Divvying up the adventures

Ketchum and Cassidy waiting for me to get the ATV started 

I have no idea how people can have half a dozen kids! I have (nearly) half a dozen dogs, and finding one-on-one time for each of them can be a challenge! I'm sure everyone handles their own multi-dog households differently, and it always astonishes me when I meet someone with a whole pack of well-behaved dogs, because I know that that doesn't happen by accident!

Here in Arizona we have the luxury of no snow days, and I'm rural which means I can cheat and take all of my dogs out simultaneously without worrying about leashing the whole lot. It gets hot here in the summer, which does sometimes constrain our out-and-about options to half an hour or so in the morning and maybe a repeat in the evening, but usually there are few days when the dogs don't get a run in.

In the morning I lock up Dice and Cody so that I can let the chickens out. I sit with the chickens while they eat free food for an hour. I try to let them out several times a day, but if it's hot, and we get no afternoon cloud cover, then they'll have to make do with an hour.

The chickens come first because they are locked up, and they're happier if they're let out for some period. Because of predation I sit with them until they are put away.

After the chickens I take all of the dogs out with the ATV. If it is cool we can go for 4-5 miles; if it's getting hot then they may have to make do with a mile or two. Dogs trot at 7 mph, and so Kate and Cassidy trot along at that speed. Ketchum and Cody can sprint along at upwards of 25 mph (any faster and I chicken out!) so sometimes, especially on the flats and when we return home, I let them race the ATV, for a couple of tenths to a quarter mile at a time. Then we stop and wait for Dice who is younger than Cassidy and Kate, but has no intrinsic need to race the gals, and Cassidy and Kate to catch up.

There are usually some lizard and squirrel chases to liven up the morning run, and Cassidy will try to hang with the younguns before she slips off the back. Kate has lost all desire in her elderstateslady capacity to act like the foolish kids and trots along contentedly at 7 mph.

Dice loves the runs, but has no desire to chase Ketchum or Cody. He wants to sniff and pee on things and that is about it. He trots and canters along, but I don't think he has ever felt the need to drop the hammer and sprint all-out.

After our run, everyone returns home and if it's warm out they take turns laying in the pool. I usually spend some time outside if its not stupid hot, either weeding or doing poultry-related chores, and the dogs lounge in the shadows.

Later on, when I go back down to the coop, Cody and Dice go into the kennel, and Ketchum comes down and hangs out with me. This is her one-on-one time. There is no training involved, she's eight and knows everything she cares to know. She sits by my chair and gets petted while she keeps an eye on the poultry and looks for coyotes. Sometimes she wanders off to sample some chicken droppings or to enquire on the whereabouts of a particularly irksome lizard, but usually she just lounges and accepts belly rubs.

Kate has been the Official Camp Dog at the 24 Hours in the Old Pueblo Mountain Bike Race for nearly a decade

Cassidy finds indoor life dull and prefers to be outside keeping an eye on the vulture situation. Because she is an elderstateslady she spends much of her day sprawled out in various shady spots. Her nights are spent on patrol for interlopers. She follows Ketchum partway to the coop with me and then lies down in the driveway and keeps an eye out for criminal activity. Cassidy is somewhat aloof and wants attention on her terms, so I make an effort at least once a day to carve out time just for her (usually brushing because being a German Shepherd she is somehow capable of shedding out her entire hair coat weekly and never going bald).

Kate lives inside and gets attention at every turn. She has recently gone deaf, and that coupled with her overall fearful worldview has lead to an increased effort to include her on dog-related adventures outside with the pack. For reasons known only to her she sometimes goes into hiding and effort is required to bring her outside with the other pups.

Cody hiking on Mount Lemmon

She wonders why we're so slow!

Cody spends much of her days indoors because she is incapable of relaxing outside, there is just too much to do. So she spends her day following me from room to room. Usually at some point she gets 15 minutes of training. She goes to training for half an hour on Thursdays (agility). She is also in the adventure rotation pool.

Dice likes to keep a watch on the yard from the front porch. He cannot seem to relax inside, so for him, one-on-one time is more important than for Cody who gets it all the time. He comes in at least once a day for 15 minutes of training and goes to dog training class (manners and just getting out in the world) on Wednesdays. He is also in rotation in the adventure pool.

Dice waiting for us on a run

It was warm, he chose to wait in the shade

The adventure pool includes the two younger dogs, though Kate gets to go on longer adventures out of town, and Ketchum sometimes goes on runs with me, though she is not in the official rotation. The official rotation is between Cody and Dice - both young dogs requiring additional socializing and exercise. I run with friends usually one evening a week, go to dog training twice a week, and run with my running partner on longer (8+ mile) runs or bike rides on weekends.

Any of these adventures that are dog-safe and in a dog-legal area can involve either Cody or Dice. They get to go out, meet new people and explore new places, while they get to run along for 4 or more miles. On longer runs I bring water and a bowl for the dogs and on a 12 miler I brought snacks.

I feel that the hardest part of owning a pack of dogs is providing for everyone's needs including that much coveted one-on-one time with me. Some dogs require more of it while others need less. If Cassidy thinks a quick swoop by for petting on her way to other adventures is good enough for her, then it is certainly good enough for me.

Why dogs do what they do

I often find it surprising how many people think their dog's behavior is abnormal when in fact it is dogs being dogs. Dogs chase (and will kill) small squeaky animals, they will bark at strangers, they will jump up on people, they will dig holes, and left to their own devices they may eat your couch. The issues that many dog owners have with these behaviors is knowing how to take what their dog's instincts demand that they do and curtail it or redirect it so that they can live in our non-doggy society.

Lets start with small squeaky creatures. Your poodle was once a wolf, certainly not recently, but recent enough ago that hunting and prey drive remains an active part of your dog's behavior. Some breeds have actually had their prey drive refined until they are as predatory if not more so than a wolf (most wolves will not hunt when full, no terrier, no matter how fat will stop chasing its desired prey.)

Terriers, hounds and herding breeds stand out as having been bred to retain predatory behavior. Terriers were bred to kill or chase the animal that usually shows up in its name (rat, fox, bull). These dogs are hard wired to chase things that flee, and to continue chasing until she can chase no more.

Border collies have lots of prey drive. Cody would very much like to eat my geese!

This does not mean that terriers cannot live with small squeaky things (children, hamsters, cats, etc...) it simply means that we, the humans need to establish parameters, and in dogs (as opposed to cats) these boundaries are usually fairly easy to establish. Terriers may have been bred to kill things like rats, but they often lived on farms, where getting over enthusiastic and eating the entire flock of chickens could lead to a very permanent and unhappy result, so they are just as hardwired to accept a list of can chase and cannot chase, and to know the difference.

Where we get into trouble is when we think we understand the list one way and where the dog understands it another. For example, your terrier may get along fine with your cat. That does not mean that your terrier is safe around all cats.

My border collies know that the rules of chasing are: chickens: no, everything else on earth: yes. If a raven which happens to be black and bird shaped takes refuge down among the chickens, accidents could happen. It is my responsibility to watch my dogs and keep my chickens safe from their natural predatory behavior.

Additionally undoing a behavior is harder than establishing it in the first place, especially if the rewards outweigh the risks. Kate has had the opportunity to sample chicken on the hoof so to speak, and apparently it was yummy. Now that I have chickens again, not only do they live in Ft. Knox, but Kate is not permitted to venture even close to the coop.

Kate misread the BARF diet as standing for Bones and Raw Feathers and ate a dozen chickens

Barking causes all sorts of stress for pet owners because incessant barking can make a dog a miserable neighbor. First know that occasional barking at real and perceived (within reason) threats is normal. My dogs, for example have largely agreed that human intruders are fine, but ravens, vultures and coyotes are not. All three of these animals 'respond' to my dogs by fleeing (in the case of ravens and vultures of course they are probably completely unaware of the ruckus their flyby has caused, but they had no intentions of lingering and so, the dogs have effectively defended the property from them.)

The problem arises when dogs are bored and they have few outlets and thus they bark out of frustration and to amuse themselves, the fact that everything they bark at (like the ravens and vultures mentioned above) usually leaves, only encourages the behavior.

A bored dog will take any normal behavior and amplify it. Yards are boring. Being outside, or inside alone is boring.

Kitty was a very active dog even into her teens, she would have been difficult to keep happy in a yard without a lot of outlets for her energy!

As a rule of thumb, all dogs should be allowed to bark an 'alert'. This is one or two barks that tells you, "intruder!" Your job is to then take over. For example when it comes tp ravens and vultures, my dogs bark "invaders from the sky!!!" I ignore them and the invader disappears. If the raven decides to alight, and my dogs continue to alert, then I step outside to make threats to all involved parties. My dogs know that I have been made aware of the situation (attack raven on premises) and I have elected to call them all back to the house. All is well in the world.

I never yell at my dogs for telling me that something is there. I want them to tell me something is there. What I do not want them to do is to continue to tell me something is there. Usually after a few barks I intervene by saying the barking dog's name. They aren't in trouble, they have simply been acknowledged, and usually they will ignore the criminal bird.

In the event something more legitimate is outside then I investigate. Again, I have asked my dogs (and they have thousands of generations of genetic engineering backing my request) to be on the lookout for intruders. That they have chosen ravens and vultures as intruders is up to them. I have few legitimate intruders so they will have to make do.

I have had senior dogs who were losing their hearing begin to bark randomly, and since they cannot hear me, I had to track them down and assure them that all was well in the world. Right now, Cassidy who is deaf as a post barks randomly at inexplicable threats. At first she would not stop barking until I found her and touched her to snap her out of it. Now she barks an alert and then stops. If no other dogs join her, then I know that there is no real concern.

When I lived in town, my special ed dog, Oakley, was a committed barker. She was young and rowdy, and hated my car to the point where taking her out on runs in the desert was a nightmare, so she wore a bark collar. The bark collar she wore allowed her three barks in a row (arf, arf, arf.) the normal warning number. At four, she got a beep. at five she got a tingle, if she kept going, the collar kept increasing the negative reinforcement. There can be no better example of cause and effect than a bark collar. She wore it for a month, and years later as a senior when she forgot how to stop barking (she always knew how to start barking, but for her momentum seemed to prevent stopping) all I needed to do was yell out her name to interrupt the behavior.

Poor Oakley was just a strange hound. She was happy in her peculiar little world.

I find dogs who jump on people to be annoying. I think it's like being bear hugged by a stranger. I find the familiarity unsettling and rude. Dogs jump on people because they are a) allowed to, and b) that's where the action is.

I greet every dog on the ground. I never punish a dog for jumping on me, I simply place it on all fours and pet it there. My own dogs do not jump on me or strangers. I do sometimes allow my dogs to jump up, but only on command, and only on me.

If I have a young enthusiastic jumper at my house (I currently have two) I ask people to please put them back on the ground and pet them there when they jump up. It's as simple as that. The dog wants attention, they get it on the ground.

Digging is what dogs do. They do it to find a cool spot to lie, to make a comfy bed to curl up, to find a yummy rodent and out of boredom. Before you can begin to address the behavior, it helps to know what is causing it.

Personally, I allow my dogs to dig. I have plenty of space for them to dig in, and its hot here in Arizona, they especially like to excavate under my cars and in a pomegranate tree well. Oakley, my special ed dog was an inveterate digger. She would take it upon herself to randomly unearth a potted rose one week, then take a six month hiatus and then dig up all of my peppers, leaving them to die alone in the scorching sun. Threats of euthanasia not withstanding, you cannot punish a dog for doing these things because you will almost never catch them in the act, and even if you do, all they will learn is that digging in front of the humans is bad, digging in privacy is good.

Some study eventually informed me that Oakley's seemingly random assaults were not always entirely random. She loved soft new dirt, especially cow manure smelling dirt. I learned that to protect my innocent plants from her murderous rampages I had to stay one step ahead.  I either put the plots out of reach, or placed huge rocks in places where I did not wish her to dig. Eventually she had no other choice but to dig in places where it was easiest and where I had no vested interest. She did have occasional flashbacks but they were rare.

I wish I could tell you that there was a simple way to stop your dog digging, but there is none. A tired dog is less likely to dig. A dog who is otherwise engaged is less likely to dig. In the end your plants may end up living in little prison camps.

What I will say is that by providing a place (like a plant well) where your dogs can dig goes a long way towards alleviating, and in most cases solving the digging issue altogether. I have five dogs, and no one digs up my plants or creates random holes in my yard.

One day I heard this peculiar noise. It was a raspy, weird grinding sound that sounded like it was coming directly from the house itself. I set off in search of the confounding sound and found my 8 year old, schutzhund-trained German Shepherd, Dax calmly eating my front porch step. I said his name, he got up and walked over to me. I scratched his ears and walked over to the step that he had found so suddenly tasty. I could find no evidence that it had recently dipped in pot roast or bathed in cat food.  I walked five feet past the step and picked up a bone and held it out to him, and he took it, acted coy and elaborately swooped off with it hoping that I would chase him. He never attempted to eat the house again.

Dax ate a porch step, but seems unconcerned

The point of this story is to illustrate the hardwiring in a dog that compels him to chew. Chewing releases endorphins in dogs and relaxes them. A dog has an innate need to chew, and in a perfect world I would tell you that if you provide your dog with the right number and type of chew toys they will never chew up things that you care about. We do not live in a perfect world.

My property is littered with what looks like the remains of a cow blown into very small fragments. This is the remains of all the raw marrow bones that I have given the dogs through the years. There are also a few Kong toys, a tennis ball, and whole hoard of trees dropping any number of sticks. Through the years my dogs have found that these items alone do not satisfy. Kitty once ate my wisteria plant to the roots, a rose bush, and she brought home and seemed to happily enjoy chewing on an ocotillo stem (these are essentially sticks with thorns). Dax chewed the front porch step. Oakley became briefly obsessed with unearthing and bringing home aging PVC pipe. Ketchum loudly flings chunks of fire wood on my deck until I am forced to chuck it off into the desert.

I do not trust my dogs in the house without my eyes on them. Kate is the exception because she has zero desire to chew. I have cow rugs on the floor (rawhide), saddles (salt covered rawhide), and boots (chicken and goose poop covered rawhide). Likewise, nothing can be left outside without the understanding that it may get eaten. Dogs love work gloves (salty rawhide), and Ketchum once climbed onto a table to eat a hole in a mallet filled with some sort of black mystery sand.

I am not saying that you have to live in a house filled with holy furniture and a yard filled with ruined drip irrigation. What I am saying is that dogs really are sometimes just being dogs, and that we have to take the good with the bad. Of course redirect when you see them chewing on things that they should not, but also be aware that in many cases your dog has no idea that something is off-limits until you tell him and it's a big world out there. It never occurred to me that I would have to tell my dogs not to eat the house.

Many dog behaviors are just that dog behaviors. They are part of the hardwiring that comes with every dog. Some dogs will never dig a hole or chase the neighbor's cats. Others will ingest your entire chicken flock and eat your house. Perfection is unattainable in both humans and dogs. We can certainly make every effort to redirect our dog's behavior when it is inappropriate, but we must also be willing to live in a world where anything is possible.

Snake aversion training

I have noticed recently that there is a great deal of hesitancy on the part of some dog owners regarding snake aversion training. For those of you who do not live in an area of the country brimming with rattlesnakes, snake aversion training is the most commonly recommended technique to keep dogs safe in the event that they encounter a rattler.

Snake aversion training involves the use of one or more live rattlesnakes. The snakes are alive, and for the pet's safety sometimes their mouths are taped shut. The dog is affixed with a shock collar in a separate location from the snakes, and either a handler or better yet the owner approaches the snake with their dog. When the dog 'keys in' on the snake, he or she gets an electric shock, and the handler or owner does and abrupt about face and runs away from the scary snake, praising the dog for doing likewise.

First, is this cruel to the dog? Perhaps I'm old fashioned, but the way you learn not to drop bricks on your toes as a child is by dropping bricks on your toes. Likewise the way that we learn that bees sting is to get stung. Pain is not cruelty, especially if it is purposeful, brief, and associated with an action. Grab the bee, get stung, don't grab bees. Your dog has probably learned this very lesson with bees.

Snakes are not bees. Snake bites can be fatal. They are always dangerous, always expensive, always serious, and always extremely painful.

Does snake aversion training sometimes fail? Yes. When I was a kid my neighbor had a pit bull who sat down at the horse corral and swallowed so many bees and wasps that she had to be hospitalized because of swelling in her throat. Did she learn from this experience to not eat wasps and bees? Not especially. Terriers have been bred for hundreds of generations to kill and attack in the face of pain or even injury. These dogs can be difficult if not impossible to snake aversion train.

Because it sometimes fails is the whole idea to cruel to attempt? No. Snake bites kill dogs. Hiking in snake country is never a sure thing. I've seen dogs bitten in 'snake proofed' yards, and at the end of a 6' lead when it stuck its nose into a bush. The only safe way for your dog to be around venomous snakes is to be scared of them, and it is my contention that in the absence of complex language skills, pain is the most effective way that we have to get our point across.

Do I aversion train my own dogs? Yes, every one. As soon as a dog enters my yard its future will involve snake aversion training. My dogs live in the desert, they run with me, they run dirt roads, Hell, I've had rattlers on my deck (four this year!). Have I ever had a dog bitten by a rattler? No (fingers crossed - I don't think Cody 'got' her training, she seems blissfully ignorant of snakes - she will be retrained in the fall). I have had my dogs alert me to snakes on both the front and back porch. I have had them alert only on rattlers, or on anything that is vaguely snake-shaped. I recommend it to every client, and every veterinarian has recommended it without hesitation.

When you see what snake bites can do to a dog, there is no reason to do anything but teach dogs to avoid them in the first place. Veterinarians are in the same boat as parents trying to tell a teenager to avoid heroin. I cannot think of any intelligent person trying to point out all the good things that will happen to you if you avoid heroin without ever pointing out that you can die if you touch the stuff! We cannot live in a dangerous world and promise our pets only rainbows and kittens forevermore, that is just ridiculous.

Is it cruel to the snakes? How do I put this? I don't care if a snake snatched out of someone's yard has a frightening few hours. I like snakes, I do, and I certainly avoid killing them, even on my own property. But, really? Wearing a tape muzzle for a few hours? That isn't cruel - annoying perhaps, frustrating maybe - I certainly cannot speak for the intellectual depths of a snake, but regardless of their momentary discomfiture, I believe whole heartedly in snake aversion training.

Is there some positive non-aggressive way to snake aversion train a dog? I have heard that people have tried it. I have no idea if it successful, and honestly, I wouldn't risk my dog's life over a rigid, untried philosophy.

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Understanding pack behavior in dogs

In the past few years there has been an increasing trend to justify our actions and our dog's behavior on pack dynamics. This started largely with Ceasar Milan and his understanding of wolf behavior and alpha behavior (being a leader). Research quickly debunked much of this philosophy, however, we still see our dogs as members of our 'pack' and act accordingly based on what our understanding of what a wolf pack is.


Leaving aside the fact that your bichon frise hasn't been a wolf for 5,000-10,000 generations, lets take a look at what a real wolf pack is and is not.

Initial studies of wolf pack behavior and dynamics were carried out on captive wolf packs in zoos in the late 40's. These early papers saw interactions between wolf members that indicated that there was a hierarchy that was achieved and remained stable through wolf-on-wolf aggression and dominance. This idea was later codified in the book, Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species, by David Mech in 1970 (it is a highly popular book to this day).1.

This is the vision that many people have of a wolf pack, a 'leader' who rises through the ranks through  sheer willpower and leads the pack like a general.

Many people now know that this is not the truth. Researchers have been able to study wolves in the wild now for decades, and the old paradigm is wrong, so wrong that one of the researchers, David Mech has stated that his earlier works were in error.1

If you listen to Ceasar Milan speak you will see that though he still tells people that they need to exert some level of control over their dogs, he sees the solution as a strong, solid leadership style as opposed to brute force. In this new pack dynamic leaders lead because they are followed. A leader is chosen by the pack rather than by fiat. This sounds much more democratic and makes many people happy.

It isn't true however. The leaders of a wolf pack become leaders the same way that humans become heads of household; they have babies. A pack is a family unit, not a random assortment of strangers. Packs are made up of mom and dad and all the kiddies. And just like us, when the kiddies grow up they leave the pack and head off to start new lives of their own. Packs of wolves are nothing more than family units made up of parents and children (some packs are slightly more complicated in their makeup than this, but the general theme runs true.)

The 'alpha' male and female aren't leaders because they are bullies, or because they have mastered the art of speaking, rather they are leaders because they are surrounded by children. When the children start knowing enough to lead, they don't 'depose' their parents in some medieval coup, they simply pack up their gear and head out of town.

If a pack's territory is invaded by a neighboring pack's kids they do the wolf equivalent of calling the cops, by either driving out or killing the interloper.

So, let's return to your bichon, the long lost cousin to wolves. We have little way of knowing if dogs see us as fellow dogs other than by watching their behavior. Are we, in fact, members of their wolf pack and subject to the same rules and regulations as that pack?

The simple answer, from the gut, is no. Dogs do not see humans as dogs, otherwise we wouldn't have dog aggressive and human aggressive dogs. There could be no distinction. Dogs are not idiots, after all, they know that there are dog rules and behaviors and human rules and behaviors. We bare our teeth all the time, and our dogs do not act threatened as they would if another dog did the same.

So, where does all this 'members of the pack' stuff leave us? it leaves us with an understanding that when it comes to human-dog interaction there are probably no correlations in wolf behavior to help us. Dogs probably come to the table of human interaction with no expectations. We satisfy no intrinsic canine need by letting them sleep on the bed, just as we deny them none by allowing them to sleep on the porch.

Wolves expect their pack members to grow up and leave them at some point, which implies that there is no lifelong bond intrinsic to the nature of wolves (outside of the bonded breeding pair). A pet living in different homes is unlikely to be 'traumatized' by having lived in several households.

If anything, in the past 5000-10,000 canine generations we have made dogs more adaptable rather than less so. Dogs do not form wolf-like familial packs, even when they are feral. Dogs do not form life-long pair bonds with the opposite sex. Dogs are routinely removed from their first 'family' at 8-10 weeks and can live in harmony with strange non-familial dogs in numerous contexts.1

Dogs are not wolves, and in the case of the mythical 'alpha' wolf, neither are wolves. It is important, when studying the 'norms' of human-dog interaction that we understand that those norms are what we ourselves make them. Livestock guardian dogs are no more or less adapted to living outside with their stock rather than indoors with their humans than are poodles; we have made these lives for our dogs, and as much as we may want to define the rules of these encounters as "living with the pack' the facts fail to stand up.