Atomic Nerds

Via Smartdogs, an interesting and insightful review of Cesar Millan’s latest book. I realize a book review of a dog training book doesn’t sound that inherently interesting, but trust me, it is- it’s also a larger discussion about different and sometimes conflicting approaches and philosophies in dog training in general, as well as the larger subject of humans living with dogs. The review is where the real meat lies, so if you like the bits I touch on here, go read it.

I’ve not been a fan of Millan in the past, not because I thought he was always wrong- far from it- but because my major impression of him was based on his TV show when he was first gaining fame, in which his style was confrontational in a way that could be very dangerous for a lot of novice pet owners, and he put a lot of emphasis on DOE-minance and gave off some “dogs are just like wolves!” talk that was just flat bullshit, especially based on some of the things we’ve learned later about both dogs and wolves. (Short version: dogs really aren’t just like wolves, they’re just like dogs. Wild wolves aren’t nearly as rigidly heirarchical as we used to think.) Judging by the review, though, Millan’s matured quite a bit since that time. I may even wind up buying or borrowing this one.

One of the things I particularly liked was the distinction drawn between training a dog in the sense of teaching it to respond to commands and training it in the sense of teaching it what the rules are to live within your household and the human world at large. Often the former is a means to an end for the latter- it’s FAR easier to teach a dog not to jump by commanding it to sit or down when greeting someone, for example, than it is to start from trying to punish the jumping. What the dog really needs is a rule- this is how we greet people like a civilized animal- and the command gives a shortcut to teaching the rule by giving you something you can communicate more easily than “humans don’t like it when you put your paws on them”, and then giving the dog a way to get it what it wants- a greeting and some attention- without running afoul of the rules.

The discussion of behaviorism fits in well with this; behaviorism isn’t ethology and is inadequate when it comes to a universal approach to figuring out why a dog (or monkey or dolphin or rat) will do the things it does and how to convince it to do other things, but what it DOES represent is a sort of mammalian common speak for how to create commands, teach simple behaviors, and establish some sort of grounds for communication. Ethology likewise won’t tell you a damn thing about how to teach a dog to perform highly specific and chosen behaviors, but if you’re paying attention you WILL learn something about what it wants and needs and what sorts of communication will be likely to make sense to it.

I keep harping on “communication”, but that really is what you need before you can do anything else, no matter how you do it; you need to convince the dog that humans are intelligent social animals that can be communicated with and made sense of. If you have ever met anyone with little animal experience who thinks of them as basically four-legged biological machines with no real brain or personality, a dog who has never really had the chance to make sense of humans for whatever reason feels roughly the same- humans are tall, make constant noise that means nothing, and must be lived around rather than with.

Little-wolf talk aside, a dog must learn all sorts of things about humans in order to live as a reasonable family pet that its canine background does not prepare it for. Any dog learns that the faces humans make mean different things than the faces dogs make; that the things we do with our arms and hands mean different things than the things they do with their legs and paws. *Many* aspects of human life have no wild-wolf-in-the-woods analogue whatsover, and a dog that lives with humans has to learn how to learn things that are simply instinctually alien to them. The whole reason it works as well as it does is one instinct we’ve bred powerfully into them is a desire and capacity to watch us closely and *try* to make sense of us.

If anything I’m particularly sensitive to these distinctions because of how different (by breeding) my various dogs have been; I grew up with herding breeds (Shetland sheepdog, German shepherd) that were extremely “biddable”- eager to please humans for its own sake- and moved on to dogs (Akitas) that generally want a reason to do something beyond “it would make a human happy”. They’re happy enough when I’m happy, but when our interests conflict- that’s not enough on its own.

The herders all excelled at taught behaviors- the clearest and most direct “I want you to do this thing, now do it”- but the Akitas have been better at learning the shape of the rules in their world. Housebreaking was faster and easier, as was teaching the fuzzy concept of “Don’t destroy my stuff, here’s your stuff that you can bash on instead” as well as “furniture is not for you” and others. Part of it is that I’m simply a better trainer now than I was then, but part of it is that while the herders were generally always waiting for me to tell them to do something and were a bit anxious when no one was (leading to outlets like chewing), the Akitas are always watching the way we do everything in general, and are not fussed if no one is giving them directions.

In any case, Millan still isn’t without flaw (the book/review contains some of the weirdest shit I’ve ever heard Ian Dunbar say, for example), but the review and perhaps the book as well are well worth your time, especially when it comes to pondering on what it is we really want and need from dogs, and what constitutes a sensible way to communicate that to the dog.

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