My friend, Amy Swope, wrote the beautiful, poetic post below. Amy has worked with K9s for a very long time
and has seen the good/bad/ugly of the working dog world. She stopped, and started a rescue from the ground up in rural Virginia
for dogs – many that are sent from Kuwait from horrific conditions. See her Facebook site on https://www.facebook.com/BlueRidgeCanineServices/. (Please donate if you can.)
She should also look into a career as a writer!
I virtually met Amy when she was trying to help get remaining dogs from being euthanized by Eastern Services – a K9 sniffer dog
company who had lost their contract with KNPC and had started killing their
dogs rather than returning them to the States.
She and local rescuers managed to get many dogs back to the US and
re-homed.
When I read Amy's story below, it made me think of all the neveux dog owners in Kuwait and how so many have bought into the Ceasar Milan misconception of getting your dog to be submissive to the owner (and all the new, "trainers" who have popped up recently with the same thought process) instead of being (as Amy says) "partners". I remember taking my German Shepherd to get groomed in Kuwait. He was approximately a year old and I was waiting in PetZone for our appointment. Mikey (who, I now know will never get along with other dogs - just the way he is - and that's ok) was barking nervously. A young man came over and started advising me on how to deal with Mikey (because the man had seen the entire Ceasar Milan collection on DVD) and then poked Mikey with the hissing noise. Mikey turned his head to look at me for permission to bite (I wanted to agree, but just told the man to go away). Because Mikey and I ARE partners, sometimes a look is enough to understand each other. He has trained me well.
Amy is a wonderful, compassionate, caring person and I love her perspective. Read on….
______
There is something very specific that
overcomes my heart when working with crazy animals. The genetic machines.
Outliers of the animal world. The ones who don’t quite fit the domestic mold.
Or broken spirits, tangled in the unnatural weight of society’s burdens. It is
a moment that i call “untraining”. It took me 10 years of “training” to learn
the art of untraining. It is the moment the animal lets go of its past
experiences of human interaction. And when I let go of human expectations
placed on the animal. And we jive in that sweet spot of mutual respect. That
partnership where “dominant” and “submissive” melt back into the neatly
packaged Caesar Milan marketing campaign. And where all the control devices for
“training” fall into a suburban poop bag which then gets tied into a tight
little knot and tossed into the Rubbermaid bin.
All of that is gone and we are back at square one. That point
where we say, I won’t fuck with you if you don’t fuck with me... let’s work
together... just like humans and dogs evolved to do. I was never a wolf, and
the dog was never a human, so we will never relate to each other on those
terms. Man is the provider of needs for the dog. Dog is the provider of
protection for the man. We are companions. I am not his alpha, nor is he my
human child. We are partners.
I’ve been bitten. I’ve been thrown from a horse. I respect both
of those responses as natural for the animal and I know that somewhere I’ve
crossed a boundary. I back up and analyze natural ways to renegotiate those
boundaries. How can I help the animal believe that it’s in their own best
interest to expand their world? That isn’t training - that is teaching. And
it’s an art.
Ive been laying awake all night thinking of when i started as a
K9 trainer living in South Africa. Thinking about how I missed the natural life
I lived there, and how it affected the relationship i had with the animals I
worked with. The lessons it taught me. You can’t control Africa. You can’t fit
the wildness of it safely into a crime-free, safe suburb, best school district,
corporate ladder packaged life. The only thing predictable is the lack of
circumstantial control. In the USA, it is a giant inconvenience if an espresso
machine at Starbucks is broken, making us coffee-less and 10 min late for our routine
self-important life. Meanwhile in South Africa, an entire reel of overhead
power lines get stolen, no one in 50 miles has power, and yet “a boer maak n
plan”. Or as the military would say “adapt and overcome.”
I started learning to train working K9s using all of the
traditional methods. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the untraditional
genetics. Out of 500 dogs bred for work, maybe 1/5th would be strong enough to
pass all the tests. They were tested in their totally raw genetic state, prior
to any training. Would they work through a bomb blast? Would they bite and not
let go, even when being beaten? Do they have nerves of steel, courageous
hearts, and the pain tolerance of a Spartan? These anomalies sit and look at
you with adoring eyes. They are like every other dog - but they’re not. A pinch
collar will bring your 90 lbs pet Shepherd to its knees and it will respect
that painful correction enough so the next correction will be barely painful
but just a reminder of what could happen. Walaaa! Your dog is “trained”. But
these anomalies say “fuck your training - I’ll see your pinch collar and raise
you a shock collar.” And before you know it, you’re hanging a dog by a pinch
collar while it’s holding onto a cement block and you pray it doesn’t let go (even
though you want it to let go) because you know it’s going to bite you next. And
I’m not exaggerating.
My years living as a K9 trainer in South Africa ended up being a
nerve-wracking juxtaposition between the need to crush wildness into little
broken pieces and glue it back together as a trained dog, and the understanding
that you can truly never crush something wild. Not for real. In a moment of
human weakness or error it will be wild again. And it will turn on the one who
crushes it. This is often referred to as “coming up the leash.”
I was given my first horse in South Africa - he was a racing
Thoroughbred that had injured his hock. I didn’t even know how to mount a
saddle. We had a shitty relationship for a long time. I constantly tried to
control him. Then one day I had a few beers, wrapped a dog leash around his
halter, jumped on his back and rode him into the African bush. He saw an open
cattle field and did what Thoroughbreds do - he tossed his head back and ran. I
hung onto his mane with all of my strength. At the end of the field he
approached the electric cattle fence and came to a screeching halt. I flipped
over his head and landed hard. He nuzzled my face and nickered as if to say
“wasn’t that fun!”
That’s when I learned. I still sucked at riding him, but I
learned to love him, and all his wild. I read Pat Parelli’s book “Natural
Horsemanship” and I read Karen Pryor’s “Don’t Shoot The Dog” and I never looked
back.
Now when I get the chance to work with the weirdos, I can’t wait
to get to the point of untraining. That magical place where we can have a
partnership. Where the trust resides and the animal allows a constant flow of
information and renegotiation of boundaries. Because the animal trusts that
learning is safe and performs his tasks as part of a partnership. I learn from
every dog I work with. Just like Africa, the only thing predictable about an
animal is the lack of control we have over it. But boer maak n plan. When I can
adapt and help an animal overcome - in that moment of untraining - then the
teaching starts to happen. And i get that specific feeling that is reserved
only for the moments that I feel my heart racing beside the heart of the
thoroughbred, or my feet plodding beside the running dog pack. I don’t know
what to call this feeling except oneness with the wild.
