How Playing with Your Dog Like a Puppy Can Reduce Fear #95

Are you the kind of dog owner who loves to play with your dog or play with your puppy? If not, why not? It's not only a great way to have fun with your puppy or dog, it's actually a great way to teach them lessons. And if you are somebody who loves to play with your dog or play games with your puppy, you are in luck because in today's podcast, I'm going to share with you how by just changing one element of how you play with your puppy or dog could have an astronomical effect on not only how that dog learns, but also it can decrease fears and phobia in that dog. And this is particularly important for those of you who listen to this podcast and have any interest in ever playing in the sport of dog agility. Hi, I'm Susan Garrett. Welcome to Shaped by Dog. I want to take you back to 1998. I had a little Jack Russell Terrier. Her name was Shelby. And about the third time she went to the veterinarian, she was probably 15 or 16 weeks old puppy. She got to the front door and she put on the brakes, like backpedaled nowhere, going back to the car. And I actually had to pick her up and carry her into the vet clinic. And she had her ears pinned back and her tail pinned. And she was like cowering. Her eyes were so big, you could see the whites under her eyes. And she was just panting and panting and swallowing and panting. You could tell she was not a happy dog. Oh, on top of that, her whole body was vibrating. She just shook and she kept like that right until we got out of the vet clinic. And then afterwards she was super thirsty and she had to pee. It was heartbreaking. Now I just concluded, wow, for whatever reason, my puppy or dog as she grew up is afraid of going to the veterinarian clinic. But it doesn't have to be that way because anytime there's a fear, we can desensitize that fear or counter condition the fear. And those two generally go hand in hand. So, desensitization means you are making the stimulus, giving the dog little inoculations of the stimulus in small, small bouts. And counter conditioning means you're changing the dog's emotional response to the stimulus. So, it would be like, you know, we pull up at the vet clinic and I just gave her, you know, a big chunk of meat and then I'd get back in the car and she wouldn't even have to go in there. So, counter conditioning is part of it. Desensitization, making that stimulus, giving her smaller bouts of that stimulus might be taking her places and having people just pick up her skin and pretend to give her a needle, but it wouldn't be a vet clinic. Okay. So, those are things you could have done. However, the way you play with your dog might make desensitization and counter conditioning a lot less important. Stick with me on this. I started observing the way dogs interact with other dogs. When they're wrestling, when they're, I mean, my dogs play together all the time. There's a lot of body slamming and a lot of open mouth biting at each other. Sometimes some closed mouth biting, but they never, I mean, it's rare if ever you hear a yelp. If there is inappropriate bite or body slam, the dog who gets body slam stops the game. And I look at that the way I look at my relationship with my dog, there's a game on and a game off. And for something like playing with my dog, if you watched episode or listened to episode number 89 here on Shaped by Dog, you'll know that when I play tug with my dogs, there's a lot of rules that get shared between us. And one of them is if your teeth come on in contact with my skin or my clothing, that's game off. Very much like those puppies that play together. You hurt me, the game is off. I am not going to play with you anymore. And so, when we play together, you need to alter something that you did. Super important to always observe what's going on with dog. And is it any of it? Now I'm not going to play bitey face with my dog, but I do know, well, how can my puppy be terrified of getting a little tiny pinprick when she's all out wrestling and body slamming? So, it can't be like she has a very low pain tolerance. And so, I used those permissions, game on, game off, as communication between my dog and I. So, if my dog walks away from playing with me, that's them saying game off. And I need to observe what happened prior to make my dog say, I don't want to play with you anymore. And just like the puppy playing with the other dog, I want to make sure I never touch those buttons that make my dog go game off. I always want them to play game on. The same, they will work towards me not putting their teeth on my hands so that they never touch the game off button. So, what can you learn from all of this? Back in 2005, I wrote a book called Shaping Success. And in it, there were a lot of games that I shared of what I play with my dogs. Now one of the games was called Smack Da Baby. And it's just a fun loving way that I took the physical play that I saw two dogs playing with each other, and I brought it into my relationship with my dogs. Now Smack Da Baby is a stumbling block for a lot of people who read that book or who are involved in any of my training programs, especially if they have small dogs or dogs that are a little bit worried or timid. They say, do I have to Smack Da Baby? And I say, yeah, it's important because what we need the dog to be okay with is physical touch, physical contact. And Smack Da Baby is a really easy way to get them okay with physical touch. Think about all the things that we want our dogs to not be afraid of. General grooming where you have to brush the dog, or maybe you want to brush your dog's teeth as we do daily, or you want to look in their ears or clean out their eyes. There's a lot of things that we have to physically touch our dogs for. And then we go to the veterinarians and somebody the dog doesn't know is physically touching the dog. So, what about, what can we do to not make our dogs just be okay with physical touch, but actually learn to love physical touch by a human being? Enter games. Now I incorporate Smack Da Baby within the game of tug. And I'm going to share with you what that looks like and how it went very wrong for one of my dogs. So, I play this with rescue dogs that come in here with puppies. Of course, puppies are so easy. First, you have to get them tugging. So, if your dog doesn't tug, stick with me, we'll circle back to that. So, we're getting our dog tugging and they love to tug. And as I mentioned in episode 89, we have all these rules of engagement that we have to be very aware of when we're playing tug. But while I'm tugging with a puppy, what I'll do is I'll hold on to the tug toy with one hand and with my free hand, I'll start from the ground and I'll sort of make a sweeping motion off to my side, very far away from the puppy at first. And then I'll change hands with a tug toy, make that sweeping motion away up in the air on the other side. And gradually I make that sweeping motion closer and closer and closer until my hand actually sweeps by and touches the puppy. Now, if the puppy doesn't notice it, that's still game on. That means Susan, you have permission to keep playing. Now I'm not going to do all of this in one tug session. There's 10 stages I go through and I will incorporate one or two or three depending on the permission I get from the puppy or the dog when I'm playing. Now assuming that I was able to wave my hand by and brush the puppy, I will then move into stage two in that I'll be tugging and I'll do a light wave, but then I'll stroke just like patting the dog on the back from the hips back. I'll stroke them. Again, I'll do both hands stroking. Does the puppy or the dogs drop the toy and go, what are you doing that for? If they do, then they're saying game off. And that's where you work. You go back to putting your hands up in the air, maybe touching the ribs occasionally with your baby finger as it goes by and working towards trying to stroke them. The idea of doing this within a game of tug, tug actually increases the dog's state of arousal. By getting the dog into a higher state of arousal, they're less likely to notice these insignificant things that we're doing like putting our hand in the air or touching their body. This is super important for rescue dogs that we're trying to build trust with or new puppies that we're trying to build trust with. Eventually they're going to say, yeah, you can pat my hips. You can pat my rump. That's okay when you're tugging. I love tugging. Then we're going to move to stage three where we're going to do full-on body strokes. Stroke the ribs, stroke the shoulders, and keep tugging. Change hands. I'm going to stroke. I'm going to stroke and stroke. Now puppy says, yeah, this is fun. We're going to move on to stage four. And with most puppies, I'll move to stage four pretty darn quickly. So, I'm tugging with a puppy and I'll do one stroke and one push with my open palm against the ribs. And puppies love that. Remember body slamming each other, a little push. I might get a higher intensity of growl. I might get, oh, this is fun. Now, if I get a redirect in that I push against you and the puppy goes, oh yeah, and they drop the toy and they grab the hand that's pushing against them, that is just me stopping the game. Inappropriate communication with your mouth with me stops the game. Okay. Okay. I'm going to keep playing. I'm going to keep playing. So, we're at stage four. We're moving up towards getting to be able to smack the baby. Pushing with your ribs. Push them from side to side so that they move their feet a little bit to the right and then they move their feet a little bit to the left. All while they're still tugging with you. Okay. Now, stage five. We are now not going to just push, we're going to give them a little smack. Now it's not a hard, we're not slapping anyone across the face. It's just a little, you know, attaboy, attaboy, attaboy, smack on this, start it on their rump. Smack, smack, smack, smack, smack, smack, smack. We are now officially smacking the baby. And you want to smack the baby in the ribs, smack them in the rump, back up on the ribs, back in the rump, keep tugging the whole time. Incorporate a little bit of a push in the ribs and then a smack in the rump. So, we're doing some pushing and some smacking. All right. Now the puppy's loving or the dog's loving all this. Now we're going to go up to stage number six, and that is we're going to incorporate a muzzle grab. Now you might be saying, well Susan, when you talked about how to decrease biting in your puppies, you said, don't let anybody grab your puppy by the muzzle. I did say that as a way of greeting. We don't want puppies to think hands coming towards their face means bite the hands, right? But their mouth is busy with a tug toy. So, by grabbing the muzzle, putting your hand over the muzzle and giving it a little shake, that actually increases the tug drive with most dogs or puppies. That actually gets them super excited. So, if you have a dog who isn't really great at tugging, they kind of tug and drop it a little bit and tug and drop. Muzzle grab is a great game to incorporate to help increase the intensity of your tug. So, we've got our muzzle grab. Now when you're able to do a muzzle grab, you might do a muzzle grab and then slide your hand very calmly up over their eyes and to their ears and just gently pull their ears. Muzzle grab into a nice stroking over the face. Muzzle grab. Now this is where I lost my Jack Russell Terrier mix decaf. She would let me muzzle grab, but when I tried to stroke anywhere above her neck, she would opt out. Game off. No, I'm dropping that toy. Game off. And so, I would then go back to tug and smacking the ribs and pushing the ribs and smacking the bum and pushing the bum. And all that was fine with her. All that was fine. But if I tried to do any stroking or smacking from the neck up, she said, oh nay nay, that is not how we communicate. And I'm like, okay, no big deal. I didn't worry about it at all. And so, we played just with those first six steps. Now I'm going to carry on before I circle back to what I discovered with decaf. Step number seven would be smacking in the shoulders. Now you pretty much are smacking that dog or that puppy anywhere and they are loving it. All right. You can smack. And now we're going to go to step number eight. We're going to do a smack in the shoulder and maybe even work our way up to smacking them very lightly in the side of the face while they're tugging. They're tugging a little smack on the side of the face. I don't know why, but when I'm playing this game, I always go smack a baby, smack a baby, smack a baby. And when I'm smacking near their face, it always turns into smack a baby in the face. Now, if we're playing this with a really tiny puppy or a fragile breed, like if I was playing this with a Chihuahua or a Palm or Papillon, I might start smack a baby and stroke a baby with one finger. I might just stroke with one finger. I don't want to overwhelm any puppy or any dog. You know your dogs better than I do. You know, so it doesn't hurt to try small and gradually increase the intensity of smack a baby. Now we're up to step nine. We've been able to smack a baby all over, push, and now we're going to introduce a little bit of a pinch. So, while we're tugging, we're going to just pinch a little skin over the ribs and pinch and pull and pinch and pull. Think of dogs grabbing and roughing. You want to pinch and do a little bit because now we're like, sometimes when I'm grooming you, something might, you know, hurt. Like I have to pull ticks out of you sometimes. I hate when that happens, right? But I want the puppies or the dogs to be okay with things that they might feel uncomfortable. This is the greatest way to introduce it is in the midst of play where their arousal state's high and they're like, whoa, this is fun. I don't know why you're doing that, but pinch a baby and smack a baby. That's all so much fun. And at step 10, you can pinch, you can pull, you can smack just about everywhere on your dog's body. With the exception, and this is something that a lot of people love to do. I don't ever grab at puppy's or dog's paws when I'm tugging because what they will do is pull them away. And that might be for a lot of people, that's like a fun game. I don't want my dog when I grab for their paws to want to pull away. That's going to make grooming, nail care, cutting hair around their feet very, very difficult. So, paws are off limits unless when you're tugging, you're just going to hold one. But quite often the puppies or the dogs, they're trying to balance and rebalance. So, this isn't a great time to be grabbing and holding their paws. So, let's just say paws are off limits. Okay. That is smack the baby. And that is going to make it so much easier for you if you have to desensitize or counter condition your dog to any touch. It's going to be so easy because you've done it here. Now let me circle back to decaf. When decaf was around a year old, I decided I was going to teach her how to weave. Now, for those of you who don't do the sport of agility, there's an element, an obstacle called weave poles where there's 12 poles and the dog has to go in and out of these poles. And it's a lot of fun for most dogs. Now decaf was having a lot of fun and she learned how to weave really quickly, but she was bouncing way up in the air, way up in the air between the poles. And I couldn't figure it out. I questioned a lot of the experts that I trialed with on the weekend. We'd all get together and chat about our new and up-and-coming dogs. And I go, I got this problem and I got all kinds of different advice. Nothing worked for her. And I thought, well, I'm going to just let her trial her and she'll get used to the rhythm and she'll get faster. She didn't. What happened? She tried to get faster and she was bouncing so high up in the air that she'd skip a pole. And she was quickly learning to not like weave poles. And I was frustrated because an average small dog might take two and a half to two and three quarters of a second to get through 12 poles. Decaf was taking four and five seconds to get through those 12 poles. It was frustrating for me. I didn't understand because she was getting very speedy everywhere else. Until one day I was teaching a seminar in California. It was in the Bay area and a student of mine gave me a little present for Decaf. It was a tiny little miniature tennis ball on a little rope. And I gave it to Decaf and she loved it. She took off in the field running with it. And as she was running back to me, I noticed that the ball as she ran would come up each side of her face because she's holding it in the middle of her mouth. And eventually it actually touched her muzzle and she'd drop it like it was burning her. And then she picked it up again because it was her ball and she loved it. She'd run a little bit more and when it would swing, swing, swing, touch the muzzle, she'd drop it like somebody was shooting her. And I instantly realized why she was bouncing up in the air on her weave poles. She wasn't trying to bounce up. She was bouncing away from the poles. Smack a baby must stop at my neck. I can't have anything touch my face. And so, I went back and played smack a baby with Decaf just with one finger, just tugging, tugging, tugging one little finger. Can I touch your neck? And I worked up to being able to smack the baby in the muzzle. And I actually took it to a set of weave poles and I would smack and I would sing to her, smack a baby into polies. And I'd smack her on her muzzle and the other side of her muzzle was up against the weave pole. So, she learned that the sensation of weave poles hitting her face was something not to be afraid of. And guess what? Almost overnight, her weave poles went from four and five seconds to three seconds. And then we just worked from there to get them faster. So, it's amazing the challenge it could cause you if you notice that your dog is uncomfortable and you decide like I did with Decaf, I just won't bother. It is a big deal. Smack a baby is a fun game that you will want to incorporate in all of your tugging and grow it into other aspects of your dog training. It's just a great way to communicate with your dog. All of my dogs love it. Every dog I've trained pugs that love it. Every dog I've ever trained has learned to smack a baby. All right. What about those of you who say, oh, my dog doesn't tug? Now, first of all, the first thing I would suggest is let that be a focus of your training. It doesn't have to be like, I have to get this. I must incorporate this into my training. Have fun, just enjoy the process and work to your dog loving the tug. And when your dog loves the tug, then you can build up these other stages. And then when you've got smack a baby with a tug, you can incorporate that into your regular training. Now, in the meantime, that doesn't mean you can't work at this. There is all, any game that you play with your puppy or your dog right now, any interactive game, try to incorporate a little bit of touch before you like throw a ball or touch before you take it back. Or if you're, you know, grab the ball, you're just going to stroke your dog. Build up more and more touch until touch is a regular part of every part of play that you do with your dog. If you're listening to this episode, you may want to jump into YouTube because I'll put some demonstrations of each step of smack the baby there in the YouTube video. And while you're there, Hey, go ahead and like the video. And if you're not a subscriber to the page, subscribe and hit that notification bell so you won't miss another video from me. I'll see you next time here on Shaped by Dog.