Culture Clash

Dogs in Drag

2007-02-02T19:24:00.000-08:00

I used to teach a lot of puppy classes, and a big ticket item in the curriculum was handling and gentling. We’d do mock veterinary exams in class, grooming practice, collar grabs and simulations of the typical body-touch scenarios a dog might encounter in day to day life. If a puppy came up spooky or recalcitrant, most commonly about one of the usual suspects like feet, head or rear quarters, we’d flag it and assign extra exercises for the guardian to do at home. And everyone would get standard prevention exercise homework. The goal was for the puppy to welcome and enjoy having his body manipulated, not just tolerate it. All well and good.

The fly in the ointment was compliance. The people whose puppies had no identified issues usually didn’t practice at all and, alarmingly, the guardians of the puppies with red flags often didn’t find the time or inclination to practice either. I’d pitch ounce of prevention, give user-friendly homework sheets and progress charts, and tell cautionary tales of if-only dogs with refractory adult body handling problems. But I made minimal impact. The homework was, well, work. Enter doggie dress-up.

The impetus for doggie dress-up was the “dogs going over little jumps” effect. To add spice to coming when called exercises in adult obedience classes, I sometimes had the guardians put their dogs on stays on the other side of a low jump and call the dog over the jump. Now if you’ve watched obedience classes much, you’ll see that it’s all over the map when people are supposed to be practicing. Some people diligently repeat the exercise they’re supposed to be doing, some stand awkward and slack-jawed waiting for more guidance and some do a few repetitions, apparently consider their dog “trained” and so retire to their seat to make a phone call. But not when there were little jumps involved. They’d all practice over and over and over. Family members would *fight* with each other to train the dog. We instructors would marvel at the sudden extreme interest in short-distance recall exercises. Dogs going over little jumps. They were crazy for it.

And so to spruce up body-handling homework, I brought in a bunch of dog costumes to one of my puppy classes one week and had them choose one to take home and try out. I then proceeded to the next class activity. I rang my little bell and cleared my throat to gain their attention for some Very Important demonstration or other. No dice. Too busy transforming their puppies into little Spidermen, fairy princesses and biker chicks. I surfed the wave. Who, by next week, could come up with the most fabulous get-up using this or other costume as springboard and, importantly, modeled by a puppy who loves his get-up. It would take lots and lots of practice and lots and lots of plying with treats but anyone up for this challenge had the chance of winning a three-dollar prize.

The following week it was like a Pride Parade. There were family members attending who hadn’t yet made an appearance at class, people pushing and pulling puppies into neon pink varsity sweaters, aviator goggles and animal print booties, then delivering roast chicken and three year-old parmesan to wagging puppies while flashbulbs popped. And this was in the hallway before class even started.

I think I understand well-meaning people who get frowny at the indignity of dogs in little costumes and tut-tut at whatever insidious pathology they speculate drives us dog parents to do it. But I think they’re backing the wrong horse if animal welfare is their concern. Not only do little costumes prompt dog body handling, they prompt brain baths of bonding chemicals in dog guardians. Numerous studies have been performed on risk factors for relinquishment of pets to animal shelters. A common finding is that dogs who are perceived by their owners to be attractive – the cuteness factor - are at reduced risk for relinquishment (e.g. New, Salman, Scarlett, Kass, King & Hutchison, JAAWS, 2002). Note that this is not a reduction in relinquishment risk for dogs that are by any objective measure “attractive.” It’s eye of the beholder, and beholder picks the get-up. People dig putting their dogs into little costumes. Dogs usually like the attention, always love the treats and get used to having their bodies handled, putting them at lower risk for stress and aggression.

It took me probably five ounces of smoked salmon to get Buffy to love her tiara, poodle skirt and pillbox hat and several jars of baby food to get her wagging when I cracked out the “Doggles,” but aside from the fabulousness of it all, I felt fancy indeed when my veterinarian remarked that she had never seen a chow so readily accept having her head restrained. And I admit a secret urge to issue cute little argyle turtlenecks to solemn-looking owners of possibly at-risk dogs wearing plain black nylon collars. Life’s just too short.

The Dog Park -- Where Evolved Human Fears Come Unleashed

2007-01-23T10:19:00.000-08:00

Among the arguments made by those who oppose off-leash access to dogs in San Francisco parks and on GGNRA lands is that there is a safety issue, i.e. that unrestrained dogs pose a threat to citizens. This is not supported by any evidence, which, interestingly (and sadly for dogs and their guardians), may not matter at all when it comes to assuaging fear in humans. But first, the facts.

1) Serious dog attacks are rare events, so rare that they are front page news when they happen. The fatality incidence nationwide has remained steady at between twelve and twenty per year since statistics have been kept. If you consider the increased compression of dogs and people in urban settings each year, as both human and dog populations climb, and the resulting rate of exposure, this is a spectacularly low – and getting ever lower - incidence. Any epidemiologist will tell you that twelve to twenty per year in a country with three hundred million people and an estimated 60-73 million dogs could very well be as low as such a number can get.

2) Dog bites that inflict no damage at all or damage comparable to a minor kitchen injury, or injury a child might get playing a non-contact sport, are much more prevalent. There has been no attempt in the popular press, however, to make a distinction between these and the rare, spectacular, serious dog attacks. However, failing to do so is very much like lumping human arguments in with felony assault and murder.

3) Off-leash access has not proven to be a factor in dog bites. According to the CDC, the majority of bites take place on the guardian’s property. The remaining incidents involve dogs that are either restrained (i.e. leashed) or at large (dogs who have escaped confinement).

Consider, for example, the three highest profile serious dog attack cases in the history of San Francisco, those of Diane Whipple (2001), Shawn Jones (2001) and Nicholas Faibish (2005). In the first, the (un-neutered) dogs were on leash; in the second, the (un-neutered) dogs had escaped confinement in the backyard and were at large; in the third, the (un-neutered) dog was confined in the guardian’s home.

Ironically, it could very well be that the safest dogs are those that attend off-leash dog parks. Shyan et al. published a research paper in 2003 in the Journal of Applied Animal Welfare Science, which looked at the prevalence of inter-dog aggression in dog parks. Dog-dog problems turned out to be minimal and of a non-serious nature. While the paper did not consider the question of dog to human aggression, the authors’ interpretation of this low dog-dog aggression incidence was interesting and, I think, relevant. They floated the idea that self-selection and peer pressure both operated strongly: People who take the time to get in the car or walk to a designated off-leash area to exercise their dog tend not to be the type who are derelict in other areas of dog guardianship, such as training, socialization or appropriate containment. And, people whose dogs are anti-social tend to be informally expelled from off-leash communities.

But here’s the rub. When it comes to fear, facts seldom carry much weight. This is because just as we inherited a craving for fat and sugar that served us well in our distant past amidst dietary scarcity and now is maladaptive, we inherited a preparedness for fearing certain environmental elements, notably animals with pointy teeth. Predators were genuine and prevalent threats back during the bottlenecks of human evolution. Those prone to react first and think later out-reproduced those who paused to consider the facts before reacting. We are all descended from people who were inclined to freak out at pointy-toothed animals. For most of us today, predators are no longer much of a concern but we can’t shake the feeling, nor replace it with one that would be more adaptive, such as, say, a fear of traveling in motor vehicles at high speed, which is statistically ten thousand times more likely to kill you than a dog. Because we didn’t evolve with the latter, we can think about the cost-benefit ratio of riding in cars and make decisions based on what we find out.

Not only do animals with pointy teeth push evolutionary buttons, but, for the same reasons, mechanical containment – fences, houses and leashes – feels like the only way to keep safe. Concepts such as “socialization,” “training” or, worse, statistics about likelihood, however much the real key to minimizing or understanding our risk, fall flat emotionally, abandoning us still to the mental picture of a toothy animal, a toothy loose animal. To set rational – and therefore effective - policy, we’ll need to trump an evolved fear module with the fancier thinking part of our brains, no small feat.

For more reading:

Preparedness of fear-evoking stimuli:
Preparedness Theory: The Boy Scout of Fear
Preparedness and Phobia: Specific Evolved Associations or a Generalized Expectancy Bias?
Fear and Fitness: An Evolutionary Analysis of Anxiety Disorders

Fundamental attribution error (a great example of distorted thinking governing behavior):
Affective Forcasting...OR...The Big Wombassa

Misperception of risk:
Development of Peril Resource

Social amplification of risk:
Perception of Risk Posed by Extreme Events

Modularity of minds and summary of the evidence that our brains are not tabula rasa:
The Blank Slate, Steven Pinker (Penguin, 2003)