Dog|Horse|Animals|Relationship
Could Your “Bad Dog” Actually Be “Good Enough”?
We put a lot of pressure on our animals to make us look good in other people’s eyes. Could you change your mind about that?
How many times have you asked your dog or horse or another animal to DO something because that behavior is the “best” or “acceptable” according to a particular training dogma?
- “Dogs should never be on the furniture.”
- “Never let your dog go through a door before you do.”
- “Feeding treats from your hand makes a horse nippy.”
- “Yuck! You just let your dog lick the plate clean before you put it in the dishwasher?”
- “Never train a dog with treats.”
- “Make that horse stand still.”
- “Always train a dog with treats.”
- “Why do you let her do that? You have to be in charge.”
Just how many experts and critics can dance on the head of an animal owner?
Canadian dog behaviorist Nancy Tucker trains dogs, trains people to train their dogs, and trains trainers to train the people who train their dogs.
The parts at the beginning and end of that list of skills are the easy ones. The one in the middle — training people to train their dogs — is harder.
As Tucker pondered that part of the training equation, she realized how much pressure dog owners can feel to be “excellent” at following a trainer’s instructions. In a dog school class, they don’t want to go home with an F for failure. Sometimes all the instructions they get from a trainer can be overwhelming.
Tucker came up with the concept of “the good enough dog” to take some of this self-imposed pressure off people training their own dogs.
There’s no official rule book for dog behavior, she says. As long as you and your dog agree on the rules, you get to make them up (for example, that furniture thing).
Tucker tells clients it’s OK to manage behavior issues rather than fixing them if that solution works for them and their pup (like, when someone comes to the door, toss a mouth-watering treat and shut the dog into the powder room until the commotion dies down).
Whew! Did you feel some relief just reading that?
A mention of Tucker’s viewpoint about training in Whole Dog Journal, one of my favorite critter publications, triggered a memory of the day a helpful horsewoman taught me to challenge common practices when they weren’t working for me or my horse.
She definitely would endorse Tucker’s take on training.
The woman was a former Olympic-level rider who offered to help me get back in the saddle after a lengthy layup following a broken ankle. I was hustling to get ready for our meetup. My mare was antsy.
Now here’s the picture. Cross-ties are straps with snaps at each end. Horse people use them to keep a horse in the middle of a barn aisle while them go about grooming and saddling and other things.
Gospel says you snap one end of each cross-tie to the wall and the other end to the side of the horse’s halter. The horse now stands quietly in the middle of the aisle. So they say.
My mare wasn’t listening to gospel that day. She kept swinging her rear end from side to side. Several times I stopped grooming and asked her to stand still so I could finish. Multiple times. Then a voice behind me said…
“What are you doing?”
The woman who’d come to help us was leaning on the lower half of the barn’s Dutch door, watching us.
“I’m trying to get her to stand still in the cross ties.”
“Why?”
“Because that’s what she’s supposed to do.”
“Who told you that?”
Wham.
Her question was a gut punch. Why, indeed? I’d never heard anyone challenge the wisdom of the common practice of cross-tying a horse in a barn aisle before. Why do we do it, indeed? Who decided this was how it should be done? Why do we pay attention to them?
My only reason for insisting that my mare stand in a barn aisle in cross ties and stand perfectly still while she was there was that someone had taught me that it was “best practice”. So, in my mind, it followed that if my horse wouldn’t stand quietly in cross ties, I was a failure as a horse person.
Who wants to be a failure?
The woman’s words challenged me to think about what was best for my horse, not me, not any guru or critic. To change my mind.
(Oh. Did I mention that the former show rider had changed careers and now practiced psychology?)
I thought long and hard about my mare’s perspective after that. Something bothered her that day. What was it? There were multiple theories to test. The next time the vet was at the barn, I asked her to check the mare’s eyesight.
A cataract clouded the vision in her right eye. “It’s like she sees through wax paper,” the vet said. So, the mare felt vulnerable in cross ties that restricted her ability to turn around and check the blind space that’s always behind a horse facing forward. She felt insecure. She got antsy.
I stopped using cross ties. I groomed the mare her in a stall or tied her outside where she had the security of a wall or fence on her sight-compromised side and the freedom to put her good eye on anyone or anything approaching from front or back.
I gave her choices that helped her feel safe rather than imposing a “best practice” that didn’t work for her. We managed the problem and that was good enough for both of us.
To learn more about the “good enough” relationship philosophy, listen to Tucker’s discussion with trainer and author Marissa Martino on the Paws and Reward podcast or her interview with Ryan Cartlidge on his Animal Training Academy podcast.
And there’s more solid training advice in her articles in Whole Dog Journal.
© Bonnie Kreitler 2021. All rights reserved.
Writer Bonnie Kreitler creates content to help fellow animal addicts build rewarding relationships with the critters in their lives. See more at www.ramblingdog.com
