save the pit bull, save the world.

I have Luce in a rally class on Monday nights right now. It’s a course-running class, two courses per class.

Luce has, what, ten rally titles and two obedience titles. (They even gave her some ribbons.) So she’s been to some trials. And she crates fine at trials.

If I try to crate her at class to walk the course she SCREAMS HER DAMNFOOL HEAD OFF. There are two other classes going on at the same time (puppy and beginner basic) so this is not exactly smiled upon.

I’m perfectly happy to run the courses cold. I’ve run plenty of rally courses, this instructor has not been at all daring or even particularly interesting in her course design. The second course is always the same path, just with some signs changed.

Last night the instructor was just adamant that I needed to walk the course and she would hold Luce for me. Luce bounced off her chest at least three times (she is nine years old and has had surgery on both knees, btw). She took her back behind a counter and she tried to jump onto the counter. She screamed. She was basically REALLY REALLY EMBARRASSING.

I declined to walk the second course.

Dogs. They’re pretty awesome sometimes.

For the record, Hyperflite discs are THE BEST FRISBEES EVER. Yes, they’re a little spendy, but they are SO worth it. This is Steve’s second. The first is in fine shape (a little rough around the edges from tooth gouges, but I wanted one in a bright color for photographic purposes.

I teach my dog useful things like going up the stairs backwards. Next on our list is handstands, which we’ve been working on sporadically for awhile. And I still need to get video of him jumping into my arms, just because it’s cool.

I’ve been reading the Beyond Cesar Milan facebook group a lot recently. Partly because it’s like a freaking trainwreck and I can’t look away. Partly because it’s really encouraging me to think a lot about my own training beliefs. There is a core population of people who seem to believe that any positive punishment is bad, cruel, and abusive no matter what. There are people there who claim they only train with positive reinforcement, which I think is naive and untrue- I simply do not believe it is possible to train with only positive reinforcement. (I do believe it’s possible to train without physical force.)

I really don’t use physical corrections in my training anymore. I did when I first started- not to teach, but to stop behavior I didn’t want, primarily Luce’s reactivity to other dogs. It didn’t work; I wasn’t able to be harsh enough to reach her in her over-threshold insanity. Which of course is a good thing- what would it have said about me if I had been harsh enough? Oy. I was lucky enough to fall in with a trainer who taught me about thresholds and how to work with her to desensitize her, and from there I started reading lots of books, learning about behavior and training, and my methods have morphed to be nearly but not completely exclusively positive reinforcement and negative punishment.

But the thing is, I don’t believe that physical correction is necessarily abusive or cruel. Can it be? Sure. But then again, I was so traumatized by the harshness of Susan Garrett’s Ruff Love booklet that it’s colored my feelings toward everything else about her ever since, and there’s no physical correction whatsoever in that book. But then I watch videos of dogs being fine-tuned with pinch collars, and I see no avoidance/distress on the part of the dog whatsoever and it makes me wonder… does the dog truly find it “aversive” or is it “just” communication? If the dog is showing up happy, eager, pushing to work does it matter if the dog is being trained with something aversive?

Are there better ways to communicate? I think so. But there are so many ways to train dogs, who am I to say what is right and what is wrong for every person and every dog? Could I train a high drive Malinois without collar corrections?

Anyway, I was talking with an acquaintance yesterday who was bemoaning her inability to put a CD on one of her dogs because the dog checks out on the heel on lead every time and she NQs. She is going to start working with a woman at our training club that I find to be one of those people who is unnecessarily and unfairly harsh with training equipment on her dog. I once saw her correct her Golden Retriever (those dogs- too forgiving- sometimes I wish they’d just haul off and come up the leash at the handlers who are so ugly to them) with a micro-prong so harshly that the dog screamed and spent the next several minutes shying away from her every time she moved because the dog did not stand on the first command on a practice rally course.

The plan is to put a micro-prong on this dog who is shutting down in the ring and teach that dog that she MUST stay with her handler.

My response was “I don’t think it’s a great idea to punish a dog who is already shutting down.”

Her reply was that she wasn’t going to punish her.

Um, hello? That’s what a pinch collar does.

And now I’m back to being confused about where I stand on the issue. The issue with my acquaintance, I think, is that she doesn’t know what she’s doing, that she doesn’t understand the potential for fall out, for making her current situation worse than it is. I tend to think P+ works best in dogs who are already very driven, for whom a correction really isn’t a big deal, and isn’t a blow to their confidence. A dog like Luce, for example. Not ever a soft dog like Steve. Not ever a dog who is already stressed and upset by their situation, like this dog who is shutting down in the obedience ring.

And the bloggity blog is sure getting neglected lately!

Steve ended up not needing surgery for his mouth, which is awesome. When I wasn’t looking, he managed to finally heal up. He’s still got an icky flap of skin that he may always have, but it has healed behind that, which is what we were looking for. What a relief!

Mushroom’s foot is still ugly even with the antiobiotics. Less swollen, but the lump he has is bigger. And now he has a lump on his chin as well. Probably not related, but I am one of those excessively reactive people who is OMG MY DOG HAS TOE CANCER AND NOW IT HAS SPREAD TO HIS FACE!! (I’m pretty sure they make medication for people like me.)

I’m not sure how long we wait before looking to surgery to see what’s going on in there.

In other news, I did end up buying the training membership at the agility club. Steve and I have been there twice now. The first time I was kind of a mess- I got there at the same time as another lady with a master’s level dog. We took turns training, but I was so freaked out by her being there, excessively concerned by my newb-ness, that I didn’t know what to do with myself or with my dog. I had him do a few jumps and we worked on the teeter a little bit. There were 12 weave poles set up, so I was going to avoid the weaves as he’s only ever done six. I sent him to a tunnel that was right next to the weaves and he took the weaves instead and ran them clean. Ok. So I guess that’s how you transition a Steve from six poles to 12. I begged off quickly and took him to swim in the pool. The other lady came in not long afterward with her dog to swim, and Steve shared the pool quite politely, which is huge for him.

This week when I got there, there were two other people there. One woman was just working with her dog on leash on being calm, so the other lady and I staked out some territory on opposite sides of the building and worked at the same time. I did have to call Steve off chasing her dog a few times (TUNNEL WHEE) but he was able to remain sane enough to leave the jump bars up, listen to me, and follow my direction.

We worked with the tire jump a bit, which has been a problem for us in the past. Steve has had a couple of really scary tire crashes (shocking, right?) which has caused me to be very stressed about the tire, which of course transfers to him. But this place has a break-away tire, which immediately made me feel better. It took a couple tries for him to remember that he’s supposed to go through the tire instead of under it, but after he got that figured out, he was fine. We did the tire from a variety of angles, and then the tire in combination, which was scary at first but posed no problems.

Then we did the tire with a 90 degree turn to the teeter. First time we’ve done the teeter in combination, but no problems there! And finally we made a big loopy loop of jump, tire, teeter, jump, jump, weaves. Steve rocked it pretty much. I’m not worrying much about handling stuff at this point. I’m waiting for classes to start for that focus, since I don’t feel like I can teach that myself. But the opportunity to work on equipment and put that equipment into more practical use in small, obvious sequences makes me feel much more optimistic about our agility future.

I’m hoping that some day I’ll show up there and get the building to myself. That’d be awesome. But so far, the sharing has been going well.

I am really glad I emailed this lady instead of quitting full stop. I’m excited and apprehensive about classes starting, but I’m hoping that we’ll be able to learn, make progress, and maybe even one day be able to join the trialing party.

Mushroom has an extremely painful toe right now. It has a lump on the bottom that I thought when picked open would be a pus pocket, but no such luck. The vet picked it open and it just left an open sore underneath. The thought is that he has a foreign body like a splinter or a thorn of some sort up inside his toe. It’s swollen and ugly and Mushroom is very very bitey about it. He’s on antibiotics and foot soaks and hopefully it will all resolve without surgery, because I don’t really want to have to put my nine year old guy under anesthesia for something as silly as a sore toe.

Steve is scheduled for mouth surgery tomorrow to sew closed a wound that’s been there for over a month and isn’t healing on its own. I’ll tell you. Multiple pets are expensive!