If Only Cooper Could Talk

Cooper!

          

Cooper, the three-ish year old Welsh Terrier who visited us for two months this fall, is an opinionated, intense and extremely funny little guy.  He grew up in Guelph, attended puppy classes at Dogs in the Park, moved on to our Levels program and spent a good deal of his time training his person to be the best she could be.  He taught her for instance that Welsh Terriers don’t like cuddling.  They like scheduled, short periods of affection, in private, quietly, at a predictable time.  He taught her that Welsh Terriers DO like hunting and ratting, but that toads taste bad and should not be disturbed.  He also began teaching her about ratio strain, schedules of reinforcement and many of the vagaries of operant conditioning, but then she moved him to the United States and they started on her advanced education.

In the US, Cooper could not find a training school that fully met his needs.  He did find an agility class that was kind of fun, where he taught the instructor that luring is lame and shaping rocks and rolls.  He taught another instructor the value of the one hour sit stare.  That is when the dog doesn’t like what is happening in class and sits.  And stares.  For an hour.  He taught his person the value of a scale of reinforcers and that sometimes you need a variety of reinforcers to keep a Welsh Terrier in the game.  Cooper took great pains to teach his person that the more you spend on Rally-O trial fees the more likely it is that you are going to be embarrassed by your dog.  When I visited, Cooper was so pleased he took a hour out of his precious day to demonstrate to me all the Rally moves he had learned successfully, but since I wasn’t at the trial, he took the opportunity to show his person new ways to do the Halt-Stand-Walk Around that included Halt-Stand-Pee on the Rally Sign while your person is on the wrong side of you.

Cooper teaching dog training

Along the way, Cooper’s person had a very good job and settled into her new life until a calamity occurred, and then Cooper needed temporary accommodation for two months.  Here at our farm, life is quite different than it was at home for Cooper.  Here Cooper lives a very structured life in our kennel with regular house time and training time and long country walks, but that doesn’t include things like “watching your person get ready for work” or “tolerate snoogling on the couch”.  At our house, Cooper spent every night in his crate.  He got yard time several times a day in the company of a very wide variety of dogs-sometimes as many as twenty different dogs in a week.  At least five days a week Cooper got to go to class, and some days he got to do class twice and had some private sessions with a variety of trainers in training.  Cooper was fed twice a day in his bowl at predictable times, with the rule of if you don’t eat, you can have dinner in class for training treats, and if you don’t want dinner as treats, then you probably aren’t terribly hungry (and yes, we kept track of how much the little dude got each day, so that he never actually missed a meal-sometimes he just got more training opportunities).  Cooper taught us the true meaning of a schedule nerd; he loves his schedule!

When his person came to pick Cooper up, he was delighted to see her and showed her a bunch of cool things that he had learned and then asked to go back to the kennel.  Three times that afternoon he came up for short visits and asked to go back to the kennel.  He was happy to see his person, delighted in fact, but he also was very clear that there were aspects of his life here that suited him just fine.  One of those things was a lot more down time than most pets get.  For whatever reason, Cooper likes to spend time in his crate.  By himself.  And he likes to spend time with his dog friends, unencumbered by the responsibility of always training his person.  

On the first evening, his person brought him upstairs to sleep in her room.  After an hour, he asked to go down to the kennel.  First vaguely, by being restless ,and then firmly by sitting and staring at the bedroom door.  We have long known that Cooper is a dog who likes his sleep, and prefers to sleep long and hard each night.  In the morning, Cooper was thrilled to have some training time, some attention and some scritches by his person, but again, he wanted to go back to the kennel.

Cooper’s person has struggled in classes in the states, and not because she doesn’t do her homework or because she has lacked for good coaching.  Part of the problem lies in the philosophy of training that Cooper espouses.  Cooper does not “get” trained.  He participates in it.  Cooper teaches his person as much as his person teaches him.  Cooper will accept nothing short of a 50-50 partnership.  Not only does he want to learn tricks and skills, but he expects his trainer to be actively learning too.  In our classes, with vet students and our staff working with him, with John and me participating in training, Cooper worked willingly for an hour or longer at a time, where at home, he would often quit on his person and give up in disgust after short periods of time.  If the trainer isn’t learning, Cooper isn’t interested in learning either.

I have often thought about what Cooper might say if he could talk.  The first thing that I think Cooper might tell us is that he is an intensely private little guy, and somewhat of an introvert.  Cooper would not tell you about his birthplace or the puppies he met in puppy class, because I think for Cooper, that is private information.  Cooper would also tell us that he likes his sleep.  Lots of it, in private, without disturbances.  On the other hand, Cooper is a responsible little guy, and he will tell you when the new neighbours upstairs get home from work at one in the morning.  Or when the person in the next hotel room gets up and goes down the hall for ice in the middle of the night.  Those are activities Cooper thinks you should know about.

I think Cooper would tell you that if you cannot think up a way to make the game meaningful to both of you, he isn’t interested in playing it.  Cooper is very interested in what makes people tick, and he manages to hit the nail on the head reliably time after time.  Cooper isn’t interested in being pandered to, and if you are not at least equally interested in what he is interested in, then he isn’t interested in playing whatever game you want to play.  

 

When Cooper is working with a vet student who is at Dogs in the Park to learn about training, he decides when they are ready to move to a variable schedule of reinforcement, and stops giving them cued behaviours the first time they ask.  Sound weird?  Yup!  Just when the student begins to grasp a one to one behaviour to reinforcement ratio, Cooper will start embellishing the system, adding bits and pieces, taking bits away and challenging the student to fine tune his or her skills.  He reinforces good timing with desired behaviours, but when the student is sloppy with his timing or cues, Coop throws nonsensical behaviours to make the student back up and start fresh.  He knows exactly when to apply the pressure of a lack of interest and participation to give the student just what is needed in terms of a learning experience.

Cooper has needs...and is most co operative when his needs are met

Cooper would also tell you that a doggy social life is essential to his well being.  Without social time, Cooper is a sad little puppy, and he will impose his view of this matter on you by dragging towards dogs he wants to meet.  Cooper isn’t unreasonable.  He will work off leash, in the presence of food on the floor and other dogs in the room, provided his needs have first been met.  From Cooper’s point of view, fair is fair, and if you aren’t going to be fair in letting him have social time, he will take care of that matter himself.

Cooper is a unique, highly communicative dog.  He is a fascinating fellow and I am fortunate to have worked with him for the past two months.  I think if Cooper could talk, he would have a lot to tell us, but the real lesson to learn from Cooper is that training is a partnership.  When you meet all of your partner’s needs, and you are willing to learn from your partner, you can both achieve great things.  I think Coop can teach us a lot about training not being about skill acquisition, but rather about meaningful activities that you do together, or more simply, about your relationship.  A good relationship is a careful weaving of needs of both parties and boundaries you each need to feel fulfilled.  It is a blend of common goals and activities and give and take on both sides, and Cooper is a dog who is unwilling to accept anything less than his fair share of the relationship.  Cooper is perhaps the best trainer, dog, horse or human, that I have ever met.

Thank you Cooper for an instructive two months.

INTERPRETING THRESHOLDS

NOTE TO MY REGULAR READERS:

Those of you who follow my blogs will have noticed that there has been a long delay since the last blog I posted on March 2nd of this year.  On March 20th, I fell off my horse and sustained a concussion.  One of the things I have not been able to do very well has been to read and write, so I have not been blogging.  Here is my first writing effort since my fall; I hope you enjoy!  I don't promise to be back as often as I have been for a while, but I take it as a good sign that I was able to put this together today.  Thanks for reading.

INTERPRETING THRESHOLDS

A threshold is the limit at which a stimulus causes a response.  When a single mosquito flies past you, most people don’t take note or get concerned; they are below threshold for mosquitoes.  If the mosquito lands upon you and starts to sting you, most people become aware of the mosquito; you could then say that they are at threshold for mosquitoes.  If a swarm of mosquitoes were buzzing towards you, and some were already stinging you, and you were swatting them and trying to get away, then you could say that you were over threshold.  

When working with dogs with behaviour problems, we look at the things that concern the individual dog, and we ask “at what point do these things become a problem for the dog?”  It is tempting to look at the things that dogs are concerned about and classify them according to if you think they should be of concern to the dog or not, but this isn’t helpful.  Looking at each dog and determining what their individual threshold is for a variety of stimuli helps trainers to determine at what point they need to change their training plan.

Thresholds and arousal are closely linked.  Going back to the mosquito example, most people are pretty relaxed about a single mosquito flying around.  When a mosquito lands on us, we become a tiny amount more aware or aroused about that mosquito.  And if we are swarmed by mosquitoes, we become vigilant and aroused, ready to act quickly if needed.  By making the link between arousal and thresholds, we can easily determine at what point we can move the dog’s threshold. 

When a dog is below threshold, they can habituate or just become gradually accustomed to the stimulus.  This is useful information if you want your dog to learn to tolerate a stimulus that you can easily control and present below threshold, but often, we cannot control the target stimulus that readily.

When a dog is at threshold, we can use Classical Conditioning to pair the target stimulus with something that the dog likes a lot.  If for instance, the dog is concerned about men wearing hats and you can present a man with a hat at a distance, so that the dog is aware of the man in the hat but not upset by him, then you could give the dog treats so that he associates men in hats with treats.  You need to repeat this until the dog is well below threshold in order to be successful, and sometimes this takes a great number of sessions.

When a dog is over threshold, he cannot learn at all.  He is aroused and overwhelmed.  Being aroused and overwhelmed can come in two flavours-he may be extremely happy or he may be really frightened.  The dog who is presented with a Frisbee and who barks and lunges and bounces around is as aroused as the dog who is presented with the frightening man in the hat and who stands and shivers.  Either way, his arousal level needs to come down before he can even begin to think, much less learn new things. 

YOU, ME AND US

Riding Kayak has brought me a number of important lessons about being a novice working with a species I am not intimately familiar with.  I am not saying that I am not familiar with horses; I am!  I am just not as familiar with horses as I am with dogs.  Lately I have been thinking about my role as trainer, and my horse’s role as learner, combined with our joint role of being partner’s to one another. 

Some of the time, when I ride it is all about Kayak.  It is all about what she needs and when she needs it, and the skills I am trying to develop in her.  It is about meeting strange things successfully and facing fears and overcoming them.  Our most recent challenge has been puddles.  As far as Kayak is concerned, putting a hoof in a puddle is really, really dangerous and she might be sucked deep into a vortex from which horses never return.  When we walk up to standing water, she snorts and huffs and puffs and if I am too insistent, she may side step and crow hop.  As someone with a strong back ground in behaviour, I know how to get through this using classical conditioning, and approach and retreat and clicking for moves towards that puddle.  It took me about ten minutes yesterday to convince Kayak to put both of her front feet in a puddle, which is a big step towards success and the culmination of several lessons of approaching, clicking and retreating.  So there she is, both front feet in the puddle.  This challenge has been all about Kayak and her needs. 

Sometimes, it is all about me.  I am competent rider, but not a confident rider.  This means that some of the time, I need to work on MY skills and confidence.  I am an intermediate level rider, and progressing well along the journey towards solid horsemanship, but I am not yet there.  This is a journey of a lifetime, and I will never stop learning about riding.  I work on things like posture and position, of clear communication, of good position through both upwards and downwards transitions (going from the walk to the trot and back again for instance).  I work on staying calm in the saddle in the face of things that might be difficult for my horse.  On those rides, it is all about me.

I see this split between the trainer and the learner with my students all the time.  Some of the time, the learner is the dog and some of the time the learner is the person.  Sometimes the dog needs to have their learning needs met, right now, without regard for what the human learner needs.  When the information is not clear to the dog, he cannot be successful, and the more I train, the more convinced I am that repeated success if the single most important part of the training process.  If the dog isn’t clear about the work he is doing, he is not going to be successful and he is not going to be able to make this work.  The more often that your dog is successful, the faster and more effectively he will learn, and some of the time, it is all about what the dog needs when training.

Periodically though, coaching my students to meet the needs of their dogs doesn’t meet the needs of the student.  This happens when the student isn’t clear and cannot convey clear information to the dog.  When this happens, I need to address the needs of the student, and that may mean in the moment, not addressing the needs of the dog at all.  In order to make things clear to the human end of the partnership, I may choose to have them work with their dog on an already trained behaviour, or I may choose to have them work with a different dog who knows more, or I may do a walk through where the human and I take the roles of the trainer and the dog and switch around until the human understands what they need to know about the exercise.

It is important to note though that the goal is not developing the dog or developing the trainer.  It is about developing the team to work as one.  When I ride Kayak, I am strongly reminded of something one of my early mentors said about dogs; “If we had to get up on their backs and depend on their soundness and understanding of the work, we would breed and train differently”.  I wish I could remember the name of this man who seemed to be at every dog show I went to (he was on  crutches all one year, but that is probably too little information!), because he is absolutely right.  If I set things up the wrong way with Kayak, she could kill me.  If I asked her for instance to canter down the hill on my farm towards our farm pond, I don’t doubt I could get her to do it, but it would not be safe.  She would be frightened and I would be frightened and most likely something would go badly wrong, especially at this icy time of year.  At best, I would fall off and she would stand there looking down at me, asking me what sort of a fool I was to ask her to do that sort of a stunt.  At worst, she would break a leg and roll on me and hurt me so badly I could die.  So even on the days when I am working more on me than on her, there is an imperative that I only ask her to do things we are both ready to do.  If I ask her for things we have not prepared for, I could die.

In dog training the imperative is still there, but the consequences aren’t.  Rarely would a dog cause you serious harm in your day to day training.  Yes, there are dogs who would bite me and who might cause me great harm, but for the most part, that won’t happen.  The worst case scenario if the trainer asks the dog for things the dog is not prepared for, is that the dog fails.  The problem here is that the dog’s failure is not something that deeply impacts the trainer in the moment.  Yes, the trainer may be frustrated, but that is nowhere near as important to the trainer as being rolled on by their horse.  The dog’s failure just doesn’t impact the trainer nearly as much as it might impact the dog.  This means that as an instructor, and as a trainer, there is a higher level of responsibility to set training sessions up so that the learner is successful.  The consequences are not there, so awareness must be greater. 

When the trainer sets things up so that the learner is successful, then something incredible happens.  When Kayak and I are on the same page, and I have set up the training session so that she can be successful more often than not, I don’t have to ask her to do things-I think them and we do them together.  It is a special kind of teamwork that just happens.  It isn’t that I don’t move my leg or use my hands on her reins, I do, but those movements are whispers not screams.  When I work with Eco and D’fer, my adult dogs, this happens in every training session because we have a deep and well developed connection; I think it and it happens, smoothly and gently.  I ask quietly with my voice and the way my body moves, and they respond.  They move in specific ways and I respond to their motions.  It is a dance of the animal giving me feedback and me responding and returning and changing as the dance continues.  When that connection develops, we are tied together in a special way, and that special goal is what I would like my students to experience.

ITS JUST ANOTHER BEHAVIOUR

Kayak, my horse, is four years old.  In dog terms that means that she is an uneducated older adolescent; she had great early socialization and lots of good handling and vet experiences, and she wasn’t permitted to develop bad habits, but really she doesn’t know much.  Kind of like Widget and Friday, the service dog candidates who are growing up with us.  They can sit, lie down, come when called, and for most part not drag me through hell and back when we walk on leash.  I am familiar with their sorts of dogs; I have handled dozens of them over the years.  When Widget jumps up on a stranger, I am not even annoyed; it is a recognizable error and I take steps to avoid it or decrease it.  When Friday scavengers a piece of bread dropped in a restaurant, I would prefer she hadn’t done it, but it is JUST ANOTHER BEHAVIOUR.  Yup.  That is right.  It’s just another behaviour just like sit, down, stand, come when called, pick up my socks and bring them to me, open the door, close the door, load the dishwasher (that is a behaviour that I encourage in my DH, not one I hope for in my service dog candidates!).

When it comes to Kayak, I am a beginner on a big learning curve.  I am learning about horse behaviour.  I am learning to read when they are annoyed with one another.  I am learning about how to ride in a more balanced way.  I am learning about a whole lot of things.  And Kayak does stuff that I don’t always recognize.  For instance, I would like to teach her to canter.  Actually, I should rephrase that, she knows perfectly well and has since she was about four hours old, how to canter.  I would like her to learn to canter when I want her to canter, on the correct lead, when I ask her to do so, and to stop when I ask her to do so.  Unforetunately, I am a novice horse trainer.  I am however a very experienced operant conditioning trainer and I recognize that when she doesn’t do what I want her to do, and does something else, it is JUST ANOTHER BEHAVIOUR. 

What does Kayak do that I don’t like?  Well, to start with, she and I had to come to an agreement about what lunging was.  What I meant by lunging was to move around in a smooth circle around me, with me in the centre of the circle holding a line attached to her halter.  What she meant was wander around, graze some of the time, stop dead and snort and once, she meant to bolt and run around the farm while I stood in my winter field boots and mockpurs and called out to anyone listening “horse loose, horse loose!”  She ran to my DH and his horse and stayed very nicely by them while I made my way over to retake her line.  And start again.  Because bolting is JUST ANOTHER BEHAVIOUR.  

Once we came to an agreement about walking and trotting on the lunge line, we began to work on the canter.  For awhile, Kayak thought that this new gait was called “trot really, really fast”.  No click there.  And no clicks means a frustrated horse.  So she tried something else.  What she tried was bucking.  Now, if you have ever lunged a thousand pounds of animal, who thinks that bucking and kicking and snorting is fun, you will realize that watching a horse kick out in mid air (not at me, just out!), at high speed doesn’t feel like JUST ANOTHER BEHAVIOUR.  It FEELS really scary.  It FEELS like you might die.  It FEELS like your universe is out of control and everything is coming to a crashing halt.  Really though, bucking and snorting and kicking is JUST ANOTHER BEHAVIOUR.  And behaviours change.

Kayak Trotting, Really, Realy Fast.  No Click!

I work on a regular basis with dogs with serious behaviour problems.  Dogs who bite.  Who charge and lunge.  Who jump up or who surf the counters and the garbage bins.  Dogs who bark incessantly.  Dogs who are afraid.  Often these dogs are doing things that feel out of control, dangerous or deadly.  When my young service dog candidates do something boneheaded, such as grabbing a lady’s purse in the mall (yes, shame of shames, I had a service dog candidate walk by a table with a purse just sitting there and whoops, he picked it up and walked several steps with it before I noticed!), I can recognize that this is JUST ANOTHER BEHAVIOUR.  Bucking and kicking doesn’t feel like just another behaviour though, and it is hard to remember what I know from dog training. 

Here is what I have learned from my years of dog training.  Behaviour is governed by emotions and contingencies and is subject to change.  Change the motivation(through classical conditioning, desensitization, counter conditioning, habituation, flooding or by using some medications), and the behaviour itself will change.  Reinforce (anything you do that increases the behaviour) alternatives and the undesired behaviour will not surface.  Use punishment (anything that decreases the behaviour) and you may never see it again.  So, although I do not advocate intentionally allowing a horse to buck and kick, or a dog to bite, it is important to remember, it is JUST ANOTHER BEHAVIOUR, and thus, it is something I can change.  And tomorrow, I will go out and change behaviours in the dogs, people and horses I encounter.  Its lots more fun when I remember that it is all JUST ANOTHER BEHAVIOUR.

The War Torn Dog

I work with a lot of families who live with dogs who have suffered some sort of severe trauma.  The journey to helping these dogs is a long and difficult one and often the families I work with don’t understand the world their dog lives within.  

I try and explain the dog's world to my clients thus;  Imagine there was a child who was born into a war torn city; say Kabbul.  At two, his parents disappear and his teen aged sibs take over.  Not knowing how to meet the needs of an active engaged toddler, they tie the kid to the central post in the home so that they can get their own stuff done.  In the course of the following three years, the child learns to toilet on the outer edge of his tether, he learns to grab whatever food he can, he learns that water comes and goes and isn't reliable.  He learns that older kids may taunt him and tease, and he learns that yelling and screaming is a 50/50 bet on getting a kick to the ribs or a sweet from the neighbour who comes in from time to time and tries her best to help this kid.  One day, the neighbour steals the child and hands him over to the Red Cross who send the kid the North America.  He is in a refugee camp for forty eight hours.  He is on several transport vehicles.  The adults in his life change again and again.  And now the kid ends up in your house.  He doesn't speak English.  He has no frame of reference for the society within which he finds himself.  He doesn’t know anything about the customs or rules that make up the culture he has come too; in fact he didn’t understand the culture he was born into either, but he did understand the room his siblings had tied him in.  

Would you expect this child to arrive one fine August day, go shopping for school clothes and enjoy his first day of kindergarten?  Would you expect him to understand Hallowe’en, Thanksgiving and the hurly burly of the winter holiday season we have here in North America, embracing Christmas, Hannakah, Kwanza, and the Winter Solstace?  Would we be surprised if this kid had nightmares?  Panic attacks?  Unexplained illnesses?  Social dysfunction?  Attachment issues?   Separation anxiety?  Aggression?  Violent mood swings?  Inability to focus or learn?

Most of us would allow that this child would need a lot of support and not for just a little while.  He would need support for a long, long time.  I read a lot of dog training lists and recently I have been reading about a number of service and therapy dogs who have been “rescued”.  These are dogs who came from horrendous situations.  One dog who had been confined to a basement for three years.  A dog who spent his first year on an eight foot chain.  A dog who was largely ignored unless he barked, in which case he was beaten with a cable.  A dog who was confined to a crate from the age of six months to fourteen months, with an electric shock collar on, and the children in the home were allowed to shock him at will.

For some reason, there is an attraction to try and train these dogs to work in therapy and service capacities.  I train service dogs and I have worked with some dogs who came from rescues or shelters.  It is hard to find the right dog for the job.  I look at dogs and reject a lot of dogs for very minor faults; they are bouncier than they ought to be.  They don’t want to hook up with me...or they glom onto me and won’t leave me alone.  They startle easily.  They look normal but come from a war zone.  For the most part, I like to start a young carefully bred dog and control the variables so that he isn’t traumatized if I want him to do work.  I want to make sure that he doesn’t go through the equivalent of a war zone, because I want the dogs who are working in the most difficult of situations, the situations where they will have to act autonomously some of the time and tolerate all kinds of crazy behaviour from the public almost all of the time, to have the best upbringing possible.  I want them to learn that the world is a safe place and the crazy things they see are just that; crazy, but not necessarily dangerous.  I want my service dogs to experience public access on my terms when we start doing that; in short controlled situations where they are not going to have anything startling or surprising happen. Service work is amongst the most difficult work for dogs because the environment they work in changes continuously.  The people change.  The expectations of perfection are very high.  They cannot touch anything on the floor, on a sales rack or on a shelf.  They cannot look into the bags of the people they encounter.  They cannot chase a squirrel, they cannot startle if a truck backfires, they cannot greet the other dogs they meet, and they can rarely greet the people they meet.  The behavioural expectations for dogs in service work and therapy work is very, very high.

We also expect a lot from the dogs who have been traumatized.  We expect them to be normal, and they mostly are not.  We expect them to fit into our homes and our lives, often when it isn’t in them to do so.  When a dog has been traumatized, he is suffering, just as a child would.  Asking a child who was raised in the sort of situation that I described above to behave the way that a child who was raised in a safe, enriched environment would be ludicrous.  Asking a dog who was raised with the sort of trauma that I read about and that my clients bring to me is equally ludicrous. 

It is somewhat fashionable amongst trainers to say “work with the dog in front of you” and I agree to a point.  The point that I break away from agreement is when the dog has been traumatized and we ask the dog to rise above and beyond and do work that is difficult, unstructured and beyond what many of the dogs who have been raised to do so might be able to do.  We need to remember that when we take on a dog like this, he is going to live with his history, day in and day out, all day, every day.  He may overcome.  He may seem better many years later, but be triggered by something we would consider ordinary.  He may wake up at night, afraid.  We need to make sure that the dogs we ask to do the hardest work are suited to that work and are able to cope.  And sadly, that doesn’t usually mean a dog who has been badly traumatized to begin with.

BRAVE HORSE

Sometimes dreams come true.  I have wanted to own my own horse for my whole life, and now finally I own my own horse.  I get to go out in the middle of the night and sit in my barn, with my mare beside me, munching on her hay while I sit on a bale of straw beside her.  I can go out early in the morning and there she is.  It is kind of magic.  There is only one problem.  I am a somewhat nervous rider.  In my teens I was in a bad riding accident and since then I have lost my confidence as a rider. 

All was going well with my young (four year old) mare, Kayak, until she started trying to buck me off.  Now although I am a nervous rider, I am a fairly competent rider and in five tries she has only succeeded once.  The problem is that although I landed on my feet, and although I have sat through her shenanigans four more times, she scared the heck out of me.  In fact, she scared me enough that one night this week, I talked myself into a tizzy and had an overbearing sense of doom about riding her.  For sure I was going to fall off.  I got myself into a real state of fear.  

Never the less, I talked myself down enough to go down to the paddock and groom her to ride.  While I was grooming her she was a bit uptight and moved around a fair amount.  My sense of foreboding got worse.  I tacked her up, and strapped on my helmet and led her to the paddock gate.  I took her out of her paddock and mounted her; she stood to mount and was well behaved and walked out nicely when I asked.  I was pretty tense though.  When we got to my laneway, I asked her to turn left and very nicely, so she did.  We walked toward the road at the end of our lane, and as we approached, a robin landed in a puddle in front of us.  Kayak snorted and jigged a bit, and I said to her “don’t worry, it’s just a bird.”  I got more nervous though. 

We got to the end of the lane and turned around and passed the bird again and I said “It’s okay, Kayak, good horse, it’s just a bird” and I got more nervous again.  Kayak responded by tensing up a bit.  We approached my giant white Dogs in the Park truck and Kayak stepped to the side.  “Silly horse,” I said.  “It’s just the truck.”  And I got a tiny bit more nervous.  Kayak continued along our laneway towards the other end, and stopped suddenly beside Eco’s Frisbee and snorted again.  “It’s okay, it’s just a Frisbee, Kayak” I said.  More tension passed through the reins between me and Kayak.  She started to raise her head up high and started to look around for more things to worry about.  She stopped at a pop can crushed on the road, and tossed her head and again, I tried to reassure her; “It’s okay Kayak, it’s a pop can.”  Suddenly I realized something.  Something I tell my students every day.  Something really important. 

When I tell my horse “It’s okay” or “Don’t worry” I get tense.  I worry.  I get more nervous.  And those nerves pass themselves down the reins straight into my horse’s mind.  No, I don’t do telepathy with my horse, but she sure can tell from my posture, from how I hold the reins, from my movements, that I am tense.  When I am tense, my horse gets tense.  I have seen just the exact same thing in the dogs I work with.  When the handler anticipates that something bad will happen, they transmit that tension through the leash and the dog responds accordingly.  When the handler is tense, then the animal is going to take that information and use it; my tension translates into my animal’s vigilance.  If I am tense, and I have a good relationship with my dog or horse, they trust that I have a good reason to be tense. 

In order to undo that, I need to do something that will counteract that tension I am feeling.  What I usually tell my students to do is to tell the dog that they are brave.  “Look at that, brave dog” can go a long way to convincing me that we are going to get through the situation in one piece.  Low and behold, when I turned around at the far end of my laneway and I said to her “You are a brave horse.  We can do this together” it was like turning a mental corner together.  Suddenly, I relaxed and just as suddenly she relaxed too.  We approached the pop can and I said to her, “Brave horse, you can walk right by that can” and when we approached the truck I said “Brave horse, we can pass the great white whale of a truck together.”  We passed the Frisbee, the bird and then approached the busy road to look at the cars.  “Brave horse,” I said, “We will look at the cars together” and amazingly, we did.  Calmly and confidently.  She is a brave horse and I am a brave rider and we did it together.

Together is important when we work with animals.  When we work together, we can achieve greater things than we individually achieve alone.  Together, I can throw the ball and my dog can fetch it up.  My horse can carry me farther than I can walk, while I provide feed and shelter for her.  My dog can gather the sheep which provide us both with meat and milk.  When we do things together, we get a sense of one another.  We get an understanding of what each of us wants out of the relationship.  When the relationship is meaningful we take one another into account.  When one of us is tense, the other picks up on that and when one of us consciously relaxed, we share that between us. 

Brave horse.  Don’t be scared.  The two sentences seem to have similar meanings but they really have something different to say that is important in how we share ourselves with our animal partners.  Brave horse recognizes our triumph.  Don’t be scared is a warning of impending danger.  When we phrase our interactions in the context of impending danger, we both tense up and get frightened.  When we phrase it in terms of our joint triumph, we both win. 

What is ironic in this story is that for many years, I have been telling my students to phrase their interactions in a supportive, constructive voice, and yet, when I was nervous about my horse, I dropped right into the language that I know leads us down a dangerous path of nervousness, of fear and of reactivity, and that is exactly what I got with my horse.  When I rephrased it, I got a different response.  A response I think is much better for both of us. 

This morning I went out to ride again, but this time it was different.  I hadn’t set myself up to be afraid of my horse by thinking all night about all the things that could go wrong.  Those things could and might still happen, but they weren’t the most important thing on my mind.  A friend came over today to meet my horse, and we groomed her together.  We tacked her up, sharing ourselves with Kayak.  I was relaxed and so was Kayak and we were enjoying the company of my friend.  We took her out of the paddock and I mounted and she stood stock still for a moment once I was up.  Suddenly, she dropped her head way down low and stepped forward three steps with her front feet.  Then she leaned back and stretched herself right out, like a dog bowing in play.  She pulled herself upright and stretched out her back legs too and then walked herself back upright and stood waiting for my signal to walk on.  I was startled but not frightened when she made this very novel move, and I am left to wonder if she has a sense of humour and is stretching and laughing because I am relaxed enough to enjoy the joke.