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DEFENSE BEHAVIOR
by Gary Patterson
http://www.finographics.com/schutzhund/
Unlike most dog events, working dog competitions are not so
much a test of how well a dog can do a particular exercise, but a more
fundamental examination of the dog's temperament. Whether it is Schutzhund, Ring
Sport, herding or service dog trials, the points may be determined by how well a
dog does each exercise, but the exercises, collectively, are a test of the dog's
temperament and behavior. In AKC matches, a dog is expected to perform a series
of unrelated exercises in only one discipline (i.e., obedience, tracking, or
agility). In working dog competitions, the exercises cut across many disciplines
and are usually placed in an order designed to identify the less than perfectly temperament
dog. While all animal trainers should understand the foundations
of the behavior of the subject they are working with (how many of us complain
that our bosses don't have good sense), it is imperative that those who hope to
be highly skilled working dog trainers understand the forces at work in the
minds and genes of their dogs. What follows is an examination of the basics of
dog behavior as they relate to training. I hope to keep the language as
unscientific as possible, but everything is based upon solid scientific research
and conclusions. I only ask that you consider this series in light of how these
ideas apply to our training, and not what some alternative thesis might argue in
light of non-dog training experiences in a more sterile environment.
Dog training, by definition, must be unscientific. We, as
trainers, deal with hundreds of variables that no self respecting scientist
would tolerate. The personalities, life experiences and relationships with
either humans or other dogs are often unique to an individual dog and not
controlled by any abstract protocol that is designed to come up with ultimate
truths. Dog trainers only deal with relative truths: what works with one dog,
works, but may never work on any other dog. It is this one characteristic of dog
training that makes it exciting and challenging, but serves as the undoing of
many trainers who believe that with each dog, you reinvent the wheel. The truth
is there is a long history of dogs-now some twelve thousand years-that helps us
define their behavior. The trainer who doesn't understand this history of
development of the modern dog is truly reinventing the wheel, meaning he is
doomed to repeat the failures of the past. Over one hundred years ago, the
English researcher, Lloyd Morgan, warned: "Never attribute animal behavior
to a high mental function, if the behavior can be explained with a more simple
process." The dog trainer who doesn't have a good theoretical base to his
training is often guilty of exactly this mistake. His is a constant routine of
trying to explain the dog's mental processes or, even worse, forcing the dog to
conform to the trainer's wishes. This is the trainer who explains dog behavior
in human terms ("The dog is defying me.") or is totally indifferent to
what behavior is really driving the dog.
On the other hand, the trainer who understands behavior seems
to do things so easily; a light correction and a soft word are extensions of an
active mind that really understands what is going on during training. A mistake
in training is little more than a challenge to this trainer who, upon reflection
and drawing from a reservoir of knowledge about behavior, finds solutions to
what others might find an impossible task.
Defense Theory
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In this section, one of the most difficult characteristic of
animal behavior is examined. Defense theory would not be so difficult, except
that defensive reactions in the animal world can take many forms, at so many
levels. Further, they are interwoven into virtually every kind of behavior an
animal displays. No matter what behavior an animal exhibits, it is always
capable of instantly shifting into defense and that is a good thing. Defense is
a basic survival characteristic built into every higher animal; it is the means
by which each can survive and procreate. In general, it can take many forms that
are ideally suited to protect a particular species in a certain environment.
Defense can be built into the animal's physical form as with a turtle or
porcupine or, in the case of canines, an active display of behavior that
improves the chances of living for another day. It is these types of behavioral
defenses that we are concerned with and even these can take many forms.
Withdrawal. An animal does not run away, but moves to
a safe place, such as a rabbit to its hole.
Flight. While mistakenly included with submission and appeasement to be
described as avoidance, these characteristics reflect social behavior, not
defense. Flight is simply getting away by running and trickery.
Bluffing. This behavior makes the attacked confront its adversary and,
through displays and posturing, it is often made to seem too great a threat so
the attacker quits the battle. It is often a war of nerves. Defense is most
often shown by prey against predators and we should remember that the first rule
of the predator is to avoid serious injury; an injured predator is a dead
predator. Therefore, these displays are often important in breaking off an
engagement where the attacker, not the prey, fears injury.
Passive behavior or freezing. Most often seen in young
mammals and birds, this behavior requires the animal to simply remain motionless
in hopes that the threat will go away or fail to see it. It is also a behavior
we will see in beginning protection training, where the dog's temperament gives
it neither the motivation to escape or attack.
Aggression. While I have never been able to find a
clear, all inclusive, definition of the word, aggression will be defined as
hostile or attack behavior against animals of a different species, beyond the
displays and posturing of bluffing.
Later, I will differentiate defense aggression, in those
cases involving different species, from social aggression, where the dog's
handler or another dog is involved, but it is important to distinguish between
the above behaviors in defense from similar behaviors we might see during social
interaction. While social responses can be similar to those we see in defense,
the motivation behind the behavior is what makes them different. In defense,
behavior must be directed against a predator or an animal of a different species
(excluding a human's relationship with his dog). In social behavior, responses
are driven by the fundamental social status among animals of the same species.
Social behavior requires that the animal's acts be controlled with no behavior
leading to the destruction or significant injury of any pack member, although
things can go wrong with resulting serious harm. Any alternative would lead to
the destruction of the social order of the pack and its ability to produce
future generations. Therefore, when watching dogs, make sure that you always
understand this important distinction between basic defense and social
behaviors, no matter how similar they may appear.
Defense and Dog Training
http://www.finographics.com/schutzhund/
Among all of the defense strategies we have examined, many
are experienced in dog training. Flight, displays, freezing and aggression are
experienced in week to week training sessions with different dogs and, in fact,
it is all these characteristics that must be identified and worked on to produce
a top working dog. If a dog attempts to flee, display instead of attack or
simply becomes passive during training, the protection trainer must work to
eliminate these responses. If the dog shows aggression, the character of the
aggressive responses may be improper with the dog either out of control in its
defense drive or displaying the wrong kind of aggression. Aggression is not a
simple process of the dog willing to attack an adversary, hut can take two
entirely different forms.
Let's examine two different situations in which a dog might
find itself where aggression is the result. In the first, a dog is trained to
patrol a farm and stop any intruder from coming onto the property. It freely
patrols the farm until it finds a trespassing bear invading the farmer's bee
hives. The dog will first display through barking and making its body apparently
larger (raised hackles, stiff front legs, ears extended forward, deep barking
and quick, but aggressive, advancement against the bear.) If the displays don' t
work against the bear so it continues to advance, the dog must then make a
decision to shift to another form of defense behavior, either flight or
aggression. The important point is that this is a voluntary act by the dog, it
either runs or fights. Either behavior is a legitimate defense, so the dog wins
no matter which way it reacts.
Using the same example, we will now chain the dog to a post
next to the bee hives so it cannot escape. Here, when the bear advances, the dog
has no alternative but to fight for its life. Thus, instead of willingly
engaging in a fight, it takes on an entirely different body posture as the bear
approaches. Its ears may go back, barking will be high pitched and shrill, its
tail may tuck under the belly and its lips will pull back to show its teeth. In
other words, the dog is experiencing stress at the highest level, a total fear
reaction.
In the first example, the dog is showing true defense, a
response where the dog voluntarily attacks and is rewarded. In the second
example, self defense, the animal has no choice but to try to save itself and
will inflict injury in any way to avoid the threat. Self defense always results
in fear and stress with the dog never being the winner. It is this type of dog
that, if it should show this kind of behavior in training, we often describe as
sharp or sharp/shy. While it is difficult to say with certainty, sharpness comes
most commonly from the basic temperament of the dog, but I have seen cases where
it seemed that poor training or imprinting was the cause. In either case, it
should be understood that the overly sharp dog is never a qualified candidate
for any protection work as it exaggerates any experience to the point where
anything can become a threat. It may bite a protection sleeve harder than any
novice dog should only to pop off, or it may as easily bite the helper's face,
club members or family friends.
It must be understood from the outset that all defense is
stressful, in the sense that defense only arises from a perceived threat, real
or otherwise. If we train a dog in the same way each training session, the
defense drive will slowly wane and then die, as the dog sees only a patterned,
predictable environment to which it must respond with no real threat to its
existence. When trainers and breeders talk about nerve in a dog, it is really
the dog's ability to cope with and conquer this stress that distinguishes the
outstanding temperament from the rest. Therefore, good protection training must
involve new experiences for the dog if it is to maintain a strong defense drive.
It has been my unfortunate experience the past several years, when giving
seminars, to have someone say in the beginning, "I understand that you are
a defense trainer and my dog really needs defense work". I am always
dumbfounded since any person who would only work prey or defense has a very poor
understanding of what the working dog sports require. Defense is important for
only one reason: the trial rules test defense behavior. If the trainer fails to
prepare a dog for these tests, he is guilty of incomplete training. Instead, we
should look at defense behavior as something that needs developing, just as much
as prey or social behavior. It is the dog that is well balanced in all of these
drives that performs well.
Before getting into the more practical applications of
theory, it is necessary to examine one more area of behavior in defense,
conflict. No defense strategy works in isolation, but constantly changes
according to the dog's temperament and circumstances that face it. We have seen
that an animal can show one type of behavior and then discard that behavior for
another strategy that might work better in the survival game. But, what happens
when an animal tries to exercise two strategies at the same time? The results
are often strange and even baffling. Conflict only happens when two drives are
competing with each other for domination. A dog may try to flee and attack at
the same time. In bite training, it may try to stay clean and attack
simultaneously and, in fact, this is a common experience in -dog trials. The dog
will out and then proceed to nip the helper or sleeve. Here the dog is
remembering not to bite, until its other drives overwhelm the control and it
nips, only to out and repeat the cycle. Clearly the dog that doesn't out isn't
in conflict, but simply so strong in one drive that no other drive or training
can control its behavior. But the dog that tries to do two things at once is in
conflict. The answer should be only to show the dog the correct behavior and
then reinforce the positive result. Once the dog is clear, the conflict should
disappear, but in protection training, where drives can get out of control, the
trainer must also work on developing the defense drive so the dog can control
it. Only in these cases can conflict truly he eliminated.
There is another form of conflict that is not so apparent, with the most common
experience being in young dog training. This form of conflict response is called
displacement. The behavior results from a dog trying to do two things at once
and because it can't satisfactorily do either, it finds some third kind of
behavior. A common example is the young dog that, upon seeing the helper
approach for protection work, barks strongly when he is at a distance. As the
helper gets closer, the dog suddenly stops barking and stares at the sky or
sniffs the ground. In this case the dog wants to both run and attack at the same
time: an act it cannot do. So it finds this third type of behavior to handle the
conflict. Many trainers become disgusted with this performance, preferring to
describe it as avoidance or a weak dog. Yet, my impression is just the opposite.
Clearly the dog isn't weak, for it barked and acted aggressively when the helper
was at a distance. On the other hand, it didn't run away, for its temperament
wouldn't allow it to do so. Actually, displacement is usually a good sign in
young dog training. Often a young dog starts out showing signs of avoidance and
it is the helper's job to make the dog strong with no thought of fleeing. It is
not uncommon in later training sessions to see this dog start displacing when
the helper comes close. This means that the dog is starting to think about
attacking, not avoiding as it has in the past. It is simply a phase that the
young dog goes through and, with proper helper work showing the dog the way, the
conflict will disappear so the dog learns to think only in terms of aggression.
It is another example of the trainer, who doesn't understand behavior, thinking
the dog is weak when the response probably shows the dog is gaining strength.
Putting Defense to Work in Training
http://www.finographics.com/schutzhund/
While the next installment will deal with prey or predatory
behavior, it is necessary to introduce a few elements of prey work in this
portion. There are a few simple rules of protection work that the trainer must
keep in mind when first starting a dog in protection training.
The first is that a dog will willingly continue to work in a
way that has brought success in past training. Therefore, if we start training
with only bites on the training field, it will soon identify protection training
with bite work and the helper will only be the source of this bite training, not
a threat by himself. Soon, protection training becomes a series of bite
exercises where the dog is only working for the bite.
The second point is that all bite training is essentially
prey work. What precedes or follows the bite may bring the defense drive into
play, but bite work is founded in prey.
A sport trainer might say, "Okay, what is wrong with that. I want a dog
only to bite in trial and if it does fine, why do I have to become involved in
any defense training? My response can be only the same as I mentioned earlier.
If the rules require defense to be tested and the trainer fails to develop
defense properly, then he is guilty of incomplete training.
This seems to leave us with the only alternative of not doing any work on the
dog until it fully matures, not something that most trainers would tolerate. The
problem with waiting until the dog matures can also be that we, as trainers,
might have something important to teach the dog when it is still young, a period
of intense learning for any dog. In other words, we may show the dog some of the
basics of future protection work, by training in the beginning.
If this still seems impossible, it may be that the trainer
believes defense can only come about with direct confrontation between helper
and dog. It is true that the temperament of any young dog is too undeveloped for
full scale pressure to be applied in training, but there is an alternative where
the dog learns to initiate aggressive acts by itself. Remember the earlier
example of the bear and the bee hives, where a dog is capable of showing two
kinds of defensive aggression. The helper who applies pressure on the young or
inexperienced dog, without thought to the problems of what form of defense
behavior the dog may show, may end up with a dog that shows only self defense, a
reaction full of stress. But, if we can use a method where the dog thinks in
terms of only true defense, then its acts are voluntary. Through skilled helper
work, the dog voluntary becomes aggressive, and doesn't consider the legitimate
alternative of avoidance.
When training any beginning dog, especially young ones, I
simply have the handler stand with the dog on the training field while a more
advanced dog is working. There is no helper agitation, nor does the handler do
anything to encourage the dog. For a time the dog will do little or nothing and
then, one day, some noticeable change takes place. Instead of doing nothing, the
dog starts to pay attention and even barks. Over time this behavior strengthens
to the point where the dog is pulling on the lead and willing to chase a decoy
who threatens it at some distance away. What have we taught during this period
before a dog even gets its first bite? First, it learns to start the action, not
respond to some helper trying to get it to come out through pressure. Secondly,
its actions become very similar to true defense reactions, where it postures and
is willing to become aggressive against the helper. Thirdly, it sees the helper
as a threat and not the source of a bite. It is only after the dog is strongly
willing to be aggressive against the helper by chasing him away that we start
formal bite training. There are two additional benefits from this work. The dog
is doing the work voluntarily; no one is making it bark or become aggressive.
Thus the stress that we worry about in young dogs is minimized in this beginning
work, yet we are teaching some valuable lessons. The other benefit is that the
dog will tell you when it is ready to advance to more demanding training. Since
the work is voluntary, its temperament and maturity will clearly show the
handler when it is time to move on; there is no guess work. Even though all of
this is true, the trainer must be patient and let the dog's maturity dictate
when it should move on to bite training. In some cases, handlers have waited
through this phase with the dog giving little or no reaction until one day when
the dog seemed to have put on a different temperament. The fact that a dog is
slow during this early training means nothing and several slow beginners I have
trained later became "V" winners in protection.
When the dog starts formal bite training, important elements of defense training
come into play. Imagine a large circle with the dog and handler at the center.
At some distance from the dog is a point where the dog will become aware of the
threat of the helper and raise a warning. Beyond this point, the dog perceives
no threat and will not react. This point is on the circle that forms the alert
zone and its distance varies from dog to dog depending on maturity and
temperament. Because of the earlier training, described above, the dog has
learned to start the action by alerting to the helper on the edge of the alert
zone. The beginning actions of the dog will be similar to those I described in
the earlier example of true defense against a bear. The dog should bark,
confront the helper head on and even show strong body posture. If the helper
would move toward the dog, in a straight line, from the alert zone, we would see
the dog continue to show aggressive like displays until some point where things
start to change. The dog might stop barking, stop staring at the helper or even
back up. This point, called the critical zone, is where the dog is considering
shifting to another type of defense behavior, usually avoidance in the form of
backing. We must remember that, to the dog, aggression and flight are legitimate
defense responses, with either resulting in success for the dog. Unfortunately,
avoidance is not an acceptable alternative for the dog trainer so we must find
some way of teaching the dog that aggression is the only acceptable response.
But, the trainer who understands defense behavior and the importance of both the
alert and critical zones is able to capitalize on what he sees. In the first
instance, he recognizes that the initial responses of the dog to the helper on
the edge of the alert zone are only bluffing or displays that must change as the
threat becomes greater. By carefully reading the dog, the incoming helper can
read these changes and adjust his work to keep the dog strong and aggressive.
Strangely enough this will involve bringing in prey work, the subject of my next
installment.
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