Evidence-based care? Not if there’s profit to be had.

Via SkeptVet, disappointingly burning stupid from the American Veterinary Medical Association’s revision of their Model Veterinary Practice Act:

The AVMA has long taken the position that it exists not to protect veterinary patients or consumers but the interests of veterinarians, narrowly defined in primarily economic and political terms. Rather than work towards sound scientific standards of care, the organization prefers to defend veterinarians’ right to profit from anything they can sell as veterinary medicine without competition from non-veterinarians. If unscientific therapies are in demand, the AVMA has no objections to veterinarians selling them.

And as a membership organization, the AVMA must also bow to the wishes of its constituencies. These include several groups of veterinarians, including the Academy of Veterinary Homeopathy and the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association, who promote alternative therapies regardless of the scientific evidence, and who are far better organized and funded than the Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine Association and others promoting evidence-based medicine.

Given such policies, the AVMA position is not surprising. But it is disappointing and dangerous in that it gives the appearance of legitimacy to “philosophies and practices” which at best are insufficiently tested and at worst are based on pseudoscience and are clearly ineffective.

The “Western” language is particularly irritating in its inaccuracy, misdirection, and endorsement of ridiculous (and racist) views of all “Eastern” stuff as oooooo, maaagical (or, if marginally less woo: ‘proved by millennia’ – I’ll be over here being bilious whilst throwing salt over my left shoulder to invite the faeries to make me more sanguine, since Humours and Scottish superstitions are an ancient and pretty continuous part of my Western tradition, and therefore clearly ‘proven’ as reasonable and appropriate responses to life and death matters).

Sigh.

You can read the whole thing here.

* * *

Here are some related posts from the past dealing with evidence-based vet care vs. pseudoscience - these also link back to SkeptVet’s great blog, because it’s one you should be reading if you’re not.

As I said in the post “Human woo increasingly inflicted on animals in place of science-based medicine” -

Adult humans can make at least somewhat informed decisions about their own medical care, and some, sometimes, can also benefit from (limited) placebo effect.There’s been a bunch of new research on the placebo effect recently: a usefully to-the-point post about it is here.

But animals cannot make these choices or even reap the minimal benefits of placebo effect, since in order for it to help, one has to know something about the pointless treatment and invest it with belief – which then reduces stress and sometimes causes some improvement based in that belief.

Animals probably do get some variable health benefits as a result of people being nice to them, just as we sometimes do – but that doesn’t replace our responsibility to also do something concretely, consistently useful and responsible when they are sick or hurt. Pan pipes and incense, so to speak (or thoroughly debunked practices like homeopathy) aren’t going to cut it. And while humans have the right to choose these things for themselves, to withhold proven and available medical care from animals who cannot speak or make informed choices for themselves is unethical.

…

If I want to stick some hot rose quartz on my chakras while inserting needles into my feet and drinking water someone said once had an herb waved over it instead of going to the doctor when I find a lump in my breast or start puking blood, it’s my right to hurt myself.

It’s not my right to withhold appropriate medical care from animals for whom I’m responsible.

Is there going to have to be an Occupy AVMA movement to counter the CAM lobbyists/merchandisers? Who’s bringing the pooper scoopers?

Number One Top Secret Pesticide-Free Insect Repellent Revealed!

Instead of standing around complaining, walk swiftly and carry a big switch.

July 4 festivities with Gilly and Tito – and a little rant about training for confidence and joy vs. training for fear and neuroses

Well, July 2nd. But you know.

Gilly loves fireworks. And parades, and huge drum corps, and fuggedabout bagpipes: he’s going to sing along. Loudly.

This is not magic, and it’s not ‘just his personality’ (well, the bagpipe thing probably is).

It’s because I trained him, from early life, by creating a positive experience of crowds and noise and strange events for him. Really, he usually doesn’t care much about what the main event is, because to him, the main event isn’t the lights in the sky or the marching people, it’s the festive energy of the crowd, the fried dough, the other dogs, the new smells: it’s a party for his nose and brain, and sometimes for his stomach.

Mainly, I made this positive association by making sure he went into new experiences after some good exercise so he was a bit tired-out, and by always remaining calm and relaxed and being visibly curious about new things (rather than worried about them) myself. And of course, he has leash-training so he’s safe walking around in mayhem, and always under control. He doesn’t drag me, or jump on people, or try to take off: he and I move around as one unit, and we both enjoy it. I trust him, he trusts me. Because of training, not magic.

Like all dogs, Gilly looks to me (and to a lesser degree, to the other people and dogs around), to see how he’s supposed to react to something. If I’m calm, and there’s a lot of happy energy and laughter, he follows that lead. If I’m neurotic and unhappy and loud and weird and histrionic and acting like something is wrong and he’s going to be VERY UPSET ANY SECOND BECAUSE THIS IS BAAAAD, VERY BAAAAD, AND DOGS HATE THUNDER!!!! OR WHATEVER!!!!! OR – OHMYGOD WHAT WAS THAT NOISE!?!?!?!?! – well then, he’ll be miserable. Because I told him to be, pretty much: with my own behavior and emotional state, I told him something is wrong and he should be afraid.

If something just randomly startles him, I have two choices: I can a) remain calm and help him come to terms with it so it won’t be scary next time,  or b) convey to him that SOMETHING VERY BAD JUST HAPPENED!!!!!!!  and he should be  VERY UPSET!!!!!! and OHMYGODAREYOUOKAAAYYYY??????? followed by lots of weird, confusing energy and messages which all boil down to a clear, clear signal that whatever the hell just happened, it was bad and next time it happens the human’s expectation is that the dog should freak out.

It seems like ‘conventional wisdom’ (in the press, from most dog owners, even from otherwise responsible shelters) is a message of avoidance and hysteria that guarantees that second reaction and consequence. That human and canine reaction then gets reinforced over and over again, so the negative association gets as deeply entrenched as a positive or neutral association could have in its place.

I started taking Gilly to parades and barbeques and fireworks displays and for hikes in thunderstorms as a pup, and have continued to expose him to all sorts of fun and out of the ordinary experiences – because new things can either be fun or terrifying for him, and I vote for fun.

I also exposed him to buses and air brakes and elevators and spiral staircases and electric wheelchairs; to a multitude of other dogs and people and skateboards and bikes and every other thing I could think of which might potentially be alarming or weird.

We went to obedience school starting when he was a pup (for socialization as much as for specific training), and I keep his leash manners perfect. To me, that’s safety-101: if I want to be able to walk him in town, around cars, I need to be able to rely on him to listen and to keep in heel position. If I can call him right to heel even when he’s off-leash in the woods, I also have good ability to protect him if something weird comes at him: more than once we’ve come across a bear or a snake or a skunk or porcupine while out in the woods – I call Gilly to heel and we pass on by without incident.  We also run into aggressive/untrained/badly socialized/unsupervised dogs on various trails from time to time: the dog charges or threatens him, I call him to heel and/or get to him first (usually we meet in the middle), my body language conveys to the other dog that Gilly is mine and that’s the end of any discussion about it, the threatening dog backs down and we pass on by without incident. His socialization with other dogs also means that his own body language often diffuses situations like this before it even gets ugly: he knows just what to do to set other dogs at ease.

I taught him all sorts of weird, funny tricks and games which we do for sport when we’re snowed-in or just bored, he worked a Saturday shift for a while in our friend’s dog-toy store as a young dog so he’d be exposed to all sorts of people and dogs and weird town things (he’s lived in the country all his life, pretty much, so making sure he got town-exposure was important), we walk daily, on leash in town and off leash in the woods.

In part, I’ve been super-conscientious about doing all of this extra-exposure training in addition to the basics of leash training and adequate exercise because Gilly’s nature is to be a nervous, tightly-wound dog.  I wanted him to build confidence as a puppy and to hang onto it as an adult, so that life could be more joyous for him and he could be safer in more situations. But I also do it because it’s fun for us both, it’s a bonding thing we do together, and the higher his skill level in the more situations, the more I can have him with me, which is where I want him whenever possible.

I’ve also been able to do this level of training because I make conscious choices about dog-raising and being a good guardian. For me, this includes things like only having one dog at a time so I can a) invest a lot of training and time and total consistency, b) afford quality vet care and food, and c) develop a very deep bond so that much of this communication between us happens below the level of consciousness – and what doesn’t I have the time and focus and energy to give him out loud and in consistent action.

I figure I need to do exactly as much as I can do really right. For me, that’s one dog.

That’s not everyone’s choice, and many people pull off great socialization and training and care for multiple dogs, but the ones who do have more money than I do, and generally are able to take on twice as much work (or three times, or four times – however many dogs they have). They also tend to want a different kind of relationship with their dogs than I want with my one dog. And that’s fine, as long as the dogs are happy and healthy and well-adjusted and cared for properly. Since I want just one dog, that means I have the additional responsibility of making sure my single pooch gets a lot of time with other dogs and has a core group of other dogs in his ‘family’ – they are pack animals, and they need that.

More often than the good care of packs, though, I see people with houses full of dogs just presume the dogs will take care of each other – and those houses are run by those dogs, none of whom get adequate training or exercise and most of whom develop behavior problems as a result.

Then those behavior problems circumscribe the dogs’ lives (ie: the dogs are never allowed out of their house or yard because they can’t be walked on a leash or trusted with other dogs or won’t come when they’re called or whatever) – and the behavior worsens.

As dogs are continually left without guidance or boundaries or clear expectations and someone they can trust, and as they are increasingly reacted to with overwhelm and helplessness, the absence of clear, consistent leadership escalates the dogs’ anxiety – and their behavior worsens.

And then, the cherry on top:  even the best-intentioned people start screwing over other dogs by disseminating bad information which inexperienced dog owners believe, and the cycle perpetuates.

Next thing you know, among many other things, every July 4 season, articles start popping up all over the place saying “YOUR DOG’S GOING TO FREAK OUT ABOUT FIREWORKS!!!! ONLY BAD PEOPLE LET THEIR DOGS OUT OF THEIR KENNELS!!!! KEEP YOUR DOG INSIDE!!! HIDE YOUR DOGS IN THE BASEMENT AND WAIT FOR THEM TO FREAK OUT!!!!!!! EXPECT BAD THINGS!!! DRUG YOUR DOG!!!!!!”  And yep, “drug your dog” is everywhere in the press. I’ll leave you to figure out who finances those articles.

Look, it might be more convenient to dose your dog unconscious instead of doing the continuous work of earning their trust by giving them lifelong and appropriate training and exposure to all sorts of noises and crowds and new things. But a dog is not an ottoman. It’s not something you can put your feet on when you feel like it and ignore the rest of the time – not without major consequences to the dog (and maybe anyone else the dog interacts with, including you). It’s a lifelong relationship with a living being who requires a major investment of care and time and proactive thoughtfulness and training and support.

Not human-therapy-style: dog-style. Which means: it’s not about you and your needs. It’s not about processing feeeeeeeelings, it’s about showing up for useful actions. It’s about being clear and calm for your dog.

The hidden benefit? What’s good for your dog is also good for you.

Personally, I find that the daily work of training and exposure does not feel like work at all: it’s fun, and a source of joy, it’s quality-time with the pooch, it’s often hilarious and moving and profound.

Sometimes I make mistakes: I get it into my head that Gilly’s going to (fill in the blank), and then he does – because he does what I expect him to do, for better or for worse, so if my expectation is negative, he fulfills it obligingly and I have to pause, rewind, clear the memory, and start over with a positive and clear expectation of the good behavior I want for and from him*.

*Please don’t misinterpret that as magical thinking or some creative visualization ‘we create reality’ nonsense. Or as ‘dogs are blank slates with no personalities of their own.’ Neither thing is true. Very simply, dogs (and, arguably, people – especially kids) don’t pay much attention to what you say, they pay attention to what you do, and to non-verbal cues. If you are a neurotic mess saying ‘everything’s fine,’ it’s meaningless. What the dog ‘gets’ is the neurotic mess, which makes them nervous, which creates good conditions for bad behavior. If you can learn to be calm, so can your dog. Even if your dog is adopted late, formerly abused, etc. – in fact, in those cases, my experience is that they thrive even more visibly with clear, calm leadership in which they can have total confidence.

That mutual learning process fascinates me, and is different with every dog. I like showing up for that, and figuring out with each dog what it is that they need from me in order to feel calm, confident, happy, joyous, curious, engaged, and well.

I do believe there are a handful of dogs who truly have an inner-ear construction that makes therm unusually vulnerable to barometric pressure changes, and possibly to loud noises (I’m thinking of one of my Mom’s Aussies who used to put herself in the bathtub and barf her way through thunderstorms, poor girl).

But more often, they’re responding to our neuroses.

And every year around this time I get irritated by the commitment with which people seem to train their dogs into fear and problems they don’t need to have, because it seems easier than doing the real work of responsible ownership. It’s not easier. It creates difficult problems, and bypasses all the glee and pleasure involved in a good, healthy relationship with a well-cared-for dog. It locates the center of the relationship with the dog in stress and avoidance, rather than mutual delight and shared experience. It’s more work and misery, in the end, than good training, good exercise, and fun adventures ever could be.

Dogs hear better than we do, so obviously they need more distance from loud noise than we do in order to be comfortable.

It also takes time to develop the degree of mutual trust and consistency and reliability I have with Gilly:  he’s ten this summer, so we’ve been doing this stuff for ten years. But that’s how we got to the guy sitting next to us at the fireworks saying: “I’ve never seen such a well-trained, good dog in my life. That’s really impressive.” And that’s how we got to me answering: “We’ve done a lot of training. And, I’m also just lucky to know him.”

Given the opportunity to have lots and lots of good training and exposure and positive experience, what fireworks means to Gilly is this:

Me: Hey poochelah. Want to go on a special date? A Very Important Dog date?

Gilly: Will there be a long walk and interesting smells and new stuff to look at and maybe some steak involved?

Me: Hell yeah.

Gilly: Let’s go!

And then we walked a couple of miles (after already having had a good walk that day – and a cannonball swim!) so that when he got to the crowd he had already worked off any surplus energy that could have translated into nervousness. We met many dogs along the way, and he got thoroughly trounced and loved by a bonkers Beagle who thought Gilly was MAGIC and had to communicate this by performing an elaborate choreography of racing in circles and tap-dancing on his head, a couple of desperately beautiful Rottie-mix puppies who agreed except that they weren’t coordinated enough yet to tap-dance so instead they did a lot of squealing and falling over, several mellow and dignified Labs, Lab-mixes and an elegant Dachshund who all nodded and greeted and sniffed politely.

We cruised the crowd several times, and were attacked at varying speeds by several small children – a thing that used to be Gilly’s worst nightmare, since they do everything wrong for a nervous dog. One particularly hyper kid he dodged a couple of times (reasonably, I had to as well), but then I started the kid talking, stopped him running at Gilly, and in seconds the whole thing had settled down into the child standing calmly next to Gilly and patting his back softly. A couple of kids approached as beautifully as the best dog trainer, which was a lovely thing to see: someone taught them how to meet a dog on dog-terms, making both kids and dogs safer. And Gilly let all of them pat him – a thing he doesn’t like all that much from strangers, but will tolerate when he’s feeling calm and secure.

We stood in line in front of a magic kitchen-on-wheels where a steak and cheese sub suddenly appeared: we shared the sub on a nice grassy patch. We ate ice cubes while watching little kids ride a kiddy-train. We met many very nice dogs. We got a glo-necklace, so that everyone who passed by him said “Oh what a cute dog! He’s glowing!” – a blast of positive regard from nearly every passing stranger.

When the fireworks started, as usual, the fireworks themselves were much less interesting to him than the cheering and clapping of the crowd of people. After a little bit, he splayed out flat on his side and asked me to scratch his chest, practically dozing: working the crowd and the steak & cheese was the main event for Gilly, the fireworks were just the closing ceremony.

And then we walked home, tired and relaxed and happy, with an even deeper bond than we had the day before, not as deep as it will be tomorrow, and with total confidence in each other.

Not by magic.

By love.

Which is an action, not a feeling.

Unnecessary surgeries and the American Veterinary Medical Association

In my travels at VetBlog, I found several articles of interest on the practice of ear and tail docking, the effort to change breed standards to do away with this painful and potentially dangerous practice, and the changes in veterinary medicine in this area.

AVMA Comes Out Against Ear Cropping and Tail Docking

Ear Cropping and Tail Docking Create Ethical Dilemmas for Vets

On a related subject, there’s also a post about a Massachusetts teen’s effort to ban ‘de-barking’ surgery:

Teen With Gumption Plans to Drive the Final Nail Into Debarking’s Coffin

There are also a number of entries about the almost always unnecessary and extremely inhumane practice of declawing cats.

The solution to problem barking is training.

The solution to protecting upholstery and toddlers from clawing cats is a combination of training, supplying appropriate places for your cat to shed its claws (scratching posts, etc.), using strong upholstery (or covering it), and training little kids.

The children-problem is often cited as the justification for much mistreatment of animals, ranging from declawing to locking dogs outdoors,  in basements, or turning crate-training into cage-living.

Obviously, people want their kids to be safe. Kids should be safe. Animals, too. They both need training.

For safety’s sake, all children should be taught how to safely and respectfully handle animals, and how to leave them alone when the animal doesn’t want to be handled.

This is an essential area of knowledge for all children, even ones who don’t have animals in their own homes: they will encounter them elsewhere. A 101-level understanding of animal body language can usually prevent a bite or scratch.

Some shelter behaviorists put on workshops in schools and community centers teaching this information. Your vet might also be able to direct you to resources for training children in animal-handling skills.

“Good Dog, Smart Dog” – the continuing study of dog learning shows how little we know (and how much we project)

["Good Dog, Smart Dog" - NYT 11/3/09]

The matter of what exactly goes on in the mind of a dog is a tricky one, and until recently much of the research on canine intelligence has been met with large doses of skepticism. But over the last several years a growing body of evidence, culled from small scientific studies of dogs’ abilities to do things like detect cancer or seizures, solve complex problems (complex for a dog, anyway), and learn language suggests that they may know more than we thought they did.

Their apparent ability to tune in to the needs of psychiatric patients, turning on lights for trauma victims afraid of the dark, reminding their owners to take medication and interrupting behaviors like suicide attempts and self-mutilation, for example, has lately attracted the attention of researchers.

In September, the Army announced that it would spend $300,000 to study the impact of pairing psychiatric service dogs like Jet with soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with post-traumatic stress disorder. Both the House and Senate have recently passed bills that would finance the training and placement of these dogs with veterans.

…

“I believe that so much research has come out lately suggesting that we may have underestimated certain aspects of the mental ability of dogs that even the most hardened cynic has to think twice before rejecting the possibilities,” said Stanley Coren, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia and an author of several books on dogs.

Since the language-learning/fast-mapping research on Rico the Border Collie, the new common wisdom is that smart dogs can learn up to 250 words, average dogs get about 165, and that we should directly compare dogs’ intelligence and experience to that of a 2-3 year old human toddler.

This new ‘conventional wisdom’ is as presumptuous, projection-based, and inaccurate as the old notion that dog’s are ‘dumb’ animals.

… Clive D. L. Wynne, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Florida who specializes in canine cognition and has himself said he met a border collie who knew 1,500 words, takes issue with efforts to compare human and canine brains.

He argues that it is dogs’ deep sensitivity to the humans around them, their obedience under rigorous training, and their desire to please that can explain most of these capabilities. They may be deft at reading human cues — and teachable — but that doesn’t mean they are thinking like people, he says. A dog’s entire world revolves around its primary owner, and it will respond to that person to get what it wants, usually food, treats or affection.

“I take the view that dogs have their own unique way of thinking,” Dr. Wynne said. “It’s a happy accident that doggie thinking and human thinking overlap enough that we can have these relationships with dogs, but we shouldn’t kid ourselves that dogs are viewing the world the way we do.”

Dogs have a canine way of thinking, experiencing, and communicating – not a human one.

We can’t even begin to comprehend dogs’ experience of the world, given the sheer number of scent receptors they have: humans have no context in which they can empathize with – or really, even creatively imagine – what it is to be a dog just on the level of scent. Add in tens of thousands of years of co-evolution with humans and the extremely complex resulting interrelationship, the ways in which dogs’  ‘animal’ trumps their ‘domesticated’ (whether people confuse them with purses and other fashion accessories or not), their physical experience of the world on a purely structural level, their vocal cord structure creating an inability to speak our languages and our terrible performance in understanding – or paying attention to – theirs, and what we know is this: very little. Might as well approach them with some humility to go with our appreciation, and quit it with the infantilizing anthropomorphism.

Anthropomorphism can be fun, and on the level of fun, I do it all the time. I enjoy making stupid (projection-based) jokes about Gilly hacking into my computer and hijacking the Hubble telescope. But when it comes to truly attempting to understand Gilly’s experience of the world, or what he brings to the table in our interactions, all I really know is what I see and how I interpret it.

That also does not mean that interpreting dogs as intelligent and individual from us – as something more than moving ottomans – is anthropomorphizing.

The whole ‘dogs don’t have fore-brains therefore they are incapable of abstract reasoning’ is basically equivalent to speculating that because ottomans don’t have scent receptors built into their naugahyde, they can’t serve any function except as tea-trays.

The more we know, the more we ought to realize that direct comparison between human and dog ‘intelligence’ is futile and speculative.

We know they adapt to our culture and communication, we know that to a lesser degree we adapt to theirs, and we know that this has proven helpful and pleasant for all involved – at least when we humans don’t use our fantasized master-race approach to animals to run dog-fighting rings.

We also know the one thing that seems to continually get lost in evaluations of dog intelligence:

we are different species.

To train or not to train: basic obedience for shelter dogs

This post at Zoom Room raises the important question of making basic training available to shelter dogs as a way of improving their chances of permanent adoption.

While I know well that resources for obedience training are often lean, what is even more stymieing in many rescue and shelter situations is the constant argument about what kind of positive reinforcement training works best.

Unfortunately, our arguments often have more to do with our egos than with what is best for the animals: when it’s possible to give dogs in shelter some basic, daily obedience training, it helps them find homes (and helps their new families carry on with the obedience training – which is the single thing most likely to keep them in their new homes).

I’ve frequently heard the argument that there just isn’t time in an animal’s short shelter stay to get anywhere with training. While I definitely understand (and have experienced) the very real limits of what can be done with never-enough shelter resources, this idea that nothing can be accomplished with a dog in a few days or a few  weeks doesn’t hold water, in my experience.

The difficult piece is really more a question of figuring out who is going to do what, and how to achieve good, consistent HUMAN behavior: the pooches will generally pick it up right away, as long as we’re consistent.

A dog can be trained, often in minutes, to walk on leash without injuring the person who is walking them, to sit when asked, and to come towards people in a curious and friendly way when they approach the dog’s cage (which is what shelter visitors want to see most).

Some dogs with hard histories may take longer, have bigger hurdles, and genuinely require adoption by a family willing and able to do a higher level of rehabilitation than a more outgoing or social dog is going to need. A majority of shelter pooches, though, respond well and quickly to positive reinforcement – and the other essential thing here is that training makes dogs feel happier and more confident, not upset or scared.

The upset and scared comes from living with tons of noise and stress, erratic and unpredictable situations, physical discomfort, lack of exercise, no clear boundaries, no clear expectations, no idea how to be. Some of that we can’t help. Shelters are loud, uncomfortable, under-resourced and stressful places. The training  piece, though, I really think we can help.

As advocates for dogs, I think we really need to understand basic training techniques and how/why they are not only important, but positive for the dog. I’m always shocked when I hear shelter people say ‘oh, training will just stress him out’ when the most minimal experience with dogs shows that lack of training is what creates stress, while clear mutual expectations create trust, safety, and joy.

Dogs love training, too. It’s fun, happy, focused, one-on-one attention with lots of praise and treats – and that makes a big difference to a shelter dog even if it’s for five minutes a day.

To be specific about one particular thing which can be controversial territory: safe leash walking is a big issue.

A lot of places prefer not to deal with leash-training for any number of reasons. Regardless of those reasons or what may well be good intentions behind the reasoning, the result is that any and every ‘walk’ – whether by staff, volunteers, or most importantly, by potential adopters – is in fact a dangerous drag that is negative for both the dog and the person.

The people get overwhelmed, upset, and sometimes literally hurt – which in turn means the dog’s anxiety is escalated and the result is more pulling, less walking, and more bad interactions between pent-up, pulling dogs and shelter visitors who feel they couldn’t possibly handle such a crazy dog.

Of course, the dog isn’t crazy – but without any training, there is a very real possibility that the person ‘walking’ the shelter pooch is going to get hurt, particularly if the dog is big (and already less likely to be adopted because of that).

A little goes a long way here. A dog who dislocates a visitor’s shoulder isn’t going to be taken home. A dog who pulls some and isn’t perfect but basically knows that s/he is supposed to stay near the person’s side – or even just occasionally makes an effort! – has a much better shot.

Basic training in safe leash walking, ‘sit,’ and ‘come’ will make a huge, huge difference in the dog’s ‘adoptability,’ and all they need is consistency and daily repetition to keep the training in place and growing.

In one afternoon, shelter volunteers can be quickly and effectively trained by a volunteer or staff behaviorist in the simple positive reinforcement techniques needed to achieve safe leash walking, ‘sit,’ and ‘come.’

If there’s a lot of argument about technique, the shelter staff can meet several behaviorists then discuss and agree upon one approach by consensus, or a shelter director can make this decision: anyone working with the dogs can then be expected to follow the technique the shelter feels good about. There really aren’t vast differences between positive reinforcement techniques at such a basic level.

If volunteers aren’t available enough on a daily basis to keep the chosen training reinforcement going, some  shelters have their staff do the repetition as part of the daily activities of maintaining the shelter.

If that’s not possible, there may be a group of behaviorists willing to donate time each week, or a dog-training school nearby whose students can be tapped to do ‘internship’ sort of hours for a shelter, or other creative solutions.

If we think creatively, there is always a way to enable a little bit of training in the shelter and boost the dogs’ chances of adoption.The thing we have to figure out is how to get everyone doing the same thing.

To me, the goal isn’t necessarily perfection (although in my experience, we underestimate how happy, willing, and even relieved dogs are – in even the most stressful situations, and sometimes especially in those situations – to learn and have a ‘job’).

It’s also not a (probably unrealistic) goal of total harmony in terms of full agreement by everyone about what training methods work best for advanced or comprehensive training.

To my mind, the goal is to agree upon and use a simple, clear form of humane, positive reinforcement training to socialize the dog and set some groundwork for two things: first, the positive interaction we hope will happen with shelter visitors considering adoption, and second, the training the adopted family will continue when they bring the dog home.

The goal is just to set them up to succeed.

Have any of you had experience dealing with this to train or not to train issue in a shelter or rescue context? Did you find any creative solutions to the almost inevitable conflicts?

101 Dalmatians…the musical?

Oh boy. Via Bark Magazine, I just learned that there’s a 101 Dalmatians musical afoot.

Julia Kamysz Lane’s article/post “I Spot Trouble: Why I think ‘The 101 Dalmatians Musical’ is a bad idea” expresses my instant reaction perfectly: NO!

I love Gilgamesh with a self-evidently deep passion. And: he is one of the most difficult dogs I’ve ever had the privilege to love and care for – and I’ve loved and cared for a lot of animals. I wouldn’t trade 2 seconds of it, but he’s not easy.

Prior to adopting him, my last dog was a rescued Rottweiler who had been abused almost to death. Compared to Gilly, he was cake.

Gilly’s only half Dalmatian (the other bits are mostly Lab, and possibly a little Chow). He has never been abused. He is brilliant, funny, deeply bonded with me (and eager to please me as a result),  and has truly astonishing social skills with other dogs. He’s not 100% representative of Dalmatians as a whole breed, of course (no individual dog, mixed breed or not, ever is), but he does have a lot of very specific Dalmatian traits. Those traits aren’t all as nice and easy as the ones listed above.

He’s curious about children, and loves to hear them laugh, but he’s frightened of the screaming and running and shrieking so many of them do. If he was ever cornered by one who was running wild and totally unsupervised (as so many parents allow their kids to do around dogs), he would panic. I make sure this never happens, of course, but there it is.

Some breed-specific sites still say Dalmatians are – as a breed – great with kids. Most do not – especially since the  101 Dalmatians movie debacle:  they instead acknowledge that Dalmatians’ high energy, high intelligence, high requirements for exercise and supervision, and high level of sensitivity can in fact breed problems with kids, and while they can make great family dogs, it takes a lot of commitment and should never be taken for granted.

Gilly might also panic if any adult tried to corner or restrain him without the skills for appropriate handling of a shy dog. I also make sure that doesn’t happen.

I spend a fair bit of time educating people with whom we interact about how to approach a nervous dog, how to read the animal’s body language, and encouraging people to show basic respect for any dog:  any of them have the capacity to be absolutely divine – and also to bite.

And a bite will, in the end, usually hurt the dog a lot more than the person: a person who does something stupid and gets their finger bitten at a dog park isn’t going to be taken to court and ordered to be killed by lethal injection. The dog who gave warning after warning, had each warning ignored, and finally snapped at someone in panic and desperation just might.

My half-Dalmatian Gilly is no different than any other dog in these things. Most surrenders of ‘unmanageable dogs’ spring from inadequate exercise. Most surrenders of ‘bad’ dogs result from lack of training. Most dog bites are the fault of humans who do unbelievably stupid things.

What’s different is how Gilly needs to be handled, trained, and supervised because of his specific personality, much of which is Dalmatian-esque.

He is shy with those he doesn’t know well, and takes a while to accept new people. Once he does accept new people, that’s it; they are his pack forever and everything’s grand. You’re the king of his world. But it takes a while, and he doesn’t accept everyone.

He doesn’t like people who want something from him without respect for his trust (ie: people who think dogs are things, props there to make them feel or look good regardless of how the dog feels or what it wants).

People who insist on aggressive behavior with dogs because they think it’s funny (or that they are an ‘exception’) also aren’t going to gain his confidence.

He came into the world a shy, tightly wound, sensitive (to an almost neurotic degree) dog. He may have been the runt, or not, I don’t know. What I do know is that as I learned how to care for him, I learned that these traits are common to many Dalmatians.

I also learned there’s one  primary way to keep him pretty balanced and happy, within the limitations of his nature:

about ten miles a day.

Yep.

As an experiment, when he was six months old, I took a whole day for the two of us and let him decide how far we walked. It was ten miles before he wanted to even sit down.

Can I always give him this? Of course not. Modern life doesn’t allow that kind of time for most of us. But he does get multiple miles a day. He’s eight now, so he’s slowed down a lot – but he still does regular hikes of 6 or 8 miles at a whack with pleasure, and needs at least a couple miles every day with longer walks at least once a week.

I also trained the holy hell out of him, and went WAY out of my way to socialize him heavily – even to the degree of getting him regular shifts at a dog-toy store so he would be constantly exposed to new people in a positive setting. He turned into an excellent sales-canine: he’d demonstrate each toy’s proper usage, model leashes and collars, flirt and play with your dog (I trained him to lie down and play from a lying down position with little dogs, so when he saw a Chihuahua or a Yorkie, he fell to the ground and played footsie instead of the boxing style he preferred with dogs his own size), and he was always very personable, but he still didn’t – and doesn’t – want most strangers to touch him.

It took until he was five years old or so before I started seeing consistent confidence in him: he matured slowly. He will always be a bit jumpy. It’s who he is. It’s fine, but it’s something I have to be aware of in caring for him.

Dalmatians were bred as carriage dogs; they were used to run ahead of the horse-team to flush pheasants, deer, bears, whatever, before the horses got to whatever might have startled them into upending the carriage. In other words, they were bred to RUN, not walk, tens of miles a day, and to scan for danger constantly.

So imagine.

You’re bred to run up to and maybe beyond thirty miles a day. Your metabolism works at the speed of light, as does your brain, scanning constantly for what comes next, what’s happening ahead, what’s up there, is there any danger. You’re innately coiled like a spring all the time. You have a high prey drive. You can be very possessive of your people.  Because you’re as athletic as they come, you’re prone to knee and elbow injury, as well as to arthritis since you’re a relatively big dog who may be a total crackhead when it comes to high-impact sports – and pain makes you snappy. While you bond deeply to your person, and are very affectionate with them, you’re often a one-person dog, and you’re not enormously snuggly by nature.  In fact, you may see no reason why anyone but your person should be handling you. You need a lot of socializing and training to be confident and well-behaved. You may be extremely vocal. You’re prone to allergies, deafness, vision problems, and skin issues from bad breeding, much of which is a result of the 101 Dalmatians movie and its sequel, which resulted in puppy mills generating thousands upon thousands of backyard Dalmatians for sale to pet stores to meet ill-informed parents’ demand for one of those cute spotted dogs for their kids. You feel most comfortable and secure in a calm, quiet environment and with miles and miles of exercise a day.

You’re picked up one day and dropped into a house full of screaming children who run and jump not only near you but on you. You’re not given anything LIKE adequate exercise: at best, they put you in a fenced yard with the aforementioned screaming, running, jumping children. You probably don’t get any training to speak of, and what socializing there is revolves around children, most of whom do everything, absolutely everything, absolutely WRONG in terms of dealing with a nervous/tightly-wound dog.

What’s likely to happen here, and who is going to be blamed?

Right.

After 101 Dalmatians the movie, shelters across the country filled up with rejected Dalmatians. And those were the lucky ones. How many ended at their vet’s office, or were just turned out and ended up dying in a road or starving, we’ll never know.

There are exceptions to everything I’ve said, of course. I’m sure the occasional Dalmation comes into the world magically confident, mellow, fully house-trained (by the fairies I guess), low-energy, and child-safe.

I’m even more sure no dog breed really does.

They all need training (and so do parents and children) and socialization and exercise to be good dogs.

Dalmatians, though, on the whole, may need even more than other breeds.They are smart, high-energy, tightly-wound dogs. Great dogs, but not low-maintenance ones.

The very things that make Gilly brilliant and hilarious and a total joy to be with day to day also make him very high maintenance.

Parents used to literally shriek and pick up their children, then run to the other side of the street or sidewalk when they saw me walking Shalom the Rottweiler mix on his leash.

Shalom would have killed himself before hurting someone. Truly. He was the gentlest dog I’ve ever known. He raised kittens for dog’s sake.

When parents see me walking Gilly, on the other hand, they literally throw their children at his face saying ‘go get the nice doggy!’ So I intervene, and make sure the interaction either happens in a supervised and safe way or it doesn’t happen at all. And I try to do some mellow and friendly education to keep them from doing that with a less trained and supervised dog.

Point is, there’s a world of impulsivity out there. When it comes to 101 Dalmatians and the effect it has already had on backyard breeding of a dog that’s high maintenance to begin with, poor decisions by ill-informed parents, a high risk to kids, and in the end a whole lot of dogs who pay the price, I say skip that musical.

Or at least make damn sure that with each ticket to the show, there’s a brochure about what kind of investment of time, money, training and socialization Dalmatians really need to be happy and safe family dogs. Which they certainly can be, with the right investment – but we’ve already seen that the necessary investment isn’t one most impulse-buying families are willing to make in their movie-inspired Dalmatian puppy.

The musical, to give the responsible people credit, is using rescued Dalmatians in the dog parts. That’s great. But it doesn’t change the fact that puppy mills and badly-informed parents will still make life hell for the suddenly-again-fashionable Dalmatian – which will result in more Dalmatians in shelters in need of adoption. And there won’t be a musical for them.

Please be a responsible owner, spay and neuter, do not ever buy from pet stores (because they are supplied by puppy mills), and if you hear people saying they intend to buy a dog as a present for their kids, any dog, please talk with them about whether they are really prepared to invest the time, expense, and many years of responsibility, exercise, training, and love any dog requires.

If you hear someone saying their kids are insisting they get a Dalmatian just like the ones in the musical/movie, please tell them not to do that. They aren’t like the ones in the movie.

No dog is.

And no impulse buy of a living being is likely to end well – particularly one who demands a huge amount of exercise and training.

Gilly is a spectacular creature whom I adore. He’s the single greatest joy in every day, and not one day has gone by in the last eight years – no matter what was going on – that he hasn’t made me laugh.

When we walk down the street, strangers stop me and say “He’s so well-behaved! What a good dog!” as if it happened by accident.

It didn’t.