개 공격성 예방: 프로젝트 투게더니스로 개나 강아지 소개하기 #72

I'm not super comfortable with what's going on. And these are emotional states. So, if you remember what I was talking about in podcast number 71, when I was working on my puppy's resource guarding, again, an emotional state. If you're a dog training a problem, you've got to deal with the emotion of that problem first. So, a dog might be eating and they freeze if another dog comes by. That's, I'm not comfortable with that dog near me. And that's fair. That's pretty common. Or they could just be doing anything. And if another dog comes by, they might put their head up and just freeze. So, freezing is a sign of, I'm not comfortable. Staring at another dog. And depending on the breed of dog, they might start stalking that other dog. They might rush towards them and stop when they get close, or they might rush towards them and then turn and body bump them. Or they might just subtly block that other dog's path. So, these are all really subtle signs that I'm not comfortable with this other dog right now. Now there might come more overt signs. So, the first five signs, you may or may not even see them, but I'm telling you them because I want you to start to look for them. That's a sign that's, you know, our dogs have so little ways to communicate with us. We've got to, if we're going to own dogs, we've got to start picking up on these subtle little ways. They might do the overt like lip curling. Like just look at the dog and they might not say a word, just curl up their lips and show their poorly whites. Depending on what else is accompanying that, that could be a submissive smile that I'm really intimidating by that dog nearby. Or it could be a, you know what, bug off, get your own sandwich kind of a look. Now, of course, growling is an obvious sign. Air snapping might come after growling. Like they just snap at the air and that might be accompanied by like all of these could be, any one of them could happen at the same time. They might freeze, stare, stalk, rush, body slam, and then air snap. And then they might do the next one, which would be muzzle grab. So, they might muzzle grab or they might muzzle grab and give a shake, or they might grab the jowls and give a little shake. And so, all of this is escalating. And then they might just jump the other dog. Now they might jump them and just make a lot of noise, but not actually put their muzzle. Like if you check out the other dog after, there isn't even a saliva trail on them. Then the annoyance can turn to aggression and it gets worse from there. So, if you've got anything from lip curling beyond, I would encourage you to check out

the advice of a behaviorist before you carry on with, I'm going to tell you, especially if you have a brand new dog or you're a first-time dog owner, right? Chances are you've got a hundred percent completely normal dog. There is nothing wrong. All that I'm encouraging you to see a behaviorist about is because you have a normal dog, but you're new to all of this. And so, you need some help to come up to speed real quick. And a veterinarian behaviorist is a great person to be able to help you with that. All right. So, we've got these dogs and we want them to get along. So, if I have like a puppy visiting for the day, I don't just let them come into the house because chances are one of my adult dogs is going to get caught off guard and might discipline that puppy by giving them a little snap or it could be an air snap. It could be a lunge. And I am a hundred percent confident that none of the dogs in my house would ever hurt a puppy, but they darn well is going to scare that puppy. And so, I don't want that to happen. People will say, oh, he needed that. He needed to be brought down a couple of pegs. You know what? You don't know what's happening to that dog. And in that kind of interaction could actually make them lose all confidence and a fearful dog could then turn into an aggressive dog. So, we want to protect our puppy's confidence and help them to behave appropriately with dogs and puppies of all ages. All right. So, project togetherness. It started for me, I made sure my puppy was always safe in an X-pen in the kitchen. And I know my adult dogs are going to ignore them. Now I used to have a dog, Buzzy, and sometimes he would rush up to the gate and snap at the puppy. So, then project togetherness had to happen with him separately so that he learned it was great when a puppy was in an X-pen in his environment. I have a problem with that, like similar to that with feature. She loves to look out the front window. Now a strange dog, sometimes dogs come over from the golf course, but if they come up the front door, then she will go at them like Cujo at the front door, just snarling and snapping at the glass. It's pretty scary. And so, she would do that with this as a puppy. And so, immediately I knew that was an opportunity to change the connection that she saw with this puppy, project togetherness. So, what does that look like? At first, when all the other puppies had gone home, I think this was maybe nine and a half or 10 weeks old. So, it was just her and my other dogs. I started every day with feature. I taught the puppy our hot zone game, which is you

stay in a bed until I give you a release word. And I had her go from one bed to another bed. And once she could reliably go from one bed to another bed and get another cookie, then I brought feature into the picture. And I put feature in one bed further away. And the puppy I kept on leash because I didn't want the puppy to go, Oh, hi, you look like somebody I'd like to get to know. Because I don't want that to happen. So, if you have a dog that might, you know, snarl, snap, lip, you, I would put that dog on a muzzle for project togetherness just to make sure there is no chance of any dog getting hurt. Now, you're putting a dog on a muzzle. You have to desensitize that dog to the muzzle. You can't just go, you've never worn a muzzle. I'm putting this on. It's got to be something the dog likes first. Okay. But I digress. So, I have my dogs and the puppy in one bed and I'll have her go to another bed. So, now feature sees his puppy moving. And when the puppy gets into one bed, she gets a cookie and feature gets a cookie. And the first day that's all I would do is have the puppy move further away. And eventually I brought the beds, not super close, but close enough that now I could ask feature to move from one bed to another. And eventually every day I would have them just moving back and forth from different beds. What I was doing was conditioning for her that when I'm doing stuff with this puppy, good things happen. And I want to tell you the treats I used for this activity feature would never get them at any other time outside of project togetherness. Then when I saw her going at the front door at this puppy, number one, this is number one rule for any kind of project togetherness. Do not allow these two dogs to interact with outside of project togetherness. So, if you know there's a chance that one dog might not like another dog or one dog might say something about the other dog's mother and army boots, then what you're going to do is make sure that they're supervised with you. You're always in the room if they're going to be together. And if they're left alone, they're left in separate rooms or in an X-pen or whatever. So, the moment that I saw feature go at the front door, I thought, okay, I'm not letting that puppy go up the stairs on her own, which puppies shouldn't go up the stairs on their own at that age anyway. She got away. So, what I would do is I would carry her up the stairs, I would open the door, and then I would do this, what we call Easter biscuits. That comes from my now past friend, Helen King. She would throw cookies on the floor and say Easter biscuits to

her dog. So, I would walk through the front door before feature had a time, a chance to snarl. I would open the door, say Easter biscuits, and I'd throw a handful of cookies on the floor, really good cookies. So, after two events like this, now how many times a day does a puppy have to go outside? Feature might be at the front door. Every time she knew that the puppy was going outside, she ran to the front door and she'd be waiting because when the puppy came in, she got Easter biscuits, right? So, I did that and I went from throwing a handful of cookies on the floor to just giving her one cookie after probably two weeks of doing this. I just gave her one cookie as I passed her. So, now she always looked forward to that puppy going past. Okay. Another thing that you can do, you can do things like Easter biscuits, throw cookies so that they get to search them, but be careful. I would do this as part of Project Togetherness with either both dogs in an X-Pen near each other. Because a lot of dogs, if one dog is sniffing resources, cookies are resources, and the other dog is nearby, they might start snarling. So, they're in X-Pens separately. Or if you know this isn't going to happen, you could have one in an X-Pen and one outside. I wouldn't do them together unless you're a hundred percent sure they're friendly. So, I can throw a handful of cookies on the floor for Easter biscuits and my dogs will all just eat what they can get close to. Some of them like Tater Salad may go, excuse me, pardon me, Student Council coming in. I think that one's mine too. He'll try and get them all. But if another one says, no, that's mine, he's like, oh, sorry, my bad. So, know your dogs before you do Easter biscuits out in the open. All right. Now, meal time. I would make sure the goal of Project Togetherness is anything that your dog loves. Let's say we have one dog that we're wanting to be happy to get along with this other dog. Anything that dog loves, this dog appears before it happens. So, let's say you're going to go to the park. Then we're going to say, okay, you two get into the friendship bed. Now it could be two beds beside each other. Eventually it could be one big bed. They just have to get on the friendship bed. They each get a cookie and then you go to the car. Or they get on the friendship bed, everybody gets a cookie, you go for your walk. Run to the friendship bed, you each get a cookie. And whatever it is that you love, we're going to do now. So, before I would put a bowl out to start feeding a dog,

I would say, you get on the friendship bed, you get a cookie. Now you each go to wherever your expens or your spots you go when I start feeding dogs. And then I'll go and get the bowls out. Friendship bed precedes the bowl. So, I don't get the bowls out and then say get on the friendship bed. I get them on the friendship bed, get the bowl, and then I separate them so that while I'm preparing the bowls, I don't have anybody talking about the way that they're combing their hair today. All right. So, now when it's feeding time, I'll put them very close to each other and eventually I get them so their bowls are touching. Now your dog's body language will tell you if that's a possibility or not. Again, one dog might be in an X-pen and the other dog outside the X-pen. You, obviously, you need to be very careful with this. And again, a behaviorist is never but a phone call away. I'm sure they would happily do it on a Zoom consult with you if you have any questions about this. All right. The other thing that I like to do is I like to teach my dogs to touch their nose to my hand. Now I have a video on YouTube about nose touching. So, you can check that out. But what I do is I get one dog touching one side and the other touching the other side. So, if one dog's in an X-pen and I'll put this hand up against the X-pen and he can touch that and that dog can touch that and they both get cookies. Eventually outside of the X-pen, I'll put my hand up and they both rush in and they touch. So, it's like two faces rushing towards each other, but good things happen. They get, now again, this would be later on in project togetherness. I'm not going to do this right up front. The most important thing about this is number one, as I mentioned, prevent the rehearsals of inappropriate behavior. Number two, as I mentioned at episode number 71, you need to record keep. So, if you're really committed to changing the way your dogs look at each other. And in episode number 14, I ranked how I see dogs living in a multi-dog household. Like, you know, do they hate each other? Do they tolerate each other? Our goal is, is to move a dog from one level up to the next so that ideally all of the dogs are in the acknowledged state. It'd be great if everyone was in the adore stage, but that doesn't happen. Very often, some dog, you might have a household with just two dogs and they would adore each other. Absolutely. The more dogs, maybe they don't all adore each other. So, the goal is if you have dogs in the hate stage, project togetherness

is very, very risky. And so, I encourage you to get the help of a behaviorist before you do it. If you have dogs and they aggravate, you can move them to tolerate. Tolerate, move them to acknowledge. Acknowledge, try to move them to adore. That's the goal. But you've got to record keep. So, I've got to ask you right now, are you interested in having your dogs get along better or are you committed? And if you're committed, you're going to do what I mentioned in episode 71 and you will be record keeping all of this. And record keeping so that every day you can look at how things went well, because you, my friend, need to celebrate the work you're doing. Because maybe it's just you and your dogs working on this, especially with those of us in lockdown right now. And so, there isn't anybody going, wow, your dogs are really getting along a lot better. Good for you. So, you need to celebrate. You need to number one, give yourself a high five. Okay. That was a little weird, but not. But write it down and go, yeah, this is what we did today. That was awesome. And number two, you can come back to this podcast and write a comment. Say, Susan, I've done this. I'll celebrate with your sister or brother. I'll do it because we're all in this for the good of dogs. And how great is it that we can change a dog's emotional state? Because that's what we're doing with Togetherness Project. Oh yeah, we're teaching hand targets. That's the operant side of things, but really that's the game within the game. What we're really doing is conditioning the dogs to like each other, just like Sheldon was doing with Penny on the Big Bang Theory. Okay. At the time of this podcast, we are probably within a couple hundred subscribers to the YouTube channel. And I mentioned that when we get 10,000 subscribers that I'm going to do a live on YouTube, my first ever live on YouTube on a subject that you guys are going to choose. And so, in the last episode, people asked for things like how to teach a dog not to jump up, conditioning a dog to accepting a muzzle. There's things that people wanted to see how to stop this, but don't be afraid to ask me if you've got a new puppy. We could do something especially about puppies, how to train something. Expand your mind. Leave me a comment here on YouTube. If you would like me to teach on any particular topic, because I'm pretty confident we're going to be getting those 10,000 subscribers here on this YouTube channel before the weekend's out. Do not disappoint me. Come on over to YouTube, hit the like button on this video, hit the subscribe button, and be sure to hit the bell

so that we will notify you when we're going live and when we've got another episode of Shaped by Dog. I'll see you next time.