Contact-training - and the big question
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Like any other fashion this also was invented by someone. Who, when and where is not of interest. WHY is a key question, and it is giving me a real headache trying to find out what the intention might have been.
Have you ever been teaching contact training among people? And how should that be? Keeping a steady eye contact? that would probably scare the wits out of some. Touch? that would definitely scare them. And what should the intention with it be? |
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When we talk about better contact between people, we mean talking to each other. Talking and listening. Maybe it should be the same between you and your dog?
Dogs are much more sensitive than us to eye contact, and feel it as a threat when they are stared at. Dogs with a normal polite social skill would never stare at each other, they would look away, blink their eyes, or avoid the stare in some way.
We know this. We also know that we should never stare any animal in the eye. It is provocative and raises the pulse and the animal’s tension, making him feel he might have to get ready to defend himself. And often in the end will.
Contact training, as they instruct in so many classes, means teaching the dog to keep a steady eye contact with you. Why??? to threaten him? to make him feel tense and unwell? The dog will try to look away, blink, showing eyes going from one side to another because he is uncomfortable with the stare, knowing it is threatening, and he does not want to be that.
Getting a treat for it, or a ball to play with, does not take the bad feeling away.
So why do we do it? That is the million-dollar question . . .
When I did obedience competitions on highest level way back in the 70-ies and -80-ies, we did not demand eye contact. My dog won many prizes in those years without staring at me. Throwing a glance a couple of times just to check on something, but never eye contact. That also meant that she could walk straight, without having to twist her whole body to look up, and twisting the neck in a painful position. So she never got a stiff and painful neck, or muscle pain because of the twisted body during precision heel work. She could move with the smooth and beautiful movements a dog in complete body balance has.
The eye contact started to show in competitions, for the sole reason that someone thought it looked fabulous, and with no thoughts about what it did to the body, and the dog feeling bad.
One of the arguments was that the dogs loved it because they wagged their tails while doing it. Wrong. Because they had to do something the dog knew was impolite and wrong, they had to use another calming signal to take the threat away: wagging tail.
Dogs use their tails in many more ways than showing happiness. They try to soothe an angry owner and make him calm down. And to make a bad situation better. If you are angry at your dog, they will show many signs of fear and calming, but often also wag the tail - often frantically.
In the beginning it was just used in competitions by ambitious owners who wanted to show off in a spectacular way. They did not see the health risks. It took many years before we started to learn about body balance, and how movements and what we do with our dogs affect the whole body. We know more about that now, thanks to studies and scientific research on muscles, joints and the whole structure of the dog. Balance is the key to a healthy body, and a varied way of moving, particularly moving freely. As soon as we force them to move out of balance, with a twisted body, twisted neck, we are doing something bad to the dog’s health.
I found it terrible to look at dogs being trained this way, so stopped competitions, also because I found it boring, but it did not give any pleasure anymore to see which way it was going.
But the worst was still to come.
The last 20 years we have got more and more of socalled reactive dogs. Dogs who react to and play up at the sight of other dogs and sometimes people, bicycles, cars and so on. 9 out of 10 dogs being brought to me for problems they had, were reactive. Since I have done problem solving with 30 000 to 40 000 dogs, the number of reactive dogs is scaringly high.
I started to work on developing ways of helping them, and found some simple methods that worked without fail, and also seemed to teach them for life. They really learnt, and changed.
Then cures and training for reactive dogs popped up in all kinds of variations. The methods came and went, and new ones appeared. One of them has been more longlived than others, and is based upon - exactly: the eye contact.
This fashion is popular also among people who should know better. Ordinary dog owners are excused, as they get information from zillions of sources and have difficulties in orientating themselves among them. They often do not have selfconfidence in thinking themselves. But trainers, who should have knowledge in not only training, but muscles, movements, balance, joints, and about dogs’ language, when they use it and do not see what they are doing to the dog, then I put a big question mark to their skills.
The most popular of the recent methods of training reactivity is like this:
The reactive dog is walked - on a short leash for control, of course. When another dog appears, the reactive dog is demanded either to sit and give eye contact to the owner, or being walked past with eye contact, and being stuffed with treats while the circus is on.
Look at the dog.
He snaps the treats of course, as a dog usually will, but what does he learn?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Eye contact means bending, twisting the neck in a way that necessarily must be painful. Try it yourself. You might be OK for 2 - 3 or even 5 seconds, then pain sets in. Real pain! If you have to do this often, your neck gets so stiff and painful in the end, that you will get a headache, pain in the back, it spreads all over the body, making the dog moving and using his body in way that shows pain, and should make red lights turn on. Your dog is in danger.
So - he must look at you while the other dog is passing, feeling pain in his neck, and he must look you in the eye, which raises his pulse and make him feel bad, and he knows the other dog is passing but is not allowed to see what is going on. There is a monster behind him, and he is not allowed to see what the monster is up to.
Do you really think he feels good in that situation? and learns to cope?
He does not.
The only one that benefits from the training is you, who feel you have control. Your dog will never learn to cope that way.
This kind of contact training is only about control, and not any learning. We want to feel good, showing people we are in control, and not feeling embarrassed but be able to show off how good we are.
Stop! This is not what it is about!
Contact-training - what a misleading word. This has nothing to do with contact with your dog. It is only control, control, control.
If you want contact with your dog, you have to do totally different things. You have to respect his language, his physical discomfort, his emotions, and not turn him into a circus animal, just because you want control.
It does not become any nicer because you stuff him with treats.
Do it the right way.
Start with parallel walking, social walks, curving when meeting, and let him have the distance he needs. No commands, and let him look so he knows what is going on. Use a barrier if necessary in the beginning, let him have choices, let him feel he can cope! When the feeling of coping is coming, he learns fast, getting the self-confidence needed to cope with first simple situations, and quickly more and more difficulties. A dog who has learnt to cope will not easily be upset or reactive, probably not at all.
Having control of the dog at the moment has nothing to do with learning. Control will make a dog helpless. Helplessness will make dogs stressed, unsure, reactive or depressed, - depending on their characters. But they never learn to cope.
So the big question is still: why do you use eye contact training?
It has nothing to do with real contact, it is physically unhealthy and painful, it goes against everything a dog is - a social, polite animal who would never behave like that to other dogs and people, it creates problems, and the dog does not learn a thing from it.
I feel like starting an anti-contact-campaign. And if you really love your dog:
Do him the favour of not having to give you eye contact.
Maybe some time in the future we can tell our grandchildren the fairytale:
Once upon a time there was a troll called Control . . .
Turid Rugaas
Dogs are much more sensitive than us to eye contact, and feel it as a threat when they are stared at. Dogs with a normal polite social skill would never stare at each other, they would look away, blink their eyes, or avoid the stare in some way.
We know this. We also know that we should never stare any animal in the eye. It is provocative and raises the pulse and the animal’s tension, making him feel he might have to get ready to defend himself. And often in the end will.
Contact training, as they instruct in so many classes, means teaching the dog to keep a steady eye contact with you. Why??? to threaten him? to make him feel tense and unwell? The dog will try to look away, blink, showing eyes going from one side to another because he is uncomfortable with the stare, knowing it is threatening, and he does not want to be that.
Getting a treat for it, or a ball to play with, does not take the bad feeling away.
So why do we do it? That is the million-dollar question . . .
When I did obedience competitions on highest level way back in the 70-ies and -80-ies, we did not demand eye contact. My dog won many prizes in those years without staring at me. Throwing a glance a couple of times just to check on something, but never eye contact. That also meant that she could walk straight, without having to twist her whole body to look up, and twisting the neck in a painful position. So she never got a stiff and painful neck, or muscle pain because of the twisted body during precision heel work. She could move with the smooth and beautiful movements a dog in complete body balance has.
The eye contact started to show in competitions, for the sole reason that someone thought it looked fabulous, and with no thoughts about what it did to the body, and the dog feeling bad.
One of the arguments was that the dogs loved it because they wagged their tails while doing it. Wrong. Because they had to do something the dog knew was impolite and wrong, they had to use another calming signal to take the threat away: wagging tail.
Dogs use their tails in many more ways than showing happiness. They try to soothe an angry owner and make him calm down. And to make a bad situation better. If you are angry at your dog, they will show many signs of fear and calming, but often also wag the tail - often frantically.
In the beginning it was just used in competitions by ambitious owners who wanted to show off in a spectacular way. They did not see the health risks. It took many years before we started to learn about body balance, and how movements and what we do with our dogs affect the whole body. We know more about that now, thanks to studies and scientific research on muscles, joints and the whole structure of the dog. Balance is the key to a healthy body, and a varied way of moving, particularly moving freely. As soon as we force them to move out of balance, with a twisted body, twisted neck, we are doing something bad to the dog’s health.
I found it terrible to look at dogs being trained this way, so stopped competitions, also because I found it boring, but it did not give any pleasure anymore to see which way it was going.
But the worst was still to come.
The last 20 years we have got more and more of socalled reactive dogs. Dogs who react to and play up at the sight of other dogs and sometimes people, bicycles, cars and so on. 9 out of 10 dogs being brought to me for problems they had, were reactive. Since I have done problem solving with 30 000 to 40 000 dogs, the number of reactive dogs is scaringly high.
I started to work on developing ways of helping them, and found some simple methods that worked without fail, and also seemed to teach them for life. They really learnt, and changed.
Then cures and training for reactive dogs popped up in all kinds of variations. The methods came and went, and new ones appeared. One of them has been more longlived than others, and is based upon - exactly: the eye contact.
This fashion is popular also among people who should know better. Ordinary dog owners are excused, as they get information from zillions of sources and have difficulties in orientating themselves among them. They often do not have selfconfidence in thinking themselves. But trainers, who should have knowledge in not only training, but muscles, movements, balance, joints, and about dogs’ language, when they use it and do not see what they are doing to the dog, then I put a big question mark to their skills.
The most popular of the recent methods of training reactivity is like this:
The reactive dog is walked - on a short leash for control, of course. When another dog appears, the reactive dog is demanded either to sit and give eye contact to the owner, or being walked past with eye contact, and being stuffed with treats while the circus is on.
Look at the dog.
He snaps the treats of course, as a dog usually will, but what does he learn?
Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Eye contact means bending, twisting the neck in a way that necessarily must be painful. Try it yourself. You might be OK for 2 - 3 or even 5 seconds, then pain sets in. Real pain! If you have to do this often, your neck gets so stiff and painful in the end, that you will get a headache, pain in the back, it spreads all over the body, making the dog moving and using his body in way that shows pain, and should make red lights turn on. Your dog is in danger.
So - he must look at you while the other dog is passing, feeling pain in his neck, and he must look you in the eye, which raises his pulse and make him feel bad, and he knows the other dog is passing but is not allowed to see what is going on. There is a monster behind him, and he is not allowed to see what the monster is up to.
Do you really think he feels good in that situation? and learns to cope?
He does not.
The only one that benefits from the training is you, who feel you have control. Your dog will never learn to cope that way.
This kind of contact training is only about control, and not any learning. We want to feel good, showing people we are in control, and not feeling embarrassed but be able to show off how good we are.
Stop! This is not what it is about!
Contact-training - what a misleading word. This has nothing to do with contact with your dog. It is only control, control, control.
If you want contact with your dog, you have to do totally different things. You have to respect his language, his physical discomfort, his emotions, and not turn him into a circus animal, just because you want control.
It does not become any nicer because you stuff him with treats.
Do it the right way.
Start with parallel walking, social walks, curving when meeting, and let him have the distance he needs. No commands, and let him look so he knows what is going on. Use a barrier if necessary in the beginning, let him have choices, let him feel he can cope! When the feeling of coping is coming, he learns fast, getting the self-confidence needed to cope with first simple situations, and quickly more and more difficulties. A dog who has learnt to cope will not easily be upset or reactive, probably not at all.
Having control of the dog at the moment has nothing to do with learning. Control will make a dog helpless. Helplessness will make dogs stressed, unsure, reactive or depressed, - depending on their characters. But they never learn to cope.
So the big question is still: why do you use eye contact training?
It has nothing to do with real contact, it is physically unhealthy and painful, it goes against everything a dog is - a social, polite animal who would never behave like that to other dogs and people, it creates problems, and the dog does not learn a thing from it.
I feel like starting an anti-contact-campaign. And if you really love your dog:
Do him the favour of not having to give you eye contact.
Maybe some time in the future we can tell our grandchildren the fairytale:
Once upon a time there was a troll called Control . . .
Turid Rugaas
