For illustrative purposes, we can think of Springer Rage as if dealing with a person who does not grow out of the very infantile stage of throwing temper tantrums and striking out at the parents in frustration for insignificant reasons or just because the kid is in a bad mood. Our theoretical person remains incapable of controlling his temper as an adult thus becoming dangerous to society and a big problem for himself - not a bad or evil person per se, just one that can not control his temper.
The neoteny hypothesis implies that since we want playful and cute baby-faced dogs as pets, we are breeding animals that stay psychologically immature. This is fine as long as the dog develops the necessary social skills, in particular control of antisocial emotions, to be able to survive and get along in a complex human environment. This does happen most of the times but at other times this fails to occur and creates a big problem: ergo the Springer Rage syndrome.
So presently, I want to deal with a case of a nine month old yellow Labrador retriever named Bo with this kind of problem whom I was able to help because of what I learned from Millie. Bo only weighed 50 pounds - relatively small for the breed but growing fast. He lived with his owner Mike, a single man, in a large two-story home with lots of room to roam. Mike had never had a dog, and since he now lived alone, decided that a dog would be good company for him. When I arrived at the home, Bo greeted me well enough, he was excited, playful and very friendly: he seemed fine to me. The problem was that Bo had the habit of picking up things and carrying them in his mouth, which Mike could most of the time take from him without a problem, but occasionally Bo would just lunge at him ferociously and without inhibition, try to bite him in order to protect the item from Mike. As a small puppy this might have been cute, but now, at nine months old, he was getting dangerous to live with.
Mike had discussed this with the veterinarian who diagnosed it as Springer Rage, meaning that the problem was neurological and that there was no cure: the dog had to be euthanized. As Mike was telling me this, I noticed that he was having a tough time with it –very understandable; he explained that he did not have many friends and that Bo was really his best buddy. Mike was also undergoing psychotherapy for depression and anxiety disorder. The prospect of losing Bo would be devastating for him, he said. As I was taking in this sad narrative, Mike's suffering and conflict were palpable and I also noticed that Bo went over to Mike, put his head on his lap, sighed a deep sigh and looked up at him trying to make eye contact while swishing his tail slowly on the ground: no question in my mind that Bo also picked up on his sadness and was showing great empathy and solidarity with Mike - not an uncommon occurrence with dogs, who are after all biologically destined to be social animals with predisposed potential to develop complex social and therefore psychological skills.
I pointed out Bo's behavior to Mike and asked him to interpret it: Mike was aware of it and explained that when he was upset, Bo seemed to know it and do that, follow him around and sometimes tried to get him to play by barking and play-bowing to him while carrying a toy in his mouth; Bo was keenly attuned to Mike's moods so I asked him how he responded to Bo at these times and his answer was complex: on the one hand it was very difficult for him to play when depressed but he also felt guilty about not paying attention to the dog, so he would force himself to focus on Bo and for short moments would forget his troubles.
At other times, he just could not deal with it and felt emotionally paralyzed and Bo would just hang out by him. I asked Mike again how he felt when this happened and from his answer it was clear that Bo was very helpful in providing comfort by his presence and attention: Bo's demeanor and attentiveness, he explained, was a tonic for him. What blew my mind was that because Bo was so attuned to him, he occasionally was capable of truly coming out of his depression and according to his narrative, a heavy weight would lift from his chest which I assumed to be the physical manifestation of his depression.
Mike loved to go outside in the yard, play ball or throw a toy for Bo to chase, which they did often. However, it was also at these times that Bo would lose it and attack Mike when he tried to take the toy from him thus making things more conflicting and emotionally wrenching for Mike.
Nevertheless, it was obvious that these activities were very useful for Mike, so I prodded him to go deeper into this and his relationship with Bo. Through our conversations in the following weeks where we worked on Bo's aggression, Mike gradually became more aware, more conscious, that during those moments with Bo and without aggression, his depression and anxiety would go into abeyance for a while, so we continued with our talks and envisaged Bo's state of mind and how he focused on the present and how he influenced Mike to follow suit and since Mike saw how this focusing-in-the-present business helped him, it gave credibility to the idea that Bo (if we could solve his problem) could teach him that life is to be taken a moment at a time and that by observing himself, he realized that his depression and anxiety are more based on unrealistic and imaginary afflictions: the anxiety would disappear momentarily when engaged with Bo and his needs. We talked about this extensively.
I asked him to take the concept of time into account when discussing his problems, that is to take the past present and the future into consideration and to place his problems in this perspective. After some time of coaching, he began to see that these were associated with impending fear of the future, which was based on his experiences in the past but that in reality they now presented no heavy and insurmountable problems. He was, after all, a relatively successful commercial artist with a fine home in a beautiful old neighborhood with majestic ancient oaks that he had inherited from his parents and his health was good.
Therefore, we discovered that Bo was his best medicine, thus if we had to put Bo down, it would be truly catastrophic for him. Now I was anxious because it was up to me not to let this happen. So, given the diagnosis and my thoughts about Millie, Mike and I went to the local hardware store and bought the largest, heaviest and thickest pair of welding gloves we could find and went back to deal with Bo.
It was obvious that Bo’s aggression was triggered by uninhibited possessive tendencies, not unusual in very young pups. Puppies play and compete with each other all the time and when very young, the aggression is not inhibited. Inhibition or control of aggression develops later on with the advent of maturation and socialization; in fact we can describe socialization as the ability to handle and control antisocial emotions and behaviors, which is after all the most significant skill that a social animal has to learn. So the neoteny hypothesis states that some dogs do not grow up emotionally enough to be able to inhibit these tendencies as a matter of maturation but that does not mean that these tendencies can not be modified or eliminated, which is what I was going to do with Bo.
The method I chose to drastically reduce or eliminate this biting behavior is a combination of a well-established procedure in the behavior modification literature known as simple extinction and a not so-well known behavioral nuance called massed trials.
The extinction procedure basically involves the repetitive presentation of the stimulus configuration that triggers the undesirable behavior without reinforcing it and the massed trial process involves the presentation of these trials one after the other without pause. The logic behind these methods is that if a behavior is not reinforced, it will disappear, or go into extinction and if it is repeated without pause, the response will become temporarily exhausted. Therefore, the combination of non-reinforcement and exhaustion should work together and eliminate the inappropriate response and set up new non-competitive and non-aggressive associations and experiences or learning. In our situation: a) we wear the gloves to protect our hands from the bite, b) do not let go of the item, c) do not get uptight about it d) let Bo bite until he quits and e) do it all over again immediately.
So I put on the gloves, which, in spite of having relatively large hands, were huge on me; I had plenty of wiggle room and could move my fingers out of the way when Bo bit down on the gloves. Given that Bo was a retriever and fiercely attached to whatever he carried in his mouth, the thwarting of his desire to possess the object was the immediate trigger for the attacks, I went to work.
Like with Millie, I threw his favorite toy for him and prepared myself for the bite. The bite came as predicted and he lunged for the gloved hand where I was holding the toy, wiggled my fingers away and Bo continued to bite: I was fine, I did not get hurt. I let him bite to his heart content and after four consecutive bites, he quit, did not get the toy and no one took him up on the challenge (non-reinforcement) and right away threw the toy again (massed trial) for him to chase.
He responded well enough, chased it but his enthusiasm was diminished due to the previous tense experience and conflicting emotions. He nevertheless brought it back with some degree of uncertainty, which was good: we were engaging his emotions. I took it from him without incident, threw it again and Bo brought it back; he bit at my gloved hand again but this time he only bit twice and not as intensely as the first time: the energy of the bite was being exhausted, the result of massed trials. I threw again; he chased and crashed it, his enthusiasm improved. He let me throw it about seven or eight times, then bit into my gloved hand again but the bite had very little energy by then. I threw it again; he jumped on it and was happy (the uptightness was disappearing), brought it back and seemed to have forgotten about the bite. All aggression had disappeared for the moment and we did this a few more times without incidents and Bo was all smiles and wagging his tail happily. So was I.
We waited for about a half hour while Mike and I talked and then I had him do the same thing. We counted the number of times that he could take the toy from Bo before he would bite: on the first set Bo bit at Mike's gloved hand after the fifth trial. The bite was a bit more intense than the last incident with me but still much less than the first trial. It was light enough that if Mike had not been wearing the gloves, it would not have penetrated his skin. We continued to do this a few more times and Bo just got into the retrieving game without getting uptight or biting at all, we praised the hell out of him and went out into the yard just to cool down. Mike chased Bo around a bit and played tug-of war with the gloves: the gloves were being associated with play and social excitement.
So we discovered that the aggressive response could be exhausted with these massed trials and developed a data sheet where we could record the number of trials and Bo's responses. I also set up obedience exercises for Bo where he would have to respond to a set of commands before he was fed, taken out, cuddled, or played with. These are very useful exercises for creating pro-social submissive behaviors or appropriate social skills necessary for domestic dogs living inside the home.
We analyzed the data in the next few weeks and to my delight, Mike was enthused about the results. The dependency exercises were going great, Bo was more attentive to Mike; he would wait eagerly to be told what to do in order to receive his rewards and the gloved exercises were also going well and although he still occasionally attacked the gloved hand, we estimated that the intensity and frequency had diminished significantly. This trend continued and by the second month of this, all serious and uncontrollable attacks stopped altogether. The only remaining aggression was now associated with play where Bo and Mike played tug of war with the gloves but the seriousness had stopped.
In conclusion, even though Bo remains a very immature animal, we were able through our procedures to train him to shift his behavior from fear of loss of a desirable item to a playful understanding that this is only a game. Furthermore, Mike, by becoming more observant of Bo and his focus on the moment, had developed a new and more enlightened perspective about his own problems: he is now reasonably capable of observing himself, is more accepting of his state of mind at the moment and more at ease with it when it does occur.
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