I just returned from presenting Open Paw Shelter Program workshops for two different shelters in Florida. The program teaches people what they need to know to either prevent or resolve the common behavior and training problems that land both dogs and cats in the shelter in the first place. It’s mostly the same few issues over and over again, often general unruliness or house-soiling/destruction.
I am obviously an advocate for training animals. However, there is another component to the unruliness problem that became crystal-clear to me on these two trips. Ladies and gentleman, we’ve got a whole slew of unemployed dogs on our hands. Seriously. The unemployment rate in canines is epidemic!
The Open Paw encourages shelters to adopt Minimum Mental Health Requirements designed to alleviate stress in kenneled animals. In some cases our suggestions are to help calm them down, in others they provide productive outlets for the expression of dogs’ inner-dogginess.
When I designed the Open Paw program back in 2000, it was obvious to me that shelter dogs needed occupational therapy. What I came to understand so clearly in Florida is that the same is true for most modern-day companion dogs. While there are many people today who see their dogs as family members, very few take the time to consider and honor their heritage and original purpose.
Most dog breeds were originally bred for some kind of work. Yet over the past eighty years or so in the U.S., most dogs have moved out of the work of their ancestors and shifted into the new, more exclusive line of work of being companion animals to human beings. The job description is markedly different!
Take my dog Zou Zou, who is a Beauceron. Beaucerons are of French heritage and were meant to both guard and herd large groups of sheep or cattle in the vast mountainous countryside of Northern France. Moving, corralling, and protecting 500 heads of sheep is no easy task. It takes lots of initiative, and energy/endurance.
Zou Zou is extremely agile, energetic, busy, and bossy. She can and will get over six-foot fences with ease. She can run for miles without tiring, can corner like a barrel racer, and loves to chase large moving objects such as deer and larger breed dogs that are running fast and in a straight line chasing balls at the park. And she is always on alert, looking for her next gig.
She lived part of her life with a mature working couple who were pretty much overwhelmed by her. Unemployed and with no real guidance, she regularly escaped from her pen, ran amok and chased deer, destroyed the garden, and so on. Do you see the disconnect here? No wonder so many canine/human relationships fail and end at the shelter door. Sadly, about 4.4 million dogs end up in U.S. shelters yearly.
So how do we mimic our dogs’ natural environment and give them opportunities to do the work they are hard-wired for? I have a few ideas:
Don’t feed your dog from a food bowl. Ever. Each morsel is a valuable opportunity to give your dog something to do, and if you hand feed during mini-training sessions, it’s also a chance to reward and reinforce “good” behavior. There are so many wonderful food-delivering toys on the market today and they each make a magic mountain of a meal, giving your dog something to do in his free time. So please, if nothing else, banish the food bowl!
Give your dog daily chores. Teach your dog to fetch the newspaper or your slippers, really! Teach them to put away their own toys and to identify them by name.
Play indoor games such as hide-and-seek or find the toy. Let them use their brilliant noses and search skills.
Thoughtfully consider your dog’s breed/mix/type and try to find ways to honor it. For example, I have found a sheep farm not too far away where Zou Zou can practice her herding skills occasionally. Never have I seen her more content than after doing what she is instinctively compelled to do. It has helped me understand some of her behavior traits I might otherwise consider annoying.
Take any kind of class with your dog! We are so lucky in the Bay Area to have a wide variety of dog training class offerings to soothe the savage beast. Basic training classes are a must, but tricks or circus class, agility, treibball (herding with big balls instead of sheep), lure-coursing, tracking, search and rescue, scent work, rally obedience, dock diving, etc. add even more enrichment.
It may take a little bit of time and effort, but it’s the least we can do for our best friends, seeing as we’ve asked them to be our loyal companions in this foreign environment. Besides, it really is a thrill to see your dog’s inner desires appropriately channeled and expressed. Give it a try, I promise you won’t be sorry – and your dog will be overjoyed!
Kelly Gorman Dunbar is Director of the Center for Applied Animal Behavior, where she recruits and trains the instructors for the Dunbar family business, SIRIUS® Puppy & Dog Training. She is the creator of the SIRIUS Sniffers scent-detection program, and is in the process of bringing the French sport of cavage (truffle hunting) to the US. Kelly is also Founder and President of Open Paw and consults on various matters.
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