Animals in Translation

by Temple Grandin

  It’s especially important to socialize dogs to children. Most of the fatal dog bites involve young children, because they’re low to the ground and they run around a lot. The dog mistakes the small running child for prey, and attacks. All predatory animals have to learn which animals are prey and which are not. A dog does not know that your two-year-old is not prey unless you specifically teach him this while he’s still a puppy.

  You also have to be careful to teach your puppy that other people’s two-year-olds are also not prey. That’s easy; you just have to make sure your puppy gets exposed to toddlers who don’t live with you. Since a lot of toddlers love to run up to strange puppies and hug them, you can accomplish this by taking your puppy for walks in parks where parents bring their children to play, or in neighborhoods with lots of families. After your puppy has met a few little kids on outings, he’ll know that small children are not prey. I want to stress that it’s essential to introduce your dog to other children in other families, because to a dog, your two-year-old and the neighbor’s two-year-old are two different categories; they’re apples and oranges. A puppy doesn’t automatically generalize don’t-attack-Johnny to don’t-attack-Joey.

  KEEPING THE PEACE

  This brings up the question of dominance. All animals who live in groups—and that is most mammals—form dominance hierarchies. Animals are not democratic and there is always an alpha animal, and often a beta animal, too. Dogs have an alpha male who is dominant over the others, as well as a beta male who is second in line to the alpha.

  Dog owners must establish themselves as the alpha, period. This is the one rule you must not ignore. A dog who thinks he’s the alpha in the house is dangerous, because dogs will fight any lower-ranked pack mate who challenges them. If the family dog becomes the alpha he’s going to be especially dangerous around important resources like food and his resting place. He’ll bite family members who come too near his dog dish or sit down too close to him on the sofa when he’s taking a nap. He’s definitely not going to cooperate with any trips to the vet, either.

  This happens more often than you’d think. There are plenty of households where the dog is the alpha. You can’t necessarily avoid the problem by getting a female dog, either. According to the American Veterinary Medical Association, 80 percent of dogs brought in to see vets because of dominance aggression are unneutered males, but you can definitely have dominance aggression in neutered males, and in females, too, whether they’re neutered or not. Actually, when it comes to females, Nick Dodman says that an aggressive female can actually get worse after she’s been spayed, because she doesn’t have as much progesterone in her system to calm her down.

  Even though unneutered males are the biggest biters, neutering a dog once he’s started to bite probably won’t solve the problem. With animals, there’s a huge difference between preventing aggression in the first place and trying to stop it once it’s developed. Dr. Dodman says that in his experience neutering a male doesn’t make him any less dominant, or any less likely to bite a human. Neutering an aggressive dog mainly keeps him from biting other dogs—but not because he suddenly becomes submissive. Neutering probably decreases dog-on-dog aggression only because the neutered dog stops smelling like a male to other males, so other males don’t challenge him as much. It’s not that the neutered dog is any less dominant after he’s been altered; it’s that other male dogs are nicer to him.21

  One of the most upsetting situations with an aggressive dog I’ve seen over the years happened to a family I knew with two very young boys and a father who wasn’t very nice to the mom. The dad was always saying mean things to her in front of the boys and the dog. Then, when the boys were still little, the family broke up. The mom took the boys and the dog and moved to another state to start graduate school.

  Not long after that the dog went crazy. He began threatening to bite the mom if she tried to pull him someplace by the collar, and he constantly tried to keep her from leaving the house. One registration day as she was getting into her car to go sign up for courses, the dog jumped in the back seat and wouldn’t get out. He growled and snapped viciously at her face each time she tried to take hold of his collar to pull him out. He ended up sitting inside her car the whole day, until he decided it was time to get out. Things got so bad that the only way the mom could manage the dog at all was to trick him by throwing a piece of steak wherever she wanted him to go, then slamming the door behind him when he ran after it. Her friends were all frightened of the dog, and so was she.

  Her boys weren’t doing well, either, and the child psychologist she took them to see said that the dad had treated her so disrespectfully her sons didn’t trust her to take care of them. They didn’t think she could do it, and they were scared.

  This was probably a case of disrespectful behavior inside the family affecting the dog as well as the children. The husband was probably the absolute alpha in the dog’s eyes. The dog may even have concluded that he was the beta animal, because the wife was so downtrodden. So when the husband disappeared the dog immediately challenged the wife for alpha status. That is always a dangerous situation.

  I lost track of the family not long after the registration day incident, so I don’t know whether the mom was ever able to get the dog under control or not. Things had reached the point where she needed to hire a trainer, but I knew she couldn’t afford it. I hope thinks worked out for them, but it didn’t look good.

  Establishing dominance over a dog is easy. Many people think that exerting dominance means beating an animal into submission, but that’s not true at all. I am totally against rough alpha rolling of dogs, which is still used by some police departments to train police dogs. In alpha rolling a person throws a dog over on his back and holds him down. Rolling over and exposing the belly is a hardwired instinctual behavior in dogs, and a well-socialized adult dog usually rolls over on his back to be petted. That’s why you want your puppy to spend some time on his back looking up at you; just being in that position reinforces the fact that he is subordinate to you.

  But you shouldn’t force him onto his back. When two dogs from the same pack meet, the subordinate dog will voluntarily roll over; the other dog doesn’t shove him over. When a dog is forced into this position by a human the hardwired submission behavior does get turned on, but when the dog stands back up he does not forget having been forced down. Someday, when your back is turned, he will bite you in the butt.

  A much better way to train the dog is to make rolling over a fun game for him through tickling or stroking his chest or belly and offering food treats when he rolls over. This makes the dog get into the position of submission without anything aversive being done.

  I also want to say something about the overall issue of punishment in animal training. I am totally against using punishment to teach an animal new skills. In almost all cases animals can be trained to do tricks or develop skills using positive methods.

  The one exception is stopping dangerous prey-drive-motivated chasing of joggers, bicyclists, and cars. In this situation a shock collar may be needed. If you do have to use a shock collar to stop your dog from chasing people and cars, it is important that the dog never figures out that it’s the collar that gave him the shock, so you should leave the collar on for a few days before using it. When your dog receives a correction for chasing a jogger, you want him to think that the dog god did it.

  The best ways to establish dominance are obedience training and making the dog sit quietly before he is fed. The dog should learn that he eats on his owner’s terms. You can also do things like going inside the door first before letting your puppy enter, putting your hand in his food dish while he’s eating, and playfully coaxing and rolling him over on his back (not throwing him over). Some trainers even recommend growling at your puppy like a mama dog and nipping him on the muzzle when you’re giving him a correction. I know that sounds dangerous, but with a puppy it’s not.

  You also have to do at least some obedience training. Obedience tra
ining just means teaching your dog to obey a few commands. The commands can be anything you like. You could get fancy and train your dog to herd sheep, bring your slippers, or wear a tutu and spin around in circles; it doesn’t matter. The important thing is that the dog learns to obey commands from his master.

  You have to do obedience training no matter what your life is like. Even if you live on a great big ranch where your dogs can run free they still have to be obedience-trained, because your dog has to know you’re the boss or you are creating a potentially dangerous situation. That’s the whole point of obedience training—obedience. Not teaching your dog how to do tricks. Obedience training establishes the owner as the alpha.

  It’s amazing how easy it is to dominate a dog. When I was in college I went to visit a friend’s house and they had a hound who had become totally dominant. If Bernie wanted the softest chair, that was the chair he was given. He was number one. He also had the disgusting habit of lifting his leg and urinating on every guest. Bernie was the king.

  But there was one guest he never peed on and that was me. He also never growled at me, or asked for my chair. Maybe it was my posture and attitude, because I never did anything bad to that dog. It shows how tuned in to people dogs are. That dog just knew, probably from watching me, that I would not tolerate being peed on, growled at, or any other obnoxious behavior.

  PACK MENTALITY

  Even when you establish yourself as the alpha, you can still have problems with other dogs, either with dogs in the neighborhood or other dogs in the household. Dogs need friends, and if you’re going to be away at work all day I recommend owning two dogs, preferably a male and a female. But I’d stop at two, because more than two dogs in one house can be a big problem if the dogs are too evenly matched in size, age, and strength. With closely matched animals the dominance hierarchy may not stabilize, because no leader is able to emerge and the dogs continue to challenge each other. If you’re going to have more than one dog the best plan is to stop at two, and to have one dog of each sex.

  Another reason to stop at two is that dogs in a pack are much bolder and more aggressive than one dog on its own. Pack mentality is real. I mentioned the collie who pretends she doesn’t notice the two barking German shepherds whenever her owner takes her for a walk. One day my friend took the collie and her other dog, the golden retriever, out for a walk along with the neighbor and her two dogs. The four dogs knew each other well, and probably felt like a pack.

  This time the collie was a completely different dog. When they got to the German shepherds’ yard and the two shepherds rushed the fence, the collie went nuts. She was slamming herself into the fence, barking, and racing back and forth from one end of the fence to the other chasing those dogs. She was really cussing them out, and it was all because she was in her pack.

  She refused to leave, too. Her three friends got totally bored taunting those poor fenced-in dogs, and kept trying to get the collie’s attention so they could go on with their walk, but the collie wouldn’t budge. It was like she was making up for lost time. Her owner finally had to drag her away.

  A dog pack can be incredibly dangerous to humans. A couple of years ago a ten-year-old girl in Wisconsin was killed by a pack of six Rottweilers while she was playing at her friend’s house down the street. There were two adult dogs and four puppies in the house (which was a violation of a city ordinance limiting the number of dogs per household to three) and apparently the little girl began to pet one of the puppies, and one of the adult dogs got jealous and bit the girl. That set off the pack and they attacked.

  Opinion varies on how to keep the peace if you do have more than two dogs. Most people, though not all, say you should always handle and pet the dominant dog first. The king must be treated like the king, although the ultimate leader is you. If you don’t respect the dogs’ natural hierarchy you can put the underdog in danger. Dr. Dodman has a horrible story about a pack of Chesapeake Bay retrievers living with a lady who indulged them totally and never gave them any obedience training. She lived alone, and the dogs were her surrogate family. Of course, in a real family children don’t just naturally sit around behaving themselves nicely and saying “please” and “thank you.” Children have to be obedience-trained, too.

  The pack in this lady’s house had formed a natural hierarchy, with two dominant dogs on top, two or three middle-ranking dogs, and two underdogs. But the lady refused to respect the ranking, and always lavished lots of time and attention on the two underdogs whenever she came home.

  All that attention was provoking the top dogs into launching vicious attacks on the bottom dogs. Dr. Dodman told the lady she needed to greet and feed the dominant dogs first when she came home, but she wouldn’t listen, and kept on showing favoritism. The whole thing ended in disaster. First one of the underdogs was badly injured and the lady decided the only way to deal with the situation was to have the little underdog put down. Then the one remaining underdog was horribly injured by the two top dogs and the lady had the two top dogs put down. All three dogs died just because this lady wouldn’t listen to good advice.22

  WORKING WITH THE ANIMAL’S NATURE: FARM ANIMALS

  A human owner has the responsibility to understand and respect his pet’s nature. Dogs and cats are predator animals. Dogs are hyper-social predators who live in dominance hierarchies. If you interfere with the hierarchy you can get the low-ranking dog or dogs killed by their own pack mates. You have to work with an animal’s emotional makeup, not against it.

  Domestic animals such as pigs, cattle, and horses are less controlled by purely social stimuli than dogs, so with these animals it’s especially important to exert dominance the way another animal would do it. I learned this lesson when I was raising piglets as part of my Ph.D. work in animal behavior. My piglets lived in a Disneyland of straw with lots of different objects to root and tear up. I would sit with my piglets for hours and watch their behavior.

  The one I named Mellow Pig would instantly roll over when her belly was scratched and would actively solicit people to rub her belly. But the largest pig in the pen did not like being petted at all, and she was the dominant boss hog. She thought she owned the place. Her coloration was what an Illinois farmer calls a blue butt; she had white forequarters and a grayish blue-gray rear. I named her Big Gilt.

  When Big Gilt reached a hundred pounds, she started biting me whenever I entered the pen. The other pigs sought petting and stroking but Big Gilt disdained it. She just wanted to be boss. The bigger she got the worse the biting got and I had to stop it.

  I tried waving my arms at her and shouting, but it didn’t help. In desperation once I even tried slapping her big blue butt. That did no good, either. Finally I figured out that I had to act like a pig. I needed to assert my superior dominance by biting and pushing against the side of her neck the same way another, bigger pig would.

  So, to simulate another pig biting and shoving against Big Gilt’s neck I used a short piece of a one-by-four-inch board, about eighteen inches long, to poke and shove her against the fence. That’s what the winner pig does: the winner pushes the loser away, or up against a wall. I shoved the end of the board repeatedly against her thick neck and I made it very clear that I was stronger, which I was. A full-grown human can still push around a hundred-pound hog. I didn’t hurt her, but I did dominate her.

  It worked like magic. Big Gilt stopped biting me and I was now Boss Hog. Using the hardwired instinctual behavior pattern was much more effective than slapping her. The only problem with this method is that it has to be done when the animal is young enough so you can still easily push the pig away. Again, I want to emphasize that I did not beat her up. She was overpowered by a stronger being who applied pressure to the right spot. Pushing the board against her neck turned on a hardwired instinctual submissive behavior.

  After that Big Gilt was now polite when I entered the pen and she never bit me again, but she still did not like petting. One day while I was stroking Mellow Pig on the belly I started
to rub Big Gilt on the belly, too. Since I was now the boss she didn’t run away, but she clearly didn’t like it. The strangest thing happened. Hardwired instinct collided with clear conscious will. Rubbing her belly triggered the instinctual rolling over behavior, but only the rear end of Big Gilt rolled over. Her front end remained standing when her hind end collapsed. The whole time I was stroking her a horrid growling sound came out of her throat. I had turned on the pleasure response to a belly rub, but the other end of Big Gilt did not want to give in. She did not dare bite me and she did not try to run away, but she surely did not like it.

  PREVENT AGGRESSION IN THE FIRST PLACE

  If I’d known more about animals I would have started establishing myself as Boss Hog a lot sooner, since as I mentioned earlier it’s better to prevent aggressive behavior in the first place than to try to change it once it’s developed.

  Once an animal has developed aggressive behavior, in most cases it’s going to be easier to deal with in prey animals than in predators. A good example is my friend Mark’s horse, Sarah, who’s nasty around the feed trough. Sarah was not reared alone, so she doesn’t have the kinds of problems Blackie did. She’s just got a bad attitude when it comes to food, and she’ll chase away all the other horses so she can have the food to herself. I’ve seen a lot of horses do that.

  All Mark has to do to deal with Sarah’s nippiness is feed her last. Then, after she gets her food, if she still tries to run the other horses off he chases her off instead. It works like a charm for about two weeks. Sarah has perfect manners at the feed trough. Then she starts getting nasty again, and Mark repeats the procedure.