Kathy Sdao Seminar Notes: Labels and Perception

I learned so much at the seminar that I think typing out my favorite points from my notes will help engrave those lessons in my brain better and hopefully you guys will get some ideas as well.

I've got about 2 pages of scribbled highlight notes so I guess I'll just dig into some of my favorites. Today I'll talk about labels and perceptions. Kathy Sdao's points on the overuse of labels and the ephemeral nature of perception definitely got me thinking.

Something I really came to realize was how all of the frustrations we encounter in training are pretty much things we have created. This is a dog. They aren't used to our "grabby hands" as Kathy called them, and they certainly don't depend on a verbal language for their main form of communication like we do. And yet we expect them to do all the learning and work?! Why aren't we making more of an effort to train ourselves to hear what they are saying, and to be better at our communication with them? We get so bogged down in what we want that we forget that this should be a partnership. We want the dog to understand our words, to share our feelings, to behave how we believe a dog should behave.... And yet our words and feelings and even beliefs about a dogs behaviors aren't ever static. How can they keep up with our flightiness?

Perceptions shift and yet we think they are so concrete. The mind sees what it has experienced though and each human has a lifetime of experiences that will color exactly what they perceive in an animal, or person or situation. Add more experience and the perceptions shift.

Because of this it is so very important not to label a dog. As soon as you are alerted to something and tell yourself the dog is a certain way - an asshole, submissive, a bully, a bitch, broken, abused, hyper... - your brain will be careful to pick up all the examples of ways the dog's behavior supports your label. You will also not pick up things that don't support that label. It isn't an intentional thing.  Most of it happens subconsciously, but you have locked a dog into a box of a label and because of that you may miss so many of the things they have to tell you about themselves. Labels are a type of control that make us feel safe and all knowing, however we don't do our dogs any favors by using them and we can certainly get in the way of any behavior modification goals we have for our dogs.

Tilly during "rehab" - she would ride in her pouch at work with me and could peek out at the world when she felt brave enough.

I did this when I was first fostering my personal dog Tilly. She was a puppy mill breeding bitch and extremely undersocialized. I latched onto the "puppy mill survivor" label and researched trying to find some good articles on rehabbing mill dogs. There wasn't a lot of happy success stories out there and the more I read, the more hopeless is seemed. It wasn't until I let go of trying to lump Tilly into the label of "mill survivor" and started truly seeing her behaviors and watching how she experienced this new world of a "house" that we started to make some progress. And labelling her a "mill survivor" today would only tell a tiny part of who this 11 year old feisty little dog is. In her 4 and a half years with us she has grown into a completely different dog and it would be unfair for me to push her into that tiny constricting label of "puppymill survivor".

On a camping trip at Baker Lake, Mt. Baker National Forest

 

On a hike at Hat Point, Hells Canyon National Recreation Area

 

On a hike with me on the North Fork of the John Day River in Oregon

So maybe before you label your dog and list out all the things they do that annoy you, try to think of what your dog does that makes you happy. What makes them fun to be around? What makes you love them? Notice the good qualities and soon the things that need some changing might not seem like the mountainous, unsurmountable issues that they did before.