Training Tips Archives • Page 5 of 9 • Three Dogs Training

Managing Dog Aggression Toward Babies

The first rule to keeping your child safe from your dog is keeping your dog safe from your child – LJ Edwards, “Please Don’t Bite the Baby…”

Question:

“How do you keep your child safe from your dog?”

Professor Boo, I have an 11 year old female German Shepherd and a 10 month old baby at home. My dog has always been friendly towards my baby girl and usually kisses her and licks her a lot. My baby is always after the dog, using her as a “ladder” to stand up, grabs her tail and face and usually my dog just walks away but today was the first time she growled at her and showed her teeth when my daughter tried to grab her (my daughter was in my dog’s sleeping area.) Does that mean she might bite her? I love my dog dearly but my baby comes first. What do I do?
Patty L.

Pinball gets to see that great rewards come when he ignores the silly toddler.

Answer:

This is common when little ones begin to toddle around and use the dog as a walking “helper.”

All dogs can bite if they feel they have no other way to stop something that either scares them or hurts them. Cute as it may be to see baby loving the dog, most dogs are not comfortable with this kind of grabbing. It can hurt your dog when a little one tugs on them especially an older dog.

It should not have to come down to a choice between the dog you love and the child you love.

To keep your child safe from your dog, always remember that your baby doesn’t know she may be hurting the dog and your dog is “please stop,” when they growl. Your job is to stop your child before your dog gets to the point where she feels the need to “correct” the baby. There are some simple rules that will help keep your child safe from your dog.

Please start out by thinking of your dog like an open pool in your back yard. You would never turn your back on your baby around an open pool. You would never let her dangle her feet in the pool without you right there, next to her. And you would always be right there to catch her if she fell, etc…

Please follow these rules:

Dog and baby are never alone together.
You are always right between them for now.
Your child can only touch the dog when you are guiding them as to how to gently touch your dog.
Your baby never wakes the dog, pokes the dog or lands on the dog when your dog is sleeping.
Your dog is never chased by baby – not with walker, not with toys and not on her own.
No dog is ever used as a walking helper for a toddler.

The first rule to keep your child safe from your dog is to keep your dog safe from your child.

In addition to the above, review of basic skills that allow parents to get their dog out of a potentially dangerous situation quickly. It is often easier to call the dog away from the child than to ask a toddler to stop advancing on a resting dog. This may mean some new or review training either individually or in a classroom. In my book “Please Don’t Bite the Baby, and Please Don’t Chase the Dogs,” I cover a number of quick techniques to get your dog out of a situation before trouble occurs.

Too many dogs are euthanized each year because they are viewed as aggressive to their toddler. Much of this can be avoided if we try to understand that for most dogs, toddlers can be scary. Most dogs try to warn the toddler away and too many parents punish the dog for the growl. This leads to a dog who feels like they have no alternative but to bite.

Always remember

When your dog growls, she has given you a great gift – she has told you she is uncomfortable with what your child is doing. Take that gift and return the favor to your dog by following the rules above and teaching or reviewing some really basic skills to keep your child safe from your dog.

Click here for more on how keep your child safe from your dog.

For more on Please Don’t Bite the Baby, and Please Don’t Chase the Dogs, click here

Nails part #1

Here is one of my favorite students, Bandit, taking care of his front nails himself on the sanding board. As you can see, he is enjoying himself.

Taking care of our dog’s nails can sometimes be an arduous task but it is a necessary one.

Bandit Stool trick — “Couldn’t I just sit here on this stool looking cute until you forget about that whole nail thing?”

If a dog’s nails grow too long, the nails push against the ground every time the dog puts weight on his or her feet which affects the movement of different joints by shifting the alignment of the leg bones and that can cause our dogs pain and lead to arthritis. It is hard to imagine that long nails can cause our dogs hip, knee, spinal pain and more, but it’s like that old song, “…shin bone connected to the knee bone…”

Sometimes our dogs allow nail trimming with little protest, but more often than not, if we have not trained our dogs to tolerate (and even love) nail clipping or dremmeling, they are only putting up with it.

“Love it?” You say?

Indeed. Before my fringy dog Pinball came along, all my dogs had their nails demmeled. They came running when they heard me taking out any power tool, disappointment showing on their faces when it wasn’t the Dremmel, but my saw or nail gun instead.

But, when it was Dremmel time, it was party time!

Because Pinball had such long fringe, I could not Dremmel his nails. The fringe from his tail got caught in the sanding drum early on in his nail dremmeling career, and that was enough for all of us. Instead, I had to clip his nails, which is not my favorite. I’ll admit it, I am a “quick wimp” and because of my fear of clipping his quick, I never cut too much away. This left his nails always a little too long.

It was time to teach him the sanding board.

Here is one of my favorite students, Bandit, taking care of his front nails himself on the sanding board. As you can see, he is enjoying himself.

“Nails part #2” will instruct you on how to build a sanding board.

“Nails part #3” will outline how to teach your dog to love sanding his or her own nails on your very own sanding board!

Stay tuned!

Pax’e Learns the Gum Ball Machine

Pax’e learns the gum ball machine is a nice example of trick training using a clicker.

I like using clickers for very specific tricks or tasks.

We’ll see this again when we see more of the nail board –

If you have read some of my other blogs, you will know I am not keen on perfect – just getting where we want to go as happily as possible.

You can almost see Pax’e’s brain cells firing away as she tries to understand how to make the gum ball machine work.

Safe dog and baby snuggling and walking together

Brody and Baby-L – The bond builds and the reports come in

Jessica’s first reports come in:

JDP October 22, 2018, 9:03 am

Things are going well.
This weekend was sweet – I was on the couch giving Logan a bottle when Brody asked to snuggle. He burrowed right in with us, but I had a pillow in between the two just for an extra buffer. Logan was also sleepy and not grabby at that particular moment. Since they were both calm, it was a nice 10 minutes! Then Brody got hot under the blanket and crawled out for some air 🙂

When our dog is calmly snuggled next to us with our body (and even an extra pillow) between dog and baby, we can insure all stays calm and safe as we continue to build their bond.

Trouble passing other dogs…

Because Brody also had some trouble passing other dogs when out walking, we worked on a desensitization and counterconditioning protocol. Taking baby and dog out for a family stroll is a great way to build a positive association – almost like a date night.

Brody walking nicely with his little boy…

JDP October 24, 2018, 8:01 am

One more thing that happened last night that made me explode with pride!
I was walking with Baby-L in the stroller and Brody beside us. A woman with two big, lunging dogs was approaching us. I crossed to the other side of the street to give everyone more space. As I crossed the street, another big dog was in his front yard – he is on an invisible fence and he started barking and running up and down the front yard. We were in the middle of these two.
I did “LOOK AT THAT!!! LOOK AT THAT!!! Those are silly dogs! Hooray!!!” and marched us all right in between all those crazy dogs, and Brody just trotted alongside the stroller – no reaction at all. I heard the lady with the dogs on leash say “Look, you guys – THAT is a good dog.”
Wait a minute. Someone used MY dog as an example of a GOOD DOG!? Once we got past the madness, I had a little party for Brody right in the street. I was so proud of him!
Happy Wednesday!
J

See more about Brody and Baby-L – How this beautiful relationship got started.

See excerpts from Please Don’t Bite the Baby and Please Don’t Chase the Dogs for more safe dog and baby tips.

Shock collars banned in Wales thanks to the RSPCA and The Kennel Club!

After years of effort, the RSPCA and The Kennel Club of the UK successfully get shock collars banned in Wales!

For as much as I don’t mince words about aversive training methods, I especially don’t mince words about the use of shock collars in dog training. Apparently others don’t either:

Communications Director Caroline Kisko [The Kennel Club of the UK] said: “Electric shock collars train dogs through pain and through fear – they are a cruel, outdated and unsuitable method of training dogs.”

The Kennel Club of the UK: “… this barbaric method of training dogs.”

Claire Lawson, RSPCA public affairs manager for Wales, said: “This is a great day for animal welfare in Wales.” (1)

Electric shock collar ban in Wales announced

Based on years of solid behavioral science we know the use of coercive behavior modification like shock collars is inappropriate and cruel. While one can choose to inflict pain to punish a behavior, it speaks more to the individual’s preference than to good training techniques.

Although some people will suggest – even put forth as solid science – that shock collars are just another option in training, they have missed the core issues in behavioral science. As Murray Sidman (2) plainly points out in his book Coercion and Its Fallout, “[J]ust punishing the animal for doing something else does not teach it to sit. At most, punishment only teaches it what not to do.” (3)

He has much more to say on this topic and I will simply add one more of his comments here: “When we take all of its effects into account, punishment’s success in getting rid of behavior will seem inconsequential. The other changes that take place in people who are punished, and, what is sometimes even more important, the changes that take place in those who do the punishing, lead inevitably to the conclusion that punishment is a most unwise, undesirable, and fundamentally destructive method of controlling conduct.” (4)

I know some will say: “Yeah, but he’s talking about humans – we’re just talking about dog training.” Actually the experiments he is referring to have been on mice, dogs, monkeys, birds, and other critters – not of the human variety. We can see what happens to humans as a result of coercion from real-life observations. We know what happens to our animal friends by real laboratory experiments where we can clearly point to the coercion as the cause of a host of unwanted “fallout” behaviors, not the least of which are increased aggression or learned helplessness and complete shut-down.

As the overwhelming body of science against shock collars continues to grow, the tide against their use as being acceptable has begun to pick up momentum and this is just the latest example.

Cymru am byth!

1 BBC 25, February 2010
2 Dr. Sidman, Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University, International Fellow, Association for Behavior Analysis, former academic appointments include: Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, EK Shriver Center for Mental Retardation, Columbia University, Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and others.
3 Coercion and its Fallout, pg 46
4 Coercion and its Fallout, pg 77