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!