When Mr. Wild Dingo approaches, all she offers him are groans, moans and huffs. It’s a good thing he doesn’t take it personally. Because he sure loves making her miserable!

“Oh crud. Here he goes again with the hugging thing. My jodhpurs will have to be re-floofed again!”

When Juno first came to live with us, she actually liked Mr. Wild Dingo. We don’t know what happened. Maybe the day we moved furniture and it scared her so bad, she ran into a wall. We don’t know. But some time a few months after she came to live with us, she decided Mr. Wild Dingo was evil. No amount of food or her favorite one-on-one trail runs could convince her otherwise. So he took her to training. That was the one thing that got them bonded closer. And it worked–mostly. She’s so much happier around him and will come when she’s called, she’ll kiss him and wag at him. But she still enjoys playing the misery card.

“How’s my pout? Do I need more sad eyes? Should I give out a groan?”

They have their own secret little game. Mr. Wild Dingo approaches Juno, she runs away to a corner, he follows her and then showers her with affection while she acts shy, snobby or disgruntled.

Wait a minute! This sounds and exactly like the recall they teach in training but in the wrong direction. The person is supposed to run away and the dog is supposed to run to the person! Not the other way around!

Sigh. It’s obvious Juno paid attention in school more than Mr. Wild Dingo did. She taught Mr. Wild Dingo the recall command quite well!  She has him wrapped right around her paw. All she has to do is pout.

“Pop, we’re in the kitchen. This means, you must dispense of the foodables if you are to enjoy my misery.”

And people say Sibes can’t be trained. Ha!  They can be trained alright. They can be trained to train you!

Sigh. That damn Sibe.

The trainer asks, “What’s the problem?”

“Let me show you,” I reply. I turn to Loki and say, “Loki, Fetch!”

Loki slowly walks away then turns around and replies, “So why are you talking to me like that? You always order me around like I’m nothing. You tell me to come, I come, then in the middle of me coming to you, you change your mind and say ‘down.’ Up, down, up, down! What am I, an elevator? You point your finger at me and shoot me like some sadist and the next minute expect me to lay adoringly at your feet.”

“Then you make me sleep on the floor, with my sciatica. And do you ever take me for a decent walk? NO, it’s out of the house, a short pee, and right back home. Maybe if I could stretch out a little, the sciatica wouldn’t kill me so much! I should roll over and play dead for real for all you care!”

“That’s amazing that he can talk! So what’s the problem?” the trainer asks.

“He has a hearing problem! I said ‘Fetch’ not ‘Kvetch!’ ”

****

Kvetching during training is an art form for Loki.  It gives onlookers a great chuckle because it goes a little like this.

Me: “Heel” (Loki heels.)

Me: “Down”

Loki: “Arghahahahrhg  grrr  ghrrrhh” and Loki lays down.

He talks back all the time. We discovered one reason he kvetches is because he keys into the smallest body movements, even my hesitations and pauses, and truly gets confused. So during our Tuesday training session we worked on training my body movements and now there’s less confusion and less kvetching. At least for now.

It will be a sad day, for me and the audience, when he makes it through an entire class without a peep from that yapper.

In the mind-body yoga experience, we are taught that our bodies have memory–cellular memory. Each experience creates memory in our bodies on a physical, cellular level. A few years ago, I experienced a severe head injury due to a bike racing crash. For weeks, I told everyone it was no big deal. On a conscious level, I truly didn’t feel emotionally traumatized, and I looked forward to when I could ride a bike again. A week later when I put my leg over the top tube and crawled up on the saddle for a stationary training workout, I looked down at the top tube and a wave of panic and terror came over me and hit me in the stomach so hard, I nearly fell off the saddle and vomited. I burst into tears. The top tube triggered the fear I had forgotten. This makes perfect sense when understanding the biography of the body. What I consciously remembered about the actual accident was glancing down at the top tube and thinking that my entire titanium frame oddly felt like rubber, completely unstable and unsafe. I remembered the physical sensation of the instability, but I never remembered the fleeting yet oh-so-concentrated fear it created, possibly because it happened so fast that my consciousness could only process and remember the physical feeling. There was no time to be aware of the panic it was creating. A week later, the simple glance at the top tube while my body was in a relaxed riding position was all it took to trigger and release the fear that had been dormant in my body. This is an example of a short-lived impact of a biographical incident on my body’s biology. But, consider for a moment how any one incident or repeated incident can impact a person’s biology for the long term, which can lead to long-term tension, stress and anxiety and eventually to behaviors such as rage, over-eating, depression, violence and so-forth. When you can consider how biography and biology works in a human being, you can begin to understand the quarky behaviors of a rescued dog are the result of its biography.

Biography and Biology in Light of Dog Behavior
Today’s dog behaviorist work on the notion that dogs live in the present and that they don’t think about the past or the future. Yet, if that is true, I must question why there are so many dogs with undesirable behaviors such as continued barking, biting, toy or food possession, handler aggression, dog aggression, people aggression, cowering, chewing, house destruction, suddenly un-housebroken, obsessive/compulsive behaviors and more. These behaviors must be learned for they don’t present themselves in nature. Behaviorists often dismiss a dog’s past experience and decide that the “why” is unimportant. Yet, time and again, a dog’s body will tell you when something has triggered his tension, stress and anxiety. When cued by a person, place or thing that have caused stress in the past, a dog’s body will become tense, and possibly show low levels of anxiety, a precursor to whatever undesirable behavior that exists today. His body adapts to these triggers and learns to behave consistently whenever exposed to those cues or triggers. Sometimes, the behavior occurs so quickly that the precursor display of anxiety is hard to catch. The more the dog gets to practice the undesirable behavior cued by a trigger, the better he becomes at doing the behavior more quickly and automatically.

It can be easy or difficult to read anxiety in your dog’s body, but once you figure it out, then the real behavior change can occur. Also, knowing a dog’s biography and what triggers tension, stress and anxiety in its body can make behavioral change a lot easier as it is easier to anticipate his behavioral reaction around the things you know may have caused him to be fearful in the past.

Biography becoming the biology is also very much apparent in breeding dogs. Dogs that are bred in certain blood lines for specific activities are a perfect example of biography becoming the biology. People choose a dog from a blood line because a working gene is present in its body to perform a specific task. The blood line/DNA in a dog’s body is as much its biography as it is his biology. Before ANY experience contributes to our own biography as infant humans, we are born to a certain body, race, sex, culture, propensity to disease, etc., that is very much our biography. The same is true with dogs. And every biographical experience after what we and our dogs are born with exists in our own bodies and our dog’s body and becomes part of the biology. So biology is not only affected by event biography, but it is also affected by genetic biography.

Working with Loki has taught me so much about rebuilding his confidence and ego. When Loki came to me, he had been through three homes in the states and one in Taiwan. I’d been told he’d been abused and abandoned. But that’s it. He had a tremendous amount of fear in him. Everything and anything would trigger his barking, aggression, and handler aggression (meaning whoever was holding his leash, usually me). It took me a year to figure out his triggers, the things that make, or rather made, him fearful, anxious which would then escalate into aggression. His rigid body, a low grumble or a high pitched whine will tell me quickly that he’s uncomfortable. It’s at that time I look around and figure out what’s new to him and quickly take action to turn his tension into calm, happy feelings.

When I first got him, I’d take him to the dog park, and he behaved fairly well for the most part, but he would exhibit aggressive behaviors on leashed dog walks time and again. So I looked for a trainer to help. In the beginning of his training, he’d panic and quickly get aggressive for which I’d have to handle through correction as the trainer had taught me. But in time, I quickly found out it was far better to catch his anxiety before it turned into aggression, redirect him to perform for me so he could be rewarded and feel good, rather than wait until the anxiety escalated to aggression, for which he would receive a correction.

A few months ago, I’d been walking Loki and Juno downtown to get him used to people, runners, bikers, leashed/unleashed dogs, loud car noises and unfamiliar locations. He’d been doing fine but then he spotted two very large Great Danes. His body grew rigid and he grumbled and whined. The Dane’s walkers saw this and graciously walked away from me. I did the same; I turned around, walked him away from the Danes until he grew calm. Then I turned around and walked toward the Danes and praised his calm behavior. We came up to three or four feet of the Danes and had a pleasant conversation with the owners all the while Loki was calm and confident. If I hadn’t caught his anxiety, it would have escalated into a barking, growling and an aggressive mess which would warrant a correction.

Loki taught me that he learns much better through positive reinforcement than punishment or correction. He also taught me that certain things will trigger his fears. In the beginning, leashes, chains, new collars all triggered his anxiety to fear aggression. In February, when I was dismantling some party decorations, I discovered long sticks or poles (used for hanging flags) trigger his fears. As soon as he saw a pole, he backed up in fear and his body grew tense. I tested Juno with the same pole and she was indifferent to it, not afraid at all. I instantly knew I had to desensitize him to that and showed him the pole and praised and pet him calmly. It’s nice to see that though Loki’s early biography still exists in his body, he is adopting a new biography and is learning to change certain behavioral reactions simply through the release of tension around the things that trigger him.

Of course dogs don’t actually live in their past lives, but their bodies certainly do. To understand this is the first step to help them release tension under their triggers by building their ego and confidence when they are exhibiting calm, relaxed behavior. Additionally, if you ever begin to train a dog using his prey/play drive, you will quickly understand that he can think into the future by anticipating his drive satisfaction (obtaining the prey item). But that’s a whole other chapter to this story. To me, it is perfectly comprehensible that a dog has a sense of past, present and future simply by the behavior he is exhibiting in the present.

Today, Loki is very calm and confident downtown among all sorts of distractions. He’s friendly with everyone and exhibits no aggression at all. We still have some unusual anxious behaviors to fine-tune, such as anxiety in car rides. I’m almost certain his fears stem from being abandoned by car. I can’t punish him for his fears, but I can redirect and reward him with simple performed tasks and keep desensitizing him to car rides.

Working with rescue dogs is never easy because they’ve been abandoned or surrendered most likely because of their odd behavior patterns. But if you have a good understanding of how a dog’s biography can become part of his biology and behavior, it becomes much easier to be compassionate about the undesirable behavior and instead think creatively how to change or improve behavior so he becomes calm and confident. I encourage anyone rescuing a dog, to have patience, to find the time to think creatively about how to change his undesirable behavior. I guarantee it can be one of the most rewarding things you can do.

Now, if I can only figure out why Juno panics around Scott…or better yet, how to fix it!

He’s not randomly aggressive toward people or children. In fact, he’s friendly to people. He’s not even food possessive/aggressive. It took him two nights to learn that he is never to even look at Juno when she’s eating. He has two choices when he’s finished: look at me or leave the room.  Now he and Juno can eat dinner and bones side by side without any issues and with people close to them petting them. And I can leave them alone. After he’s finished, he leaves the room and finds me so I can tell him he’s a good boy for ignoring Juno while she eats.

Loki’s main naughty behaviors are redirected anxiety–taking stress out on whomever is closest to him, a person holding his leash or a nearby dog.  When he gets excited either from happiness or nervous anxiety it can build and culminate into naughty behavior. He “loads up.”

Thankfully, between all the reading I’m doing about anxious, high-drive dogs and my trainers, I’m learning how to work with a dog like Loki. His training becomes an hour of making judgment calls of when to correct him or when to “unload him” by touching and walking him easily.

After our daily walks, I would let Loki and Juno into the dog yard and used to unhook their collars and let them run. Still loaded with some low level excitement and anxiety from the walk itself, he’d release his anxiety by bullying Juno and biting her scruff. While it’s not exactly a dog fight, it’s definitely not a form of play, therefore it’s unacceptable. And Juno hates that behavior when it isn’t playful. Who wouldn’t?

So now, after our walks, Juno gets released first while Loki and I spend a minute or two together while I unload his stress and anxiety through touch and praise for his excellent walking.  After unloading him, I give him the release command and he looks up at me completely surprised like, “really, I can go now?” and he calmly walks away, instead of sprinting after Juno for a bite.

Unloading Loki has become a way of living but the rewards are gaining quickly. Though I don’t leave toys out, I do leave one or two “low drive” tug toys he can put in his mouth to redirect his anxiety instead of taking it out on Juno. He now goes and reaches for his toy when he has anxiety building from his natural need to possess us while we’re spending time with Juno. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner. His biggest form of anxiety release is through mouthing and tugging.

Loki still rants and rages occasionally in obedience class. Over time, it’s gotten better. The first class I couldn’t shut him up or keep him from wigging out. The stimulation of dogs running on recall exercises and running up agility walls was all too much for him to handle. In the 9 weeks we’ve been training, he still protests like a defiant teenager, but he can now make it through an entire group class without a trainer pulling me aside to work one on one with us.

People who’ve watched him from that first day comment to me on how far he’s come. He made THAT much of an impression that first day. Think: two year old temper tantrum during a quiet moment at a movie theater and envision the two year old having chomping fangs and 64 lbs of muscle and you’ll begin to get the picture. Most people would probably run. Not me. I seem to have a few screws loose.

To me, Loki is like a special edition corvette, with unique engineering and steering capacity that an ordinary person who can drive a car won’t necessarily figure out. I can’t let just anyone drive my corvette. He will ALWAYS test his handler. I see it every time I do a leash hand off to a trainer Loki may not know. He’ll spend 5 seconds wigging out and trying to dominate the handler. He learns pretty quickly the handler has driven that type of car before so he falls into place. I, myself, am still learning how to drive this corvette.

The truth is Loki’s got some special gifts that make him an exceptional dog. He’s got a high drive to work, loves agility and shows his pride with strong athletic grace. There isn’t an ounce of fat on this dog. He’s also silly and likes to cuddle.

Slowly, his anxiety is already starting to retreat.

I almost peed my pants one day last week when a Labrador puppy went over to distract him while he was in a down-stay at the park. That lab walked over him, stood over him, sniffed him, licked him and basically did every single thing to tease him out of his down. Loki, having just been corrected for breaking his down stay, had amazing resilience and stayed down for several minutes until I released him. He made me proud. I know he can do this. I know he can become obedient. And I’m so thrilled to be the person who can help him become a model canine citizen.

Happy 6-Month Anniversary Loki! You light up our home and soul.