If you read magazines, books, articles, etc. on child raising today, you will find a proliferation of information on A.D.D., A.D.H.T, and autistic conditions of children born in the U.S. Those things abound in schools, complete with programs to help youngsters deal with their issues. There are not so many negative connotations in being attention deficit, or even being autistic – it is built into our society and to a degree: far more understood and accepted than in earlier days. I am convinced there were those kids when I grew up, though it seems with far less frequency than occurs now. In the ‘old days’ we had names for the problem kids and just figured they were weird or had lousy parents. Now, we know a whole lot more why some kids think the way they do and behave in manners which are not within the normal part of the bell curve. I work with large numbers of dogs far more than the vast majority of society members. And I am fully convinced that conditions paralleling these (and others I probably don’t know anything about) are very present in the dog world. I know there are dogs with attention deficit disorder, very much like what we see in young children. There are many version of very hyperactive minds and bodies in dogs, versions which make ordinary interactions difficult, sometimes impossible. I believe there are dogs which if analyzed by an expert, would be considered autistic, with the huge variability in degree and severity of that condition. When people work with dogs, there is always a certain level of expectation. My dog should “do this” or “do that” because that’s what they are supposed to do. My dog should listen to me, come when I call, want to sit next to me, want me to touch it, want to retrieve, want to hunt, etc., etc. If it doesn’t then I’ll read a book, watch a video, ask my neighbor or someone whose dog does listen to find out how they got it to do that. Or, and I make a great living this way: send it off to a professional so they can make it do what I want. But let me explain what process I go through when I get a dog in for training, because someone wants a certain set of behaviors from that dog. The first thing I do when I am getting to know a dog is to see how that dog’s mind functions. That’s the FIRST thing. It may have an impressive pedigree or no pedigree at all, but pieces of paper are not the dog’s story. If I look at a new dog like a computer program waiting to happen, and all I have to do is go through the appropriate steps and write the code for specific behaviors, then I won’t see the dog, only the vision of the final product. And for some dogs, this is actually enough. They are mentally sound enough, physically sound enough, and mentally balanced enough to want to take in new information, grasp its meaning and then remember to at least try to follow requests. Easy dog to train. Not a lot of those out there, but I’ve had a few easy ones like that. What I see with an alarmingly increasing frequency, (I wish I could make the word alarmingly in gigantic page filling font, to underscore how big a deal I think this is) are dogs with an inability to focus on a single thing for longer than a second or two if that. A canine A.D.D. if you will. I also see with increasing frequency, dogs that do not connect or care about things outside their inner sphere. I understand puppies and the mental development that is not yet there; that is not what I’m talking about. Given any dog’s age and state of maturity, there is an expectation of awareness growing, of the dogs ability to figure things out with repetition, of that dogs enjoyment out of learning and engaging in something besides mere fleeting entertainment. Here’s the scary part for me. When a dog doesn’t focus or listen, you have a couple of options. You can use force (wait, let me use the term people like: “Pressure”) to scare the dog into paying attention. You can give up and wait for the dog to ‘grow up’. You can assume the dog is just not ready to pay attention and wait, or you can say, “Shoot, another one. Let’s break training into teeny tiny sessions and work on one tiny detail at a time until we have enough tiny solid parts that we can begin to put them together piece by piece.” And that takes time and infinite patience. Or, the last one is to use pharmaceuticals just as we do on our difficult to manage children so they are numb and not as much of a problem. I’d be scared about what a trainer was doing with my dog if it were a handful whose mind didn’t want to or couldn’t pay attention, but that’s another article. It isn’t real pretty…. Less often, but still with increasing regularity, I see dogs that are for all practical purposes, autistic. They are in another world in their minds. They look at you but they aren’t looking at you. They hear you but they are responding to other things. They do not have the same interest as the other dogs, except sometimes they do. They don’t respond to pressure much, well or poorly, just not at all. They don’t make progress as rapidly, sometimes not at all. And they are just as happy to see you leave as to see you show up. It doesn’t even make sense, but I’ve seen it often enough that I know I’ve got a special case when one of these ‘kind of there’ dogs show up. You never get out of them what you hope for, but you can make good progress if you don’t get angry, and you don’t give up. And then there’s everything in between. Bottom line, these dogs have mental issues just like people. I don’t know if it’s because they are eating food contaminated just like ours with hormones, antibiotics, steroids, chemicals, etc. or if it’s in the air these days. Maybe they are mimicking the people with which they live or absorbing the energy in which they have been raised or brewed as fetuses. In any case, I hope people look at their dogs with an understanding of the base on which these dogs operate: their thinking. If there’s a problem there, there solution is not in the training techniques, but in the thinking of their teachers….
Posted on: Fri, 19 Sep 2014 19:08:24 +0000
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