‘Dog whisperer’ knows how to lead a polite pack
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Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO) (Published as Rocky Mountain News (CO)) – October 21, 2006Browse Issues
- Author/Byline: Mary Winter
- Edition: Final
- Section: Home Front
- Page: 2E
- Readability: 9-12 grade level (Lexile: 1120)
Daisy greeted Pat at our front door with irrational exuberance.
She flung her 11-pound frame three feet into the air from a dead start, did a couple of half-pikes, landed briefly, performed a few touch-and-goes, circled Pat twice at warp speed and reared up on her hind legs like a wild stallion, her front paws furiously batting the air. Her next act was to bounce off Pat’s thigh a few times, as if she weren’t sure she’d gotten Pat’s attention.
Daisy greets most visitors this way, and long ago it stopped being cute.
I needed an expert to tell me how to change her annoying behavior.
So I called Pat Blocker, our neighborhood Certified Professional Dog Trainer, or dog whisperer, as I like to call her.
Actually, Pat doesn’t whisper. She talks to Daisy softly, calmly, sometimes in baby talk, telling her what a good girl she is.
In fact, Pat tells me, dogs respond much more to your body language than to what comes out of your mouth.
For example, the minute Daisy starts jumping on me when I arrive home at night, I should say nothing, turn my back to her and move away, repeating this behavior until Daisy gets the message, Pat says.
Daisy, a Boston terrier, jumps to get my attention, Pat tells me. By giving it to her – in the form of putting my hands out, telling her to “stay down” and shooing her away – I’m actually encouraging her to do it more.
“When you engage her like that, she thinks it’s a game,” Pat says. “She thinks you’re playing.”
Pat, a student of canine behavior for 13 years, led training classes for PetSmart for five years and opened her own business, Peaceful Paws, in 2004 (www.peacefulpaws.net, 303-364-4681). She grew up on a farm in Iowa, where she learned to love and understand animals.
She tells me she has “an innate talent for reading dogs.”
As if on cue, Daisy flops on her back and melts into a complete, unabashed, four-legged spread-eagle right in front of Pat, who is seated on my sofa.
I bet that behavior means she really trusts you, I offer.
“I think she just wants her belly rubbed,” Pat says as she reaches down and accommodates her.
Pat says solving canine behavior problems is her specialty; elimination issues and jumping up are two jobs she’s most frequently called on to correct.
When a dog relieves herself in the house, the owners often assume it’s because the dog is mad at them. Not so, says Pat. “As far as I know, there is no such thing as poop revenge.”
Anxiety is usually the cause of dog accidents, barring physical problems, Pat says.
Changes in the owners’ work hours, construction down the street and noisy kids next door all can upset a dog.
Pat uses psychology and detective skills, plus what she’s learned in hundreds of hours of courses, to try to find what’s causing the problem, from excessive barking to excessive shyness.
“I’m not going to come in and wave a magic wand and say it’s all fixed,” she said. Dogs are all different, and there’s rarely a one-size-fits-all solution.
One client she worked with was so diligent the client was able to get her two dogs’ barking under control in one week. On the other hand, it took Pat a year to get her own adopted German shepherd, which had been isolated in a garage as a puppy and learned no social skills, to go anywhere in the car with her.
Pat ends our 90 minutes declaring she wants to teach Daisy a trick. The ace up her sleeve is the fanny pack she wears containing rice-and-lamb treats that smell like summer sausage.
Their odor alone puts my dog in an extreme state of nervous anticipation. A squirrel with a two-pound T-bone in its mouth could have crossed two feet in front of her nose unnoticed.
Using a technique called “luring,” Pat quickly passes a treat under Daisy’s nose and gets her to follow the treat with her head.
Step by step, she maneuvers Daisy first to lie down, then roll on her back.
Three treats later, Daisy has rolled over. It’s an ugly rollover, but it’s a rollover nonetheless.
This is what Pat calls “shaping behavior” with positive reinforcement, and it is the bedrock of her training.
Another principle she follows at home, which she shares with three dogs, is that someone must be in charge, and that someone is she.
In a recent “Taking the Lead” pet column that she writes monthly for the Lowry community newsletter, she stated:
“I do believe in being in charge of my ‘pack,’ but I do so in a benevolent way. The best definition of ‘alpha’ I have found is: priority access to limited, critical resources. In other words, ‘I have the cookies – that’s why.’
“My dogs are on a nothing-is-free program. They need to sit while they get their leashes on, sit and wait for food and wait at the door before being released . . . Everything that is important to them comes through me and their polite behavior.”
I like that.
I’m going to try it on the entire family.
- Memo: mwinte@aol.com
RIGHT AT HOME - Record: 0610210088
- Copyright: Donated to the Denver Public Library by the Rocky Mountain News, under the permission of the City and County of Denver, other rights reserved. Copyright © 2006 Rocky Mountain News. All Rights Reserved.
