High Drive Dogs에서의 데니스의 페이스북 라이브

that this is just a free Facebook live I decided to do it about 30 minutes ago so you get what you get and what that means is I have three dogs in the house and it's perfectly likely that my squirrels because I have squirrels too in the backyard are going to serve it they're not pet squirrels I don't have a choice about them but there are squirrels here if they start to run around then the dogs will start to run around you know what what can I say you'll get 20 seconds of dogs barking I'll stop for that I have human children I have a husband and they walk around and they do things too they will do those things and I think I have people coming to my house some kids are gonna do something in my backyard with power tools and I can't remember if that's 10 o'clock or 1030 if that happens there will be a little excitement for a period of time while that gets settled I'm hoping it's 1030 though so just be aware of that if I was charging you for this via a webinar there would be no dogs in the house there would be no squirrels right oh and there's a squirrel and there would be no children running around so you know just keep them keep in mind that's Brito let's see if they're gonna stop on their own maybe if I have to I'll deal with them all right obsessive-compulsive disorder versus obsessive-compulsive tendencies versus obsessive-compulsive behavior obsessive- compulsive disorder is a bad thing it is always a bad thing it is a bad thing in people it is a bad thing in dogs it basically means that the dog's behavior is not in their best interest in the sense that a logical rational person could look at it and say that is functional behavior it is in the sense that all behavior has a reason so somewhere in that dog's biology obsessive-compulsive behavior serves a purpose for that dog so you have a person who washes their hands that's the example I used in the blog of a human being who has obsessive compulsive disorder and they wash their hands 50 times a day and they're a bloody mess and it's miserable and it hurts and they hate it they hate everything about what they do and how they do it but they cannot stop because the act of washing the compulsive part relieves something for them it's a mental thing right and it's a chemical thing and they don't have a choice but any logical rational person could look at that and say that is not functional behavior and it's not but they're going to do it anyway because it's it solves something inside of them because they have something a little wrong with the wiring or with the chemicals or something I don't even know about dogs have this too and when you

have that you need medication and you need professional help because it's not a matter of just a little tweak it's going to come right back it's going to be a problem so when I talk about obsessive-compulsive behaviors I'm not talking about obsessive-compulsive disorder necessarily obsessive-compulsive behaviors the way I talk about it in relation to high drive dogs is dogs that appear highly obsessive over certain things but one hopes that under certain conditions they can stop and show more functional behavior so a dog that will play ball for an hour until it drops of heat stroke is that to say is that a disorder or is that a behavior I don't know where do you where do you pull the line so the dogs I have I would say historically in the last 10 to 20 years the dogs I've had that are working bread working wine would absolutely play ball to the point of heat stroke and so I have to be responsible for them I can't allow that to happen having said that when I put the ball away and come in the house my dogs do not do things that would suggest to me that they were struggling or suffering because they weren't able to play ball at that moment so when I say we're done and we go in they are done they're able to stop and they're able to go about their lives in a normal fashion it does not cause them to come in the house and show other weird behaviors because they've been asked to stop playing ball however having said that there are dogs out there absolutely positively that do not have that reaction and when you play ball with them rather than coming in the house and being happy and tired they begin to stress up and act bizarre and they are struggling for the fact that they've been asked to stop that's that's maladaptive that's a problem for us right so where's the line well I can't really answer that question but if it's something you really want to think about because why do we want dogs that would play ball to the point of dropping of heat stroke well we want it because if it's a working dog a real working dog or even a sport dog if you want to look at it like that you need dogs that will stay in the game even when it's kind of not fun anymore so a herding dog who's rounding up sheep it's raining the dog still needs to do that job a police dog who sent after a bad guy the person tries to hit the dog hard not not for fun and kick the dog you need a dog who will stay in the game you you're a hunter you've shot a duck the duck fell in the water the water is cold you need a dog who will go get the duck that is the dog's job and if the dog does

not have a very strong attraction to the behavior a herding dog really wants those sheep and if they don't and they opt out when it becomes a little inconvenient you don't have much of a working dog and the relationship between sport dogs for work a sporting dog might be an IPO dog versus a police or military dog but those are very related and if you look at the pedigrees you will find a huge amount of overlap between sport dogs and working long dogs a working sheep dog same thing a sport dog does the same thing a herding dog as they would do if they were a real herding dog on a ranch again you're going to find a lot of overlap in the pedigrees in the breeding certain things would be different certain behaviors people would breed for slightly differently in a sport dog than a working dog and same thing with really all of the working drives so one of the big differences between dogs that are bred for a sport and dogs that are not is their persistence under adversity right so the reason I when I was breeding dogs the reason I worked with working line Belgians rather than show line Belgians is because I've done both I have a what's an IPO three on a show line Belgian and all I can tell you is I'll never do it again I don't want to work that hard it took a lot because he wouldn't persist with the game aspect when the adversity became greater than he was comfortable with whereas my working line dogs work extremely hard to stay in the game because their breeding makes them do that and partly that's because they have obsessive behavior so when I show them a person with a sleeve and this is a game for them but it's an important game for them and they see that there's an opportunity to play tug they are not inclined to walk away from that opportunity is that good or bad well let's go a little deeper let's talk about the fact that a lot of working dogs go to people who are not dog trainers and this is true across the board just because a farmer is a farmer with sheep doesn't mean he wants to be a dog trainer he wants a dog that does the job if a person really loves hunting and they get a dog to help them they may or may not be a dog trainer they may get a dog to do a job in my area when the police department is looking for a handler people apply for that job you don't have to be a dog trainer as a matter of fact odds are very good you are not a dog trainer you may not even like dogs they have a process again in my area this may vary where you apply you get paid a little bit more so it's kind of attractive and then

you get a dog partner and you may know nothing about dog training and now here you have this high-performance animal who's hopefully well trained and you have to do something with it and that means that unlike somebody like me who might have many many many many years of training and experience with these dogs that person probably does not and somehow that dog is going to have to function and manage with this person and so to some extent we breed dogs that make up for poor handling in the working arena unlike performance where you know if you want the dog to go over the teeter-totter and you don't know how to teach it the dog is probably not going to figure that out for you working dogs will work incredibly hard to figure things out for you and then that brings us to a discussion of drive what do we mean by drive I am NOT referring to a science word when I say drive there is one drive reduction theory but that is not what I'm talking about I am talking about the common knowledge usage of the word so when I say wow that guy's really driven I don't have to define that for you we can all understand what that means that person is driven that woman is driven that child is driven people understand that means an innate quality of the person or dog to stay in the game and reach something some goal that is out there they will persist they have resilience if something knocks them down from their path they get back up and they try again they tend to maintain a positive and cheerful attitude towards the thing right that's a driven person it is no more complicated than that and I'm not about to toss the word because it wasn't created by a scientist if you want my opinion scientists have not done a very good job of creating words that help people understand so I'm going to stick with the common usage word drive if I say a dog is driven just mentally say what would I be saying if that was a human being and you'll get there so what do we want with that police officer who knows nothing about dogs and somebody just handed them their leash and said this is your new partner you want a dog who is resilient because that person may not have a clue about how to train or how to do anything the dog needs to stay in the game you want a dog who has a good attitude about it you want a dog who persists and eventually drags the handler along right so it's really the dog pulling the handle or not the reverse dogs that require exceptionally good handling are not going to be the most successful working dogs they may be very

good sport dogs because a sport population is a different population and so handlers within the sport population can take dogs that are more edgy and bizarre and maybe have more actually pushing harder into the obsessive compulsive in the disordered word and that's when we get into people talking about extreme my dog has extreme this extreme that and then those dogs are often very temperamental and what do we mean by temperamental well you better do it right now you have a Ferrari and if you do your Ferrari wrong you don't go right so whereas if you have a Chevy the thing keeps going so a working dog is probably going to be better off as a Chevy but when you're trying to get super high points and you care not only that you don't get the duck but that he go fast in a straight line and hand it to you without moving and you know that's a whole nother matter now we're looking for dogs that go beyond just good solid drives and stability but that gets us into a whole nother set of things which is where people may be more novice uh trainers or breeders or maybe people who aren't novice but are let's call it superstitious learning they've had dogs in the past that they did things they did terrible training I have seen the worst training in the working world way worse than anywhere else because the dogs make up for you and unfortunately so you go oh look at this this is amazing if I hit him really hard right over his shoulder blades right before I say fetch he does it every time well he was going to do it anyway but the person got it in their head that somehow they caused that behavior because human beings like to take positive responsibility for things that go well so when it goes well we say oh this caused that cause and effect and often it didn't cause it at all I often say dogs often learn in spite of us not because of us and I guarantee you that is way more prevalent in the working world and that is why the working sports in the average levels I'm not talking about the high end the high end is very sophisticated but the average working dog trainer is at a lower level of understanding and capacity than an average level performance or or well performance trainer because generally performance dogs are not bred to be quite so high on the scale and they don't have the drive and they're not so resilient so if you hit them over the shoulder blades they leave they don't fetch right so it's harder to make inadvertent conclusions about how your behavior caused the dog's behavior I can tell you I have seen people training working dogs and I had absolutely

no idea how the dog figured out what the owner wanted I knew because I'm a dog trainer and I could look and say oh they're trying to teach the dog a down out of motion but what they're doing isn't going to get them there and you know what the next week I come back and indeed the dog is doing it so somehow the dog figured out what I could not that speaks very well of the dog very poorly of the handler but it doesn't change the fact that people take responsibility for changes in dogs behavior high drive dogs with a lot of resilience will stay in the game in spite of very poor decision making and that is a lot of why we continue to breed them because it works and when it doesn't work we wash the dog out so the washout rate in the workout sports is higher than in the performance world largely because of the there's a lot of bad training so dogs get washed out who shouldn't because they're not being handled properly and the dog did not have enough resilience to put up with it all right breeding for drive versus breeding for anxiety and movement there is this thing in people's head when dogs move that that's drive and the reason we think that is because most working sports do require dogs that move I mean there aren't that many sports that involve not moving right sit stay yeah but think about this you have a hurting dog a border collie and it's out all day long 12 14 hours it's not functional to move for 14 hours it's also not necessary so the dog just lays there and stares at the sheep the dog is doing that 100 in drive because drive is doing the appropriate thing at the right time so if the sheep aren't moving there's no reason for the dog to move is the dog in drive absolutely but he's not moving because there's no reason to move if one sheep moves that dog will respond how will it respond maybe with movement maybe just by shifting its body maybe by shifting its gaze does it solve the problem if it does the dog goes back to doing nothing and staring if nothing else the border collie is sure that it's a good thing it watched the whole time right because see i saw that now i'll wait another hour movement is not drive it never has been drive it's just that when we need it it needs to be there so that border collie needs to go from zero to 20 miles an hour instantly and then stop when it's no longer appropriate to keep moving an ipo dog uh ipo for those who don't know it's a protection sport or a police dog i see so many police dogs driving down the street barking hysterically in the car spinning that is ridiculous it's that is movement but it's useless why is the

dog doing that how does that benefit the dog as a working dog now compare that to a dog that just rests quietly in the car until you need it you'll have way more to work with if the dog doesn't wear itself out plus you're not irritating the entire neighborhood but that's another thing uh drive does not have to be movement and it actually does start to bleed over into anxiety so when you have dogs that move not because they're in drive drive requires a focal point that's how i tell people you can tell the difference so if a dog comes into a space and it's moving and then everybody's oh i love that dog has so much drive well the dog has a lot of movement so does the dog have drive well here's how you can tell ask yourself as you watch that dog moving why is the dog moving if you can't answer that question what you have is movement not drive so if you say to me oh he's moving because there is a ball on a shelf and he sees it and he's trying to get to it i will agree with you that is drive because there's a focal point if you say oh he always does that when he gets into a new space that's not drive that's movement well is it anxiety okay how about well he always does that when he comes into a new space with dogs he doesn't know that's anxiety is it terrible maybe not i mean it may just be a dog who has a little anxiety about new dogs and his response to anxiety is movement so that brings me to another thing i want to talk about average dogs pet dogs may move more or they may move less when they're a little bit nervous and anxious just like people right some people when they get nervous they pace they go go go go and other people just stop moving and get very small and quiet and they pretend like they don't exist right both are perfectly logical responses to stress one is stressing up and the other is stressing down as a general rule working dogs stress up they exhibit stress with movement movement not good not bad just is when you stress a working dog let's say you stress it because you correct the dog and the dog doesn't know what the correction was for movement will generally be the result with a working bred dog so they will get anxious and as a result of anxiety they may actually look kind of flashy and people like that and then they say oh no he likes to be corrected it brings out his drive but it's a terrible misunderstanding what's happening what you're seeing is a dog who is anxious and nervous and as a result he starts to move more and then you start seeing that this kind of stuff you often hear squeaking if you're dealing with like a german shepherd they squeak

belgians you see the mouth come wide open and you see all the dog's teeth and they pull back their lips that's not happy that's not dry that's anxiety but these dogs exhibit anxiety and drive and then you find that when these dogs understand the correction if they're well trained so if you're at the top end right the top one one hundredth of one percent of the IPO dogs there's really really good dogs you don't actually see some of those behaviors because the dogs understand the corrections because they've been very well trained and they probably didn't get a lot of corrections because i think you'll find that as you talk to people most people find themselves using many fewer corrections as they become more sophisticated because they don't need them anymore people who are using corrections all the time generally aren't very good trainers so it doesn't this isn't a matter of being a positive reinforcement trainer or not it's just that your use of your choices is often a reflection of your capacity so i know that i am a crossover trainer i've used many a correction um and i can say that as i became a better crossover trainer i used fewer corrections because i was better at communicating what i wanted so this isn't really a function of how you train it's just a reality that uh your dog gets trained more quickly and will understand what you want um more quickly uh so movement is not drive that's one thing i want to certainly clarify anxiety can result in movement and that is more likely with a high drive working style dog um obsessive compulsive disorders uh are always bad but obsessive compulsive behaviors may actually serve a working dog population well under certain circumstances when you breed there is a lot to be said for recognizing that the ability to calm oneself is hugely valuable you don't need to breed dogs that are hysterical all the time uh in a working herding dog situation you would not find farmers being very enthusiastic about dogs that could not settle so dogs that spin constantly in their crates would um probably not get bred and they may not even survive actually uh because they wouldn't tolerate that they have no need for that it is a misunderstanding that has worked its way into the dog sports performance or uh working dog world that movement is a benefit movement is not a benefit unless there's a reason for it i prefer dogs that can settle uh and right now for the most part my dogs are pretty calm uh in my house uh and just for the record all of my working all of my dogs have always lived in my house i've never had

a kennel i've never had dogs outside so they do live in the house and i can look back and i can see that one of my dogs had anxiety and i thought it was drive she actually had both she was very high drive very high anxiety uh and i made a lot of mistakes and could have done a much better job with her if i had recognized both and separated them and addressed them individually and taught her to be calm i think i could have i just didn't uh what else movements uh i think i covered the things i wanted to talk about the one thing i think i'd really like to leave with you if um if you breed or buy or work with hydride dogs don't don't let the dog's quality allow you to take advantage of them right so if you're unable to communicate to a very bright dog and these are very bright dogs very quickly what you want it's on you not on the dog so the solution is not to come down on the dog or add more punishments it's to stop and ask yourself why the dog isn't doing what you want because if you're holding a ball and your dog lives for that ball and you say sit and the dog doesn't sit there's a reason there has to be a reason because the dog wants the ball more than anything so if they're completely locked up and what i mean by that is when the dog wants the thing so much they can't hear you they can't function that's a training problem that's your responsibility to figure out how to allow the dog to calm down enough to be able to hear you so getting the dog more and more jacked up is not the answer that's irresponsible does it work eventually yeah maybe because these dogs make uh they make up the difference for you but that doesn't mean it's right and it doesn't mean you should do it it also is a slower route so figuring out how to allow the dog's brain to engage when he's excited that's a training issue you can teach that uh and you should teach that because you'll be more successful so the fact that you were successful without teaching it doesn't mean you did the right thing it meant you had a good dog and often working dogs are excellent excellent dogs in terms of breeding anytime your dog shows extreme behaviors and that makes it difficult to train i want you to really think about the um your choices in breeding i'm not saying you should or shouldn't breed the dog i'm saying breeding for extremes um might be kind of exciting right oh my god look at that dog he bites and he bites and he bites so that's nice but he has to let go you know if the dog doesn't let go you didn't pass people breed that dog oh my god he's so amazing um some dogs when they're biting when i watch them

it's almost like the dog is mentally gone if you look at their face and people are doing god all everything to try to get the dog off the sleeve and people think that's great you know my god that dog is so tough well that's nice um the problem is you're sort of torturing the dog you know he can't hear you and you can't get him off so you've got probably a lot going on there you probably have a dog that's um maybe wired not completely right and maybe your training didn't do the dog any favors you know whipping the dogs up uh i don't know why people do that um if you have to whip up a melon well it's not suited to the sport that's just the reality you should be balancing the dog you should be balancing the dog's forward drive with stop control you need both and you should be doing that from eight weeks of age not when they're one year of age and out of their minds and they're completely out of control and now you're going to get control because you sort of set yourself up and the dog's going to pay the price so that's kind of not kind at the least so that's what i wanted to say i'm going to look back through your questions and see if you have any um questions you want me to address you're welcome to put them in the chat box