with a cat tucked under my arm. Might qualify for Ripley’s.) Mark. Two remaining kittens are running amuck. Send. Phoenix flies across the yard, ignores kittens and sits fast when I stop him. Praise. Treat. Nose is running. Fingers are numb. There are muddy little cat paw prints on my jeans. End session.

Tonight’s plan: food stuck on the garage wall vs food on a ground target. I would like Phoenix to actually get a reward at the point of success (going clear to the wall) without having it stolen by the kittens first. I have no idea how high the kittens can leap. I expect to find out.

Part IV: The Rules

 The problem with rules is that when someone tells me “You have to do it this way,” I immediately start thinking of reasons why no, I don’t have to do it that way. This is probably human nature – I’m not that much of a rebel and generally, I’m pretty good about following directions. But rules are often restricting and don’t encourage the experimenting and “what if . . .” thinking that can make training a dog even more fun.

So posting a set of training rules is probably not a good idea for me because A) too many rules equal too much rigidity which leads to cookie cutter training where there are no allowances for individual dogs and B) as soon as I think I’ve established a hard and fast rule, Phoenix immediately presents a reason for an exception.

On the other hand, if there is no structure to guide what you’re doing, it can be entirely too easy to stay in your (or your dog’s) comfort zone, thus missing the chance to work through some problems and improve as a team.

So the rules I’m listing here are the baseline I’ve set up for Phoenix and me. It reflects where we are right now. It could change tomorrow!

Keep in mind my primary goal with this plan is to make a substantial portion of our training look like showing so my dog becomes comfortable being asked for formal work without any tangible rewards over a period of time that would mimic our ring time at a trial, and to teach him that the rewards he values are still very much available.

Having said all that, here are The Rules.

• This approach (using formal run-throughs as part of my training routine) is only for a dog who is truly “ring ready.” It wouldn’t be appropriate for dogs who are still learning individual skills.

• We can still work on specific skills in separate training sessions. In fact, we will NEED to because run-throughs don’t involve active “training.” They are tests. (Major exception – if the wheels totally fall off, STOP and go back to training mode. Don’t practice a bad run through just because it was on your agenda for the day.)

• We can have a real ring set up with gates and stanchions (indoors or out) or an imaginary one where I designate part of the building or back yard as the ring and part as the crating area. I put my crate or chair with all my stuff on it outside the ring. Phoenix and I can do anything outside the ring that we would do a real trial – play, give cookies, do tricks, etc.

• When I’ve warmed up my dog, I give my “it’s time to work now” cue (verbal and/or body language) and we go into the ring. No food or toys on me or near the ring.

• Phoenix is wearing a ring-approved collar. 

• We enter the ring, I take off his leash, set up and we do whatever I’ve chosen as the first exercise. Complete the exercise and release.

• Now I have a choice – we can go on to the next exercise OR return to the ring gate, put the leash back on, leave the ring, go back to the chair/crate and have cookies. Putting the leash back on is in important. I can’t let my dog run out of the ring (real or imaginary) to get his goodies. He wouldn’t do that at a trial, right? We need to go together. Have a cookie, play with a toy, then back into the ring, leash off, set up . . .

And so it goes. My goal is to make it black and white to my dog what is expected of him and what he can expect as a result. There will never be cookies in the ring. There will never be toys in the ring. But there can always be cookies outside the ring and I want him to know they are available and he CAN earn them.  Going into the ring is not the end of all things wonderful.

One thing we're working is the engagement factor before, during and after exercises. He'll drop his head and go into "ho-hum" mode at any given time. I've been doing a hand-in-the-collar hand-touch "correction." Take collar with one hand, ask for a touch with the other hand, touch, touch, verbal praise, leash back on, leave the ring, have a cookie, then back into the ring and start again. This seems to be working for us and gets him in the right frame of mind to stay engaged without being verbally rescued or putting the leash back on and giving a collar pop correction. I know it's working because I'm having to do it less and less. Unfortunately, we have a couple of years of practicing disengagement and the ho-hum attitude to overcome because I allowed it. Bad trainer, bad, bad.

Initially, I started doing run-through training by just going into the ring, setting up and releasing to go back out and get cookies. We’ve built from there. Right now, releases for cookies come either at the conclusion of an exercise OR after we’ve moved to the set-up spot for the next exercise. I want Phoenix to know food is available, food can be earned with sustained effort and food will not be delivered in the ring. That’s very clear to me but it’s a concept that has been difficult for him to grasp. For him, the formality of the ring procedure, combined with the cessation of food delivery, pretty much spelled the end of the world. It looked nothing like our training sessions with all their wonderful informality, working bits and pieces and inclusion of food/toys as part of the training.

If he commits an error during a run-through, I correct it with a minimum of fuss and we move on to whatever comes next. There are no do-overs. We can repeat the exercise later in the session if I want to. Error correction is a gray area. It’s an individual decision on what to fix and what to let go during a run-through. I’m willing to allow minor errors. We can address those in skill-training sessions. A run-through is not about being perfect – it’s about sustained effort with good attitude and earning something he wants.

If you have an exercise that needs serious work or a certain skill that is weak, take it off the table when doing run-throughs and work it separately. Don’t practice doing something badly.

One of the major benefits of doing run-throughs is that it forces me to present the “silent handler” my dog will see in the ring. Left to my own devices, I will happily chatter and cheerlead during training. The handler Phoenix had in training was often a very different person than the handler he had in the ring.

What if the session starts to head south? This happened to us after a week of really great sessions. The farm next to the park where we do a lot of our outdoor training moved a herd of cows into a nearby pasture. Phoenix acted like he had never seen cows before in his life. This, the dog who lives on a cattle farm and sees, smells and hears cows every day. But these were new cows. In a place where there had never been cows before. So fascinating. Who knew?

He could not function for keeping an eye on those cows. After struggling with set-ups and two very distracted exercises I gave up on using the run-through approach for that session. We finished by working on attention skills. Add flexibility to the rule list.

Having written this series of posts, I will be the first to agree that yes, I would rather train bits and pieces of exercises that do a lot of formal work. I would rather teach tricks and games that enhance the exercises than focus on repeating the entire exercise much of the time. I would love to have the kind of dog who needs no cookies or toys to make our obedience work sparkle. But that isn’t working for us right now.

I also realize that the instant I post this, I am going to think up a dozen other points I wanted to make. So there may be more to come on this topic.

The journey continues.

Pictures. Cuz they're fun.

I haven't put up any pictures lately so here ya go. iPhone photography at its finest.

Harvest in Iowa Township.

Seriously, woman, taking care of you is exhausting.
Can't a guy catch a nap?

The site of many, many walks over recent weeks.

This morning we saw squirrels and deer.
Phoenix says he saw other things, too.
I didn't ask.

Not  much fall color here yet but gorgeous weather for walking.

The Adorables at seven months.
If you give a cat a box . . .

From left, Siren, Weezel, Gryphon