Apr 28 2009
Communicate and Cooperate
Communication isn’t the same as command. If you want a dog who snaps to it like a good cadet, you aren’t really looking for communication, as that’s a two-way street. If you want a dog who lets you know someone’s been in your yard, or that it’s dinnertime (useful if you work at home, and if you enforce that not all times are mealtime), or where the search subject is, what you want is communication.
Observing the rescued mix-breed puppies as they get bigger, I notice that one is innately a better communicator than the other. Bruce likes being told what to do. He likes knowing what to expect, and he likes knowing what his people expect from him. He now sits pretty reliably for the hand signal, and he mostly comes when called if he’s not just too terribly distracted.
Wanda, on the other hand, likes to tell me things. Yesterday, on discovering that there was food in the crate, she gave me her patented saucy look, then put her nose to the latch and stood there staring hopefully into the crate. Message clear: “Would you mind opening this door, please?” She wasn’t being rude; there was no yapping or fussing. She simply let me know she’d appreciate a bite to eat. I appreciated her politeness, so I rewarded it before she built to a noisier message. Later, she tried the same message re: the garbage can in the kitchen cupboard. This gave me room to say that she would not be getting any salmon bones no matter how hard she asked. Now we have a division between the acceptable and the unacceptable, and with a fairly mild “Nuh-uh” now instead of a great screaming “NO!!!” fest at some later date. She trusts that I will be reasonable about feeding her; I trust that she will listen to me at least a little.
Similarly, they don’t have the same approach to cooperative behavior. Bruce likes grabbing toys and carrying them around. In fact, he likes grabbing anything and carrying it around, and we’ve been working on such useful words as “Mine!” and “Trade.” However, if he brings me some thing or other, it’s largely accidental, and it hasn’t yet occured to him that I might throw the thing so he can chase it. If I call him, he can’t handle two thoughts at once: he either keeps carrying or he comes to me. At this age, that’s no guarantee he’ll never retrieve. He just doesn’t yet.
Wanda chased a fuzzy frisbeelike toy this morning, brought it back, soaked up the resulting praise and fuss with great pride, and performed a perfect fetch once more. While she can handle the bring-it-back concept, she cannot handle a fetch with a jealous brother attached to her head; the game ended after two tosses. This is a sign that I’ll have to start separating them to get them both to develop to full potential.
Ideally, of course, they’ll be separated into homes. Someone else’s! For now, though, it’s time to start training them and playing with them one at a time.
