Author: Chris Howles

Woody & the Leaf

The small moments that carry meaning

As the year gradually draws to a close and a new one is around the corner, it’s a time for reflection. All those dogs I am fortunate enough to learn from. But this time of year in particular I often think about the dogs who were adopted and given a second (or third) chance in life. Often they are not socialised and certainly have little training. And for some, just the experience of being outside beyond the confines of where they once lived is a new experience. This opportunity, to just experience, and to do this together with them, is a privilege for us. They are special moments. And it reminds me of one I had with years ago with my dog when he was a puppy, and it stayed with me ever since. I will call it Woody and the Leaf.

What brought me full circle to remembering Woody & the Leaf were some of the heart-warming tales of those adopted dogs I worked with this year – though often with heart-breaking beginnings. There was a little mutt who was kept in a crate in an outbuilding without any electricity. So when it was dark and cold….it was dark and cold. He was saved. And the fact that this little chap now celebrates life every day in his new home is a testament not only to the kindness of his human adopters, but also to this fella’s amazing will to survive. And the will to love and be loved. He’s taken to the training too! Sure, some things are going to take a long time, but even if time stood still now, what a happy ending.

Then there was the dog who was a forced breeding ‘machine’ and, as far as we could tell, never, ever, let outside the boundaries of her previous ‘home’. With her rescue came some needed medical care, but now she is okay. More than okay. She is safe and happy. And revelling in life with her new human mum. My training always adapts to these dogs’ histories. We don’t ask for a Sit with her, because of physical issues. As long as she is comfortable, we can still reward her for a good behaviour. She likes a treat! We’ll call her Sophie.

Every day brought a new experience for Sophie, and her new owner relished in this. Once she sent me a video of the first time (we think) Sophie saw a cat. They were in a stationary car at the time, with the cat sitting on a fence looking at them, and her owner captured on video the look of Sophie’s curiosity and wonder. We think! But actually it doesn’t matter what we think. It’s what we feel together. What we experience. On the video her owner started laughing, and Sophie barked once as if to join in.

You see, it’s about the small things. It was a small moment but one that carried huge meaning. Sophie was seeing something for the first time and processing it. We want to keep this being a positive experience, but a natural one too. We won’t want to try too hard. Just to experience the moment, and whatever that brings. Being together. Bonding. Sophie’s look of wonderment…

Of course with young puppies, we have a blank canvas with these moments – almost everything is new. Savour these moments. Do it together. But it can be with a dog of any age, and it doesn’t have to be something new. It’s just that moment when they process something that carries meaning for them. Your dog could be much older and even not seeing or hearing well: It can be about touch or smell too. That moment a warm towel goes around them to dry them off, or an especially riveting scent!

Even if a dog is scared of certain things and reactive, we can still enjoy looking at and processing things, as long as we are both together in our safe bubble, from far enough away. Or, yes, it can just be something they will have heard a thousand times before, but this one time their curiosity is piqued. When we’re training sometimes an owner will ask me what their dog is thinking at that moment. Often there isn’t an answer. “I don’t know” I might say, “but it’s nice just wondering, isn’t it?” Revel in the mystery.

These moments are a privilege for us, and are hard to convey in words and so it is with Woody & the Leaf, but I will try. He was a puppy and we were in the garden on an autumn day. I don’t know, probably waiting for that wee. Naturally, he was distracted with everything around him. It was very quiet but there was a breeze. Then suddenly something broke his concentration. It was a leaf falling from a tree. The breeze was perfectly swaying and buffeting it gently on its slow journey downwards. Woody was tilting his head and watching it. As it touched the ground, he still studied it. Then looked up at the sky. “I know”, I said.

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I would like to wish all my readers and friends a Happy Christmas and best wishes for the New Year!

Can dogs feel empathy?

Can they understand and share our feelings?

Dogs, as we all know, are very good at picking on our emotional temperature. I am sure you can imagine countless examples. If a person is nervous with our dog, our dog can become equally cautious. Or if we are excited, our dog is usually more than happy to join in! If we are ill or hurting, most dog owners will swear their dog is sympathetic to our condition – showing a variety of displacement behaviours. So what’s going on here? Some psychologists and behaviourists maintain this is something called emotional contagion. This implies a dog does respond to our feelings, but without properly understanding them. Simply a good, bad or neutral scale. But can dogs feel empathy ?

Defining Empathy

Defining a term is often easier if we first look at what it isn’t, and we should differentiate it from sympathy. Sympathy is when we do share an emotional connection with someone else’s experience or feeling. But there remains a certain detachment. Empathy is something on a much higher level. It implies an actual understanding of those feelings, and the ability to imagine ourselves in the other being’s emotional skin. It’s much more immersive. It implies the ability to differentiate from self and other. So we are setting the bar quite high, here.

My training is based on an empathic approach – ‘Be Dog’ if you like. To re-imagine ourselves into how a dog truly thinks and feels. So it’s important! But I am curious about the level at which a dog can reciprocate this. Because training is as much about engaging with feelings as it is about auto-responses and simply doing things.

First level biological senses

I got to thinking about this topic from a recent experience. I was laid up with an illness and many of you will recognise my dog’s behaviour with this situation. He stuck by me. He was much closer, more of the time. Now, there are other things going on here. Specifically with illness, there are obviously physical changes in the body.  Where these are not immediately obvious to our appearance, from our dog’s point of view, we are still walking around with a big flag. We smell different! Dogs have even been trained to detect certain illnesses with their nose. (I still marvel at this!) But without question, my dog probably knew I had a lurgy well before I showed physical symptoms.

Was his emotional reaction to be closer to me an empathic one though? Sure, there may be other things going on.

Dad is on the sofa during the day. This is weird, I better stay close. Not sure what’s going on. Or…This is nice. He’s not working, it’s good to hang out together. And so on. But most dog parents will tell you, they know, and there is a lot more going on, because we can feel their emotional connection to us.

The mirror test

Some debunk the idea that dogs can feel empathy and distinguish between self and other by using the mirror as an example. But I think this is too crude, and also inconsistent. Most dogs do not seem to react to their reflection in the mirror. A few do though, either displaying prolonged curiosity, or excitement, or even animosity (a belief there is another dog there, or a frustration at not understanding?). But we can never be certain what’s going on in their mind when they see themselves. We could even argue that the majority response of ‘not interested’ means they know exactly what they are seeing, it’s no big deal. Vanity is certainly a concept alien to dogs!

What does the science say?

There have been many studies about this, and they are divided over whether dogs can feel empathy. Because we never know for sure of course. But so many of these studies do hint at the possibility of dogs feeling empathy. Bond Tests (measuring the degree of attachment a dog has to their parent) demonstrate dogs will act with urgency if they feel their owner is in distress. This is a good starting point: emotional contagion for sure. Can we go to a higher level?

For me, one of the most telling studies was by a pair of psychologists. In this experiment, dogs were observed individually in the presence of their parent and also a stranger. The two humans would take turns with different vocalisations, mimicking different emotional levels, such as talking, singing or crying. When the stranger pretended to cry, most of the dogs showed a concern for them. Approaching them, and even licking or muzzling them.

If we are talking about only emotional contagion, we would expect the dogs to possibly mimic the stranger’s behaviour, but approach their owner instead, for comfort. The fact that most chose to try and comfort the stranger instead, suggests evidence of empathic concern.

Mystery and wonder

Maybe some questions can never be answered. But in one sense, the mystery and wonder of dogs’ complex emotional make-up is what is so meaningful to us, rather than how we define truth or fact. I think the answer to the question is Yes. But whatever we believe, embrace the fact that our dog is probably understanding our emotions more than we sometimes give them credit for!

Paws for thought

How surfaces affect dog behaviour

It took me a while to realise that there was a common thread running through training two different dogs I am currently working with. And this involved the very nature of the ground they stand on. It then got me thinking about the different textures and temperatures of the ground. Literally, how surfaces affect dog behaviour.

Two dogs, two opposite behaviours

Let’s call them Dog A and B! Dog A enjoys a back garden in their family home. He will happily chase a ball there and sniff around the borders and plant beds, or generally hang out with his humans. Doing all the things a dog might normally do. But he will never toilet there, only on a proper walk further away from the house. He will toilet on the pavement or the grass in the park, he’s not fussy there. But never in their back garden. You can imagine this presents an issue for his humans.

As it does for Dog B, who has the exact opposite behaviour: he will only toilet in his back garden. Never, ever on a walk, no matter how long the walk is, and whatever the terrain. No matter how much he interacts with nature on the walk. As soon as everyone returns from the walk, he will go straight out in the back garden and do his business. So what’s going on here?

Can surfaces really affect dog behaviour?

In both of these cases, I think it does. Because in both cases, the surface of the back garden was the same, and we eliminated other potential causal variables as far as we could. Both gardens had artificial grass. My theory is that they have learned an association with the very surface of those areas, rather than the area itself. The result is two completely opposite behaviours, but that share this one commonality.

I’m not going to debate the pros and cons of artificial grass here. (Though I will say if you are considering it as an option, your dog will thank you for sticking with the real thing.) But my point would be the same for some dogs who have a ‘neurosis’ about hard flooring. To illustrate my point about surfaces, let’s first briefly consider the importance of a dog’s point of contact with the world: their paws.

Dog paw anatomy

We will leave aside the mysterious dew claw and carpal pads which are higher up the limb, and for which no-one for sure knows their original purpose. Apart from being sticky-outy things that are prone to injury! Then we have the claws (for digging and gripping) and of course the main pads, known as digital pads. These pads are made of extra thick skin, because they are subject to a huge amount of load-bearing and wear-and-tear. Despite this, they are extremely sensitive. Apart from allowing the dog to regulate their body temperature (that and their mouths alone), they transmit signals about the surface the dog is standing on. Far more so than our human feet.

So a dog’s pads are an important door through which the world is explored and learned. Dogs can build cognitive associations very quickly based on touch and feel. We tend to focus on their aural and visual triggers – seeing and hearing things that cause a reaction in a dog’s behaviour. The touch aspect is often over-looked. It’s why I often address touch sensitivity when tackling a dog’s behaviour problem that may seem completely unrelated. In essence, dogs can form very powerful associations with the type of ground they stand on.

So what was going on with dog A and B?

Dog A was adopted as an adult so we don’t know about their early toilet training. But it appears they may never have come into contact with plastic grass before. To a dog, this surface is much closer to carpets and rugs than to real grass. It does not smell or feel like grass, but smells and feels of artificial fibres or maybe cleaning products, much like our carpets and rugs. Clearly this dog thought going to the loo in the garden was akin to doing it in the house. So they would only perform their rituals out in the park.

Dog B was raised correctly as a puppy – to toilet outside. They were praised when they did this. I think this dog made a strong association with the feel of the ground, not the context of ‘being outside’. When their paws felt the plastic grass, and they went to the loo, they were praised. Boom, there it is. Quite logical when you think about it.

Both dogs were thinking in a logical way, and trying to do the right behaviour. But it goes to show, this can sometimes have undesired or odd results!

The difference that surface can make

The implications for training other things are significant. When we think about distractions for our dogs, we always think of sight and sound. But the surface you are training or interacting on will also have an effect. Some more so in others. But if a dog is fine with doing a Sit in the living room but not in the kitchen, sometimes it can be because they have a different association with what their paws are telling them. And if you are outside, is the ground hot or cold, rough or smooth? And so on.

A surface won’t cause a behaviour (“the pavement makes him reactive”!) but it can seal the early learning of a behaviour by locking in an association. So surfaces do indeed affect behaviour and mood. Maybe we wouldn’t be so different either if we didn’t wear shoes!

Adrenaline & your Dog

And what it means for you

I had to take my dog to the vets recently (happy ending, by the way). He’s generally pretty good with vets but when we pull up in the car outside, he does become nervous. There is a little shaking and lip-licking. Once we get inside to the waiting area he is obviously tense. But he does busy himself watching the comings and goings of people and animals. He had a significant limp which was why we were there. But on his way from the car into the building, and then into the consultation room, the limp had all but vanished. Had the cause of the limp just disappeared? Typical! Actually…

As the vet commented, the sudden disappearance of a significant injury symptom can be quite common in these situations. What was going on with Woody was that his body was producing a lot of adrenaline very quickly, which was now displaying as nervous excitement (uh-oh, the vet table !). But adrenaline suppresses pain for a short time. Adrenaline and your dog will produce outcomes very quickly. What still amazes me with the vets was how quickly this had happened. Sure enough, once we got home and he had calmed down, the limp re-appeared just as it was.

What is adrenaline?

Adrenaline is a hormone produced in the body that prepares the body for exertion. The result is increased pulse, breathing, and muscles in the body primed for more extreme use. Its purpose has obvious evolutionary benefits and its effect both over-rides pain receptors as well as impairing cognitive functions (thinking).

It is well-known that when we sustain a physical injury, if it’s painful enough our bodies can go into ‘shock’. The resultant adrenaline that is produced can have a sedative effect on the pain. But we know it’s gonna hurt later! This is another good example of its temporary but powerful effect.

Why are dogs so efficient in producing adrenaline?

Domestic dogs’ ancestors, like wolves and other wild canids, had to make quick decisions to survive. The quickest way to make a decision is based on an emotional reaction, rather than thinking about a problem to try and solve it (which dogs are most certainly capable of doing). The most efficient way to have an emotional reaction is to produce a lot of adrenaline, very quickly. So it’s a genetic relic, of little practical use for our domestic pets, but not something we can remotely change.

Is adrenaline just more energy?

No. The effect is the consumption of more energy, but it comes at the expense of the fixed energy supply available in the body, so it’s common for the dog to feel more tired afterwards. Energy we measure in joules and calories. Adrenaline is like a turbo boost that really opens the taps to access that energy, but it drains the tank quickly.

What does this mean for dog behaviour and training?

Anything and everything! If your dog is either very scared or over-excited about something, a lot of adrenaline will be produced very quickly. This covers everything from aggression to more innocent excitement. The result is the brain will filter out everything not of relevance to their immediate situation. (Remember that survival instinct.) This means they can’t hear you. So they may not be able to respond to you, they won’t be interested in the treats that usually never let you down, and they certainly won’t remember what a “Come Here” means. It’s all just ‘bah!’ and white noise! They are hyper-aroused.

We need to recognise our limitations with this scenario. Your dog is not behaving badly. Your dog is an animal, and it is in a highly aroused state, because of adrenaline. It’s a physical, not a wilful reaction, resulting in something over which they have no control.

What we do next is the important bit, because if we shout at or try to punish our dog for the consequent behaviour, think about what this means to them and how they perceive you. They will certainly be able to process it all afterwards, when that adrenaline has worn off.

The best thing we can do is do our best to remove them from a situation that is causing this, and potentially putting them in harm’s way, or in a less dramatic situation, recognise it for what it is, and let them burn it off doing those zoomies! Removing them from triggering situations is where training can help: if we have rehearsed and reinforced a routine to do just this, you have a much better chance at succeeding, even with that adrenaline. And then we need to calm down, because although we have changed the situation, the adrenaline is still there.

Is an ‘adrenaline rush’ somehow ‘addictive’ for dogs?

Dogs are quite capable of working themselves up into a hyper-aroused state by themselves (think about those zoomies). Repetitive ball-play can produce a similar effect if the dog is naturally over-excited by this. A spaniel seeing a pheasant? Now there’s a rush. It’s well known that for humans doing sport or gym activity that the buzz from an adrenaline rush is self-reinforcing, whether subconscious or outwardly recognized as a beneficial side-effect. Could dogs learn that certain situations and activities are beneficial because it simply makes them feel good too?  

In dog behaviour studies there is always discussion about a category of dogs that appear to enjoy being aggressive, even to ‘enjoy fighting’. A more accurate description would be they enjoy the adrenaline rush that comes from aggressive situations. Every dog has a survival instinct, and physical aggression is expensive (injury) and risky (death). But could it be that some dogs learn that the adrenaline buzz is always produced when they are hyper-aroused, and they enjoy that feeling itself? It’s quite plausible, and certainly food for thought!

Adrenaline and your dog always co-exist. But for most of us, next time your dog is over their threshold, it doesn’t mean we have to be invisible. We just have to know what to do.