17 SepEpisode 170 | Nutso men, a cranky kid & a self-appointed guard dog develops PTSD: Scenes from a dog trainer’s life
Annie shares two recent anecdotes from her life, both involving humans behaving in extreme ways and young animals she loves (her toddler and her dog Poppy) having meltdowns. These two events made her think about punishment, fear, socialization, behavioral expectations, generalizations, and the way in which people treat animals (dogs or humans) who are emotional, for whatever reason. The episode talks about counter conditioning, using punishment on animals who are experiencing fear, and looks at the weird ways in which different people react to scared dogs: from bellowing at them to getting down on all fours.
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Mentioned in this episode:
Behavior Therapy Day Training Sessions with School For The Dogs
Adaptil – Dog Appeasing Pheromone Diffuser
Solliquin® Supplements – Dog Behavioral Health
Transcript:
[music and intro]
Annie:
I wanted to share two kind of crazy experiences I had recently that relate to behavior and dog training in my own life. I guess you could classify this kind of episode as a Dear Diary type episode. And my three month old Marigold is right next to me as I'm recording this. And first she had the hiccups and now she's sneezing. I think she wants to make herself known in this episode, which actually is about her in some ways.
So one of these life episodes is, I would say, crazier than the other. And they're both about people who I guess you could call crazy, but I feel like that's sort of a broad and sloppy term, probably not particularly PC. So I think I'm gonna go with calling both these people simply bananas.
The first incident I wanted to talk about happened about a week ago when I was on my way home from my daughter's nursery school. I think it was her first day of nursery school. I had her with me, she's two and a half, and the baby. And we were waiting for the bus and the bus wasn't coming.
And finally the bus came, and right before the bus came, a cab went by, and Magnolia said, “I wanna take a taxi.” And I said, “No, honey, we're taking the bus.” We got on the bus and she had a meltdown. “I wanna take a taxi! I wanna take a taxi!” Crying, screaming about how she didn't wanna get on the bus, she wanted to take a cab.
I had to pick her up because she was doing that toddler thing where they try and go flat on the floor. And I was also carrying the baby. I had the baby like strapped to me. And the bus was really crowded and some very kind person stood up and said, “Why don't you take my seat?” And meanwhile, Magnolia is screaming, crying the whole time.
And you know, I felt like everyone was looking at us, but not with like great anger. Just kind of with like that upside down smile, like Beaker the Muppet smile-frown, feeling pity for me, I guess.
But the guy who was in the seat right next to me, an older man starts saying to me, “You need to chastise that child! This is the problem with the world today. You should be chastising her. If she was my kid, I'd smack her.” And at that point, I'd say two or three people nearby me offered to get up and give me their seats.
But we were really only going, like, I think like seven blocks. So we only had like a couple minutes left in front of us on the bus. And it was hard enough getting myself seated in one seat with the baby and the tantruming toddler. So I didn't really wanna move. So at the same time that I'm like trying to settle down Magnolia, I'm also holding her really tight cause I'm trying to protect her from the bananas man next to us. She's still crying.
And I'm also thinking to myself, Really? Lke, does this guy really think that the problem in the world is that people don't punish their children enough, people don't chastise their children enough?
Cause that certainly doesn't seem like what's causing issues in the world. If anything, it's the opposite. You know, it's the fact that all over the place, people are trying to use force to change behavior, to stop behaviors they don't want without teaching behaviors they do want. I mean, certainly with dogs, but I think with all kinds of people in society as a whole.
And even more than that, I was thinking, you know, in this moment — sure, you know, learning's happening all the time. I say that all the time on this podcast. But I didn't think that her tantruming on the bus was teaching her that it's okay to tantrum on the bus. I think she was tantruming on the bus cause she was two and maybe needed a nap.
And you know, to bring it back to dogs, similar thing with puppies. A puppy that is nipping at your ankles is nipping at your ankles because the dog's a puppy. And if you did nothing about it, that does not mean the puppy's going to grow up learning that nipping at the ankles is an okay thing to do. They're gonna stop doing it because they're gonna stop being a puppy eventually.
So in the moment it's more about stopping the behavior because it's annoying for you. Just like Magnolia tantruming was annoying for everyone in the bus.
But to everyone's credit except for the bananas man next to me, nobody seemed to be making a big deal of it, because plenty of people have dealt with toddlers in their lives, and toddlers can be moody for no good reason.
But I was interested in stopping her behavior, if only cause I didn't want to be bothering everyone else on the bus. And also I didn't want to incite violence from the man next to us, who would've liked me to smack her as he told me over and over again.
But, you know, seemed to me like a good example of why punishment is so problematic, especially in a moment where an animal is highly emotional, as she was. Could I have punished her in some sort of way that would've stopped the behavior? Maybe. I suppose I could have yelled at her or hit her or done something like that.
But I think that the emotional learning that would've taken place, the classical conditioning that would've taken place, the association she would've made with me, and maybe with the bus or who knows what, would have been far more meaningful to her in the long term. It might have stopped the behavior in the moment, but it would have done nothing to improve our relationship. And I certainly don't want her to learn by association that I am scary or unreliable, or that buses are places of violence.
And I'm talking about positive punishment. Negative punishment would be, you know, like giving her a timeout. And I have a good friend who does a lot of timeouts with her kid, but even she points out that it's hard to do a timeout when you're out and about or you're in a public space. Sure. Maybe it works when you're at home and you can go stick the kid in a corner. And it certainly seems less aversive than screaming or yelling or using any kind of physical correction, but still can be problematic.
Anyway, I was having all these thoughts and also trying to tend to my two very young daughters and not insight violence from Mr. Bananapants next to me. And I'm certainly no expert at any of this stuff. I've only been a parent for a couple years and I'm just figuring it out.
So I did something that you can't do with dogs, which I figured was worth a shot. I just spoke to Magnolia and told her what was up. And I said, “I know you're really upset.” Oh, that's another sort of thing about dogs, too. With dogs, we so often get tied up in like the reason for their behavior, when like the reason, I mean she was upset cause she wanted to take a cab. It didn't really make any sense. But you know, young animals are emotional. I mean even older animals can be emotional for no reason that makes any sense.
Anyway, I said to her, “I know you're upset. I know you wanted to take a taxi, but we're on the bus now, we're almost home and your behavior's really bothering everyone around us. So can you just try and be sad and upset in a more quiet manner until we get home, and then you can scream and cry as loud as you want to.” And it worked, which honestly sort of surprised me. I wasn't really sure it would work. I just did not know what else to do in that moment.
So she'd settled down. I continued to hold her tight along with the baby. I wanted to turn to the next to me and say “Ha!” But I didn't. I said to him, “I'm really sorry she's been so annoying.” And then we just sat there quietly for the last two minutes of the bus ride while he continued next to me saying under his breath, “She should be chastised!”
The second anecdote from my life that I want to share I promise relates more to dogs than the first one. Although it's gonna take me a minute to get to the dog part of the story. It happened just about exactly eight weeks ago. I know this because Marigold just turned 12 weeks, and she was three weeks old at the time.
It was a Saturday morning and my husband had taken our older daughter to the playground to let me sleep in a little bit because I'm up all night with the baby. I was in bed. I was only wearing my underwear. The baby was next to me in her bassinet. And I heard the front door open and close, and I thought it was weird because they had just left and I thought, well, I guess maybe they forgot something and came back.
But then Poppy, our dog, started barking like crazy, which also seems strange cuz she doesn't normally bark at my husband when he comes through the door. But I was like basically asleep so I wasn't processing totally what was going on.
Anyway, next thing I know there's this young clean cut man standing over my bed. And he says to me, “Someone's trying to kill me.” And I started screaming and he was like, “No, no, no don't scream. You have to help me. Someone's trying to kill me.” And I grabbed the baby. Poppy was barking at the guy like mad. I was saying like, “Who are you? Get out of my house.”
He wasn't like violent seeming at all. He actually seemed sort of scared himself, but I was pretty petrified by the whole situation. I managed to grab a hoodie to throw around myself, and, wearing nothing else but my underwear grabbed the baby and ran out the door, ran into the street, grabbed the first person I saw walking on the street and said, Hey, I need to call 911 and I need to call my husband.
And again, I was half naked in the street with a three week old. I'm sure I looked like the crazy person in that moment. My heart was racing. I sat down on the sidewalk, waiting for whatever was gonna happen next. And then I realized, Oh my God, I left Poppy in the apartment. You know, I was so focused on getting the baby out of the apartment, and Poppy was running around the apartment, chasing the guy, which you know, really is kind of what you want a dog to do in that situation.
And while I understand my own instinct to just get myself out and the baby out, I sat downstairs, outside my apartment, pretty stressed out by the idea that I had just left her in the apartment with this stranger who seemed paranoid and like he was having some sort of psychotic episode. And was he going to hurt her?
Fortunately I really do think he was — well, I mean, not fortunately for him, but I guess fortunately for me, I really don't think he was violent. I don't think his intentions were bad. I think he really was having some sort of mental break and was looking for help. After I ran out of the apartment, he ended up going upstairs to my neighbor's apartment and pleaded with her to help him.
I actually don't think he even broke in, because later on we learned that our front door had been broken. We live in a really sort of old crappy building and we didn't realize it, but the doorknob was broken in such a way where the door could be pushed open and had been like that. Although my husband and I hadn't noticed. And in the apartment door wasn't locked. We do usually lock it but it was the middle of the day and my husband didn't lock it. When he left to go to the playground.
The police ended up coming, taking him away. He didn't take anything from anyone. He did not hurt anyone. I hope he received some mental health help and everyone was fine. And we all went on with our lives. Just fine. All of us, except for Poppy.
Poppy was really traumatized. I would diagnose her as having doggy PTSD. And I've talked about this on the podcast before, in some other situations, about how socialization is something that's happening always. We talk often about puppy socialization, but like I said earlier, we're always learning. Animals are always learning and I believe the more experiences an animal has, the more they are going to be able to deal with new experiences without major stress.
One time I heard Ken Ramirez who used to train at the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago, talk about how he wanted the animals he was working with there to be so well socialized, to be so accustomed to unusual things happening and those things being no big deal, that if the roof blew off the place, the sea otters or whatever would just think, Oh, this must be just another one of these silly humans doing a training exercise with us.
But the reality is sometimes scary stuff happens that we can't control. And the bar for what might freak out a person or a dog is going to be lower or higher based on the individual. Our trainer and my good friend Anna Ostroff’s dog Ginger one time was out walking with her, and a guy on a skateboard skated up really quickly, right past them. And it was quite scary to Ginger. And after that, she developed a real phobia of being outside from that single experience.
And that can happen. Of course the same thing might have happened to another dog, and they wouldn't have cared at all. I mean, I guess you could kind of say the same thing about this guy coming into our apartment.
I mean, by the time my husband came back from the playground with our older daughter, I was like pretty much fine and ready to talk about what we were gonna do for lunch. And my husband was like, Wow, I think as if the same thing had happened to my ex-wife, she would've taken to bed and spent the rest of the day hyperventilating. Which, you know, might not have been an inappropriate response.
Anyway, I could tell right away that Poppy had been quite freaked out. And the experience of helping her over the last couple of months has been interesting. It's been a good learning experience for me. And it's also been sort of interesting to watch other people deal with a dog who has fear issues. And it's made me think about my assumptions and other people's assumptions too.
Firstly, it's made me think about generalizations. You'll often hear people talk about how dogs are not good at generalizing, which I think is sort of funny, cause people say it often as if humans are good at generalizing and dogs aren’t, whereas I think humans are also pretty bad at generalizing. I mean I knew a guy who had a bad experience dating a Gemini and refused to date Geminis after that.
I at first thought that Poppy might be scared of black men. The guy in the apartment was black. So I started thinking, okay, I need to arrange to have different friends of mine who are black and male come over. Ideally, I don't know, every day, every other day. So I can work doing some counter conditioning with her, but it turns out I was wrong and that her fear was not attached to people based on gender or skin color.
At first, at least she was basically scared of any new person at all coming through the door. And we have two doors in our apartment, two entrances, and it was the door the guy had come through that was really triggering for her.
She definitely seemed more scared of men in general than of women or children, but an overall high level of fear relating to anybody coming through the door that she did not already know in that first couple days, or at least at least the first day and the next day, she also was scared of any men that she saw on the street. I think probably her cortisol levels were still really high. She still wasn't quite herself.
And that first day, or maybe it was the next day, I was out walking her, and a guy walked by. He was with a woman, and Poppy barked at him, which I'd never seen her do on the street. She wasn't barking like crazy mad or anything, but she did bark at him, and he turned around and went, “Hey!!” Which you know, wasn't helpful. It scared me. I have to imagine it further scared Poppy as well. And it was like his knee jerk reaction.
Andnow that I'm talking about it now, it makes me think about the guy on the bus freaking out about the toddler crying. I mean, toddlers cry sometimes, dogs bark sometimes. These are not inherently bad behaviors. So chill the F out. I don't believe Poppy was attempting to show that she was dominant over this dude. I think she was just scared.
Anyway, the good news is her behavior on the street has been totally fine except for that one next day where every little thing seemed to push her over the edge. But it was pretty evident from the start that I was going to need to do some work with her inside on helping her learn to feel okay again about new people coming into our apartment.
And you know, it's funny because the realization that I now had this behavioral problem that my dog really needed therapy in order to get better about, I have to say it has made me more empathetic to our clients. Because, firstly you can, as a trainer, go in and say, This is how you do counter conditioning, and you need to set up trial situations and you need to make sure that there aren't people coming into your home at random times when you're not prepared.
But the reality of doing that stuff is really hard. I mean, I wrote to six men that I know, men of all different skin colors. Like I said, men have been more of a trigger to her than women. So I wrote to men who she doesn't know to see if I could arrange a time for them to come over so that I could work with her.
Didn't hear back from a single one of these friends. Which didn't really surprise me only because I know as a professional dog trainer, I have definitely done work before getting people to behave as decoys with dogs who have various issues, and it can be hard.
It can be hard to get people to volunteer, to work with a dog who has fear issues that have to do with them in particular. And it can also be really hard to control the comings and goings in my apartment. I'll talk more about that in a second.
But the other thing is it was the first time in my life where I thought, oh my God, I really need a professional dog trainer to come in and help me. And at first I thought, you know, I need an outside opinion. I need someone else to look at this with a different set of eyes. And then I realized that I didn't need that as much as I just needed someone else to help me do the work.
I mean, I love, I love training dogs. It's the thing that I'm more passionate about than anything else, at least work wise. But I have a lot going on. I run a business, I have two tiny kids, I do this podcast. And so I really found myself thinking, I do wish that I could outsource this. And I found myself envious of clients of ours who can afford to have a trainer come to three days a week for an hour and just work with their dogs.
We call it Day Training when we do training where the owner isn't there. And I haven't ruled out, signing up Poppy to do some Day Training with someone on our staff to give me a little bit of a hand, which I could definitely use. And I do get preferential pricing as it is my own business.
I guess I'm just saying that I see it as a financial commitment that our clients make when they maybe even could do the work themselves. It's not that they don't understand how to do the work, but it sure can be helpful to have someone come in and just do trial after trial with your dog, someone who is really setting aside the time to do the work that needs to be done.
It's a luxury to be able to afford a trainer who can come do that. But it's so awesome that we have clients who do do that with their dog, who really are paying for therapy for their dogs to help their dogs be happier and exist in a more peaceful way. So I guess it's given me a newfound appreciation for my own profession, because I know what to do, but that doesn't preclude me from wanting to outsource some of the work.
So the day after the incident, we had some friends come over with their two young daughters. They had never met Poppy before. And with hindsight I maybe should have not had them come over, but I wasn't aware really of what the problem was yet. And Poppy really freaked out and their two little kids were a little fearful of dogs and I was managing my two little kids. It was a lot.
So I opted to put Poppy in her crate in the other room, some food and a puzzle toy and some treats. And I think I put peanut butter in a Marrowbone for her, and she was okay. And I think it's a really good reason to make sure you have a dog that is not only comfortable going in a crate, but for whom the crate is kind of like a safe, happy spot.
Cause the crate really has become that for Poppy. As long as she was in the crate, she seemed pretty okay with having strangers in the other room. I think she felt protected there.
The second time someone came over was, I don't know, maybe a week after that, one of my husband's students came by. He is a professor, and this guy, super nice guy has a really long beard. Like Civil War era, Duck Dynasty style beard, which I mention because I think he probably looks quite different than anyone else Poppy has seen. And I didn't know this guy was coming over. I wasn't particularly prepared, but he loves dogs and he was willing to do a little bit of work with me and with Poppy.
So as he and my husband sat and chatted I asked them to put themselves at like the farthest end of our deck. We have an outdoor space which is like the biggest expanse of space where there's like a straight visual line in our home. And I set myself up with Poppy as far as I could be from him. And I clicked and treated every time she looked at him like at a starting rate of maybe be, I don't know, 10 times a minute, even if she was barking. If she had her head up and was facing towards him, I clicked and treated.
And it worked really well. I'd say within 20 minutes she was not barking at all. She was happily looking at him and then looking back at me for a treat. And even my husband was like, Wow, this really looks like magic.
But I had the baby strapped to me the whole time, our older daughter was running around and after doing it for like 20 minutes, even though Poppy was just doing so, so, so well, I felt like, oh my God, I can't do this anymore. This is craziness. I like, I can't be the dog trainer I need to be to Poppy right now and be a mother to my two daughters at the same time. Just, there's not enough of me to go around.
So I put Poppy in her crate. At that point she had settled down a lot, and again, the crate is a comforting place for her. So that was overall a good trial. Although again, it made me feel like I wish I had a professional trainer here who could just be focusing on Poppy while I'm dealing with everything else that's going on here.
Another week or so after that, another friend of my husband's came by for a drink in the evening. And this time I thought about it in advance. I knew he was coming. And I also, at that point had made the decision that any new person coming into our apartment was gonna have to use the other door.
And whenever possible all of us in the household have been using that other door. I don't think we have to do that forever, but at least for now. Because I think the door that the guy came through, just the door itself became a trigger for Poppy.
So Mark, my husband's friend, came in. He came through the other door, but before he arrived, I had Poppy in her crate already. And when she was in a state that seemed pretty chill, I let her out. I had put up a baby gate in the doorway between where Mark was and the area where her crate was. So she still had full access to her crate. She could have gone back in there if she wanted.
But I set up this baby gate and she was barking at him. But again, I just started clicking and treating her actually for just approaching the gate at all. And after maybe 10 minutes of that I put her on a leash and brought her a little bit closer, and again, just started clicking and treating her for looking at him.
And when that seemed easy for her, I sat on the couch next to him. And then he started feeding her treats first by tossing treats at her. And then she was eating out of his hand. And within the span of about 45 minutes, she was literally in his lap licking his face like he was her long lost best friend.
I think that that very successful experience was something of a milestone. I think that she has been getting better and better since then. And I have also been doing the work to be as mindful as possible about setting up situations, not letting people come into the apartment unless I am pretty well prepared to deal with her.
I think it's those moments where I was sort of taken by surprise where it felt extra difficult. I also have been using a DAP plugin, Adaptil, dog appeasing pheromone. They make collars and sprays, but I particularly like the plugin. We use them at School for the Dogs. We sell them storeforthedogs.com. They’re made to resemble the pheromone that's in dog's mother's milk and can calm dogs down. Not sure it's working, but I think maybe it's working.
Also I've been giving her Solliquin supplements. It's a behavioral health supplement that's made from L-Theanine, which is what's in like green tea and Turkey, I think. And I've been using her crate more. The crate, like I said, is definitely a safe spot for her.
And one other thing I've been doing, which might seem sort of counterintuitive, but I thought I would try it. And then it seemed like it, it worked, is letting her run into the hall to greet people rather than having her greet people when they come into the apartment. I think letting her approach them outside of our home is helpful. And something I haven't done, but I think I should try, which I think would also be helpful, is meeting people outside and coming inside with them together.
And it's been kind of interesting watching, like I said, watching other people's reactions to Poppy, like that guy who yelled at her on the street. Or even my husband's way of dealing with her. Sometimes he just gets kind of frustrated with her and will be rough with her, not in a way that's intended to hurt her, but he'll just kind of push her off the bed it, or pick her up in a kind of not very subtle, sensitive way.
And our old dog Amos was like kind of bombproof and unflappable, but this whole situation has made me a lot more tuned into how sensitive Poppy is. And I feel like I've had to become her advocate and really come down on him for just sometimes being too rough with her. She needs to be treated with great sensitivity and care, and she is easily spooked.
The other day I was playing with Magnolia and she accidentally jumped on my foot really hard and I screamed. And when I came to, I realized Poppy had run to the far, far corner of the apartment and was cowering there, licking her lips and completely like curled up in a terrified ball.
And I don't know if that's because, you know, I screamed the time of the incident before I ran out of the apartment, or if it had nothing to do with that. But that's the dog she is now, and we need to treat her in such a way that's gonna help her be as un-fearful in life as possible. Cause there are certainly gonna be more situations in the future that we can't necessarily control.
And people think, Oh, well I know dogs. Even my husband, “I know she'll be fine.” Well, I don't know if she'll be fine. Similarly I have an uncle, wonderful guy, really like the first dog lover I ever knew. I think maybe I've talked about him on the podcast before. He had this dog named Elsa who's the first dog I really remember loving as a kid, and he loved her and he's had many dogs since then. Just a dog person through and through.
But he has ideas about dogs that I think are kind of wrong, I mean like benign, but still wrong. For example, he's been over a couple times now since this happened with Poppy, and Poppy had met him before, but was not too familiar with him, so I think saw him as a new potentially scary person.
And the first time he came over, his reaction to her barking at him was to get down on all fours on the floor and put a treat in his mouth as if she would walk up to him and grab the treat from his mouth. And, you know, I had to say, I think you're actually freaking her out more by being on all fours on the ground than anything else.
And when I managed to get him to, you know, stand up and, and come sit on the couch where I think Poppy was a lot more comfortable with him, he like in trying to get her to feel more comfortable put a paper bag on his head? At which point, I was just like, I don't know what you're trying to do, but just stop doing that. You're definitely just freaking her out more.
Although again, it was sort of a moment where I wished that there was a professional dog trainer in the room that wasn't me, if only because, as a professional in that situation, I think it would've been easier for me to tell him to stop doing what he was doing, whereas because he is my uncle and I knew he was trying to be helpful, it was a little bit harder to, I don't know, get into the headspace to explain to him why what he was doing was a bad idea. Cause I knew he was really trying to be helpful.
[baby squealing in background]
Anyway, I have to stop being a dog trainer now and be a mommy to this little baby. So I guess I'll just end it on that note and say if a person having a mental episode ever wanders into your home and your dog freaks out, putting a paper bag on your head is not gonna make them feel better.
