Morals and responsibility: a puppy story

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The other week, I walked out of my place, down the hill, and out of the property. At the entrance, just on my side of the property boundary, I saw one of these red plastic mesh potato bags, and the rear end of a dead rat sticking out. It was … weird. Out of place. Our brains immediately fill in the blanks when we get a glimpse of something, so before I had time to investigate or even look closely, my mind had come up with the explanation. Someone had tossed a bag with a dead rat over the barbed wire fence when passing. It was WEIRD because why would you dispose of your dead rat on someone else’s property, but stranger things have happened.

I investigated by touching the dead rat with my shoe and pushing the potatoe bag off. That’s when I recognized what I was actually looking at: it was a tiny puppy, no more than a week old. And it wasn’t dead. The moment I touched him with my shoe, he started whining. That moment, my stomach dropped. Do you know that visceral feeling sick to your stomach that comes out of nowhere? The psychosomatic kind? I feel it rarely and almost always in situations like this, where I suddenly become aware of something horrifying about human nature and it strikes out of nowhere.

It’s because all the things I know about puppy developement, rural areas and what I saw right in front of me came together without needing any more processing time, and I knew: This puppy had been thrown over the fence at an age where he was not able to survive on his own, move very far, ingest solid food or regulate his body temperature. He had been left in a place where it was equally likely nobody would find him before he froze or starved to death or died of dehydration than it was that somebody would find him. And if somebody did find him, it would be very difficult to keep him alive until he was old enough to eat solid food because you need puppy formula and a way to keep the puppy warm and a lot of time to keep feeding him and activate his bowel movement and clean him …

I first typed this text on a plane, and I’m retrospectively editing it. I used “it” as a pronound for the puppy and just changed it to “he.” When does an “it” become a “they,” a “he” or a “she”? It’s up to the speaker, I suppose. Right now, I am choosing to make the puppy a him. And that editing choice is going to impact the way you feel as you’re reading this post. The moment someone becomes anything other than a neutral pronoun, we feel less distant. At least I do when I speak English. Back to our puppy story.

My own ethics are never AS crystal clear to me in theory as they are in a practical situation where I simply KNOW. It was the cruelty that struck me. I know about dogs procreating freely in rural areas. I partially grew up on my grandparents’ farm where the same thing happened with cats. My grandparents, in the 80ies and early 90ies in rural Austria, also didn’t spay or neuter their animals. It probably seemed like a grotesquely complicated, time-consuming, stressful and potentially expensive thing to do that maybe city people talked about. They hadn’t acquired the cats on purpose, the cats just moved in, as cats do when there are barns with mice. It was fine for some of them to live there, but my grandparents didn’t want hundreds of cats, so anytime my grandfather found a litter of kittens hidden in the hay, he would quickly and painlessly end their lives.

My cousins and I loved finding kittens and we’d never tell my grandfather and sometimes even hide them because we wanted to keep them around. At the same time, it was very practical and pragmatic; it wasn’t traumatizing to know what he did. It was what small-scale farmers did at the time. It was fast, painless, pragmatic, and kind. He’d cup them gently in his hands. There was no suffering. We got that even when we were kids.

So as I stood there, and it had just started drizzling, and right as the other three puppies started whining in response to the first one … the other three had made it out of the potatoe bag and dug into the grass and the blackberry underbrush … So all of that, together, gave me that feeling in my stomach. It wasn’t the fact that someone didn’t want the puppies. It was that a fellow human being had chosen to not end the suffering or ensure their survival.

So I saw my ethics around this topic clearly, in this moment, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell you about them as clearly before this experience: I don’t have an ethical issue with the fact that dogs in rural communities multiply and puppies are not necessarily wanted, and may be culled. I’m not on a moral high horse in this respect. I grew up with its kitten equivalent, and I understand it.

It’s also not the giving away of unwanted little animals. You could take them to someone who’d raise them. You could leave them with the mother dog until they are a few weeks older and able to eat solid food, and then you could take them somewhere near a restaurant or garbage dump where they stand a chance of finding food. You could do what my grandfather used to do and quickly end their life before suffering has a chance to begin.

What shocked me is what ACTUALLY happened: leaving puppies too young to survive to potentially die of dehydration, starve or freeze.

I only briefly feel the visceral sick-to-my-stomach thing. 5 seconds maybe? Then I move into solution mode. I got a cardboard box for the puppy in the bag and two more I saw. I heard a fourth one I couldn’t find in the blackberry brush. Because it had started raining, I took the box with the first three up to my place and came back to search for the fourth one, digging with my bare hands into the thorny blackberries until I found her.

I don’t know if there as a fifth puppy. I didn’t hear or see another one. It was raining. The fourth one was the last one I picked up.

I have no kitchen and no running water, no working car and no way to heat anything. It gets quite cold at night. Plus I had to leave the country in 2 weeks. Me trying to raise these puppies was unlikely to be successful given the current circumstances.

I reached out to my neighbor to ask where I could take a litter of tiny abandoned puppies. They said they didn’t know. So I waited for the rain to die down, and then carried my cardboard box the two kilometers to the highway restaurant. I planned to ask the folks working there.

Let’s take a step back for a moment. What is really interesting here, and I reflected on this hours later, was that the moment I picked up the first puppy, the litter became MY responsibility. No questions asked; they just WERE my responsibility and you could not have convinced me otherwise. As long as I didn’t touch them, I might even have been able to convince myself that I didn’t look closely enough and it probably was a dead rat. But the moment I picked up that first one, I had crossed an invisible line in the sand and there was no going back. The responsibility had been transferred to me. As long as they were lying in the grass quietly and I didn’t know they were there, it’s like the in-between area of a land border between Latin American countries. If you cross by land, you exit one country and get your passport stamped, and then you walk for a bit through a zone that either isn’t part of either country or at least, it’s unclear what country it belongs to, and then you get your passport stamped again at the tiny immigration booth on the other side, entering the neighboring country. That’s what you did 15 years ago anyways; I haven’t crossed land borders in a while.

When whoever found the puppies and put them into the potato bag and maybe took their motorcycle, and until the bag sailed through the air across the barbed wire fence, the puppies were this person’s responsibility. Then, they landed in no man’s land. And when I picked up the first one who knows how many hours later, they had entered the next country over. They had entered my responsibility. And there was no going back.

As soon as I had scooped them up, I knew very clearly what my options were. There were only two: because of my personal circumstances, I couldn’t raise them myself. Trying to wouldn’t be fair to the puppies; it wouldn’t give them their best shot at survival. My two options were: A, find a place where they would be raised by someone who knew what they were doing. Or B, end their suffering quickly. Given how cold they were, they were already suffering.

I looked at both options and picked A. Not for sentimental reasons. Both are, in my book, morally acceptable options. I picked A because … well, I love dogs, so of course that was my first choice. I wasn’t aware how hard it would be to find someone for them.

The restaurant at the highway was packed when I got there. I talked to one of the girls whose job it is to run back and forth between the kitchen and the counter with plates of food. You always get 3 different kinds of starch at this restaurant: rice, potatoes and a surprise carbohidrate. The pasta is my favorite. Meat of some sort and a little bit of salad. I interrupted her flow, told her I had found abandoned tiny puppies, opened my cardboard box for her to see and asked if she knew who to contact. She said she didn’t, but would ask the cook. The cook was in the area behind the counter, and while I couldn’t hear their conversations over the sounds of dishes and customers and sizzling in the background and the blasting TV that always plays Caracol News, I saw that the cook gesture towards her right as she shook her head and the younger girl’s eyes getting bigger. She returned to me and told me to just put the box outside.

I asked why; did they know someone who could come for the puppies or …? “We don’t know,” she said. I was confused. Why would I put the box outside and leave it there if there was no solution? I asked again, did they know of someone I could call? Or should I take them to the vet myself? If they knew of anyone, that would be my preference. Because I had no car and would have to take a bus with an unwieldy cardboard box. But I would of course go. I just needed to know which one it was; what was the plan if I “put them outside”? The girl went back to the cook, and then told me the cook knew someone; they’d call once the restaurant calmed down. I said, okay, great, I’ll wait. I found a table in a corner and kept the puppy box next to me; it was cold and windy and drizzling outside; no way would I place them there; they were already cold enough. Until I had handed the responsibility over to the next person, I wasn’t leaving their side. Outside the restaurant was no man’s land, and that’s not where I leave puppies.

A cyclist sat down next to me. We started talking and a little ways into the conversation, I told him the puppy story and opened the box. The puppies were not whining anymore but piled up in a corner of the box; their bodies still cold. He took out one after the other; his hands were hot after riding all the way from Bogotá and he wanted to warm them up. He was very gentle with them, went back and forth between utter kindness and empathy and problem solving mode, called a friend who was a vet who confirmed what I had told him: no, we couldn’t feed them anything; puppies need formula, not cow’s milk, and we’d make things worse, not better. We hung out for a while, warming the puppies in our hands, moving the box around the table anytime a warm and sunny spot appeared through the clouds. Customer after customer filed out and made the kind of face people make when they see a baby creature of any kind. The cyclist started trying to give them away in an attempt to help me and them, and I stopped him. These puppies were my responsibility; I sure as hell wasn’t going to give them to a random person at a reststop restaurant who’d impulse-take home a puppy too small to survive without proper care.

The place emptied out and the cook and the girl still hadn’t come back. My image of my fellow humans is generally positive, but that entire conversation had not only felt understandably rushed – a lot was going on in the restaurant – but also insincere. And as time kept passing, the puppies spent more and more time away from warmth and food and their suffering continued. Plus the later it got, the less likely it was I’d get to a vet before they closed if I had to.

I asked the cyclist if he’d mind investigating for me. I had a feeling no one was getting called. And indeed, they admitted to the cyclist they were not planning on calling anyone. Lo dijeron para salir del paso, he said, shaking his head. They just said it to get rid of you. I told the girl at the counter that the lie sucked, took my cardboard box and found a bus to town. I found the closest vet on Google Maps and walked there. They told me, no way, they could not take abandoned animals. I kept pressing and they gave me a phone number of someone who supposedly had some sort of rehoming organization. I reached out to this person, still at the vet’s office, and they told me, no way, they already had way too many animals and I should tell the vet to stop giving out their fucking phone number. Next, the vet sent me to a pet store around the corner. The pet store sent me to a different vet. When the second vet also said they couldn’t take the puppies, I asked if we could, if they didn’t know of anyone else, euthanize them. I felt like I had been prolonging their suffering for hours by now, and it felt shitty. They were getting weaker and colder and hungrier by the minute, and it was not okay. The vet said, nope, these puppies aren’t sick, so I can’t euthanize them either. Since they also couldn’t get rid of ME, they sent me to some sort of agricultural government office. This was the least likely place I expected would be able to help me … but since I couldn’t think of anything else, I went. And while this office clearly wasn’t set up to receive animals, two of the people working there took pity on the puppies or my desperation and said they’d do everything possible to sacarlos adelante. They’d do everything they could to keep them alive. We found the warmest spot in the office and they headed out before me to find formula. They knew how to raise puppies, and they clearly wanted to help. I trusted them. And I finally made my way home.

It was an adventure of several hours. I’m glad the puppies are in good hands … but wow, did I not expect things to take this long! With every passing minute, I felt like I was letting them down: they either needed to be in a warm place and get fed already, or I should have ended their life quickly and painlessly when I first found them. The more time passed, the more they suffered, and THAT is what I’m not okay with. I hope those four will go on to have wild and precious lives.

I could use the puppy story as a metaphor for other things in my life. It’s just far enough removed from human-human interactions that I could interpret it in any way I want as I mapped it onto something else; something different. It would feel like cheating though. I don’t think my morals about these puppies have a metaphorical meaning at all. They just mean that I have strong feelings about the suffering of living beings. I imagine most of us do … but what we define as suffering, or a being capable of it, most certainly differs depending on who we are.

For an audio version of this blog post, check out today’s podcast episode.

Pieces of you (a philosophical post, not a dog training one)

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Sometimes, you want to be kind to other people, and you (or me anyways) end up allowing them to chip away little pieces of you over time. They are small and cumulative, so you hardly notice. OR you respect or love someone so much that even though the pieces are BIG, you don’t notice the loss of yourself. Something else is distracting you: your love for them is front and center, and the loss of yourself is not. (And to be perfectly clear, when I say, “you,” I technically refer to my own lived experience. I just suspect this may be more of a universally human thing, not just me. Hence the collective “we.”)

I’ve let this happen more than once in the past. The example that most stands out to me is the ex I lived with in Austria. I had a tiny apartment I loved; he lived in a large one with a friend. Because I didn’t have housemates and he did, it was only logical that we’d spend time at my place rather than his. Gradually (but really pretty quickly), he’d bring over stuff and then leave it around. One day when he was at work, I happened to open a closet door, and I realized most of the stuff in the closet was his. Board games. Laundry. Random shit.

He had moved in with me! And I hadn’t even noticed. He may not have noticed either. I didn’t want to say anything because I didn’t want to embarrass him. At the same time, I very strongly believed that before living together with someone who is something other than a platonic friend, a (or many) conversation(s) need(s) to happen. At least back then: I had lived with plenty of people, including good friends, but not with someone who fell into the social category of “partner.” I was self-aware enough to know I didn’t want to live with a “partner” at that point in my life … not because of them, but because of me. I still needed time for just myself, in my own space. I wasn’t done having a “I’m renting my own apartment” experience.

Add to that, I would not have lived with ANYONE in this particular tiny apartment on a long-term basis. I worked from home, I had two large dogs, I loved my space and my alone time, and this apartment was way too small for an additional person. Especially someone who also occasionally works from home and wanted to get a dog too. Especially someone I hadn’t dated very long, and whose life rhythms were different than mine. If this was going to be a permanent living-together conversation, I’d want at the very least to make a plan, have both of us think of what obstacles we might run into, and talk them through before deciding whether we wanted to do this or not. I felt like our unawareness that the moving in had happened robbed me of the opportunity to have that thoughtful conversation. I didn’t speak up because back then, in my early 20ies, I still didn’t question the cultural myth that we MUST let the feelings of others matter the most to the extent I do today. Remember, I grew up in a tiny European country, in a small town, and the values this country, especially its small towns, are steeped in are community-oriented. I lived in the country’s capital and largest city, but those values were still with me—even though I didn’t believe in them

Eventually, I could not bear the constant proximity in the tiny space any more. We needed to either move apart and keep dating (that’s what I would have preferred) or move to a larger space together. Or I’d break up with him; it was only a question of time until I’d explode over a small thing and he wouldn’t know what had hit him. I still don’t know if I was just very good at keeping the peace and suffering silently, or he was really bad at recognizing all the things that annoyed me. Maybe a bit of both. On top of all that, I had a therapist who very much pushed me to stay sith him. I liked the therapist. I liked her sense of humor, the strength she projected and the way she put things into perspective. I learned a whole lot from her, but in this respect, she held me back. She framed me making myself small and not speaking up when I disagreed with him as self-growth. I believed her for a long time. I wanted to self-grow. When I shared things about his constant presence I struggled with, she recognized our fundamental differences, and painted it as a most excellent learning and growth opportunity for me to (I rephrase) squeeze my own mind into acceptance.

When we were at the choice point of moving apart and continuing dating or moving to a bigger space together, I knew beyond a doubt that I wanted to do the first thing: move apart. Just undo the mistake that had happened by accident. But I loved the guy and didn’t want to hurt him. The therapist thought we should live together. I wasn’t convinced. I asked a trusted friend for advice rather than just doing what I wanted. I shared the two options I had come up with and that I strongly preferred the living-apart one because I felt like we had not had enough time just dating. I asked my friend, did they think he could take it if I explained both options and then said, I’d really like for us to just live apart again?

My friend shut me down. They said he would take it as a rejection; it would destroy my relationship; if I really felt the need to, I should bring up moving apart, but I should definitely not say that I preferred it.

I was sure he’d pick the other option if I simply presented both: living together in a bigger space. Which I felt like I could manage because I liked him a lot and did want to keep dating. But living together really was not what I wanted at this point in my life. At all. I trusted that the therapist knew better than I did, and I trusted that friend even though I disliked their advice. I presented both options objectively an let him choose.

It went the way I foresaw: he picked living together in a larger place (probably didn’t even take the other suggestion seriously), and that’s what we did.

I ended the relationship a year and a half after we had moved to the bigger place. I realized: what my friend had said back in the day? It was TERRIBLE advice. Not only was it terrible for me (never advise your friends to do something they genuinely don’t want to do! It makes you a misguided friend at best and a terrible one at worst.) It was also insulting to my partner in that it rested on the assumption that his ego wouldn’t be able to take me kindly explaining that I loved him and wanted to keep being with him, but didn’t want to live together. It robbed him of the opportunity to show me that he was an emotionally mature, self-confident adult who could handle a genuine conversation.

I don’t know what he would have done. If the relationship had ended then and there, it would have spared us 1.5 years of intermittent misery. And if it didn’t end, we probably would have broken up either way eventually, but without the need to deal with a home neither of us could afford the rent for on our own. My hard boundary would have caused us to live apart and slow way down … maybe even making room for possibilities other than breaking up. Any break-up would have been a lot less stressful because our lives would have been less entangled. We could have supported each other through it rather than getting sidetracked by how we could get rid of the place we were renting together and where we’d each go to live now (me: Thailand. He: stayed in the same place and was married to someone else 2 months later.)

It took me a few more rodeos to learn to say stop. (Single-event learning? Not me! I need to touch the stove a couple times until I believe it’s really hot.) Even now, I still get carried away … of course I do. It’sfundamentally human to get carried away by emotions sometimes if we allow ourselves to feel. I hope I’ll always be able to allow myself to feel. But when I realize I do get carried away, I will now (a decade later) stop, I will think of the kindest way I am able to communicate my own flaws of being a human who gets carried away, and I will not let things get to the point of living-together-hell. (Literally or metaphorically.) It’s about me, not about you. I appreciate you; I don’t want to live with you. It’s not about being flexible. It’s about being true to what I need. I know what I need better and better every year of my life, and it sure as hell is not living with someone I don’t want to live with. I may never want to live with anyone. Having my own space, and friends who come and hang or stay for a while now and then, is perfect for me. The bar of actually wanting to share a space with a partner (who by definition expects more than just cohabitation) is EXTREMELY high because it would have to feel net better than living by myself.

Recently, I was faced with a different kind of conundrum that brought up all this reminiscing you’ve been reading about. I’m new in a place I’m moving to. It’s a different culture. I want to live here. I’m an anarchist; I believe the idea of nation states and nuclear families is deeply flawed, and I strongly want everyone to be able to live wherever they want and however they want. At the same time, I recognize the reality we live in, and I recognize the place I ended up picking for myself happens to be inside a community that shares a certain culture. My preference would be it being in the middle of nowhere … but it’s not. I didn’t find a truly middle-of-nowhere place I could afford that had the kind of climate I like.

I’m still a guest, a newcomer, to the community. I don’t share the values of the community, but I appreciate and respect them. I don’t want to poleaxe them. The people around me have been extremely nice and helpful. That has been wonderful! I’m a helpful person too. I believe community (my definition of it is different than that of most people, but for the sake of simplicity, let’s just call it all community) is important. I’m someone you can call if your house is on fire, and I’ll run into the building to help you get your grandma out, burns to my skin or no burns. I’ll lend you my couch if you lose your home. I’ll cook you eggs if you’re out of gas. I’ll buy you food if you can’t afford it and give you money if you need some. OF COURSE. I’ll cancel other appointments and help you find your dog, your kid or your horse if they are lost; I’ll help you look all day and all night. I won’t charge you for help with your dog if you can’t afford it. All of these things are OF COURSE things to me; matter of fact; no questions asked.

I’d like my neighbors to know this because one or more of these things are bound to happen sometime, and I want them to know they can count on me. Because it DOES make a difference, and because I love this kind of human connection.

Now, there are also many things I very much am not, and that at the same time happen to be part of the community culture around here: I can’t stand smalltalk in my own space unless I’m extremely relaxed and haven’t talked to another human being in days. While I’m happy engaging in smalltalk in public as I’m waiting for my orange juice, I don’t like spending my free time drinking gaseosas, beer or tinto with my neighbors, or simply standing around and talking and joking for minutes at a time. Minutes I could use for other things, like lying under a tree in peace. I don’t appreciate people stopping and honking anytime they drive past to encourage me to come down and chat. I downright hate people coming over uninvited and without calling first. I don’t like people calling me to ask me to come have a drink with them. I don’t like getting cold calls at all, even from my friends. There’s a reason doG invented texting. It allows us to schedule calls rather than get surprised by them. In a sentence: I dislike most things my neighbors do all the time.

I’m picky when it comes to my friends. I’m not going to be your friend just because you live next to me … I’m going to be your friend because we have a connection that is meaningful to both of us, no matter where in the world you are. I’ll help you if you need me to because you live next to me. That doesn’t make us friends. I’ll also help you (if I can) if I don’t know you and I’ll never see you again. I believe we, qua humans, should all help each other out anytime we can, and I see this as completely independent from friendship or smalltalk.

Now here’s my conundrum: I’m a newcomer. Everyone wants to make smalltalk with me (and set me up with someone Colombian because dude, the societal expectation is that everyone wants a mate. That, too, isn’t true for me at this point in my life, but I’ll let that one slide for now.) What I don’t want to establish is a pattern of stopping by and talking. Especially when I’ve been busy and finally have time off, and I’m home, the LAST thing I want is to talk to a neighbor. I want to lie in the grass with my dogs and talk to no one. That’s how I recharge. That’s how I am able to show up fully and genuinely when I am needed, and that’s how I’m able to stop and help out a stranger I’ll never see again: because I recharge. And I recharge alone, or with my closest friends. I don’t recharge with my neighbors, and I certainly don’t recharge going places to have a drink, being honked at or smalltalking.

My instinct is to just explain to folks who approach me:

“I super appreciate your friendliness and welcoming-ness. It shows me that you want me here and see me as one of you! Thank you!

I also want you to know that you can count on me. If you need me—this is my number; you know where I live. Just ask; I’ll help where I can, no questions asked!

Also also, here’s a little bit about me. I recognize I’m new and you’re curious about me. I’m a loner and happy that way. Feel free to chuck it up to my background culture causing me to be weird. My dream space to live would be in the middle of nowhere, no neighbors. I strongly dislike smalltalk. I want to spend my free time by myself, with my dogs or with my closest friends. I don’t enjoy fence-talking.

That part? Not personal at all. It’s entirely about me. It’s a boundary that matters to me and that I’d like to be respected. Please let me know if there’s any boundary you’d like me to respect, too! I appreciate frank, direct conversation. Over and out.”

So this is my instinct. I trust my gut instinct for the most part: when I don’t listen to it, things tend to blow up in my face. See also: that ex in Austria. But I’m in a new country, so I ran it by a close European friend (note: not the one who had given me bad advice about my ex) and a Colombian friend who is familiar with both European and Colombian culture. Both of them were like, we totally get it, but it may be a bit much for the people living in rural Colombia. They might think you’re a jerk. Take a golden middle type approach. Be pragmatic! Meet them occasionally. Use the “different culture” or “busy” excuse at other times.

I hear it. I can logically follow the arguments. They don’t sit right with me thought. I don’t want to use excuses. I want to live in a world where people are capable of understanding individual differences (be they cultural or idiosyncratic) and go with them. I want to live in a world where I get to be a loner who absolutely will always be reliable when it matters. I don’t know if we actually do live in this world. But hearing the feedback, thinking back on past experiences of letting little pieces of what makes me me get chipped away … I’m not comfortable doing this anymore. I want to be authentically me, not hide behind excuses. If people are offended at first, so be it, but I truly believe people, unless they have a fragile ego, are able to understand that me being me is not about them.

I’m not going to squeeze myself into little boxes that are convenient or what people are used to. I find the local community lovely. And I don’t want to participate in it. These are not contradictions. I won’t disrupt local customs, and I’ll still be me, doing life my own way.

I’ll write down my thoughts, and put that piece of paper with my bullet points in my pocket, and anytime the invitation for a drink or the honking or the wanting to visit comes up … I’ll take out my list, smile and explain.

Assimilation is the chipping away of pieces I’m not willing to let go of. I won’t do it. I’m going to be respectful, kind and helpful. I’ll make my boundaries known and respected, and I will enforce them.

I won’t be like my parents who kept accepting giant chocolate Easter bunnies out of politeness, even though no one would eat them, and saying thank you so much that the next year, the chocolate Easter bunnies would be even larger and more plentiful, and now they have a house full of expired chocolate Easter bunnies. I don’t want a house full of expired chocolate Easter bunnies. Considering my friends’ opinions helped me see that.

~~~

When I started writing this post, I hadn’t yet had to explain myself to a neighbor. Now that I’m finishing it, I have. And it went well. The person—someone who had been very insistent on spending time together—understood and wasn’t insulted. We can all be adults here. We can live in a world where many worlds fit. And that’s the only world I’m interested in living in.

In other news,

since I forgot to mention these news to you last time:

My online content has a new home now! My first course, Calling All Dogs (an updated version of what used to be on FDSA) just made it on Tyler Muto’s Consider The Dog platform! It’s available as part of the membership as well as an individual purchase. One thing I like about this platform: CTD doesn’t create artificial scarcity. Everything is ALWAYS available, not creating the “need” to purchase something “right now.” Check it out! I’m still finding my way around there myself, and getting to know my fellow trainers via their huge course library. More content of mine? Coming soon!

Learning through habit and learning through consequences

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A while ago, I shared on my Patreon that I kept going the wrong way because there were SO many corridors in the apartment building I’m staying at, and all the corridors look exactly the same. By now, I’ve figured it out, and 95% of the time, I pick the right corridor right away.

Something new has crept up though! There’s an elevator here. As I got used to taking the elevator, I stopped paying attention to the elevator buttons. (When you first take elevators in new buildings, you stop and think before you push the button: what floor do you want to go? What button do you need to push? For a couple seconds, your full attention is on the buttons, and you pick the correct one because it’s a conscious task you put effort towards.)

By now, I’ve taken the elevator so many times that I don’t shift into attention-to-the-buttons mode anymore. I just continue daydreaming or thinking about whathever it was I was thinking before I got on the elevator. I expect my finger to unthinkingly push the right button. Riding the elevator has become a habit, and I seem to unconsciously expect that so has pushing the button. Only that second part? Not true! Ever since moving the button-task to the habit-part of my brain, I push the wrong button … pretty much every second time I go up. So far, I believe I’ve gotten it right every time going down; probably because the down button is the very first one, which makes it obvious. The up button I need is in between many other up buttons. I need to push 4, but I’ve pushed 3 a lot, and just now, I pushed 2. I usually recognize the errors of my ways when the button I pushed lights up. It snaps me out of daydreaming. My mind then actually focuses on the task, I push the right button and the “close the doors” button when we reach the floor I accidentally pushed.

When riding elevators, what makes us fluent in the “right” behavior is habit: we push the correct button consciously until we do it unconsciously. I’m pretty sure for a lot of people, the transition is seamless. For me, in this building anyways, it hasn’t been. The task has shifted to the unconscious bucket before it was ready, so I keep making the “mistake” of pushing the “wrong” button about 50% of the time when I go up. That’s a lot of “mistakes!” I put the word “mistakes” in quotes because … nothing bad happens. I lose 2 seconds of time or so, but that’s it. It’s not a “punishing” consequence; it’s a consequence I don’t mind. So the consequence of the doors opening on the wrong floor first isn’t likely to teach me anything.

I think if someone put a sticky note on “my” (the “right”) button for going upwards, or lit this button before I pushed it, my success rate would be close to 100%. Even without thinking about it. Because just like going down, it would be obvious. And if the button stayed obvious for another … I don’t know, 50 reps, which equals 16.666 days, they could then remove the sticky note or the light and I’d probably be able to unconsciously select the “right” button due to the habit having had more time to form without me making “mistakes.”

Do I care about getting it right the first time? No. It doesn’t matter to me. So I’m good; I don’t need anyone to help me out with sticky notes. I just find it interesting to think about. I suspect that even without the sticky notes, if I kept riding this elevator for a few more months, I would end up getting it right—unconsciously—every single time. I won’t be able to confirm this because I won’t stay here long enough, but I believe that learning is going to happen; it’ll just take more time because I’m free to make mistakes, and the only consequence is a lack of reward (getting to the right floor is a low-value reward most times; the doors opening on the wrong floor slows me down and I don’t care; it is simply the absence of a reward.) Habit will develop, but it will take longer than if the “correct” button stood out to me more.

This is of course a dog training metaphor. And I fully believe that other learners would not need a post-it note or a lit-up button to learn faster. Other learners may already have learned what I didn’t learn. Other learners yet may perceive the doors opening on the wrong floor more saliently than I do, and also learn faster. Different beings have different learning styles, and different experiences matter to different beings.

For a learner like me, what would be the fastest (which isn’t automatically the “best”; it depends on the task at hand what is best!) way of teaching/learnign to push the “right” button going up? Note that when it comes to me riding elevators, learning speed doesn’t matter at all, making this purely a thought experiment. I believe for the learner I am, if you wanted to maximize the learning speed in the elevator scenario, you’d have to implement a consequence I’d prefer to avoid every time I pushed the “wrong” up button. The consequence would have to be delivered either immediately, or someone needed to mark it.

Remember I need to push “4” to get it right. So if I pushed “3,” there should either be a beep (a “punishment marker”) and then, when I got to floor 3 and the doors opened, the consequence would be implemented (say, that floor was filled with several inches of water and it flooded the elevator the moment the doors opened, so my shoes and socks would get wet. Or floor #3 was on fire, so when the doors opened, I’d have to work to keep my dogs’ noses away from the open doors so they didn’t get singed, and I’d feel an uncomfortable heat wave pushing into the elevator. Or there’d have to be very loud, very terrible music playing on floor #3, causing me to cover my ears the moment the doors opened there.)

An immediate consequence (not requiring a marker) could be: all the wrong buttons could have sticky stuff on them, and if I touched them, my fingers would then also be sticky and stay that way until I reached a faucet. I’d dislike that quite a bit. It could be tooth paste, jam, peanut butter, paint that hasn’t yet dried … I’d dislike it the most if I didn’t know what the sticky stuff was and thought it might be vomit or snot, but I think something less disgusting, like toothpaste, would do the job just fine. Vomit or snot would be accessively intense, and (I suspect) not speed up my learning process.

Or anytime I pushed the button, there could be a kind of noise that sent shivers down my spine, for example the sound of chalk screeching on a blackboard.

Or anytime I pushed the button, the button itself could spray water in my face, or release the odor of cheap perfume, which is something I can’t stand.

This experience would probably be punishing, and I suspect what would happen to me is, I would move the riding-up-the-elevator task out of the bucket of “habit” and back into the bucket of “pay attention when you do this!” It would stay there longer, allowing me to actually create a functional habit, and by the time I moved it back to the habit container, I WOULD be able to unconsciously get it right even when I was daydreaming.

When it comes to the elevator, I’m happy learning just over time. I really don’t care. So there’s zero reason for an aversive consequence, however well implemented, that would speed up the learning process. The stakes aren’t just low, there are no stakes. I wouldn’t mind pushing the wrong button for another month. That’s why I said, whether learning speed matters depends on the task.

I can also imagine that some learners would not learn at all, not even in 2 months, if nothing happened when they pushed the wrong button. That’s why teaching style needs to take into account who your learner is. If the task has zero stakes and the learner doesn’t progress, does it matter? Maybe not! That’s up to you, the teacher.

For other tasks, like crossing a busy highway, learning speed absolutely matters. I wouldn’t want my mind to shift this task into the “don’t pay attention” bucket before I was sure I had installed a strong habit of checking whether I was about to get run over by a car or not. The faster I learned this, the safer I would be. So in this scenario, if I was a slow learner who shifts tasks to the “whatever” category too fast, it would arguably be in my best interest to implement an undesired consequence for stepping off the sidewalk without checking what’s going on first.

Why do I bore you with my elevator ruminations this morning? I’m stuck at home with a nasty cold. And I think it’s relevant for dog training. I’d love anyone’s thoughts! Do you agree with me? How we teach should be about who the learner is and what the task is? If not … what should it be about? I want to hear your perspective! Also, of course, it’s not either habit or consequence. Most things (like crossing streets and riding elevators) become habits eventually either way.

Before I let you go, let me give you a couple news since I haven’t shared a blog post in a while and A LOT has happened since the last one!

Patreon

If you liked this text and want to see more like it, as well as other thoughts and videos about balanced dog and human “training,” as well as thoughts about different cultures, adapting to them, and being downwardly mobile … join one of my paid Patreon tiers. The reason they exist is that I need your support … and by now, there’s a big backlog of (mostly) videos to go through!

Free-roaming dogs journey!

I’m planning a small trip to observe and discuss the free-roaming dogs of Colombia next year. I’ll take between 4 and 6 people, and since this is the very first time I’m going to organize something like this, I will keep it as budget-y as possible! Send me an e-mail if you’re interested, and I’ll invite you to our first video meeting where you get to chime in about content, planning and even when we go!

Doggie’s vacation week – day #7 (September 6, 2024): one last morning of training, socializing with dogs and a handover session

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Morning training and dog/dog socializing

We started the morning with a session of lots of street-crossing practice in my neighborhood.

Then, we went to the dog park1 for the last time of Doggie’s stay with me. His confidence has continuously grown from one day to the next, and today, he started playing! All the dogs in the compilation below are unfamiliar to him. I think it’s safe to say that when Doggie gets greater freedom at home now, he’ll be chill around new dogs (who he hasn’t had access to while being mostly confined due to his suicidal street-crossing maneuvers.)

A relaxed car dog

After practicing sidewalk behaviors and socializing all morning, we headed back to Naucalpan around noon. Doggie slept through the car ride – an hour is just the right time for a juvenile Mal to recharge!

The handover session

I spent the afternoon with Doggie’s humans for a thorough handover session. It was great to see how happy and excited Doggie was to see his favorite people again, and how excited and newly motivated they were to keep working with him! Eduardo had already shared my videos and explained things in theory to his sister and dad. When I got there, everyone was already on the same page.

First I showed them what Doggie and I had practiced in person, and then they took turns working on all the different steps. With a little help, Doggie did great for everyone – both stopping at curbs until released with “¡Libre!, listening to his leave it/stop itcue (¡Alto!) and his sit cue, fetching toys in the field next to the sidewalk without stepping on the street and tugging on a toy instead of the leash.

We ended with a few theory tips about how to help Doggie relax around Eduardo’s young nieces and nephews.

Speaking of nieces and nephews: there is only thing I regret not having done while Doggie stayed with me. When the neighborhood kids asked to pet my dogs when I was out with Chai and Doggie, I said no. I’m used to saying no because Chai is not a fan of being touched by strangers. I missed out on this opportunity for Doggie to refresh his puppy memory of interacting with children. He’d have benefitted from it, especially now that I’ve heard that unlike his dad Drago, Doggie hasn’t been allowed around Eduardo’s nieces and nephews so far. That said, I hope that with a plan in place, he’ll get to be around them in the future either way!

Trueques

My new windshield wipers aren’t here yet – but soon! I love when we’re all helping each other through exchanges of knowledge or things rather than money. It feels more personal and fun. Eduardo’s family knows they’ll always have a dog trainer in their corner, and I know I’ll always have someone who knows about cars! When they need someone to look after one of their dogs, I’ll be here for them – and when I need someone for Game, she’ll be welcome with her bonus family there. It takes a village!

The weeks ahead

Doggie is still a juvenile baby raptor, full of energy and the need to go-go-go. Eduardo and his family will continue implementing the training I started and up his exercise and play routine a bit. We’ll reassess in a few weeks. If necessary, Doggie will spend another week with me in the end of September where I can make him my priority before being tied up with FDSA from October 1st, or I’ll come back for another session or two (it’s unfortunately a bit of a drive.) The hope is, of course, that Eduardo and his family will be able to work with him themselve going forwards, with only minor hickups! But with juvenile Mals being juvenile Mals, you never know.

The benefits and risks of living life off leash

I’ve talked about this on several occasions in the past, but this is a good opportunity to share my own point of view again.

Doggie’s best life, the one we all want for him, is one that is like his dad Drago’s: being able to roam freely. Drago was able to do this from the day he came home to Eduardo. Doggie, as a small puppy, fearlessly wanted to play-jump on strangers and cross roads. This led his humans to restrain him more than their other dogs in order to keep him and everyone around him safe, and that, in turn, caused Doggie to be difficult to live with because he had lots of energy and not enough places to put it.

It is of course risky to allow dogs off-leash freedom around cars. None of us are kidding ourselves about this. It is also a question of life quality. Not everyone has yards, cars, time to drive to dog training facilities and hiking trails, or dog parks within walking distance. They aren’t the only ways of giving powerful, high-energy dogs their best lives. I’d venture that being around one or more family members all day long, getting to hang out while they are attending customers, playing on the field with neighborhood dog friends or the dog’s humans and toys whenever nothing else is going on, and going on long off leash walks or learning new tricks as soon as Eduardo gets home from work at night make for a damn near perfect life of freedom, exercise, enrichment and dog/dog as well as dog/human social interactions! Our hope is that Doggie is a few steps closer to having this life now too.

I’ll update you on “what happend next” with Doggie and the other rebelde puppies as soon as I get around to it … The backlog of what I want to share is large – but slowly, step by step, I’m making my way through it! I want to continue transparently sharing the ups and downs of their lives with you all!

  1. If you’re in the Global North and part of a particular slice of the dog world, you may be apalled by the fact that Doggie is going to a dog park to socialize. The local dog culture here is different, and so is the dog park culture. The way I live and work with dogs changes depending on where in the world I am. ↩︎

Doggie’s vacation week – day #6 (September 5, 2024): practicing and filming all of Doggie’s important skills, staying home alone and trying to take pictures!

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This morning, a friend followed us around the neighborhood and took videos of our work for Eduardo, Doggie’s human. We practiced and recorded all the skills Doggie had practiced. Below are two of them, showing things I haven’t shown in my previous posts.

Stop and sit at the curb

The first video is the goal behavior for our city puppy: Eduardo’s greatest challenge has been the fact that Doggie isn’t afraid of cars and hasn’t learned to stay on the sidewalk. He could be roaming freely if only he learned to respect sidewalk boundaries. Doggie’s other high-energy challenges come from the fact that Eduardo’s family doesn’t have a yard, and that unlike their other Mals, Doggie is the kind of dog who will run back and forth across busy streets – and they live in a busy car neighborhood. To keep him safe, he has been confined or on leash – and that has made it hard for Doggie to keep his teeth and paws to himself whenever his humans have time for him!

The goal behavior is for Doggie to stop at the curb even if the human gets going and even if food is dropped (not on video, but we’ve worked up to this successfully), and sit before being released. I still use a sit cue (¡Siéntate!) in this video, but as Eduardo and his dad and sister keep working on this, it will eventually become an offered sit. The sit is a safety behavior in addition to stopping: once it is well-rehersed, if one behavior breaks down, it will be the first one – sitting – rather than the second one – staying on the curb. A dog who stands on the sidewalk rather than sits is better than a dog who jumps in front of a car!

I’ve only worked on this behavior for a week. While we’ve generalized to many sidewalks, Eduardo and his family will need to continue working on it to really turn it into a habit. In the video below, I show how to help Doggie if he steps off the sidewalk before his release cue (¡Libre!)

We also went into the dog park again (no video), where Doggie’s confidence around new dogs had grown even more than on day #5, and my friend took a few pictures of Doggie and me – I want memories of Doggie’s time with me! This one is my favorite:

After a longer outing, we headed back home where Doggie practiced staying home alone with the girls while I went back out for a lesson with the young gentleman below:

The manual for being a juvenile Mal

Doggie was being a good, relaxed boy for the rest of the day … until I had a video consult! As the manual for being a juvenile Malinois requires, he woke up just in time to unplug my Internet not just once, but twice. Unfortunately for Don Doggie, he got tethered before he had a chance to kick my clients off the call a third time.

We ended the day – our last day together! – rolling around the couch in an attempt to get all four of us in a picture … with varying levels of success!

Doggie’s vacation week – day #5: an off-leash walk, the dog park and a little barking and getting barked at

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September 4, 2024: a new day!

He’s a handsome young man!

Juvenile Mals are a lot of dog first thing in the morning! As of today, we’ve found a place for Doggie to put his early-morning arousal: as soon as his day starts, he gets his tried and true fleece tug pacifier to hold on to. I keep the other end of it in my hand so he can’t loose it.

Chai’s on a retractable leash first thing in the morning, and Doggie would like to chew her leash – but if there’s his fleece tug, he’ll choose that instead, no questions asked. It’s got to feel a lot more fun to bite down on! So this morning, our first loop consisted of Doggie tugging/holding on to the toy almost nonstop – it feels like holding a kid’s hand as we walk – while Chai does her own morning things on the retractable leash. Then I went back and switched adult dogs. Game is always off leash in the morning, and by the time we got to her loop, Doggie had down-regulated enough for me to leave the tug in the apartment without getting jumped on, humped or my feet chewed.

Doggie explored and sniffed alongside Game, sat for treats, checked in for praise a lot and did his morning peeing and pooping. Superstar! All of this off leash for him – only Chai is currently leashed in the morning (until we’ve got our cat chasing sufficiently under recall control – we’re almost there!)

Thoughts on Mals and Border Collies

It’s been a lot of fun to remember how intensely worky juvenile Mals are! Chai, the last dog I had at this age, has been super chill in comparison. Part of it may have been that she constantly had diarrhea at that time and may have felt physically weaker. A lot was still new for her at 5.5 months, so she may have had less muscle and satiated on stimulation more easily because of it – who knows! Hadley, the Border Collie I raised for an ex, was certainly higher maintenance at this age than Chai, but no comparison to any of my Mals or even to Phoebe.

The Malinois I’ve raised are different from the Border Collies I’ve raised (I haven’t raised a lot by any means, so these observations really only apply to my own dogs and a few puppies of friends I know well.)

When Game and Grit were puppies, I had a yard and a 2-person, 5-dog household (for Game’s first 6 months and Grit’s first 1.5 years.) Game took a colleague’s weekly puppy socialization class, we trained all the foundations at home, and anytime she wasn’t sleeping or working with me, she’d find herself a playmate in one of our other dogs.

When I went to Thailand after, we didn’t have a yard, but the dogs certainly got a lot of physical and mental stimulation: weekends running at the beach, and during the week, I slowly worked Game up to twice daily treadmill runs of 30 minutes each (Game did an hour in one go), we went on short neighborhood walks every morning and evening and occasionally Game worked at chilling under the table when I went to a corner food place for lunch. We also spent time at the Siam Crown training fields and yards most days where the dogs got to run free on a giant property and we trained a little. I worked on tricks around the agility equipment with Game and we did bitework foundations, and we played and trained (and the dogs swam) around/in Siam Crown’s saltwater dog pool. Sometimes in addition and sometimes instead of Siam Crown, we went to walk banana plantations and swim in irrigation canals, watch huge monitor lizards and look for Thailand’s beautiful snakes, or walked around some of the temples of Sam Phran and interacted with free-roaming dogs. Grit and Game played a lot with each other, and Game also had a Mal friend who was her age and a Boston Terrier friend.

At home, Game also worked on nosework almost every day.

Every single calory she didn’t earn in training came from a Kong, Squirrel Dude (basically a more difficult Kong) or was a frozen raw meat bone – chews to keep her busy.

When we moved to Guatemala, we had a yard again. Game’s physical activities included lots and lots of mountainbiking and uphill bikejoring, long daily hikes and running with my car because I lived on an almost traffic-free dirt road. The training activity of our choice at this point was sniffing out fake cadaver scent in huge outdoor areas. She also went almost everywhere with me, from visiting friends to getting my hair cut and eating out to being my demo dog when I worked with in-person clients.

Up until last year, whenever I didn’t have a yard, I spent around 3 hours outdoors with Game every day (in addition to a little bit of training or informal play) unless we did A LOT of intense brain training.

When Chai joined us, Game and I started doing a bit less – it was made up for by lots of play between the two, especially when Chai was a puppy and juvenile dog. Then Game was busy with her puppies who sure took lots of energy. I’ve built her stamina back up after. She continues not needing quite as much exercise anymore and being a chill and content dog in the house, but she also has a treadmill again for days I’m sick or can’t take her out as much as we’d like to for another reason.

None of the Border Collies were as physically strong and intense as the Mals when they didn’t get their cognitive and physical needs met. Hadley sure had issues as a puppy, but they expressed themselves in less destructive ways. Mals get “angry” or destructive. Border Collies get depressed or neurotic.

There sure are similarities (two working breeds who generally like cooperating with humans), but they are SO different too. It’s hard to put my finger on the key difference. Being serious, as a personality trait, seems stronger in Mals – including in goofy ones like Game. Game is un-serious for a Mal. There is still more of a “this is serious business and I am working on this” vibe to working with any Mal I’ve ever met, while my Border Collies and most other Borders I know well have had a more playful vibe. They too could train all day long, but they seemed more light-hearted.

Mick may be an exception; he was always serious, and his single interest in life was sheep. Or maybe Mick was the rule and Hadley and Chai are exceptions. Who knows! Maybe there is no rule. I like that thought best!

Urban adventuring with Doggie and Chai

For our training walk, I took Chai and Doggie to our usual park. Doggie needed 2 or 3 reminders at the curb – it’s still a new behavior, AND I just added Chai to the mix, and also ducking out of sight behind parkeded cars to reminding him to keep an eye on me – but he did SO well that I had him off leash for the entire walk today! He’s doing fantastic and learning fast!

Dog park adventure

I took Doggie and Chai into the dog park again. Doggie reciprocated dogs greeting him and showed interest in a 4 months old Border Collie puppy (who was so much smaller than him! It’s wild!) Either the fact that we came back to a familiar space, as opposed to it being new yesterday, or the fact that Chai was around as well (or both) helped him approach other dogs. There were more dogs here today than yesterday, and Doggie ventured further from me and even stole a ball, and showed real interest in the Border puppy.

There was, however, also a situation in the dog park that was a bit much for Doggie: people wanting to interact with him while there were also All The Dogs around (see the video below.) I let him find out that he was safe for himself.

Depending on the dog, I’d handle situations like this differently. For example, I would not have put the much more sensitive Chai into this kind of situation – to this day, I’m very adamant about her not having to deal with strangers reaching for her. Doggie’s confidence, even when he’s insecure, is far greater and he doesn’t spiral up in greeting scenarios – so I let him find out what it’s like to walk up to and be greeted by people and dogs for himself. You can see in his body language in the video below that these aren’t stress-free interactions, but ones he is perfectly able to handle nevertheless. He is also free to leave and does so (I didn’t catch the second time on video.)

In a different situation today, Doggie checked in with me on two occasions when a dog barked at him. This, I’d venture, is a tentativeness-based response. I reinforced the check-ins and will facilitate some more meet-the-dogs outings in the next few days. I can see how he’s coming out of his shell at the dog park. If he lived here with me permanently, I’d take him there every day for a month or so and expect him to then be back to his puppy self around dogs, simply by meeting lots of different ones off leash every day.

Everything we did not chase today

No bike chasing, kids chasing, trying to play with the broom of someone weeping the sidewalk or chasing of passing dogs or even Chai when she was crittering … I’m very proud! The only one who got briefly chased a bit exuberantly was the Border Collie puppy when we met them again outside the dog park, and Big Doggie was like, “Hey, I KNOW you!” and ran towards the puppie who took flight. I was able to call him off with his “pup-pup-pup” recall. Its strength keeps impressing me.

Doggie earned A LOT of food out and about AND found a large junk of chicken for dessert. A successful outing! Chai, for her part, only found bones. But then again, she came across an entire bolillo last night. It’s not as if the streets had been stingy with her either.

Arousal behaviors and calming down

Barking and drinking

Doggie likes to talk: barking is part of his attempts to get Chai to play, and before we established “sit to ask for stuff,” he vocalized while shoe-biting me too. Game also used to like to vocalize when she had opinions at his age.

Doggie is also an arousal drinker: when highly excited, he’ll drink a lot. Adolescent Chai used to be that way too. I am seeing Doggie’s arousal drinking go down already as he settles in with us more and more every day.

Clarity

I can’t ask him, but get the impression that clarity and structure also make a big difference in terms of Doggie’s arousal. (Part of this may be my confirmation bias, of course: I get the impression that worky dogs in general do best with clarity, which makes me likely to attribute positive behavior changes to increased clarity.)

Down-regulating

Doggie’s down-regulating after coming home from today’s outing to the park was fantastic too. He only followed me around the apartment for two or three minutes, curious what I was up to. Then he laid down to rest. Briefly after, he got a second wind and tried to get Chai to play – but before long, he peacefully passed out on the couch.

Closed doors

As of yesterday, Doggie is able to stay behind closed doors, for example when I go to the bathroom, without scratching them. Goodest boy!

Late afternoon outing: kids and adults, bikes and bread, running and yelling …

There was A LOT going on around the apartment towers tonight; from someone selling bread out of their car and announcing it loudly to someone selling random little snacks at pop-up tables to what felt like all the kids running around and yelling or riding bikes all at one, and all the adults taking strolls between the buildings. I don’t think I’ve seen things here THIS busy before (I’ve only lived in this neighborhood for a few months and am still learning about it.) We walked a little, then I picked Doggie up and carried him past the main commotion because I didn’t want to risk him running after a kid. I had forgotten the fleece tug, and I didn’t want him to practice chewing on his leash or pulling either. Conveniently, he’s still easy to pick up and carry, and just like we practiced when the puppies were tiny, he’ll go limp in my arms and relax.

We went to the part of our space that has all the wild, giant large-leaved plants and tall grass and bushes. Everything was still wet from the rain, and Doggie got the best kind of zoomies (while mom Game found THREE avocados that had fallen off a tree and ate them all. Lucky girl!) Doggie had a great time zooming, and in between bouncy, high-speed loops, he’d come back and sit to ask for a treat.

Two dogs in two different windows saw Doggie running laps and barked at him. His response to this was to come and check in with me. He’s a little tentative when dogs are yelling at him.

On the way back to my place, he gave one bark towards a suddenly appearing person who was moving away from us and took off towards them, full-on “I’m a big and powerful Mal, look at what I can do!”, tail high and confident and arousal-hackles up. I called him; he turned on a dime to come and eat his scatter.

This was interesting to observe! Either Doggie was wound up from his zoomies OR he is getting used to this environment and starting to regard it as “his,” so if someone we haven’t invited comes into our zoomie space, we tell them who’s boss. The bark-run towards the person looked like an adult Malinois response, not like a fear-based or conflicted behavior to me. From what I’ve seen (he’s a big, friendly boy,) if I let him run up to a person in this state of arousal, he’d probably end up jumping and asking for attention once he got there rather than continuing to bark – but I don’t know since, of course, I called him back instead of letting him scare the person.

As we were almost back home, four kids playing some game came running and yelling towards us from four directions at the same time. I put Game on Doggie’s leash and picked up Doggie. On the way out, a little kid on a bike fell right in front of us (we were being good and eating a scatter rather than going to investigate), but running kids at this age, this speed, this number and this noise level … not exactly a scenario I want to add two Malinois to! Doggie gave one soft bark as the kids kept coming super close and running right around us, yelling. I held on to Game’s collar and we waited until the craze had moved on. Both dogs continued their walk back home without giving the kids a second thought.

I wonder what it’s like to grow up here. I suspect it is fun: this apartment complex has to have 6000 or more inhabitants (which is more than the entire town I grew up in.) The reason I know it’s at least 6000 is that it is part of some city neighborhood-something initative, and only housing projects of 6000 or more people get to be a part of this initiative. The supposedly biggest housing project in the city has (numbers vary) between 8 and 9000 inhabitants, which is twice as many as the town I grew up in. It’s wild to think how many people fit into such a small area if you just make your buildings taller instead of urban-sprawling all over the place!

Turn taking

Doggie did great staying on his suitcase when I worked with Chai in the same room today. He’s really coming along nicely! I’m happy with his day.

Doggie’s vacation week: day #4 – city adventures, handler focus, free-roaming dogs and the dog park

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September 3, 2024

Walking to and back home from the park

Walking to the park on leash

We walked from my apartment area to the park in the next neighborhood over on leash. Doggie had an easy time dismissing dogs we met on walks. No problem passing them up close on the sidewalk. We practiced sitting and waiting to be released with “Libre” at the curb before crossing any and all streets we encountered, choosing a different route than the previous days: I want to mix it up to help him generalize. He’s getting better and better!

Choosing the pacifier tug over leash biting

During bouts of juvenile-dog-ness, by now, Doggie reliably chooses the fleece tug (when I have it on me) when his arousal gets high! Rather than jumping at me or biting my clothes/shoes, he simply holds on to his pacifier. Since this is actually more fun for him, he looks happy and calms down quickly – as opposed to occasionally looking desperate before I introduced the pacifier. I love how fast he learned to choose the fleece tug over leashes, human limbs and clothes!

Walking home off leash

Today is the longest I’ve had Doggie off leash in an urban environment: after our park adventures I’ll talk about below, we walked all the way home off leash. Doggie rocked it! I’m proud of him!

At the park: curiosity and neutrality towards unfamiliar dogs, handler focus, the tug pacifier and redirectability

Like aunt Chai, Doggie discovered how much fun it is to play in the fountains!

Today – a day WAY less busy than when we first came to this same park on the weekend – I had a few opportunities to record! The video below shows Doggie’s curiosity (first clip) as well as neutrality around other dogs, his handler focus (he chooses to happily play and walk with me rather than explore) and how easy it is to redirect him (last clip.)

If you’re located in the Global North, let me clarify something before you watch. The dog culture is different here. At this park (it’s in a somewhat, but not yet extremely gentrified area), there’s a 50/50 split of on and off leash dogs. Unless an on-leash dog’s human shows that they don’t want to be approached, on-leash greetings are welcomed by humans and dogs.

I know the Schnauzer in the first clip (but Doggie does not.) The reason I added this clip to the video is not to upset anyone, but to share Doggie’s curiosity – and, most of all, the “arousal-happy hackles” I mentioned in my post about day #1!

A fun detail to observe: “arousal-happy hackles” in puppies and juvenile dogs with a certain coat structure

You can see them well in the clip above, where Doggie interacts with the Schnauzer (watch his neck), and you can also see the loose body language. In the second clip, there’s still a bit of “arousal-happy hackles” from exploring the world.

Hackles up doesn’t necessarily mean a dog is grumpy. We need to read it as part of their overall body language. Think of it as a word in a sentence or a sentence in a paragraph: in and of itself, hackles in breeds with a certain coat structure (Malinois among them) mean arousal – no more and no less. The same goes for wagging tails (in all dogs): by themselves, they only mean arousal. They do not necessarily mean the dog is happy or friendly.

Unfamiliar humans at the park

As for humans, it’s been easy to redirect my off-leash guest at the park. He’s interested though and it doesn’t take much encouragement from a stranger, and he’ll approach. Running children are also tempting (but easy to redirect from.) I suspect if I didn’t redirect, he’d play-run and jump on kids. At 5.5 months, he is confident and playful with humans.

In the dog park

I also took Doggie into a dog park for the first time today. Below is a snippet of this part of our field trip:

This video is interesting. One, ideally, I would have hidden my treats and the toy to be less of a magnet for Doggie. He offers a lot of sits for me to get a treat (and since we are only just learning this behavior, I keep up my continuous reinforcement schedule.)

Doggie ignores the other dogs in the park in order to ask me for food instead. While this is lovely, it also shows that Doggie hasn’t been around non-household dogs: since he hasn’t been off leash outside and likes tugging on the leash, he has rarely been out and about with his humans. So it’s been a while that he had the opportunity to interact with unfamiliar dogs.

I’m reading my dog park observations the following way: Doggie is comfortable around dogs (I started recording right after going in, and the Basset Hounds came up right away to try and mug me for treats – no problem for Doggie.) At the same time, he doesn’t quite know what to do (how to play) with the unfamiliar dogs because he hasn’t had a chance to practice dog/dog play over the last few months. A dog his age and of his breed, with his level of energy, who isn’t afraid of other dogs should technically try to play, play and play even more (like he tries to convince Game and Chai to do.)

Watching him here, I decided to keep bringing him back into the dog park every day he’s with me to provide an opportunity to loosen up and start playing with the others. I might have to hide the food and tug the next time!

In any case, I’m really happy how chill he is around dog park dogs! My extreme-early-socialization bias wants to attribute this to the fact that he met between 50 and 60 different dogs in his first 8 weeks of life with me. If he hadn’t had this many interactions early on, I’d expect to see a fearful dog. Mind you, this is just me going off what I’ve seen in dogs this age who have not had a chance to interact with many other dogs since they moved to their humans at 8 weeks or so, and who have not experienced extreme early socialization.

In Doggie’s case, I see (I want to see!) a juvenile dog whose early puppyhood experiences have immunized him against fear of dogs. He hasn’t honed his dog/dog play skills with new dogs in months and therefore switches to known behaviors instead: sit to ask me for treats.

Thoughts on dog parks

We dog trainers will often tell folks to keep their dogs out of dog parks.

In reality, there is no one-size-fits-all solution: some dogs do great in dog parks. Others do not. Depending what part of the world a dog park is located in and what that dog park looks like, we can also either expect it to be filled with well socialized dogs … or with poorly socialized ones.

I don’t tell my international clients to take their young dogs into dog parks. I also don’t hesitate to take this puppy who I have raised with extreme early socialization into a Mexican dog park for continued juvenile socialization. Doggie is going to benefit. If he was a different dog or we were in a different part of the world, my decisions might look completely different. They’d also look different if I was a different person. There is no one right way, but there usually is what’s right for you and your dog right now – tomorrow may be different.

Free-roaming dogs around my apartment complex

I live in a neighborhood that’s not (yet) gentrified (not the same one as the one with the park I showed you), which means we get free-roaming dogs here.1 Today, I recorded Doggie’s encounter with two of them. If I remember correctly, he has seen both these dogs once before (but I don’t have it on video.) It’s lovely to see how quickly he dismisses the white dog and shows interest in sniffing/scavenging instead! No hyper-greeter feelings, no fear. Just doing his thing and co-existing. He’s a lovely boy!

Thunder? So what!

In other news, it’s been thundering and raining at least once a day since Doggie got here, and he has either not stopped whatever he was doing or slept right through it. SO happy that he’s doing so well! Even when a transformer fuse exploded today, he didn’t miss a beat! Yay! I’m aware that noise sensitivity can develop later in life, as it did in Game – but so far, so good!

  1. Latin American dog culture differs widely, largely depending on two factors: (1) the socioeconomic bracket of a neighborhood and (2) whether it’s a rural or an urban area. ↩︎

Doggie’s vacation week – day 3 (September 2, 2024): toy play, urban sidewalk boundary practice, nail trim experiments and biteable pacifiers

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AM adventures


This morning started out with lots of wonderful bounciness and a little bit of imitating Game:

On our walk back, outside my building, I saw Doggie bark at a stranger (human, not dog) for the first time. Last night, even in the twiligt of our last outing of the day, he was being a superstar. The person this morning had a toddler strapped to their chest, with the toddler’s legs dangling and moving by their side. If you only saw the silhouette, they would have looked like a person with 4 arms, I imagine. I called Doggie (“pup-pup-pup” is incredibly strong and snappy), and he immediately turned to race back to me rather than continuing to approach the person. He loved the party I threw for him and didn’t look back at the person with the toddler. We also saw not just one, but two barky dogs around the apartment complex this morning – one Chihuahua sized dog on a leash on the other side of the basketball court fence we were playing in, who came up to the fence, and later a slightly-smaller-than-medium white curly dog who was out by themselves, wandering around the parking lot, saw us and started barking. Both times, Doggie just looked and dismissed. I’m very happy with this response – especially given that it happened soon after we got reunited in the morning and I suspect arousal levels may still have been above average!

As for the Chihuahua-sized dog behind the fence, Doggie’s look went hand in hand with a brief hackles-up, and the immediate dismiss went with hackles-down. This is the hackles-up of arousal we see in many young (and some adult) dogs, especially shepherdy ones and other dogs with this type of coat: they’ll often have “trigger-happy hackles.” Sudden/unexpected spikes in arousal express themselves in this way a lot. This is something to read in context. If the context is surprise and the dog comes right back down to baseline or combines it with curiously approaching and loose body language, this is neither what we commonly label as “fear” or “aggression” – it is just the way internal arousal manifests itself. Arousal is neutral – neither “good” nor “bad.”

I’ll try and get a video of arousal-happy hackles sometime; I imagine folks with dogs whose coat is longer or tends to lie flat against the dog’s bodies, is curly or cover them fluffily are not aware of this, and it’s a good thing to know! (You wouldn’t see this in Goldens, rough-coated BCs, Shelties, Cockers or Poodles, for example.)

Handler focus and picking up behaviors

I’ve been throwing a lot of new stuff at Doggie, and am impressed how quickly he’s been picking things up. His handler focus is still strong, and he clearly appreciates genuine praise/pets and feedback (more so than the average dog.) If he checks in or comes back, just praising and petting will make his eyes shine. That’s a lovely quality. He may outgrow it … but it’s cool, however long it will last!

Toy play for Chai and Doggie

During Chai’s outing, we played in the basketball cage today until she was so tired she lay down in a puddle of rain water with her toy. While simultaneously playing with Chai, I taught Doggie a simple game of fetch and used it to strengthen his “libre” release in new circumstances: “sientate” to ask him to sit, “libre” and then toss his ball. I love seeing his understanding grow! Look at this boy sitting to ask for his toy rather than throwing himself at me!

In the video above, I wait for Doggie to voluntarily drop his ball or trade for kibble (“Drop” announces me dropping a handful of kibble, which then allows me to pick up the toy.)

I’m adding behaviors and cues to his game faster than I would otherwise because I don’t have as much time with Doggie as I would with my own dogs, and it could make a big difference in his future life quality. We’re now peacefully asleep after getting to both move and think. Good puppy!

Doggie’s solo training session

Doggie and I went to get some video and practice waiting at the curb. The behavior organically developed into stop at the curb and sit until released. We first practiced on leash, then with the leash dragging and then off leash.1

We’ll work on this every day at every curb on every walk until he goes back to Naucalpan.

We’ve also established that there’s no need for Doggie to walk in a halter. He can be off leash or on any collar; he just needs a fleece tug to carry or tug on anytime he feels the need to, and he won’t pull or bite shoes:

The video above is from September 5 when I had a friend following me and videoing for Doggie’s humans – but we started practicing on September 2. My hope is that this simple trick will allow them to feel less frustrated taking him out, and he’ll end up getting to go on more field trips – on or off leash.

If your pup or juvenile dog is a landsharky breed with boundless energy, try simply carrying something they can hold on to or dig their teeth into anytime they need an arousal release. If the material is fun to bite, dogs who express arousal with their mouths tend to quickly learn to use that biteable pacifier (rather than their leash or your body) whenever they need to!

Nail trims

I don’t know if and how often Doggie has gotten his nails done since he left, but I was curious to see if I could still handle his paws and clip the nails. I could – no problem at all except for when he wanted to play with the nail clippers instead. I LOVE that he continues being good with this procedure that we practiced soooo much!

Nail trims are one of these things some dogs need months and months to learn and tolerate. I’m SO glad I taught Game’s puppies nail trims are normal so their humans will be able to focus on fun stuff instead!

I know that Judge (Oso; purple collar boy) is having an easy time with the Dremel as well. I don’t know about the other three puppies, but will find out when I get a chance!

  1. The reason I can progress this behavior so fast is that I’m using R- in addition to R+. I don’t want to go into details in this post (I’m not interested in participating in the dog culture wars with this post), but I find it important to acknowledge this here. There is no way Doggie would be able to learn about the sidewalk boundary this fast without the R- component. ↩︎

Doggie’s vacation week – day #2: urban outings, toy play and lots of observing

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September 1, 2024

Doggie is a morning person dog!

Doggie was a bit of a desperate maniac when I finally released him from his prison this morning. I opened the door to the outside world for him to see what would happen (I need coffee before or while taking out the dogs these days; my brain won’t brain otherwise.) The open door is something he’ll need to learn for his humans, who worry he’ll take off. It’s safe here since we live on a plot that’s part of a high rise housing thing with a giant shared “yard” in the end of a dead-end street. His humans live right on a car street, which makes the same thing a lot more dangerous.

Our start into the day: getting to lo leave and choosing to stay; meeting a stranger and a new dog and imitating Chai’s toy games

Doggie did great: took himself out to potty, stayed close and came right back in. He sniff-explored within sight of the door and kept coming back in to check on me until I had transferred the coffee into my thermos mug (thank you, Chris) and was ready to head out.

I let Doggie observe Chai’s morning play session, and he picked up on it and started running along with her and showing signs of trying to imitate our game! Smart boy!

He also curiously approached1 the person who feeds the pigeons around here every morning. The birds flew off and the person waved the feed-bag (a big black trash bag) in his face and told him to get lost, and he calmly deferred and came back to me. Lovely job there, Doggie! I’m focusing a lot on observing at this point to find my best training angles.

We also met our first free-roamer this morning. The dog came over to greet us because they didn’t know Doggie yet (they know Chai and Game), and he was completely neutral towards them, just like he’s been with the various strange humans we’ve seen. I’m very happy with this – so far, the only thing I’d like to be different is that I wish I had gotten more sleep. I’m glad our first two days are a weekend where I have less non-Doggie things on my plate!

Time to train!

All three pups have settled down as I’m typing out my morning notes2, so Mr. Doggie is going to get a training session next! If possible, I use sessions to reinforce being chill (rather than reinforce bouncing-off-the-walls with training.) I’ll use half his breakfast and then the other half for the outing I’ve planned for later this morning. The preliminary plan for Doggie’s second day and, if it works well, the days ahead:

+ Short morning outing with either play or exploration.
+ Non-Doggie work until/while he’s calm and sleepy.
+ First training session of the day for part of breakfast.
+ Work until/while he’s calm and sleepy again.
+ Longer outing by himself or with Game and/or Chai to observe, move his body, play, potentially train in public.
+ Work until/while he’s calm and sleepy again.
+ More training.
+ Work until/while he’s calm and sleepy again.
+ Depending on the day, more training or right into the …
+ short evening outing.
+ Calm down and bed time.

Day #1, session #1: revising the suitcase (“¡Maleta!”) and adding distractions

Remember: the goal is for Doggie to default to staying on sidewalks/stop at curbs unless/until released to step off. I’m using the suitcase to explain the basic principle that differences in surface height have meaning.

Doggie did fantastic this morning! Not only did I work up to opening doors and going out of sight while he stayed on the suitcase; I even added Chai as a distraction in the end of the session.

Now Mr. Doggie is chilling out again. I like how quickly he was able to down-regulate after the session. This may be either because he didn’t get a lot of sleep last night or because his morning needs for moving and thinking have been met. Either way – I’ll take it!

The longer outing

We walked to “the”our” park in the next neighborhood over. It was as busy as it gets on Sundays! I had Doggie wear a head halter because I’d seen him pull badly on a collar. He didn’t pull at all, but carried his leash in his mouth and occasionally shook it or gave a tug. No feelings about the head halter at all – he walked in it as if he had done it all his life.

At the park, I let him off. He ignored or politely greeted all dogs we met. He was interested in a sweets-selling stand and tempted to jump on one person who carried a bag of food (our old “Pup-pup-pup!” recall worked again!) He curiously approached about 3 people who encouraged him for pets. He ran after a soccer ball kids played with, but once again called off the moving ball with “Pup-pup-pup!”

Outside of this, he often chose to stay close and make physical contact with me – not out of fear, but because he was clearly over the moon we were out and about together. It feels great to see how strong the early puppyhood relationship we built is showing up so many months later!

On the way back, we worked on “Espera” – “Libre” – “street is lava” with several street crossings. Doggie picked things up fast!

Back home, he quickly relaxed on the cool tile floor. Excellet job, little one!

Toy play!

We’re starting to build interest in interacting with balls! When Doggie doesn’t seem interested in cooperative play – Game to the rescue! I ended the session below the moment I noticed he was about to opt out. Ideally, we’ll never beg our dogs to play (if at all, the other way round!)

The video angle is a bit weird, and in addition, it’s a wide angle video – but you get the idea!

… I don’t remember what else we did that day – not enough note-taking! But I do remember Doggie being very, very cute:

Sweeter dreams!

After a longer evening outing with Game, his second night was already calmer than the first one.

  1. To clarify: letting my off-leash guest approach busy strangers is culturally acceptable in Mexico City (except for certain gentrified and foreigner-heavy neighborhoods.) People will communicate with the dogs they run into rather than expecting the owners to do it for them. ↩︎
  2. The note-taking I’m talking about in the present tense here happened on September 1 – unlike my pre-publish editing of this post, which is happening on September 28, 2024 (right now). My blog posts will often involve some time travel. ↩︎

Doggie’s vacation week – day #1: getting reaquainted and testing the basics

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August 31, 2024

Last week, I visited Doggie (red collar boy) and his folks. He’s turning into a beautiful dog – strong, full of energy and fearless. He recognized Game and me at once and immediately tried climbing in my lap. Doggie is the puppy who went to live with his father Drago in Naucalpan in Mexico State. Towards the end of week 8, he had been the barkiest of all puppies and the second bitiest one (first place in terms of land-sharkiness was my favorite girl Chispa).

I hadn’t seen Doggie since he moved out, and it was SO cool to meet him again!

Eduardo and their dad mentioned that they’ve been struggling to keep Doggie calm: his energy is boundless and they haven’t let him off leash because unlike their other dogs, Doggie hasn’t picked up the concept of staying on the sidewalk. They have no yard and he doesn’t have the other dogs’ freedom to run, roam, play and train in the public field next to their house because it borders a street. For the same reason, he doesn’t get to go on off leash errand around town.

When leashed, he’ll bite and tug on the leash a lot, and he has learned to get attention by biting shoes and pants. Eduardo’s dad showed me the “battle scars” on their arms: what is to be expected from a bitey little landshark interacting with someone whose skin isn’t young and flexible anymore.

They mentioned that Doggie’s needs for exercise and stimulation were among the highest of any Mal they’ve had (they’ve had quite a few.)

I can’t help but feel proud of the boy: he’s exactly what a Mal should be. But I could see they were struggling to meet his needs, which in turn caused Doggie to struggle to relax. They haven’t found an affordable trainer nearby to help them out. Since I’m not nearby enough either (it’s about an hour’s drive, depending on traffic), we agreed that he’d stay with me for a week, and then we’d do a handover day. If they needed more help, I’d be able to make time or take him for another week in September.

No one has mentioned their puppy getting car sick. I know for sure that at least 2 of them never have; with the other 3, I haven’t had a chance to ask. Our numerous early puppy car adventures may have paid off (or it maybe it’s entirely genetic.)

A week later, I picked up Señorito Doggie without Game and Chai. He was calmer than he had been on my last visit – they had made sure to take him out for a walk before I got there. We drove by my place and I added Game and Chai to the car. Then we headed to Bosque de Aragón. I put a tracker on Doggie (just in case I needed to unexpectedly collect him somewhere) and let them all loose in a big field.

Testing who Doggie has grown up to be at Bosque de Aragón!

He was amazing. He was more interested in staying close to me than anything else, even though he took the world in with interest. For the first 15 minutes or so, he was SO happy to try making physical contact at all times as we walked, tail high and proud, wagging nonstop, shiny eyes! It took some walking until he had convinced himself I wasn’t going anywhere, and started exploring with the others.

It was the weekend, so a little more than usual was going on at Aragón. We walked off leash past joggers, other dogs, ducks, children, a skate park, food stands, bikes, giant animal statues and four-wheeled pedal cars. Doggie was a superstar. He fearlessly followed me up a bunch of stairs (the kind Chai had struggled with in the beginning), fell off on the way down and just kept going like nothing had happened. He remembered his puppy recall (“Pup-pup-pup!”) and turned on a dime whenever I called. First impression: he’s growing up to be a little superstar!

Doggie has the kind of environmental confidence I’ve been hoping for with my extreme early socialization! With this particular puppy/juvenile dog, at this particular moment in time, it looks like I have accomplished this goal. Nothing fazed him – he was neither repelled by nor overly attracted to interesting people and dogs: he had seen it all.

I’m biased, but isn’t he beautiful?

I did, of course, get some shoe biting and jumping for attention – he had learned this skill well since we’d been apart and was generalizing to me lightening fast! For the time being, I picked him up anytime he bit my naked feet (because I wore sandals and it hurt) and set him down again a few steps later. It was management, not training, since he didn’t mind being picked up at all. As we had worked on in the last … I think two weeks with me, in a variation of Julie Daniels’ puppy protocol, he just relaxed and went floppy in my arms to be let down again. When he felt like it, he’d take another run at my feet right away.

This is an interesting observation to me because for many puppies, picking them up can be used as a harmless punisher for unwanted behavior (because they don’t like being picked up.) Not with a puppy – at least not with this puppy – who has been picked up a lot by a lot of people, and built all the positive associations to it!

Back home: a break

Hard to believe, but true: even 5.5 months old Mals fall asleep eventually!

#1 training priority: respect sidewalk boundaries by default

After Doggie resting and me working on non-Doggie stuff, he got his first formal training session for training goal #1, the first priority for his humans: the concept of staying on sidewalks. Before we could work on this out in the world and with actual sidewalks, we needed a few things in our toolkit:

  • A shared language
    • A food marker (¡Sí!)
    • The concept of shaping and/or luring
    • The concept that offered behaviors pay off (R+)
    • The concept that “keep doing what you’re doing” pays off
    • A release cue
  • The concept of boundaries having meaning

The above would be true for any dog I worked with. In Doggie’s case, I only have a week to teach him what I would otherwise take my time with – perhaps several months. This means I’ll add other elements to our communication to speed up his learning, even if I wouldn’t usually use them. For this particular project, I added

  • as part of the shared language:
    • The understanding that offering behaviors can turn off environmental stimuli (R-/escape conditioning in the sense of: if I plug in my seat belt, the car will stop beeping at me.)
    • The concept that avoiding certain behaviors keeps certain environmental stimuli turned off (P+/avoidance conditioning as in: as long as I don’t unplug my seatbelt, the car will remain silent.)

R- was going to be key in speeding up the learning process. I was confident I’d be able to teach the goal behavior in a week and generalize it to all sidewalks with its help. You’ll find out whether I was right in the posts to come!

I was also sure that I could use R- without emotional fallout for Doggie, in a way that would increase clarity much faster than if I didn’t use it. Maximizing clarity fast would get me results fast. Getting results fast would result in increased life quality for Doggie in the years to come – so my pragmatic math was simple: of course I was going to use whatever I needed to in order to help Doggie archieve the life quality and freedom I wanted him to have.

I taught all parts of our shared language over the course of 3 sessions in the absence of distractions with the help of a suitcase: the suitcase served to explain the basic concept that changes in surface height – such as steps and sidewalks or, in this case, suitcases! – can be meaningful.

Here’s our very first suitcase session. I first attempted to shape Doggie, but since he didn’t know how to chase treats, I quickly went to luring instead. I love teaching dogs to shape, but for our particular project, I knew I’d be faster if I just lured my target behavior and then rewarded.

After the session above, I introduced our release cue (¡Libre!), a cue for going on the suitcase (¡Maleta!) and the P- element (the “floor is lava” game, aka an equivalent to the seat belt beep in a car.)

#2 training goal: an alternative way of asking for attention

Doggie had already learned to get attention by biting shoes/feet and jumping on his humans. I was going to offer him an alternative: sit to ask for what you’d like! I marked and reinforced all his sitting with food and attention that first day.

Typically, this is all I’d do. I’d redirect to a chewable item and withdraw attention for biting and jumping until it just stopped happening. However, since we were on a time crunch – a week, and I wanted to see no more shoe biting at all! – I added …

  • another part to our shared language:
    • A punishment marker (¡Alto!)

Not only did jumping and biting my shoes no longer work to get attention – it now produced undesirable consequences. Not results Doggie hated (there’s no need for that); just something he was not looking for under these circumstances, similar to Sarah Stremming’s “milk, not water” analogy. This was simply something we worked on throughout the day, all day, starting on our first day together – as soon as we had gotten home from Aragón, where I had learned that picking up wasn’t undesirable enough.

Luckily, Doggie only bites his humans’ shoes, but not the shoes of strangers – that would have made things a lot harder!

By means of the undesired consequence followed by helping him into a sit if he fell back into his old habits, he started offering his first sits for attention that very evening. I was proud of my smart little snuggler! Apart from biting shoes and feet, he is actually a very snuggly puppy – as long as the attention he needs is provided!

Sound sensitivity?

We had a loud thunderstorm that first evening, and Doggie couldn’t have cared less. I’m SO glad that so far, as far as I know, none of the puppies show noise sensitivities. (Again, I know this for sure about two of them, but haven’t had a chance to ask about the remaining 3.)

That said, Game only became noise sensitive after having moved to Guatemala – so if she’s passed on some of those genes and my early noise-desensitization did not do the trick, it may still develop for the rebeldes later in life. So far so good though!

The first night

… was difficult night for Mr. Doggie. I wondered whether he had separation issues in general (his humans hadn’t mentioned it) or whether being back with me in a place he wasn’t familiar with (this isn’t the apartment or house he grew up in) was just too difficult to sleep through the night. He had a hard time not sharing the bedroom and woke me up a few times.

Game is currently the only dog with bed privileges, and she likes her peace at night. Chai voluntarily puts herself to bed in an open crate in a different room when she’s ready to sleep. I had Doggie sleep in Chai’s room, but he found it difficult to settle there. I was pretty sure Doggie would sleep peacefully in my bed, but just to be safe, I’d want Game elsewhere if he was there. That didn’t seem fair to her. I decided to give Doggie sleeping in Chai’s space another try our second night rather than giving in to his snuggle wishes just yet.

Update: I asked, and was told Doggie didn’t have separation issues at home. That’s great to know! I’m glad he doesn’t. This greatly increased the probability that he’d settle more and more peacefully in Chai’s room in the nights to come!