THE OTHER END OF THE LEASH

Pia Silvani’s, Director of Behavior and Training at St. Hubert’s Animal Welfare Center in New Jersey, gave a talk at APDT that focused on play between adult dogs, and it was a fantastic presentation. The best part of the talk was her videos of dogs playing–both appropriately and inappropriately. My absolute favorite was a video of two Tervurens meeting, greeting and eventually playing together beautifully. It was a like watching two strangers meet each other, and end up dancing as if they were on Dancing with the Stars. Several things stood out in the video that are, I think, important aspects of healthy dog play.

First of all, the dogs were able to meet each other one on one, without other dogs around. So often it seems that dogs get introduced into a ‘pack’ and are overwhelmed by 3 or 5 or 7 other dogs all trying to get access to them at the same time.

Secondly, the dogs weren’t forced into anything; they were able to approach and withdraw often, which is another way that dogs can avoid too much pressure during a greeting. This reminds me of the Ph.D. research of Dr. Anneke Lisberg from the University of Wisconsin, who did some of the first real research ever done on scent marking in domestic dogs (familiarity breeds contempt in science too!). She found that dogs entering a dog park were most likely to be the ones urinating after a greeting ritual with the resident dogs, and that the “newbee” often ended a close encounter by trotting a few feet away and urinating. Dr. Lisberg speculates that the entering dogs can avoid tension during greetings by walking away from close contact w/ other dogs and urinating a few feet away. It would be as if the dogs were providing information about themselves in their urine, on the ground, to avoid all those noses stuck up under their tails. Interesting, isn’t it? This makes me think about indoor day care facilities, where dogs are inhibited from urinating… I wonder if that causes problems? It does seem, on reflection, that all dogs should be able to meet and greet outside where they can use urine to communicate.

Thirdly, the Terv’s in Pia’s talk began to play with lots of play bows and ’stop/starts,’ done with a good distance between them. Gradually, as their play continued, they began to play closer and closer to each other, and finally began to make contact only after several minutes of mutual play. It really was one of the loveliest examples I’ve seen of two dogs reading one another and politely beginning a relationship.

Contrast that with the video she showed of a poor (Boston?) little dog being tossed into the mosh pit of a busy day care. The dog was literally swamped by 5 or 6 (I’m guessing here) other dogs who overwhelmed it, ran after it, surrounded it and basically terrified the poor thing, giving it no chance to get a breath much less manage to be appropriately greeted. Thank heavens, there are many, many day care facilities who are very careful when they introduce new dogs, starting with a one-on-one session with a known “good greeter” and then gradually introducing them to the entire group… would that they all did this, yes?

I’d be curious about your experiences with your dog, both while greeting and playing with unfamiliar dogs. My Willie, aka “I-came-with-so-many-issues-Trisha-called-me-the-Spawn-of-Satan once,” plays beautifully with other dogs IF I manage the introduction so that he doesn’t get overwhelmed. First impressions matter with dogs too, don’t they?!

Here’s Pia mugging with a statue in Louisvile:

Speaking of great play between dogs, I recently visited some dear friends who I met through our mutual love of Great Pyrenees. Here are 2 photos of Czar, Tundra and Osa the Newfie playing as beautifully as dogs can play. What a joy it was to watch them!

And here’s yet another view of fall at the farm. Sorry, I just can’t stop myself.

Camille Ward and  Barbara Smuts gave a fascinating talk at the APDT Play Symposium on “Play and the Development of Social Relationships in Litters of Domestic Dogs.” Their research (and that of their colleague, Erika Bauer) has focused on play in the domestic dog. They discussed two issues related to play in both puppies and adult dogs:

50/50 Rule: Years ago a scientist hypothesized that, for play fighting to work, the participants would have to switch roles about 50 % of the time. In other words, related to dogs, half the time one pup  should be on top in the “assertive position,” and the other pup should be on top the rest of the time. As Camille explained to us, this speculation, as often happens in science and other fields, slowly turned into “fact” (without the benefit of any actual observations or research!)

For example, look at this quote from “The Development of Aggression” by Tremblay, Hartup and Archer, 2005:

“For play fighting to remain playful, it needs to follow the 50:50 rule (Aldis 1975; Altmann 1962). That is, each pairmate has to win close to 50% of the playful encounters.”

Camille and Barbara tested this assumption in 3 litters which were observed as they developed in about 2,000 instances of play between two individuals (at 3-8 weeks, and at 10-23 weeks for 2 litters, and the third litter also at 27-40 weeks). They found that the 50/50 rule did NOT apply–12 of the 15 pairs in the first 2 litters observed did not reverse roles symmetrically. As a matter of fact, one female from the third litter was ‘on top’ 100% of the time, but her litter mate still initiated play preferentially with her.

In an earlier study, Dr. Erika Bauer and Dr. Smuts also tested the 50/50 rule in adult dogs at a dog park, and Dr. Smuts reported that there too, the 50/50 rule was not upheld. (By the way, it wasn’t reported at APDT, but this work also found that role reversals…. you mount me and then I mount you back….occurred during certain types of play, but not others. Chases and tackles were initiated by either partner, but mounts, muzzle bites and muzzle licks were consistently performed by the same dog. Perhaps certain types of play may be good indicators of social relationships between dogs?  Let me know if this fits with your own observations of play between your dogs or your dog and friends at the dog park.

Another aspect of Dr. Ward’s talk was about partner preferences. She found that (out of 1,300 instances of play initiation), the young puppies from 3 to 8 weeks showed no partner preference, the 10-23 week old pups the same, but the older juveniles (27-40 weeks) began to show strong preferences to play with one other individual from their litter. This preference was stable across time periods, and suggests that dog often form long lasting bonds with other dogs that should be acknowledged. The fact that some of our dogs become close friends with other dogs is, of course, not news to us, but I think it is important to remind ourselves that long-term stable relationships with another dog might be important to the dogs who live with people but not another member of the same species.

I think about that with my Will, who plays with Lassie several times a day, but I wouldn’t say they are close friends.  Will adores a  young Cavalier King Charles Spaniel… Brody, who comes to visit on occassion, but is moving to Florida soon. I’d love to get Will  a play mate, but hesitate to get another dog during Lassie’s last years. I am pretty darn sure she is not interested in sharing any more of  my attention… it’s tough, isn’t it, when you know one dog needs something that is the opposite of what the other dogs needs.  Will does have some other play buddies, but I think I should go out of my way to find him more; he and Brody seemed to have a special connection. I wonder if he will miss him? (I will! Not to mention missing his human!)

Speaking of play–here’s my colleague and dear friend Dr. Karen London, ‘playing’ on our way to dinner in downtown Louisvile.

Well, I’ve edited and compressed 31 separate videos for my 2 talks at APDT. Whew. They aren’t perfect, but some of them are truly instructive and a few are just plain fun. It’s been like being in a tunnel for the last 4 days working on these things, and still… I continue to be fascinated by all the issues related to play between people and other animals. One of the the things I’ll be talking about at APDT is how often dogs intersperse PAUSING with active motor patterns. As I watched videos of dogs playing I was impressed by how many times dog would use some typically exaggerated motor activity, whether it was a bite or a hip slam, and then stop and either stand still, or stay still in a play bow position. If you think about it, play bows not only provide information to the receiver that what happens next is “just in fun,” they also give the participants a ‘time out’ to manage their emotions.

I suspect this is one of the problems that people run into when they are playing with dogs. People don’t tend to pause as often during play, and often end up over arousing their dog. The dog spirals up, loses emotional control and ends up biting too hard or cycling into aggression. I’m going to suggest in my talk that dog training classes should include a section on play, including the importance of teaching both people and dogs a “pause” that is on cue for both of them.

I’m also going to talk about play signals… how individuals of both species tell one another that they want to play. It turns out that signals are relatively species specific. Here are 2 photos illustrating typical “I want to play” signals from a person and a dog:

Here is Jasper telling his human he’d like to play, using the stereotypical play bow of wolves and dogs.

Here is primate Sara  doing the classic “play face” of  a primate!  Primate usually communicate play with their faces, while dogs use a  full body posture…

How do you tell your dog you want to play?

And here’s a photo from fall at the farm. It is heartbreakingly beautiful right now.. I have to admit I am loathe to leave the dogs, the farm and the fall colors. But I know that once I arrive at APDT I’ll be caught up in the joy of intellectual stimulation and seeing good friends and colleagues. Come up and say hi if you’re there!

Oh, what a joy to be home in fall on the farm. It may have rained much of the weekend, but that’s okay, we needed the moisture. In spite of the rain I got to spend much of Sunday out in the country with Willie, Lassie and weekend visitor Brody (the Cavalier) out in the hills collecting wild apples.  Five huge buckets full. Yum yum. Yum for us… I made applesauce much of Sunday afternoon (thanks to friend Harriet who leant me her Foley  Food Mill; now that’s a handy item) while the dogs slept. Yum for the sheep: the ewe flock got to crunch away on juicy apples that I tossed into their feeders.  The lamb flock is separate (I don’t castrate the ram lambs, so the boys are now old enough to breed their mommas. Not a great idea!) and has access to lots of wild apples on their own, so everyone at lots of apples yesterday.

Sheep ADORE apples, they crunch into them as if eating candy. I love feeding them this food that comes free and wild every year in southern  Wisconsin. What a time of bounty. I’d include a photo I took of red ripe apples, but I don’t have it here at work. I’ll bring it in tomorrow.

But back to dogs… isn’t it wonderful when your dogs have had plenty of exercise and sleep soundly in the house while you putter at something in the kitchen? I remember a few years ago Jim and I were spoiled by our hosts when we went to Montana for me to do a seminar. (Our hosts were Nancy Tanner and the Galloping Dog Agility & Flyball Club in Bozeman. What wonderful folks… visit them at www.gallopingdog.com) The day before the seminar, we were taken on a 12 mile horseback ride into the mountains. What a joy. I used to ride a lot, so it was like going home for me. (Jim had never ridden, what an introduction! He was amazing, I have to say. And so was his wonderfully reliable horse.) I bring this trip up because two dogs accompanied us on the ride, running helter skelter, back and forth for the entire ride. They easily  must have run over twenty miles.  I swear, they were barely tired at the end of the trip.  Oh, if only our dogs could have exercise like that every day! Okay, maybe that wouldn’t be good for a pug, but think of all those retrievers and herding dogs bred to work who don’t have that much to do. What a wonderful feeling it is for those of us who own them to see our dogs sleeping soundly after a good, long session of healthy exercise. Ummmm. Part of why Karen London and I wrote Play Together, Stay Together is to help people find ways to exercise their dogs for their sake, as well as for their dogs. I have included a photo of Mr. Will enjoying one of his toys. It always lifts my heart to watch dogs playing.

Meanwhile,  Willie slept for a couple of hours, and then ran his tail off searching the high pasture for the lamb flock in the evening so that we could bring them down for their grain. He came home happy to gobble up his dinner and rest again, while we sat down to a dinner from fresh, local and ogranic sources. Yumm. I do love fall!

Applesauce, anyone?

I’m a little behind today, because yet again I stayed up too late watching the Olympics.  Addicting, aren’t they? And I’m not even that interested in sports… I was the girl who stood in right field in enforced elementary school softball games saying “Please don’t hit the ball to me, please don’t hit the ball to me.” But I can’t resist the drama of watching other people turning purposeless games into lifetime commitments and prime time excitement for the rest of us.

How fitting that today our new booklet about playing with our dogs just arrived from the printer.  I co-wrote it with Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist Karen London, and there is nothing like writing about how to play (and how not to play) with your dog to get you thinking about WHY we play with our dogs, HOW we play and all the ways that play can enhance our relationship with dogs and at the same time, cause terrible trouble. I hesitate to bring up the play booklet now, it seems a bit self serving, but this has been such a big part of my life for so many months that it’s hard not to write about it.

Here’s what seems crazy: as vitally important as it feels to encourage people to use play more to train their dog, I think one of my favorite parts of the book is the section on how NOT to play with your dog. That seems so negative, and yet, I’ve seen so many problems created by inappropriate play.  It’s so easy for members of two different species to confuse one another. For example, research shows that one way people try to get their dog to play is to pat the ground–which in my experience is a great way to lie down when asked, because it seems to effective at getting them to do so!. Lots of people push their dogs away with their hands when the dogs jump up, and yet to dogs, the people are telling the dog they want to play.

Most importantly, twenty years of working with serious problems in dogs has shown me how often people aren’t aware that their dog is becoming overly aroused during play. Being out of emotional control is a problem in our species too (”I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out”)–you’d think we’d know to watch for it in dogs.  Ironically, while over arousal is a potential problem in play, you can use play to teach your dog to calm down on cue using play.

The possible best, and the potential worst of our interactions with dogs–that’s play in a nut shell.  And now, although I really think I should write more, I just can’t resist going home to go play with my dogs…

Will and I playing one of his favorite games.

He has even taught me how to toss things with a small degree of accuracy. Will wonders never cease?