How not to take the Christmas photo

Having recently endured a formal family portrait with four generations of the Farmer’s family (19 of us, including a 3-year-old in a very bad mood whose vocabulary that day consisted largely of “NO!”), I really enjoy the simplicity of taking pictures of my dogs.

One is an OTCh. One is an OTCh.-pointed UD with UDX legs. They can do a simple sit/stay, right? No brainer! Pose the dogs in a scenic setting, tell them to stay, get the camera, snap a few dozen frames and there you go - brilliant new pics for the blog and the Christmas card. Impress my friends and family.

Do you see any new pics here?

There you have it.

I am developing an unnatural attachment to this blog header, which I’ve had for over a year. I kept intending to replace it with a more seasonal snowy pic during the winter but we hardly got enough snow last year to make the effort worthwhile. It was the Winter That Wasn’t.

Several times throughout this fall, I set out to take new pics. All attempts met with limited success. Here is a condensed list of things that can go wrong when photographing allegedly trained dogs.

Pose dogs. Both dogs act like they’ve have no idea what “stay” means.

Pose dogs. Remind them firmly to stay. Dogs stay but give you a hateful, non-photogenic look.

Pose dogs. Jamie moves. At age 13 1/2, Jamie has decided he doesn’t need to do anything he doesn’t feel like. And why would he feel like staying over THERE when the cookies and Mom are over HERE.

Pose dogs. Jamie tips over. Although his vestibular issues have greatly improved since the episode in early October, he is still wobbly and occasionally just loses his balance.

Pose dogs. Phoenix’s ears disappear. I don’t know where they go. Apparently he can fold them directly into his skull.

Pose dogs. Dog A decides he wants no part of Dog B touching him and shifts just enough to wreck the composition of the photo.

Pose dogs. Dog suddenly feels the need to perform personal hygiene.

Pose dogs. Line up shot. Nobody moves. Perfect! Dog sneezes just as I press the shutter.

Pose dogs. Dogs refuse to look at the camera, no matter how many kissy-squeaky noises I make.

Pose dogs. Peel Phoenix off my head. Assure him "Kitty, kitty" was just a joke.

Pose dogs. Phoenix hears a command beamed from the starship Enterprise and takes off to go where no Malinois has gone before.

Pose dogs. Line up shot. Notice huge eye goobers that were NOT there 10 seconds ago.

Pose dogs. Jamie forgets what he’s doing and wanders out of the frame.

Pose dogs. Dogs look in two opposite directions. Not sayin' "Kitty, kitty" again. I don't have a death wish.

Pose dogs. Now Jamie’s ears are sideways. He looks like a Belgian version of Yoda.

Pose dogs. Phoenix decides he needs to hack up a hairball.

Pose dogs. The Farmer pulls up in the pickup and both dogs bolt to go see their papa.

I swear they are trained. Apparently very badly.

Livin' la vida loca

My apologies to Ricky Martin. I’m sure the subject of this column is not at all what he had in mind when he sang his 1999 hit.

But the song title seems most appropriate to my life right now so I’m going with it.

Frequent blog readers know we are under a mouse siege at our house right now. After a rather unfortunate series of events (mouse poop in places it does not belong - which is ANYWHERE in my house), I decided that more than one or two casual traps were needed to remedy the situation.

I went to the mouse trap store. I stocked up. I went home and began a highly scientific project with the goals of A) catching mice B) finding out what bait catches the most mice C) not catching malinois.

I suspected C might be the most difficult since Phoenix is all about mouse traps. Experience has taught him that mouse traps often lead to VERY fun human behavior. I am careful to always set them with the baited trigger pointed away from inquisitive Belgian noses. More than once, I've caught him nudging them repeatedly, leaping into the air when they snap, then looking at me like "COOL! Make it do that again!"

So far, all efforts have been successful. I have caught a lot of mice. I have caught mice using peanut butter,  dog treats (Zuke’s, for the record), Purina Cat Chow and, although it’s a cliché, cheese. I have not caught a malinois.

Oh no. The malinois has not been snapped on the nose. He’s obviously smarter than that. He knows where every single trap in the house is set. He waits until the trap catches the mouse, then he springs into action.

Springs.

Dives.

Grabs.

Bolts.

Disappears.

You get the picture.

Phoenix has taken to snatching mouse traps and absconding with them.

I have done some crazy things in  my life. (Feel free to substitute stupid for crazy. It’s usually appropriate.) Until last week, I had never tried to get a mousetrap, with deceased mouse securely attached, away from a dog who was experiencing a great deal of mental conflict about A) wanting to be left alone long enough to figure out how to get the mouse out of the %$#@! trap and eat it and B) knowing this was never, ever, ever going to happen so he might as well just give up now.

Welcome to my world.

What do normal people do with their time?

You know it's cold when . . .

 . . . you come home and find the Old Dog sleeping on the couch with his tail over his nose.

Yep. Sound asleep. Didn't wake up while I took several shots. Then realized his sleeping beauty-ness was being photographed and looked annoyed.

Thankful for the little things

The couple on the right are my paternal grandparents, Laurel and John Hanson. The lady on the left is Ada Gaskell, one of their cousins.

It was taken in 1921 and they were ice skating on the Mississippi River near Burlington, Iowa. My aunt just shared the picture with me. She commented that if they fell down, at least the women had plenty of padding with the long skirts and long coats. Guess my grandpa was just out of luck if he fell. Not much padding there.

I'm no expert on the history of textiles but in 1921, I'm guessing they had cotton clothing and wool clothing and short of things made from fur or leather, that was about it. Maybe there was silk for women's underthings but kind of doubting my pre-Depression era ancestors could afford it.

No Polartec fleece. No moisture-wicking base layers. No Thinsulate insulation. No Smartwool socks. No Gore-tex waterproof membranes or jackets with Windwall or Windbloc. No synthetic blends. No flannel sheets from LL Bean. No fleece blankets to curl up with in their La-Z-Boy recliners to watch TV. Um, no TV.

I'm very thankful I was born in the 1960s and get to enjoy all the wonderful fabrics we have today that allow us to be outdoors in cold, wet weather without being totally miserable. If' I'd been a child in the 1920s, I probably would have frozen to death.

If I'd grown to adulthood, I would have been a very bitter woman who had to hand wash all her limited clothing. My grandparents didn't have electric lights in their rural Iowa home until after World War II, let alone an electric washing machine. They farmed with horses, pumped water from a well, milked cows by hand, separated cream, churned butter, grew a huge garden and preserved food for the winter by drying, curing and canning.

If my grandparents were alive today, they would be amazed at the array of conveniences that are so easy to take for granted in today's world. So on the day before Thanksgiving, I am extremely thankful for the "little" things we might not think twice about - warm clothing, electricity, hot and cold running water, indoor plumbing, refrigeration, a furnace and the local grocery store. I love my microwave, self-cleaning oven, washer and dryer, dog-fur-sucking Dyson vacuum, iMac and iPhone.

And I am thankful for the Farmer, Jamie and Phoenix and everything we've laughed about, cried over, endured, explored, learned from, succeeded at and swore we'd never do again in the last year.

Have a wonderful, safe Thanksgiving, everyone!

Thanksgiving #1

Today, I am thankful for sweatpants.

No. Seriously.

The Farmer's family had Thanksgiving today: 25 people, two turkeys, an insane number of side dishes, three pies and my own contribution, Death By Chocolate.

I got home in time to take the dogs for a waddle . . . um . . . wobble . . . um . . . walk before dark. It probably only burned off a tiny fraction of the calories I consumed but it's the thought that counts, right?

Now I can relax in a food coma for the rest of the evening. I am also thankful for my recliner and my fleece blanket that Marsha gave me for Christmas last year. I plan on spending quality time with both.

Malinois in a bubble

This morning a friend helped me with Phoenix for a few minutes after we did a lesson with her dog. I wanted to see how he would react if another person deliberately put pressure on him while I was asking him to play and heel. (This is from Week 3 of the on-line class I'm taking, the topic is how dogs respond to the pressure we create, often inadvertently, by how we use our bodies and how you can add and remove pressure to help them in training.)

Susan did a great job - following, approaching, moving in close and really getting in both his face and mine. She never touched him, didn't need to. This was totally mental pressure created by her physical proximity. Her presence inside his "bubble" was enough to bump him out of his comfort zone even though he knows her and she is very non-threatening.

I've always known Phoenix has a big personal space when it comes to other dogs. But since he is such a goofball around people, I never thought much about PEOPLE exerting pressure on him by being too close.

What happens at an obedience trial? You go in the ring and here comes the steward to collect your leash and the judge to welcome you to the ring and direct you to the first set-up. No wonder Phoenix frequently de-railed quickly. People were invading his space from the get-go and it made him very uncomfortable because he was not free to go interact with them on his terms. Then they made it worse by following him around the ring the entire time he was there.

It took me a long time to recognize this - he warmed up well in congested areas outside the ring but no one there was confronting us directly, we were all going about our own business. But in the ring, both stewards and judge created pressure as we were the focus of their movements and they frequently moved into our space.

If Susan had sat on a chair on the edge of the ring, Phoenix would have been fine. If she had walked around the perimeter of the building while we worked, he would have been fine. But to have her THAT close to us, he was not fine. He didn't react aggressively and he didn't act "distracted," it was more of an overall concern that she was in his space and how could he be expected to think?

He had a choice to make: watch her or engage with me. He could engage on a tug or doing what Denise Fenzi calls "personal play," just interacting with me w/o toy or food. Heeling would be fine, too, if he could relax to the point where he could give it.

We started with hand touches and tugging. Initially, there was a great deal of eye flicking and ear twitching while Phoenix decided how to deal with another person moving around close to him. Every time he looked at her, I turned around and ran. He clearly wanted ME more than HER because he ran after me. Running and chasing was fun. It temporarily relieved the pressure. (I've noticed this in the ring, when he can "chase" me between exercises, he brightens a lot.) When he "caught" me, we tugged or I asked him to heel while Susan caught up with us and we started again.

It took about 2-3 minutes before he settled into a new comfort zone, able to heel with ears up hard, eyes bright and not flicking, no longer concerned by the presence of another person moving very, very close to him.

He had made the decision that Susan was not worth worrying about and he would rather interact with me. We accomplished it without adding any additional elements of stress or anxiety by trying to "correct" the lapses in focus. I kept the session short, we worked less than 5 minutes and stopped on a high note.

I think Phoenix will always have a big personal space. Now that I understand that space is not only related to other dogs, we can address it specifically in training since my friends are always up for helping.

Today, I am thankful for people who put new ideas in my head and friends who help me train.

Training and/or playing

Mutually exclusive: Adj. 1. unable to be both true at the same time. contradictory . incompatible.

Are training and playing mutually exclusive?

Until this summer, I would have said the two were distinctly separate activities. Play was play and training was training and ne’er the twain shall meet.

Learning more about playing with Phoenix has been an adventure. It’s fun. It’s physical. It’s occasionally painful (which has spurred me to find ways to play beyond tugging - these hands and wrists can only take so much.) It’s shown me the weak spots in my approach to improving his obedience work. It’s shown me that people interpret play in very different ways and they use it in very different ways. Or they don’t use it at all, often because they don’t know how or don’t think their dog will play with them.

Phoenix and I played from the start, when he was an itty bitty baby dog. He was the first dog I’d ever had who genuinely loved to tug and I was delighted. My previous dogs ran hot and cold on tugging. So Phoenix and I mostly tugged or fetched a ball. What else was there, right?

So we trained. And we played. Distinctly. Separate. Activities.

I used food during training as “rewards” and as a “motivator.” Or so I thought. In reality, the food wasn’t doing much motivating. When it disappeared, Phoenix didn’t try harder to make it come back. All it did was create a sense of false enthusiasm that never managed to carry through in the ring.

If the food was present and being delivered at regular intervals, it was all good. When the food disappeared from the equation, or when external pressures increased (show ring), Phoenix didn’t really see any particular reason to continue being an active participant in what he thought was a very unrewarding activity. I bribed him to work through a fairly high level of achievement but struggled to understand why we were getting worse as a team and not better, in spite of mastery of technical skills.

I blamed stress, confusion and lack of confidence for our lousy ring presentation and I’m sure those were all elements, to a degree, of our downward spiral. But the bottom line was my dog did not think I was much fun. Great Pez dispenser. Not much fun otherwise. We did not know how to have fun doing obedience if it didn’t involve eating food.

It’s taken me the better part of 5 years to get a grip on the power of play and start using it to our advantage. I wouldn’t say we’re ready to start getting 200s but our obedience training sessions throughout this fall have improved tremendously, with a marked increase in play and a marked reduction in food. I no longer have a weekly cheese budget! (Well, okay, I do, but now it’s all MINE. That’s another issue.)

Tug is still the foundation of our play but I’ve been putting a lot of time into building personal play - chase games, hand touches, push games and just silliness in general that is not dependent on a toy.

We finished our “training” session last night and it occurred to me that I had spent the entire time focused on elements of play. Obedience skills were there, but they were not the object of the session. Whoa. First time in YEARS that has ever happened. Big step for me, the obedience OCD poster child.

Phoenix is a well-trained obedience dog. He has earned a UD. His Novice and Open scores were all above 195. His Utility work was a roller coaster but he was generally in the lower to mid 190s, with occasional surges to the upper 190s. He has given me some very lovely, solid work. He has HITs from AKC and UKC trials.

Knowing this, there is no point in continuing to drill technical skills in the name of “training.” He has shown me he knows how to do them. When he is happy and truly enjoying working with me, he is amazing. This has been evidenced in brief flashes throughout his obedience career to date. Where I’ve failed is learning how to keep him in that happy place with any consistency.

Having finally figured this out, our “training” time is no longer a black and white division between playing and training. We heel, tug, heel, leap and chase (he leaps, he chases - not me), we do a recall, we heel, we tug, etc. It’s very different from my previous approach to “working” specific exercises.

Most trainers would agree that playing with our dogs is fun. So why don’t more people tap into play? There’s the cookie addiction that most of us have suffered from at one time or another. It was hard for me to put the cookies up and offer interaction with myself as the reward and motivator. What if I was rejected? And I was, frequently, initially. I got over it. Phoenix wasn’t rejecting me personally, he just didn’t understand that fun existed beyond the cookie zone.

Plus, if you have a non-tuggy dog and don’t know any other way to play, food seems like the only way to go. It’s generally very easy to use and most dogs turn on for it, at least on the surface. It lets you make behaviors happen quickly, which makes your dog look brilliant and make you feel like Trainer Of The Year.

Probably the biggest reason more people don’t use play more is play takes energy on the handler’s part, especially if you have a big athletic dog. It’s one thing to tug with a 25 pound Sheltie. Tugging with a 55 pound Malinois is a whole different ball game. Plus, you can’t turn your dog onto running and leaping if you’re standing still, so you have to burn a calorie. (Privately, I think there’s a whole diet plan here just waiting to be marketed.)

It’s not all about tugging. It’s not all about balls or all about food. It’s about doing things that make your dog smile and say “I want to be with YOU and do what YOU’RE doing.”

I’d like to do a series of “thankfulness” posts leading up to Thanksgiving. Today, I am thankful for dogs and people who make me think and help me learn.