There’s a beautiful story in today’s New York Times that should resonate with dog park frequenters everywhere.
We wrack our brains to remember the names of dogs we’ve met before, then wrack them even harder to try and remember the name of the owner, and once in a while we stumble, calling the owner by the dog’s name, or vice versa.
Dick Sebastian resolved he would not make those kind of mistakes at the small-dog run in New York City’s Washington Square Park after he became a regular there a few years ago, along with his wife Susie, and his dog, Kitty.
After a visit, Sebastian, 71 and a retired surgeon, would return home, draw illustrations of the dog’s he had met and label them with their names. Later, he started bringing his chart with him to the dog run, where new dog owners started asking if he’d include their dogs on his ever-expanding artwork.
That led to Sebastian attempting less cartoony, more serious portraiture, sketching some of the dogs he had come to know. He started with a pug named Sidney, and in less than a year, he had drawn and presented, as gifts, 50 dog portraits to their owners.
The dog park crowd appreciated Sebastian’s efforts. Said one, “The fact that someone would care enough that he’d want to draw what’s unique about your dog for you …”
Sebastian was appreciated as well for his kindness, and his interest not just in other people’s dogs, but the people themselves.
He’d become a fixture, but now he’s leaving. Sebastian and his wife plan to move back to their native Ohio this month, so that Sebastian, who has Parkinson’s disease, can get easy access to care at a retirement home.
“New York is full of ad-hoc communities based on proximity and built up around mutual affection — walk into any watering hole at 7:30 p.m. — but they often have a live-and-let-live looseness to them. While parental oversight can stifle, en loco parentis oversight can be a rare, welcome comfort in the circles of urban life,” Times reporter Susan Dominus writes.
“For passionate dog people, the folks at the Washington Square Park dog run are also, it turns out, passionate people people, and there have been myriad parties scheduled in honor of Mr. and Mrs. Sebastian before they depart.”
It’s not the first time I’ve said it, and I’m not the first one to say it, but dogs — if they don’t just automatically make us better humans — certainly manage to open up the opportunities for us to be.
Dick Sebastian, it seems, recognized that — most artfully.
(Artwork: The small dogs of Washington Square Park, by Dick Sebastian)
Greta Kaplan, CPDT, CDBC
Last week I traveled to Lake Tahoe to give a half-day presentation on Control Unleashed at the Entlefest. I realize this requires some translation. The Entlefest is the annual national breed club meeting for the National Entelbucher Mountain Dog Association. An Entlebucher (Entlebuch Sennenhund) is one of the four Swiss Mountain dog breeds. Many are familiar with the two bigger members of this group, the Bernese Mountain Dog and the Greater Swiss Mountain Dog. The smaller members, the Entlebucher and the Appenzeller, are much less common and less well known. The Entlebucher is rather low slung and powerful, and was specially bred to gently but firmly herd prized Swiss dairy cattle without knocking them off the numerous cliffs. Entles in the US do not do much herding, but enjoy lives as pets, obedience dogs and sports companions (there are a few very fast flyball Entles). The question most often answered by Entle owners is, “Is that a Beagle/Rottweiler mix?”
I was honored to be asked to present. CU author and developer Leslie McDevitt personally recommended me to the NEMDA members who inquired many months ago. Committee members Linda Planting and Leelee Stefanki were very patient with me as we worked out scheduling, programming, and accommodations. I was even more excited when they asked me if I could add another activity for the afternoon of the same day: Judging a European-style working temperament test for the dogs in attendance. I will write about that separately.
Along with able assistant Jett Wyatt, her Aussie, Kiva, and my Border Collie, Mellie, we drove the 600 miles from Portland to Lake Tahoe the day before the presentation. It was tiring and I’m very grateful to the nice policeman who decided not to ticket me for speeding near the Lava Beds National Monument. We were hoping to arrive at the lake before dark so the dogs could have a good run, but we didn’t quite make it. We stopped in Carson City to buy a good flashlight and the dogs got a short ramble on the beach before we collapsed.
The presentation started at 8:30, and I spent the first 20 minutes arranging the participants so that their dogs were in the most restful spots possible. A very big part of CU is learning to set up your dog’s environment to reduce arousal and stress. Instead of allowing participants to put crates in rows along the tent walls, I had them spread crates out to minimize strange-dog proximity stress. Then we got started.
We had anticipated about a dozen working dogs, but in the end, nineteen dogs’ owners wanted to participate. I decided to arrange things so that every owner got at least one participatory slot. I selected six dogs to work all the way through (three sections), and then divided the rest into thirds and assigned each third to one of the three sections. The owners’ questionnaire responses were invaluable in helping me to select which section would most suit each dog.
I talked about theory for about 15 minutes and then we launched into the first working section, which was about body language. As each dog entered the “box” (the working space in CU), the audience called out their guesses about how each dog was feeling. I was thrilled that so many members readily identified sniffing and lip licking as signs of stress. We added some more signs for them to recognize and apply: stretching, shaking off, yawning, and so on. The last demonstration was possible because one of the applicants for a working spot had an elderly dog who’d gone blind. We had her interact with a stable younger dog so that the audience could see what the younger dog did when the older one inevitable was unable to recognize early body language and continued into the younger one’s personal space bubble. The older dog handled herself fine and I hope the lesson was clear: Dogs are communicating by tiny body language signals all the time! A lot is happening before there is a growl or snap.
We then moved onto demonstrating the Give Me A Break game. This game is hard to visualize from reading the book. We had the usual range of dogs who were Velcroed to their owners to dogs who needed really long breaks. The audience was getting good at telling sniffing for information apart from stress (displacement) sniffing. All the dogs shortened their “breaks” on their own and the owners started to feel the value of allowing the dogs to choose attention rather than trying to compel it.
Last we examined the Look At That game. Probably the best known of the CU games, it’s a very useful one. We supplied distractions to suit each dog as best we could. I ran around one dog who sometimes grabs running children. (She was great, very hard to distract!) We brought in Mellie to tug, walk, or run near some of the other dogs. We banged a crate door and dragged a chair for one dog who startles at sudden noises. Finally, we worked with a formidable titled athlete who is obsessed with tennis balls. We showed how we could get him to “LAT Tennis Ball” as a way to get him to leave it alone. After five minutes, he was looking at the ball as Jett and I rolled it back and forth between us just a few feet away. His owner was impressed and could see how to expand this result to a more normal situation.
With this dog I also detoured for a few minutes to show how to teach a good Out with a tug. He is a mature, powerful dog who has spent 6 years being very hard to get toys from. In five repetitions I had him releasing his tug extremely readily and was starting to put a cue on it. Once I recovered my breath (we were at 6200 feet!), I could see that quite a few audience members were busy taking notes.
We wound up when the lunch crew was busy setting up tables. Our tent had become the lunch tent! People had lots of questions and I finally had to defer so we could give our hardworking dogs a break before the afternoon activities started up. We were thrilled to notice one of the attendees playing Look At That dog in the parking lot. I’m certain he’s on the way to agility success with his beautiful, athletic young Entle boy.
Sixteen month old Destiny Marie Knox is dead after being attacked by a dog. The information coming in about the story is spotty, at best, at this point, but here is what we think we know.
Destiny was supposedly staying at a babysitter's mobile home off County Road 87 just outside of New Ablany, MS. The dog was one of at least 5 'pit bulls' on the property that were always left chained up outside. However, the dog somehow slipped out of its collar as the family was bringing groceries into the house, got through the open door, and attacked the young toddler.
While the story itself is tragic, what may be more tragic is the reaction of the officials that were interviewed that are already taling about "legislation" and "dog laws". But none of that will fix the problem we have here.
New Albany, like much of Missisissippi, has a very high percentage of its population living below poverty level (Mississippi as a whole is nearly 20%, New Albany is just below that). And this isn't the first incident of a significant tragedy along this stretch of County road 87 outside of New Ablany. Eighteen months ago, a child was killed due to child abuse along the same county road. Also on the property, which happened to also be a puppy mill, were over 180 dogs -- many of which were also victims of cruelty.
While it is "easy" for officials to blame a particular breed of dog in this incident, it's much more difficult for them to acknowledge a larger social issue at play here -- one that is at play in many parts of the country. In pockets across the US, we have have groups of people who are low-income and poorly educated....and many of these areas suffer a lot from violence. It appears that this stretch of County Road 87 is no different. And while we can talk things like dog breeds, it is really a distraction from the much larger issue -- which is that as a part of the overall lack of education that comes in these poor areas, so follows the lack of education on how we should properly keep our pets. Chaining continues to show itself as a horrible way to keep a dog as its primary form of containment -- and often leads to other issues -- including, often, aggression -- especially among those it has not been socialized with (in this case, a toddler who was not a member of the home).
Until we start realizing tragedies like this for what they are, a small part of a larger social issue, we will never make any progress in solving the problem. Breed of dog does not matter...but how the dogs are cared for does.
My heart goes out to all of the families involved in this tragedy.
I'll post more updates as they become available. At this point, only the Tupelo Newspaper and two of the local Tupelo TV stations are covering the incident, so information is coming in pretty slowly.
Comment Submitted by Anonymous on November 6, 2009 - 7:16pm
I really don't feel there is a firm grasp of operant (behavioral) conditioning concepts in place here. Getting your dog to stop picking up trash off the ground by praising him is putting that behavior on stimulus control. This is widely used to eliminate unwanted behaviors-you don't ask for it, you don't get it. And I don't think you can call trying something with a few dogs a "theory." That is an insult to the scientific method, quite frankly.
I appreciate dog owners doing their best to be better owners to their dogs, operant conditioning is ALWAYS at play in every interaction you have with not only every dog, but every human you come into contact with. Behavior is constantly being reinforced or punished.
Operant conditioning is NOT simply positive reinforcement, and anyone who makes that claim (which I will admit has become fairly common) does not understand operant conditioning.
Read Skinner, read the Brelands, read Karen Pryor!!
Operant conditioning is postive and negative reinforcement (both which INCREASE behavior), and positive and negative punishment (designed to DECREASE behavior).
These methods are used to train animals of literally nearly every species in captivity from elephants to whales to sharks to turtles to fish to alligators to cats to rabbits to frogs to fish (zoos and aquariums aquire all KINDS of behavior with it), so please do not disregard something proven to be so universally successful as something that may not really work for dogs. I love dogs, but I am sorry to say they are not any more special or unique than any other animal. Don't "dogthropomorphize" behavior when it is simply behavior that is yes, specifc to dogs, but not so unique that the wheel must be reinvented to accomodate it.
Answer, submitted by Lee Charles Kelley on November 7, 2009 - 7:41am
Hi,
I don't think you have a firm grasp of what I've written.
1) How was the scavenging behavior put under stimulus control? The general principle for that technique is something I'm very familiar with. I use it all the time to teach dogs not to jump up or bark by first teaching them to jump up or bark on command, then teaching them what “Okay, off,” or "Quiet..." means.
Explain how that applies here.
2) I never said that the use of praise to stop a dog from scavenging was the basis of any theory. If you had read my articles more carefully you'd see that this behavioral shift was only presented as an example of learning that can't be explained through the alpha theory or learning theory.
3) The idea that operant conditioning is always at play in every interaction someone has with any animal or human is a myth. Not even a die-hard behaviorist would argue that. (They'd say you're ignoring instances where classical conditioning is at play.) Meanwhile, I would argue (and have) that neither form of conditioning can explain all types of behavior or learning in animals and humans. How does a child learn impulse control by pretending to be a factory guard? Is that operant conditioning? How does operant conditioning explain the scavenging example? Like everyone else, you've only attached a label to the phenomenon, you haven't explained it.
4) As for your reading list, I've read Skinner. Lots of Skinner. I've also read the Brelands. And sad to say, I went through my own Karen Pryor phase, where I thought operant conditioning was the "one true answer." But the more I applied oc principles to dogs the more I realized that the emperor has no clothes. Perhaps you should read Dennett and Chomsky and Pinsky and John Staddon and Gary Cziko.
5) I understand full well the difference between positive and negative reinforcement. I was explaining my approach to dog training yesterday in Riverside Park to a woman who's been training dogs for 6 years using clickers and positive reinforcement. We were discussing the praise issue mentioned here. She seemed to think that whether you're praising a dog or shouting at him you can still be reinforcing the behavior.
"Though shouting," she said, "would be negative, not positive, reinforcement."
"Actually," I said, "if shouting increased the behavior it would still be considered a positive reinforcement."
She didn't understand; she thought I was making it up.
6) The fact that these methods are used to train captive animals means very little. When we base our understanding of learning on the behaviors of animals in captivity we're only seeing a small, unnatural piece of the pie (which is, unfortunately how Skinner’s theory was first developed, in the lab, with animals kept captive in boxes, not walking around in real life). Captive wolves exhibit hierarchical behaviors, wild wolves don't. Why is that? When captive dolphins, who are designed by nature to swim hundreds of miles a day through open waters, are held prisoner in small (to them) tanks, why wouldn't they be willing to perform all sorts of acrobatics for food, or even for praise? What else are they supposed to do with their energy? Could they be trained to do all those things out in the open ocean? No, because in their natural environment they'd have another outlet for their energy.
7) Finally, you're completely misinterpreting my argument for dogthromorphism. I never said we should dogthropomorphize behaviors, but that instead of anthropomorphizing dogs, we should dogthropomorphize ourselves, meaning we should try to see their behavior from their own unique perspective. It may be true that all animals learn the same way, but that way isn't through operant conditioning; it's through the way emotional energy either flows or gets blocked. The satisfying release of emotion is what reinforces behavior and creates learning. Sometimes operant conditioning imitates that process, sometimes it doesn't. Dogs are the clearest window we have into this phenomenon.
LCK
