FourIsCompany
Hmmm... Where to start? If you have a dog with lots of confidence, there's no need to do a confidence building exercise that I can see. Why would you? Pushing is a confidence building exercise for dogs who lack confidence. So, I wouldn't advise it for your dog... unless he has other behavioral issues.
Pushing (in our context) is not about making a B'asia want to play. It's about having her be willing to give up her "prey" to us. She LOVES to play. She just won't give up the frisbee once she has "caught" it.
The "pushing" exercise does not make a dog "pushy". It teaches a dog to deal with feelings of insecurity and even (hopefully) fear. It teaches a dog to "push past" emotional confusion, irrational desires to attack and to withdraw (fight or flight).
Chuffy
I think dogs SHOULD have some level of inhibition. I think that's healthy. When "something" inside the dog inhibits them from rummanging in my dustbin or jumping up on my work surfaces, I don't WANT them to work past it.
I don't know what to say. Have you read the attached articles? Do you know the purpose of the exercise?
Chuffy
If it DOES increase the expression of the dog's drives
I don't think it increases drive. It teaches the dog to deal with his drive.
Again, FIC, I think you've hit the nail on the head. The pushing exercise teaches the dog how to deal with with shifts in energy that would normally throw him off-balance.
The following, from the intro to my blog article, "Swimming Upstream: Using Resistance to Solve Behavioral Problems," may help people understand this a little better (and please remember, this is from a weblog):
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We've talked a lot here about how tug and the pushing exercise can build a dog's confidence. And that sounds fine and quite noble in a way, but what does it mean really, to build a dog's confidence? And what about dog owners who perceive their dog's aggression, for example, as not being caused by a lack of confidence, but too
much of it (or "dominance"
;)? Or the woman I met on the street today whose dog's paws are bright pink from being licked obsessively, yet the owner claims her dog is super confident, and the least anxious dog you'd ever meet? On a certain level neither type of dog needs to have their confidence built, but they both need help with what's going on inside their emotional pressure cookers.
As usual I think it's best to take this down to its barest essentials: how the dog handles changes in the continuous flow of energy between himself and the environment. As we know, when talking about dogs as part of an energy exchange system, a dog's energy has two polarities: attraction and resistance. Also, since it's been my thesis for a long time that dogs are part of a self-organizing system, which for lack of a better word we call "the pack," I was both surprised and delighted to find this
definition of self- organizing systems on Wikipedia:
"Self-organization is a process of attraction and repulsion
in which the internal organization of a system, normally an open
system, increases in complexity without being guided or managed by
an outside source. Self-organizing systems typically (though not
always) display emergent properties."On the topic of self-organizing systems, I've recently upgraded my website, and I've also been revising my first novel,
A Nose for Murder, in order to make it available again, through a "second printing," something my publisher has given up on. (They also gave up on Murder Unleashed, which will be my next revision project.) At any rate, in that first novel, Jack Field says the following: "I see the pack more as a self-emergent heterarchy."
Now this idea, of the canine pack as a self-emergent system, has been a theme (or sub-theme) throughout all of my novels. The point here is that self-organizing systems are said to operate on polarities of attraction and resistance (or repulsion), which for me, goes directly back to
Natural Dog Training by Kevin Behan, even though Kevin had never heard of emergence theory when he wrote it. But since the topic of today's blog is how and why playing tug and doing the pushing exercise helps a dog overcome behavioral problems by building his ability to deal with sudden shifts in energy, particularly in the form of strong feelings of resistance that he feels he can't get past, I thought I should lay down a bit of that foundation first:
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One of the problems I mentioned in an earlier post, about understanding a new theoretical paradigm from within the conceptual framework of the old one, is that with any new theory, at least one that really is part of a paradigm shift, there has to be new language to describe phenomena. So while the pushing exercise can be viewed as increasing the prey drive, or increasing self-confidence, or decreasing inhibitions (at least on a certain level), what it's really about is teaching the dog that he can handle shifts in energy that normally would cause him to feel resistance to those changes. That's why I came up with the salmon swimming upstream analogy in my blog article. Here it is:
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All aggression is based on fear.
And Willie is exhibiting high levels of nervous tension (or stress).
Think of the little guy as a salmon swimming upstream, fighting against
the current, only Willie is fighting against internal emotional
currents that get stirred up in him when he sees other dogs and feels
suddenly as if he's going to be attacked. In the normal scope of
things, his emotional river runs through a broad channel, and the
current travels at a slow, comfortable pace. But when he sees another
dog, the energy builds, the emotions tighten up in him, and he feels
like he's going to "drown." So he lashes out at what he perceives to be
the locus point of the sudden energy shift from lazy river to extreme
rapids.
The
reason his emotions feel like rapids is that he doesn't have a normal,
well-balanced dog's (or a salmon's) natural skill for swimming
upstream. This is probably because he was abused or trained in very
heavy-handed manner before you came along and rescued him. So, to
repeat the metaphor, when there's a sudden influx of energy, he feels
thrown off balance emotionally. And since he has strong levels of
social attraction, his instinctive strategy is to go AT the other dogs
rather than to run AWAY from them. The primary reason he does this is
that he hasn't been given the skill-set necessary for dealing with
strong feelings of internal and external resistance. He doesn't know
how to swim against the current.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Okay, so Willie's problem was the sudden shift in energy he felt when he saw another dog. With B'asia, it seems that her problem was a form of "resource guarding," which is an anxiety-based behavior. And so far the pushing exercise seems to have reduced the anxiety that caused her to not want to let go of the Frisbee. With Trevor (who I mention briefly in my blog article) the problem was SA/D (which he's had for nearly 10 years). The pushing exercise has helped him deal with the shifts in internal energy he feels when he's left alone. For Fancy, the boxer I mentioned in a previous post, the problem was aggression at the dog run. When she was wrestling with another dog she was fine until the energy got to be too much for her, then she shifted into fear aggression. Doing the pushing exercise not only turned that around, it also seemed to get rid of her fear of of sidewalks grates, something I wasn't even working on! Plus it made her less wiggly and more direct when meeting new people or other dogs.
The point is that the pushing exercise isn't designed to reduce all of a dog's inhibitions, just to reduce those based on fear or blocked drive flow. Remember, in the NTD paradigm we look at all behavior as part of energy flow between the dog and his environment, internal and external. The energy flows more readily to the "proper" behaviors when there's less fear/tension/resistance and more release/attraction in relation to the self-organizing system he has with his owner and other dogs. Certainly a dog shouldn't be jumping up on work surfaces, counter-surfing or getting into the garbage, but I've found that when a dog learns how to handle his energy flow, whether that comes from removing all forms of dominance from the owner's interactions with the dog, or from teaching the dog to obey by using his drive flow in training, or giving him lots of hard vigorous playful activity, or using the pushing exercise, the dog no longer needs to counter-surf or get into the garbage or jump up on people. His drive flow is free from the blockages that are the actual cause of those behaviors.
The pushing exercise is not a magic bullet, by any means. But it's a big help in relieving the dog's internal tension and stress. And that creates remarkable behavioral changes (like those that seem to be happening with B'asia) as part of a trickle-up effect.
I hope this helps add a little to everyone's understanding of this,
LCK
By the way, the pushing exercise is fairly new, meaning you won't find it in Natural Dog Training. The techniques Kevin recommended in that book were based on teaching the dog to jump up on command. Some of the other exercises in that book are also out of date.