Why we need "no" in our toolbox

The other day I experienced the worst plane trip of my life. I was seated in front of Damien the Hellspawn who screamed non-stop for two full hours. Was Damien the Hellspawn a wee little baby unable to clear his ears? No. Damien the Hellspawn was a child whose parents had no tools to tell him to shut the hell up!

They were desperate (the parents) to shut this little hellion up, I could tell because they kept attempting to negotiate with him, "do you want a cracker?", "Do you want to sit with mommy?" to which Damien, in between Hell-shrieks would gasp out the word, "No".

These parents had no tools. They had been told that to tell their little Hellspawn "no", or to enforce the "no" with something more than references of future losses (they actually threatened to not take him on vacation anymore! Vacation! What need or understanding has a 4 year old of vacation?!?). They were trapped in a parenting hell created to minimized negative reinforcement in child-rearing. I, of course, would have hauled the child into the bathroom and threatened him with physical harm, which may be one of the reasons I do not have children.

This got me to thinking about what we do to our dogs when we take away our tools for negative reinforcement.  These parents may have deeply desired euthanizing, or at minimum, dumping at the nearest shelter their Hellspawn, but luckily for Damien there is parental attachment, and barring that, laws, to prevent them from simply dumping him and getting a better child. No such safety net exists for our dogs.

I am not going to tell anyone that the way that they choose to train their dog is wrong (unless they're flat-out unfair and abusive), and I know that there are people capable of training creatures like Damien the Hellspawn without the use of violence whether implied or real. Good for them, the world is no doubt a better place for the lessons they can teach us all.

However, the shaming of people who do not adhere to the positive-only crowd is a problem and it is something that needs to be exorcised from training discussions as being unproductive and dangerous. Positive-only sounds wonderful. It sounds happy and fluffy and friendly. Who doesn't want to be happy and fluffy and friendly with their dogs? After all, aren't our dogs our companions?

I love my dogs, they are wonderful members of my family, and much of their training is positive; not due to any philosophical adherence, but because dogs instinctively want to please and it's easy. I am no dog trainer, but I have a deeply rooted understanding of animal psychology and cause and effect from years of training horses and working in veterinary hospitals. I can tell you with absolute authority that your dog will only listen to you for as long as there is something in it for them. If you want to test that sentence out try calling your dog off a squirrel sometime. I'm sure that there are excellent positive-only folks who can call a high drive dog off a rabbit, but I can't, nor can most people.

Most people, by the way, are the people who own dogs and give up dogs to shelters and who get sucked into fuzzy sounding ideas like positive-only. These are the people who are hearing that telling your dog "no!"  is tantamount to animal abuse, and that you should never ever use physical force on a dog, and you should never use anything but a flat collar on a dog, and you should never, never, NEVER!!!

And so they never, because they were told they should never, but they're not dog trainers, they're just people, and their dog isn't easy, and their timing isn't good, and one thing leads to another and the dog ends up at the shelter; the people get a new puppy, and the whole sad episode repeats. The good news, of course, is that their dog was trained using positive reinforcement only. yay!!

Well, I do. My dogs know "no!" and if they put their teeth on me when I'm pulling a sticker out of their paw they get a little thump on the nose with my fingers. If they are down at the chicken coop and begin acting like barbarians they are told to go home, and that is reinforced with hand waving and thrown dirt if necessary. There are positive-only folks who would paint these actions as dog abuse, and that is where I have a real issue.

You want to try training your dogs a different way? Be my guest. I came out of the equine world where no two trainers ever had the same solutions to a problem. If you're smart about that, you find out that there are different solutions and as long as they are all fair and respectful of the horse, then good on you! Keep trying until you get it right, was my mantra. I rode a lot of different horses, and what worked on one didn't work on another. Every time I spoke with another trainer I listened for their solutions and I gave myself more tools.

Tools solve problems. No two animals are the same. No one ever told me that I could only use half my tools; that I had to accomplish the same tasks with one hand behind my back. That is what we're doing, not to trainers, who will do what they want regardless of public opinion, but to everyday pet owners.  That's unfair.

We need to provide pet owners with more, not fewer, tools, to help them retain relationships with their dogs. We need to allow pet owners to know that they have options in dog training and that those options are different, not abuse. We need to stop taking tools away from people and instead provide people with lots of different tools that are all fair to their dogs, and fair to the owners. Because, while positive-only is fair to dogs; in the hands of a lot of every day people it is not fair to them, and these people end up with dysfunctional dogs who cannot move to the next apartment with them, or don't like the new baby, or one of a thousand different excuses to "we just didn't get along."

If you can train your dog using positive reinforcement only, I commend you, but don't pretend that you have all the answers, because you can't. None of us does.

Thank you for reading, please join the conversation on Facebook.

Safety

We all want our pets to be safe. I work hard to ensure that my dogs don't end up injured or sick when it can be avoided, as do most people who own pets. As a member of the veterinary community I am forever advocating those things which are the most conservative, safest course of action.

That being said, I also believe that dogs and cats, horses and goats are still animals, and as such they deserve a life that is as full as we, their caretakers can possibly make it. Herein lies the contradiction. A cat that lives outdoors has a full and glorious life, for an average of about 4 years. An indoor cat may have a lazier, less excitement filled life, but will live upwards of 20 years.

The stakes are even higher for horses. Horses seem to spend their lives in pursuit of disabling injury or gruesome death. While they do not appear to be safe anywhere, we know that the least safe place is a pasture, however, a horse in pasture is also a happy horse.

So, where do we strike the balance? The simplest answer would be that any action that provides an animal a safe environment yet denies them the ability to pursue basic functions of their species is fundamentally unfair.

It is a simple sentence to write, and a much harder sentence to act upon. Cats are hunters. They stalk, catch, terrorize and eat prey. They cannot do this very well in most homes. Cat owners can, through interactive play, mimic the feel of most of these actions for their cats, and those cats may do fine living an indoor only life. I suspect, however, that most cats do not receive stimulating play that mimics hunting or stalking behaviors on a regular basis. These cats lie around their homes like pillows and are generally overweight and bored.

I'm not attacking cat owners here, nor am I making a judgment call. Being bored and fat describes many Americans and most teenagers, we certainly wouldn't recommend chucking them into the wild and telling them that they'll have a better life if they are permitted to chase wild animals with a knife.

What I am saying is that in a society increasingly risk-averse, and in a society that is increasingly seeing pets as furry people, we run the danger of failing to provide the basic needs of the very pets we seek to keep safe.

We also run the very real risk of judging people who we feel are being unnecessary blasé' about the health of their animals. Horses once lived in barbed wired fences. Horses in large pastures still do. Tell a backyard horse owner that your horse is in a barbed wire pasture and you may as well tell them that you trained them using a baseball bat. Barn cats are going extinct, for good or ill, largely because as a society the idea of a cat outside in the barn (a self-contradictory statement if there ever were one) is akin to animal abuse.

We all like to use the phrase, "I would never..." to express our disgust at whatever it is that has offended us. "I would never..." leaves a great deal to be desired when it comes to reasoned discourse. Obviously all of us know that there are many things that "no sane person would ever.." and these we have agreed upon as a society, but when we start off from our limited perspective, we limit the conversation.

We need to realize that animal abuse is an overt act that causes pain in an animal. It is not a husbandry choice that causes inconvenience. Cats have lived in barns for millennia, dogs have slept on porches since there were porches to sleep in, before that they slept around the campfire, as
we all did, and just because you would never, doesn't mean that no one should.

Common sense pets

There is a mania gripping this country regarding pets. It is being driven by people who love animals, who work with rescues, who share horror stories of abuse on social media, and it runs the risk of placing those of us who care about our animals, but who do not call them 'babies', who do not think clicker training can solve all problems, who think that horses should have jobs and no harm will come to most dogs if they sleep outside, on the margins of the pet-owning world.

Long gone are the days of socially acceptable barn cats breeding generations of inbred unvaccinated kittens, or people who shoot the family dog because it ate the chickens being permitted to say so in normal company. These people and these situations still exist, but they have been moved to the fringes, their actions border and in some cases cross the line into abuse and actionable intervention by legal authorities. The world is a better place because of this.

However, we are in danger of swinging past the middle ground where barn cats - spayed and vaccinated - can still exist, and a dog that eats chickens can be re-homed without recrimination. We are fast approaching a world where government driven by public opinion, not science, or fact will dictate when it is too hot or cold for pets to spend time outdoors, where horses who do not wear blankets or live in barns are considered 'neglected' or where hunters are cursed as murderers by people who eat meat and wear leather.

We are collectively losing our minds where animals are concerned, and it is my contention that there needs to be a voice of reason for those of us who believe that animals are not babies, those mewling helpless infant humans who cannot feed themselves, but are independent beings who have urges and needs that are both real and often underserved, and who need advocates who respect that fact.

I am a certified veterinary technician. I believe in excellent veterinary care for pets and find it abhorant when people choose price over quality for veterinary care. I believe in spaying and neutering, I believe that pets from the pound can be wonderful, and purebred pets from backyard breeders and puppy mills can be costly, heartbreaking disasters.

I worked for several decades in the equine industry. I hate unfair training practices, am not a fan of Tennessee Walkers and suffer from a strong love/hate relationship with horse racing. I think too many horse breeds have been damaged by judges who have lost touch with performance, and I think that even my beloved dressage sometimes rewards horses with forced, ugly but rhythmic movement over beautiful and flowing but slightly uneven tests.

I was a vegetarian for 8 years, and I still cringe whenever I think of factory farming. I try to find ways to eat from better sources, but sometimes I fail. I have never tasted veal, and never will. I have eaten a bison killed by my own father and found it very tasty. I feel that an animal that lives happy and free and has one very bad day is better off than an animal forced into cramped, unsanitary and unnatural housing for the length of it's entire brief life and then is systematically killed. I think we would all be better people if we were forced into fields with guns and had to choose the cow that would feed our family for the coming year.

I believe that everyone who loves and cares for animals and pets is at some points a hypocrite. We will be horrified at a photo of a dead giraffe killed by a hunter, yet we will laugh with forks full of chicken killed for us by proxy in the millions. We will find the actions of others always worse than that of our own.

I believe that we as animal lovers, and advocates must own our hypocrisy. We have to own the reality that we are not dealing with rational forces on the fringes of the debate in which we are engaged. We must let science and reality and common sense dictate our stances, and when our stances diverge (as they must - since we're all hypocrites) we have to be watchful that we do not devolve into name calling and accusation, but rather enter (as best we can) into reasoned debate, and be prepared to find that we are wrong.

Also we have to be prepared to understand that many of these debates are opinions, the facts such as they are, are muddy at best. We are entitled to hold those opinions, and entitled to explain how we formed them in an ongoing and rational debate, but when reasoned opinions are overtaken by dogma we all fall into the trap of losing credibility. Animals demand our care and our support, they demand lives that are respectful of what their lives mean to them, not how we perceive them or how we would wish them to be. This should be the underlying goal of all animal lovers, and when we lose sight of this we endanger the very lives we seek to protect.

Healthy vs Natural

Thee is a growing trend in the US to look for what we call 'natural', we attempt to mimic what we were meant to eat in nature how we were supposed to move in nature, etc.. and then we extrapolate that to our pets.  We ask ourselves, what does natural dog care look like? What does natural veterinary care look like?

I absolutely understand this. I write this sitting outside in nature listening to my chickens who will hopefully begin delivering me absolutely natural eggs. Many of the advances that we have made towards feeding the many have caused an unnatural balance to evolve in our diets, and have affected the quality of the food we eat. I am all for natural.

The question that we must of course balance is, what is natural vs what is healthy. My chickens are eating free range foods that are healthy and natural, and should create healthy eggs for me to eat. Leaving them outside with the coyotes to eat is also natural, but it benefits neither them nor me, so at night, they are unnaturally locked up. Domesticating them in the first place is distinctly unnatural, however, foraging for puny little quail eggs will not keep me fed. I must balance the natural with the unnatural to keep me and my animals safe and healthy.

We all want what is healthiest for ourselves and for our pets. However, even knowing what is 'natural' is fraught with debate. Are grains natural for dogs? They've been eating our scraps for tens of thousands of years, how long does it take before what we have chosen to feed them becomes "natural"?  Are grains natural for humans even, we've only been cultivating grain for about 10,000 years.

Before we humans began to cultivate grain we were hunter gatherers, we lived 'naturally' off the land, and had enough to just get by, we were smaller, suffered from malnutrition, and lost babies by the score to disease and malnutrition. in bad years we died naturally of starvation and parasite infestation. With the advent of grain we starved less often, but began to live 'unnaturally'. With the advent of grain we were able to begin cultivating livestock, including my chickens, which in turn fed us, providing superior unnatural nutrition and protein.

Feeding our dogs and cats bagged food is inherently unnatural. Feeding our dogs and cats our overly fat, corn fed, antibiotic riddled livestock can hardly be deemed more natural. My dogs eat horse manure and grasshoppers, they eat grass and if I let them, my chickens, that is natural, but will grasshoppers and manure be enough? What is a dog's optimal nutrition? 

What to know about 'natural' is that it is neither a panacea nor a curse. It is something that like everything else in our lives must be weighed carefully. Should we as a rule pursue eating natural foods? By all means, should those natural foods include raw meats and unpasteurized dairy? Not if health is our goal. If pursuing 'natural' for the sake of health is the goal, then choosing unpasteurized milk and eating raw meat will lead to a whole slew of natural diseases and possibly a very natural premature death,

With our pets we must balance these same issues. Is whole raw meat natural for an animal that has been fed left overs and scraps for 30,000 years? Who knows? Will feeding in this manner convey better health? Possibly, there is no way of really knowing. We obsess over natural food when the things that truly affect our health and the health have very little to do with the essential fatty acids in the eggs I eat.

People in third world countries, and their pets and livestock, live naturally. They drink water from rivers, and eat what comes to hand. They have no worries about chemicals in their environment, nor whether or not their beef was grass fed. They are living naturally, and dying young and often of diseases long since gone here. They may have the benefit of a natural diet, but they are dying because they lack our very unnatural Western Medicine. The much maligned curse of people who worship natural above all things is the one glaring difference between dying in infancy and living long enough to worry about pasture raised eggs.

Western Medicine is not natural. Western Medicine has eschewed herbal remedies and witch doctors for chemicals and drugs. It ignores stories and leans heavily on facts. Western Medicine doesn't care at all about natural.

We must remember that naturally wolves live to be about 7 and we live to be about 35-40. Dying young and dying often are natural. Western medicine has decided that in the face of death and disease natural has no place.

It is trendy in certain circles to point to our modern unnatural world and say, "Look at all the cancer, the dementia, the autoimmune diseases! Western Medicine is unnatural and causes these things." To that I must admit that I absolutely agree!

Western Medicine does cause cancer. It causes cancer for the same reason it also causes dementia, Alzheimer's, and other illnesses that come with age. Vaccines and modern medicine have allowed us and our pets to live long enough to encounter diseases that affect the old. Cancer being the number one cause of death in pets is just as unnatural as many of our pets seeing their teen years. It is unnatural that modern medicine has conquered so many of the diseases that used to make old age a rarified thing.

I'll take unnatural in that case. Natural has its place, but when it is pursued blindly in the face of logic it becomes ludicrous. I will try to buy grass fed beef, and I will allow my dogs to supplement their diet with whatever vile thing they can dig up, but once a year we will all trek to our various doctors and veterinarians, and we will pursue a long and unnatural old age.