Expectations versus maturity - Part 2

Since I made that blog post last week about online acquaintances struggling with younger dogs in performance sports...I've done some more thinking while off showing in agility over the weekend and have more thoughts on this.

The more I think about this notion of pushing the maturity issue with younger dogs and the parallel idea of people. (I'm not going down the Anthropomorphism rabbit hole here.)  None of us would expect a 12 - 14 year old kid to go and work successfully on Wall Street as a banker...or as an tax accountant...or a police or fireman. We don't expect 12 - 14 year old kids to be able to work college level calculus. Yes, there are some exceptional kids who could take on college level courses or actual jobs like scientists or law enforcement....but they are exceptional and few and far between. Why do we expect that same level of maturity of our younger dogs for them to work at the same level as a 5 - 7 year old dog??

I was joking with an agility friend earlier this summer that Ocean at 3 was like a 21 year old college guy. A 21 year old old college guy is a mix of great choices and not so great choices. And that in a nutshell, was Ocean this past year...a mix or good choices in the ring and a mix of not so great choices. At turning 4 years old in a couple of weeks, Ocean is more or less equivalent to a 28 year old guy and 28 year old men can be successful at holding down an actual job and making a whole bunch of great choice with maybe a not so great one thrown in for fun. I'm really looking forward to this upcoming year with my true adult dog in agility.

I think there's something to be said about being honest with where your young dogs are in their mental maturity. Yes, a 12 month old large breed dog looks like a grown up dog. But their brain is still in puppy land. So, if you have the 4 legged equivalent of a 12 - 14 year old kid, try to allow them to stay in middle school where they belong instead of trying to shove them into post doctorate work.

Is your dog training fluid? Or is it written in stone?

I was just on a dog message board discussing with dog agility with a couple of members. The core discussion was someone was struggling with their young 18 - 24 month old dog's behavior when training. He's a Cattle Dog/Rat Terrier mix and as she put it, he was going through some sort of teenage boy jerk-face stage. His behavior was becoming combative, not listening, brain falling out of his ears, and just being a jerk for the sake of being a jerk. She had a training session that left her in tears earlier this week. She said that there has been a lot of regression in their training as of lately. She admitted that she felt like giving up and wasn't sure where to in her training or how to get his brain back into some sort of thinking mode. I'll post some of my responses below (bold and in italics) and actually build a blog post out of them and some comments that will help that happen.

I do hate to say it, but....you can't rush or train maturity in dogs. It will come on their own schedule. Ocean is just now turning into the agility dog I have been waiting for him to be this year....at the age of 3. Next year....at 4, that will be the year it all comes together with Ocean. I started trialing him at 15 months old. We had a couple of rough years of NQ's after NQ's after NQ's.

Just keep at building experience and mileage with him. That's why I just kept trialing and training with O. All of that mileage does add up. Do the best you can...but keep in the back of your mind you have a young dog who needs to mentally grow up (and there's not anything you can do to speed that up.) Take your training day by day and you'll see small improvements over time.

I've been seeing this trend online a bit with message boards, on facebook, and in real life with friends who are struggling with younger dogs. Younger dogs who are living in the shadow of expectation of these peoples other dogs....both past and present. Or, they are living in the shadow friends' dogs of similar age who are consistently performing in classes, practice, or at trials.

On the dog message board another poster had commented that her dogs matured well at the ages of 3 to 3.5 years old. My final thoughts from the message board discussion are posted below and will close out this quick, impromptu blog post. I really would like people to really take this sentence to heart and think about this when they are working and training with their dogs:

"You need to be able to adjust your training plan to the dog that is in front of you at that moment....not adjust your dog to your training plan."

^^^ In my humble opinion, that skill right there, is what separates the masterful and great dog trainers from all of the other dog trainers.


This totally supports that saying in dog training - "You really don't have a dog until 3." In my experience, 3 years old is when the dog settles into itself and they have the mental maturity to handle the stress that working them causes. I started to trial Lars in agility until he was about 2 months shy of 3 and in obedience for his CD when he was a couple of months over 3. If I had started to trial him in either before 3....both sports would have been a hot mess. Lars really settled into himself between the ages of 4 and 5.

I do know there are dogs out there who are out there who are consistent and awesome at younger ages. But you absolutely cannot compare your dogs to other dogs....including your own. You're going to do nothing but get frustrated over why isn't my dog like so and so's dog or my other dogs. Because they aren't those other dogs....they are who they are. You just have to embrace who they are....and all of who they are, good and bad. You have work and train the dog in front of you. Some days you may only be able to work on simple, foundation things because your young dog can't think their way out of a paper bag. The next day, you might be able to do a sequence. You need to be able to adjust your training plan to the dog that is in front of you at that moment....not adjust your dog to your training plan.

Last night, Ocean was a little crazy practicing at home because it was cooler outside. He was forgetting the concept of collecting if I'm holding my place on the course and not go blowing by me. We went back to something that we haven't had to revisit in months - Calling him into heel after one jump. He needed that exercise at that moment...and we did it a bunch of times until he got his head together. I didn't get mad, upset, or frustrated because my dog who is a P2, Open/Excellent agility dog was blowing by me and we needed to go back to basic agility foundation 101. I did recognize that at that moment we needed to go a bunch of steps back in order to go forward last night. Training dogs is fluid...it's not always onward and upwards every training session. Sometimes it needs to flow backwards or stay stagnant because the dog in front of you needs that.

Welcome to Excellent Agility Ocean!! New Open FAST title

Yes!! I am so happy to announce...I FINALLY HAVE AN AKC EXCELLENT AGILITY DOG!!!!! Little Mr. Ocean earned his Open FAST title Saturday!! Ocean is my first AKC Excellent dog despite me playing in agility for a bunch of years now. Lars has always been very challenging in agility....so the Kidd-O at the age of 3 got farther than his genius brother ever did in AKC agility.

Going back to my earlier post this week about spiritual gangstering...I can't tell you how much of mind game it was to me that I struggled and struggled to get a dog to Excellent levels in AKC. I was convinced that I was that limited of a handler that AXP's and MXP's were something that would always just be out of my reach. I didn't step back and say, my dog's (meaning Lars)  strength wasn't agility. It wasn't me as a handler...I had challenges facing me that even most very experience handlers would have struggled with. My work on my inner self has allowed me to step back and get some clarity that it would come. That my dog (meaning Ocean) and I were getting a little bit better each time we stepped into an agility ring. And...it did finally come when I let go and just enjoyed the journey with Ocean. How about that shiznit??

I have some video of some of the awesome NQ's we had the rest of the weekend. This Open JWW had two bars down in the closing line. And the Open Standard here was an NQ because Ocean leapt just over the yellow on the dogwalk. I crowded him on the weave pole entrance. But....this was identical to the Ex/Masters Standard run. It was only missing two jumps at the very end. :)

Spiritual gangsters and dog training

So, I will fully admit, the Tasks blog has been put on the back burner this spring while developing new products and working on a myriad of other things with the boys and even on myself.

That is where the title of today's blog post comes from...the hard work I have been doing on the inside. Long story short, I started to see a mental health professional almost a year ago now because there was a lot in my life that wasn't working for me. At the time, I thought it was burnout from my former day job with an undercurrent of depression. It infiltrated everything...work, personal life, and even the journey I walked with the boys. It wasn't until about 4 - 5 months into the sessions that we had a big break through...I wasn't burned out or clinically depressed. I was Codependent. What that means in a nutshell, I learned a lot of self defeating mental survival skills as a kid growing up in a dysfunctional household that I carried into and cling to as an adult. To quote Codependent No More, the book that has more or less redefined my life - "Codependency involves a habitual system of thinking, feeling, and behaving towards ourselves and others that cause us pain. These habits are self destructive." Codependent people worry about, obsess over, and try to control other people and events that are not our business to worry about, obsess over, and try to control. We enmesh ourselves in external things and people and detach from ourselves. Codependent people also have low self worth. We don't feel good about ourselves and we don't like ourselves very much. We tie our self worth to accomplishments and external things/events.

That has been my operating system for 40 or so years and removing that virus from my operating system is going to take some time. It's been slow going and I have had moments where its easier for me to fall back on familiar, old habits. But, it is getting better every day and I am putting one foot in front of the other on the path of codependency recovery. I'm working hard on detaching from everything that isn't my direct responsibility. The only thing I'm responsible for is me (isn't that a radical thought!) I'm working very hard on placing my own needs first and practicing self care (physically and emotionally.) I'm working very hard on developing the idea that what other people think of me is really none of my business. I'm letting go of all things that I can't control (which is everything but my own actions, feelings, and thoughts.) I'm becoming a spiritual gangster.

 

So....what does all of  have to do with dog training?? Actually, quite a bit. I know that I was taking dog training and the end goal of getting titles way too seriously for my own good. I see a lot of people who are in dog sports who also take dog training and getting those scores/titles way too seriously for their own good too. A dear friend of mine asked why I was driven by the need to be perfect...why was I so scared to fail or even make small mistakes? I would get defensive with instructors or friends who were trying to give me constructive criticism. They were trying to help me...but I took their input as attacks against my fragile self image. I couldn't process what they were trying to tell me in a healthy way. I couldn't process much of the world in a healthy way.

 With my new self awareness in place, I started to question why that was with me and speculated why that was with others too. I was basing my self worth on getting a Q or a title, or a great score. I worried way too much about what others thought about me as a person if I didn't Q, get that title, or that great score. Last year, agility caused me an incredible amount of angst because I could not Q with Ocean at 24" to save my life. Towards the end of the summer, I broke down at a trial and sobbed to friends saying "Why is this so hard?" My self worth took a huge tumble...I couldn't get my dog out of novice and I had been listening to advice from people. I wasn't listening to my own voice because of that poor self worth...I had detached from my own wisdom. It wasn't long after that agility break down that I moved Ocean back down to 20" to where he should have been. Wouldn't you know it, we're back to getting those Q's on a regular basis.

My new favorite dog sport shirt!!

Over these past couple of months with this new self awareness, I've learned where we are in our own head-space massively impacts training and working our dogs. We hear so much about the psychology side of sports and I don't think the obedience world has really looked at how that can impact their performance. The agility world's more competitive teams are aware of the mental game....but does the average agility team struggle with it? I surely didn't think that my everyday undercurrent of mental crap impacted how I trained or showed. But it did...and did a lot. I wasn't ready until now to really come out and talk about this recovery I'm working on. Now that I am ready, I'm probably going to write about it as it pertains to dog training.

If you see yourself in anything I wrote above, you're not alone. Codependency is a common issue for people who have lived/grew up with family dysfunction, alcoholism, mental illness, or abuse. Codependent No More by Melody Beattie is a life changing and validating book. I highly recommend it to anyone who knows or thinks codependency is part of their life.

Train 'Em Topics! - The Why in Dog Training and Why It Matters:

           This post is derived from a photo I shared on my Facebook page a while back. I was going to make a cute comment about the photo which was a little kid standing next to a very large dog and it had its arm around the dog. There also was a quote from Orhan Pamuk which said "Dogs do speak, but only to those who listen."

     I had a moment in an agility class once that involved Ocean. He is much more environmentally sensitive than Lars is. He notices things that Lars typically doesn't give two hoots about. Sometimes those things bother him and that's something I've become more aware of. Anyway, Ocean doesn't usually have start line stay issues in the classes I have taken with him. But for the last run

Good Wait, Ocean...

that night, I left him and headed out to where I wanted to lead out...when I got there, he was standing in place. He wasn't moving...but just standing. I went back and re-set him back in the sit and told him to wait. I did my lead out again and when I turned to look back at Ocean,  he was standing again. This was something that was different than what he had done before...when he does break his start line, he will start running. But, he was standing with a look on his face...and he was uncomfortable with something. It was like he was trying hard to stay but he was very uncertain. I looked up and just a couple feet behind O was another handler and dog playing a vigorous game of tug. I hadn't noticed them until I saw O's expression. Typically people standing behind a dog holding a stay can create a good bit of pressure and with some dogs, that can be unnerving enough to the point they break the stay. That pressure can be increased adding movement to that position behind the dog. The pressure that people is creating can be magnified the further and further the dog's handler moves away. A dog of Ocean's age (he has a year and a half old at the and experience, it doesn't surprise me he did what he did. I have not proofed a stay with Ocean with that much pressure (or much pressure at all at this stage of the game.) That is something we need to work on, especially as he does more and more obedience. But, I want to gradually expose him to increased pressure during a wait/stay  in a way that he is successful and confident when dealing with it. A dog of Lars' age and experience, I would expect them to stay despite a person and dog playing tug behind them.     So, I returned back to Ocean and set him back in a sit. I asked the lady who had been playing with her dog, if she could just hold off playing until Ocean left the start line. She was more than happy to do that and placed her dog in a sit. Ocean held his start line perfectly with them just standing right behind him. That sort of pressure was okay and the play was too much. Ocean was trying to tell me that and I listened.

     Dog do tell us stuff all the time in their behavior...but we as trainers should really listen to the message they might be trying to tell us. I distinctly remember thinking "Why is he doing that?" as I stood on the other side of a tire jump and a bar jump at class looking at my young dog standing when he should have been sitting. But, I'm the kind of trainer who likes to know the "Why." If I don't know the "why" behind incorrect behavior, then I can't really fix it.

    There are trainers who are in the mind set of "just fix it" and not bothering to know why is their dog doing what they are doing. There are trainers who don't like dealing with problems and will attempt to put a training band-aid on where they have weak spots in their performance and even their relationship with their dogs. Figuring out why your dog is behaving or performing incorrectly will get you to understand your dog on a deeper level. Sometimes, the problem doesn't lie with our dogs. Sometimes the problem lies with us and we need to put our handling under a microscope. Maybe we're not cueing the dog correctly, maybe we're not clean with our handling, or maybe we're not showing up the way we expect our dogs to show up in our training.

    I know they appreciate that you are listening to them. I saw that when I left Ocean for the third time with no one playing behind him. He was relieved that the pressure was gone and he could do his job. I know now it is a weak spot in our training and I have a game plan on how to address it.  If I had gone in and read him the riot act about not staying put, that wouldn't have been fair to him because we haven't proofed something like that. He's the kind of dog that if I had gone in and really corrected him for not being able to handle that sort of pressure...I would have put a huge dent our relationship and eroded that trust I'm trying to build between us. Ocean is more my husband's dog than he is mine and That was one of those times where "Oh, just fix it..." would have blown up in my face.

    Trying to figure out "the why" can be hard and it may not be a quick fix...but it will be worth it in your relationship with your dog and your performance in the long run.