Treating PTSD With Natural Dog Training

 

This Is Not Freddie

Play vs. Prozac 
In a previous article here (“Canine PTSD: Its Causes, Signs & Treatment”) I wrote about the very real probability that millions of pet dogs in North America may have developed post-traumatic stress as a result of being mistreated, abused, lost or abandoned. This is particularly true of rescue dogs. Of course not all rescue dogs suffer from post-traumatic stress. And symptoms of trauma can be found in non-rescue dogs as well. However, it’s important to understand that, due to the release of certain neuro-chemicals in the brain, both during the initial traumatic event as well as in subsequent flashbacks, a dog can actually develop neurological damage similar to what’s seen in traumatic brain injury. This is why it can be very difficult to bring dogs who’ve suffered emotional trauma back to anything close to normal. It’s not your fault. And it’s not the dog’s fault.

There seem to be only two ways to undo this kind of damage. One is through the use of medications like Prozac. The other is through rough-and-tumble outdoor play which, according to research done by Jaak Panksepp and others, releases tremendous amounts of brain-derived neurotrophic factors (BDNFs), associated with new neuronal growth and brain plasticity. (Human subjects with PTSD have been helped by playing video games like Halo and, oddly enough, Tetris.)

The only problem with using play to heal emotionally wounded dogs is that most of them have forgotten how to play. However, in this article I’ll provide readers with two very simple exercises that can help rescue dogs relearn how to play. I use them all the time in my training practice in New York City, both with my paying clients and with members of my Rescue Dog Owners Support Group. The exercises were created by former police-dog trainer Kevin Behan as part of a system called Natural Dog Training. 

Behan created 5 Core Exercises specifically designed to achieve optimal emotional flow in dogs with “stuck” emotions.

1) Bark (the dog speaks on command)

2) Push (the dog pushes into the handler while eating)

3) Collect (the dog moves backwards into a relaxed down)

4) Supple (the handler massages the dog’s shoulders) 

They all lead to the most important exercise,

5) Bite (the dog plays fetch and tug, and brings the toy back) 

I’ll focus here on the first two exercises. 

The 4 Quadrants of Natural Dog Training 
Before I describe the exercises I should point out that they might not make much sense at first because they don’t operate through the more commonly known principles of dog training, i.e., dominance and submission or positive and negative reinforcement. That’s because Natural Dog Training operates through the physical and emotional properties of attraction & resistance, and tension & release. 

What does that mean? 

A simple example of attraction would be a puppy who, on his first walk, sees a leaf blow by and chases it. Why? Because anything that exhibits certain types of movement stimulates feelings of attraction in the pup, and thus exert a kind of “magnetic pull” on his body and emotions, drawing him toward them. Meanwhile things which engender resistance would cause a pup to move away from them. Common examples might be tall men in hats, sudden loud noises, etc. 

You always want to generate more feelings of attraction than resistance. For instance, it’s not uncommon for an older puppy or adult dog to feel that his owner is generating both attraction and resistance: “She feeds me and plays with me!”—and—“She scolds me and won’t let me eat cat poo!” So the pup begins to ignore or “disobey” the owner in some circumstances while running excitedly toward her in others. 

I hope that gives you a window into attraction & resistance. 

However, we could also look at a puppy chasing a leaf through the lens of tension and release. The leaf’s movement stimulates actual, palpable feelings of tension and pressure within the pup’s body, causing him to run toward it. His movement provides a subsequent yet small feeling of release from that pressure. He would get a lot more release if he could actually bite the leaf and rip it to pieces. In fact, many times when a pup is prevented from “killing” something he’s been chasing, he’ll jump around, bark wildly, or start digging in the ground. We tend to think of these behaviors as nonsensensical, yet they serve a very important biological purpose: they release tension. 

Using these principles we can see that behavioral problems most often arise when a dog is feeling more tension than he’s able to handle or release.  One very practical reason for understanding this is that it may give you a new insight into your dog’s specific behavioral problems, so can you begin attacking them from a new and different angle. 

Standing Your Ground 
Let’s start with two very common problems: fear and aggression. First of all, on a certain level there’s virtually no difference between fear and aggression because all aggression is caused by fear. Fear manifests, behaviorally, in three ways: fight, flight, or freeze. In the last two the dog is feeling a great deal of tension with little or no release. But the dog who’s able to flip fear over on its head, and fight back, is releasing all that tension and more by “standing his ground.” 

One example of how this can help dogs involves my Dalmatian Freddie, who many years ago (in 1993) started having severe panic attacks, sparked by any little noise on the street. I tried everything I could think of to help the poor dog but once he was in his panic state, all I could do was wait it out.

Then I learned that a friend of Freddie’s, a Sheltie named Duncan, had cured himself of thunderphobia simply by barking at the lightning. 

Brilliant! I thought. He’s barking at the thing that scares him! 

After that, every time Freddie went into a panic state—ears back, tail between his legs, head down, ready to run off in any possible direction—, and I gave him the speak command, as soon as he barked, he became a different dog, almost as if he couldn’t understand why we’d stopped walking to the park.

One practical way this idea can be put to use is by doing what Duncan the Sheltie did on his own, i.e., teaching thunderphobic dogs to bark at the lightning. 

Begin by teaching the dog to speak on command in different locations, so that the behavior becomes reliable and automatic whenever the cue is given. (After you do this you should also teach your dog to be quiet on command.)  Then, on a day, when a storm is due, before the dog starts to panic, you give her the “Speak!” command. In most cases, once she’s able to bark at the lightning she’ll no longer be frightened of the thunder ever again.

Why? Because instead of freezing or fleeing—where the dog’s fear gets stuck in her body, and has nowhere to go—, she’s pro-actively fighting back against the scary sound. It doesn’t matter that the thunder and lighting don’t stop or go away. She doesn’t care because she’s no longer afraid of them. This is similar to a kid who’s being harassed by a bully. Once the dog finally stands her ground and fights back, the fear is no longer controlling her behavior and the thunder/bully no longer has any power over her. 

Hunger, Balance & Fear 
Another important aspect of how fear operates is illustrated by a lost and wounded dog who hides in the woods until he’s hungry enough to take food from someone. Being in a weakened and unstable condition creates feelings of resistance rather than attraction toward people who might be in a position to help him. Eventually, hunger overrides those feelings, the dog comes out of hiding and will take food. (Many volunteers at shelters cite the first day that a scared dog finally took food from them as the moment when things started to turn around for that pooch.) 

So, to recap, hunger cures fear. How? Through increasing a dog’s feelings of social attraction. And aggression cures fear. How? Picture the body language of a dog who’s frightened. His head and shoulders and tail are all down. He’s cowering. Picture that same dog barking furiously at the lightning. His body and tail are erect and his four paws are firmly planted on the ground. 

The fact is that whenever a dog (or human) is frightened, anxious or nervous he a) doesn’t feel hungry, and b) doesn’t feel grounded; he feels off-balance both physically and emotionally. In fact there is virtually no difference between being off balance physically and being off-balance emotionally. It operates on a purely Pavlovian level. (If you still don’t think there’s a connection between fear and balance this little factoid might help: in puppies the first fear development phase comes around the same time that the pup begins learning how to stabilize himself physically.) 

Playing and Pushing: Stabilizing  Unstable Dogs 
So I’ve given you one tip on how to reduce (or release) emotional tension in dogs: have them speak on command. But there’s still another hurdle the dog has to cross, which is a reservoir of unresolved emotion that may cause him to fling a ball or rope around on his own instead of bringing it back to you for a therapeutic game of fetch or tug.  

How do we bridge that gap? 

A few years ago I got an email from a veteran dog trainer in Virginia who had just brought home two Jack Russell pups. This woman was having problems housebreaking the female, who’d been the runt of the litter. Plus she was frustrated that the dog seemed withdrawn and a bit nervous. I suggested that she do “The Pushing Exercise,” essentially hand-feeding the doggie all her meals outdoors in a very specific way.

This trainer didn’t understand why I made this suggestion, but she did it anyway. A few days later she called to tell me that not only had the doggie stopped doing her business inside the house, but the pup brought her a toy for the first time ever!

Now, some readers may balk (or feel resistance toward) the idea of having their dog push for food. “I don’t want my dog to get pushy over his dinner.” This is something I also felt initially. Then one day, one of the dogs staying with me, who was normally very social and easygoing, exhibited a fairly severe case of resource guarding; he wanted all the food in all the doggie bowls! So I pulled him away and fed him separately for three days, using the pushing exercise. On the fourth day, when I put everyone’s dinner bowl down, he was happy with his own food. There were no residual traces of food aggression or resource guarding.

Here’s how the exercise works. At a time when your dog is hungry, take her to a quiet place outdoors where there’s a platform of some kind—a bench of a flat rock—that she can jump up to or climb on. Bring along her favorite food, either in a pouch or a bait bag. It’s not a bad idea to wear latex gloves if the food she eats is messy.

Take a handful of food out of the pouch, holding it in your non-dominant hand (i.e., your left hand if you’re right-handed). This is especially important for large breeds. Show her the food, waving it around a little, if necessary, to pique her interest. Then say, in a pleasant tone, “Wait…” And then close your fingers over the food, move it under her snout, say, “Ready?” then open the hand and let her eat.

While she’s eating, surreptitiously cup your dominant hand, palm up, against her chest. If she balks, pull that hand away or stroke her gently wherever she likes being stroked while inviting her to eat from your other hand. With some dogs you have to work gradually, day by day, so that all resistance to feeling the second hand against her chest dissipates. With others you practically need to wear chain mail gloves! (This brings up an important point: some dogs aren’t as careful about where their teeth go as others, so proceed with caution!)

The idea is that while she’s eating, you gradually increase the amount of pressure the dog feels against her chest. You don’t do this by pushing the dog! You do it by pulling your food hand away slightly, in small increments, until she has to push into you in order to feel the pleasure of eating. You want to get to the point where the dog is up on her back legs, totally off balance, while pushing into you as hard as she can. 

Why is it therapeutic? 

Because she’s being put in a position where the person she loves most in the world is hand feeding her in such a way that she doesn’t even realize that the harder she pushes, the more off-balance she becomes. (She won’t really be off balance because you’ll be her balance beam.) You’re also triggering a little of the good kind of aggression, where the dog feels confident enough to stand her ground. 

If you’d like to learn more please visit my website. There is a downloadable pdf, giving a more detailed description of the exercise, along with 4 demonstration videos.

There are no immediate guarantees. In some cases, it may take several months or longer to get the final results. In other cases, the changes can be quite dramatic and manifest within only a couple of days or weeks. Just keep pushing. It’ll help your dog stand her ground against all her fears, not to mention all the internal tension, pressure, and resistance causing her behavior problems. 

On her blog Jenya Chernoff gives a very good, and I think important description of Natural Dog Training. 

The real-world of Natural Dog Training is by nature a bit intuitive and improvisational (according to my husband, “it’s just jazz.”) That said, there are some fundamental exercises that could be summarized as follows: bark, bite, supple, push, collect. Not necessarily in that order. I like to describe it as part primal scream therapy, part dressage for dogs. Training the bark (“speak”) brings the drive to the surface; the bite resolves it. Pushing for food, mirrored by collection, elaborates into the behaviors heel, sit, stay, down, etc. “Suppling” your dog through massage relaxes her and accesses her primal puppy memories. 

I am, like so many modern humans, action-oriented, goal-driven, and addicted to formulas and schedules. “Less is more” may be one of the hardest things for me to internalize. So I get that it’s often a tough sell for the OC among us when we’re told “Just work on building these skills, and everything else will fall into place.” Work on problems indirectly? Trust your improvisational skills? Wax on/wax off? 

Whatever.

But seriously, kids. It works that way. 

Lee Charles Kelley

“Life Is an Adventure—Where Will Your Dog Take You?” 
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