Chromatic K9

This food refusal brought to you by and lobster 🦞 (yes she is spoiled-as she should be)

I don’t know how but the universe gave me a hairier version of myself when I brought Frank home. We had a lot of conflict in our early years-and a lot of terrible advice that broke our relationship and her trust in me. Curiously enough, this was happening at the same time that my relationship with myself was just as broken.

I’d like to believe both of those relationships are repaired at this point and so we are now both learning to navigate as ourselves-not our damage. And we are both an infuriating combination of high motivation and strong opinions. Meaning-we both have to fail over and over trying things our way before we will listen truly commit to trying things someone else’s way. But once we commit-we are just as stubborn and relentless doing things the right way as we were to failing doing things in our own way.

I learn these lessons about her over and over-and usually the easiest way to figure out what she’s thinking is to put myself in her shoes and imagine what would work on me.

She’s perfect.

I was teaching a lesson on nail trimming to a clients with a dog who hates paw handling and has been known to get defensive and violent during nail trims in the past. The owners asked me this past week, “what does your nail trimming routine look like with your dogs?” I figured I’d share our routine and my thoughts on teaching handling to the general social media sphere.

My dogs’ nail trimming routine is a perfect example of being clear about choice vs. must.

If given the option between nail trims and a different activity, not a single one of my dogs would chose nail trims.

Eli came to me with some pretty intense aversion to handling. The first time I tried to introduce him to nail trims at 12 weeks old he attacked both me and the Dremel to get the torture to end.

Sonny can be seen here starring at Frankie’s crate because she is already eating her reward and given the choice between stealing her chew or letting me trim his nails I think the choice is obvious.

My approach is simple:
1. I will make myself worthy of your trust and never ask you to tolerate anything actually dangerous.
2. If I am doing something to you, you must hold still and any attempt to flee or fight me will not be effective.
3. You will always get something really great after being asked to tolerate something unpleasant.

Why would I chose this approach over counter conditioning, working on my dogs “opting in,” working “under threshold”, etc.?

1. Time-if my dogs could speak English and I asked them “would you like to spend 20 hours over the next 6 months working on nail trims or would you rather get it over with and use those 20 hours to go hiking or play instead?” I think their choice would be obvious
2. We will eventually find ourselves in a situation in which I need my dogs to tolerate something they dislike that doesn’t make sense to them. Ask anybody with a senior dog, an injured dog, or a chronically ill dog. I want to reduce my dogs’ stress in that situation as much as possible. I need them to trust that if I say something is going to be ok-even if it makes 0 sense to them-it will actually be ok. They learn this through practice-weekly.