Spoiler: Not she’s not.
Winnie is now a year old. She has spent the majority of her puppyhood being a puppy. Learning about the world, making all kinds of friends, learning when it’s not the right time to make friends, visiting all sorts of locations and concerts and having great experiences. Mostly she has been having FUN, whether of my creation or her own. Although her own choices get a little dicey sometimes. In that way she is a perfectly normal Border Collie.
Her training has involved mostly life skills: learning to be comfortable in a crate, learning that you must always pause and wait when presented with an open door to the outside, learning to be
handled all over and accept care tasks (grooming, dental care, nail trims, baths etc). If it were up to her, she’d be a stinky, ragamuffin, coat-blowing machine! She’s worked on very basic obedience skills, has been exposed to low-impact agility work, has done some light pulling work in harness, has learned how to swim, and is not at all a complete imp in public.
She has grown into a sweet, good-natured girl who is so well-behaved when meeting new dogs and kids, and mostly well-behaved when meeting new adults (they can take an occasional over-enthusiastic nose punch after all). Overall she is a good-natured girl with a respectable and well-loved devious streak. Just as she should be.
She has also been learning about boundaries and patience, two things she could personally do without, but she is trying her best. Like all dogs, her learning does not generalize well, and new situations where these skills may be used need to be introduced from the beginning. These are the moments when I love watching the wheels turn in her brilliant head.
Recently, we’ve joined a Family Dog class at Tails-U-Win in Manchester. I wanted her to get more exposure to working in a public place, I wanted to learn new skills and techniques myself (a good trainer is always learning), and I wanted to get the prerequisite classes underway so that we could join them for agility training.
Watching her start to use her brain in new ways is so interesting. She is still mentally very immature, and learning from this class has been a great step to her developing new ways of thinking. She very much so wants what she wants when she wants it. Her biggest obstacle right now is learning to give just a little.
A skill we’re building right now is “touch,” a simple touch of her nose to my hand. It’s a simple skill that can be built into a lot of different, more complex skills. It can be helpful with loose leash walking, recall, and plenty of other behaviors that require specific body positioning.
Winnie thinks “touch” is boring. Not a ton of drive about working at it, not very interested in playing the game, would rather be elsewhere… What happened to having a ton-of-drive, wants-to-work-all-the-time and please-please-please Border Collie?
My Border Collie is broken.
But like I said, no she’s not. She’s learning to use her brain in new ways, she is not always super food-motivated, and she would rather have the good thing NOW rather than having to figure out what behavior might get her the treat she only maybe wants.
My goal with this behavior is to turn it into a blue merle fur missile at my hand. Lots of drive and enthusiasm! Right now, it ranges from mild interest in my hand to a very soft nose touch. She has a fairly reliable response to my ask, she just doesn’t care all that much. Can’t really blame her. I decided that right now, treats were not going to do it for this particular behavior.
This morning, I picked up Ball. Another way in which Winnie is very much not broken is her relationship with Ball. Ball is Life. If she could stick that bumper sticker on her butt she absolutely would (but it would come off pretty quickly with all of that coat she is currently blowing stuck to it). She needs Ball and she needs Ball now. She is a rather good sharer of Ball, so long as whoever she is sharing it with is going to throw it for her and not play with Ball themselves. But she is not used to adjusting her brainwaves between giving up Ball and chasing Ball. Just throw Ball.
This morning, “touch” was the gateway to Ball being thrown.
Well, that opened a can of worms. There was barking and pacing and pawing and dancing and did I mention barking? Her wheels were turning furiously and all she could think about was Ball. I am very empathetic to a dog’s struggles, but I also remain objective and emotionless while they work things out. I have no expectations that she’ll do what I want. Either she will or she won’t, and we’ll deal with either situation when we get there, no problem either way. But eventually, whether because I helped her or because she did it accidentally, my outstretched hand (the one that did not have Ball…) gained some attention, and Ball flew. For a while, the connection to Ball getting thrown each time was not noticed, and her impatience continued, until something else caused Ball to fly.
Slowly but surely, she began to notice the pattern. Watching her realize she had to slow her thoughts about Ball WAY down, work through actually doing that, and then pay real attention to what caused me to throw Ball was so interesting. It did not happen all at once. She’d get to the point where she’d make purposeful touches to my hand, and then the next few times her frustration would return. Why can’t we play Ball the same way we always do?! She’d stamp her feet and bark at me and scratch at Ball and bark at me some more. MOMMMM. But eventually, she realized that a quick touch to my hand didn’t really interrupt her normal game of Ball at all, and that I was happy to throw it again quickly if she gave a tiny bit of something in return. After a short streak of success, we switched to playing ball normally for a few more minutes before we finished up.
She worked on so much more than “touch” today. Her biggest accomplishment was beginning work on adjusting her perspective of The Winnie Show. She is very much the star of her own show and expects to live her life accordingly. I kind of love this about her, but it isn’t super conducive to a productive training relationship. It’s all well and good to teach her individual behaviors and skills, but without working on adjusting her thought process in the first place, her understanding of the individual skills doesn’t matter all that much. I fully intend to nurture her confidence and self-importance. I feel that those traits are a big part of why she is so comfortable and happy in the world. But setting her up to practice adjusting her goals, or at least how she goes about accomplishing them, so that we can both benefit together, will foster a wonderful amount of teamwork and make our relationship and enjoyment of activities together so much healthier and so much more fun for us both.
Next time your dog is struggling with a skill or behavior, take some time to think about how it may not be the skill itself at all, but rather how they think or feel about the situation. Present them with a new way to think about it and give them the time and empathy they need to process it. Like Winnie, it very well may get worse before it gets better. That is ok!! Giving them this opportunity to work things through, as often and as long as they need it, may very well improve your relationship and other training obstacles as well.
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