Next stop: the roof of our apartment building! We’re off to a strong start with the empty plate. (The reason no one here is running full speed is the fact that it is HOT!)
Upwards and onwards: intermediate distraction on the roof – the paper bag!
This went so well – after a break, we head back for our third and most difficult challenge in the intermediate environment: kibble!
At first sight, the video above looks great: Chai recalled, didn’t she? Well – yes and no. Watch again! At 00:11, she does a double take. I should not count this as a win, but repeat the session. I saw the double take in real time and again when reviewing the video. And then I said to myself: you know what, she is doing SO well – nevermind that little hesitation. Oh, past C, my friend! Future C smiles at you and shakes his head. You lowered your guard! You don’t know it yet, past C – but nothing escapes the twentythird sense of The Border Collie. She won’t let that one slide …
Urban art clue #4: it IS in one of the neighborhoods that have more than one part (when I say parts, I mean the equivalent of Upper, Lower and Midtown Manhattan.)
Before it got too, too hot, I experimented with Shade’s ideas of using either two targets or no target to encourage Chai to come back to me when tugging. The link above shows our two attempts. We’re not there yet and may have to keep experimenting – but we are having fun! What better morning exercise than a good game of tug?
Solo adventure
Friday is indoors mall adventure day! For the time being, every Friday, Chai and I walk there and then adventure our way through the mall.
Magic hands and R-
On the way there, we came across a scary construction site. Magic hands and negative reinforcement (distance) for the win!
Next stop: the elevator!
Chai did so well on the elevator today! A little bit insecure (maybe because we went on it soon after the construction corridor which had already used up some of her bravery – but once again, she entered voluntarily and stayed quiet throughout the ride (there are some signs of nervousness in her body language, but nothing big). If things are no harder than this, I will just go with repetition: once a week, we’ll ride this elevator until it’s a total walk in the park for Chai!
I also carried Chai up and down an escalator – her very first escalator experience!
On the way home, she waited patiently as I ordered and waited for tortas to go and then again outside a corner convenience store.
Left: waiting at an electronics store; right: foot-on-leash down cue as I’m ordering tortas.
On the way to the mall, I used the magic hands trick twice: once to walk across a manhole cover with holes in it and through a construction site, and once to walk past a trash can full of dog poop bags that were flapping in the wind a little. On the way back, she walked past the poop bags can without issues. The construction site had changed – there was no heavy machinery going – so we looped around it on the other side of the street. It was getting WAY too hot (over 30°C) to keep training.
I thought I’d use the heat to my advantage and work on the manners context in a new street, but Chai’s brain was as heat fried as my own and we went back to sleddog context after a futile attempt.
Tip: if something doesn’t work – don’t force it. Take a break and come back to it another time. (Especially if your city/country is experiencing a heat wave.)
Chai thinks Zane’s empty Corona can makes an excellent toy: yumm, metal!
June 17, 2023: Chapultepec fun and some hands-near-toy practice!
Alan, his girlfriend Vane and I took Kiba and Chai to Chapultepec today. They had a blast (and so did we, the humans!) Here’s a video, set to a song that is sad, but REALLY good – and it happened to be just the right length!
Left: spikey plants! Right: Alan is carrying a tired Kiba! I’m still working on this trick (Chai allowing me to pick her up this way). Thanks for the idea, Alan!
Chai at the busy swimming spot.May and June are the warmest – and June is really kicking our asses this year! Needless to say, the dog swimming spot is busy on the weekends!
Our beautiful girls: left – looking regal, right – being themselves!
We also took a two-ball video for Shade!
And here is Chai … trying to swim-fetch in the cutest way imaginable!
Because we are overachievers these days, we also played another round of the hands-near-toy game with a new element: let go of the toy upon food marker. (I already knew Chai could do that part, but I believe it was in Shade’s lectures.) Mostly, we went back to hands-near-toys.
June 18, 2023: be careful what you optimize for and a second bout of adolescence!
I’ve already told you that the other day, Chai started paying more attention to her environment – such as the goings-on outside the window. I’ve interrupted window-looking with scatters so far. However, I accidentally taught my dog to race to the window to look out in order to get more scatters (of course!) She’d keep putting her paws up on the window and then looking at me: “Treat me already!” Not the behavior chain I was going for!
So as of today, I’m implementing a more nuanced training plan.
Background details that will help you understand why I am choosing this particular plan for this particular dog:
+ I don’t mind window shopping. Unless a dog is clearly hyper-stressed by it (most dogs are not), that is the one advantage an apartment life has over a yard life: you get to see things going on outside anytime you get bored. The reason I’m adding this is that some trainers do not want their dogs to look out windows at all, assuming that window shopping by itself necessarily triggers stress.
However, I do not want to teach Chai to bark at everything she sees – quite the opposite. That’s again because I live in an apartment and I don’t want my neighbors to be disturbed by my barking dog.
The plan: + Randomize praise (and the occasional scatter) throughout the day when I’m home and Chai is NOT looking out the window but doing anything else I like – for example chill on the couch. + If I spot precursor behaviors to barking (e.g. lips or ears tensing up while looking out the window or staring at the door) – cue a scatter to prevent barking. + If I miss precursor behaviors and Chai barks, pick her up and give her a 2-minute time-out in her luxury kennel aka the bathroom.
I didn’t get to video any instances of barking, but in the first video below, you’ll see how fast window-lookingturned into a strong behavior because I had reinforced it with scatters. To soften the blow of extinction, I’ll still praise/pet/engage when she comes over after looking out the window – I just don’t treat. (Yes, Chai likes praise and attention – but I highly doubt that they are strong enough to maintain the looking-out-of-windows behavior).
What I accidentally optimized for was more looking-out-the-window rather than less barking. That’s the tricky part about gamifying or training anything: you don’t necessarily get exactly what you want by pushing a certain lever!
Stop on a regular basis, take a step back, look at the changes you’ve seen and ask yourself: if I was an observer and didn’t know the goal behavior – what would I believe was being optimized here? Sometimes, you’ll find that what you are optimizing for is exactly what you planned. Other times – not so much! That’s okay as long as you keep an eye on it. It doesn’t mean your training plan was “bad” if the results are unexpected: dogs are individuals, and sometimes, what we want to happen … doesn’t! Even if it might have worked with a different dog!
In the video below, you see the result of my original strategy (pre-emptive scatters during nightly window-shopping incidents): I have created a window-shopping addict who will look out the window and then ask to be paid all day long! This is in the morning. Chai went from only-at-night to all-the-time in 2 days. In the video, I talk to her now and then, but don’t give her more attention than that. If she came over, I’d pet her. No treats since in this video, Chai is not concerned about the environment – she simply wants scatters!
The video below shows when I DO feed: this is a compilation of moments I recognized precursor behaviors or precursor stimuli to barking. (Yes, I agree – Game looks extremely annoyed at the state of the world in this video! She can’t even be bothered to get up and collect her part of the scatters.)
… and our goal, of course: rest and relaxation inside while I work; occasionally wandering around or looking out the window without feeling barky or otherwise overly aroused!
Home alone practice: don’t let it slide!
Chai stayed home all by herself while Zane, Game and I all went out to Mexico City’s bike Sunday.
Hello again, adolescence!
I took Chai to Casa Bruna with me for some do-nothing practice. She was able to chill out beautifully for 45 minutes, but then a Border Collie she knows (tricolor puppy Juana) showed up at the next table over, and that was too much: Chai wanted to greet and started barking when I didn’t let her.
We are definitely having another bout of adolescence! Hanging out at Fresa Parque after Casa Bruna, Chai finally got to play with Juanita and an adolescent ACD. She was having a harder time responding to her informal pup-pup-pup recalls today than usual – another sign that both calm days and listening skills overall are getting more difficult in our second wave of adolescence!
Chai had a Big Day and so did I: we had a lot of adventures today!
We started out on a brief morning walk around the block together with Game. For the first time, I let Chai partially off leash on the sidewalk during the daytime!
Next, we got back home and had a brief tug session on the roof of our building.
Loose leash walking – manners mode
Having gotten our morning crazies out that way, we went to practice loose leash walking in the manners context: when the leash is attached to Chai’s collar, I want her to walk next to me, staying behind the imaginary line1 at the tip of my toes. We worked up to 9 steps between treats:
We are now walking in the “real world” – the space we have available to us – a comparatively quiet street with a nice, wide side walk. If I had an even quieter street, that’s where I’d go – but I don’t, so I use the environment I do have. To help set Chai up for success, I walk the street on a harness before switching to manners mode in the same street. This way, Chai gets to get most of her sniffing and pulling needs out of the way before we start working on the more difficult behavior (staying behind the invisible line). Walking on a harness is our way of acclimating.
My goals in this session:
Cue “With me!” before clipping the leash from harness to collar. I want this to eventually become an informal heeling cue that also works off leash. I make sure Chai is already behind me when I use the cue.
Count up to 9 steps, then click with both hands on the leash (my defined home position), blink once with both hands on my leash (my transition behavior), then reach for the treat bag. It is behind my back to help Chai gravitate back rather than forwards.
If Chai oversteps the imaginary line running parallel to my toes, I cue “Touch!” – ideally (I don’t always succeed with this mechanics-wise) with both hands still on the leash, blink, and offer my hand. In this video, you’ll see that I’m sometimes too fast and take my right hand off the leash when saying the “touch” cue.
I turn sideways and lead Chai to my hand stretched back in the direction we just came from.
I feed slightly behind heel position with my hand targeting my side (again, something I manage to do MOST of the time, but sometimes … I get distracted and feed without my hand touching my side). My treat placement brings Chai back into the position I want her to be in for our informal heeling adventure.
End of video: when I want to go back to the harness, I cue “All done!” and clip the leash back to the harness. Where the leash is attached would in and of itself function as enough of a contextual cue for the two modes of leash walking to be distinguished by a dog. However, since I am planning on transferring the cue to off-leash informal heeling, I need that end cue just like the “With me!” cue in the beginning.
Stay-home-without-humans-and-relax practice while C goes off on a human solo adventure!
Chai then stayed home alone with Game while I went to climb The Wall – a 30 meters climbing wall on the outside of a building that’s just around the corner from my place. I had set myself the goal of climbing it at least once and enjoying the view from above. Today was the day! And I did it – I climbed all the way up to the top of the yellow wall in the left picture below. Unfortunately, cellphones are not allowed on the wall, so the only pictures are from below.
Chai then got to practice staying home by herself again during Game’s noon walk.
Parque México
Next, we drove to Parque México to get Chai a fancy adult dog collar, walk around a little and then headed to a meeting. Here’s Parque México – as busy as it gets on Saturdays – with recalls, check-ins and dog encounters off leash, followed by walking in a harness on the median of calle Ámsterdam.
This is Robert Sapolsky’s “dopamine jackpot” theory I reference in the video above:
Chilling with folks at a restaurant
At the table and under the table: the art of doing nothing.
We left when Chai became active and started throwing her rawhide bone all over the place – good conversations caused me to overstay her ability to settle until she let me know by throwing bones!
Heading back to the car, we practiced harness walking for a few blocks. When Chai is on a harness, I will …
Super easy environment: simply circle when Chai reaches the end of the leash. No food.
Slightly more difficult: in addition to circling when Chai pulls, click and treat every 4th check-in (offered eye contact). If she checks in twice and then pulls, I will circle and reset my count, starting to count eye contact over with 1 again.
If the environment is too hard for Chai to succeed on a predominantly loose leash with circle resets, I will keep the same rate of reinforcement but do won’t reset when she pulls: for example, she may check in twice on a loose leash and then pull (this triggers a circle), then check in again. In this case, the check in after pulling (and circling) would count as 3 rather than start over with 1.
If this is still too hard, I will up the rate of reinforcement to every 3rd, 2nd or even every single check-in.
If we need to pass something moderately difficult (think dogs barking somewhere up on a balcony on the other side of the street), we will pass and then scatter away from the difficult stimulus.
If we pass something very difficult (think dogs barking behind a fence right next to us), I will use my “floor” protocol and feed almost non-stop. I will explain that protocol in a different post.
In harness mode, I don’t mind if Chai is on my left or right side and I’ don’t care about a precise spot of food delivery’m less precise in my food delivery: harness mode is meant to be easy for me, the handler, just like it is meant to be easy for the dog.
Walking through Condesa and Roma, some food is required! I’m going with tier #2 described above: click and treat every 4th check-in and reset after circles.
The reason that my go-to is feeding every 4th time is that I want to hit the sweet spot of the dopamine jackpot: supposedly, intermittent reinforcement is most powerful if it happens either 25% or 75% of the time a behavior is being displayed (see video above).
Here’s a clip from walking either from Parque México to the restaurant where I met friends or back to the car after hanging out there for about 2 hours (I don’t remember which direction this was). Apart from our leash walking strategy (feeding every fourth check-in and resetting when Chai pulls), you will also see her disengage voluntarily from an unfamiliar dog, do a successful “leave it” for a tossed piece of kibble and work on her “warten” (wait) cue at a curb.
More leash walking (harness context)
It started getting dark by the time we made it back to the car, and we stopped for vanilla ice cream dinner before heading home!
Waiting at the rubber-duck themed ice cream store.
Chai and I are sure to sleep well tonight – hopefully, so will everyone else!
(1) Here comes my usual spiel: for more leash walking context, check out the leash walking lectures from Out and About in your FDSA library or look here for my December class and a micro e-book on LLW. If I don’t find a few more hours in my days soon, said December 2023 class may even focus entirely on LLW … stay tuned or send some extra time my way!
+ We worked up to 3 steps between treats behind the invisible line (loose leash walking, LLW)1 #in the corridor of our apartment building. Go Chai!
+ We met our new friends Alan and his Border Collie Kiba, who is just a month older than Chai, at the park and the dogs played beautifully.
+ After having played for a bit, Chai was ready for another round of invisible-line loose leash walking outside! (Because my inside space is limited, it is easier for Chai and me to work on loose leash walking right outside in calm parts of “the real world” – especially since I have chosen not to stop while feeding.) If I worked inside or on the roof, there would be a lot of turns in addition to an increasing number of steps – and for Chai, that’s harder than beginning with a straight line. The park allows for straight lines with a single turn. What’s more, Chai was able to “Ilo it”2 and go right from 5 steps inside to 6 steps between treats outside! If your own dog needs you to back up a little and, say, start over with 3 steps when you change locations, that is perfectly fine as well.
Sidenote for professional dog trainers: the training approach funnel
This brings me to an important point for anyone who works with dogs and their humans professionally. There really is no one-size-fits-all solution. Tailer your approach to the human and the dog in front of you: where and how do they live? What training spaces are available to them? Who is their dog, who is the person and what are their temporal and financial resources? What is their best hope (thank you for teaching me about this concept and phrase, Chris!) for loose leash walking? What kind of training approaches do they feel most comfortable with? It may be one you actively teach or one you may want to refer to a colleague for. Vary your approach depending on all these factors! Some LLW approaches require more time than others. Some require a highly food motivated dog. Some require a patient owner, others are faster and no less valid. Some humans want to work on LLW in a specific way because of their own ethics. Others want to learn about a new LLW method or in order to become better trainers. Others yet may need the behavior for safety reasons: a tiny person who doesn’t feel like they are stable on their feet (maybe they are elderly, maybe they use crutches …) with a large, strong dog with the propensity to lunge and pull into traffic may need a fast solution! All of the above are perfectly fine.
Factors that go into your decision funnel as you pick an approach for the human and dog in front of you and the order I personally consider them in:
(Funnel image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images on Pixabay – thank you!)
… but back to Chai’s park adventures!
+ After the second LLW session, I tethered Chai to a park bench to help her relax while park-officing some more.
Home alone
Both dogs stayed home alone for 3 hours while Zane and I unsuccessfully tried to get haircuts and successfully ate at one of my favorite little places in Narvarte and then walked all the way back home.
Off-leash night walk
Both Chai and Game went on a brief off-leash walk around 2 am. The streets are almost empty at this time, which makes it perfect for introducing off-leash street freedom to Chai. (Only once I have worked through my recall protocol will I also let her off during the day.) She did great at night, and it doesn’t feel unsafe because there is hardly any traffic during the week after midnight.
June 9, 2023:
3 Solo adventures
Running errands
In the morning, Chai and I walked errands and Chai waited all by herself out of sight outside 3 different places. Go puppy!
Waiting outside a store (and blocking half the entrance – oops!)
The mall
In the afternoon, we walked to the dog friendly mall. Chai was perfectly confident walking among a crowd of people and dogs:
My subtitles in the video above mention that I don’t reinforce auto check-ins because I want Chai to “take in the environment.” What I mean by this is that (1) I don’t want her to focus on me nonstop, and (2) I don’t want food to mask her true feelings about the mall. Here’s why:
1. Insecure dogs who trust their handler may focus on them in order to not have to deal with the environment. If your dog’s eyes are glued to you, they do not learn to feel comfortable in the environment you’re exposing them to because they may be tuning it out. An analogy: think of a toddler who turns their head away from a stranger. They may feel safer because it is as if the stranger – or the toddler themselves – were not there at all.
2. Food-driven dogs will eat and may even look happy (due to the food) in environments that, without the food overriding the fear, might feel overwhelming. Just like some dogs focus on you, others focus on their treats. You may be able to walk a dog like this through a big environment like the mall above and not notice that they are actually afraid: eating and thinking about how to earn the next treat can cause them not to sense the environment. (Imagine you are on your smart phone and walk right into a lamp post: the post was there all along, but you simply didn’t see it because you were distracted.)
The glass elevator
Chai was slightly insecure and very brave, riding the glass elevator a few times (it’s more difficult alone than with Game!)
At the mall, Chai also practiced her down and chill on my “foot on the leash” cue while I got money out of an ATM.
She also had another mall-based new experience: we passed a screaming baby up close! I don’t think Chai has heard a baby cry before. She looked slightly bewildered but did perfectly well passing the new stimulus! Go puppy!
Toy play
We tugged on the roof for Shade’s toys class in the morning and a second time in the afternoon (trying to get her to bring the toy back!) In the evening, we gave it yet another try. It’s been challenging to convince Chai to bring me the toy!
Husbandry
+ Announcing “Clippers”: I cut Chai’s back paw fur. + “Brush!”
Home alone
Chai stayed home alone by herself during Game’s noon and afternoon loops around the block.
Night walks
I went on another another 2am walk with both dogs off leash. Chai is doing great – we’ll stick to this new routine for a few weeks!
(1) For more leash walking context, check out the leash walking lectures from Out and About in your FDSA library or look here for my December class and a micro e-book on LLW.
(2) Ilo is an amazing student dog. Her and her human will occasionally be able to simply jump ahead a few steps in a training protocol without skipping a beat! That’s where the phrase “Iloing it” (which all of us should be using all the time) comes from. Shout out to Sylvia and Ilo if you’re reading along!
To go with today’s episode: a video so you can see a messy and comfy dog people studio apartment and meet everyone (except for Game who is in the car crate because we wanted to talk rather than teach her not to eat Norbert) and me because I’m holding the camera – but you can hear me talk a little). And good music because dog play requires good music!
These clips are all from the first day the animals met, not from the day we recorded the podcast. By then, everyone had gotten used to each other and calmed down, and Chai knew how to relax around Norbert and where his personal space bubble started. He set an excellent boundary with her on day #1 (early on in this video!)
When Norbert comes back up from the floor in the middle of the video, you’ll see Niffler do some excellent splitting (he is being a moving fence!) between Chai and Norbert.
Chai’s “I’m not quite sure what to make of you”-pacing resolved itself later that same evening when she drifted off to sleep and Norbert showed more interest in the rain outside the window than in her.
I also felt like the podcast (particularly our accidental conversation about dating and the less accidental part about independence) required some more thought-out thoughts from me. I don’t know who listens to my podcast or reads my blog and ended up writing a whole long personal story about many things I hadn’t said on air.
And then I decided against sharing it. I didn’t get it right, and language (thank you, Saint-Exupéry) is the source of misunderstandings. Just know that there’s a lot of personal stuff I’m not talking about in this episode. That I’ll share with friends like Kayla, but not necessarily on air (not yet anyways). Things that matter to me even if I don’t say them publicly. The podcast is just one of many slices of life.
I’ll leave it at that! And I wish everyone who could possibly read this or listen to my podcast well.
We didn’t go on any adventures or exciting outings today – except for pee breaks, we all stayed in, and it was …
Positions
… time for obediency stuff! We worked on positions in two sessions: one for Chai’s breakfast and the other one for her lunch.
Breakfast session
You’re about to see a 10 minute long uninterrupted positions training session with a 5 months old puppy. Is this what I, C, Professional Dog Trainer, would recommend anyone do with their 5 months old puppy? No. I’d say keep sessions to 2 minutes or, if you have a really avid worker, 3 minutes max at this age to ensure your puppy learns that training is a privilege rather than a chore. So why am I not heeding my own advice? Because I’m me and some days I can’t help it. I am grateful for having dogs who just roll with it! Also note that this is a day where training is pretty much all Chai got to do (except for pee outings which at this point mostly only involve Game peeing).
Session profile:
Cues: sit (sitz), stand (steh) and down (platz) Announcements: All done (I will not work or play with you anymore even if you pester me) Marker cues: tongue click (treat from hand), Good (room service), treats (scatter cue; in the very end of this video) Home position: hands behind my back Transition behavior (what I do between (marker) cues and (treat or lure) hand movement: blink once
Lunch session
Session profile:
Same as above.
Look how far her understanding has come between the two sessions! Go Chai! This is looking fantastic!
In some of the reps, it looks as if Chai was guessing positions. That is entirely possible … and it doesn’t bother me. She can play a guessing game and get reinforced anytime she gets it right. Over time, this leads to learning. Notice that Chai is learning several new things at the same time in this session: the marker cue “Good” (room service) and all three positions. She does not need to understand every single word I say in order for us to have an enriching training conversation. It’s like learning a new language or reading in a foreign language: you don’t need to know every single word or grammar rule in order to follow the plot.
PS: when I say “Yes,” it’s just a commentary on Chai having done well. It is not a marker cue.
PPS: the reason Game is chilling on her mat behind us is that she has excellent mat skills. If there was no mat, she would very much be participating!
Husbandry
+ Chai got the claws on her left and right back paws clipped and did great.
The art of doing nothing
She was able to hang out in her luxury kennel – the bathrooom – with visitors and Game in the main room. Good puppy keeping the FOMO from raising its head! It is just as important to include your puppy in your general activities as it is to occasionally have them NOT participate. Both are important skills for your future life together!
The dog training world is very campy. That’s bullshit, but it is the way it currently looks to me. This image is what I’m picturing when I say “left of center” or “right of center” in the podcast. It also shows you where I’d put myself, training-wise … and who I’d consider “my people”: anyone who’s not a campy extremist, really.
However, in an ideal world, there wouldn’t be a continuum at all. Instead, we’d have a menu of sorts, like a menu at a restaurant. On that menu, you’d find everything from BAT to Nepopo. We’d order the menu alphabetically in order to not play favorites.
Every training technique and system ever invented would be on the menu. And we dog trainers would choose one or two or three of them to study and become experts in by means of learning from the ones who came before us (standing on the shoulders of giants, as we always do).
We’d pick in terms of what we want to learn and teach; in terms of what feels good to US as individuals. Our picking would not be judgmental. It would be like picking the flavors of ice cream to go in your cone – not like picking a political party.
By picking your flavors of ice cream, you are not saying the other flavors are evil – you are just saying, these are my favorite flavors (these are the ones I want to learn more about and become an expert in). You can still be best friends with someone who chooses different flavors of ice cream. You can even talk about ice cream or taste their ice cream out of curiosity, and let them have a taste of yours. It would be encouraged rather than criticized: tasting each other’s ice cream is what friends do, after all.
That’s very different from choosing a political party: if you choose a political party, you are making an idiological (rather than subjective) decision, and you feel strongly about it being the “right” or “better” one – at least that’s how I feel when it comes to politics. I only have voting rights in Austria. Austria is a democracy with a large menu of political options. I oscillate between two of them, and have never voted for any other one: the Green party and the Communist party. I like both of them, and which one I will end up voting for is often a close call, and depends on the issues at hand and how they are handling it. I can’t see myself voting for any of the other parties, and some of the other parties (the ÖVP and the FPÖ, for example), I consider downright harmful to the planet, humanity, society and community.
In an ideal world, dog training would be like eating ice cream, not like voting. Thank you for coming to my TED talk!
Here’s a link to the podcast episode this post is riffing off of:
I just got to have Marc Bekoff on my podcast! We talked about Jessica Pierce’s and Marc’s latest book: A Dog’s World – Imagining the Lives of Dogs in a World Without Humans.
I translated this book to German, and it recently got released by Kynos Publishing. Since I usually stay in touch with “my” authors in the translation process, I grabbed the opportunity to invite Marc on a Zoom chat.
In this episode, I acknowledge the relevance of A Dog’s World to pet dog owners today, and I challenge Marc on the conclusion drawn in the book: that the species dog would survive (or turn into a new species) if all humans disappeared. It’s the latter part that I want to talk about some more after further thinking about the book and our conversation.
Survival in a posthuman world
What I’m still grappling with is the idea that dogs would survive without us. My openion (and yes, this is VERY MUCH an opinion because we can’t test this scenario in a meaningful way) is that dogs would go extinct in a world without humans.
Jessica and Marc believe that many dogs would not only survive, but thrive in a world without us.
Suspension bridge on a trail in Amatlán de Quetzalcóatl, Morelos
Where we come from
Only in the course of this conversation did I realize how different the points of origin of our respective arguments are, and how our respective conclusions followed, perhaps quite naturally, from exactly these anchor points we already had long before this conversation.
Marc’s longest field research project, I believe, was on the lives and behavior of coyotes in Yellowstone National Park. As an ethologist, Marc observes behavior and writes ethograms (a list of observable behaviors and their contexts) about different species in their natural environment. In Marc’s case, these species were primarily wild canids.
Marc is a dog lover who has also spent many days at dog parks, observing the interactions of Boulder’s dog park dogs through an ethological lens. Marc has researched, by reading everything that is available in terms of observational studies, the lives of free-roaming domestic dogs around the world, and observed feral dogs arund Boulder. On the podcast, Marc points out that the ethograms of domestic dogs and wild canids is nearly indistinguishable.
Marc has also lived with dogs: companion dogs who were off leash when Marc was out with them around Boulder, CO. Marc observed the behaviors these dogs would engage in in their off-leash lives. (They were only out and about off leash when Marc was with them – so probably living degrees of freedom similar to my own dog, who is not a free-roamer.)
Taking the similarity of the ethograms, the independence of Marc’s own dogs and a group of feral dogs who would make occasional trips to the dumpster but also hunt outside of Boulder, Marc and Jessica Pierce conclude that there would absolutely be individual dogs – enough to form new wild populations – surviving the demise of the human species.
Suspension bridge on a trail in Amatlán de Quetzalcóatl, Morelos
The anchor point of myship train of thought is different. I am a dog trainer. The dogs in my life are usually sports or working dogs, or very active companion dogs of high-maintenance breeds, or not so active dogs living with highly sophisticated dog folks who are most definitely not average pet dog homes. I have never had a pure pet dog myself, and neither do most of the folks I work and interact with today. My personal interest and the areas into which I am trying to stretch are behavior analysis, psychology, neurology, and behavioral medicine. I have no degree in any of these fields, but I try and learn as much as I can about them. I also live in a part of the world where many (most?) dogs are homed free-roamers. I love observing them; I consider their life quality high, and I have dedicated a Youtube Channel to them.
When I think “domestic dog,” what comes to mind is not the general pet dog population: I think of dogs who live with geeky trainers on the one hand, and free-ranging dogs on the other hand. I sometimes forget that there are also pet dogs.
When Jessica and Marc think “of “domestic dogs,” I suspect they think of pet dogs on leashes and in dog parks on the one hand and wild canids on the other hand.
What I agree on with Jessica and Marc
I fully agree with Jessica’s and Marc’s conclusions about how the lives of pet and companion dogs could be improved, and how we can draw these conclusions by looking at the behavior of free-ranging dogs today.
The sociability and ability to form groups and packs is something I see a lot in free-roamers, so we’re on the same page there as well. I don’t doubt that dogs will be (variable degrees of) sociable and able to form packs. Free-roaming dogs already do.
Alloparenting also occurs in domestic dogs that are kept in groups when breeding as well as in free-roaming dogs. Again – I have no doubt posthuman dogs could alloparent (and some would do so if they survived).
I don’t doubt that they will hunt solitarily either – I know plenty of dogs who will do so when given the opportunity (these are not free-roamers, but sports and working dogs). What I wanted to be convinced of, however, was the cooperative hunting part – something I’ve never seen and find hard to imagine.
The food resource thing …
I have never – NEVER – seen free-roaming dogs who did not depend on anthropogenic food resources. Even the feral dogs around Boulder that Marc mentions visit the dumpster. That makes me suspicious of whether they could survive if they had to rely on hunting. When Marc’s student saw them hunt cooperatively – did these dogs actually take down prey, or were they just chasing, like many dogs would, without actually killing/consuming? I am not clear about this. Even if they killed, but did not consume – I don’t think we could call that cooperative hunting. For hunting to be hunting, doesn’t it need to end in eating the prey? (I don’t know; I’m sure there is a definition though.)
What even is a feral dog?
A feral dog is a domestic dog who isn’t tame. A dog like this will have a bigger flight distance than other free-roamers. I have seen very few feral dogs in my life, and they usually look as if they were starving because they are too scared to visit the dumpster on a regular basis.
How do feral dogs happen? I suspect a truly feral dog has missed out on any and all human contact during the sensitive socialization period, as a very young puppy. This can happen if a free-roaming dog has puppies away from their home – say in a forest where humans rarely go -, and the dog’s humans don’t look for or don’t find the puppies.
Why are there so few of them? Because most of them will die! Your chances of survival are much higher if you are not feral and can access human handouts and the waste we generate.
Wouldn’t there already be feral dogs everywhere today if it was easy to be one?
I also suspect that if dogs without humans were a realistical scenario, we’d already see successful secondarily wild dogs who have no contact with humans whatsoever, and who hunt cooperatively. As far as I know (and I may be totally wrong – please comment with resources if I am!) these dogs do not exist today. (It has been argued that Dingoes are not feral dogs, but true wild canids. That said, I have read that there are secondarily wild dogs on the Galapagos Islands. I haven’t had time to look into them yet. If these dogs were truly feral and descended from the domestic dog, and were not dependent on any anthropogenic food resources – this would be a convincing argument for me that under specific and rarely occurring circumstances, the species dog might be able to survive in certain locations in a post-human world.)
The posthuman dog future I imagine, based on my anchor point
From my current point of view, given the dogs I see, I think most pet dogs, if left loose in a world WITH humans, would make decent free-roamers and enjoy the trash we leave behind as well as our handouts. They’d have social relationships etc. Working dogs like mine would also enjoy killing all the livestock around town (which would result in them getting poisoned or shot).
If I imagine the fate of dogs in a world without humans, these same dogs would eat all the trash we left behind, and then feast on the livestock (easy prey) as well as urban rats and pigeons (also easy prey). And then, they’d die, mostly in the transition dog generation (the generation of dogs who still had human contact).
I have a hard time imagining dogs learning to hunt cooperatively in the little time they have after all the livestock and trash are gone. Most of them will die, and the few that survive … Will they be neutered? In that case, they’re in a genetic dead-end street. Will enough of them be both intact and able to hunt cooperatively? I really doubt it because the free-roaming dogs today – remember that’s about 80% of the world’s dog population! – have been selected (naturally, if you will, by humans killing dogs who kill livestock) to NOT hunt. I’m not sure if “average pet dogs” will be able to hunt. Working dogs certainly would (solitarily at least), but there are so few, and they are so far apart, that they may never meet each other. And if you’re a working dog (other than a terrier), you may be too big to sustain yourself on the kind of prey you may be able to catch by yourself once the livestock is gone. And the livestock will be gone because it will either die without us or be killed by transition dogs.
A thought experiment
I just googled, and according to a dubious source (but that’ll do for my thought experiment), a 100g jack rabbit contains 173 calories. Now let’s see how many calories an adult dog needs. Say Game’s RER is 650, and if she had to stustain herself by means of hunting, her caloric needs would be 650 x 2-5, which, if I’m calculating this correctly (and I may not), makes 1295 caloiries. That’s a lot more than a single rabbit. If Game had to sustain herself on jack rabbits she’d have to catch 1295 divided by 173 makes 7.5 jackrabbits every day. That is A LOT of rabbits. I cannot imagine a world in which my dog would successfully catch this many rabbits on a daily basis.
We’d also have to look at the energy spent on hunting a rabbit. Since this calculation is based on the caloric needs of an active working dog, let’s say if all of Game’s hunts were successful, she would meet her caloric needs every day with 7.5 rabbits. But she is unlikely to succeed every time. So how many calories would she loose with each rabbit that got away? How many calories does it cost to hunt one rabbit? (I do not know.)
In any case, if two rabbits, after a high-energy chase, got to safety, Game would be losing rather than gaining calories. Consequently, that very same day, 7.5 jack rabbits would not be enough anymore – she’d have to successfully hunt, kill and consume, say, 9 to make up for the energy spent on the ones who got away. This is even less likely because every hunt is tiring, and hunts #8 and #9 have a smaller chance of success because of it.
Dogs don’t need to eat every day. So Game could go a while without eating 7.5 rabbits a day and still do okay. She’d gain experience hunting with every attempt – but she’d also spend energy on every attempt, successful and unsuccessful. After several days of not eating, there may be peak performance due to peak motivation, but then that performance will go down unless Game was highly successful at peak motivation. So by the sheer amount of rabbit hunting required, I don’t think it is realistic for a dog of Game’s size to survive as a solitary hunter. Most solitary hunting canids are smaller than she is. (There are solitary coyotes or foxes, for example, and they get by hunting bunnies and rodents (and, given the contents of the scat I’ve seen around Guanajuato, lots of cactus fruit). Game is heavier than they are.)
So Game would likely have to go after larger prey, and large prey can often only be overwhelmed by means of cooperative hunting. Will dogs really figure that out in time? I have my doubts. The largest prey animal I know fairly well are (Austrian) deer, and they are fast and flighty. It’s certainly possible to hunt them cooperatively, but I imagine it would require a lot of practice. And transition dogs may not have that time. Especially because, being dogs, they would not gather to brainstorm for a future of hunting while there still were anthropogenic food resources. Instead, they would – evolutionarily myopically, if you will – focus only on these easily accessible resources until they ran out of them. (Just like we humans and our fossil fuels, really. We’ll only implement meaningful changes once we’re past that climate change tipping point, and at that point, our changes will make little or no difference for many folks around the world, because the places they live today will have become uninhabitable for our species. This is an opinion, not a fact, and I would love for it to be wrong.)
Suspension bridge on a trail in Amatlán de Quetzalcóatl, Morelos
There may be dogs (smaller than Game) who can sustain themselves on bunnies and the like. But will they happen to be close enough to another transition dog to breed? Maybe in rare cases. Will their puppies survive? Few will, I assume, because the survival rate of wild canids and free-ranging dogs is very low.
The anthropogenic world as the dog’s niche
After thinking about all of this some more, my opinion still is that dogs won’t survive without us – even though during the conversation itself, I was trying to be open to the possibility that they would.
I would not say that the ecological niche of the domestic dog is the human household (80% of the world’s dog population is free-roaming), but I would say that their niche is the anthropogenic world. And this niche will disappear with us. I’m not optimistic they’d adapt to a new niche fast enough … even if they all happened to be free and outdoors when we humans disappeared from the planet. I think of their niche as the anthropogenic world in the same sense I think of this being the niche of urban rats and pidgeons. In my opinion, all three of the above would die after eating all the resources we left behind when disappearing. I suspect this will be the fate of everyone who is considered a Kulturfolger animal in German.
I also realize that this very much is an opinion based on my background, my work and my interests. I can absolutely see how a different background, like Marc and Jessica have it, will lead to completely different conclusions!
Why does everything have to be so annoyingly relative?
Coming at a topic from different angles can lead to misunderstandings or talking past each other – I think this, too, happened to us. And it just goes to show how difficult it is for folks from different fields, who have different jargons they take for granted, to understand each other! For example in my conversation with Marc, this happened when Marc used the word “engram.” This term also appears in A Dog’s World (once). I had never come across it before, and researched a little when translating the book. Conveniently, the German equivalent is “Engramm.” It’s basically the same word with the same Greek root. In the book, Marc writes:
“We’ve provided a range of ideas about what the evolutionary trajectories of posthuman dogs might look like. A recurring theme has been trying to understand and appreciate the ancient impulses and memory traces that still lurk in dogs’ brains—the indelible engrams that still influence what they do and how they feel and which will shape how they do without us.”
(Page 157 in my copy of the publisher’s PDF)
I looked up the meaning of the term when I was translating, but I can’t say I feel like I understood it. The way Marc uses the term, it seems to refer to a kind of collective memory of generations long past. Something that isn’t “active” – basically something that isn’t “online,” but could theoretically be brought online again by life circumstances. From digging into the topic a bit, it seems to still be controversal whether engrams actually exist.
On the podcast, Marc used the term engram again, and I asked whether this would work like a modal action pattern. (“Model action pattern” is in my active vocabulary; I know its definition: it is a behavior chain that is released by a certain stimulus and usually displayed through to the end (it is difficult to interrupt). It hardly varies from one occasion to the next or between individuals. Modal action patterns are more like a highly complex reflex you don’t consciously control than advanced and varied social communication. Modal action patterns are NOT offline, but very much online, and they are innate. An example is the hunting sequence of the wolf: search – eye-stalk – chase – grab-bite – kill-bite – consume. Another example is the herding behavior of the Border Collie, which is a modified hunting sequence: it goes from search to eye-stalk to chase, and ends there.
Anyways, so I asked Marc whether an engram was like a modal action pattern, only that it would be brought online by necessity rather than already being online and simply being displayed when a certain stimulus was present.
Marc ended up basically giving me the definition of a modal action pattern. But whatever an engram is, it can’t really be a modal action pattern – unless there is a field (psychology? ethology?) that uses “engram” in the way behavior analysts use “model action pattern,” and the terms actually mean the same.
But cooperative hunting – not hunting, but the cooperative part – can, by its very nature, not be a modal action pattern. Modal action patterns are rigid and hard to change, and cooperation is flexible and adaptive. So Marc didn’t answer my question, and I don’t think that was on purpose, but either because Marc isn’t familiar with the way “modal action pattern” is used by dog trainers or because I didn’t manage to formulate my question clearly! Argh! Or maybe I’m using an outdated definition of modal action pattern!
Cooperative hunting is by its very nature varied because different individuals have different roles. In a word: I still don’t understand what exactly an engram is. In both a German article and the English Wikipedia article, it seems to be about memories of something that happens in your lifetime, and (maybe) the physical location where these memories are stored in the brain. But this is not the way Marc uses the term, as far as I can tell: cooperative hunting can’t be an experience being remembered by an individual dog who has never had the experience of hunting cooperatively.
I don’t think it has been shown that it is possible to “remember” the social behavior of our very distant ancestors. Sure, we are influenced – both through social learning and genetics and in-utero/in-petri-dish experiences by biological relatives and the folks around us. But these are not distant ancestors! So I am still confused about the engram explanation of cooperative hunting, and this is frustrating to me. We were discussing a topic we were both passionate about (dogs), and we didn’t speak the same jargon. I’m used to talking to behavior folks and dog trainers, and we have a shared vocabulary! Marc is probably used to talking to ethologists or pet folks. With the former, there is a shared jargon (which I do not speak), and the latter probably don’t ask the kinds of questions I ask. Anyways, if someone reading this can explain the meaning of “engram” to me, please leave me a comment!
Communication is fucking hard!
In the end, this is probaly the take-away from the conversation I find most fascinating: it is difficult to understand each other if you don’t have a shared vocabulary! And it is really the anchor point of our experience our our field that informs our opinion! When you start with wild canids and compare their ethograms with domestic dogs, you’ll conclude that because they are very similar, they will also be able to hunt cooperatively. (At least if you are Jessica Pierce or Marc Bekoff.)
When you start with working dogs (and know little about wild canids) and observe free-roaming dogs who depend on anthropogenic food resources, you don’t think they will master cooperative hunting. (At least if you are me.)
Suspension bridge on a trail in Amatlán de Quetzalcóatl – and Game’s tail!
And really, this is a metaphor for so many things in life! Depending on where we’re coming from, we’ll find strong arguments to support our respective opinions. (Yay, confirmation bias! Yay, anchoring effect!) We may be fully convinced of them. And yet: some of them are opinions, not facts. It’s both hard and worth striving for to hold both these truths at the same time: on the one hand, our convictions themselves on the basis of which we are who we are in this world. And on the other hand, the fact that some of these convictions will always be opinions we can’t currently fact-check. And that’s fine. Complicated – but fine. Doesn’t make them less valid. But sure makes everything a whole lot more complex.
There are facts, of course. I am not a relativist. I see facts, and will fight for them, especially if they are facts I care about on a deep and personal level. But whether or not dogs would survive in a world without us? That’s not something we will ever be able to know.
This is episode 6 of our podcast, Our One Wild and Precious Lives (and Our Dogs). I’m really proud of this one – it turned out really well, if I may say so myself! Thank you, Peter and Val, for being vulnerable and brave and brilliant with me!
I’ll be adding the link to the episode below so you can all listen – but before I do, I want to ask you all a favor. If you are reading this (potentially because you’re a subscriber to my blog), and if you’ve been enjoying the podcast episodes I’ve put out so far – every second one is dog geeky, and every other one is about living abroad, being brave, vulnerability, mental health, politics, queer lives etc … So if you’ve been enjoying them, please subscribe to the podcast on one of the podcast platforms as well! We’re on all the major platforms. AND please, if you’ve been REALLY enjoying things, leave us a rating on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and a nice review on Apple Podcasts! I’m not making money podcasting; I’m just having a lot of fun doing it – and seeing the listener numbers increase makes my day. Ratings and reviews will give the podcast greater exposure, and that means positive reinforcement – more listeners! – for me. Thank you so much!
I myself am super lazy when it comes to reviewing podcasts. I’ve got SO many favorites I haven’t taken the time to review yet. So I’m setting myself the goal to review one independent podcast I love for every review I get, to pay it forward! Thanks, folks!
Alright – on to this episode I really, really like! I’ll embed a link, and you’ll find the episode description below.
In this episode, Chrissi and Peter talk to Valerie Russell. Originally from the US, she has studied forensics in the UK and worked in law enforcement in the New York metropolitan area for many years. After severe depression and a PTSD diagnosis, Valerie started her life from scratch: she moved to Guatemala and opened Due South Travels, a unique and successful travel business. Val is one of the first people I (Chrissi) met in Guatemala, and I admire her on SO many levels. She is brave, courageous, authentic, and simply good people.
In this episode, we talk about mental health, all the things the animals we share our lives with do for us, the broken system of law enforcement and health care in the US, and smuggling cat nip. We hope you enjoy this conversation as the three of us did!
A friend (who already knows quite a bit!) asked me where to learn more about dog training without spending a truckload of money they don’t have, and I started putting this list together. It’s not complete (there are so many great resources out there!), and the order is semi-alphabetical: I try alphabetizing it, but I occasionally forget what letter comes when. I have not read every single post, listened to every single podcast episode or seen every single video on the Youtube channels below. If a resource is mentioned in this post, it is because it has caught my attention and I have found some of its content thought-provoking. I’m not familiar with every single piece of information the trainers linked to below have put out into the world. Even if I agree with some of their content, I don’t usually agree with all of it because I’m human, and different humans see things differently! There are many resources in this list that include opinions and approaches I disagree with or wouldn’t use myself, but still found useful and informative. This list is not restricted to any particular training philosophy. Go have fun!
If you have your own recommendations for FREE resources, leave them in the comments! I’ll remove advertising and recommendations for paid content. Apart from that—go ahead and share away! Add a link, what type of resource it is, and why you are sharing it!
