Week 2: Reactive Human Tries Threshold Training

So here we are. Me and my crazy dogs trying to get our shit together. Trainer Miriam Pollard says that when dogs are unsure what to do in a situation, their genetics take over. When I am unsure of what to do in a situation, I turn to books. For myself, I picked out some business communication books. For the dogs, since they can't read YET (we are still at the beginning of our retraining), I picked out two trainers to study: Molly Arvin and Mike D'Abruzzo.

Mainly, I was just trying to figure out where to start.

Molly Arvin, a dog trainer based in Salt Lake, is big on keeping her dogs in their "front" brains as opposed to their "lizard brains."

The idea behind all of this is that if a dog is focused while you are walking, hiking, etc., and in their "front brain," they are going to make better decisions about situations they find themselves in, but more importantly, they are going to have the brain space to pay attention to the cues you are giving them. This all kind of sounded boring-like how fun was work going to be if I had to stay calm and be logical all of the time. Were the dogs still going to have fun on our walks if they weren't just balls to the wall pumped every time we wet outside? I loved seeing them excited to do something. At the same time, they are reactive and it is hard to control all of them together when we want to go camping or hiking or even walk around our new neighborhood, which is filled with bunnies, ducks, off leash dogs, and stray cats. It was time to try and reign it in so that I wouldn't have a nervous knot in my stomach every time I wanted to take them on a walk together.

Sigh.

After this realization, I paced around for a while, bought new hair scrunchies off Amazon, examined some new moles, and did everything but attempt to train the beasts. There were four of them. There was one of me. (And, yes, my fur children have a fur father but he also doesn't follow directions. So unless Molly Arvin also has modules on how to train husbands, I was mostly on my own for this endeavor.)

I needed to PICK SOMETHING- DO anythhhhinnng to start creeping toward my dog-training goals.

Given that I felt overwhelmed and wasn't sure where I was going to find the time to train four dogs individually, I picked this idea of keeping the dogs in their front brain as my first skill to work on: it would help with every future skill and I could start immediately. And by immediately, I meant, first thing next morning.

Starting Now: No More Running Through Doorways

Working with this idea that the dogs needed to be in their front brain before leaving for our Neighborhood Safaris, I started with the front door. Usually we would just hook them all up to their leashes and hope no one got knocked unconscious as we all piled out the front door. Today, on this, the first day or their retraining, I lined them all up and told them to "wait." I use "wait" to mean "don't move forward goddammit" and usually use it when we are hiking down something and I need the dog to wait so I can navigate steps or roots with out going ass over head. I also use "wait" when we are practicing off leash stuff and they've gotten a little further ahead then I am comfortable with and want them to stop moving forward.

Some trainers don't say anything at all at doorways and just wait for the dog to sit or calm without a cue. I might work back up to this, but I'd have to train each dog on their own for since since bad decision group energy is no joke. Ultimately, I've been letting the dogs bust out the door for so long that in this moment I gave a cue for the new behavior rather than let them try and figure it out for three hours.

I put them in a wait and then I went to open the door. Any time one of the dogs moved forward, I would shut the door and ask them to move back ("back"). We occasionally work on this when we are trying to instill order at the back door, so they generally understood what was happening, but Cheeze was really having a hard time. As a group, it probably took about 12 minutes for us to get out the door and six of those minutes were because Cheeze was breaking rank. This was still a good start because...any start is better then no start.

Starting Now: No More Pulling

IMMEDIATELY after walking out the door, we also instituted the next rule: NO PULLING. Starting RIGHT NOW.

When the dogs were little and we knew we were getting a 3rd, I read Karen B. London and Patricia' McCormick's book Feeling Outnumbered? How to Manage and Enjoy Your Multi-Dog Household.

The authors suggested that if I was planning on walking my dogs all together, then I needed to run out and get the "Sense-ation No Pull Dog Harness," which I obviously did because I didn't want to look like the neighborhood jester trying to walk three dogs (that would come later). I put three harnessesses in my Amazon cart immediately.

.

The no pull harnesses have given me a lot more control over the dogs as a whole when I walk them together, but I would have to wean the dogs off of them later when I wanted to transition to real loose leash walking. But for now, you have a sense of the equipment we were using.

So for this first walk where we decided that the dogs were not allowed to pull us anymore, we simply stopped every time one or all of the dogs started pulling (ie: the leash was a line instead of curved). This was not easy. The squirrels and bunnies were apparently having a block party on the same day that I wanted to start training my dogs not to pull and I had to get in my squat position to hang on to them every 5 ft as we walked past a tree and a drunk squirrel decided to gyrate on it. Every five feet, the dogs would pull, I would squat and hold (you are welcome for this visual imagery), we would come to a full stop, and then I would wait 5, 10, 20 seconds in my squat and hold until the dogs would step back or turn and loosen the slack on the leash somehow.

For the next 40 minutes, we didn't make it more than 1 or 2 steps before the dogs were pulling and I had to stop. Instead of trying to complete our normal walk, once we hit 20 minutes, we just turned around and heading back home, which took another 20 minutes.

My brain was so tired from concentrating for 40 minutes straight that I needed a nap when we got home. My husband, on the other had, who was walking Mabel and NOT doing the squat and hold drill for 40 minutes as directed, went on with his day.

I had two immediate take-aways from our first walk:

• The threshold work and the "stop and go" did help. The dogs realizing they had to loosen the leash themselves required a lot of front brain thinking on their part and the threshold practice before we even walked out the door had reminded them that this brain existed so they could access it during a walk. By the end of 40 minutes, the dogs were still pulling, but they were starting to learn to tap into their front brain, and also that they couldn't spring load and leap (the most powerful pull) and get what they wanted. It was a start.

• I WAS going to have to train the dogs individually because giving group feedback was as ineffective with pack of dogs as it was in the classroom. The kids who needed the feedback were not listening (Porter) and the dogs who were paying attention (Cheeze and Gussie) could already do the things I was trying to teach. One-on-one training was going to be necessary.

But what about me and my reactivity? The communication books I had listened to thus far had not really talked about how to stay in your front brain just during daily life; they mostly focused on what to do after you got fired up and realized you had something to say.

What would a human threshold routine look like? IE: When I know I am about to get into a situation that is going to cause me to want to get excited and scratch someone's eyeballs out, what can I do ahead of time to keep my head on?

The answer came from one of my former ski instructors, who was upset that I would get scared shitless whenever we got to the top of a run he knew I could do but that I was throwing a fit about. He had assessed my skills. He knew what I could ski, and yet, when he took me to a run that was within my ability but maybe a bit harder than what I had been on previously, I would get scared and ski down the run like a frozen robot. He was frustrated and told me I needed to not be scared. I was frustrated and told him I didn't know how to not be scared when I was scared, which he thought about quietly for the rest of the gondola ride.

And he did come up with an idea. When we got off the gondola, he took me to a run that he knew I could do but would be scared of. Instead of just going straight down, he stopped me to do some formal breathing. It was simple: few breaths in and out just to get our heads on. I was grateful because he was the only instructor who had given me a tool instead of just telling me not to be scared. I am not sure the breathing did much, but the acknowledgement of my feelings was the magic. I did ski well after that. Since that time, when I get to the top of a run and I feel emotions start revving up, I acknowledge that I am scared but this is all going to go a lot better if I breathe, loosen up, try to use proper form, and not feel down bad about the toddler that just sprayed me while skiing by.

But I only do that when I am skiing. Maybe I could steal it for predictable work for situations that I knew were going to piss me off?

In teaching, a lot of elements can come together at any given moment to piss me the fuck off. Sometimes I can't predict them, BUT 99 PERCENT OF THE TIME, I know I am going to I lose my shit when I open up my email; there's always some stupid fucking shit in there.

Like the door routine we were trying to implement for the dogs, I created a little calming pattern for myself before opening my email, which can be found here in its entirety:

• Find quiet, focused time dedicated JUST to knocking out my email. (Every time I tried to knock out some emails during class it GUARANTEED that there was a parent email, the announcement of a new and dumb county policy, and a survey that will not matter even though it's titled "Teachers! Your Voice Matters!"Bad idea to teach and be mad-just save the email for later-or never.)

• Take a deep breath.

  
  

• As I am on the THRESHOLD of opening my email, I remind myself that SOMEONE in this email batch is going to piss me off and THEY can go fuck themselves.

  
  

• Open email. Deal with everything calmly since I've already told everyone to fuck off in my head.

  
  

• Close email

  
  

• Do not open again until tomorrow. : )

And there you have it: Threshold training for dogs and humans. Let me know how your threshold training is going in the comments!!