Dancing with Bob

Several years into my practice, I saw a case of a lady who lived alone with her 14 month old male Great Dane named Bob. Bob had bitten her seriously enough on the face to require emergency treatment and plastic surgery. This was a bad bite and she was lucky enough not to have lost an eye. The bite occurred in a situation where she had struggled with the dog over his grabbing her shoe in his mouth and not relinquishing it. The authorities deemed the animal dangerous and wanted to have him euthanized, her ex-husband agreed as well. This would seem a reasonable conclusion to draw but she said no, she loved that dog; did not know what she was going to do, but euthanasia was out of the question as far as she was concerned. She would not allow anyone to touch Bob and called her veterinarian for advice.

The veterinarian then called me and expressed how surprised he was by the incident. He had been taking care of Bob since he was a small pup and had always been a pleasant animal to treat. However, given the extent of the injury, he thought that for some unknown reason Bob had become dangerous and he had, obviously. I told him that I would talk to the owner but based on his description of the situation, I too had my doubts about the animal. When I first spoke to her on the phone, I expressed my fears on how dangerous her situation was simply because of Bob's size and strength but she still insisted that Bob not be put down. I listened and decided to suspend my judgment at that time. Perhaps there was more here than meets the eye, I thought. Why would an animal described by the vet as pleasant and obviously in a very strong bonding situation with its owner turn violent and attack like that? I was still skeptical if truth be told, but agreed to come see them if only to try to help her see the problem as the rest of us saw it. This conversation also told me a lot about her love for her animal. Her attachment was great, the bond she had with Bob was deeply felt and I was more than curious to learn about it.

So I visited the home early one afternoon and met her outside the house. She still had stitches on one side of her face: there were two long jagged cuts running from just below the eye down to the corner of her mouth where the upper canine teeth had ripped as she pulled away from the bite. I was already apprehensive and the sight of the injury kicked up my "freak-out" gauge a couple of notches (big aggressive dogs give me the willies, but again, no one promised me a rose garden in this business).

To my surprise, when Bob was brought out, he greeted me wagging and wiggling, smiling from ear to ear and whining like a puppy. He was exuberant! Simply put, the dog was delighted to see me. No fear here, biting me was definitely the last thing on his mind; I began to breath again. I expected to see at least an apprehensive animal if not downright an Attila the Hun. We released Bob from his leash and he came bounding up to me in the most playful demeanor; a big baby and I laughed but he was big and rough. He kept jumping up on me for attention, grabbing my hands and arms since I used them to protect my face from his paws. He was just a silly and unruly pup,  but too big! I gently pushed him away but still welcome him into me, my face all smiles and goofy talk, always signaling friendliness and excitement. We were communicating our good intentions and states of mind (at least my mind as I know it), but his expressions and mine danced in unison and there was trust and friendship, therefore there was common mindfulness.

So I just followed suit and plunged into the spirit of his game.  This play allowed me to be very conscious of his demeanor for any changes in emotion and I also kept my balance at all times, dancing with Bob. There was no need for tests of emotionality as the Open Field Test (see previous post)  or test for fear of strangers and all that. I felt safe but watchful, because as long as there is play, the probability of aggression is extremely low but that does not mean that it can not change and a good observer can generally predict when that is going to happen. (However, and to my misfortune, on a few occasions I have accidentally pushed the envelope a bit too far when playing with aggressive dogs and have been bitten as I will describe in future posts; at other times I have done this purposefully while ready for the attack to find out the point at which the dog's demeanor changes. Finding this threshold is very useful information because it gives us a starting point  for behavioral intervention where the trigger stimulus is to be manipulated.)

Since Bob  was very strong and unruly, there was no way that I could control him physically without exerting lots of muscle which I did not want to do anyway, I just wanted to observe the natural behavioral patterns as they occurred. I also did not want to get into a match of wills with him as long as we were making body contact. So I played, giving him some leeway in his unruliness; but in reality I was having a good time anyway and did not want to stop either, especially since my trepidation was not met. Then I changed the game to tug-of-war with a short piece of heavy rope and he was fine with that also. He grabbed that rope with his teeth and we tugged and growled playfully which gave me a break from wrestling.

Many trainers believe that we should not play tug-of war or wrestle with our dogs because it is competitive and that, it is. However, competitive behavior is not only a very important variable to investigate as a way of assessing and understanding a dog, but competitive play is also a form of therapy to socially channel potentially dangerous behavioral patterns, provided that we keep it in check. Competitive play is very useful in that playfulness in the animal is a very powerful and utilitarian reinforcer; in my professional experience, I have found tug-of-war to be a very convenient and powerful reinforcer when training energetic dogs.

I definitely got my exercise playing tug-of-war with Bob and finally tired, so I changed the game to throwing a ball for him and that made it easier for me. Bob stayed just as enthusiastic with that. We must have played hard for about 15 minutes and his energy remained high. So what did I learn from this? I learned at least that the aggression could not have been triggered by some well organized set of learned dominance driven responses or by a well established fear motivated reaction and that it must have been triggered by something that the human did that freaked out the dog. In other words, I suspected a novel external stimulus configuration which produced intense alarm in the animal: alarm-triggered aggression.

Bob's mom said to me: "See how sweet he is, how can I put this dog down? He is my daily companion, sleeps with me, follows me around and I talk to him all the time. I love this dog, he is my family! Is he sick, mentally imbalanced, is he a lost case?" These questions kept coming at me like machine gun fire, all charged with anxiety and fear for the animal; she was not concerned about her own safety so much as she was about the life of her pet. This was a happy dog, no question in my mind. He too loved his owner, he ran to her to be petted, jumped on her smiling his happiness for having me around to play with and so on: not your typical nasty animal that bites. It was obvious that these two had a very deep and loving relationship, they were strongly attached to each other. She was right, no way I could recommend to put this dog down without at least gaining some insight into the problem and try to solve it.

So what happened? Why did Bob bite her? The answer was not difficult to arrive at once we went deep into the incident and gathered some history: Bob came to her as an eight week old pup weighing only a few pounds, he was always playful  and very energetic but grew in size and strength very quickly, he had a free run of the house and very little obedience training. He would sit for treats and that is all and came when he felt like it. His owner managed him gently, manipulating him softly to bring him back into the house from the yard. He was difficult to walk on a leash, dragged her around and got worse as he grew. If she tried to restrain him, he just muscled his way out (I suspected this by the way he played with me), pant-smile and go on with what he was doing. Bob had also learned about his own strength during a very critical period when many domestic pet dogs seek independence which is around six to eight months of age, coinciding with the onset of sexual maturity.

           

Occasionally, Bob would pick up something like a shoe and not give it up. If his owner insisted, he would turn his head away from her and growl a low guttural growl of warning while still smiling and holding his body in a playful pose but eventually give up the item and forget the whole episode - the beginnings of possessive aggression. She realized that she had very little control over this very large animal and that the situation could get out of hand, so she called a trainer for help.

The trainer correctly diagnosed the situation as a a case of hierarchical/dominance issues and unruliness. He called Bob an "alpha dog". So he went to work: after playing a bit with Bob, the trainer let him have a shoe that in the past lead to the possessiveness and eventual warning growl. When Bob took it and happily ran off with it, the trainer  approached him and tried to take the object from him which, as expected, lead Bob to resist and growl. The trainer then took the dog by the collar and wrestled him to the ground, pinned him there and took the shoe away from him. The dog, as the owner told me,  put his tail between his legs and slunk away in alarm when he was released and went to her for comfort which she gave. So there, his recommendation was that she had to dominate and show the dog who is boss, or alpha, as he referred to it. The trainer tried to coax Bob into taking the item again, but the dog refused to participate, he simply laid down by his owner's side while  apprehensively looking at the trainer. He was very subdued after that. The lady was impressed, she had never seen Bob in such a docile state before.

The bite took place a few days later on the first occasion that she tried to wrestle and pin Bob to the ground as she was instructed to do. As she was telling me the story, I cringed since I would have put my bottom dollar on the bite. The bite took place because Bob's owner acted in a very atypical and unpredictable way, she violated the established order between them. In the dog's mind, if you will, his past experience and learning told him that he could take anything he wanted and his owner was to coax him into letting it go. They had an understanding of the nature of their relationship and how they did things and her unexpected violence alarmed Bob which then triggered the bite. The trainer got away with alarming the animal by pinning him aggressively because they had no history. The dog had no expectations of the trainer and immediately saw him as someone "you don't mess around with". Plus the trainer was relatively large and strong, certainly more formidable visually and physically than the owner. Bob was bullied by a stranger who inspired fear and a defensive retreat.

Therefore, what the trainer dangerously did not take into account was the nature of the relationship between the dog and its owner and the differences between her and him. It is within this relationship, this matrix of social patterns that the dog learned who it was in relation to its owner who very wisely paid attention to Bob's warning growls. They understood and predicted each other's behavior; not necessarily satisfying to the human but it had flow and predictable continuity and everyone was civil. The bite took place because something was done to alarmingly rupture this continuity with all its emotional components. The dog was certainly alarmed by his owner's aggression but not afraid of her as was the case with the trainer as a stranger - they were qualitatively different. Bob knew his owner and had a sense of being confident in relation to her, so the lack of fear toward her and the emotional alarm triggered the bite. Simple.

I thought about the details of the case and decided that in order to solve the problem it was necessary to understand and manipulate this relationship where hierarchical issues were not well established by the players and define it where the person is positively accepted as dominant and discard all violent attempts at control. I needed to produce a dependent dog and did this by setting up contingencies for him in which he had to respond to a set of commands from the owner (work for reinforcers) in order to have his daily needs met: food, let outside, play, petting, attention and so on. The more commands, the better.

The logic behind this program is based on the fact that social and select physiological dependency like food and shelter leads to submission where authority is not challenged. Although dominance is sometimes acquired through being the toughest individual in the group, most often dominance is maintained through social consent and tradition where violence and threats do not play a defining role. When dominance is acquired through violence, it is generally short lived: by definition, violence produces fear, inhibition and resentment; these factors are effective for short term control of another but in the long run it fails since it produces a very weak, unstable and non-harmonious social matrix which can be disrupted and even dismantled easily since the members of the group are not strongly bonded to each other. There are many examples of this problem, both on the popular and scientific literature, where trainers and keepers of large animals have been injured and killed by their charges. These incidents always take place either immediately following a bout of aggression on the part of the human or when the trainer puts himself in a vulnerable position and the animal charges, fueled by pent up resentment and fear.

Following a systematic protocol, Bob's behavior changed dramatically: the unruliness fell off in time and he became more manageable. He smiled as much as he did before. The growling became a game and he was more attentive to his owner - from a behavioral point of view, the owner became a very powerful higher order reinforcer and from an ethological perspective, Bob accepted his owner as dominant. So in reality, this was a case of misunderstanding, not one where the dog is inherently aggressive and nasty or a maverick with evil intentions toward its owner. We rearranged the social canvas with the materials we had: the social need of the animal and the human to be connected to each other, to have a relationship. It is this need for sociability that is at the heart of the matter, what its final nature will be is totally dependent on experience, the physical and psychological limitations of both, their developmental histories and emotional constrains.  To be clear, not all dogs are the same, there are breed and individual differences for sure and I suppose the same can be said for humans. In Bob's case, I am very happy to say that all we had to do was establish a social matrix where everyone got what they wanted in a harmonious and civilized fashion. I was very happy with the results and kept my friendship with these two for a long time until Bob died when he was 8 years old. Unfortunately, these giant breeds rarely live past this age. I miss Bob.

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