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.