It’s one thing to write about my training ideas, another to show you how they actually work in the real world. Red and I are close to the kind of relationship I really want in a dog. He is intense, odd sometimes,quirky. I have been listening to him carefully, applying my own training rules and techniques, encouraging the behaviors I like in a positive way. Red was trained as a herding dog before me, but he had never lived in a house or been housebroken or moved around in the human world much. So I have had a lot of training to do. We are close, we communicate with one another, I have been my own trainer with him, as I have been with Frieda.
This doesn’t mean trainers are necessary or useful, it means I need to be the primary architect of my training, and turn to others when I am stumped, if that happens. It hasn’t happened in awhile. I don’t feel I really need another voice, another point-of-view coming between me and my dog. My own confidence is building. Frieda helped do that for me, I will never have a tougher task. I wanted to show you Red doing his outruns, something we do every day of his life, rain or shine. He helped inspire “Listening To Dogs: How To Be Your Own Training Guru,” my e-book original now on sale where digital books are sold.
This week, I’m throwing all of my tools into the promotion of this book – there is no publisher, it is only me – my blog, Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest, my podcast and videos. It’s exciting. Come and see a dog in his element. It inspires me every day to train my dogs well and faithfully, I hope it inspires you.
A reader on Facebook asked me this question this morning in regards to my new e-book, “Listening To Dogs: How To Be Your Own Training Guru.” It’s a good and fair question and there are many different ways to answer it, many different answers. The training of all animals, dogs in particular, has many different faces and voices. There is no one idea about training, there are scores, perhaps hundreds, and even though many people will tell you they know precisely what training is and how it should be done, I am not one of them. Training, like grieving, is personal and individual and I didn’t write this book to tell you what to think about training, but to encourage you to think. There is a big difference.
The hallmark of the truly intelligent person is the ability to listen and hear, not to disclaim and pronounce. The open mind is always curious about the ideas of others, the closed mind bullies and argues and looks for labels and pastes them on his or her forehead. The intellectual says “I don’t know,” the ideologue says “I always know.” In our society, and especially in the world of dog training, anyone can be an expert. It is tough to be an individual.
The animal world is now overwhelmingly dominated by women – training also – and the gender variations within are compelling. I am comfortable around women, much more so than men, and in my life with animals, I have always seen women as viscerally loving and connected to animals, much more so than men. In this culture, some people, a minority I think, are also very angry, perhaps using animal advocacy as a way of projecting notions of abuse and mistreatment onto their ideologies and training philosophies. Anger runs through the dog training world like a stream, cropping up wherever training and animal advocacy is discussed. You cannot have a public discussion about dogs or pets or training without seeing it, it is the elephant in the room, it cuts off open discussion like a door slamming in the wind. Any animal lover knows this and feels sorrow about it. Loving animals is not about battering humans, it teaches us just the opposite.
I have a lot of anger in me, and a lot of projection, and I have worked hard to remove it from my notions of dog training or a life with animals. It doesn’t work there, animals are too sensitive to it, and unlike humans, they are not drawn to it, but away from it. It is a cancer in communicating with animals. I am grateful to dogs for many things, but most of all, for helping me become a better human, because you cannot train them if you are not a better human. When you live with sensitive dogs like border collies or intuitive creatures like donkeys, you must either confront your anger and put it away, or accept that you will never really be able to train or communicate with the animals that you love.
We live in the corporate nation, so one kind of training comes from pet store chains and from troves of expensive and thick books, manuals and videos. This is the face of training for many dog owners. It tends to be general, superficial and basic, effective at offering ideas about basic obedience.
Another kind of training comes from the often politically and ideologically driven advocates of various theories – obedience training and pack theory training are two of the biggest and most popular training philosophies. Of these, I like positive reinforcement training (except when I am not positive) and do not make a good dog pack leader. Clicker training is not for me, something else to drop or lose or misuse. I believe in reinforcing the behaviors I like, rather than badgering the dogs over the behaviors I don’t like. I also recognize that some dogs require more assertive and domineering training approaches, sometimes dangerous in the hands of men but also necessary. Dogs are animals, they do not react to challenge and touching the way humans do. This is often how they communicate with one another. It isn’t an approach for me, but it is surely a valid approach for some.
I have developed my own mix of very personal and individual training ideas. First, I have to know the dog. Then I have to know me. Then my home, family and immediate environment. What do I wish the dog to do? What will our lives together be like? Training for me is not possible in four classes, but goes on the life of the dog, every day in a dozen ways. Making him wait before I go out the door. Making him wait a few seconds or minutes before eating. Doing calming training every day, my own blend of obedience exercises that are pleasurable and effective and that show the dog how to do nothing sometimes and be happy. I take dogs everywhere I can, socializing them in every way possible. I always find work for them to do, each one has a separate function I support and reinforce. I love to go on vacations without them, always leave them in crates when I am out of the house, do not feel any anxiety in separating from them for short periods, I take them for several walks a day. I will not medicate them in place of training (me either.)
I don’t care for dog play groups, they seem chaotic and often unhealthy to me, and adult dogs don’t really need them as much as their owners do. I do not believe the only way to get a dog is to rescue one, I believe the only way to get a dog is in a way that works for the dog and you. Sometimes that is rescue, sometimes not. I don’t wish to see dogs only through the prism of rescue and abuse, that is too narrow for me, like the “left’ or the “right.” I love good and conscientious breeders, and I hope dogs like Red, Lenore and Rose remain in the world, which they won’t if nobody uses good breeders. Those border collies people love to watch don’t grow out of cornfields, they are bred.
These are a few of my notions of training, those and more chronicled in “Listening To Dogs: How To Be Your Own Guru.” Obviously, many trainers have good ideas for us, but I believe the more I have become my own favorite trainer, the more I believe in myself, the better my dogs and I have done together. I took Orson to a half dozen trainers and none could repair the damage in him. I trained Frieda by myself, and it took a long time, and is underway still, but it showed me that I could do it. I think this idea saved her life and perhaps it could have saved Orson’s. Our culture takes power and confidence from the individual and gives it to the experts, pundits and specialists. When it comes to training dogs, I’d like to give some back. This is an empowerment book. Speaking on behalf your dogs, I think it’s an idea worth considering. The book costs $2.99, so I’m not planning on getting rich from offering this theory to the world. I believe in it.
We opened up the new pasture this morning to another driving rainstorm and the path to the outer pasture was a bog. Simon just plowed ahead and went right after all the scrub and Fanny waded in and followed him, but Lulu hesitated. Donkeys never abandon one another, not even for food. Lulu brayed nervously, Simon turned to her and brayed for her to come, Fanny turned around to see where she was. Fanny came back out for her, and Simon came to the gate. Then it started to pour and we brought all of the donkeys back into the pole barn. We’ll try again tomorrow. Lulu will make it, and Fanny and Simon will see that she does. I love the loyalty of donkeys to one another.
Publication day for “Listening To Dogs: How To Be Your Own Training Guru” was exciting and revealing. And successful. The book is at the top of the e-book training lists, has broken onto the top 100 list of Kindle Non-Fiction Books and is chasing after a search-and-rescue book for the top spot on the Animals and Pet Care List. I’d love to get to number one. Barnes & Noble is putting the book up today. This the first of my 26 books that I have published without the benefit of a big publisher and it is fascinating process, there is nothing pushing the blog but the blog and the social media pages. And me and my podcast.
I got another penetrating look yesterday at the plight of the dog lover seeking good, sensible and realistic information about how to train their dogs. Whenever I set out away from my life, my farm, the blog, my own civilized Facebook community I feel as if I’m entering a war zone, the animal world mirroring the fragmentation and rigidity and anger of the political world. How difficult for anyone who loves a dog to get some gentle and helpful information about it. The loudest voices of the animal world are broken up into dogmatic and warring camps filled with dogma and unyielding ideologies. People who disagree are demons, callous, or worse, abusers of animals, evil brutes, clueless, even Devils. There are countless people who proclaim themselves absolute experts with a lock on the right way, yet the plight of dogs in America seems to be worsening all the time in many ways.
Many claim to understand the inner workings of dogs, but seem unable to talk to people in a civil and open way. They remind me to listen not to judge, to be open, not closed, to turn inward when it comes to training my dogs, not outward. The thoughtful and the reasonable are driven to the edges out there, bullied into silence or driven to quiet and more coherent places. I don’t listen to people who tell me what to do or claim to have all of the answers. I don’t believe there is only one way to do anything meaningful, certainly not the training of dogs. I am learning to listen to me as well as my dogs.
It seems that many advocates of training theories and philosophies seem almost cult-like in their inability to listen or disagree in a civil way. Some are even inventing their own Orwellian language around dog training – food-aggressive dogs are no longer food-aggressive but “resource-hoarders,” and how could anyone be disturbed about the hoarding of resources? One trainer told me I was a resource-hoarder, and I said, sure, but I don’t bite.
But if you love dogs, you have to worry that dogs are not doing well in our current system of incoherent and confusing training philosophies. Dog bites are skyrocketing, according to the Center for Disease Control, up 47 per cent a year. Lawsuits are now into the billions and hundreds of thousands of dogs are on anti-anxiety medication and anti-depressants. Millions are returned to shelters each year because people have no idea what real dogs are like or how to handle them. With all of these experts and all of these books, videos, movements, certainties, why are so few dogs trained well, and why do so many people feel they are not able to train their own dogs, even as they spent vast amounts of money on gurus and experts? I think our corporate culture has elevated the notion of the specialist, from dog training to law to medicine. If we are not paying a lot of money for information, we think it must be no good.
We are losing confidence in our own instincts and judgements, in civics as well as animal training. We are forced into intellectual ghettos like the “left” or the “right.” We must choose from one theory of dog training, another kind of ghetto of the mind, a world filled with labels and, increasingly, with righteous anger. I know a lot of farmers up here who train their dogs well and lovingly and without turning to theatrical TV shows to guide them. My forebears did it as well. And good dog training is never angry. I feel sorry for dogs who live with angry people. I have never met an angry person who has a grounded and well-trained dog.
In “Listening To Dogs,” I write about my own efforts to create an alternative, spiritual and successful life with my dogs. And I am not a trainer, but a writer about animals who has been listening to them for years, and, I think, hearing them. You will never learn to listen to your dog if you listen to people telling you what to think and claiming to know what your dogs think. Training is not about obedience for me, but is a profoundly satisfying exercise in communication and listening.
In my happy life with dogs, there are no gurus, trainers, experts or behaviorists telling me what to think and do. I have had great and painful defeats and joyous and spectacular successes, and many of you have followed both. It is not always possible to do this, but it is often possible and it is well worth a try. Training has too been hijacked by people selling complex expertise for money and by unyielding ideologues who have no idea how to communicate with people, let alone animals. There are many good and conscientious trainers, and we often will need them in our lives with dogs, but it seems to me we need to ask ourselves if we can do better for ourselves, in our own homes with our own dogs. Maybe we aren’t as dumb or needy as we are led to believe. We can even use our own words, in plain language. I feel strongly about this book and it is also an exciting new adventure for me, there is nothing promoting it but me, and this book costs less than a cup of coffee or tea. Brave new world. Consider giving it a try, I’d like to get to the top of the list today and make some points about animal advocacy and new directions in writing. If you read it and like it, share it and consider reviewing it. I hope it is helpful to you. It costs $.299, less than a cup of coffee. I’m continuing the discussions on Facebook today, they are all revealing, good and bad.
And thank you for your great support. There is nothing but this blog and its attendant communities pushing this book to the top of the best-selling lists in just a day. Wow.
