When we consider safety and wellness, our dogs are healthy both in mind and body, are free of pain and fear, and can enjoy their lives. And we develop a set of tools to help do this quickly, so we can teach when we are ready, and enjoy each other along the way.
Harmony depends on ensuring safety and encouraging wellness for everyone involved, human and canine. And safety and wellness are often the very first element of building harmony that smart guardians attend to. Why? Because here is where we get our quick fix, our first solution, and where we build the foundation for every other element of the harmony model. Training, socialization, enrichment, communication, all of it depends on building emotional and physical safety first.
Management is a quick fix (and that’s great!)
Yep, the fastest fix of all, in fact. And since instant changes are pretty rare in the real world generally and in dog training specifically, we’d encourage you to take them where you can find them!
Perhaps you’ve identified three areas that need training attention, and only have time to work on one of them right now. That’s fine! The others just need to have a quick and easy solution that compliments a longer teaching plan. Until those skills are learned, it’s time for a quick fix! Trainers often call this management: a way of keeping your dog out of situations where she doesn’t yet know what to do. By keeping your dog out of situations she isn’t prepared for, you keep her and you safe. You also do something crucial to your future harmony with your dog: you prepare the ground for learning by making sure the skills you teach aren’t competing with behaviors and reactions you don’t want.
Management isn’t about changing behavior, it’s about changing the opportunities for behavior. If your dog constantly patrols the kitchen counters looking for snacks, keeping her out of the kitchen for now will help you teach another way to behave in the kitchen later. If your dog loses it, barking and lunging he hears the doorbell only to turn into a social angel when people come inside, switching to a silent doorbell that alerts your phone and not your dog can be one way to prevent the opportunity to bark until you are ready to work on his reaction to the sound.
Dogs are professionals at what they practice, and by preventing your dog from practicing behaviors you do not want, you prepare him to learn what you do want. Since training often (not always) comes last in our plans, management can meet both our needs for immediate solutions and our dog’s needs to both be and feel safe. Safety simply means managing the environment to proactively ensure your dog’s physical and emotional health, as well as their physical and emotional safety.
Safety is physical and emotional, too
Keeping your dog safe from physical harm is likely something you already think about. That’s why he wears a lead when walking near heavy traffic, why you make sure human medications and dangerous foods are out of reach, and why (we hope!) you have him ride in the car safely contained or restrained. (These are all also management strategies, by the way! Preventing your dog from practicing a behavior you don’t want by changing the opportunities to do so. Did you recognize them? Of course you did! That’s one reason why management and safety go together in the Harmony Model.) One of the great responsibilities of modern dog guardianship is ensuring safety in a world that is not built with them. But safety is larger than just physical safety, it’s about emotional safety as well.
Yes, we said emotional safety! One of the big missing elements in many training plans is ensuring the emotional safety as well as the physical safety of all involved. Knowing you’re safe and feeling safe are two different things, and that’s true for our dogs, too. When we keep our dogs physically safe, we are ensuring their continued physical health, and by attending to our dog’s emotional comfort and keeping them out of situations in which they perceive danger or are emotionally overwhelmed, we do the same for their behavioral health.
Ensuring emotional safety means taking your dog’s view seriously
“Oh, you’re FINE, it’s just a ….”
Ever find yourself saying this to your dog? We have, too, unfortunately. Dogs societies find seemingly ordinary parts of our world exceedingly scary. A blowing trash bag, a loud truck, a nail trim, the sound of the dryer, the sight of a kitten. The internet is full of examples of our dogs struggling to cope with things that aren’t a threat to their physical safety, and these clips are presented as heartwarming, silly, or harmless.
But imagine that the tables were turned, and we were on planet dog. Here, dogs are two to ten times as tall as us, and have a whole world of gadgets, objects, and practices that we’ve never seen before. Because they use smell to navigate their pathways, there are no visual cues about what will happen where. And, surprise! all of a sudden here comes a dog holding a large squirming something in its mouth. The thing has smooth parts, lumpy parts, and one.. is it a leg? Is it a claw? Is it a stinger?? You can’t tell but before you can get a good look the dog knocks you off your feet and places the squirming something near the back of your head. Are you screaming yet? “Oh, you’re FINE,” the dog says with his tail, even though you’re terrified and you don’t speak dog, anyway.
Yes, it sounds like a far-fetched, silly example, but it is very similar, emotionally, to the experiences our dogs often have in our world. And when we force our dogs to interact with these things we know aren’t dangerous, but which our dogs experience just the way we might experience the human world into which we bring them. Imagine a small child crawling over to a dog in the corner of a couch, lifting and placing her small hand near his back (Or is that a claw?! Or a stinger?!). Even though you and I know the child is no physical threat, your dog may not. And these experiences might lead to fear, avoidance, aggression, or all of the above now and in the future. When we don’t attend to our dog’s emotional safety, our dog’s can learn to fear things that are truly safe! And this fallout can change our dog’s behavior in big and long-lasting ways. (Just a note, positive socialization can help teach dogs how to enjoy new things without this fallout, and that’s one reason it’s essential to the Harmony Model.)
Wellness
Unhealthy dogs can sometimes learn, but they may not learn what you want them to learn, and they may not learn as easily or retain as much as a dog who is comfortable, healthy, and free from pain and physical discomfort.
The more we learn about how dogs experience pain, and how to detect pain in nonhuman animals, the more we realize how pain can and does affect our dog’s training, enjoyment, welfare and yes, their outward behavior. In short, pain is probably more common than you think, and it might play a larger role in your dog’s choices and behaviors than you think. Even young, healthy-looking dogs can suffer with an ear-infection that makes being touched on the head painful, or that makes certain sounds uncomfortable, for example. So excellent trainers know to consider a dog’s health first and foremost when thinking about harmony. They also recognize both how good they are at concealing it and adapting to it and how to work with a vet to rule out pain as a proximate or distant cause of a dog’s fears, phobias, behavior problems, serious and less-so, and their enjoyment of their world.
